The Transformation of the World (105 page)

In Malaya, the British operated for a long time within the plural world of local princedoms, which had never known an overarching imperial supremacy such as that of the Moguls in India.
⁴⁰
In 1896 the four states on the east coast of the peninsula became the Federated Malay States, with their capital in Kuala Lumpur; in addition there were the Unfederated Malay States and the Straits Settlements. At no point before the Japanese invasion in 1941 did a single administrative structure exist for the whole of British Malaya. Annexation was a method that the British used more sparingly than in Africa, for instance, and
their “residents” cultivated the art of diplomacy at the Malay sultans' courts for a long time yet. One reason for this was that in Southeast Asia, representatives of the British Crown had events largely under their control, and subimperialisms such as that of the early East India Company in India or Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa did not play a major role. To a great extent the various states were independent only on paper, but the precolonial pluralism of rule was not entirely swept away. Nevertheless, life was not breathed back into it after independence. From the patchwork quilt of the colonial period, all that remained after the 1960s was two sovereign states: Malaysia and Singapore.

Indochina, on the other hand, broke up again after the end of French rule into the three historical entities of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. If we add Burma and Siam, both major powers toward the end of the eighteenth century,
⁴¹
then the surprising conclusion is that the age of colonialism did not fundamentally alter the precolonial configuration of states in mainland Southeast Asia. The pentarchy, which came into being more or less simultaneously with the arrival of Europeans, is still in existence today.

In China and Japan, Europeans and North Americans encountered highly complex political systems that could not be brought under colonial rule. Japan was never tightly integrated into any kind of international order. It was never part of a major empire, still less of a system of states roughly equal in strength, such as that which emerged in early modern Europe or in eighteenth-century India and Malaya. Even after Japan closed itself off in the 1630s, it maintained intensive commercial, artistic, and scholarly relations with China, and was thus an important component of the Chinese world order.
⁴²
However, the later opening up of Japan was bound to lead to a particularly dramatic “clash of civilizations.” Before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, the Japanese knew a thing or two about international politics in Europe, though only at a theoretical level; they had scarcely any experience of diplomatic dealings with other nations.

The opening-up process involved
relatively
gentle methods: Japan was not overcome militarily or subjected to an occupation regime (as it would be after 1945). The United States as well as Britain, immediately behind it and soon taking the lead, enforced access to the island kingdom for their own citizens and the kind of trade concessions already familiar in the 1850s from other parts of the world (Harris Treaty of 1858).
⁴³
They did not impose the full imperialist package of Western privileges pioneered in the China peace settlements of 1842 and 1858–60. Considering that Japanese negotiators had never had to face remotely similar problems before, they acquitted themselves surprisingly well. From the point of view of the Western powers, Japan did not have to be detached from a highly integrated world of states such as the traditional “Chinese world order.” Few impediments had to be overcome for it to be tied into the modern state system under relatively favorable conditions. This process was effectively concluded in the 1870s, and in 1895 it received legal confirmation when the Great Powers agreed to revoke the “unequal treaties” negotiated with Japan between 1858 and
1871—something for which China would have to wait until 1942.
⁴⁴
The Meiji government thereby achieved one of its main foreign policy objectives: to make Japan a sovereign subject with full rights under international law.

The situation in China was much more difficult.
⁴⁵
Over many centuries, the Chinese Empire had built a world order of its own and maintained it politically as a fully developed, monocentric alternative to the polycentric state system of modern Europe. In many respects, it was the more “modern” of the two. For example, it had a more abstract concept of territorial inclusion: dynastic possessions or “crown land” (in the sense that nineteenth-century Luxemburg was a crown land of the Dutch House of Orange, etc.) were unknown, as was the feudal notion of overlapping claims to rule. In the seventeenth century, there had still been strong elements of polycentrism in East and Central Asia (the two should be seen as one geopolitical entity). A temporal cross section in 1620, for example, shows a number of formidable neighbors alongside the Ming Empire and not subject to it: Manchus in the north, Mongolians in the northwest, Tibetans in the south. After the completion of the Sino-Manchurian empire around 1760, the rulers in Beijing had to deal with a fast-strengthening Tsarist Empire but otherwise were surrounded by weaker tribute states in various kinds of symbolic vassalage toward them. This world order was a “system” in the broader sense of the term, consisting as it did of recognizable individual elements related to one another in accordance with explicit rules. But it differed fundamentally from the European state system in that the whole configuration radiated inward to the Chinese imperial court. The idea that each element was sovereign and enjoyed the same rights as the others played no role. Hierarchical thinking was deeply ingrained in the Chinese state, although historical experience had given it a repertoire much wider than the simple management of vassalage. Adaptation to the new international order of the nineteenth century was therefore bound to be much more difficult than it was for Japanese, Indians, or Malays.

The years between 1842 and 1895 were a striking period that used to be known euphemistically in the West as “China's entry into the family of nations.” This involved a number of wars: in 1839–42, 1858–60, and 1884–85. Knowledge of the first of these, the Opium War of 1839–42, helped the Japanese in their negotiating tactics and underlined the risks of resistance. The Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871, the first ever between those two states that respected the forms of international law, set the institutional seal on the opening up of China. China was opened to international commerce by means of “unequal” free-trade treaties. Foreigners were granted immunity from Chinese law and received the right to settle in a number of port cities. The old vassal belt of the Qing Empire was “decolonized” piece by piece, until Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 and Mongolian independence in 1912 completed the dismantling of the old Chinese world order. The incorporation of China into the Western-dominated international arena was significantly more difficult and protracted than that of Japan; it involved a true clash of empires.

A further complication was that, in the eyes of Europeans and Americans, China stood at a lower “level of civilization” than Japan and deserved to be treated accordingly. Unlike Japan or India, it also became the locus of an international race for colonial bases and economic concessions. Yet, except for brief moments such as the defeat of the Boxer movement in 1900–1901 or the turbulent changeover from empire to monarchy in 1911–12, China never ceased to act as a sovereign state. In most cases, albeit from a position of weakness, it even played an active part in reshaping its external relations. Thus, the “unequal treaties” system was by no means a Western diktat alone. From the Chinese point of view, it continued the tradition of dealings with “barbarians,” who could best be held at bay by giving them clearly defined areas of residence and negotiating only through their community leaders. The treaty ports and foreign consuls served this purpose. By the early 1890s, then, China had been quite stably integrated into the international hierarchy at a bottom-rung position.

The Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95 exposed in an instant the extreme military weakness of the Middle Kingdom, which until then no one, not even the Japanese, had really appreciated.
⁴⁶
With this conflict, in which China lost almost all influence in Korea (traditionally its most important tributary state), the remnants of the old “Sinocentric” order in East Asia was fatally undermined—or at least that is how it appeared until Japanese historians traced deeper continuities beneath the surface of wars and treaties. In this new interpretation, the old Sinocentric order in East Asia passed much more imperceptibly into one dominated by the West and Japan in antagonistic cooperation with each other. In particular, China's trade within Asia—much more important for it than the trade with Europe and the United States—led to the development of hybrid forms of tribute and commerce. Seen from an Asian optic, the treaty ports were not so much bridgeheads for Western capitalist penetration of a passive, backward Chinese economy as relay points between different, but not incompatible, economic systems.
⁴⁷
Similarly, the centuries-old thinking behind the “Chinese world order” did not vanish overnight amid the “onslaught of the West.” Korea, for example, used the traditional pattern of relations with China for its handling of early foreign incursions, and strong forces in the country were careful until the last to avoid antagonizing the Qing court. In 1905, on the very eve of the Japanese declaration of a protectorate, Korea's ruling elite found it difficult to imagine any alternative to Chinese suzerainty, even though tributary practices had ended in 1895 and a modernizing current actually viewed China as a barbarian country on the fringes of the civilized world.
⁴⁸
The Russo-Japanese War, which led to a completely new interstate structure and had a profound impact in the very heart of Europe,
⁴⁹
finally drew a line under the Chinese world order. It was followed by four decades in which the Japanese attempted to construct their own hegemonic space in East Asia, known during the Second World War as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In this continuum, the First World War was not an event of prime importance. The international history of East Asia is framed by the years 1905 and 1945.

3 Peaceful Europe, Wartorn Asia and Africa
⁵⁰

Contemporary observers and more recently political theorists have given much thought to the question of what constitutes a “great power.” Most of their considerations boil down to a simple core: a great power is a state that other great powers recognize in principle as coequal or (in the language of duels) “capable of giving satisfaction.” This happens if it is prepared to defend its interests by military means, or if its neighbors believe that it could and will do so successfully. Although economic performance and territorial size were important criteria for the assessment of a given state's international stature, the fact is that the ranking order within the nineteenth-century international hierarchy was on several occasions established on the battlefield. Great-power status and military success were more closely correlated with each other than in the second half of the twentieth century. That an economic giant such as today's Japan carries virtually no military weight would have been inconceivable in 1900. However rapidly the United States grew after the end of the Civil War, and however much prestige it accumulated in foreign policy, only the victory over Spain in 1898 confirmed its claim to be a great power. Japan won respect as a regional power in East Asia through its triumph over China in 1895, but only its victory over the Tsarist Empire in 1905 gave it entry into the circle of the Great Powers. “Germany,” hitherto mainly a cultural category, suddenly drew attention to itself as a great power in 1871.

Conversely, military disasters often exposed a mere pretense, as when China, the Ottoman Empire, and Spain suffered defeat and lost their claims to be taken seriously as “powers.” Austria's prestige never really recovered from the debacle at Königgrätz in 1866; Russia's defeats in 1856 and 1905 precipitated major internal crises; and France's international position and self-esteem were so damaged by the traumatic events at Sedan in September 1870 that for decades they cast a shadow over its foreign policy and fueled a thirst for revenge. Even Great Britain, which between 1899 and 1902 had great difficulty in prevailing over the numerically and materially weaker Boers, fell into a self-critical mood at the height of the rivalry between the imperialist powers. If the period from 1815 to 1914 is taken as a whole, then only three states experienced uninterrupted ascents as political and military powers: Prussia/Germany, the United States, and Japan.

Behind this shift in the ranking of the leading states lay more general tendencies in the history of organized violence. These may be gauged most clearly within a long time span stretching from the French Revolution until the First World War.

Organization and Weapons Technology

First
. The most general trend of the period was the systematic application of know-how, both organizational and technological, to problems of military effectiveness. Army organizers and battlefield commanders, and not only those in Europe, realized very early on that war is not just a matter of expressive combat
rituals but requires careful planning with limited resources. The Chinese classic by Sun Zi (fifth century BC) formulated rules of strategy that were still being heeded in the twentieth century. The new element in the nineteenth century was the greater concentration of command structures, at once more flexible and more systematic. Prussia's rise among the European powers was thus based largely on the extensive reform of its army between 1807 and 1813, in response to the collapse of 1806. Prussia was the first state to raise the old leader-follower relationship between commanders and troops to a higher level of rationality. Beneath a royal supreme commander, expertise and authority were concentrated in a war ministry, and later also a general staff responsible for strategic planning, which guaranteed the continuity of military preparedness even in peacetime. The general staff, one of the most important military innovations of the nineteenth century, went decisively beyond the romantic heroism of the Napoleonic period, which could now act itself out only in colonial wars. Prussian officers were no longer principally fighting men and combat leaders but, in keeping with the times, highly trained professionals who practiced the “art of war” as a science. The Prussian army, especially from the 1860s on, gave its officers a completely new profile, which meant, among other things, that those in command at every level were carefully prepared for rational decision making on the field of battle. A dense network of communications was supposed to ensure that subordinate officers were aware of the overall plan and could, if necessary, react flexibly in the light of it. Even before Prussia had great industrial strength at its disposal, the rationalization of its army had enormously increased its military potential. A position in the aristocracy did not automatically translate into military rank; only the princes of the ruling family, and sometimes not even they, escaped the general demand for increased competence. Thus, especially after the victories of 1864, 1866, and 1870, Prussia set the world standard for a modern, professionally organized army.
⁵¹
The Japanese were the star pupils, whereas Britain and the United States adapted the Prussian model to their needs only around the turn of the century.