The Representation of External Threats: From the Middle Ages to the Modern World ed. by Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Representation of External Threats: From the Middle Ages to the Modern World ed. by Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde Alexandre Coello de la Rosa Eberhard Crailsheim and Marõa Dolores Elizalde, EDS. The Representation of External Threats: From the Middle Ages to the Modern World Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. 466 pages. Today's world is convulsed by global environmental threats, cultural fundamentalism, the rise of right-wing extremism, migratory crises, not to mention the impoverishment of large sections of the global population, the loss of political rights, and more recently, the deadly new coronavirus disease. In this pessimistic context, Brill has published a lengthy, multi-author edited collection, which revolves around the sociological theory that representations of external threats have the potential to impact the internal cohesion of and strengthen the existing social order in the threatened communities. Starting from a research project initially focused on the Spanish-colonial Philippines, editors Eberhard Crailsheim, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of History, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), in Madrid, Spain, and María Dolores Elizalde, a CSIC researcher as well, expand the focus of security studies and threats to other geographical areas and historical periods to conclude that "threats are part of our daily lives. . . . [and] shape our political and social behaviour and contribute to the features of our personalities" (2). To narrow the focus, this volume concentrates on external military threats to states and empires and their sovereignty claims (5). The contributors come from different disciplines, such as political science, philosophy, and history, but no anthropologists were invited to participate, which would certainly have enriched the epistemological analysis of violence. [End Page 111] The book has seven parts, which reflect the variety of topics about and approaches to external threats. Part 1 features chapters that theorize the representation of external threats. In the first one, Crailsheim approaches threat representations from conflict sociology and securitization theories, emphasizing Niklas Luhmnann's theories on communication as the constituting element of a social system. He sees external conflicts as factors that increase the internal cohesion of a social group. Public fears fuel "real" threats, thereby reducing humanity to fixed-action patterns of aggression. In his chapter on nineteenth-century pan-Slavism, Vladimir Belous uses a dialectical approach to the dichotomy of own/alien to argue that every external threat is fundamentally a cultural conflict (64). Part 2 analyzes threat communication in general. It opens with Theresia Raum's chapter that applies Crailsheim's threat communication to explain how the Byzantine emperor and his court in the seventh century gained support from large sections of the Roman population in the face of external military threats, specifically the Persians and Avars. Marie Shreier focuses on the Scottish colonization attempt in Panama at the end of the seventeenth century. Looking at the same period, Simon Kemper examines the discourse of threat among the sultans of Banten in western Java, demonstrating how Muslim elites eventually transformed the potential threats posed by the Dutch East India Company into a security issue (106–27). Part 3 focuses on internal "others" turned into minoritized scapegoats. It begins with Stephan Steiner's chapter on the depiction of Gypsies in the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian monarchy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. They were accused not only of misdemeanors but also of acts of espionage and treason (134–39), making them the scapegoat for the people's fear of the Ottomans. The fate of the Armenian merchants in the Moldavian Principality was not much better, according to Alexandr Osipian, who links their depiction as heretic suspects to their trade "in the lands of infidels"—the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate (161–62). Finally, Anna Balian's essay analyzes the different ways the Russian ruling class represented Jews as intellectual, economic, and racial threats from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (186–202). Part 4 concentrates on threat communication and how Europeans constructed a perverse image of their enemies. Federico Niglia discusses the perception of "the German" as a threat to the rest of Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the Second World War. This process of "enmification...