V.I. Lamansky: Civilizations and the War of Languages

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of language and war in the civilizational concept of the Slavist Academician V.I. Lamansky. Lamansky's attitude to the Crimean War and Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1879 is traced on the basis of archival documents. His assessments of military and political events are given. It is pointed out that Lamansky's political-geographical doctrine formulated in his treatise «The Three Worlds of the Asian-European Continent» (1892) and in his earlier works, was a development of the Slavophile ideas and included the provisions later developed by Eurasianists. It is pointed out that he gave not only a geographical but also a linguistic definition of civilizations, in particular, he believed that civilizational worlds are held together by a common language (world-historical language). According to Lamansky, who formulated the doctrine of linguistic hegemony, the competition between peoples and states, including military, is replaced by the competition of world-historical languages. In Europe, he believed, three Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish) and two Germanic languages (English and German) are struggling with each other. Of these, only Spanish and English, thanks to the vast colonies of Great Britain and the former colonies of Spain, could retain their world-historical significance. In time, he suggested, even Spain's former colonies in South America might come under Anglo-Saxon rule, and the center of the Western world would shift to the New World. In the Middle World or the Greco-Slavic world, Russian has no competitors, so it should be a common literary, scientific and diplomatic language, uniting the peoples of the Middle World in a civilizational unity. Language is the main geopolitical force through which cultural and, in the long term, political unity is first formed. Based on the philosophical and historical analysis of the contradictions between the Romano-Germanic and the Greek-Slavic worlds, Lamansky concluded that the coming world war was inevitable.