Section Five:

"...All these schemes were debated without staff advice or consideration of detailed maps. There was no inquiry whether shipping was available, nor whether there were troops to spare...It was cheerfully assumed that great armadas could waft non-existent armies to the end of the earth in the twinkling of an eye."

--A.J.P. Taylor
   English History 1914-1945
  ( On the Origins of the Dardenelles Campaign)

Islam, 1401 A.D.: Timur from Central Asia conquers Damascus and Baghdad.

2028 A.D.
Islam, 1402 A.D.: Timur takes Bajazet prisoner after defeating him at Ankara.

2037 A.D.
Rome, 90 B.C. Civil war in Rome between the popular and patrician parties. Marius, the populist, is driven out.

2039 A.D.
Rome, 88 B.C.: Athens (and much of the rest of the eastern Mediterranean) rises against Roman rule. Beginning of wars against Mithridates VI of Pontus.

2040 A.D.
China, 260 B.C.: There is a complicated series of wars involving the states of Ch'in, Chao, Yen and Wei.

2045 A.D.
Rome, 82 B.C.: Sulla becomes dictator for life.

2048 A.D.
Rome, 79 B.C.: Sulla resigns.

2051 A.D.
China, 249 B.C.: Ch'in absorbs the last territories of the nominal emperor.

2056 A.D.
Rome, 71 B.C.: Slave revolt under Spartacus defeated by the general Pompey and the financier Crassus.

2061 A.D.
Egypt, 1486 B.C.: Queen Hat-shepsut conducts a policy of external restraint and internal improvement.

Neither are all problems domestic. The unpleasant feature of hegemony is that eventually you have to exercise it. Obviously, this can be extremely awkward for nucleating nations like Rome, which have been devoting fewer resources and attention to foreign affairs in the face of increasing domestic conflict. But even the State of Ch'in, designed for continuous world war and motivated by an ideology envisioning the manifest destiny of universal dominion, came to find the necessity of actually having to subdue the small principalities at the heart of the world was more than it had bargained for. The matter required exertions which were more than pro forma. For that matter, the tendency of civilizations to regard the world as coterminous with their influence can, even at this period, be shown to be an illusion. Though the whole last half of modernity is an era devoted to finding new forms of order, disaster is always possible, sometimes from the inside, sometimes from the outside.

Of all the major civilizations, Islam seems at every point in its history to have had the least control over its barbarian hinterlands. Except in military tactics, it never developed a decisive technological edge over the less civilized societies which surrounded it. Even worse, its geographical position at the crossroads of Eurasia made it almost impossible to defend even in the best of circumstances. In this epoch, indeed, the nucleating Ottoman nation suffered a blow when a nightmarish invasion from Central Asia overran even its new homeland. (Rome would have suffered a similar fate, had not Marius the populist demagogue defeated a Gaulish horde which invaded northern Italy about this time.) At a later and less resilient period in its history, such a blow could easily have destroyed it. It is illustrative of the deterministic power of historical cycles, perhaps, that at this fairly early stage in their career, all the Ottomans had to do to regain their position was wait. The hordes of Timur were part of no larger story. They exploded across the ancient seats of Near Eastern civilization like a flood, but seem to have altered the course of history not a whit.

Rome, and to some extent the West, present the extreme opposite example of civilizations whose problems were largely self-caused. In both instances, democracy (in the different senses in which these civilizations defined it) reached the highest levels it ever would. Rome, of course, suffered civil war and social revolution in the sequel. The West, pursuing its own highly idiosyncratic notions of justice and equity, came close to achieving equality of result for all ethnic groups and both genders in the most visible stations of public life. The problem, however, is that any position or institution which is manipulated to this degree soon ceases to be a real center of initiative or influence. Leadership is a fundamentally mysterious quality, not one that can be apportioned out according to legal criteria.

Not, of course, that the nominal leaders of society and government were unwilling to try. In Rome and elsewhere, this was an era of the expropriation of the rich, including the imprisonment and execution of old senatorial families. Social classes are not organizations, and so they can never come to power. What can come to power are alliances of people of various income levels and ancestry in the name of one or another social class. In more than one civilization, "the people" come into their own for a few years during this period. The result is the death of the democratic ideal where it exists, and the hardening of hierarchical structures everywhere.

Healthy politics, or at any rate healthy political discourse, is never about power. To take an analogy from economics, any manufacturing company that acts as if it is in the business of making money, rather than in that of making its own product, is not going to make a lot of either in the long run. In much the same way, ideologues who make policy for the sake of power, rather than seeking to make good policy with the hope of receiving power as a natural consequence, will soon find themselves out of office, or worse. In the West during this period, some classes of foreign military engagement were "popular," a situation that left the decision-making authorities curiously vulnerable once they decided to get involved, since they quickly lost the ability to deal with the matter on the merits. In the case of the West, as distinguished from more labor-intensive societies, the natural consequences of relying on a small, precision-instrument military to police the world inevitably became apparent once it lost a major battle or was needed in two places at once.

The reaction (for once the proper word) to popular mismanagement of military affairs (and so of the economy, which was increasingly international and so terribly adverse to political risk) was thorough-going, frequently unjust, often bloody, and entirely successful. In Rome and the West, the paraphernalia of the authoritarian states of a century before, martial law and the concentration camp, first make their appearance in earnest. These new institutions created by the reactionaries are only extensions of initiatives made by their populist predecessors, and they do not actually stay in operation very long. However, the charm has been removed from the nucleating states. Their people have seen no historical corruption will be spared them.

This is the last hurrah of the old-fashioned secret police, the kind who want to stop people from thinking certain things, rather than just making sure they do what they are told. Politics is temporarily closed down as a working institution, though the constitutional forms are maintained. These, indeed, are revived and refurbished to an extraordinary degree. For a few years, however, the reality of government becomes an exercise in vendetta on the part of the conservative victors, a comedy of hypocrisy on that of the discredited populists. Offices at home are filled on the basis of "merit," meaning the merit of adherence to the conservative party. Or, rather, to the conservative leader. Much, though not all, of the special legislation going back almost a hundred years which had been designed to reshape the constitution of society is now eliminated. This in fact makes little difference, since the legislation had always had consequences different from those intended, but the repeals mark the close of an era. Hereafter, until the end of modern times, politics really is just about power, and ideology consequently withers. For real power struggles, no analysis is needed.

Abroad, order and respect are restored, but in some cases that is all. In Egypt as in the West, the process of international integration was brought to a deliberate halt. Queen Hat-shepsut contrived to gain control of her ever more militant and expansionist government, seeing that giving free reign to her young male relatives in their designs on Asia was incompatible with the traditional values of Egyptian civilization. For a few years this enforced respite was possible, and for a few years there was a revival of old arts and old customs, an attempt to think with a smaller, clearer perspective. It cannot last, however, because people like Queen Hat-shepsut (and Sulla in Rome) are wrong. The traditional society she is trying to preserve ended two hundred and fifty years before; the traditionalists about her worship a chimera, a historical reconstruction made of elements from the culture of the Middle Kingdom period taken out of context. When even people of goodwill come to see this, there is nothing to prevent the world from collapsing into its final state.