Peter Turchin on Empires
I’m reading Turchin’s War and Peace and War, on the rise and fall of empires.
Turchin’s argument is basically that empires are created from nations forged in the boundary zone between alien and hostile ethnic groups; for instance, the Roman frontier between Romans and Germanic barbarians, the frontier between the German Christians and the Slavic pagans, the frontier between the Spanish Christians and the Muslim Berbers/Arabs, the frontier between the Slavic Christians and the Turkic Muslims.
Basically, constant hostile pressure and attacks create Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah (common ethnic identity and shared interest, the ability and desire for each individual to suppress his interests and sacrifice for the good of the group,) a common drive, the ability to assimilate strangers into one’s own group, the ability to fight/negotiate/trade with hostile aliens, and most importantly, resilience: the ability to lose, keep losing, not give up, and eventually triumph.
Say this is true. What can we predict?
- Due to insane and suicidal elites, the entire West is importing hostile and violent, predatory or parasitical aliens en masse, turning its whole area into an ethnic frontier/boundary zone. If you live in a town in formerly ethnically and culturally homogeneous places like, say, Maine, Minnesota, or the British backwoods, expect to have some Somalis, Pakistanis, Subsaharan Africans, etc. move in next door. So we can predict that big empires will rise from the ensuing conflict. A white European (or American) 60 years ago was likely to define himself by his differences from and similarities to his fellow whites, who made up the vast majority of the people he encountered throughout his life: nationality, taste, class, mods vs. rockers. In 20–40 years, many of them will define themselves through belonging to a synthetic group which will emerge in response to constant close and hostile contact with an alien ethnos. These groups will not be white nationalist per se; one of Turchin’s key parameters for the emergence of a cohesive empire-forming group is its ability to assimilate members of a typically hostile alien group. Assuming they survive, these groups will provide the foundations of future states and empires.
- We in Israel live in exactly the sort of conditions Turchin describes as the hotbed for the formation of an imperial ethnos. We’ve been living in these conditions for, oh, approximately 2300 years, from the colonization of our land by Greeks through exile and into the return from exile. The next step will be coalescing under a common identity (“Israeli” is not much of one,) expansion and assimilation. I think that this will happen, as all things we do, in a way that is different from how the other nations do it. Meaning, the groups we assimilate will not be linked to us by geographical proximity (alone) but by a historical connection and one of identity. Immediate candidates are the descendants of Jews who converted to Islam and Christianity and want to come back, and the descendants of the Lost Tribes (the Pashtuns are a big group which comes from the Exile of Israel and has not lost its connection to that identity.)
