Westernization

Westernization is the adoption by non-Western societies of institutions, technologies, laws, manners and habits of mind that originated in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots. It has taken the form of deliberate state policy — Peter the Great’s reordering of Russia, the Ottoman Tanzimat, Japan’s Meiji reforms, Atatürk’s republic — and of unplanned diffusion through trade, missionary work, schooling and mass entertainment.

Conservative thought approaches the subject from two directions that pull against each other. Conservatives hold that the Western political inheritance is a real achievement rather than an arbitrary local custom: the rule of law, secure property, representative institutions and the separation of religious from civil authority produced liberty and prosperity that other arrangements did not. Conservatives also hold that institutions grow rather than being installed, and that a constitution transplanted into a society lacking the habits which sustain it becomes a facade. The tension between those two commitments is the substance of the conservative argument about Westernization.

Key Takeaways

• The classic state-directed programmes are Petrine Russia from 1698, the Ottoman Tanzimat from 1839, Meiji Japan from 1868, and the Turkish Republic from 1923.
• Samuel Huntington’s distinction between modernization and Westernization is the standard conservative frame: societies can acquire industry, medicine and weapons without acquiring Western political culture, and many have.
• Conservative scepticism about exporting constitutions rests on the Burkean claim that political forms depend on inherited manners, religion and law rather than on drafting.
• Roger Scruton argued that the West’s distinguishing feature is the separation of civil from religious jurisdiction and the idea of citizenship under secular law, which he treated as a substantive good rather than a preference.
• The postcolonial critique holds that Westernization was imposed rather than chosen and carried a hierarchy of civilisations within it; conservatives answer the second charge more readily than the first.

History And Context

Peter I returned from his Grand Embassy to Western Europe in 1698 and began shaving the beards of his boyars personally, and from 1705 taxed those who kept them. He built a new capital on the Neva from 1703, imported shipwrights and artillery officers, replaced the old ranks with a Table of Ranks in 1722, and made service to the state the basis of noble standing. The reforms produced a European great power and a permanent division in Russian thought between Westernisers and Slavophiles that persists in Russian politics today.

The Ottoman Tanzimat began with the Gülhane Edict of 3 November 1839, which promised security of life and property, regularised taxation, and equality before the law for Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. It produced a commercial code drawn from French models, a new army, and a constitution in 1876 that was suspended within two years. Mustafa Kemal completed the project by demolition: the caliphate abolished on 3 March 1924, the religious courts closed, the fez prohibited in 1925, the Swiss civil code adopted in 1926, and the Arabic script replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1928.

Japan’s course was the most successful and the most deliberate. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 the new government sent the Iwakura Mission — roughly fifty senior officials, including Ōkubo Toshimichi and Itō Hirobumi — on a twenty-two-month tour of the United States and Europe from December 1871 to September 1873, to study institutions and revise the unequal treaties. They returned with a programme: a Prussian-modelled constitution promulgated in 1889, a conscript army on French then German lines, a British-modelled navy, compulsory schooling, and a legal code that persuaded the Western powers to surrender extraterritoriality by 1899. Japan industrialised without abandoning the throne, the family system, or Shinto observance, which is why conservatives cite it.

China’s Self-Strengthening Movement between 1861 and 1895 attempted the same and failed, defeated by Japan at Weihaiwei and by the reluctance of the Qing court to accept the institutional changes that the technology implied. In India, Macaulay’s Minute on Education of 1835 committed the East India Company to English-language instruction and to producing a class Indian in blood and English in taste — a policy whose consequences both its admirers and its critics still argue over.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives distinguish between the goods and the mechanism. The goods are real. A society with independent courts, enforceable contracts, secure property and a government answerable to those it taxes will be freer and richer than one without, and saying so is not chauvinism. Roger Scruton put the constitutive difference in the separation of religious from civil authority: the West produced the idea of citizenship — membership in a community defined by territory and secular law rather than by faith or lineage — and that idea is what makes representative government workable.¹

The mechanism is where conservatives balk. Burke’s objection to the French constitution-makers was that they treated a nation as a blank sheet, and the same objection applies to the export of constitutions two centuries later. Institutions rest on prior habits: the expectation that a losing party will hand over power, that a judge will rule against the government, that a tax collector will not simply keep the money. Those habits took centuries to form in England and were not created by any statute. Oakeshott’s account of rationalism describes the characteristic error of the reformer who mistakes a written technique for the practical knowledge it summarises.⁵ American experience in Iraq after 2003 and Afghanistan after 2001 gave the argument an expensive demonstration: elections were held, constitutions ratified, ministries built, and the underlying political order did not follow.

Huntington’s formulation is the one conservatives use most. Modernization — industry, literacy, urbanisation, military capacity — is available to any society and does not carry Western political culture with it.⁴ The Meiji example proves the point in one direction and the Gulf states prove it in another. A civilisation that acquires the tools without the constitutional habits becomes stronger, not more liberal, and Western policymakers who assumed otherwise for three decades were reasoning from a theory rather than from evidence.

Thomas Sowell’s comparative work adds the material half of the argument: cultures have absorbed technologies and practices from one another throughout recorded history, and the societies that borrow readily have done better than those that refuse.³ On that reading Westernization is a case of a general phenomenon rather than a unique imposition, and the question is what a receiving society does with what it takes.

Differing Positions

The postcolonial critique, given its canonical form by Edward Said in 1978, holds that the Western account of non-Western societies was produced by and for imperial administration.² Knowledge of the Orient was organised around a contrast — rational, dynamic West against static, sensual East — that justified the rule it described. On this account Westernization was rarely a free choice; it arrived with gunboats at Edo Bay in 1853, with the Opium Wars, and with treaty ports whose courts answered to foreign consuls. A conservative who values organic development ought, by his own principles, to object to the interruption of other societies’ development.

A second criticism runs from the universalist side and cuts against conservatives from the opposite direction. If the rule of law and representative government are goods, they are goods for everyone, and calling them Western concedes too much to the relativist. The mathematics, medicine and constitutional ideas at issue were assembled from Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Indian sources as much as from European ones, and treating them as a civilisational patrimony misdescribes their history.

The theory of multiple modernities offers a third path, arguing that Japan, Turkey, India and the Gulf states have each produced a distinct modern form rather than converging on a single Western model. Conservatives have little quarrel with this. It is close to what the Burkean argument predicts: that what a society borrows will be reshaped by what it already is.

References

1. Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (ISI Books, 2002).
2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).
3. Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History (Basic Books, 1998).
4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
5. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics”, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962).