Western ‘colonization’ vs Eastern ‘naturalization’
Looking at human history since the first human civilization formed in Sumeria, humans have had many wars either because the ideas, religion, or beliefs didn’t match or simply for wealth and sometimes because of a woman (like the sexy queen of Egypt, Cleopatra because of whom Caesar and Mark Antony fought each other), and after any group wins a victory, the thing that gives most rulers headache is how to occupy the loser’s territory including the people, in fact, population was considered wealth by ancient rulers since they didn’t have the industrial revolution and everything from farming to making war weapons relied on human and animal labor, so they took controlling population seriously. Controlling the loser’s territory and population becomes even more difficult if the war was for religious reasons, because to conquer the other group’s people you need them to form an identity that is different from their previous that caused the war, like Islam conquerors enforcing Islam on the conquered which led to the creation of modern day Islam majority nations. Here the differences between Western civilizations (we shall refer mostly to civilizations of European origin) and Eastern civilizations (we shall refer mostly to civilizations of Asian origin, particularly the Islam nations and China) can be seen vividly in how they handle the issue of the conquered.
Western civilizations throughout history, have used military force in the conquered region to make the conquered obey them, let’s call it ‘colonization’. Take the example of the colonization since the industrial revolution, western civilizations export their political systems, religions and language with an aim to change the conquered nations . This has had profound impact on the colonies, most former colonies now widely adopt the English language and Christian religion and have a democratic political system and it has becomes part of their identity as a people, and they are fiercely protective of their new identities especially when it comes to religion.
The Eastern civilizations however, follow a different pattern, one of the shortcomings (or positives depending on how you look at it) of western ‘colonization’ is that it is not a complete change of the conquered people’s ideology or culture, it is only partial and not permanent. Western ‘colonization’ methods require the presence of a strong military force to enforce its ideas on people. Now we consider the Eastern ‘naturalization’ method, in the Eastern civilization history, there have been so diverse ethnicities that historians either bite their teeth in excitement or hatred. The ‘naturalization’ method used by most Eastern civilizations is to completely destroy the conquered people’s past culture and language and traditions and replace them with the victor’s. The victor (hereon, victor means the rulers and people of the victorious tribe or kingdom, loser means the rulers and people of the losing tribe or kingdom) uses tactics such as population migration wherein the loser’s population is divided and transferred so that they become the minority in their new location, destroying all the loser’s literary heritage and rewriting their history books, putting all the cultural and political leaders of the loser to house arrest or death, and most importantly, teaching the new generation of the loser the culture of the victor whether it be language, history or traditions. These methods have been historically very effective (very sad for the loser), you just need to look at the Muslim world, where all Islam majority nations share the same language, traditions, religion, political system, and all believe the same mythology, and the Chinese where 90% of the population consider themselves as Han ethnicity and all again follow the same traditions, language, and political systems.
The western civilizations however did not follow this route of permanent social change (though some did, most did not), the Greek, Romans, Vikings, etc. did not follow the policy of ‘naturalization’ in the lands they conquered. The most recent example I can find of the different approaches of west and east is the Germans in world wars 1 and 2 and Chinese policy in Xinjiang and Tibet, while the Nazis hated and killed Jews they did not try to permanently change them, neither did they change the territories they conquered, on the other hand the Chinese are clearly trying to permanently change the minority ethnicities of its nation to suit the Han ethnicity (this is my own opinion and I confess I may be biased, but there would not be a propaganda war by the U.S.A. and other nations, esp. about Xinjiang and Tibet, without a mix of truth in it, and I hold my views until disproven).
While there are many overlaps between the colonization and naturalization method, and it not necessary that colonization and naturalization occur only in the west and east respectively, however on a broad historical scale, colonization has been largely adopted by western civilizations and naturalization by the eastern civilizations.
Please note that this article is purely a reflection on population and cultural engineering methods in history and not meant to spread hatred, or label one superior to another.
