RUSSIA AS EUROPE'S OTHER Iver B. Neumann European ...

terms of what was seen as European history: ’out of so many little wild peoples,
as the Greeks were also once, a mannered (gesittete) nation will come to be.’
It would, furthermore, be a mistake to overdo the particularism of Herder, since
his fashioning together of the peoples to the east of Germany as Slavs and his
description of them as living in a happy pastorale may also be read as a way of
holding them up as a mirror for his Germans to emulate. On a less speculative
note, there can be no doubt that, for those of his followers who focussed on the
political implications of his culturalist ideas, political Panslavism was less about
Russia than it was about the necessity of all Germans to live in the same
state. 21 Here again is a way of representing Russia in order to teach another
colective self a lesson.
The theme of particularism also cropped up in the application of the new
racialist constructions of the later half of the period to Russia, as when Louis
Buffon in his book Natural History held that ’There are as many varieties in
the race of blacks as in that of whites; the blacks have, like the whites, their
Tatars and their Circassians.’ Similarly, in annotating his own essay ’national
Characters’, David Hume wrote that he was apt to suspect that blacks were
naturally inferior to whites, among other things since ’the most rude and
barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TATARS,
have still something eminent about them’ (both quoted in Wolff 1994: 348). At
this early stage of racialist thinking, however, the place of Russians in the
biological hierarchy was not fixed. In 1776, Galiani took on the climate theory
in no uncertain terms, and proposed instead that
everything is about race. The first and most noble races originate of
course from Northern Asia. The Russians stand out in this regard, and this
is why they have advanced more in the course of 50 years than have the
Portuguese in the course of 500 (quoted in Lortholary 1951: 271).
One notes that in this case, Russia was held to be at the upper end of the racial
hierarchy, the reason given being their geographical and therefore, by inference,
biological proximity to what should become known as Aryans. This runs directly
counter to the idea that the Tatars, and, again by inference of geographical and
biological proximity, therefore the Russians, were somehow at the fringe of the
white race. Thus, once the racial theme became pervasive in European discourse,
21 See for example August Ludwig von Schlöser, who begins his Allegemeine nordische
Geschichte (1771) by describing the Slavs as ’that great, renouned, ancient mighty race which
spreads so vastly in the North and about which we know so little’ (quoted in Petrovich 1956:
19).
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