This uninhibited book of Collingwood’s rounds off his contribution to philosophy in a fiercely personal style. Declaring his unbounded admiration for the Leviathan of Hobbes and following its fourfold structure, Collingwood offers a systematic account of man, society, civilization, and “barbarism” – the last being understood as active hostility towards civilization, or revolt against it. Collingwood’s thoughts on the meaning of “society” and “civility,” as well as on questions of peace and war, remain very much alive; of particular interest here are his distinction between “eristic” and “dialectical” approaches to disagreement, and his conception of a body politic as the scene of a “dialectical” relationship between social and non-social elements. Other discussions impose greater distance on a modern reader – among them his briskly affirmative treatment of the role of a “ruling class,” of our entry into a presumed “social contract,” and of the “intelligent exploitation of nature.”

In appreciating the institutional perpetuity of war, while simultaneously acknowledging the historically informed, inherent limitations of attempts to bound its conduct by international law, this chapter introduces the three interrelated questions that serve as the organising themes of this volume: first, is there a historical continuity with legal protections in war being informed by notions of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarity’?; second, what is the relationship between the ideals and operational realities in international humanitarian law (IHL)?; and third, what are the limitations of international laws designed to restrain excess in war? Via a brief overview of the divergent evolutions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello law, this introductory chapter further explores the sub-themes present in this volume: universalism and its shortcomings; problems with punishing violations of IHL; and the degree to which modern laws of war legitimate activities that should otherwise be prohibited.

After an introductory discussion about Mann’s and Heidegger’s direct comments about each other, I explore how Mann and Heidegger are situated with regard to what has been called conservative revolution. Mann not only helped to gain currency for the concept of conservative revolution, but he also defended it against what he considered its right-wing and/or fascist spoilers, before eventually providing a thorough criticism of it in his Doctor Faustus. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show that in the 1930s and 1940s his thought veered towards the direction of conservative revolution, as described in Mann’s novel. To complement the understanding of conservative revolution, I also draw on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s seminal speech from 1927, which helps to determine how much Heidegger’s philosophy partakes of the spirit of conservative revolution in Germany.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

In the Second World War years, the long-dreamed-of idea of a politically united Europe finally began to be realized, if only in Western Europe. At the heart of this project for a united Europe was the principle of “unity in diversity,” with the diversity lying in the distinct national cultures across Europe. Chapter 8 focuses first on the various reflections on the idea of a “European spirit” discussed at major international conference in Geneva in 1947, before considering the ways in which the notion of “unity in diversity” served to provide an ideological underpinning for this new Europe. Among the many writers and thinkers discussed in this chapter are T. S. Eliot, Denis de Rougemont, Georg Lukács, Stephen Spender, Georges Bernanos, and Karl Jaspers. The chapter highlights just how challenging it is to break with Eurocentric, Euro-supremacist, and Euro-universalist agendas even when the emphasis is placed on diversity. The case of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Fascists in the interwar years, is particularly instructive. As this chapter shows, he was among the most ardent advocates of a united Europe, his arguments having profound implications for any progressive idea of Europe.

Following the revolutions across Europe in 1848, nationalist conceptions of Europe became increasingly dominant, culminating in the founding of the new nation states of Italy (1861) and Germany (1871). The period also saw an intensification of European colonialism, culminating in the “scramble for Africa” towards the end of the nineteenth century. European nationalism and colonialism were increasingly shaped by an ethnological idea of the European, with racial theories of Homo Europaeus justifying colonial barbarism (as exposed by Joseph Conrad at the end of the century). Alongside this particularly dark period in the history of the idea of Europe, Chapter 5 also considers the work of those who sought to champion a cosmopolitan idea of Europe, including Victor Hugo’s calls for a United States of Europe and Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the “good European,” most fully embodied for Nietzsche by Western Europe’s Jewish population. As this chapter reveals, however, Hugo’s idea of Europe was profoundly Francocentric, while Nietzsche’s incorporated deeply disturbing elements of the emerging race theory. The chapter concludes with an assessment of growing sense of European decadence at the end of the century, as articulated by writers such as Max Nordau and Georges Sorel.

If the eighteenth century was dominated by a French Enlightenment idea of Europe, following the French Revolution and then the Napoleon Wars, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a German Romantic idea of Europe, dominated by strains of cultural nationalism. On the one hand, German Romantics such as Novalis looked back nostalgically to medieval Christendom for the model of a united Europe; on the other hand, thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Schlegel brothers dreamed of a Europe dominated by German culture. The roots of the shift from universalism to nationalism lay in the work of writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who challenged French Enlightenment universalism with an insistence upon cultural differences. While Herder also challenged the prevailing Eurocentrism and Euro-universalism, the post-Napoleonic era saw both a growing nationalism across Europe and an intensifying European imperialism that would culminate in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explores the complex relation between the idea of Europe and that of nationalism in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the ways in which the ostensibly antithetical ideas of the universal and the national were integrated into the idea of Europe.

One of the abiding questions in the discourse on the idea of Europe since the Enlightenment has been whether Russia belongs within European civilization, or is essentially Asiatic. Following Peter the Great’s attempts to Europeanize Russia at the end of the seventeenth and in the early years of the eighteenth century, culminating in the construction of St Petersburg as a European city, Russia’s relation to (the rest of) Europe became a hotly disputed question both within and beyond Russia when Peter Chaadayev published his Philosophical Letters (1826–31), in which he claimed that Russia lacked all the qualities of a European nation. This led to a long-lasting debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles in Russia, culminating in the profoundly Slavophile views of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who took issue in particular with the Westernizing views of Ivan Turgenev. Russia’s relation to Europe was also explored by Western European writers, including Germaine de Staël and Astolphe de Custine. This Western European vision of Russia was often profoundly negative, with Russia being seen as an Asiatic threat to Europe. Chapter 4 explores this enduring debate on Russia’s relation to (the rest of) Europe, one that continues to this day.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, which many saw as the result of nationalist rivalries, the immediate postwar period was dominated by concerns regarding European decadence and by dreams of a united Europe that would be able to regain its geopolitical power in a new global landscape increasingly dominated by the United States of America and by Russia. The French writer Paul Valéry set the agenda by arguing for a genuinely “European spirit” that had arisen out of the confluence of classical antiquity and Christianity. He was followed in this endeavor to champion a distinctly European spirit by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann von Keyserling. Chapter 6 charts the development of this idea of a European spirit, as well as the various plans for a politically united Europe, most notably as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s proposals for what he termed “Pan-Europe.” The chapter reveals the cultural supremacism that taints many of these attempts to identify a European spirit, as well as emphasis placed on the need for European to re-establish its geopolitical and geo-cultural influence.

Following the devastating Wars of Religion that had plagued large parts of continental Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new cosmopolitan spirit concerned with putting an end to internecine conflict as well as establishing the idea of a European civilization that was entitled to dictate the nature of any future world civilization. A preoccupation with the idea of Europe ran like a red thread through much Enlightenment thinking, commencing with a tract by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre first published in 1712 on the best means to establish peace in Europe, and including contributions from major writers and philosophers of the period, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Kant. In many respects, the idea of Europe during this period was of French, with the French language being considered the natural European language and French civilization the model for European civilization. Chapter 2 considers the flourishing of the idea of Europe during the Enlightenment, and in particular the way in which it served to a new global vision of civilization. It was in this period that European civilization and values were seen as universal, this Euro-universalism underlying the idea of cosmopolitanism.

This chapter focuses on some of the ways in which states and their citizens have sought to describe and identify terrorists and terrorism, and why they have adopted certain historical tropes and language in the process. Modern states have utilised a number of long-standing historical tropes as lenses through which to view the nature and threat of modern sub-state terrorism, in turn adopting corresponding historical narratives to condemn and counter terrorism. ‘History’ has therefore proved a useful tool in helping states legitimate counterterrorism policies. ‘History’ has also played a role in the scholarship of Terrorism Studies, with commentators looking to the past in order to differentiate between ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism. The historical evidence for the old/new terrorism thesis may be fragile, but the presentation of ‘new terrorism’ – characterised by religious fanaticism (notably Islamic extremism), irrationality and unlimited violence – has drawn heavily upon the historical trope of civilisation struggling against barbarism. Terrorists have become the paradigmatic new barbarians of our current political era. The wider cultural resonances of this linguistic association between barbarism and terrorism is important because, as Crenshaw rightly argues, language is not neutral. By using the language of barbarism in reference to terrorism, states are able to situate terrorists immediately within a deep cultural understanding of threat and the Other.

This chapter focuses on colonial military ventures against frontier communities, which were widely deployed throughout the nineteenth century. It foregrounds previously overlooked debates between administrators and soldiers on dynamics of state and tribal violence in Baluchistan, the Naga Hills, and along the Punjab frontier. Despite environmental and social differences, in northeast and northwest alike, administrators frequently argued that violence could be a method of educating ostensibly refractory tribes, which could be punished legitimately as a corporate body. The colonial also often employed frontier inhabitants as agents of colonial violence, deriving an unstable form of power from the very methods it derided as barbaric. The chapter shows that this was just one of many tensions within colonial frontier violence. Many administrators viewed it as ineffective, believed that it threatened the moral basis of imperial rule, and advanced contrasting conceptions of an individualised tribal subject.

Various prologues and public statements made by Borges about Domingo F. Sarmiento respond to specific historical conjunctures where violence evinces anxiety about barbarism. In 1944, the prologue to ’Recuerdos de provincia’ responds to the immediate context of the Second World War and equates Nazism unequivocally with barbarism. In 1957 and 1968, Sarmiento’s formula of civilization/barbarism continues to serve as a framework for interpreting reality under Perón’s two governments. At the same time, however, the other classic work of Argentine literature, ’Martin Fierro’, evokes a world of courage and rebellion that crystallizes the aesthetic phenomenon. With the return of Perón in 1974, Martin Fierro is displaced again by Facundo as a compelling archetype in and for the national imaginary.