Kipling’s Ballad of East and West of 1889 (“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”) echoes the myth of historical clashes and cultural influences between the nations of the Eurasian landmass. The asymmetrical valorization of this East-West opposition, and its implied eurocentrism, can be traced back as far as Herodotus’s Histories and Aeschylus’s Persians: Greeks are represented as defending their liberty and democracy against imperial despotism encroaching westward from Asia. The East-West polarization springs from this opposition between Hellenes and Barbarians (Goldammer 1962: 9-20; Koselleck 1979: 187-196).
Literary testimony reflects the experience of large-scale migrations and cultural movements in the vegetational and economic zone of the northern hemisphere (Goldammer 1962: 31). Four periods in such a Eurasian history can be distinguished: the rise of the civilizations between Nile and Yellow River (3000-1500 BC); the Indo-European expansion (1500-0 BC); an Asian-based westward expansion (0-1500 AD) and the rise of Europe to global hegemony from the late Middle Ages onwards (Schaeder 1960: 25-47, 188-215). Karl Jaspers (1949: 94) succinctly sums up the European perspective as follows: “Die Griechen und die Perser, die Spaltung des römischen Imperiums in das Westreich und das Ostreich, westliches und östliches Christentum, das Abendland und der Islam, Europa und Asien, das sich seinerseits in vorderen, mittleren und fernen Orient gliedert, sind die einander folgenden Gestalten des Gegensatzes, in dem die Kulturen und Völker sich zugleich anziehen und abstossen. Darin hat sich jederzeit Europa konstituiert, während der Orient den Gegensatz von Europa erst übernahm und seinerseits europäisch verstand”. While there is certainly cause to speak of a self-positioning (Jaspers’ Konstituierung) of a ‘Western’ position vis-à-vis an Orient, the opposite is not the case. China has from ancient times seen itself as a ‘Middle Kingdom’ as opposed to barbarians from North and West.
As Donald Lach has shown (1977-93) Europe owes much to Oriental influence, techologies and inventions, a rich stock of literary and artistic influences and motifs, but also its Olympian pantheon, much of its mythological demons and monsters, and Christendom itself (the
European adaptation of a Near-Eastern type of monotheism). “A bird’s-eye view of East-West relationships in the arts leaves hardly any doubt that Europe received more than it gave. [...] Indeed, it was the uninterrupted contact of the West with non-European civilizations, particularly those of the Old World, that helped to foster the endless variety, vitality, and cosmopolitanism in our own art.” (Bowie 1966: 19; Fischer-Hansen 1988; cf. also Hundsbichler 1994). Accordingly, the deconstruction of myths of oriental despotism and stagnated isolation has undercut the “eurocentric myth of the West” (Hobson 2004). Nevertheless, technical and political developments have been arguably more successful in the West’s rise to global hegemony.
The European images of Oriental peoples and cultures ar determined by historical events, religious mores and fanciful imagination. The Biblical prophecy of the rapacious tribes of Gog and Magog (Ezechiel 38-39) served as a template for incursions by horse-mounted tribes from Central Asia. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century left terrified memories among the inhabitants of Eastern and Central Europe; the name of the Tatar tribes was changed to “Tartars” under the influence of their hellish reputation (Bezzola 1974). Conversely the civilization of India was legendary ever since the reports of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, witness the generally popular chivalric genre of the Alexander romance, with its descriptions of fabulous wealth, gymnosophists and curious animals. Late medieval travel writings like those of Marco Polo, Jean de Mandeville, or Ramusio’s collection Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550) helped to spread such themes, and also cast China, just then beginning to come into the European purview, in this same imaginated mould. In the image of Asian empires such as Persia, India, China and Japan, a proto-colonial European sense of superiority (cf. Demel 1992) vies with a ‘philosophical’ admiration for a refined lifestyle and wise government (Berger 1990, Hsia 1998).
The Hellenist mix of Near-Eastern cultures lasted from Alexander the Great until the expansion of Arabic Islam (Colpe 1990). Thenceforth, the Orient referred either to the Levantine region with, for its cultural centres, Persia, the Ottoman Emire and Egypt, or else the Maghreb including Marocco and Spanish Al-Andalus. The accompanying imagery features mosques and minarets, shaded courtyards and trickling fountains, harems and eunuchs, camels, caravanserais and Beduins (Hettner 1931), as well as despotism, slavery, cruelty, and the hateful enmity of Moor, Turk and Saracen. Conversely, in Oriental cultures ethnotypes exist of the crusading ‘Franks’ (Kabbani 1986, Khattab 1989).
In contemporary academic commentary, two matters need to be distinguished. One is the literary formulation of the Orient in medieval epic (continued in the fabulous eastern knights and princesses in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata), or, much later, the poetic inspiration which Goethe received from the Divan of Hafiz, as well as the literary exoticism and allure of the East as evinced in the success of the Arabian Nights and of the Rubaiyyat. The other is the literature of hegemony and imperialism, e.g. the stories and verse of Kipling, as tackled by the postcolonial analysis of orientalism following Said 1978 (cf. Sardar 1999; for critiques, see MacKenzie 1995 and Benne 2002). Meanwhile, orientalism is thriving in a new guise. Starting in the early twentieth century with theosphically inspired fads for Oriental “gurus” and “swamis”, and reinforced by the counterculture discovery of Hinduism and Buddhism in the 1960s, the New Age sees things Oriental as an alternative to the rationalism, technocracy and soullessness which is condemned in the West’s cultural antecedents. Elsewhere, the orientalism debate has spawned the notion of occidentalism or the construction of ‘Westernness’ by non-European cultures and regions (Carrier 1995). In all of these cases, old images may be given new values, or inverted in their perspectival relationship, while leaving the underlying polarity in place.
The opposition between North and South is largely determined by climatological arguments (which, to be sure, are also activated in orientalist discourse); the opposition between West and East reflects historical events and political and religious cleavages. Its mythical character is demonstrated, however, by the mobility of the imputation of “Easternness”. The idea of despotic empires or cruel hordes threatening true civilization from the East can be applied in widely different contexts: the China-linked myth of the Yellow Peril around 1900; the term ‘Huns’ used in anti-German British propaganda during the First World War; the orientalization of ‘Asian’ bolshevism in the propaganda of the Third Reich, which by the same token sought to proclaim itself the champion of something it called ‘Europe’; the Cold War alignment between the opposition East-West and the antinomy of oppression and freedom; and the recent notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’. Much as the Orient stretches from Casablanca to Yokohama, so too can countries as widely diverse as Czechia and Israel see themselves as bulwarks of Western, Enlightenment traditions in a benighted Eastern setting, while the global centre of that ‘West’ has migrated away from Europe across the Atlantic. East and West have not met, but they have become blurred, and from points of the compass or historical spheres of influence have become ciphers of mythical and ideological values.