THE EXPANSION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The predominance of the Western civilization throughout he world on the eve of the fateful year 194 was, indeed, both recent and unprecedented. It was unprecedented in this sense-that, though many civilizations before that of Europe had radiated their influence far beyond their original homelands, none had previously cast its net right round the globe.

The civilization of Eastern orthodox Christendom, which grew up in mediaeval Byzantium, had been carried by the Russians to the Pacific; but, so far from spreading westwards, it had itself succumbed to Western influence since the close of the seventeenth century. The civilization of Islam had expanded from the Middle East to Central Asia and Central Africa, to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Pacific coasts of the East Indies, but it had obtained no permanent foothold in Europe and had never crossed the Atlantic into the New World. The civilization of ancient Greece and Rome had extended its political dominion into North-Western Europe under the Roman Empire and its artistic inspiration into India and the Far East, where the Graeco-Roman models had stimulated the development of Buddhist art. Yet the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire had co-existed on the face of the same planet for two centuries with scarcely any direct intercourse, either political or economic. It was the same with the other ancient civilizations. Ancient India radiated her religion, her art, her commerce and her colonists into the Far East and the East Indies, but never penetrated the West. As far as we know for certain, the only civilization that has ever yet become worldwide is ours.

Moreover, this is a very recent event. Nowadays we are apt to forget that Western Europe made two unsuccessful attempts to expand before she eventually succeeded.

The first of these attempts was the mediaeval movement in the Mediterranean for which the most convenient general name is the Crusades. In the Crusades, the attempt to impose the political and economic dominion of West Europeans upon other peoples ended in a complete failure, while, in the interchange of culture, the West Europeans received a greater impress from the Muslims and Byzantines than they imparted to them. The second attempt was that of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth century of our era. This was more or less successful in the New World, but, elsewhere, Western civilization, as propagated by the Spaniards and Portuguese, was rejected after about a century's trial.

The third attempt was begun in the seventeenth century by the Dutch, French and English, and these three West European nations were the principal authors of the world-wide ascendancy that our Western civilization was enjoying in 1914. By 1914 the network of European trade and European means of communication had become world-wide. On the plane of politics, the European nations had not only colonized the New World, but had conquered India and tropical Africa.

The political ascendancy of Europe, however, though outwardly even more imposing than her economic ascendancy, was really more precarious. The daughter-nations overseas had already set their feet firmly on the road towards independent nationhood. The United States and the Latin American Republics had long since established their independence by revolutionary wars; and the self-governing British Dominions were in the process of establishing theirs by peaceful evolution. In India and tropical Africa, European domination was being maintained by a handful of Europeans who lived there as pilgrims and sojourners. They had not found it possible to acclimatize themselves sufficiently to bring up their children in the tropics; this meant that the hold of Europeans upon the tropics had not been made independent of a European base of operations. Finally, the cultural influence of the West European civilization upon Russians, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and tropical Africans was so recent a ferment that it was not yet possible to predict whether it would evaporate without permanent effect, or whether it would turn the dough sour, or whether it would successfully leaven the lump.

This then, in very rough outline, was the position of Europe in the world on the eve of the War of 1914-1918. She was in the enjoyment of an undisputed ascendancy, and the peculiar civilization which she had built up for herself was in process of becoming world-wide. Yet this position, brilliant though it was, was not merely unprecedented and recent; it was also insecure. It was insecure chiefly because, at the very time when European expansion was approaching its climax, the foundations of West European civilization had been broken up and the great deeps loosed by the release and emergence of two elemental forces in European social life-the forces of industrialism and democracy, which were brought into a merely temporary and unstable equilibrium by the formula of nationalism. It is evident that a Europe which was undergoing a terrific double strain of this inward transformation and outward expansion-both on the heroic scale-could not with impunity squander her resources, spend her material wealth and man-power unproductively, or exhaust her muscular and nervous energy. If her total command of resources was considerably greater than that which any other civilization had ever enjoyed, these resources were relative to the calls upon them; and the liabilities of Europe on the eve of 1914, as well as her assets, were of an unprecedented magnitude. Europe could not afford to wage even one World War; and when we take stock of her position in the world after a Second World War and compare it with her position before 1914, we are confronted with a contrast that is staggering to the imagination.

(From Civilization on Trial, by Arnold Toynbee)