The Transformation of the World (103 page)

The Crimean War was essentially a conflict between the only two Great Powers of the day that had major interests in Asia. Its course and its outcome demonstrated the military weakness of both sides. The backwardness of the Tsarist Empire was plain to see, but serious doubts also became possible about Britain's ostensible position as the only world power; experienced veterans of France's colonial war in Algeria proved superior to the British units.
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When in spring 1854 France and the United Kingdom entered the Russo-Ottoman war that had begun the previous year, this was a watershed in the international history of the nineteenth century. For the first time since 1815, war appeared an acceptable option—so much so that it actually happened.

The bellicose interlude in European history came to an end in 1871. If we think that by far the largest civil conflicts of the century—the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Taiping Revolution (1850–64)—as well as the Muslim unrest in China (1855–73) occurred in the third quarter, then clearly we are talking of a worldwide surge of violence with no common underlying causes.
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The aftermath presents us with a major paradox. By 1871 there were no longer the simplest institutions or the most elementary values to preserve the peace, and yet
peace did prevail in Europe for the next forty-three years—at least if we follow a convention among historians and disregard the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, fought mainly in what is now Bulgaria. The really astonishing thing about the First World War is not that it occurred at all but that it began so late. The “systemic” interpretation of European history developed by Paul W. Schroeder for the period between 1815 and 1848 may convincingly explain why peace reigned at that time: his argument, in a nutshell, is that the European system of states developed into an international community.
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It is much harder to account for the stability of Europe in the age of industrialization, arms drives, and militant nationalism; each of the international crises (none of which led to war) would anyway have to be treated separately.
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But a few general points may be made here.

First
. For a long time no single power armed itself offensively for an intra-European war. A partial exception is the Anglo-French naval rivalry of the 1850s and 1860s, the first arms race in history that centered on a quest for the latest technology rather than quantitative accumulation of material.
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The founding of a powerful German nation-state in the heart of Europe did not lead immediately to a new arms drive. Field Marshal von Moltke, the top strategist of the Reich, had concluded from the events of 1870–71 that Germany's interests would be best served by an armaments policy geared to deterrence. This changed only in 1897, when Admiral Alfred Tirpitz, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and “pro-navy” forces in the German public adopted a program of military shipbuilding that was not only part of an international trend to replace British hegemony at sea with a new balance of power but was from the outset offensively directed against Britain.
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London took up the challenge, and in both countries—though in Germany without the basis in a dominant culture of seafaring—the navy was presented as the symbol of national unity, grandeur, and technological might. Of all people, it was an American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who provided the historical and theoretical rationale on which the new worldwide (including German) enthusiasm for the navy based itself.
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European politicians now had their first taste of an industrially accelerated arms race involving all the Great Powers.
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The defensive goal of deterrence had an attack plan built into it. But, unlike after 1945, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave some inkling of what high-tech warfare would entail, the arms drive around the turn of the century pointed to a future whose gruesome shape lay outside the imagination of any but a handful of contemporaries. Nobody anticipated the horrors of Ypres and Verdun.

Second
. For reasons that cannot be explained “systemically,” no power vacuum appeared in Europe that could have led anyone to adopt an aggressive foreign policy. This was the paradoxical outcome of the successful building of nation-states in Germany and Italy, but also in France, which soon recovered from the military catastrophe of 1871. No state broke up. The Ottoman Empire was gradually driven from the Balkans in the years up to 1913, but it never collapsed in a way that gave its neighbors a chance to realize their fantasies of carving it up. In 1920, with the Treaty of Sèvres, these pipe dreams reached another climax in
plans to confine Turkey to a rump state in Anatolia. But a great military effort under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) quickly put an end to such visions, in which the United States too had temporarily shared. In the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the Great Powers accepted a Turkish nation-state as the strongest political force in the eastern Mediterranean. Still more important was the position of Austria-Hungary in the European world of states. Its internal evolution was contradictory: impressive economic development in several of its regions, combined with growing tensions among its nationalities. But this had little impact on the international position of Austria-Hungary. By any conceivable criteria, the Habsburg Monarchy remained the second-weakest great power throughout the century. During the four decades before the First World War, it was strong enough to retain its place in the European system, but too weak to behave aggressively against its two main rivals, Germany and Russia. This unintended optimization of Austria's power potential stabilized eastern-central Europe and left no room for any prospect of a “Central European” (
Mitteleuropa
) imperialism, such as many in Berlin as well as Vienna entertained in their dreams. The First World War was not a result of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire; the exact opposite was the case.

Third
. Bismarck's policy after 1871 meant that a straightforward duel in Europe no longer made sense. Any conceivable war would have to involve rival coalitions. But the building of such alliances was far more difficult and tiresome, both politically and militarily. It was clear to all statesmen in Europe that the next war in the heart of Europe would not leave any of the Great Powers untouched.
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The post-1871 “competitive alliance equilibrium”
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suffered from a confidence and conciliation deficit, but it endured because all the alliances were defensively oriented: not a “balance of terror,” as after 1945, but one of mistrust. Only after the turn of the century, as showdown fantasies (“Slavs versus Teutons,” etc.) became virulent and developments in the Balkans enabled small countries to play on Europe's most dangerous fault line, that between Austria and Russia, did a fatal instability creep into the system.
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Fourth
. The special relationship between Europe and overseas also helped to limit conflict. It was to be expected that the periphery would have various functions for the European system of states: as a safety valve for European tensions or conversely as a catalyst for conflicts that then impacted on Europe, but also as a field for trying out new weapons. Imperial powers could see that they were overstretched—the background to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 on Asia—and decided to slow the dynamic of their expansion. Whenever and wherever this actually happened, the decisive point was that the uncoupling of the periphery for the purposes of security policy conflicted with its growing economic integration. The uncoupling proceeded all through the century, and attempts (such as Bismarck's at the Berlin Africa conference of 1884–85) to transpose the unwritten rules of the European system of states to the scramble for colonies were unsuccessful in the long run.
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This, of course, is again a systemic
argument. In the imaginative horizons of key players—especially Britain and Russia—there was by no means a sharp separation between Europe and the rest of the world. For example, a major reason why London continued to support the Ottoman Empire was that a course of action directed against the sultan (who also claimed the religious title of caliph) would have provoked unrest among millions of Indian Muslims.

Global Dualism

In contrast to various early modern peace agreements regulating colonial interests, the Congress of Vienna concerned itself only with the states of Europe.
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The rest of the world was deliberately ignored, except insofar as slavery was taken up as a side issue. The very fact that the Ottoman Empire had no place at the conference table underlined this narrowly European focus, making it possible for the delegations to regard the Eastern Question as a special problem outside the framework of the settlement. All the mechanisms agreed upon at the Congress, whether counterrevolutionary interventions or diplomatic meetings to resolve conflicts in a timely manner, applied to Europe alone. It did not take long for this exclusion of the periphery to have practical consequences when the Great Powers, including the most reactionary of them, Russia, intervened under British leadership in the eastern Mediterranean. Flying in the face of all the moderate and conservative accords on Europe, it was a policy in favor of a revolutionary movement and against the oldest dynasty in sight: the Imperial House of Osman, in power since the fourteenth century. But this action on Greece had no repercussions for the relationship of the European powers with one another, and the potentially explosive creation of the Kingdom of Greece and almost simultaneously that of the new state of Belgium, showed the post-Vienna diplomatic mechanisms at their best.

In several respects, the insulation of Congress Europe from conflicts on its periphery was a brilliant peace-building idea.
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It had an echo in 1823, when US President James Monroe proclaimed his famous doctrine that both North and South America “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”
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Thus, on both sides of the Atlantic, the years from 1814 to 1823 witnessed a conscious deglobalization of international politics. After the great world crisis of the preceding period, when revolutionary events in North America, France, and the Caribbean triggered effects as far away as South Africa, China, and Southeast Asia, international political relations became compartmentalized, while at the same time economic links continued to grow and intensify.

In a longer-term perspective, however, this also meant something else. During the early modern period, it had not been possible for Asian and European powers to construct a shared legal system; they had merely recognized that the other was in principle a legal subject of equal status, so that contracts or oaths had been valid across cultural boundaries. In the new order established in 1814–15, the
Europeans refrained from taking the initiative toward a new global legal order. The conditions were therefore lacking for the preservation of peace on a world scale. Even European international law, a major civilizing achievement, did not become part of a broader Western legal consciousness imposing certain obligations on Europeans overseas. Neither the
ius ad bellum
, which required a legal justification for war, nor the
ius in bello
, which regulated the conduct of war and was supposed to prevent excesses, found strict application outside Europe. In the age of rising global disparities and an ever sharper sense of cultural and ethnic differences, the globalization of law could consist only in the gradual imposition of European concepts, whose practical application, moreover, always tended to favor Europeans.
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The conceptual divide meant that overseas conquests and military interventions were not subject to the limits on warfare prevailing within Europe. Nor were there any normative rules in the European system of states that might have prevented or mitigated the most brazen forms of Western land grabbing, such as Russia's extortion of vast territories north of the Amur from China in 1860, the scramble for Africa, Italian operations in Tripolitania, or the US subjugation of the Philippines. The persistence of such dualism, even at the climax of imperialist aggression, served to maintain the insulation effect for Europe. From the 1870s on, the Great Powers grew used to the idea that their policies for equilibrium in Europe should also apply on the world stage—although this would really come into its own only during the Cold War after 1945–47. In the late nineteenth century, contradictory tendencies stood in opposition to each other: a growing certainty that all international relations should be seen as elements of a single global system, and a continuing conceptual separation of the periphery from the sphere of “true,” European politics. The imperial powers tangled with one another in various places in the world: all parts of Africa, China, Southeast Asia, the South Seas, and in winter 1902–3 even in Venezuela. However, it was possible to solve all these conflicts or to limit their effects, not least because of unwritten rules of the game, such as the principle that “compensation” should be provided or tolerated elsewhere for the failed ambitions of an imperial power. Many of the imperial tensions fueled lasting mistrust between European governments, but not one impacted on European relations in a way that was directly productive of war.
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The European system of states in the decades before the First World War was not destabilized from without. Asia, Africa, and the Americas played an ever larger role in the overall political calculations of European governments, without leading them to suppose that a great war of the empires was unavoidable. It has even been suggested that, in the half century before 1914, the European interstate system of the five Great Powers established their collective “world supremacy.”
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Is this a reasonable proposition? It is certainly true that Britain, Russia, and France all had significant interests outside Europe, ruling or influencing large territories, as did the German Reich on a lesser scale after 1884. It is also
true that the states of the pentarchy together had the world's greatest industrial and military potential and (with the exception of Austria-Hungary) were prepared to deploy it in interventions overseas. But this does not mean that Europe alone had attained the supreme cultural achievement of orderly “international relations,” while the rest of the world remained mired in murderous anarchy.
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The European system of states was never preponderant in the sense of acting as a single power, or even a coordinated collective, on the international stage. The main diplomatic congresses of the age were convened not by the system as such but by one individual power that saw it as being in its own interests to act as a “broker.” The decisive alignments of overseas interests were invariably bilateral. Only once, in summer 1900, was there collective action outside Europe—when an eight-power expeditionary force broke the siege of the diplomatic missions in Beijing by the insurrectionary Yihetuan (“Boxer”) movement. Japan and the United States played a major role in the relief operation, which was also the most ambitious action that Austria-Hungary carried out abroad in its entire history.
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