shintoism, zen buddhism and violence

The rise of militarism, nationalism and the process of “westernization” under Emperor Meiji (1868–1945) were accompanied by the official separation of Shinto, the indigenous, animistic religion of Japan and Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri) and by a nationwide campaign to eject foreign religions from the country.
However, in practice, given the overriding goal of infusing a heterogeneous population – national unification was only achieved during the Meiji Restoration – with a sense of social cohesion in the face of Western influence, the future of the imposed totalizing State religion, called Kokka Shintô, mainly hung on its ability to develop a blend of Shintoism, Zen Buddhism, and Confucianism. Advocates of this newly established political religion sought to bring the Japanese emperor back to the center of the political arena and to turn it into the core marker of Japanese group identity and national essence (kokusui).
At the same time, Shinto-Zen priesthood would function as an extension of the central government, with an enormous liability, ensuring that Japan would be correctly understood as a vehicle for world salvation and that other Asian countries would come to accept the plan of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, that is, a racialized “imagined community” dominated by Japan.
The revival of traditional Shintoism was neither a reawakening nor a return to the past, but rather an evolution of pristine cultural forms and the reconstruction of new identities by resorting to historical themes. It served to lend legitimacy to the ruling elite, portrayed as a properly constituted authority which would guarantee the welfare of the whole of society.
The dismissal of the racial equality clause to the preamble of the Covenant for the League of Nations, which had been proposed by the Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to undermine Australian and American immigration restriction acts and unequal international treaties, was taken as a denigration of Japan and the Japanese people. The public called for more aggressive and self-assertive domestic and foreign policy, and Kokka Shintô underwent a process of radical transformation. The Depression further intensified a trend hostile to democratic liberalism. In 1930s and 1940s Japan, as in Europe, governments were given full powers to manage the economy and society because ordinary citizens desperately needed to climb out of the Depression. This made their arbitration and dictates on public matters virtually indisputable. In Japan, a country which was heavily dependent on foreign trade, unemployment soared, labor disputes became more frequent and violent and so did anti-Japanese insurgent movements in Korea and Taiwan. Rural debt forced poor tenant farmers to sell their daughters as prostitutes and thousands of small businesses were gradually absorbed by zaibatsu, that is, huge financial combines which pushed for more authoritarian and imperialistic policies.
Accordingly, through its commitment to uphold the good and the righteous society, the Japanese State acquired a strong ethical foundation and was entitled to give moral guidance in public life and see that citizens didn’t swerve from the right path. Prime minister Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922) stated that the “immutable and incomparable” national system (kokutai) was grounded, historically and spiritually, in the divine essence of the imperial dynasty – the Imperial Way (kôdô) – and of the Japanese islands, as well as in the principle of unity of worship and rule, religion and politics, known as saisei itchi. Adherence to this principle, encapsulated in the word matsurigoto (political affairs), which contains the term matsuri, for religious festivals, involved the merging of state authority (kokkashugi) and ethnic identity (kokuminshugi) (Gatti, 1983).
Because there was no transcendent source of moral authority outside the emperor, there followed that Japanese could not rely on an independent standard of justice, fairness and moral conduct, and nobody would dare to challenge the emperor’s decisions. Soldiers were enjoined to unfailingly obey their superior officers as they would obey the orders of the emperor himself. But because the emperor was infallible, then dutiful soldiers and officers would always be right, no matter how vicious their war tactics and behaviour towards civilians and POWs. That would exclude them from moral responsibility and would assuage feelings of guilt and fear of retribution.
Also, the deeply pessimistic and essentially anti-humanistic anthropology of Kokka Shintô encouraged distrust in people’s independent moral judgment and capacity for free and responsible action. The monopoly of ethical authority that religious leaders accorded to the State caused the legal suppression of pluralist accounts of the good life and the imprisonment and purging of hundreds of opponents. Consequently, historical, political, economic necessities, infused with a religious zeal, overruled any legal constraints and alternative moral views. The Japanese empire was held to be the mundane embodiment of all that was pure, true, good and beautiful. The belief in the ultimate infallibility of the leadership provided a considerable measure of ontological security (Ohnuki-Tierney, 2002).
Kokka Shintô reinscribed emotional attachment, spiritual yearning, and an idealistic sense of citizenship in a society in which citizens were expected to put their own interests and rights after the interests of their community. “Empowered” and highly motivated individuals would counter the iron cages and the amoral social atomization of liberal-capitalist Western modernity. Shinto Zen doctrine of political and ethical absolutism offered the millenarian promise of an alternative, re-moralized modernity and of a collective, mundane salvation, involving the redemption of the national community from an alleged fallen state. Behind these ostensibly noble pursuits, however, lay an invidious condescension for real people and their shortcomings, as well as the willingness to employ all possible means to shape and discipline the new Japanese man and the new Japanese society: including the abolition of pluralism, social conflict and fundamental rights, and the obliteration of all the forces and obstacles that could presumably undermine the moral fiber of society (Maruyama, 1969).
The dramatic predicament of the samurai caste is also worthy of careful consideration. Thousands of trained killers found themselves unemployed and devalued when Meiji reformers initiated sweeping changes in the dominant value system and social conventions – according to the motto fukoku kyōhei, that is, “enrich the country, strengthen the military” – and removed the ban against intermarriage between members of the upper and lower classes. Former samurais realized that the only way to retain their privileged position was to anchor their social status to a biological, and therefore unalterable, standard of distinction: one could only be born with the skills of a samurai. The shift towards an ideology premised on the natural causation of social inequalities and an emphasis on the biological and hereditary determinants of human behavioral traits exerted a major influence on the development of Kokka Shintô. At the same time, loyalty, obedience, fearlessness, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, and honor, that is to say, the keystones of Bushido, “the way of the sword”, the samurai warrior class’ code of conduct, were incorporated into the national ethos.
As a result of these developments, Kokka Shintô was shaped in such a way that it would not serve the interests of a democratic society, but of an autocratic warrior oligarchy captivated by the aesthetic appreciation of violence, death, and martyrdom. The same caste that had cynically exploited Japanese peasants for centuries resorted to indoctrination and propaganda to achieve the same results during the industrial era. Incidentally, it is worth asking whether Japanese nationalism was really so widespread under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867), given the massive effort on the part of the Meiji government to instill nationalism in the larger population. After all, when Commodore Perry’s crew went ashore, on July 14, 1853, ordinary people welcomed them; instead, it was the samurais who felt threatened and intimidated and took an aggressive stance (Duus, 1988).
Kokka Shintô was also the outcome of the inability and unwillingness of the Japanese ruling classes, raised in a society where ethical universalism never really took hold, to critically incorporate Western values and concepts and suppress a rigid and atavistic system of frozen hierarchies which hampered upward mobility. In this sense, Meiji reformism was less a spiritual revolution than a deft strategy deployed by a pre-modern élite haunted by a siege mentality vis-à-vis the alleged Western threat, to transcend modernity by protecting the old system, while at the same time fashioning a modern, industrialized nation that could compete with Western powers for hegemony in the Far East. These reformers saw Western modernity as at once necessary and polluting and Western-style education as imparting knowledge that would shape “shallow, cosmopolitan-minded persons.”
A nationalistic and authoritarian government was the answer to a demand for a distinctive Japanese transition to capitalist modernity, that is, an alternative modernity that would preserve uncontaminated the essence of traditional Japanese culture and spirit (yamatodamashii). Japan was to become modern without simultaneously becoming Western, that is, without losing its cultural spirit and authenticity (bunka seishin), and its exceptionalism and uniqueness.
This would also substantiate the claim that, because of its capacity to amalgamate Western and Eastern cultures, Japan was the only nation that could seriously aspire to the role of Asian leader of a coalition of nations prepared to wage a total war (saishū sensō) against Western colonialist powers. Hence the advocacy on the part of the exponents of the Kyoto school, fascist sympathizers heavily influenced by the German philosophical tradition and by indigenous religious beliefs, of a New Asian Order under Japan’s leadership. The planned New Order would overcome the Western order (kindai no chōkoku) and the attendant individualism, materialism, the commodification of culture, social abstraction, alienation, universalism, international law, state’s neutrality on moral issues, and human rights theory (Harootunian, 2000).
Having said that, judging from the relative lack of media coverage of the philosophical debate on Japan’s role in the process of decolonization of the Far East and on the commonality of Asian peoples, it is safe to assume that nationalism and militarism were a necessary, yet not a sufficient condition, in the rise of Japanese vicious imperialism. Without the Kokka Shintô fundamentalist grounding and its corollary of absolute moral certainty, this doctrine would have almost certainly floundered, for it did not seem to have aroused the interest of the Japanese public or to have helped further Japanese economic interests.

Like today’s Islamic fundamentalism, Kokka Shintô rejected modern secularism, which extolled the value of personal freedom and the inherent worth of the individual over religious faith and collective duties, labeling it a source of incoherent liberal values leading to social fragmentation and atomization, a watered-down religiousness, and political decline. Its militant advocates believed that an uncontaminated cultural and moral authenticity could be preserved in the context of modernity, provided that the manipulative, cosmopolitan Western values were prevented from seizing control of the distinct historical and aesthetic path of Japanese civilization. Culturalism (bunkashugi), as part and parcel of a broader process of redefining what it means to be Japanese through an emphasis on self-affirmation and authenticity, would enable the Japanese to acquire the “modern” without acquiring “the West” as well, and especially the inquisitive “democratic frame of mind” characteristic of an autonomous citizenry. In this way, the Japanese “closed society” would be eternalized and the Japanese would be subsumed by the organic state and submerged by a collective, hyper-ritualized religious practice. The voluntary dissolution of the self to serve the public (messhi hōkō) would secure the attainment of a perfect sense of spiritual integration.
Kokka Shintô did not acknowledge the existence of individual inalienable rights and exalted the well-being of the community above that of individuals, instead of seeing them as complementary. Priority was assigned to moral obligations (giri), over legal obligations (gimu) and rights (kenri). Individual citizens existed for the sake of the nation and of the state-religion, not the other way around, and this reinforced the conception of individuals as mere corpuscles immersed in the eternal stream of history, whereby the past – the ancestral virtues and millenarian traditions of the Yamato race – was projected into the future – the modern manifestation of the same primordial community –, and vice versa (Dale, 1986).
As a response to the “artificial”, heterogeneous, and competitive social milieu of modern urban society, in which ties between individuals are loose and people are held together by personal interest, instrumental rationality, and by the social contract, this self-denying political religion valorized restriction and hierarchy over freedom, and a neo-ruralist, “natural,” organic model of society marked by cultural homogeneousness, cohesion, common objectives, and emotional bonds. The personal and the supra-personal were therefore inseparable and individuals dissolved into the group: loyalty to the group and to one’s own kind came first. Needless to say, the sense of universal indebtedness and responsibility to all other human beings was compromised (Petzin & Ruprecht, 1994). In this “ideal” society, age and kinship would determine a person’s position within an ascribed hierarchy and the strength of the obligation one must have towards his or her group. Stringent moral prohibitions, obliterating the separation of the public and private realms - on the ground that religion is inseparable from law and politics - would make rules to protect individuals from abuse unnecessary: true freedom was reconfigured as voluntary submission to the will of the emperor (Ito, 1998).
At the same time, the institutional indifference to individual circumstances and interests, and the fear of personal liberties, which is so typical of organic conceptions of society, fostered a self-righteous worldview stamped by intolerance and violence, and the crystallization of differences as timeless essences. This at once perversely narcissistic and nihilistic worldview justified killing, mass murder, and the ultimate clash of irreconcilable civilizations, for those who did not belong to the divine, racially and culturally superior Yamato ethno-religious community – i.e. the jama gedō, “unruly heathens” – were impure and corrupted sub-humans.
The process of dehumanization and depersonalisation of the victims was further exacerbated by the primacy of purification rituals in the Shinto religion, which sees dirt, pollution (kegare), and disorder in general as an offence against the cosmic, social, and cognitive order: a transgression of the most sacred boundaries, which cannot go unpunished (Reader, 1991), especially because those who are deemed impure may contaminate others.
In late nineteenth-century Japan, blood (chi, ketsu), became a metaphor for both the transmission of intellectual faculties and physical attributes, and for the perpetuation of the Japanese racial essence. This fascination with bloodlines was certainly encouraged by the Shintoist belief that blood is impure and that anything smeared in blood is tainted. If purity could not be invoked from the outside (divine intervention), it would be obtained by internal cleansing (Reader, ibid.).
Additionally, the tension between predestination and free will has never been resolved in Japanese culture. Akira Kurosawa once observed that the cheerful faces who celebrated the end of the war where the same that gazed at their swords with pleasure only a few hours early, before hearing the emperor’s radio message to surrender. The celebrated Japanese director remarked that he could not quite figure out whether he had witnessed a spectacular display of Japanese adaptability or of Japanese imbecility. Most importantly, he learnt that “without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy” (Kurosawa, 1982, p. 145).
While a collectivizing agency is a central element of the genocidal logic, another one is fatalism and the attending diffusion of responsibility. Karmic beliefs suppressed independent human agency and gave rise to a proclivity to see the course of human existence as pre-determined by an omnipotent and ubiquitous agency. This led to the neutralization of the moral relevance of individuals and their actions. A fundamentally nihilistic universe was altogether indifferent to the fate of millions of human beings. Accordingly, the Tenno was not expected to show concern for his subjects, nor were his soldiers: if the value of their lives was so minuscule, then the value of enemies’ lives was even more insignificant. Also, because individuals could not escape from their destiny, mass-killing those opponents who interfered with the progress of humankind under the “enlightened guidance” of the Japanese emperor, really amounted to nothing more than fulfilling a higher, absolute purpose, that of removing internal and external pollution. Their humanity was left out of the picture (Victoria, 1997).
As I mentioned before, this moral imperative was strengthened by the belief, conveyed for instance by the Lotus Sutra, that karma (innen) is a substance that can be transmitted through body fluids, like a virus or defective alleles. People are then punished not only for their own sins, but also for those committed by their relatives and ancestors, which are inherited. Hence, obligations of interdependency, especially those related to blood and familial ties, must be accepted unconditionally. A doctrine such as this, which faults the individuals for their actions in previous lives, instead of denouncing the social determinants of injustice and discrimination, is certainly not conducive to feelings of mercy and empathy, or to the promotion of social reformism. In Japan it consolidated the existing order, for iniquities were explained away as the outcome of karmic retribution, and therefore social inequality was defined as the only genuine form of equality (Victoria, 2003).
These tenets also disposed thousands of Japanese soldiers to self-sacrifice for the sake of Japan’s rebirth, for if their destiny was to follow the imperial dictates to the letter, then their duty was to eagerly embrace their own death – and, in desperate circumstances, national salvation through mass suicide – and the death of those who opposed the emperor’s plans. Japanese soldiers would look at themselves through the eyes of the imperial propaganda and of Japanese society and see their deeds and choices as inevitable and transcending good and evil. As a result, decisions concerning the life and death of civilians were morally indifferent, as witnessed by the atrocities committed by desensitized Japanese soldiers during the war, and especially at Nanking, in 1937, when as many as 350,000 Chinese civilians were remorselessly tortured and murdered (Chang, 1997).

References

Chang, Iris, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Dale, Peter N., The myth of Japanese uniqueness, London and New York: Routledge, 1986.
Duus Peter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 6, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Gatti, Franco, Il fascismo giapponese, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1983.
Harootunian, Harry, Overcome by modernity. History, culture, and community in interwar Japan, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Ito, Masayuki, “The Status of the Individual in Japanese Religions: Implications for Japan’s Collectivistic Social Values,” Social Compass, 45, 619-633, 1998.
Kurosawa, Akira, Something like an Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Maruyama, Masao, Thought and behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, Kamikaze, Cherry blossoms, and nationalisms, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Petzin, Dietmar and Ruprecht, Ronald (Hrsg), Geschichte und Identität (III): geistige und ideologische Vorausetzungen des Totalitarismus in Deutschland und Japan, Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1994.
Reader, Ian, Religion in contemporary Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.
Victoria, Brian, Zen War Stories, London: Routledge, 2003.
Victoria, Brian, Zen at War, New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1997.

Great Depression

The most dramatic economic shock that the world has ever known began on October 24, 1929, also known as “Black Thursday”. After years of large-scale speculations, with millions of investors borrowing money to chase the dream of easy riches and hundreds of banks willing to accept stocks as collateral, stock prices far exceeded the companies’ actual productivity, and the bubble eventually burst. The collapse of the New York stock exchange continued through October 29 (“Black Tuesday”) and, during the following days and weeks, countless investors found themselves suddenly broke, while hundreds of banks were forced to default on their loans.

By the early 1940s, the Dow Jones stock prices were still approximately 75 percent below the 1929 peak, a level which was only reached again in 1955, and the number of banks in operation almost halved over the next four years driving thousands of business owners to the wall, as the banks called in loans to stay afloat. Furthermore, because the banking system could no longer supply the necessary liquidity, new business enterprises could not be undertaken and millions of workers lost their jobs with little hope of regaining them in the near future. In 1933 and 1934, one half of the total US workforce was jobless or underemployed. To make things worse, home mortgages and loans had produced a huge amount of consumer debt and, while incomes decreased, debts did not. Predictably, consumer spending declined dramatically: between 1929 and 1933 expenses on food and housing went down by more than 40 percent, with crop prices following the same downward path. The crisis of the financial markets had set off a domino reaction.

Unfortunately, the American president Herbert Hoover was a steadfast advocate of laissez-faire principles and believed that the “invisible hand” of the market and the moral fiber of American people would ensure that everything would eventually work out just fine. A rugged individualist and a champion of the values of frugality, hard work, plain life and self-reliance, he was persuaded that the economic Depression could be treated like any clinical depression because the whole problem came down to a large degree to a “a question of fear”. In keeping with the contemporary tendency to manage economic problems by trade measures, Hoover adopted austerity measures and, on June 17, 1930, he signed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which doubled import duties on selected goods, causing other Western countries, already burdened by war debts and reparations dating back to the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which had ended World War 1, to react by raising their own import tariffs. This provoked a major disruption of world trade, with an overall reduction of about forty percent and widespread unemployment and hardships, especially in those countries whose economy was heavily dependent on international trade. Worse still, the Federal Reserve refused to provide emergy lending to help key banks to at least partially recover from their losses.

Internationally, a combination of high external debt, falling export prices, government fiscal difficulties, and internal banking crises spelt disaster for the world economy. Latin American countries, the most dependent on selling raw materials to U.S. industries and therefore the most sensitive to the fluctuations of the American economy, were the first to default on their debts. Bolivia defaulted in January 1931, Peru in March of the same year, Chile in July, and Brazil and Colombia in October. Europe was hit in 1931, when several banking crises translated into foreign-exchange and fiscal crises. Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece were forced to default in 1932, followed by Austria and Germany in 1933. Austria’s largest bank, Vienna’s Kreditanstalt, which financed two-thirds of Austrian industrial production and controlled 70 percent of Austrian bank assets, had failed in May 1931, an event which had sent shockwaves across Europe. Depositors rushed to take out their money from banks that were perceived to be in weak financial conditions and, in so doing, they compromised the stability of the entire banking sysyem of several countries. By mid-June many German banks had collapsed. Major Italian banks were rescued by the fascist regime, which corporatized the national economy and started to drift away from international rules and agreements and to shift towards racist and imperialist policies.

One of the main consequences of this chain reaction was that trust in sovereign loans was shattered. The social and political repercussions were catastrophic. Industrial unemployment in the United States averaged 37.6 percent in 1933, while Germany reached its highest rate at 43.8 percent, the United Kingdom at 22.1, Sweden at 23.7, Denmark at 28.8, and Belgium at 20.4 percent. In Western Canada more than one fifth of the labour force remained unemployed throughtout the 1930s and even the introduction of important measures of welfare assistance did not help boost the economy. Farmers publicly protested against new immigrants, calling them “the scum of Continental Europe”, “men and women who have behind them a thousand years of ignorance, superstition, anarchy, filth and immorality”. Meanwhile, in the United States, the penal system became increasingly punitive. More executions were carried out than in any other decade in American history – an average of 167 per year – and there also took place a sharp rise in imprisonment. In point of fact crime rates did not significantly rise, but the mass media popularized the idea that the social order was on the verge of collapse, and generated a “crime wave” frenzy among the public.

By the early 1930s, the economic slump had destabilized the international political order, the erosion of liberal values was at an advanced stage, and welfarist cost-benefit analysis had gained appeal and credibility. Prompted by the need to cut down on public spending and the moral panic generated by the Great Depression, several governments of the most advanced democratic countries lost confidence in the effectiveness of social reforms and undertook programmes for the involuntary sterilization of thousands of citizens. It was argued that, under exceptional circumstances, basic rights could be withheld and that, in order to reduce the burden on the public purse, social services should only be granted to those whose social usefulness and biological capability were past doubt. In the Weimar Republic, the hardest hit by the Depression, this ideological shift produced a radicalisation of medical views on racial hygiene and “euthanasia”.

Trade protectionism, nationalism, and fascism were among the most tragic results of the Depression, which had persuaded international observers that conventional economic policies should be reformed and that national economies needed increased state control. Earlier enthusiasm for internationalism, cosmopolitan law, and international institutions completely disappeared, replaced by the feeling that large-scale conflicts between powers were once again inevitable.

Nationalism, imperialism, militarism, social Darwinism, autarchic protectionism, a centralized economy, corporative statism, a meticulous division of labour, large industrial cartels, and the coordination of transnational economic blocks under the leadership of a few hegemonic powers were the central tenets of fascism and grew in opposition to the pre-Depression world order. Impermeable national and ethnic frontiers were described as a defense mechanism against the evils of globalization and would defuse the threat of global market competition, speculative mobile international financial flows of capital, Bolshevik class struggle and intra-national ethnic conflicts. They would also provide individuals with organic identities, rooted in history and nature, and therefore far more solid (and less free) than the contingent and impalpable identities generated by the dialectics of democracy and by mass consumerism.

A comprehensive scheme of socio-demographic, economic and geo-political reconfiguration of the planet, in open violation of international norms and treatises, was envisioned, which would bring about a hierarchical and standardized systematization of the relationships between peoples, countries, and territories on a relativistic and particularist basis. National sovereignty and ethnic specificities would justify all sorts of abuses. Within this perspective, because no common rule of law could exist, international statutes ceased to be applicable from the moment fascist powers decided not to comply with them. This spelled the end of the international order of the League of Nations and of a model of cosmopolitan law founded on the principles of liberal universalism.

In the Far East, during the 1920s, hundreds of villages in the Chinese hinterland had seen their consumption patterns change dramatically as a consequence of the marketing campaigns of transnational corporations, which employed hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants. However, the progressive internationalization and connectedness of the Chinese economy meant that it became increasingly vulnerable to trade fluctuations and, when the Depression took place, the entire structure of Chinese agricultural production was hit with unprecedented force and the process of pauperization of the countryside population seemed unstoppable. There followed two major consequences: the strengthening of the Communist Party and a major diaspora of Chinese emigrants seeking a better future abroad.

In Japan, a country which was heavily dependent on foreign trade, unemployment soared, labor disputes became more and more frequent and violent and so did anti-Japanese insurgent movements in Korea and Taiwan. Rural debt forced poor tenant farmers to sell their daughters as prostitutes and thousands of small businesses were gradually absorbed by the zaibatsu, that is, huge financial combines which pushed for more authoritarian and imperialistic policies.

On a global scale, the Depression proved far-reaching because of the degree of interdependency of the world economy and because colonial empires acted as relays for the transmission of its effects from the centre to the periphery. But how did goverments handle this massive crisis?

In the United States, Hoover’s seeming idleness was interpreted by millions of American voters as callousness and the presidential candidate for the Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who evoked a more interventionist and caring state won a landslide victory in 1932. His presidency will be for ever identified with the New Deal, comprising a series of “Keynesian” relief, recovery and reform measures, in the understanding that “deficits in time of recession help alleviate the downturn.” This program revitalized the economy by reinvigorating mass consumption through deficit spending and restored psychological confidence and people’s trust in the American institutions and in the future by effectively reshaping their expectations.

Sorokin once righlty noticed that calamities tend to expand the scope of governmental regulation of social relationships. Indeed, deficit spending for government-funded public works programmes was successfully used for economic recovery in Social-Democratic Sweden, but also in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan. These countries were among the first to overcome the crisis. Instead, in Britain and France, two countries whose currencies were pegged to the Gold Standard, mostly for reasons of national pride, a genuine recovery only began when large scale rearmament was undertaken as a reaction to the National Socialist threat. It is noteworhty that those countries which remained on the Gold Standard fared far worse than those which did not.

In the final analysis, the Depression lasted for about a decade and was aggravated by a steadfast and self-defeating loyalty to the Gold Standard, as well as by increased wealth inequality and financial speculation. It was not brought to an end by the concerted effort of fair-minded and judicious leaders committed to the cause of world prosperity and peace, but by a vast military build-up leading straight into World War 2.

The final question we need to ask is whether a Great Depression could happen again. If a crisis of that magnitude is ever to occur, it is unlikely that it will be triggered by the same factors. The Depression had such a lasting impact on the lives of those who experienced it, that policy makers and analysts have thoroughly canvassed the subject so as to define those steps that governments should or should not take to prevent a repeat. These comprise higher inflation and lower productivity, more social justice, a greater emphasis on employment targets rather than exchange rates, and the protection of farmers.

Rome's Fall

It is often assumed that the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and therefore the transition from Classic Antiquity to the Middle Age, coincided with the deposition of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus, in AD 476 by the Gothic chief Odoacer. However, the deposition of Romulus Augustus (476) should not be seen as a landmark event, but rather as a chronological benchmark that was conventionally established by later commentators to schematize complex historical events.

The fact of the matter is that contemporary chroniclers took little notice of the fate of Romulus Augustus. In a seminal article, Arnaldo Momigliano referred to it as “the noiseless fall of an empire”. Chroniclers and lay-people alike had been far more traumatized by the Roman defeat at Adrianople (near today’s Istanbul) in AD 378 in the East – the worst since Cannae, when Hannibal seriously threatened to overrun Rome – or by the Sack of Rome, in 410, in the West. By the late fifth century AD, Barbarians had built their kingdoms within the imperial borders, most emperors were figureheads, and the imperial institutions had already crumbled.

Instead of a “fall”, it would thus be more appropriate to speak of a steady decline, with episodic recoveries, which began with the successor of Hadrian (AD 117-138). The next emperor, the celebrated Marcus Aurelius (163-180), had to confront the first wave of invasions from the North, which were barely contained in Northern Italy, while a catastrophic epidemic of plague visited the empire, and the traditional eastern enemy, the Parthians, took advantage of the Roman weakness to launch a large-scale offensive campaign in the Middle East.

The killing of his despotic and capricious son, emperor Commodus, in 193, marked the beginning of a long period of instability for the empire, which was ruled by very few capable men, who were, in the main, usurpers. Most of the emperors died a violent death and the legions of Gaul time and again rebelled against Rome and arrogated to themselves the right to proclaim the new emperors, while various remote provinces gained increased autonomy and sought to become independent.

It was only in AD 284 that Diocletian, a former slave from Illyria, restored the order by enacting a series of important administrative, economic and military reforms. But when he died, in 305, several aspirants to the throne set off a civil war that lasted for almost two decades, until Constantine “the Great”, in 323, managed to defeat all his opponents. He moved the capital to Byzantium (now Istanbul, in Turkey), which was rechristened Constantinople – so that the empire’s centre of gravity shifted from West to East –, took on the functions and prerogatives of an Oriental despot, reformed the army, and authorized the Christian cult, personally attending the Council of Nicea, in 325, which established the principles and dogmas of Christian orthodoxy. He died in 337, and another civil war for his succession was brought to an end in 353 by his son Constant II. Meanwhile, the pressure on the eastern and northern frontiers was mounting, as the cohesion of the empire weakened.

In AD 378, the entire Eastern Roman Army was destroyed at Adrianople by the Goths, and emperor Valens fell on the battlefield. His successor, Theodosius, was the last great emperor to rule over the whole of the empire. Upon his death, which occurred in 395, the empire was definitively split into the Western and the Eastern empires, governed by Theodosius’s heirs Honorius and Arcadius.

While the Eastern part withstood the Germanic and Hunnish invasions, the Western part, which was the most coveted, rapidly collapsed. In 476, Odoacer sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople and ruled Italy “on behalf” of the eastern Roman emperor. In Gaul, Spain, Britannia, and Africa various Roman/Germanic kingdoms were founded; some had an ephemeral existence, other, like the kingdom of the Franks, would play a central role throughout the Middle Age and beyond.

Like any other complex socio-historical phenomenon, the “fall” of the Roman Empire calls for a multi-causal explanation. Augustus’s major accomplishment was the creation of a socio-political entity that functioned rather smoothly for a couple of centuries. This prolonged period of peace and relative affluence generated a widespread sentiment of self-righteousness and invincibility. Many Romans truly believed that they lived in the best of all possible worlds, one that was immutable and unchallengeable (the so-called Roma aeterna).

This presumption was seriously undermined towards the middle of the second century AD, when Slavic and Germanic populations, moving from present Hungary, crossed the Roman fortified frontier (the limes), reaching North-Western Italy.

This dramatic event had huge psychological repercussions, far greater than those commonly associated with the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. It not only shattered the feeling of safety and security of the Roman population, it also inflicted a terrible wound to the whole Roman model of civilization, a wound that, it turned out, could not be completely healed.

This moral crisis was aggravated by a pestilence that brought about a demographic collapse and the breakdown of the economy, which was heavily committed to crop production. The ensuing decrease of tax revenues forced the administration to levy new taxes, so as to maintain the yield of taxation. Unfortunately, such measures depressed the economy, while the inflation rate reached intolerable levels: the outcome was a disastrous economic crisis, the bankruptcy of small and middle-size rural businesses and the pauperization of thousands of farmers, who in many cases turned into serfs of rich landowners.

Central governments increased public spending, instituted some primitive forms of welfare assistance, pegged prices, and fought inflation, but the concentration of wealth and political influence in the hands of local landowning dynasties (called potentes) – five percent of the population controlled all the wealth of the empire – caused the evaporation of trust in the public institutions, no longer seen as protective and motivating, and now regarded as merely vexatious, the erosion of civic spirit, and the progressive decline of Roman towns and cities, which had heretofore formed the backbone of the empire.

The lack of significant technological innovation, especially in agriculture, sapped the strength of Roman society and forced thousands of farmers to live barely above subsistence, leaving them prey to exploitation. Simultaneously, Diocletian’s imperial reforms reduced the prospects of upward mobility, crystallized power relations, and concurred to prevent the formation of a new class of enterprising modernizers, who could have imposed radical changes in Roman society.

Finally, the sustained rise of inflation triggered the transition from a monetary economy, based on coins (denarius), which had greatly contributed to preserving the unity of the empire, to barter, that is, to a natural economy.

Predictably, the late Empire was a winter of discontent and instability, generally provoked by charismatic and unscrupulous military leaders, who proclaimed themselves to be the saviours of the glory of Rome, even though their plans involved insubordination, civil war, and the carnage of Romans and Germanic allies. It is only fair to say that the decline of the late Empire should be imputed, to a large extent, to the internecine fighting of the military, as civil institutions (like the Senate and the consul) lost their functions and influence.

Meanwhile, the struggle between Christian loyalists – those who sought a compromise with the heathen rulers – and Christian fundamentalists – those who were not prepared to sacrifice their autonomy and orthodoxy in exchange for social integration and a greater influence on the administration of public affairs, and were therefore openly antagonistic to the Empire both politically and ethically – saw, in the III century AD, the substantial victory of the loyalists. Christians remained the only powerful, efficient and cohesive organization of the empire and a constant challenge to the dominant views of the heathen leadership.

The authorities soon realized that the fabric of Roman society could not be “purged” from Christianity without causing the final collapse of Roman institutions. This is the reason why Roman emperors, starting from Constantine, reached a series of agreements with Christian loyalists, which ultimately led to the amalgamation of “Romanity” and Christianity in AD 391, when Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of the State in return for its unstinting support of the Roman system. As a consequence of the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church would take over most of the secular functions of the State,

By the end of the fourth century, for all its weaknesses, the empire was still immense, stretching from the Middle East to Caledonia (today’s Scotland) and from North Africa to the Black Sea. While the centre of gravity of the European Union is the Atlantic Ocean, which features some of the world's most heavily trafficked sea routes, Roman economy revolved around the Mediterranean basin. Romans never really attempted to conquer regions that lay too far from the Mediterranean Sea (Mare Nostrum) and the Black Sea, the only exception being Britain, which was rich in mineral deposits. Conversely, the large Central European rivers (Rhine, Danube) that nowadays traverse the core of the European Union, marked the Roman frontier, the outpost of civilization.

The Romans had created a huge commercial network across the Mediterranean, planting vineyards and olive groves, building villas, harbours and market towns. Merchant ships crossed the sea to supply Rome, a megalopolis of more than a million inhabitants.

We now call that period Lower Empire, evoking the idea of the unstoppable decadence of Rome, plagued by corruption, moral decay, and pointless theological disquisitions. But the two most serious plights were the disloyalty of generals and the poverty of “Barbarians”.

Troops were more faithful to their generals that to the emperors, and they often acclaimed their leaders as the only emperors worthy of their recognition. Such usurpations generally led to civil wars and widespread political instability. “Barbarians” looted frontier provinces and requested the payment of tributes in exchange for peace.

The empire had survived thanks to capable and rather tyrannical emperors/generals like Aurelianus, Diocletian, and Constantine. They had introduced conscription, doubled taxation, strengthened the bureaucracy and the secret police and, to stifle social protest, they had promulgated extremely severe laws against desertion, tax evasion, and political dissent (even an unfavourable premonition about the emperor’s life could cost a fortune-teller his life). They incarnated the notion of the “oriental despot” and militarized Roman society, but their recipe, a combination of pragmatism, far-sightedness, and callousness momentarily saved the unity of the empire and helped the economy to recover. The cost they paid was enormous: the alienation of the population from the political establishment.

The Roman Empire, now a multicultural and multi-ethnic society, was undergoing a thorough transformation, from a pagan to an essentially Christian community. Constantine issued the edict of Milan in 313, which granted religious freedom to all his subjects and empowered the Christian Church. Like his successors, he hoped that Christianity, with its vitality and fervour, would generate that unity of purpose that Roman secular institutions could no longer guarantee.

Various Germanic tribes and populations had been converted and were gradually changing their customs and mores. They were “romanizing” themselves. However, paradoxically, the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire was in part the result of the Gothic peaceful resettlement in the Balkans. At the time, Flavius Valentinianus, a brilliant general, had become emperor (AD 364) and, one month after his accession to power, he had appointed his brother Flavius Valens as the Eastern emperor, keeping the Western portion for himself. Valens was not a military man but he did his best to gain the favour of his subjects by fighting corruption, reducing taxation, and building a new aqueduct. However, people never really took a liking to him, also because he was a religious fundamentalist when conciliatory tones would have been far more advisable.

Moreover, he had to confront an usurper, Procopius, who had seized control of Constantinople while Valens’s army was marching towards the eastern front. Traditionally accustomed to attach far more importance to bloodlines than to state legislation, the Goths backed up Procopius because he was a relative of Constantine, an emperor with whom they had signed important agreements. However, when the Gothic reinforcements arrived, the insurrection had been nipped in the bud, and they were all enslaved. Then Valens ordered savage retaliatory attacks that brought the Goths to their knees in 369. But he did not exterminate them. Roman emperors were expected to display benevolence and generosity towards a defeated enemy, and a people who “never had a chance to be Roman” and crossed the frontier “in the pursuit of Roman happiness” (the Roman Dream).

A significant testimony of this tradition is provided by the orations dedicated to Valens by two heathen rhetoricians, during the campaigns against the Goths that would result in the military and political disaster of Adrianople, in AD 378.

The contrast between the merciless conduct of warfare and the political pragmatism of Roman bureaucrats and legislators, who pressed for economic sanctions and compulsory recruitment of young Goths to be used as cannon fodder in the Middle East, and the humanitarian and progressive slogans of the élite, intent on incorporating their Northern neighbours into Roman society, was truly noteworthy. Themistius, a senator and a philosopher, stated that just as the Romans strove to protect endangered species of animals in Africa and Asia, so the emperor should be praised for not annihilating the Goths, who are human beings, like the Romans, when he could (368-369). This oration, like several others, as for instance those delivered by Libanius, encapsulates the universalistic and civilising thrust of late Roman imperialism. Genocidal schemes, were probably envisioned by Roman generals, but they were unpalatable for a political leadership that offered security and literacy in return for loyalty, recruits and tax-money. Rome was to set an example for all other peoples.

When the Huns, a fierce nomadic population whose existence had never been recorded in Roman history, pushed the frightened Goths southwards, the gap existing between humanitarian rhetoric and Realpolitik became obvious. Thousands of starving Gothic refugees, fleeing from a cruel enemy, reached the riverbanks of the Danube and pleaded to be allowed to be relocated within the Roman borders. The emperor’s counsellors saw that as a huge opportunity: the Goths would be allotted less fertile lands and many of them would join the army and exempt from military service an equal number of Roman citizens. They were all transported across the river and immigration officers attempted to record their names in order to plan their re-settlement. But the sheer number of refugees and the confusion were so huge that they realised the futility of such an operation. They preferred to take advantage of the situation by accepting bribes and selecting slaves for their own villas.

Meanwhile, other tribes had been informed that the border was open and the mass of refugees kept growing, until the alarmed Roman functionaries decided that the maximum quota had been reached and left thousands of now furious Goths on the other side of the Danube. Worse still, refugee camps were flooded with people who did not receive enough supplies because the commanding officers sold on the black market the provisions that had been destined to the refugees. When these were finally escorted to the relocation areas by the frontier garrisons, thousands of Goths who had been left out, crossed the river clandestinely.

Panic ensued amidst the Roman population, while the proud and desperate Gothic immigrants could no longer tolerate their debasement and destitution. A seemingly unstoppable snowball process led to war and to the Battle of Adrianople (378), where up to 40,000 Romans were killed, together with emperor Valens, who chose not to wait for the reinforcements sent by the Western emperor, because he desperately needed a decisive victory to shore up his position and prestige. St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, called this battle “the end of all humanity, the end of the world,” while the most famous contemporay Roman chronicler, Ammianus Marcellinus, commented as follows: “Never, except in the battle of Cannae, had there been so destructive a slaughter recorded in our annals.”

After Adrianople, Rome lost its superpower status and was no longer able to keep in check the “Barbarians” by purely military means.

More and more Goths and Huns were absorbed by the Roman legions, or engaged as mercenaries and the Roman population felt increasingly insecure, threatened by their presence. Commentators lamented that emperor Theodosius I had allowed too many Barbarians, parvenus with their hands still covered with Roman blood, to reach the highest ranks of the army. How could Romans tolerate the arrogance of those Barbarians who dressed like Romans and spoke Latin only when they met Romans, and spent the rest of the time speaking their own language and deriding Roman customs?

It is undeniable that someone like Alaric, a nobleman who served for various years as a commander of Gothic mercenaries in the Roman army and, after Theodosius’s death, was elected king of the Visigoths, only to sack Rome in 410, confirmed this impression. Some “Barbarians” could be like a snake in the Roman bosom. But there were also loyal and brilliant generals like Flavius Stilicho, the son of a Vandal, who repeatedly defeated Alaric before 410, and could have deferred Rome’s ultimate humiliation if the anti-Barbarian party in Rome had not resolved to have him executed for treason, together with the families of those tribesmen serving in the Roman army who, subsequently, could only defect to Alaric.

Anyhow, we should not let ourselves be swayed by the contemporary obsession with ethnicity and make too much of these views, assuming that the anti-barbaric and racist lobby ruled Roman politics. It is far more likely that most such comments simply denoted the political expediency of ambitious men who had vested interests in arousing animosity to preserve the status quo. In point of fact, some of the most successful and loyal champions of Romanity were “Barbarian” generals, who thought, spoke, and acted like Romans, or mixed-blood like Stilicho and Aetius, “the last Roman”, who was the son of a Schythian and became the most powerful man in the Western empire. He was assassinated in 454 by emperor Valentinian III himself. This prompted Sidonius Apollinaris (430-489) to declare: “I am ignorant, sir, of your motives or provocations; I only know that you have acted like a man who has cut off his right hand with his left”.

Aetius’s well deserved fame arose from his untiring effort to keep the empire together, with the help of various Barbarian tribes and, above all else, from the strategic victory he secured for the Roman/Gothic/Frankish Christian alliance against Attila’s Huns and their allies at the Catalaunian Fields (451) near Châlons-en-Champagne, the last major victory of the Western Empire.

We should also not overlook the part played by the Eastern Empire in the fall of the Western Empire. Eastern emperors like Zeno and Basiliscus and their political advisers realised that they could strengthen their power by gradually pushing less dependable mercenaries towards the West. This is one of the reasons why Alaric found himself leading an entire Roman army in the West. In all likelihood, the Eastern élite had come to the conclusion that Rome was doomed and that their best bet would be to secure for themselves the most prosperous portions of the Western Empire. This is precisely what Justinian, who became one of the greatest Roman emperors because he chose his courtesans, generals and wife with great acumen, achieved in the course of the sixth century, when he re-conquered Italy, Southern Spain, Northern Africa, Dalmatia, and most importantly, the Western Mediterranean.

This was the last, short-lived attempt to reunify the Roman Empire. After Justinian’s death, the Eastern Empire, which for a century continued to claim sovereignty over the West, although to no avail, became increasingly hellenized and greatly influenced the development of Eastern European cultures, while Barbarian and Western Romans lay the foundations of Western European civilization.