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Most accounts of European civilization neglect the place of Byzantium. The Byzantine world is often dismissed as a chapter in the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, whose legacy in the conventional account was taken up by the Western monarchies and modern Europe emerged from a path that supposedly goes back to Rome and Athens. The historical significance of Byzantium for a broader conception of Europe as a civilizational constellation should not be underestimated. The argument in this chapter is that the Byzantine Empire was an important transmitter of classical antiquity and that consequently continuity in European history cannot be entirely considered without reference to Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire was the most important basis of Christianity for centuries before the rise of the West and transmitted the cultural, legal and political legacy of the Roman Empire to Europe. In the account offered in this chapter, those parts of Europe that were influenced by the Byzantine world and later by Russia constitute not only a borderland, but an integral part of the wider European civilizational constellation. Russia itself is more than a nation-state and empire but a civilization that has been significant in shaping European and world history. Russia embodies both European and Asian civilizational components, but it is best seen as a Eurasian civilizational form in its own right. Due to the supremacy of the Soviet Union for much of the twentieth century, much of Central and Eastern Europe has been influenced by a civilizational pattern that has been very different from Western civilizational patterns. The Orthodox tradition remains an important reminder of the existence of a different civilizational route to modernity, but one that interacted with the West and with modernity. It thus should be seen as an alternative kind of modernity. The confrontation between Russia and Europe is not the product of a fundamental clash of civilizations, but of different interpretations of European modernity.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_4

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