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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Volume 5 Issue 3-4 2011
Parvin DARABADI
D.Sc. (Hist.), Professor at the International Relations Chair of Baku State University
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
THE GEOHISTORICAL PRINCIPLES AND SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE MILITARY-POLITICAL SYSTEMS IN THE MUSLIM EAST AND THE CHRISTIAN WEST
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) The Ballad of East and West
Abstract
T
his article attempts to examine several aspects of the geohistorical principles and specific features of the evo-
lution of the military-political systems in the Muslim East and the Christian West. It traces the historical roots from which these sys-
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tems stemmed in the Middle Ages and in Modern and Recent History. It analyzes the experience of the many-century military-political standoff between the West and the
East in the context of the dynamics of the geopolitical changes in the correlation of forces on the world arena over the past one-and-a-half millennia.
Introduction
The dramatic events of the first decade of the 21st century evoked by the failure of the so-called multi-culturalism policy in Europe, the subsequent intensification of anti-Islamic and anti-Christian trends in the societies of several leading countries of the West and East, and the terrorist acts carried out by both Christian and Muslim extremist forces have revived the conflict between these two major civilizational-religious communities, their ideologies, and their values. Certain events in Christian Europe and the Muslim East have brought into clear relief Huntington's intercivilizational clashes, which are fraught with much greater danger for the whole of mankind than even a potential military clash between nuclear powers. Along with this, in the new century, an entirely new sociopolitical global phenomenon is emerging—geoterrorism—the brain child of geopolitics of the 21st century, whereby the methods of conducting armed conflict engaged in by the international terrorist structures and the antiterrorist coalitions opposing them differ little from each other. It is enough to observe the military-political processes unfolding in the first decade of the current century in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the past year in the Arab East.
All of this prompts us to turn to the past and examine the previous multi-century period of WestEast confrontation, particularly since ominous signs of the revival of crusades and clashes of civilizations are becoming evident in the new century. This might mean that a global political collapse could happen much sooner than a planetary environmental disaster.
The Historical Roots of the Military-Political Systems in the Muslim East and the Christian West
One of the most important components of historical development in the Muslim East and the Christian West over the almost one-and-a-half millennia covering the Middle Ages, as well as Modern and Recent History, has been the formation and enhancement of their military-political systems. Whereas the military organization of the leading Christian countries of medieval Europe was formed on the basis of the ancient Greek and Roman military systems, military affairs in the countries of the Muslim East throughout the entire Middle Ages developed on the basis of the military experience of the previous two millennia, in particular, that relating to the Assyrian-Median, Byzantine-Persian, and Hun-Turkic military systems. In so doing, it synthesized to a certain extent the main elements of the three largest military systems of this era—the Arabian, Persian, and Mongol-Turkic.1
At the same time, specific local sociopolitical, socioeconomic, national-ethnic, and cultural-psychological features left their mark on the development of the military systems of the largest states of the Muslim East—the Arabian Caliphate and then the Timurid, Ottoman, and Safavid empires, the religious factor being a pivotal element.
1 See: E.A. Razin, Istoriia voennogo iskusstva, in 3 volumes, Vol. 2, OOO Izdatelstvo Poligon, St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 109-123, 203-211, 226-248.
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Islam, which came into being at the beginning of the 7th century on the Arabian Peninsula, was, according to 19th century German military historian Hans Delbrück, a "military-political organization of the people"2 in the Middle Ages, and the main principles of jihad, as well as the moral-ethnic standards for carrying it out set forth in the holy Koran, became the solid ideological base that ensured the grandiose victories of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates and subsequently blended intrinsically into the military systems of the medieval Muslim states of the East, primarily the states of the Turkic Seljuks and the Timurid, Ottoman, and Safavid empires.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Muslim East was the only civilized neighbor of Christian Europe. The entire Middle Ages passed in the grips of almost continuous military-political confrontation between these two civilizational-religious unions. By the time the European crusaders reached the Middle East at the end of the 11th century, Islam had already succeeded in embodying elements of the three main military-political systems of the East: the Arabian, Persian, and Turkic, each of which made its contribution to building the strength of Islamic warfare.
The high efficiency of the Eastern military system was demonstrated during the crusades of the 11th-13th centuries when despite several initial impressive achievements, they generally ended in failure for the West. It is no accident that this was the time when several European countries created their own military-religious organizations—monastic-knightly orders that existed right up until the 16th century. It was light cavalry, firearms, and several tactical improvements that came to the West through the East.
The appearance in the Middle East of a new powerful military-political force in the form of the Turkic Seljuks at the beginning of the 11th century, and then of the Turko-Mongols at the beginning of the 13 th century, made a significant contribution to improving the military systems of several large states of this region which ultimately became a driving force for four centuries, beginning with the 14th century right up until the 17th century, in the Timurid, Ottoman, and Safavid empires. They intrinsically united the main elements of the essentially kindred desert Arab and steppe Turkish military organizations. The Arab-Turkic military system predominated throughout the Muslim East right up until the Early Modern Period.
As in the Arabian East, religious and military factors merged in these military systems, making it possible for them to exert relatively strong military-political pressure on the countries of the West over the span of three centuries, in the 14th-16th centuries. In particular, the military power of the Ottoman Empire reached such a level in the 16th century that the leading war-torn countries of Western Europe were only able to withstand them due to the contradictions between the leading powers of the medieval East—the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Dynasty.
In turn, the real Turkish threat to Europe in the 15th-16th centuries prompted several Christian states—Venice, Portugal, Spain, England, the Papacy, the German states, etc.—to create an anti-Ottoman military-political coalition with the Muslim states of Aq Qoyunlu, and then with the Safavids, who were trying, in turn, to control the traditional trade routes and, primarily, the Great Silk Road linking China and India with the Western markets. This required gaining access to the Black and Mediterranean seas. In turn, the West was pursuing far-reaching geopolitical goals aimed at creating favorable conditions for imminent colonial expansion in Asia, clashing with each other and, in so doing, weakening the two mighty Eastern monarchies—the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Dynasty. What is more, by the end of the 15th century, the Spaniards, by gradually destroying the Arab-Moorish emirates, succeeded in becoming a sufficiently strong centralized state with their own powerful ocean fleet on the southwest flank of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula.
This created prerequisites for the leading European states, with the help of the strong sea power that formed at this time, to implement a geopolitical strategy called Anaconda that envisaged establishing control over and suffocating the coastal territories of the Afro-Asian countries. These intentions were fully implemented as early as the 18th-19th centuries when the capitalist West, on the crest of the industrial revolution, surged far ahead of the hopelessly backward feudal East.
: H. Delbrück, Istoriia voennogo iskusstva v ramkakh politicheskoi istorii, Vol. III, Moscow, 1938, pp. 149-150.
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The Principles and Specific Features of the Military-Political Systems
in the West and East in the Early Modern Period
Having rebuffed the onslaught of the Muslim East by the beginning of the 17th century, the Christian West began to gradually take up the military-strategic initiative. The great geographical discoveries radically changed the geopolitical appearance of the world. The development of the main sea trade routes under the control of the Western Europeans led, against the background of the decline of the caravan trade as a whole, to a breakdown in the traditional trade and economic ties the Middle East had formed over the centuries with both the European countries and with India and China. This was one of the main reasons for the economic and accompanying military-political decline of the entire Muslim East at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. An important geostrategic factor also played its part: the countries of the Muslim East, which remained at the level of the times of Sinbad the Sailor, did not become the possessors of sea power, which comprised, according to the concept of American Admiral Alfred Mahan, three main components—a naval fleet + a commercial fleet + naval bases, for, as Bernard Carra de Vaux noted at one time, "Muslims ... on the whole are not reputed to be great lovers of the sea."3
Possessing immense sea power by that time, thalassocratic Western Europe, which was relatively limited in the spatial respect, was able to win a geopolitical battle against the vast tellurocratic East, which, for several reasons, had fallen into a prolonged stupor, from which it was only aroused by the threatening reverberations of the 20th century.
The West's powerful economic upswing at the beginning of the 17th century, which was prompted by the appearance of large centralized states in Western Europe with relatively stable political regimes, could not help but also have an impact on the development of the military systems forming at that time in the great European powers—England, France, Spain, and Austria, as well as in Prussia and Russia at the beginning of the 18th century.
As early as the late Middle Ages, it became utterly clear to Europe that supremacy on the seas was a prerequisite for continental hegemony. The practice of sea battles and major naval expeditions was institutionalized in Europe into targeted development and became an important element of the dynamic striving toward maximum expansion of spheres of influence. It was precisely in the 17th-18th centuries that sea powers with strong military fleets appeared. The formation of a centralized military organization and regular armies and navies, the possession of high-tech firearms for those times, and the improvement of strategy, tactics, and operational art during the waging of the numerous wars in Europe could not help but promote a qualitative increase in the military potential of the leading European nations and, on the whole, gave the West a strategic advantage during the colonial wars in the East. Thus, the East lost to the West primarily in the struggle for supremacy on the seas. At the same time, it was precisely the presence of a large fleet in the Mediterranean that made it possible for the Ottoman Empire to hold out until the beginning of the 20th century.
On the whole, the economic backwardness of the Eastern countries designated at that time also had an impact on the development of their military systems, which made it possible for the West European countries to begin legitimate colonial expansion toward the east and the south.
When addressing the evolution and enhancement of the military systems in the countries of the Muslim East in the Modern History, it must be noted that although the first attempts were made at the beginning of the 19th century in several Eastern countries, particularly Turkey and Persia, to bring their armed forces into harmony with the advanced European military system, this did not yield the expected effect, which was clearly demonstrated by the numerous Russo-Turkish and Russo-Persian wars of the 18th-19th centuries. Possessing strong sea power in the form of the Black Sea and Caspian
1 B. Carra de Vaux, Arabskie geografy, Leningrad, 1941, p. 23.
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naval fleets and advanced military organization for that time in the form of a regular army, Russia was able to establish a niche for itself in the expanses of the Black and Caspian seas and significantly expand the land borders of its empire, bringing the Crimea and Caucasus under its wing, as well as Turkestan in the second half of the 19th century.
This was primarily due to the fact that warfare in the Muslim countries of the East at that time did not correspond to the demands of the times since it was still under the direct influence of the existing archaic feudal sociopolitical system. Moreover, the East lagged significantly behind the far advanced leading Western nations, including semi-feudal Russia, in economic and scientific-technical terms. As French Emperor Napoleon I noted in his letter to Persian Shah Fatali written in 1806, although "the people of the East are courageous and gifted, their lack of knowledge in certain skills (meaning the art of war.—P.D.) and careless attitude toward discipline, which increase the power of the armies, are for them a great disadvantage in the war against the North and West."4
In turn, Frederick Engels emphasized at the end of the 19th century that warfare as expressed in the military doctrines, charters, and directives of the European countries could not in itself change the appearance of the armies of the Eastern countries if the necessary conditions were not available. At the same time, he noted that this, however, did not mean that the Eastern nations could not be taught European tactics. In order to inculcate the European military system in the Eastern nations, it was first necessary to create an officer corps and enlist non-commissioned personnel trained in accordance with the latest European system, free of the old national prejudices and throwbacks, and capable of inspiring the new formations. The experience of forming national armed forces in the countries of the East during the second half of the 20th century clearly confirmed the accuracy of these arguments.
When touching on such an important feature as national mentality, including in military affairs, Frederick Engels wrote the following as early as 1857 about the Afghans in particular: "The geographical position of Afghanistan, and the peculiar character of the people, invest the country with a political importance that can scarcely be over-estimated in the affairs of Central Asia... The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race. With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits. The Afghans are divided into clans, over which the various chiefs exercise a sort of feudal supremacy. Their indomitable hatred of rule, and their love of individual independence, alone prevents their becoming a powerful nation; but this very irregularity and uncertainty of action makes them dangerous neighbors, liable to be blown about by the wind of caprice, or to be stirred up by political intriguers, who artfully excite their passions."5 These thoughts were clearly confirmed during the military-political events in Afghanistan in the 20th century and are still pertinent at the beginning of the 21st century.
The 20th Century—A New Stage in the Evolution of the Military-Political Systems in the West and the East
The complete military-technical supremacy of the West over the East achieved by the industrial revolution and by the improvements made in the political systems of the great powers was clearly confirmed in the 20th century. At that time, the specific historical military traditions of the East were manifested during the numerous wars and armed conflicts that went on throughout the past century when the constant attacks on the rear and flanks of the enemy, night raids and ambushes, strikes on
4 Quoted from: Kh.M. Ibrahimbeili, Rossia i Azerbaidzhan v pervoi treti XIX veka (Iz voenno-politicheskoi istorii), Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1969, p. 85.
5 F. Engels, "Afghanistan," in: K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 18, Articles for The New American Cyclopaedia, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1987.
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supply lines and support bases, skillful use of the conditions of mountain and desert locations, and so on comprised the tactics for conducting armed struggle. It was these features that formed the basis of the theory of irregular (petty, partisan) warfare elaborated during the First World War and carried out successfully in practice by British Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence during the Arabs' military operations against the Turkish army in the desert expanses of Arabia. It is no accident that it was this expert on petty warfare who coined the phrase that "making war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup off a knife."6
This experience was enriched during several subsequent large and small wars in some of the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa, particularly in Algeria against the French colonial army in the 1950s, in Afghanistan against the Soviet troops in 1980s, and in Somalia against the American troops at the beginning of the 1990s, and proved its high efficiency. A similar situation can also be seen to one extent or another in the antiterrorist NATO operation in Afghanistan against the Taliban.
On the whole, the experience of combat action of the armed forces of the countries of the Muslim East against foreign invasions over the past few decades shows that the aggressor can only be successfully rebuffed in contemporary conditions if armed formations have reached a high degree of expertise in the use of contemporary weapons, are able to make skilful use of various means for organizing all kinds of progressive fire, as well as stable anti-tank and air defense, have been trained in both immobile defense and delaying action and are able to rapidly switch from one form of combat to another, and, in particular, have the ability to fight in special conditions—at night, on the march, when rebuffing amphibious and vertical assault, and in densely population metropolises.
On the whole, the rich experience of waging national liberation wars in Asia and Africa in the 1950s-1980s showed the high efficiency of the three-component structure of military building in these countries—regular troops; local (regional) formations; and partisan and self-defense contingents. This structure made it possible to draw the highest number of local residents into combat action against aggressors.7
Rational synthesizing of the time-tested Western and Eastern military systems in several large Muslim countries of the Middle East with significant human and natural resources, huge territories, and a relatively developed industrial-technological base promoted effective development of their military potential. They were able to build their own national armed forces and military industries in compliance with contemporary demands and in keeping with the local conditions that best suited them. At the same time, in the present conditions of the information-technological revolution, even possessing nuclear weapons does not guarantee protection of a country's sovereignty.
As world experience shows, victory is achieved by combat action, that is, an organized armed physical and ideological struggle that has a sufficiently stable political and material-technical base in direct proportion to the availability of economic resources and the state's sociopolitical structure. In so doing, a strong and stable economy forms the foundation of the military might of any state.
Both objective and subjective factors guarantee victory in a war: a more flexible and stable rear, a more powerful economic base, political unity of the people and, consequently, greater persistence, endurance, perseverance in battle, strong moral and ideological foundation of the armed forces, and the people's strong desire for victory. To this should also be added the best weapons, innovated, trained, and war-experienced command and personnel, as well as the willingness of the soldiers to give their life for their Homeland and nation. Outstanding German military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz noted as early as the beginning of the 19th century that great aims form the spirit of war. He also emphasized that "if the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles."8
6 i
7 See: Vooruzhennaia borba narodov Afriki za svobodu i nezavisimost, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1974, pp. 374-
' Quoted from: B.H. Liddel-Hart, Lawrence of Arabia, Da Capo Press, Reprint edition, 22 March, 1989, p. 135.
375; Vooruzhennaia borba narodov Azii za svobodu i nezavisimost, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1984, p. 311.
8 K. Clausewitz, O voine, Eksmo, Midgard, Moscow, 2007.
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Conclusion
At present, as incidentally in the past, only the fatal split in the Muslim East, in contrast to the Christian West that consolidated into powerful military-political unions after World War II, primarily in the form of NATO, is giving the latter the opportunity to put effective military pressure on several Eastern countries in critical situations. Whereby contemporary high, scientific-intensive, military technology is making it possible for the leading countries of the West to conduct non-contact warfare with as few losses as possible in terms of manpower and materiel.9 The local wars and armed conflicts of the beginning of the 21st century are akin to police operations under the guise of multi-national forces aimed at overthrowing undesirable regimes (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya).
In turn, the Muslim East, by rejecting the Western Christian values imposed on it, is trying to preserve its civilizational-value essence, often resorting to so-called asymmetric wars, the avantgarde role in which is played by the forces of international terrorism with their outlandish ideas about a World Caliphate.
At the same time, creation of a collective security system in the countries of the Muslim East in the form of military-political blocs or unions like NATO and the EU could promote more successful opposition to the next so-called crusades, i.e. so-called peacekeeping operations, peace enforcement, and similar military interventions that often accompany so-called friendly fire, thus ensuring their national security and genuine independence. But for several objective economic and subjective political reasons, this does not look very likely in the near future, and can even be said to be utopian.
9 See: V.I. Slipchenko, Voiny shestogo pokoleniia. Oruzhie i voennoe iskusstvo budushchego, Veche, Moscow, 2002, pp. 34-38.
