John Gray
UNDER WESTERN EYES
Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West
By Anthony Pagden (Oxford University Press 548pp £20)

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In the winter of 1822-3, Hegel gave a series of lectures at the University of Berlin. The subject was the philosophy of history, which for him meant the onward march of spirit, or reason - and for the German seer this ongoing process had one highly specific implication: the absorption by 'the West' of the non-Western world, which he thought was thoroughly stagnant. The Muslim East had made no advance since the caliphate, while India and China were 'static nations' in which there could never be anything that could be called 'progress to something else'. The conclusion was obvious: 'It is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjugated to the Europeans; and China will, some day or other, be obliged to have to submit to this fate.'

Hegel's belief in the universal triumph of the West has had a long innings. His view of non-Western societies was inherited by Marx, who supported European colonialism on the grounds that it disrupted the immobility of Asian life, and by generations of academics who tried to explain the totalitarian character of Soviet communism by describing it as a reversion to 'oriental despotism'. The belief that the West embodies progress was given a boost when the Soviet system collapsed, an event greeted as final proof that Western institutions and values were bound to prevail over those of the non-West. As could have been foreseen, the euphoria has proved short-lived. The seemingly inexorable advance of Western power after the end of the Cold War was based on cheap oil and cheap money. Now that these resources are no longer available, and Chinese, Russian and Arab funds are buying up Western assets, we hear rather less of the triumphal rant. Money talks, even when it says very little about what it is doing. The fact that Western primacy is coming to an end seems finally to be sinking in, though the far-reaching consequences have yet to be thought through.

The boundaries that separate the West from the non-West have never been fixed for very long. They shift along with changes in geopolitics and cultural fashion, and Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War aims to show how they came to be where they are today. Pagden's narrative starts with the Greeks, who were the first to divide Europe from Asia and to see the two as antagonistic. The Greeks of Herodotus's generation viewed the Trojan War, as presented in Homer, as 'the birth of Hellas, and later of Europe, and its triumph over Asia'. As Pagden observes, this was not how Homer saw things - his Greeks and Trojans worshipped the same gods and shared the same values - but the Greek perception of a Europe defined by its opposition to Asia, which Herodotus voiced, shapes our view of things even today. The perception persisted throughout the rise of Rome and the advent of Christianity, the encounter with Islam and the emergence of the Enlightenment. Each of these developments strengthened the Western claim to embody a universal civilisation, while at the same time reinforcing the Western sense of being different from the rest of the world.

Ranging from the formative conflict of Greeks with Persians right up to 9/11 and its aftermath, from Alexander in India to Napoleon in Egypt, from Genghis Khan to Saddam Hussein, Pagden's narrative is engagingly written and always interesting. He is particularly good on Islamism's debts to the West, perceptively noting the admiration of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb for modern Western science. There are some disquietingly large gaps in Pagden's narrative, however. It is rather odd to write a history of the conflict between East and West without discussing Japan, which became the first non-Western state in modern times to inflict a crushing defeat on a major European power when it destroyed the Russian Imperial Fleet at the battle of Tsushima in 1905, and which at the start of the twenty-first century is the most modern of nations while remaining the least Western. Russia is mentioned almost in passing as the classic case of a country straddling Asia and Europe. It would have been worth examining how international institutions managed to delude themselves that post-communist Russia was on the way to becoming a Western-style democracy, and why it has taken so long for the penny to drop that the Soviet collapse was actually a historic defeat for westernisation.

These gaps in Pagden's narrative suggest questions about the ideas that shape it. Like many post-Cold War historians, Pagden identifies the modern West with the process of secularisation and views that process as fundamentally benign. 'The majority of the populations of the world are far better', he writes, 'because of what the secularising west has brought them.' One does not need to enter into a debate about the costs and benefits of empire and globalisation to question Pagden's confidence on this point. Is it so obvious that the Russians and the Chinese are better for the experience of communism - a secularising Western project if ever there was one? From another angle, is it plausible to talk of the 'secularising west' when the pre-eminent Western state remains as intensely religious as it has ever been, while its foreign policy has been in recent years more evangelical than in the past? Perhaps Pagden believes the power of Christian fundamentalism in American politics is a blip on the screen of history that will vanish as the US becomes increasingly secular. But there is no more reason to think such a transformation is about to happen in the twenty-first century than there was for believing that religion was in decline in America when de Tocqueville visited the country in the early nineteenth.

If secularism is a distinctively Western ideal, it is partly because its origins lie in Western Christianity. That is one reason why it is unlikely to be a universal feature of modern societies. Secularisation has in any case very little to do with the ongoing shift in global power, which is favouring countries such as China whose understanding of religion has always been quite different from that which has prevailed in the West. Pagden's account of the 'secularising west' is more subtly qualified than many recent histories. Yet it is in the end another story of Western triumph, and one that events are leaving less credible by the day.

John Gray's most recent book is 'Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' (Allen Lane).