The centrality of Central Asia

Abstract

This paper poses some questions about how Central Asia fits into world history. The questions arise from my attempt to study world history as a world system. From this perspective, as one nonspecialist addressing other nonspecialists, Central Asia appears as a sort of black hole in the middle of the world. Little is known or said about it by those who focus on the geographically outlying civilizations of China, India, Persia, Islam, and Europe—including Russia. Even world historians see only some migrants or invaders who periodically emerge from Central Asia to impinge on these civilizations and the world history they make. Historians of art and religion view Central Asia as a sort of dark space through which cultural achievements moved from one civilization to another. At best, they see Central Asia itself as a dark tabula rasa on which itinerant monks, mullahs, and artists from these allegedly civilized areas left their marks. Now their remains can be admired in a thousand Buddha caves and mosques spread through Central Asia. Or they have been deposited in museums spread through the cultural capitals of the West and Japan after their “discoverers” unearthed them, crated them up, and carted them away.     

Must Nations Become States?

A world in which every nation has become a state, that is, a world in which cultural and political units coincide, would be a very different world from the one we know. There are now close to 200 political units recognized as states in the international system. Nations, understood as cultural units, are not as easily identified. Taking only language as a defining criterion, one could count some 6,000 linguistically defined groups. Many of these groups number so few speakers and are so close to extinction that their future can be discounted.2 If one turns to other cultural markers, however, from religion (or church) and ethnicity, in the sense of common origins, to “a shared style of expression,” the number of cultural groups may well be almost unlimited. Many such groups would call themselves “nations” as a dignified form of selfdesignation. The claim that cultural nations must become political states thus presumes strongly on present-day reality and has deep implications for the future. An international system consisting of many hundreds, possibly even thousands, of state units would function along different lines from the one we know. Granted that such an outcome is not likely to be realized integrally, the general theoretical proposition underlying this vision receives a respectful hearing. Though resisted by many jurists and other scholars, the thesis that nationhood, understood in a cultural sense, must-both in the sense of “should” and in the sense of “will necessarily”—entail political statehood continues to advance in public consciousness. After the end of decolonization, where state creation was dictated by unique considerations, we have continued to witness a rise in the number of recognized states and, even more so, in the number of struggling independence movements. Debate focuses on procedural issues, such as modes of separation from existing states, rather than on the fundamental premises underlying and legitimizing the acquisition of statehood. In this paper I propose first to examine three sorts of arguments invoked to justify the claim that cultural nations must—in the different senses of that term—become political states. These are arguments that can be described as definitional, causal or functional, and moral. The definitional argument makes a case based on linguistic coherence in the use of terms. The causal or functional argument founds itself on a sociology of modernity which posits the interdependence of culture and politics. The moral argument is rooted in an ethics of autonomy and self-rule, recognition and identity.