Review- Peter Turchin’s “War and Peace and War- The Rise and Fall of Empires.”

I just finished Peter Turchin’s “War and Peace and War- The Rise and Fall of Empires.” Fascinating book.

Very early on Turchin identifies two terms: Asabiyyah and metaethnic

Asabiyyah means is a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion.

Metaethnic:s In colloquial discourse, it usually signifies a larger in-group of distinct ethnic groups who identify more closely with each other than they would with out-group ethnic groups. The groups within the in-group may be genetically and culturally related which reinforces the grouping.

These two terms are used repeatedly as empires and social groupings rise and fall.

The author does a great job of tying these concepts in across centuries of historical examples from western europe and eastern europe. Probably the weakest chapters are under Part III- Cliodynamics especially chapter 12- War and Peace and Particles- which is a distraction from the historicism Turchin using previously.

Essentially, the book is about the ability of societies to create an “us vs them” dynamic in which ethnic groupings get superseded by metaethnic groupings. A good example is the growth of the Roman Empire. The original Romans were different ethnic group than other tribes on the Italian peninsula and were at war with them often. But as pressures from groups outside the peninsula began to attack them all, the Romans and other peninsular groups became bound together in their larger metaethnic grouping to ward off these new “outsiders.” One group was the Lombards- a Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula between 568 and 774 but then were pushed back to what we now call Lombardy. They too eventually became part of the larger peninsula based Roman metaethnic group to oppose newer outsider pressure, but eventually all fell to the Frankish attack creating the Holy Roman Empire.

Turchin illustrates similar dynamics in eastern Europe such as the pressure on the slavic regions by Turks and Mongols from the steps as ethnic groups meld with others to create metaethnic groups for survival to hold territory against more nomadic attacks from the east until they can begin agricultural activity.

As an aside- though Turchin does not address it, some of the commentary on the Asian steppes and clashes with the more settled people west of them reminded me of our own “steppes” clashes as white settlers moved out and clashed with the native Americans on the American plains.

Apropos to the USA, which is also an empire, though not perhaps in the traditional sense, is his discussion on income inequality as relates to asabiyyah as such disparity undermines social cohesion. One can easily imagine high up officials creating new outside enemies to reinforce social cohesion. We saw that on 911 and we see it now with one group pushing the anti-immigrant narrative to create an outside group to hate in order to bind the current society together even as it distracts for income inequality and other social and class disparities!

Another key factor is his assertion that the decline in asabiya (social cohesion) is not linear. The most pointed use of this is that the Roman Empire didn’t just decline in one steady line of progress but did so in cycles of decline and recovery and decline.

Other factors include an increase in the number of “elites” in a society relative to the number of non-elites. The society would essentially become top-heavy, causing social dislocation as the elites struggled with each other for greater pieces of the pie, destabilizing society leading to conflict, war and chaos.