Einar Wigen

Civilizing emotions: Concepts in nineteenth-century Asia and Europe

This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. Emotions are clearly involved in how civility and civilization are constructed in late nineteenthto early twentieth-century world cultures during the age of high imperialism in the investigations produced by these authors. However, the scholarship that informs these essays in the main stems not from the history of emotions so much as the history of concepts, a form of intellectual history particularly strong in the German academic tradition. This takes concepts – in this case civility and civilization – as the subject of investigation, explored through language and semantic fields in texts that, here, primarily concern the genres of dictionaries, encyclopedias, media debates and literature. As Jan Ifverson emphasizes in his Afterword, a key contribution of this collaborative project is its interest in going beyond national-level investigations to the transnational and its global entanglements. This is a particular challenge in a field that is grounded in linguistic specificities but which is handled here through attention to transfers, transmissions and translations of concepts between cultures.

Two-level language games: International relations as inter-lingual relations

To the extent that polities interact across linguistic boundaries, international relations are also inter-lingual relations. Since relations and practices are given meaning in language, it has to be possible to give at least a minimum of shared meaning to mutual relations in order for inter-lingual relations to function smoothly. Otherwise, the divergence of meaning and consequently also of social expectations will limit the possible extent and quality of those relations. Nevertheless, International Relations has not theorised inter-lingual relations. This article addresses this deficiency by proposing a theory of ‘conceptual entanglement’ as an approach to studying how compatibility of meaning comes about and is maintained between linguistic communities and hence also between polities. With the ‘expansion of international society’ from the 19th century onwards, linguistic divides have gradually narrowed, especially in terms of political vocabularies. Yet, residues remain, making inter-lingual relations qualitatively different for different pairs of languages, and thus also for polities. The article elaborates on how conceptual entanglement is an aspect of ‘entry’ into international society by using the theory on the case of how the French concept of ‘civilisation’ was translated into Ottoman and became part of the political vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey.

Pipe Dreams or Dream Pipe?: Turkey's Hopes of Becoming an Energy Hub

Turkey’s energy policy is closely tied to its tradition of geopolitical thinking. While Turkey has very few energy resources of its own, the country’s policy-making elite is deeply committed to making energy a central aspect of its foreign policy. Taking for granted the uniqueness of the country’s geography and convincing others of the same, Turkey is on the path to becoming an important part of the network supplying Europe with energy.

Conceptual Synchronisation: From Progress to Crisis

International order is also temporal order, based on the alignment, more precisely, the synchronisation of the multiple times at work on a global scale. Synchronicity between cultures, languages, and polities does not emerge by itself. To create temporal orderings on a global scale requires work: political, social, and linguistic. Some work of synchronisation is performed by technological innovations such as clocks, trains, telegraph lines, phones, satellites etc. Another set of tools, however, is linguistic, made up by concepts used to make historical and political time understandable and workable. Concepts are used to order events, objects and polities temporally, thus making both them and their temporality aspects of international order. By drawing together experiences, events, and meanings from different knowledge fields or cultures, they synchronise them, aligning their speeds, rhythms, and durations. One of the most central concepts that have been used in synchronisation over the past two centuries is progress. In this article we map out how it has synchronised temporalities on a global scale, and ask whether progress is in the process of being replaced by the concept of crisis as the main tool for synchronising temporalities in international society – using examples from political and administrative rhetoric as well as anthropological studies.