Trans-European Project

From Hobson's Choice

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The Trans-European Project is a theoretical construct of Europe and North America. According to the TEP theory, the several nations of those continents are administrative divisions within a single empire, and wars among the member states were civil wars.

Contents 1 Name 2 The Usual Relationship between Empires 3 Relations Among States of the Trans-European Project 4 Notes 5 See also

Name

The choice of Trans-Europe is unsurprising; it is well-known that North America was colonized by invaders from Europe, and North American civilization is certainly an adjunct of the European; it is not autochthonous. "Project" refers to an ongoing scheme of ecological redemption that promises to "redeem" the landscape for the TEP industrial system.

The Usual Relationship between Empires

The Trans-European Project is used to designate a multi-state entity with an historically consistent, unified agenda of imperial conquest, transformation, and consolidation. Other imperial entities, such as the Major Empires of Asia, were usually self-contained economic and political units. While the empires of Japan, Vietnam , Western China, and Manchuria occasionally recognized the Eastern Chinese emperors as the font of legitimate authority, they traded only in luxury commodities like silk and precious metals.^[1] There was no concerted flow of capital or labor among the various empires. There is no plausible way one could argue that Ottoman economic development in the 16th century owed anything whatever to neighboring Safavid Persia. Some commerce passed through Persia, Russia, and the Holy Roman Empire, but this didn't include significant quantities of food, skilled labor, finance-capital, energy, tools, or much else. More to the point, that which did—Armenian entrepreneurs, Khuzistani legumes, Ukrainian lumber—was not at all contingent on that neighbor's industrial system. Indeed, in pre-industrial times, flourishing empires exported little; the metropole was always the best market.

With few exceptions, pre-industrial interactions between empires and even minor kingdoms adjacent to each other tended to take the form of tribute, trade in luxury goods, and intermittent flows of talented refugees. Most noted exceptions took place, as it happens, in the vicinity of Europe: Hanse commerce in lumber, grains, and money (Baltic & North Seas), and slavery.^[2] But the Hanse was itself a sort of federal league of coastal communities; and most bulk commerce with empires tended to take the form of colonial outposts with unorganized hinterlands, as, for example, Omani entrepots along the East African coast.

A final observation about ancient inter-imperial relations is that most tended to have tense borders. In the great majority of cases, any two adjacent empires had long term plans to destroy the other. Warfare was a normal state of affairs. Even modern histories seldom inquire into the question of why neighboring empires went to war. Unless the empires were in Europe, such explanations are superfluous. War occurred because it was possible.

Relations Among States of the Trans-European Project

Click for larger image (medium) Europe & the Byzantine Empire, c.486

Click for larger image (medium) Europe & the Byzantine Empire, c.486

The states of Europe were quite different from (most) neighboring empires of Asia. To begin with, there was a period in which the vestigial kingdoms of the Roman Empire (see map "486 CE") were occupied with the conquest and resettlement of Central Europe. There emerged from this political landscape a complex of kingdoms, duchies, ecclesiastical territories, and free cities which were under the ultimate authority of the Holy Roman Emperor or kindred monarchies (see map "1000 CE"). The complex system of inheritance and enfeoffment that emerged across Europe allowed immense social diversity between, say, Visigothic Spain and the Kingdom of Denmark, while a complex web of royal sovereignty spread all over the continent. The Luxembourgs, Habsburgs, and Wittelsbachs had territorial possessions that formed a patchwork from the Baltic to the Adriatic (map). The title of the territory reflected the degree of control within that area, so that a count was more subject to the interference of the emperor than a king was. Royal houses acquired different types of titles to different lands, so that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was King of Bohemia, Hungary, Spain, and Naples; Archduke of Austria; Duke of Brabant, Luxembourg, Burgundy, Carinthia, Carniola, and Gelderland; Count of Holland, Zeeland, Tyrol, and Nevers; Margrave of Moravia; and ruler over imperial cities, such as Besançon, Mülhausen, Metz, Cologne, and Dortmund (this is just a sampling). Scarcely a decade went by when one of the huge royal houses, like the Wettins or the Hohenzollerns, exchanged territory, lost territory, or restructured their empire.

The polities that appeared in China over the millenia also had complex and shifting political divisions, but these divisions were always contiguous, like miniature empires within the greater Chinese empire. There was usually a very small number of them, such as three, five, or eight; further subdivisions were fairly rare. These divisions of China did not correspond to ethnic or linguistic divisions of the country, and were usually the residue of historical accidents, rather than regional peculiarities. Finally, the Chinese Empires were much more reluctant to interfere in the lower levels of administration than were the European rulers, such as the Holy Roman Emperor. The Chinese Empire itself had clear and technically imposed limits; while non-Chinese dynasties often sought to conquer adjacent states (e.g., the Mongol Yüan Dynasty, or the Jurchen Q'ing), the Han Chinese at most went for protectorates.^[3] The parallels between China and Europe during the period of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) were that

1. both reflected a confederation of highly autonomous states (through the overlapping Holy Roman Empire & Habsburg domains);
2. both experienced minor wars during periods of imperial disunion, including against imperial authority;
3. both had arbitrary geographical divisions, although the arbitrariness of Chinese political divisions was a conscious administrative choice, whereas the European arbitrariness was the result of inheritance and marriage alliances that united diverse territorial entities (which, themselves, reflected definitive ethno-linguistic zones).

Ming China had a land are roughly equal to that of the European Union c.2005, or the area occupied by the key TEP states (which then included Prussia and Bavaria rather than Germany, England rather than the United Kingdom, and so on.

Notes

1. ↑ Exceptions exist to this. During the period 369-662 CE, the Yamato Court was deeply involved in the three-way struggle between Baejke (Paekche), Goguryeo (Koguryo), and Silla. During this period a large number of artisans migrated from China and Korea to Japan. However, official contacts were sparse (e.g., four missions to the Sui court in Luoyang between 581 and 618; the first, in 607, occurred 26 years after the founding of the Dynasty). After this period, Japanese courtiers made a major effort to master Chinese technologies; but contacts virtually broke off after the collapse of the Heian dynasty (797). See Dorothy Perkins, Samurai of Japan: A Chronology From Their Origin in the Heian Era (complete text online) DIANE Publishing (1998)
   
   There was also close and mysterious symbiosis between the proto-Khmer Empire and Srivijaya, in roughly the same epoch. See George Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, University of HawaiiPress (1968). Unfortunately, most references are to stelae inscriptions.
2. ↑ See James D. Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-distance Trade in the Early Modern World Cambridge University Press (1993)
3. ↑ The current People's Republic of China occupies territory conquered by the Manchurian Q'ing Dynasty, minus [Outer] Mongolia. At its greatest extant, the Q'ing Empire included 12 million Km². The T'ang and Ming Empires covered about 4 million Km² at their peak, with protectorates adding perhaps another 1.5 million at certain times. See Patricia Buckley Ebrey, A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization, University of Washington.

See also

The Trans-European Project-1, 2, 3, & 4; Maps