Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (56 page)

11

Eurasia without a Center

Modernism, War, and Cultural Decline

The twentieth century represents the culmination of the revolutionary movement of Modernism, with its fight against tradition, natural law, and nature itself in all areas, levels, and aspects of culture. It was especially calamitous in Eurasia, where Modernist revolutions of different kinds instituted populist, totalitarian, and fundamentalist tyrannies and brought devastating wars and mass murder at unprecedented levels. Disastrous Modern economic policies helped to produce the worst global recession in recent history, the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to the Second World War in many countries. Culturally, the ruthless application of radical “revolutionary” programs resulted in the cultural devastation of Central Eurasia: destruction of thousands of monasteries, shrines, mosques, churches, synagogues, and educational institutions affiliated with Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, as well as destruction of books and torture or execution of clerics. Central Eurasia suffered more than any other region of the world from the ravages of Modernism.

Mongolia and Tibet regained independence upon the fall of the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1911, and parts of East Turkistan followed, briefly, a few decades later. But shortly after the Second World War the communists won the civil war in China and the Chinese quickly seized Inner Mongolia, East Turkistan, and finally Tibet (in 1951). The three countries were put under military occupation and were flooded with Chinese settlers.

After the Second World War and the Chinese invasion, Central Eurasia was even more isolated than before. The eastern and western extremes of Eurasia were dominated by the United States of America, a non-Eurasian state, and the planet was divided into communist and capitalist camps. Their protracted struggle, known as the Cold War because the two camps rarely used open military force against each other directly, focused above all on control of Eurasia.
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The anticommercial “socialist” systems of the large communist empires—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union) and the People’s Republic of China (Communist China) brought poverty and isolation to both of those states as a whole and, in particular, to Central Eurasia, most of which they occupied militarily.

The Littoral System and the Silk Road

In the Modern period, Eurasia continued to be dominated by the Littoral System, which ultimately grew out of the much earlier Littoral zone commerce. That earlier commerce should certainly not be overlooked, nor can it be doubted that it was significant; however, it has been argued that the maritime commerce of Asia was not merely as significant as the continental Silk Road commerce, it was much more important. This argument misses the point of what the Silk Road was, even according to most traditional treatments of it, and obscures what happened to it.

The Silk Road was actually unparalleled by anything in the Littoral zone. Before the Portuguese discovery of the direct sea route from Europe, and their domination and cultivation of it, the Littoral zone maritime trade system was in essence only that: a commercial transportation network or, perhaps more accurately, an interconnected system of regional transportation networks. By contrast, the Silk Road was not in essence a commercial transportation network at all. It was the entire Central Eurasian economy, or socioeconomic-political-cultural system, the great flourishing of which impressed itself upon the people of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the records and remains of which impress even the people of today.

Until the destruction of the last steppe empire and the partition of the region by peripheral states in modern times, the society, economy, political systems, and culture of Central Eurasia as a whole (including the herding, agricultural, and urban peoples, and the warriors, artists, intellectuals, and others) were the equal of the other contemporaneous major world regions of Eurasia: East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southwest Asia, and Europe. During the early Modern period, as shown in
chapter 10
, Central Eurasia became an impoverished backwater. In the Modern period it remained so, but sank even lower, becoming one of the most deeply depressed and poverty-stricken regions in the entire world, far beyond what might have been expected from political conquest alone, with few monuments or other physical reminders of what had once been great cultures. The question of why that happened must be answered.

The reason adduced here is the conquest and partition of Central Eurasia by the early modern European and Asian peripheral powers. Because Central Eurasia thus no longer existed as an independent entity or group of entities during the Modern period, its nations became “frontier problems” for the colonial powers.
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The entire region was thus largely ignored during the twentieth century, and its participation in Modern history was limited almost completely to being the victim of one or another Modern horror. Accordingly the history of Central Eurasia in the twentieth century is to a large extent subordinate to the history of the Eurasian periphery, particularly Western Europe, Russia, and China.
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This chapter outlines that history, with an eye out for its effects on Central Eurasia and the eventual beginnings of a new imperial order at the end of the century.

The Radical Modernist Revolutions

Before the First World War, the ideals of monarchy and aristocratic cultural tradition prevailed nominally in most of the European-dominated world, despite the challenge of populist forces emanating from those countries that had adopted a republican form of government. After the disastrous First World War, most of the remaining monarchies of Europe were overthrown, or the monarchs were stripped of any remaining actual power.
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They were replaced with overt Modernist “democracies,” all of which were republics, at least theoretically. The institution of compulsory national education in all modern republics brought with it the indoctrination of children in the ideology of “democracy” so they would not oppose the programs of those who held actual political power but would instead unwittingly support them.

THE FIRST MODERNIST REVOLUTION IN CHINA

The first significant Modernist revolution of the century began in China. It was led by Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a Cantonese intellectual who emigrated to Hawaii in 1897 and subsequently lived in Hong Kong, Japan, Britain, and the United States.
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The revolutionaries stated as their goal the overthrow of what they called the “alien” Manchus—who were by then actually indistinguishable from ethnic Chinese in culture, language, and national identity—and the establishment of a “democratic” government. Both of their then radical goals derived from European and, specifically, American influences. They finally succeeded in overthrowing the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1911. The Central Eurasian protectorates of Mongolia and Tibet immediately pointed out that, as their political relationship had been with the “alien” non-Chinese Manchus specifically, not the Chinese, they were fully independent again. In East Turkistan, the imperial occupation forces were taken over by the new republican leadership. They retained control there partly because of the country’s multiethnic composition and consequent lack of national political unity.
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The new Chinese republic was weak, and warlords took over much of the country. Upon the capture by General Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975 [r. 1926–1949 in China, 1949–1975 in Taiwan]) of the then capital, Peking,
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and his establishment as leader of the Nationalist Party,
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the capital was moved south to Nanking (Nanjing). The new capital was located on the navigable Yangtze River only 140 miles west of Shanghai, which was a great internationally dominated port and already the largest, most prosperous city in China.

The First World War

The mutual distrust lingering from the previous century among the major European powers, coupled with a genuine desire for war, built up tension and armaments to the bursting point. When an excuse for war took place in the Balkans, the multinational alliances went into effect and the First World War (1914–1918) began. The combatants belonged to two groups. The Allied Powers were Britain, France, Serbia, Russia, and Japan, which were joined during the war by Italy (1915), Portugal and Romania (1916), and Greece and the United States (1917). The Central Powers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, which were joined during the war by Bulgaria (1915).
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The war was especially devastating in northwestern Europe, where most of the major battles and other destruction took place. In a few weeks of battle about one million young men perished.

The nations openly at war were more or less exclusively in Europe, though due to the extensive alliances the warfare did extend into the Ottoman Empire in the southeast, where it had far-reaching effects and led to the fall of that regime. It was thus not quite a “world” war but was called one because the major participants considered Europe and its immediate neighbors in the Near East to be all the world that mattered.
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