Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

I previously reviewed Azar Gat's "War in human civilization" (Feb. 2008). This is an important book and despite its neocon slant--in particular, the tendency to regard all social processes in fake biological terms--many of its arguments have intellectual validity. So my discussion with Gat continues.

The Jewish people never had an instituion of nobility and did not have kingship for the past 2000 years. Yet, for the most part of this period, they lived in the midst of hostile peoples. Hence, Gat's exaggeration of ethnic factors in warfare and his complete oblivion to others, in particular, dynastic, confessional and class reasons for war is understandable, especially from his position as a mid-ranking reserve officer of Israeli Army.

Yet, for the sake of truth, I must take an argument with his vision. First, ethnicity existed only as an academic category before mid- to late XIX century. Ethnicity as a political factor followed nationalism and did not precede it. For instance, when my grandfather grew up in the Russian Empire, simple people like him did not identify themselves as "Russians." They considered themselves "Skobar" (i.e. from Pskov), "Poshekhonian" or "Ryazanski", i.e. by the place of their birth. The word Russian meant the subject of the Russian Tsar and the Greek Orthodox.

In the first world war, Russian Baltic Navy was commanded by von Essen and the doomed East Prussia invasion force by von Rennenkampf. His German opposite number was Gen. Francois (i.e. "French" in French). Similarly, the inhabitants of the neighboring villages in the Transcarpathia were typically called "Slovaks" if they were Roman Catholics, "Ruthenians" if they were Uniate and "Ukrainians" if they were Orthodox. If you think that boys from one village in course of the centuries never dated girls from another village, you gravely misjudge human nature. Similarly, the closest neighbors in the Western provinces of the Russian Empire were Catholic Lithuanians, mostly uniate White Russians or Orthodox Russians. On the contrary, a peasant from Smolensk and a peasant from Tobolsk in Siberia identified themselves as Russians on the basis of their common Orthodox religion. If you were to call Metternich, Radetzky or Windischgraetz Czechs they would be neither offended, nor find it hilarious. They simply would not understand it as if you were calling them astronauts.

Nor this phenomenon was limited to the Eastern Europe. When, in 1870s the King Victor Emmanuel united Italy he quipped: "We created Italy. Now we must create Italians." Friulani in the North were absolutely different people from central Toscanians and had nothing to do with Napolitans or Sicilians. Norwegians of the ancient Kingdom of Norway, before the advent of national television were three distinct groups who could barely if at all understand each other.

What Azar Gat confuses with ethnicity is "localism", which certainly existed (and informed warfare) from the time immemorial. When the Catholic Poles, semi-pagan Lithuanians of "Polish Rus" and Orthodox Novgorodians from the Russian principality of Novgorod jointly opposed the Teutonic Knights they did it in the name of the local patriotism and the Polish King from Lithuanian dynasty. So much for ethnicity. Again, when the federation of Italian towns under the Milanese leadership defeated Friedrich II at Legnano--one of the turning points of late medieval history--they did it to avoid Imperial taxes and other impositions. German ethnicity of the knights and the Emperor's Sicilian upbringing had no part in that.