Military Orientalism: Easter War Through Western Eyes

"Patrick Porter has written this very interesting book in which he has tried to look at the role of culture in military history and in particular the argument that there are fixed national cultures and that this can or can’t lead to particular outcomes. And what he is actually saying is that we mustn’t push the cultural interpretation too far. I found that particularly interesting because reading his book made me think maybe I have been pushing it too far in some of the works I have been producing. Of course his major target is a much easier and softer target, which is the military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s rather teleological and self-congratulatory accounts of American military culture. But I think Porter raises a broader issue, which is when we think of long-term cultural assumptions we use terms like Oriental culture, Asian culture, the culture of the Middle East etc, and he wants to know how far are we actually creating a kind of ethno-genesis, a kind of long-term account for what is often in fact very short term? Although Porter doesn’t bring this out, there has been some good work recently by military historians on China , arguing that the classic account of Chinese strategic culture, which is that it centred on Confucianism and was not expansionist, isn’t actually right. It is true for some periods of Chinese history but not always. For example, in the 18th century the Chinese were extraordinarily expansionist and Confucianism scarcely explains the views that they were following. I think that this revaluation of Chinese history is very exciting because what it does is to take us back to the role of the short term and of the immediate. That is important because it gives us agency. In other words, if you take a view that cultures determine what goes on, you have replaced one form of determinism, socio-economic determinism, with another form of determinism, cultural determinism. And what you have done if you do that is to say essentially that everything else is just short term. What I think is much more exciting is the argument that yes, of course, there are long-term continuities. For example, it is not going to rain very heavily in the Sahara next year. There are long-term geographical continuities, and there are long-term cultural impulses, but at the same time you can see major changes occurring that reflect the agency of individuals. An obvious example is the complete change in the position of women in British and Western public culture in the last 100 years, as something that was not culturally determined by what had happened prior to that."