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[–] Oswy 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
It's nothing to do with "Turkic influence", which doesn't apply in Russia's case. It's simply the Orthodox Graeco-Slavonic world. You can add parts of the Caucasus and Levant, to taste. "isolated" isn't the best word either. Contact was constant, they just did their own thing. The West is Roman Catholicism, Germano-Latin civilisation, with Gothic architecture, feudalism and castles. Some modern Western places like Ireland and Gaelic Scotland were excluded in the beginning, and later brought into the same system, usually kicking and screaming.
I share your reservations, and would point out that there are other important divisions between north and south - with the territory of viticulture versus beer being quite significant, for instance. The VERY important January isobars roughly approximate the West East thing, though.
[–] TheRealMaestro [S] ago
For Russia the Turkic (not Turkish) influence was from the Tartars; Altaic would be synonymous for my purposes there. In any case I had meant rather to paraphrase Huntington's description of Orthodox civilisation without merely quoting him, than to imply it was my personal view. How anyone who is familiar with Catherine the Great can say that Russia was isolated from the Enlightenment is beyond me.
I agree that the north south division is significant. In some other posts I have mentioned before that the distinction between Protestant, Germanic and (mostly) Latin, Catholic civilisation is probably more important than Huntington's distinction of Latin American from Western. Spain has more in common with her daughter countries than with Germany or Sweden.
[–] Oswy ago
I'm English and live in Spain, and would probably find things rather more alien to me in Sweden or Bavaria, I dare say! The seafaring nations have another commonality that marks them from the rest as well. We had a thread here a while back urging how this largely separates the Dutch from the Germans, for example. As for las Indias, sure they speak Spanish, but there are cultural undercurrents out there that might as well be Martian, too. All of these categories we try to put things in are very generalised and somewhat abstract. While occasionally useful, and helpful to the student of history and culture, any distinctions made have to be seen in context of wider more complex patterns.