Ibn Khaldoun and Nikolay Trubetskoy: nomads vs. sedentary populations

I recently read the translation of “The Legacy of Genghis Khan” by Nikolay Trubetskoy, famous Russian linguist, who is considered the founder of Euroasianism, an ideology currently experiencing a revival in some quasi-official circles in Russia. Alexander Dugin, an influential thinker, is a well-known admirer of Trubetskoy.

            I will not discuss here the ideology of Euroasianism which I do not know well, nor the entirety of Trubetskoy small, interesting, but in my opinion fundamentally misleading “Legacy…”  but will focus on  a contrast, that I am not aware has been made before, between Ibn Khaldoun and Trubetskoy. In fact, both Ibn Khaldoun and Trubetskoy address the relationship between nomadic and sedentary peoples but come to different conclusions where (to give my opinion away) Trubetskoy’s are vastly inferior to Ibn Khaldoun’s.

In Ibn Khaldoun’s “Prolegomena…” (published in 1377), the opposition was between the nomadic population of the desert, among which those that have so successfully conquered most of the Middle East and parts of Europe within a couple of centuries of Islam’s rise in the Arabian peninsula, and the sedentary populations.  As is well-known, Ibn Khaldoun’s view was that nomads, by their very way of life, are unable to create durable nomadic civilizations until they themselves get reabsorbed and “re-educated” by the sedentary peoples they have conquered. (Note that even the term “civilization” used in European languages comes from civitas, city, which of course is a feature of sedentary populations.)  It is only the  sedentary populations that are creators of arts, commerce and stable legal rules. The danger however is that nomadic populations are often militarily stronger since their way of life predisposes them to be braver and better warriors. Hence a danger permanently looms over the rather fragile fruits of human civilization.

Trubetskoy draws on the same contrast  in “Legacy…”, there made between Genghis  Khan’s Mongols and the sedentary and old civilizations of Persia, India and China that Genghis conquered before his descendants got reabsorbed into these culturally superior Asian civilizations. But for the Eurasian landmass (vaguely, from the center of today’s Ukraine to China), Trubetsoy’s conclusion is different. There he believes that Pax Mongolica created a superior form of governance, characterized by two key  features. First, reliance on the warrior class fully obedient to the hierarchical principles and not on the “inferior” human type of opportunistic and calculating servants. The former type is, according to Trubetskoy, characteristic of nomadic tribes and the latter of “civilized” sedentary cultures. Second, religious tolerance or religious syncretism that in many respects looks like the one practiced by Romans where religion as such was indispensable but the type of religion practiced was irrelevant. (In Gibbon’s famous words, different religions “were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful")

While Trubetskoy agrees with Ibn Khaldoun (only implicitly so since not a single author is mentioned in Trubetskoy’s small volume) that historical Asia was set back by Genghis Khan’s conquest, namely that “…Asia suffered damage because Mongol conquest, by taking some parts of Asia from their 'splendid isolation' and by breaking in from the outside into their historic way of life, arrested for a long time their cultural development”, he sharply disagrees that it was the case for the Eurasian space. There, the previous limited conflicts that existed between the sedentary states (the Kievan Rus, Khazar Kingdom and Khorezm are mentioned by Trubetskoy) and various nomadic peoples of the steppes were brought to an end with Genghis Khan’s unification of all these nomadic peoples under one rule and the formation of a huge, yet mobile, empire of Eurasia.

Genghis Khan is criticized for his ultimately unsuccessful and unnecessary forays into India and China, but is praised as the founder of a single political space of Eurasia (“a historical necessity” as Trubetskoy writes). The Russian state is then seen by Trubetskoy as the rightful historical heir of that single Eurasian political entity created in the 12^th century. All Russian problems, from Peter the Great to Lenin, are explained away by Russia’s failure to live up to that mission and wrong-headed desire to get “Europeanized”.   

As I wrote in the beginning I will leave aside this noxious and rather implausible narrative of Trubetsoy’s (which is not devoid of some interesting insights) to underline the sheer implausibility of regarding a nomadic empire as capable of creating sustainable commercial, artistic and law-abiding state. Trubetskoy agrees with Ibn Khaldoun that such a role could not be fulfilled by nomads in regards to ancient Asian civilizations, but then turns around and suggests that it was with regard to Eurasian steppes.  

The implausibility of Trubetsoy’s argument is not shown only by this duality but also by the absence of any discussion of a way in which the Golden Horde was presumably able to advance progress. We are not given any realistic description of its modus operandi, nor any clam to its superiority in the matters of governmental, nor bizarrely, even in the matters of military organization. One gets the impression that the whole edifice was built on random use of force that eventually had to peter out since there was neither technological development nor cultural or ideological superiority to sustain it.

Trubetskoy’s encomium of a nomadic empire appears empty and the suggestion that Russia should find its world role as inheritor of such an empire makes sense only in a geographical sense since the Russia of the past two centuries is contained within the area circumscribed by the Mongol empire, but is substantively meaningless. Nothing shows better how meaningless it is than lack of encouragement to economic and political advancement that, as Ibn Khaldoun pointed out more than seven centuries ago, is immanent to all nomadic empires.

English language and American solipsism

Several months ago Simon Kuper published what seemed to me a bizarre piece in the weekend edition of the Financial Times arguing that native English speakers are handicapped by the fact that the entire world (or to be more realistic, the global middle and ruling classes) are able to read or speak English. This gave to the latter the advantage of fully understanding English speakers, their opinions, prejudices and motivations, while taking away all incentive for the native English speakers to learn foreign languages (why bother, if everyone speaks your language) and thus to understand and influence other cultures that still conduct most of their bread-and-butter business using national languages.

What I found odd in Kuper’s piece was that it reversed the normal and long-standing view that having foreigners learn your language was always a mark of cultural or technological superiority, that it entrenched that superiority, and  was therefore a very desirable thing. Greece influenced Romans through their love and awe of the Greek language (what Gibbon called “the perfect idiom”), and thus transmitted its culture and way of thinking.  It is not for nothing that such diverse emperors as Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Julian were Hellenophiles, often more at ease in Greek than in the rather coarse Latin. (I am writing this some 200 meters from the Hadrian’s Gate in Athens.)

The advantage of having others speak your language was always taken as a fact: it helps your culture, religion or trade, as we see among the French-speaking elites in the Middle East, English-speaking elites in the Indian subcontinent, or most of Africa. World-wide expansions of Christianity and Islam are unthinkable without cosmopolitanism of, at first, Greek language, and then Latin, English and French; for Islam, Arabic. The US gains from foreigners speaking English are immense: domination in the popular culture, media and book worlds, easy propagation of American ideas in politics, philosophy, sciences or economics. Such advantages have led the philosopher Philippe van Parijs to argue that, as a matter of justice, native English speakers should compensate non-native English speakers for the “unearned” advantage they (the speakers) enjoy.

So, how can such obvious advantages become a handicap? While disagreeing with Kuper, there was, in my mind even then, a slight doubt, that perhaps in some cases he might be right. And I think that an argument can be made for it. “Cultural solipsism “ of  native English speakers is exacerbated by everybody’s speaking their language, tolerably well (as I do here). This then reinforces a very human tendency toward intellectual laziness where one communicates only with the people who speak English and learns everything about the country one travels to, or more seriously, on which she works or writes about from English-language sources or English-speaking natives. This is bound to give a very truncated view of reality.

I was struck by observing native English speakers', who actually do speak foreign languages, indifference to native-language media sources in the countries where they lived. Some of them might have spent a decade or more living in X, speaking even its language, without bothering much to read the news in local language or engaging in more demanding intellectual intercourse in that language.

It was brought to me again when a couple of days ago I watched, in my hotel room, a Russian political talk show where a clearly smart and somewhat insolent host discussed with a number of guests the current US-Russia relations.  The loquacious host dictated the structure of the show, and to represent the US point of view, he invited an American journalist working in Moscow. His Russian was passable and I even think that he could conduct a real conversation in Russian in a one-on-one setting. But in a fast-paced talk show where he did not control other speakers and people were interrupting each other, his attempts to make a point were nothing short of pathetic. (I vaguely thought that he might have been deliberately brought for that reason too.) Showing that he lived, even in Moscow, in an entirely Anglo world, he referred to Montenegro (in the context of NATO expansion) as “Montenegro”, not as “Cherna Gora” as it is called in Russian. That to me indicated that he was not reading or watching Russian media discussing NATO, but was probably learning about  Russia's reaction  from the reading of American papers and a few conversations with local English-speaking Russians. Exactly the thing that a foreign correspondent should not do.

I could go with such examples for a long time, since in my travels I have seen them aplenty. As for example, the discussion of the Russian revolution in Moscow where some of the most famous Western historians did not feel confident enough to speak in Russian in front of a 99% Russian audience (some of whom had to resort to listening to translation). I thought that it would be rather odd if a Frenchman who wrote a book on US Revolutionary War decided, at a conference on the topic held in the United States, to speak in…French. Or I remember a famous medieval Greek and Byzantine historian who asked for even ordinary information in Athens only in English. Or a Western ambassador who in the middle of the Bosnian civil war kept on pronouncing the name of a city where the battle then raged as it was (wrongly)  pronounced in Washington, not in Sarajevo. And I do not need to expand on people who know not a bit of the language of the country on which they write but nonetheless bravely pen compendia of common places which proceed to win prizes in the Anglo world.

Thus Kuper’s piece, while in some respects extreme, did contain some truth. The ubiquitousness of English language has stimulated intellectual laziness by making native English speakers less likely to make an effort to learn foreign languages. And even when they do learn them, to use them mostly to hire taxis and read restaurant menus, and not to engage with the language and culture of the country which they are supposed to know and to write about. It has led them to live, even in places thousands of miles far from the United States, and culturally entirely different, in a bubble of the ideas generated by the Anglo-American media, to believe only in such ideas, and to reinforce the solipsism which has always been strong in well integrated, big and geographically isolated nations like the United States.