韩家亮：谈谈古希腊民主的起源和衰落

·韩家亮·

了解古希腊民主起源和衰落对我们来说具有比较和借鉴的意义。我在这里参照的是一本较权威的历史教科书，《西方的崛起》[1]。它的作者William McNeill是芝加哥大学的荣休历史教授。原书写于1963年。1991年重印时仅加了一篇短文，原文只字未改，这在教科书中是少有的。这本书在史学界评价很高。在我的平装本背面有如下介绍：

“《西方的崛起》获1964年国家历史书奖。《西方的崛起》驶名于它雄心勃勃的广度和知识的精确。在书里， McNeill挑战了Spengler-Toynbee观点即世界文明是许多分别的文明沿着基本独立的经历发展。McNeill辩说人类文化在每一个阶段都相互影响……”

Arnold Toynbee 是世界上非常著名的历史学家。William McNeill挑战了以前他的学说。而Arnold Toynbee反而对这本书有如下的称赞：

“《西方的崛起》是对世界历史以叙述方式我所知最清澈的表达。它的叙述直到西方在现代的优势，也解释了文明从它的诞生地，肥沃月牙地（Fertile Crescent), 向东，也向西扩展……”（注意Toynbee明确指出世界文明最早最发达是在中东月牙地，不是在中国。实际上，早期许多影响世界历史进程的最重要发明是在中东和希腊。）

古希腊民主描述是在书中“古希腊文明成型”这一大节里，主要叙述在书中190页至205页。我们先来熟悉一下几个关键特有名词：polis 城邦， 即 city-state；古希腊由许多相对独立的城邦组成；hoplite 古代希臘的重裝備步兵；phalanx 方陣。

古希腊文明借鉴了中东文明的许多方面。在希腊早期重要城堡Mycenae（约1500B.C.)，社会的重要支柱是那时代具有贵族特征的战争。那时的主要战争工具是战车。因为非贵族无法配置起战车，战车这种新的（相对于1500B.C.的希腊来讲）战争技术加强了贵族的权力。所以Mycenae与中东社会相似。有一点不同是Mycenae的航海发达。

城邦诞生在Ionia（1000B.C.?)。城邦是古希腊及古罗马文明生活的基本细胞（194页）。在实体上，它是一个城镇或城市，周围环绕着农业区和牧业区。在政治上，它是一个群落通过长官和法律来统治。在心理上，它是一个自足的由有特权的成年男子组成的群体（不仅外国人，而且奴隶，妇女，儿童都被排处在外）。

希腊社会早期各种力量的均衡使得贵族家庭联合在一起，限制了皇家权威（196页）。贵族权力的上升和皇权的衰落有一段过程。逐渐地，出现一些城邦由贵族议会作重要执政决定。到公元前八世纪时，大多数发达的希腊城邦权力都转移到贵族手中。乡村的自然发展有类似中东文明的趋向，贫富二极分化：即休闲的贵族和饥饿的大众（198页）。军事战术上的一个重要改变限制了贫富分化达几个世纪之久：即方阵的引入。在公元前七世纪下半叶特别是公元前六世纪重裝備步兵 （hoplite）取代了骑兵成为战场上的决定力量。重裝備步兵经过训练使行动一致合拍的方阵（phalanx）在战斗中胜出骑兵和松散组织的步兵。

方阵的引入带来了深刻的社会变化（198页）。当农民—重裝備步兵成了战斗的主力时，贵族的优越就不再存在了。在方阵的训练中，财富和社会地位都不重要，而重要的是力量，勇气，和纪律。社会上形成一种情绪，贵族的张显是坏的，非希腊式的，野蛮的。好的公民是一个生活朴素的独立农人，有足够的土地使他生活体面，有能力配置武器参加战斗。在这样的环境下，富有的希腊公民竞相把财富捐给公共建筑和公共服务。这满有活力的希腊平均主义和内部团结使得希腊与其它文明不同。

作者在202页将希腊与东方作了一个比较。在东方，农民是被动的，他对任何政治变化无动于衷，看不到主人的变动对他有什么影响。而在希腊，农村民众至关重要地主动参与政治。

在公元前七世纪和六世纪，城市有许多商人和艺人，他们联合小农（地太少，无法过体面的生活）成为一股政治势力，因此产生了许多暴君。这里，暴君是通过政变上台，不依法律统治（202页）。多数暴君劫富济贫。这些暴君因为没有统治的合法性加上城邦的支柱步兵阶级对其失去的权力不满，暴君统治极不稳定。

要解决商业化的城邦面临的问题，有两条截然不同的道路（203页）：（1）采用寡頭政治在政治上压迫穷人；（2）激进拓展原来基于hoplite的民主。Corinth采取了第一条道路。但它需要外强的军事支持，而且把公民分成对立的两派而使城邦政治瘫痪。Athens采取了第二条道路，在510B.C.推翻暴君后引入了宪法演进和激进民主，使无地的公民也可参与会议和法庭。但在483B.C.前这些穷人政治地位不牢固。在483B.C.Athens大大扩展了它的舰队。穷人可以成为划手，因而对城邦有重要贡献和有当然的发言权。

如果说方阵是希腊城邦基本学校，那么舰队就是希腊民主的毕业学校。如果说家庭农场是有限民主的经济基础，那么商业船队和它的附属工场，仓库，和市场则提供了激进民主的腱。

当然，古希腊民主从不是完全的（203页）。奴隶（城市中有许多）没有任何政治权力。妇女也一样没有政治权力。居住的外地人只有在非常特殊的情况下才可能取得公民权。事实上甚至在500B.C.以后很长一段时间，古希腊公民权还都是封闭的，世袭的，基本上是血统相关的。

古希腊民主的衰落表述在（258-260页）。在古希腊民主全胜期，希腊由分散的主权独立的城邦组成。当一个城邦，如Athens，发展到非常强大，它扩张权力破坏了这样的局面。466B.C. Athens要求其它城邦进贡，实质上它要成为帝国。后来其他城邦联合Sparta打败了Athens。但Sparta对其它城邦比Athens更为任意，不尊重各城邦的主权。后来Thebes和Macedon也是如此。这些内战破坏了城邦的构成。就现在了解的城邦Athens来说，公元前四世纪社会分工开始出现。职业士兵和将军主管打仗。职业演说家和领导者主持议会。金融专家则负责平衡公共帐户。这与公元前五世纪公民一致处理事务大不相同。500B.C.时的紧密交织田园群落演变成松散多的，更大都会，但活力大减的社会。至此古希腊民主体制终结。

这里我想提请读者注意几点。（1）古希腊民主起始是基于权力分散：贵族议会在城邦中的掌权。（2）方阵的军事技术强化了民主（和平等）。（3）Athens的激进民主扩大了公民基础。（4）古希腊民主主要是从实用方面来的。（5）古希腊民主不包括奴隶，妇女，外邦居民。（6）民主可以有不同程度的民主。（7）与民主相对是独裁或寡头统治。

对照现代民主，我们可以看到一些有趣的方面。现代民主的代表之一是美国。美国先在宪法中声称“人被造而平等”。这里平等和公民身份是宗教的，先验的。这与古希腊实用主义起因相对照。早期美国民主也是像古希腊民主一样，排除奴隶，妇女。经过二百多年的逐步演进，不仅奴隶制被废除，妇女，黑人都有了与其他人一样的公民权。导致美国民主进步的一个重要原因基于美国宪法。如果从历史的角度看，这二百年的民主政治进展非常大。由于现在许多民主政权有保障平等的宪法和各种政治机构，像古希腊民主倾覆的事情就不太容易发生。我打算以后详细讨论这些问题。

注释： [1] William McNeill，"The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community", University Of Chicago Press (January 1, 1992)

Cheaper by the Dozen

By ARTHUR HERMAN

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Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

F-105 Thunderchiefs refueling midair from a KC-135 Stratotanker. The Boeing-built Stratotanker debuted in 1957 and is still in service today.

The military-industrial complex. The chilling phrase conjures up rows of gleaming ICBM's and B-52 Stratofortress bombers and nuclear submarines—or the mad Gen. Jack Ripper in the movie "Doctor Strangelove." Most people know that the phrase comes from President Eisenhower's Farewell Address of Jan. 17, 1961, in which he declared: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He warned that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could keep America's "huge industrial and military machinery of defense" from becoming a potential threat to liberty and peace.
For liberals, Eisenhower's speech, especially that encapsulating phrase, turned Ike from a figure of fun into a revered prophet. Even the radical Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962, picked the phrase up. The "military-industrial complex" became a part of the rhetoric of the student movement—and has remained a part of the thought process of America's intelligentsia ever since.
Figuring out what Eisenhower meant by the military-industrial complex—and whether he was right to see it as something to be guarded against—is one of James Ledbetter's many tasks in "Unwarranted Influence." Exactly how the MIC (as we might abbreviate it) operates is the avowed subject of William Hartung's "Prophets of War," a scathing portrait of Lockheed Martin, America's largest defense contractor.
After World War I, it became popular to assert that the world's munitions makers, "the merchants of death," promoted wars to enhance their own profits—the most glaring example of how "capitalism kills." Mr. Ledbetter recognizes that such claims were ill-founded, even absurd: after all, the country that wound up with the biggest and costliest MIC of all was the communist Soviet Union. Still, he cannot resist joining the chorus of those who see the expansion of the Pentagon's budget during the Cold War as a grotesque and menacing development, one that made the world more perilous at the time and makes the future dangerously uncertain now.
What Mr. Ledbetter cannot explain is how this military buildup managed to check Soviet and Chinese expansion around the world, allowed Western Europe to unite and live in peace, and provided a nuclear deterrence without triggering the end of civilization (as critics predicted)—or ever once interrupted the flow of butter as well as guns.
Some would say it was an amazing achievement rather than a source of shame. But not Mr. Ledbetter. Instead, he insists that the MIC has blunted our moral sense and enabled adventurism. In recent years it has led to "the controversial detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the torture revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison; the privatization of security and combat as represented by the Blackwater firm; and the overruns in cost, length of engagement, and American lives" in Iraq.
It is hard to see what this litany has to do with the MIC per se, especially when the Pentagon's weapons-spending programs have steadily shrunk as a percentage of the federal budget to less than 20%, compared with 60% in Eisenhower's day, and when the defense industry itself is far from a dominant force in the nation's economy. Today you could buy all the Big Six defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, for roughly a 10th of the value of Microsoft. In any case, it is hard to imagine Eisenhower—the man who approved the CIA's overthrow of governments in Guatemala and Iran— losing much sleep over Gitmo.

Unwarranted Influence

By James Ledbetter
Yale, 268 pages, $26

It is true, though—as Mr. Ledbetter shows—that Ike was a bundle of contradictions. He was the son of Mennonite pacifists who went to West Point and became the Army's top expert on logistics and war mobilization. As the supreme commander in Europe he achieved victory by means of planes and weapons from companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Dow and DuPont that he would excoriate as props of the military-industrial complex. The president who pumped America's defense dollars into a nuclear-armed fleet of B-52's took time in his Farewell Speech to dub nuclear disarmament the country's "continuing imperative."
In the end, Mr. Ledbetter is forced to conclude that Eisenhower's worry about the MIC was part of a larger fear—about the growth of an arrogant and expensive federal government and the growth of federal debt. Would building more and bigger weapons systems, Eisenhower wondered, bankrupt the country?
In fact, it is social programs that now have the federal budget firmly in their grip and keep our deficits soaring. One could call the Pentagon's $685 billion measly compared with the continuing costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Today the MIC barely registers at 4% of GDP; in Eisenhower's day it was nearly 10%, even after the Korean War. By Ike's own standards we should be spending at least twice what we are now spending on defense.
For Keynesians eager to push up aggregate demand with more "stimulus" money, defense spending is a win-win: Unlike high-speed rails to Las Vegas and windmill farms, the money spent on weapons and armaments goes directly into real economic goods and into the pockets of defense workers, including those at Lockheed Martin.
This public-private nexus bothers observers like Mr Hartung. Indeed, his picture of Lockheed in "Prophets of War" reads like the stuff of 19th-century muckraker journalism. Not that Lockheed has not encouraged such an approach: In 1974, a scandal broke about Lockheed executives bribing foreign officials, including Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands and a Japanese prime minister, who wound up with a stiff prison sentence. But more generally Mr. Hartung paints a portrait of a company with tentacles everywhere, from the Pentagon and Congress to agents in foreign governments, a company that feeds the forces of militarism around the world and enriches itself in the process, especially through cost overruns.

Prophets of War

By William D. Hartung
Nation Books, 296 pages, $25.95

Yet profit is of course why businesses exist, even arms businesses (just ask Bofors, peace-loving Sweden's venerable arms giant, bought in 2005 by BAE). And most cost overruns these days have less to do with corruption than with constant new "add on's" and bureaucratic fiddling, including safety-standard requirements, emanating from Washington. This is one reason why a device like the MDARS, a golf-cart-size sensory robot envisaged in 2000 as a cheap way to patrol warehouses and air bases, now costs 50 times more than planned.
Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin president, is Mr. Hartung's bête noire. He portrays him as a "tough behind-the-scenes lobbyist" who has enriched himself and his company at the public trough. Yet it was Mr. Augustine, seeing the absurdity of the government's procurement process, who quipped that in the year 2054 the entire Pentagon budget will be spent to buy exactly one airplane, to be shared on alternate days by the Army, Navy and Air Force. It was not meant as a happy prediction.
As it happens, America's military- industrial complex developed in World War II as a way to save money, not squander it. Industrialists and military men learned that working together on plane and weapons designs made for better weapons at a faster pace, as battlefield experience got incorporated into existing designs. It also speeded the development of technologies that continue to spin off from the MIC, from radar and cellphones to the Internet (an outgrowth of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency). Everyone complains about a bloated defense budget, yet history shows that a continuous, functioning MIC costs far less in lives and dollars than having to ramp up our military from scratch when a crisis hits.
From 1946 to 1950 a drastic downsizing of our military almost left us helpless to halt a communist takeover of Korea. After Vietnam, we were ill-prepared to confront the Soviets' Third World adventurism and its new interest in sea power. After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was a similar attempt to claim a "peace dividend." Each time the critics of "empire" argued that, at last, we could beat our swords into ploughshares. Those who disagreed were dismissed as alarmists or, more routinely, as shills with a vested interest in the status quo.
But we all have a vested interest in the status quo—a world in which the U.S. military assumes the awesome burden of acting as the world's policeman, from fending off rogue nations and knocking off terrorists with Predator drones to defending the sea lanes and global commons from pirates and assorted bad guys. The task of rebuilding a hollowed-out military is a daunting one. If we manage to appreciate the virtues of the "military-industrial complex," we won't have to face it again.
—Mr. Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the arsenal of democracy.

Companies to Colonies -- Privatizing the business of empire.

BOOKSHELFDECEMBER 9, 2010.

By JEFFREY COLLINS

On the morning of June 23, 1757, the armies of Bengal, in what is now eastern India, engaged English soldiers under the command of Robert Clive. The battle took place near a village north of the British imperial stronghold of Calcutta. Siraj- ud- Daula—the ruler of the entire Bengal region—had marshaled forces reportedly numbering 50,000, to Clive's mere 3,000. But Clive's tactical audacity and conspiratorial guile won the day. Having secretly sowed treason in the Bengali ranks, he seized the high ground and cannonaded his disoriented enemy. Siraj-ud-Daula was deposed, murdered and replaced by a puppet prince. Britain secured the riches of Bengal.
More than a century later, in the fall of 1893, a rout of similar dimensions unfolded in the southern African kingdom of Matabeleland. European settlers, already glutted with recently discovered diamonds and gold, invaded the primitive kingdom seeking more. The settlers marched at the bidding of Cecil Rhodes, the diamond oligarch and prime minister of Britain's Cape Colony. Outnumbered perhaps five to one, they enjoyed a complete victory. The Matabele fell by the thousands beneath a hail of machine-gun fire, and their lands were soon rechristened Rhodesia. As the English writer Hilaire Belloc mordantly versified around this time: "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not."
Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes are iconic figures in the annals of imperial history. Few did more to keep the sun from setting on the British Empire. It is thus remarkable to remember that neither man commanded royal troops or acted as an official of the British Government. Both, in fact, owed their power to private companies. They were ardent British patriots, but it was nonetheless the interests of the East India Co. and the British South Africa Co. respectively that they served.
History tends to portray the European empires as the creations of kings and nation-states. But as Stephen Bown's "Merchant Kings" reminds us, private economic interests did as much as statesmen to colonize the globe on behalf of Europe. Particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European states struggled to modernize themselves while burdened by the costs of war, monarchs regularly privatized the business of empire. They chartered national trading companies, granting them valuable monopoly rights to do business in far-flung locales—and to outfit private armies, conduct diplomacy and negotiate treaties.

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Merchant Kings

By Stephen R. Bown
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 314 pages, $26.99

The British and Dutch, with their advanced commercial economies, were particularly fond of the device. The original intent was to organize trade, but the temptation toward direct conquest and rule often raised the "animal spirits" of the trading companies. In an age when correspondence between Bombay and London could take six months, states could do little to tame the companies. The results could be staggering. Private trading interests founded important colonies such as Massachusetts and Virginia. For generations the Royal Africa Co. monopolized the British slave trade. The Dutch East India Co. ruthlessly dominated the Asian spice trade for decades. In Bengal, the English East India Co. governed and taxed nearly thirty million natives long before Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India. Until 1870, England's Hudson's Bay Co. governed nearly 1.5 million square miles of Canada on behalf of a few hundred investors.
This was private colonizing on a scale to make Halliburton and Blackwater blush. Lenin once called imperialism the "last stage of capitalism," but in many respects it was the first. Of course, as Adam Smith observed, the great chartered companies were not free-marketeers but venal monopolists. And unlike trade, the companies' governing efforts rarely turned a profit. The temptation to tax and administer rather than barter usually ruined the bottom line. And the human costs of company rule could be catastrophic. The ruinous taxes collected in Bengal by the East India Co. exacerbated a famine that killed perhaps 10 million Bengalis in the early 1770s. Rhodes's South Africa Co., seeking docile black laborers, laid the legal groundwork for apartheid.
Nevertheless, for a remarkably long run, European trading cartels were major imperial players on three continents. It is fascinating and forgotten history, and we could use a good general account. Mr. Bown, unfortunately, has not provided one. A successful popular writer, he chooses to tell the history of the great trading companies by sketching six of the major personalities who dominated them. Clive and Rhodes are among his subjects, but so too are lesser known figures, such as Aleksandr Baranov, who ruled as "Lord of Alaska" for the Russian American Co., and Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the sea captain who served the Dutch East India Co. with the brutality of a warlord.
Mr. Bown writes smoothly, but he appears to have done no original research and his potted biographies are linked by the barest of thematic threads. He establishes that the grandees of the trading companies were uniformly men of ambition and rapacity, but this is hardly news. He provides no broader account of the political and commercial conditions that propelled the rise of the trading companies. How profitable were these enterprises? Who were their investors and financiers? How and when did they cooperate or clash with the sovereigns who chartered them?
The author does what he can, but the biographical vignettes allow him little space for such questions. "Merchant Kings" is not a robust popular history but a flimsy one, a collection of anecdotes strung together by generalizations. That's a shame, because the heyday of the chartered trading companies may have passed, but the unsavory alliance of bankrupt states and crony capitalists is a topic that never gets old.

Mr. Collins, a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, is currently a visiting fellow at Cambridge University.

Islamist Turkey vs. Secular Iran?

Early in the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman and Safavid empires fought for control of the Middle East, Selim the Grim ruling from Istanbul indulged his artistic side by composing distinguished poetry in Persian, then the Middle East's language of high culture. Simultaneously, Ismail I ruling from Isfahan wrote poetry in Turkish, his ancestral language.

Selim the Grim (r. 1512-20) wrote poetry under the name Mahlas Selimi; his arch-rival Ismail I (r. 1501-24) wrote poetry as Khata'i.

This juxtaposition comes to mind as the populations of Turkey and Iran now engage in another exchange. As the secular Turkey founded by Atatürk threatens to disappear under a wave of Islamism, the Islamist Iranian state founded by Khomeini apparently teeters, on the brink of secularism. Turks wish to live like Iranians, ironically, and Iranians like Turks.

Turkey and Iran are large, influential, and relatively advanced Muslim-majority countries, historically central, strategically placed, and widely watched; as they cross paths, I predicted back in 1994, racing in opposite directions, their destinies will affect not just the future of the Middle East but potentially the entire Muslim world.
That is now happening. Let's review each country's evolution:
Turkey: Atatürk nearly removed Islam from public life in the period 1923-38. Over the decades, however, Islamists fought back and by the 1970s they formed part of a ruling coalition; in 1996-97, they even headed a government. Islamists took power following the strange elections of 2002, when winning a third of the vote secured them two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Ruling with caution and competence, they got nearly half the vote in 2007, at which point their gloves came off and the bullying began, from a wildly excessive fine levied against a media critic to hare-brained conspiracy theories against the armed forces. Islamists won 58 percent of the vote in a September referendum and appear set to win the next parliamentary election, due by June 2011.

Atatürk excluded Islam from Turkey's public life and Khomeini made it central in Iran's.

Should Islamists win the next election, that will likely establish the premise for them to remain enduringly in power, during which they will bend the country to fit their will, instituting Islamic law (the Sharia), and building an Islamic order resembling Khomeini's idealized polity.

Iran: Khomeini did the opposite of Atatürk, making Islam politically dominant during his reign, 1979-89, but it soon thereafter began to falter, with discordant factions emerging, the economy failing, and the populace distancing itself from the regime's extremist rule. By the 1990s, foreign observers expected the regime soon to fail. Despite their populace's growing disillusionment, the increased sway of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and the coming to power of hardened veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, as symbolized by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, imbued it with a second wind.
This reassertion of Islamist goals also increased the people's alienation from the regime, including a turn away from Islamic practices and toward secularism. The country's growing pathologies, including rampant drug-taking, pornography, and prostitution point to the depths of its problems. Alienation sparked anti-regime demonstrations in the aftermath of fraudulent elections in June 2009. The repression that followed spurred yet more anger at the authorities.
A race is underway. Except it is not an even competition, given that Islamists currently rule in both capitals, Ankara and Tehran.

Erdoğan and Ahmadinejad, in sync at last.

Looking ahead, Iran represents the Middle East's greatest danger and its greatest hope. Its nuclear buildup, terrorism, ideological aggressiveness, and formation of a "resistance bloc" present a truly global threat, ranging from jumping the price of oil and gas to an electro-magnetic pulse attack on the United States. But if these dangers can be navigated, controlled, and subdued, Iran has a unique potential to lead Muslims out of the dark night of Islamism toward a more modern, moderate, and good neighborly form of Islam. As in 1979, that achievement will likely affect Muslims far and wide.

Contrarily, while the Turkish government presents few immediate dangers, its more subtle application of Islamism's hideous principles makes it loom large as future threat. Long after Khomeini and Osama bin Laden are forgotten, I venture, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his colleagues will be remembered as the inventors of a more lasting and insidious form of Islamism.
Thus may today's most urgent Middle Eastern problem country become tomorrow's leader of sanity and creativity while the West's most stalwart Muslim ally over five decades turn into the greatest source of hostility and reaction. Extrapolation is a mug's game, the wheel turns, and history springs surprises.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Nov. 30, 2010 updates: Two points that did not fit in the main body of my column
(1) Ankara and Tehran work together ever closely these days but I predict that they will soon be rivals for Islamist leadership. Historical pride, sectarian ambition, and geo-strategic competition all suggest that the current moment of harmony will not last long Look for the Turks to dispute Iranian leadership in such arenas as commercial prowess, military power, and religious potency.
(2) I sketched out this rivalry in a 1994 article in the National Interest, "[Turkey vs. Iran and] Islam's Intramural Struggle," in which I noted "a long, deep, and difficult fight" likely brewing "between two of the great countries of the Middle East, Turkey and Iran." Turks , I wrote, "seem not yet to realize what the mullahs know: that fundamentalist Islam will rise or fall depending on what Turks do, and that Iran and Turkey are therefore engaged in a mortal combat. Will Turks wake up in time to hold their own? Much hinges on the result."

伊斯兰主义的土耳其和世俗的伊朗

作者 Daniel Pipes
华盛顿时代
2010年11月30日

http://zh-hans.danielpipes.org/article/9158

英文原文: Islamist Turkey vs. Secular Iran?

在16世纪初，当奥斯曼帝国和萨法维王朝为中东的控制权而斗争时，统治伊斯坦布尔的Selim the Grim尽情施展他的艺术才华，用代表当时中东最高文化的波斯语，写出了非常优秀的诗歌。与此同时，统治伊斯法罕的伊斯梅尔一世用土耳其语——即他的祖先的语言，来写诗歌。

Selim the Grim (r. 1512-20) 以 Mahlas Selimi为笔名创作诗歌; 而他的夙敌伊斯梅尔一世 (r. 1501-24) 以 Khata'i为笔名创作。

现在，土耳其和伊朗的人们正在进行另一种互换，这就让我们想起了这一并列的现象。在伊斯兰主义的浪潮下，由阿塔图克建立的世俗土耳其面临消失的威胁，而由霍梅尼建立的伊斯兰主义的伊朗则摇摆在世俗主义的边缘。土耳其人希望像伊朗人一样生活，而具有反讽意义的，伊朗人希望像土耳其人一样生活。
土耳其和伊朗都是面积广阔、有影响力，而且相对先进的穆斯林占大多数的国家，都曾在历史上位居中心，有战略性的位置，受到广泛的关注。随着他们道路交错，我早在1994年就预测，他们必定朝着相反的方向前进，他们的命运不仅会影响中东的未来，也会潜在地影响整个穆斯林世界。
这就是现在正发生的。让我们回顾一下两国各自的发展：
土耳其： 在1923年到1938年期间，阿塔图克几乎将伊斯兰教从公众生活中清除。然而在过去的几十年时间，伊斯兰主义者回击，截至20世纪70年代他们已经成了统治联盟中的一部分；在1996年到1997年，他们甚至领导了一届政府。在2002年奇怪的选举之后，伊斯兰主义者当权。他们谨慎而又充满竞争力的统治，使得他们在2007年又取得了近一半的选票，当时他们撕破面纱，横行霸道就真正开始了：用征收面积广泛的过高罚款反对媒体的批评，到用疯狂的阴谋理论对付武装部队。9月伊斯兰主义者赢得了 58%的投票，似乎又打算赢得下一届的议会选举，即2011年6月的选举。

阿塔土克将伊斯兰教排除在土耳其的公众生活之外，而霍梅尼则使之成为伊朗公共生活的中心。

一旦伊斯兰主义者赢得了下届选举，这将可能成为他们持续掌握权力的前提。在这期间他们将让国家转向，以顺应他们的意愿，将伊斯兰教法律（沙里法）制度化，并且建立与霍梅尼理想化的政体类似的伊斯兰秩序。
伊朗：霍梅尼做了和阿塔土克相反的事情，在1979到1989年他统治期间使伊斯兰教占据了政治主导地位，但是自那之后他很快就开始犹豫，看到派别纷争， 经济衰败，同时百姓将自己和政权的极端主义统治拉开距离。直到20世纪90年代， 国外观察家预计这个政权会很快倒台。尽管人民的理想日渐破灭，但伊斯兰革命卫队影响加强，经历过两伊战争的强硬派退伍军人逐渐掌权，其标志就是艾哈迈德内贾德，激发了第二次风潮。
重新主张伊斯兰主义的目标也不断增加了人民和政权之间的距离，包括脱离伊斯兰教的宗教实践，转向世俗主义。这个国家一些病态现象日益泛滥，包括猖獗的 吸毒, 色情作品以及 卖淫都指出了问题的深度。2009年6月的选举弊案过后，反政权的示威游行象征着这一疏离的高峰。之后的镇压行动甚至激起了百姓对当局更多的愤怒。
一场竞赛正在激烈进行中。除了还不是一场公平竞争以外，伊斯兰主义者在两个首都——安卡拉和德黑兰都当权。

埃尔多安和内贾德最终步调一致。

向前看，伊朗代表了中东最大的危险，也是中东最大的希望。它的核建设、恐怖主义、意识形态的侵略性，以及"抵抗联盟"的形成都呈现了一个真实的全球性威胁，从石油和天然气的价格急剧飞升，到对美国的电磁波袭击。但是如果这些危险可被引导、控制和缓和，伊朗有着独特的潜力引导穆斯林走出伊斯兰主义的黑夜，进入一个更加现代、温和和更睦邻的伊斯兰教的形式。正如在1979年，这一进步将可能更远更广的影响穆斯林。
相反的，当土耳其政府少有造成直接威胁时，它更加微妙的适用伊斯兰主义那些可怕的原则，却使之明显成为未来的巨大威胁。我敢于认定，在霍梅尼和奥萨马ˑ本拉登被忘记以后，埃尔多安和他的同僚将会成为更加持久、潜在的伊斯兰主义的发明者，而被人们记住。
因此，今天最急迫的中东问题国家可能会变成明天明智、有创造力的领袖，而五十年来西方最忠实的穆斯林同盟却可能成为敌对和回击势力的最大来源。预测往往是徒劳无功的游戏，车轮转动，历史不断给我们带来惊讶。

Engines of Commerce -The unheralded machine power that moves manufactured goods and raw materials around the world.

The unheralded machine power that moves manufactured goods and raw materials around the world.

By NICK SCHULZ

It's no secret that Al Gore and other hard-line environmentalists hate the internal-combustion engine. In 1992, Mr. Gore in his book "Earth in the Balance" called for a program that would lead to the engine's elimination by 2017. He believed this was no fanciful goal; it was just a matter of practical engineering harnessed to political will.

Vaclav Smil doesn't mention Mr. Gore in "Prime Movers of Globalization," a detailed, fascinating account of, as the subtitle has it, "The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines." But somehow I suspect that the Nobel laureate and scourge of fossil-fuel consumption was not far from the author's mind. For if the story of these remarkable machines reveals anything, it is that Mr. Gore's vision is utterly untethered to reality.
The technological achievement alone is extraordinary, never mind (for the moment) the commercial effect. In the late 19th century, the German engineer Rudolf Diesel developed an engine that operated by injecting fuel into cylinders containing air compressed by pistons (fuel ignites more easily in compressed air). The pistons, in turn, were driven by the gases released in the fuel's ignition. The inventor himself imagined something on the scale of diesel-powered sewing machines. These days the engines power almost all sizable ocean-going vessels as well as major rail and truck transport. "When measured in tons per kilometer," Mr. Smil notes, "about 94 percent of global trade is now diesel-powered." The engines dominate global trade because "the cost, efficiency, reliability, and durability of diesel engines offer a combination that has not been surpassed by any other energy converter."
The gas turbine—invented by Frank Whittle, a British engineer, in the early 20th century—relies on a process of continuous combustion, with spinning fan-blades driving a compressor or turning a shaft (e.g., a ship's propeller) or producing powerful thrust through a nozzle, enough to send an airplane into the sky. Orville and Wilbur Wright are the first fathers of flight, but Frank Whittle is the mostly unheralded father of globe-spanning air travel.

"In 1930," Mr. Smil writes, "there could be no such thing as a non-stop transatlantic commercial flight." But the gas turbine dramatically changed that state of affairs. "In 1950, the crossing took twelve hours," he notes. Eight years later, it could be made in six hours, though only a small number of first-generation jetliners were in operation. By 1960, such flights "became an increasingly common event, and so, figuratively, the world shrank by half in a single decade."

Prime Movers of Globalization

By Vaclav Smil
(The MIT Press, 261 pages, $29.95)

These two internal-combustion engines—diesel and turbine—soon became "prime movers" as Mr. Smil dubs them. They are now the "indispensable driving forces of the global economy." Without them, "trade would not have achieved its truly planetwide scope or have done so at such massive scales, at such rapid speed, and at such affordable costs."

When most Americans think of the internal- combustion engine, they naturally think of the one under the hood of their car. And indeed, gasoline- powered engines are "the most common prime mover of modern civilization. . . . There are now roughly 1 billion of these engines installed in cars, trucks, motorcycles and garden machines, boats, snowmobiles" and so on.

Why did this "impressive machine" fail to become the force behind globalization, moving goods long distances? It is "not practical in very large sizes," Mr. Smil says. The global transport of large quantities of goods and people requires much more massive engines. The inventions of Messrs. Diesel and Whittle—refined, modified and extended countless times by later engineers—picked up where the conventional gasoline engine left off.

Mr. Smil's account of the engineering advances throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries— advances that brought the world large marine diesels and gas turbines—is first-rate history, both thorough and compelling. It is also fairly technical for the lay reader. But the rich detail doesn't just explain the intricacies of the engines and how they work. It also helps to show how easily we take for granted machine-power of such marvelous sophistication and, relatedly, why an environmental dreamer might mistakenly imagine its disappearance within a quarter-century.

"Who does not know (indeed, has not seen) a Boeing 747, the first wide-body jet?" Mr. Smil asks. "Who is not aware of Wal-Mart's China supply pipeline, and who has not seen the images of container ships laden with what seem to be gravity-defying layers of steel boxes? But for how many people would the JT9D or the K98MC7 (the engines that have made those remarkable airplanes and vessels possible) ring any bell, and how many educated adults could cogently and accurately describe how a turbofan works . . . or why diesels endure?"

Readers of "Prime Movers of Globalization" will know the answers to such question better than most when they are done, and they will understand why these massive machines will not disappear soon. It is true that diesels and jet turbines are not without their problems. They have added to environmental pressures by enabling the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the dumping of plastic debris into the North Pacific; and, with the creative destruction caused by global trade, they have created social disruptions that their inventors could hardly have imagined. Mr. Smil acknowledges such problems; he is no Pollyanna and is even something of an environmentalist. But he has been mugged by the reality of physics and engineering.

Mr. Schulz is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of American.com.

A Revolution From Below --The break-away from Britain had less to do with high ideals than with the passions of the common people.

The break-away from Britain had less to do with high ideals than with the passions of the common people.

By ALAN PELL CRAWFORD

In November 1774, almost six months before the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord, a delegation of the common people of Philadelphia called on Martha Washington. Martha was of course the wife of George Washington, the commander of the new American troops and the most distinguished gentleman in the colonies. Mrs. Washington had just been asked to attend a fancy-dress ball, and, as T.H. Breen writes in "American Insurgents, American Patriots," the ordinary people thought it was "a very bad idea."

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MPI/Getty Images

A Paul Revere rendering of the 1770 Boston Massacre.

 

Mrs. Washington's callers in effect read her the riot act, citing the Articles of Association recently adopted by the Continental Congress. The articles called for a boycott of British goods to protest the closing of Boston harbor and, among other things, discouraged "every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of games, cock fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments." So the delegation -- "with great regard and affection" -- asked her not to attend the ball. Sensibly, she complied.

The next day, "attended by the troop of horse, two companies of light infantry, &c.," Mrs. Washington left Philadelphia for Massachusetts to be closer to her husband, then commanding troops outside Boston, and to avoid antagonizing the commoners whose support he would need.

The committees enforcing the Articles of Association did not confine their activities to courtesy calls. They did much more. Mr. Breen argues that a proper idea of the American Revolution depends on our understanding the role of such "extralegal" bodies.

More

• Excerpt: Revolutionaries
• Excerpt: 'American Insurgents, American Patriots'

Conventional accounts of the Revolution emphasize the leadership of those we now recognize as the Founding Fathers, a phrase that did not exist until it was used by Warren Harding in 1916. Generation after generation, students are taught that the Founders inspired a hesitant, though hardy, American populace to reclaim its rights. Wise and sober men, they skillfully directed their countrymen's righteous indignation into productive channels, avoiding the excesses of other revolutions, past and present.

The truth is a good deal messier and more interesting. Historians in our own time—Mr. Breen, Gary B. Nash and Gordon S. Wood, among others—have shifted the emphasis to the common people, for whom the Founders often felt disdain. "Disdain" puts the matter rather lightly. Consider the attitude of New York's Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention who, by virtue of education, wealth and social status, was characteristic of the colonial elite. To Morris the people were either "sheep, simple as they are," or "poor reptiles," who, given half a chance, "will bite."

American Insurgents, American Patriots

By T.H. Breen
Hill & Wang, 337 pages, $27

Bite they did. A full two years before the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, the people of the New England countryside had declared themselves ipso facto free and independent of Britain. In one farm town after another, seeking permission from no one, they booted out their royal rulers, substituting makeshift political organizations that Edmund Burke, back in England, recognized as historically significant. In "Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America," Jack Rakove quotes Burke telling the House of Commons that, in America, "a strange new, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable."

America may have been "conceived in liberty," but the home-grown arrangements that came to represent government to the country people were not composed of civil libertarians. They did not share the Enlightenment sensibilities of, say, Thomas Jefferson. The Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Observation and other ad hoc assemblies eagerly snooped on their neighbors; forced the signing of loyalty oaths; seized property; and tarred, feathered and otherwise terrorized suspected British sympathizers.

Nor did these upstarts await the exhortations of Patrick Henry, much less the learned disquisitions of John Adams to take up arms. In early September 1774, just as the delegates to the first Continental Congress converged on Philadelphia, rumors were rife that the British had bombarded Boston, destroying America's third largest city and killing six Americans. Before the facts could be established—no bombardment, no killings—thousands of armed and leaderless volunteers were streaming toward Boston, itching for revenge.

The Redcoats weren't the only ones unnerved by their approach. The uprising also troubled America's congressional leaders, who suddenly found themselves, Mr. Breen writes, "in the extremely awkward position of becoming followers—perhaps even irrelevant spectators—while ordinary people [from country towns] assumed the lead in defining the character of resistance against Great Britain."

Revolutionaries

By Jack Rakove
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 487 pages, $30

The response of Congress, also believing Boston had been destroyed, was to endorse the so-called Suffolk Resolves, which urged the citizens of Massachusetts to withhold their taxes and otherwise defy their British masters. With the adoption of the Suffolk Resolves, a far more radical act than the delegates would otherwise have committed, there was no turning back in the drive toward independence. (Once the truth was learned—that Boston had not been leveled—the volunteers headed home; their hostility toward the British still simmered, however, awaiting further provocation.)

Mr. Rakove's thorough if somewhat unfocused "Revolutionaries" explores how and why Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison turned from "loyal subjects" into "as unlikely a group of revolutionaries as one can imagine. Indeed to call them revolutionaries at all is almost ironic. With the possible (and doubtful) exception of Samuel Adams, none of those who took leading roles in the struggle actively set out to foment rebellion or found a republic."

They became revolutionaries "because a crisis in a single colony spiraled out of control," Mr. Rakove concludes, referring to the protests and conflicts in Boston. England's overwrought response—and the colonists' overwrought response to England's—gave striving men little choice. Elites who did not find reasons to support the cause of the common people had no future in American politics—or in America, period. There are, of course, other, more high-minded ways to account for their revolutionary conversion, and Mr. Rakove gives their republican ideals, for example, a proper hearing. But knowing what we now know about the "common" revolt, a more cynical explanation cannot be discounted. Republicans ideals mattered, but so did personal ambition and possibly even survival.

 

—Mr. Crawford is the author of "Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas

Jefferson."Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W4