I was listening to the Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, and Daniel Kurtz-Phelan (Editor of Foreign Affairs) was interviewing Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell, experts on Russia and China, respectively, about the Sino-Russian relationship, and Stephen Kotkin made an interesting point about a core difference between Russia and China: Russia is culturally European but not institutionally Western; China is neither culturally European nor institutionally Western. With these two categories in mind, he creates a 2x2 and places the US and Europe in the culturally European and institutionally Western category, and Japan in the not-European but Institutionally Western category. For me, this 2x2 offered a lot of explanatory power, especially as I continue to puzzle over Russia and its seemingly inexplicable behavior in Ukraine.
I’m not sure if Kotkin has documented this 2x2 elsewhere, or if it was something he was making up on the spot, but I didn’t care for the “European” culture component, so I renamed that axis “Culturally Western” when I replicated the 2x2 for myself. I also added a few more countries to the 2x2.
I replaced European with Western because I think that although the culture of the US is heavily indebted to Europe, it has influences from other cultural traditions, as does modern Europe. But the cultural core is the same. It’s a minor inflection. Feel free to put Kotkin’s initial label back in your mind if you’d like.
I remember reading Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes some years ago, and Ansary made the argument that the Islamic world never really went through an Enlightenment the way that Europe (and consequently, the American founders) did. Up through the 17th century, Islam was politically, scientifically, and culturally more advanced than the West. In the 18th century, Europe accelerated past the Islamic world in all three areas, and in the 19th century, Europe began conquering and colonizing the Islamic world. The seeds of the Enlightenment began in the Renaissance, with the rebirth of classical learning, and the broadening acceptance of reason and a faith in human rationality over tradition (especially as represented by the Roman Catholic Church). It was the scientific and social revolution represented by the Enlightenment that powered the West into a position of eventual global dominance.
I am not a scholar of the Enlightenment, but if you would indulge me with a couple of pivotal points that I think are important. First, Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, developed the first printing press with moveable type in 1436, putting it into commercial operation in 1454 to print the famous Gutenberg Bible. Considering previous editions of the Bible would have had to have been hand copied, this innovation dropped the price of a Bible exponentially. Let’s say a copy of the Bible dropped from $50,000 per copy to merely $1,000. The average person probably still couldn’t afford one, especially given how poor the average European was in 1436 (the average European peasant lived at near-starvation in that time), but cutting the cost of a central cultural resource radically led to many more people having direct access. They no longer had to rely on a priest to tell them what was in the Bible, they could see for themselves. This led directly to the Protestant Reformation and interpretive autonomy.
Second, it was not until 1513 that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was prepared to demonstrate that the astronomical system of the universe, with the Earth at its center, which had been handed down from Aristotle for some 2000 years and held as doctrine by the Catholic Church, was not correct, and that in fact a heliocentric (sun-centered) system was in fact more true. The Church officially rejected this contradiction of tradition, and when, a century later, Galileo tried to challenge Church doctrine, he was jailed for doing so. But with the printing press, it becomes eminently harder to suppress communication of ideas. The Catholic Church didn’t officially end its rejection of heliocentrism in 1758.
I believe that from the fall of Rome until the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church provided an ordering system in Europe. It was limited in scope, but something is better than chaos. If we accept this idea that the Church was a bulwark against greater disorder, then we can see why it would have been a valuable social resource. The Church relied on tradition to maintain its order. Having a Polish scientist poke holes in one part of its tradition in and of itself wasn’t a problem - the Church fathers probably didn’t much care whether the sun went around the Earth or the Earth around the sun - they only cared about the maintenance of the tradition. If someone could prove the Church was wrong about this thing, then what else might the Church be wrong about? And that breaks the power of tradition. Which is exactly what the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment ushered in the secularization of culture and the rise of reason over tradition, which then allowed for the scientific and political advances that led to the emergence of the West.
The Declaration of Independence is one of the great Enlightenment documents. The second paragraph of the Declaration gets to the heart of some of the core Enlightenment beliefs:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
I see four Enlightenment values illuminated here:
All men are created equal. There are no inherent social orders. The aristocracy is not God-given.
All men have the natural rights of life and liberty to pursue their own ends.
Governments are subordinate to the people, not the other way around.
Governments exist to protect the rights of the people.
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen are more carefully numerated as points, but the idea is very similar. What is interesting is the French Revolution embraced the values of reason and rationality, along with the rights of individuals, but it descended into The Reign of Terror precisely because it obliterated respect for tradition. Nothing was left sacred and what we all know is we can use reason to justify anything we want. It took France a long time to come back to a republic and rule of law. What is remarkable is that the United States never fell into a Terror.
The liberal democracy that represents Western institutions is built on these basic beliefs that emerged as a result of the Enlightenment. To be institutionally Western means to believe in these principles, and to hold to a system of liberal democracy. Along with liberal democracy, Western institutions are fundamentally capitalist.
“The basic institutions of capitalism are: (i) the right of ownership in productive assets, (ii) freedom of contract, and (iii) constitutional (limited) government. Those three institutions set capitalism apart from other social systems. They generate incentives that have specific and predictable effects on the behavior of decision makers, the allocation of resources, and the flow of innovation.” (Pejovich, 1990)
Liberal democracy is tied to constitutional limited government. Property and contract form the liberty that the Declaration refers to. Since the Enlightenment, liberalism and capitalism have lead to the wealth and innovation that the West has seen, and greater than any in human history.
The Russian state is not a liberal democracy. It is a limited access order. The pre-Soviet Russian state was an autocracy, the Soviet Union was an autocracy. The Soviet Union had numerous purges on a scale far larger than the Reign of Terror over many decades precisely because communism denounces tradition and embraces reason without values. Although there was some possibility of a liberal post-Soviet Russia, what has emerged is not a liberal democracy. Again, I am not a Russian historian, but I believe the Enlightenment values never integrated into Russian culture. In particular, the subordination of the government to the people is not something that I believe is widely believed in Russia. It is certainly not believed in China, where the people are subordinate to the State, and the State is subordinate to the Party.
Culturally, Russia shares a long and inseparable history with continental Europe. In particular, the Christian heritage makes it culturally Western (as opposed to the Islamic or Chinese cultural heritage). This part of the 2x2 is a little sketchy for me - I have a hard time separating economic freedom and culture, since much of personal freedom is tied to economic freedom, but Kotkin is probably right on some fundamental level. Below is a graph comparing Russia and France on six cultural components (click on the graph to go to the web site).
You can see France and Russia share some cultural similarities, reinforcing the common cultural heritage.
Comparing Japan and the US, you can see the cultures are quite different, despite both being “Western”.
Post-WWII, Japan adopted Western institutions and effectively became part of the West, despite not being culturally Western. Japan and China share a cultural heritage in the same way that Europe and Russia do (Russia bridges Europe and Asia, though most of Russia’s people live in the European portion of Russia.). China is neither culturally Western, nor has it adopted liberal democracy or capitalism, preferring instead communist doctrine which allows for autocratic rule.
I think Kotkin’s analytical categories are useful because it tells us that despite being culturally heterogenous, the West can absorb other countries. Japan is a good example of moving into the West, despite being culturally non-Western. I have been bullish on India for many years because I have always seen them moving, perhaps reluctantly, toward Western institutions, and thus toward the West. Russia is confusing because while it shares cultural heritage with the West, it has rejected (at least for now) Enlightenment-based Western institutions.
Could Russia merge with China to form a new system to become a counterweight to the institutional West? I think that is an interesting question. I think the Western institutions represent an operating system (to borrow from tech) that allows heterogenous cultures to work together. Marxist-inspired communist governments have always sought dominance rather than cooperation because socialism requires central planning, and there can only be one center. Coupling this dominance focus with cultural heterogeneity, I don’t see collaboration working except in opposition to the West, and in the long-term I think the drive to domination will break up the cooperation.
I think I will be thinking about this 2x2 going into the future when I think about international affairs. Clearly institutions dominate culture.