The core states of Western Europe have an unbroken continuity of up to a thousand years, during which time they neither disintegrated internally nor were ever conquered by alien groups
If we take even a cursory glance at global history since the beginning of the Middle Ages, around 1000 AD, we find that one of the most remarkable features of the West, which distinguishes it radically from the rest of the world, is the extraordinary longevity of the Western states during this period. Thus, the core states of Western Europe, such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Holland, have an unbroken continuity of upto a thousand years, during which time they neither disintegrated internally nor were ever conquered by external, internal or neighbouring alien groups. Probably, the last war of conquest there was the Battle of Hastings in 1066, in which England was conquered by William the Norman.
It is not that they did not have wars amongst themselves; on the contrary, they probably had more wars than in many regions of the world. However, these were not wars of conquest; rather, they were wars between a group of stable states for the purpose of resolving various disputes, or for retaining a balance of power in the region. Its nature is best illustrated by the famous saying that “war is just diplomacy by other means”, meaning that war is just the measure of last resort in the process of diplomacy which aims at resolving disputes among stable states.
The situation in the rest of the world has been just the opposite; internal disintegration or conquest by alien groups continued to routinely occur right up to the 19th century and, as a result, most states there had wildly changing boundaries.
In addition, there was a total lack of continuity in the laws governing the state as every new ruler set them all anew, solely on the basis of his personal wish or whim.
This extraordinary longevity and stability presumably played a very significant role in the rise of the West and its progressively intense domination of the world during the last five centuries.
It, therefore, appears very desirable to look for reasons or causes for it; these should obviously be features or phenomena which were present in the West alone, in keeping with the fact that the longevity was confined to the West alone.
When one looks for elements of Western societies that might be expected to promote stability there, one finds that the church may be considered as the most easily recognizable candidate. The proper working of the church and its numerous institutions depended, to a very large extent, on concessions of various types that it was able to extract from the king and other secular power holders. These consisted mainly of:
i) guarantee of the physical security of its manpower and its material possessions (obtained mostly from donations);
ii) tax concessions on agricultural holdings and commercial activities;
iii) concessions of self government within the institutions and their rural and urban possessions;
iv) monopoly on the religious affairs of the general population within their domain of activity.
Negotiating for these concessions obviously required hard and strenuous efforts, so that once acquired, the church people liked them to be continued indefinitely. This was possible only if the socio-economic and political structure of the society remained intact with the passage of time; the church, therefore, had a vested interest in retaining this structure without serious disruption.
Any conquest by aliens, either external or internal, would not only disrupt and shatter this structure, forcing the church to renegotiate for all the concessions without any guarantee of immediate success, but also posed a real threat to their material possessions. A conqueror always had the power to confiscate the belongings of any section of the conquered population. The church would therefore resist with all its power (mostly moral but also including some physical, based on its not-very-insubstantial material possessions) any conquest by aliens. And for precisely the same reasons, the church would also use all its power and influence to prevent the internal disintegration of the existing societal order, which also had strong potential to devour all the benefits and concessions acquired. The church played a significant role in the stability of the Western state and society.
The dynamics of this stabilizing role of the church points towards the main agent of stability in the West — the so-called “civil society” for whose stabilizing role, a similar dynamics operates. As has generally been realized these days, by “civil society” we mean the vast number of institutions, organizations and pressure groups built by various sections of the population to “connect and protect” them from the bare or naked power of the king or the state. They emerged in the West (and West alone) at the beginning of the last millennium. The earliest were the formal and informal groupings and assemblies of the feudal lords which looked after and promoted their collective interests, thereby curtailing the power of the king to take arbitrary decisions.
These groupings were operative in places such as England and France even before 1000 AD. It was through their efforts and struggle, stretching over centuries, that King John of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 AD. However, the real impetus to the building of these organs was given by the rise of trade and commerce in the 11th century and the consequent growth of a large number of urban centres. There now emerged a vast number of craft unions, trade unions, merchant unions, trading companies, institutions of international and long-distance trade such as the Hanseatic League or the annual exhibitions in France held in 12th and 13th centuries, and an equally vast number of organs of local self-government in towns and cities. Each of these institutions had extracted, after a very hard and often bloody struggle, substantial amount of socio-economic and political power from the currently established ruling class and state structure.
Thus, by the 14th century, the core states of Western Europe had acquired a fairly well-established civil society (which continuously expanded during the following centuries), having substantial socio-economic political power independent of the formal central authority of the royal bureaucracy. However, the irony of the situation was that the same ruling class and state structure whom they fought bitterly to extract rights, privileges and concessions, became the sole guarantor of continued possession by them of these privileges and concessions. The disappearance of this political structure, either by internal disintegration or by alien conquest, would nullify their achievements and force them to carry out the struggle without any certainty of quick or complete success.
In other words, the elements of civil society which struggled hard against the king and his bureaucracy to acquire part of his (king’s) power, became the most vigorous defenders of this ruling structure and central authority, as they realized that by defending the structure, they were really defending their own powers and privileges. Any alien invader, even if he had been able to defeat the king’s army, would face the resistance of the civil society whose collective power was really tremendous. As the very existence of these institutions had transformed these societies into a form in which governing them was impossible without their (institutions’) active cooperation, any alien conqueror would have faced grass-root resistance (seeds of emerging nationalism?) which would have been almost impossible to overcome in spite of military strength.
For the same reason, elements of civil society opposed the other cause of lack of stability and longevity of states viz the internal disintegration of the central authority, by seeing to it that local power holders, who also needed the cooperation of these elements to govern their locality, remained loyal to the central authority so as to avoid chaos and confusion in any part of the region. They also promoted the concept of primogeniture (inheritance of the whole estate or kingdom by a single successor), in order to avoid unnecessary division of central authority at every stage of succession.
Another stabilizing role that the civil society played was to prevent kings, during normal times, to take arbitrary decisions and to force them to honour past agreements and decisions taken by them or their predecessors. This ensured that there were no sudden or abrupt changes in the rules of governance or the existing socio-political order of the society.
The existence in the West of a powerful civil society contrasted starkly with that in the rest of the world, where the total absence of civil society meant not only that there was no organized resisting force against internal disintegration, but also that once an alien conqueror was able to defeat the king’s army, he faced no further resistance from any section of the population. In fact, it was one of the basic tenets of the political philosophy throughout the East that any contest for the rulership of any region was solely the concern of the two contestants, with the population of the region playing absolutely no role in this contest. It (the population) was duty bound to become loyal and obedient subjects of whoever won the contest.
There are numerous episodes in Oriental history illustrating this fact, and we mention here one of these in the year 1006 AD. The Qarakhanid general, Jafertigin, an enemy of Sultan Mahmood Ghazna, attacked Balkh, a part of the Sultan’s empire. As it was very poorly defended by the government forces, the people of Balkh themselves organized stiff resistance to Jafertigin, although they were not able to stop him. Ultimately, Sultan Mahmood reconquered the town, and on entering it, reprimanded the people of Balkh, saying that they had no right to resist the enemy and so place his (Sultan’s) property in jeopardy, and that the subjects must resign themselves to whichever ruler shows himself to be the strongest. The result of this thinking and practice was that internal disintegration and conquest continued in the East right up to the end of the 19th century with no societal stability for any length of time.
We may now sum up our discussion by saying that one of the significant differences between the West and the rest of the world was the rapid emergence in the West, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, of an elaborate civil society structure which never appeared (indigenously) in any other region. As the institutions of civil society played a very powerful and vigorous role as agents of stability and continuity in the society, the core states of the West lasted for centuries, without internal disintegration or external conquest.
