The Transformation of the World (102 page)

The categorization and stereotyping of colonial subjects was not only a project of officialdom. To some extent the various peoples assumed the identities given them, but they also put up resistance and invested much energy in constructing an ethnicity of their own. Nationalism, an idea developed in Europe and imported from there, often reinforced formative processes already under way, constantly adapting to and changing them. The authorities thus faced a dilemma: the “divide and rule” principle tended to foster differences between ethnic groups, but they had to be prevented from escalating to a point where the groups became violent and hard to control. Collective identities were not always susceptible to manipulation, nor were they inevitably defined in
ethnic
terms. In fact, that was not much seen outside Europe in the nineteenth century. After the First World War, a wide range of options emerged for the creation of anti-imperial solidarity. The Indian freedom movement, in the phase that began in 1919 with Mohandas K. Gandhi's first campaign, was neither ethnically nor religiously based, and the idea that there should be a special Muslim state on Indian soil did not gradually mature over a long period but burst forth after 1940 in the tiny circle that went on to found Pakistan. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, empires were arenas for the formation of collective identities. These processes, already discussed as the “nationalities question” toward the end of many empires, were beyond anyone's capacity to channel them. Only in exceptional cases did a reasonably compact proto-nation become subject to an imperial power (Egypt in 1882, Vietnam in 1884, Korea in 1910) and then later, after the end of colonialism, successfully pick up the thread of its earlier quasi-national history. Elsewhere, empires generated willy-nilly the forces that would later turn against them.

Seventh
. Of the political lessons that were learned in empires, the most widespread and important was that politics was possible only as resistance.
²¹⁶
Empires know only subjects, not citizens, in their periphery. The dominions of the British Empire were the great exception in this respect. In 1867 the Hungarians managed to break the rule in the Habsburg Empire; and in 1910, with the founding of the Union of South Africa, the Afrikaners achieved a special variant of their own. Only in the French Empire after 1848 were a small number of nonwhites granted civil rights: in the
vieilles colonies
of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, and Réunion, and in the four coastal cities of Senegal.
²¹⁷
Even when elite collaborators were integrated into the imperial state apparatus, they were barred from decision making at the top, remaining mere transmission belts from the real power center to the dependent society. Institutions that could articulate local interests were seldom created. For all the differences in detail, an empire is thus reducible to a one-way chain of command. Strong-willed men on the spot might make it looser, and smart imperial politicians kept their demands within limits and ensured that it was theoretically possible for their instructions to be carried out. The bow was not to be stretched too far; the empire must not appear to its subjects as no more than an apparatus of terror. Ever mindful of the cost-benefit relationship, imperial statecraft sought to establish firmly rooted interests, cultivating the perception
that it was more advantageous to live inside the empire than outside.
²¹⁸
This did not alter the general lack of indigenous political participation: the co-opting of a few elite figures into the “legislative council” of a British crown colony was window dressing designed to produce an illusion of representation; all nineteenth-century empires were autocratic systems from beginning to end. As in early modern variants of Western European “enlightened absolutism,” this did not exclude a degree of legal security. Although it would be an exaggeration to describe the British Empire (where this was taken furthest) as a law-governed state, a kind of basic legality or “rule-based command” did generally prevail.
²¹⁹
Indigenous people might still be denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by whites, and access to the justice system could be very difficult for them to obtain. But around the year 1900 it made some difference whether an African lived in King Leopold's Congo or British Uganda.

The nineteenth century was an age of empires, and it culminated in a world war in which empires fought one another. Each of the belligerents mobilized resources from its dependent peripheries. If it did not have any—Germany, for instance, could no longer profit from its colonies after 1914—then it became an major war aim to acquire additional quasi-colonial areas. After the end of the war, only a few empires were dissolved—and not the largest and most important. Germany lost its small, economically insignificant colonies; the Great Powers in the victorious coalition shared them out among themselves. The unique Habsburg Empire, a European multinational entity with no colonial possessions, broke up into its component parts. Of the Ottoman Empire there remained Turkey and the former Arab provinces (now mandated territories or semicolonies of Britain and France). Russia had to give up Poland and the Baltic, but under Bolshevik leadership it was able to reunify the great majority of non-Russian peoples of the Tsarist Empire within an imperial “union.” The age of empires did not come to a close in 1919.

To be sure, generations of historians who have seen the rise of nationalism and the nation-state as key features of the nineteenth century are not wrong. But their judgment does need to be heavily qualified. Once all the new republics had emerged in Latin America by 1830, the formation of nation-states proceeded more slowly. The Balkans were the only (small) region where the pace was quicker. Elsewhere the opposite was the case. In Asia and Africa, independent political entities—one would not wish to describe them as “states”—disappeared in great number into the expanding empires, and no small nations freed themselves from coercive imperial relations. Not one of the numerous national movements in nineteenth-century Europe managed to help its national community to independence outside an empire; only Italy may in some sense be considered an exception. The partition of Poland continued, Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, and Bohemia did not separate from the Habsburg Monarchy. Still less did any of the national movements destroy an empire.

Nationalism registered few palpable political successes in Europe, and fewer still in Asia and Africa. This must be distinguished from the fact that solidarity in the name of a nation was a twofold novelty of the century. On the one hand, nationalist intellectuals and their followers worked within imperial contexts to prepare the independent nation-states that many countries would become during the period from 1919 to around 1980. The great protest movements of 1919 in Egypt, India, China, Korea, and a few other countries of Asia and Africa were already nationalist in their motivation.
²²⁰
On the other hand, nationalism also became the mainstream rhetoric in fully consolidated states.
²²¹
People began to understand themselves as a French or English/British or German or Japanese “nation”; they developed an appropriate cosmos of symbols, strove to differentiate themselves from other nations, talked themselves into competing with them, and lowered their tolerance threshold in relation to foreigners and foreign ideas. This happened in a world where exchange relations were multiplying and intensifying between members of different nations. Various kinds of nationalism were to be found in empires as well as nation-states. Pride in one's own empire, often fueled by official propaganda, became a widespread sentiment around the turn of the century, a constituent of the national self-image. Nationalism
within
empires was not always directed against the structures of imperial rule: it was thus not exclusively anticolonial. It might also—especially if reinforced by religious identities—fan the flames of conflict between subordinate groups. This would result in the breakup of the Habsburg Empire in 1918–19 and of unified India in 1947.

Nowadays, the word “empire” bears associations of unlimited power. Certain reservations are in order, however, even for the Age of Empire at its height.
Early modern
empires (with the exception of China) were loose political and economic networks rather than tightly integrated states or closed economic blocs. Even the sixteenth-century Spanish world empire, often cited as an early example of transoceanic territorial rule, rested to a large degree upon local autonomy, and mercantilist control over trade had to be constantly enforced in all empires against widespread smuggling. Empires were not the creatures of nations: their elites, and often the proletariat laboring on their ships or plantations, were composed of people from the most diverse countries. By 1900 most empires had become more “nationalized.” Thanks to modern power techniques and media, they were more tightly integrated and therefore easier to control. Regions producing for export were closely tied into the world economy, often as small enclaves whose hinterlands became ever less interesting to imperial governments unless trouble was brewing there. Yet, in one way or another, every empire continued to rest upon compromises with local elites, upon an unstable equilibrium that could not be maintained only through the threat or use of force because military action was too expensive, difficult to justify, and productive of problems that were hard to calculate. In the club of imperialists, an empire counted as modern if it had a rationalized and centralized administration, made the exploitation of economic resources more effective and profitable, and took pains to spread “civilization.”
Such activism, however, carried high risks. Reforms disturbed the existing equilibrium and always unleashed some kind of resistance whose strength it was never easy to predict;
²²²
North America in the 1760s was one cautionary example. But they also created new material, cultural, and sometimes political opportunities for particular groups, which in the long run, as bearers of a rival modernization, might develop into counterelites and social forces with a horizon beyond that of the empire. In the Ottoman and Chinese empires, notables in provincial cities strengthened centralizing initiatives;
²²³
this even contributed to the downfall of the Chinese monarchy in 1911. Restraint in the sensitive areas of law, finances, education, and religion was therefore a definite option for imperial centers. The British, for example, tended toward such conservatism in post-1857 India, and later wherever they practiced some form of indirect rule. “Empire light” did not disappear from the historical agenda. Indeed, in some circumstances the nation-state could weigh more heavily on its citizens, especially on members of an ethnic or religious minority, than many an empire did on its subjects.

CHAPTER IX

 

International Orders, Wars, Transnational Movements

Between Two World Wars

1 The Thorny Path to a Global System of States

Foreign policy players at the level of the globe or within one of its macro-regions—this chapter will refer to “spaces of power and hegemony”—together form a world of states, irrespective of the type and density of the relations among them. If these relations attain a certain threshold of structure and regularity, we should speak of a
system
of states or an “international system.” Of all such systems in history, the best known is the modern European one that lasted, if we want attach precise dates to it, from 1763 to 1914—during a period between two world wars, the Seven Years' War and the Great War.
¹
If an international system is held together by institutions
and
also by normative commitments to peace, without yet achieving the higher integration of a league or even federation of states, then the term “international community” is used.
²
In order to illustrate this distinction: the Second Hague Peace Conference in June 1907 brought together not only the European Great Powers (which had had their own “international system” for decades) but representatives of a total of forty-four states. It was the first time that nearly all of the world's states currently recognized as independent—the “
world
of states”—had gathered in a conference hall.
³
But this assembly failed to agree on institutions and conventions that would substantially further the cause of peace. An international
community
therefore did not take shape at The Hague.

The Two Phases of Peace in Europe

The European system of states was an action-guiding image in the heads of the foreign policy elites of individual countries. At least since the Congress of Vienna, it no longer produced fragile balances more or less automatically but required political management structured by a basic set of both manifest and unspoken rules. Statecraft, at least in theory, consisted in upholding national interests only so long as it did not threaten the functioning of the system as a whole. This worked for four decades—a long time in international politics.

But then came a period of eighteen years, from 1853 to 1871, in which five wars were fought with great-power participation: the Crimean War (1853–56), the war of 1859 in Italy that pitted France and Piedmont-Sardinia against Austria, the Danish-Prussian War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Austria was involved in four of these wars, Prussia in three, France in two, Britain and Russia in one. The Crimean War severely shook the cohesion among European nations, while the Italian and German wars of unification were accompanied with realpolitik that blatantly contradicted the spirit of the post-Napoleonic peace.

The Crimean War, the first in the series, differed from the others in two ways. On the one hand, its objectives were less clear. It came about “less through cool calculation or hostile intent than through a long chain of mistakes, wrong conclusions, misunderstandings, false suspicions, and irrational enemy-images.”
⁴
It is remarkable that forces supporting war were at work in such diverse societies: in Russia a ruthless and ill-informed tsar, Nicholas I, who at the end of his reign was obsessed with his dilettante foreign policy; in France a political gambler, Napoleon III, who used risky maneuvers abroad to boost his prestige and popularity at home; and in Britain a Russophobic press capable of exerting pressure even on a supremely self-confident (though in the early 1850s by no means unanimous) political class. On the other hand, despite the chance events and short-term thinking that triggered its outbreak, the Crimean War involved a logic of geopolitical and economic interests that pointed beyond the European system of states. Its cause lay on the fringes of Europe, since the key issue was whether Ottoman-ruled lands would come under Russian control or would remain as a strategic buffer zone guaranteeing routes to India (the Suez Canal did not yet exist) and providing a new area for British economic penetration.