The Transformation of the World (107 page)

Sixth
. In 1793 the French Revolution invented the
levée en masse
, the mobilization of the entire (male) population in a spirit of patriotic enthusiasm. Some have seen in this the birth of “total war”—not false, but an exaggeration nonetheless.
⁷⁶
Mass conscription grafted the energies of a new nationalism onto the dynamic earlier associated with social and religious movements. Yet the
levée en masse
, or rather its myth, might be interpreted in various ways: as a voluntary expression of spontaneity and enthusiasm, as a universal obligation to perform military service, or as a mobilization of all forces, including civilians, for war. If there was a
levée en masse
in the nineteenth century after 1815, then it was the short-lived mobilization during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 (followed by the introduction of universal military service in France). The myth of the
ubiquitous French
franc-tireur
later did the rounds in the German army, and in 1914 it was the pretext for preventive atrocities against the civilian population in Belgium and northern France. Genuine mass mobilization is found above all in civil wars: in the American War of Secession, and in the Chinese Taiping Revolution after 1850, in which a religiously motivated charismatic leader, Hong Xiuquan, amassed a huge following in the space of a few years.

In Europe, rulers ensured early on that the dangerous élan of military mass mobilization was diverted into disciplined institutional channels. Napoleon, too, was careful not to rely on enthusiasm: his armies were not carried to the ends of Europe on waves of patriotic excitement; their fighting core was made up of hardened veterans, more like military professionals than citizens in uniform.
⁷⁷
Still, the extension of war required ever more manpower. A vast conscription apparatus held the whole Napoleonic empire in its grip, and for the Emperor's subjects of every nationality there was nothing more repugnant than the forced consignment of young men to the French war machine: a human harvest that reached its peak in 1811 with the recruitment of cannon fodder for the invasion of Russia.
⁷⁸
For anyone who wished to hear, the wars of the Age of Revolution taught lessons about how to mobilize large populations. We see the new knowledge reflected in the work of a military theorist such as Carl von Clausewitz. But land armies, militias, partisans, and irregular troops of various kinds were a potential threat for any political and social order. Governments were therefore wary of letting them off the leash. The term “total war” is applicable not to people's war as such but to its bureaucratic organization within the framework of the state monopoly of force. And only the new communications technologies that emerged in the 1860s in the most advanced countries of the world made it possible for propaganda, coordination, and the planned use of productive resources to maintain its total character for a period of years.
⁷⁹
The first total war was therefore the American Civil War. It remained the only one in the nineteenth century. The epoch prepared the ingredients of total war but did not suffer its consequences until 1914.

Seventh
. This should not mislead us into thinking that the wars of the nineteenth century were less terrible than those of other eras. The statistics for those killed and wounded, especially in the civilian population, do not permit of any general assertion. But one thing is sure: the Napoleonic armies were larger than any in the early modern period, and the few
major
wars of the nineteenth century should be measured by that yardstick. In 1812 Napoleon led an army of 611,000 men into Russia; Tsar Alexander I could mobilize 450,000 troops against him. In March 1853 a Taiping army 750,000 strong appeared before the walls of Nanjing. On July 3, 1866, at Königgrätz, 250,000 fought on either side. Two weeks after the French declaration of war on July 16, 1870, Moltke had assembled 320,000 combat-ready troops on the frontier with France; a million reservists and home army members were waiting in the background. Also numbering 320,000 was the force that the British sent to South Africa by October 1899. In the winter of 1904–5, the Japanese fielded 375,000 men against the
Russians in Southern Manchuria (Port Arthur).
⁸⁰
The Napoleonic format thus persisted until the First World War.

Only in autumn 1914 did the mass slaughter acquire a new dimension. In the greatest battle of the American Civil War, which took place near Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) between July 1 and July 3, 1863, the number of dead
and
wounded was 51,000, almost twice as much as in the big Austro-Prussian battle at Königgrätz three years later. In the bloodiest conflict in Europe between 1815 and 1900, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, a total of 57,000 soldiers lost their lives, while in the Crimean War of 1853–56 the figure was 53,000. In the fighting for the Russian fortress of Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria, nearly 81,000 men died between August 1904 and January 1905
⁸¹
—a bloodbath that was seen as shocking and unparalleled, although a few years later the killing on the fields of Flanders exceeded it by far. If any conflict between 1815 and 1913 gave a taste of things to come, it was the Russo-Japanese war.
⁸²

The horrors of war cannot be quantified and neatly inserted into a historical trend. They stretched from the Franco-Russian winter battle at Eylau (February 1807) and the excesses of the partisan struggle and its repression after 1808, so vividly depicted by Goya, to the massacres of numerous colonial wars to the pin-point artillery fire that rained down on Mukden and Port Arthur in 1904–5 and already foreshadowed Verdun. It is a striking feature of the nineteenth century that medical care kept pace less than ever with the capacity to kill and maim. The introduction of needle injections in 1851 was a great advance, making it possible to administer larger doses of opium as a painkiller. A young Genevan businessman called Henri Dunant, who had found himself on June 24, 1859, on the Solferino battlefield south of Lake Garda, had been so overwhelmed by the misery he saw around him that he provided the impulse for the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
⁸³
If “armies of cripples,” such as those produced by the First World War, were not in evidence after 1871, it was not because few had been wounded but because their survival chances were extremely poor.
⁸⁴
Despite all the horrors of war, as portrayed in literature from Erckman-Chatrian's
Histoire d'un conscrit de 1813
(1864) to Tolstoy's
War and Peace
(1868/69) to Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), the hundred years from 1815 to 1914 in Europe was a period of relatively little violence among states, a peaceful interlude between the early modern age and the twentieth century. The few wars to be waged were neither protracted nor “total.” The distinction between combatants and civilians was observed to a greater extent than in earlier or later European conflicts or in wars fought outside Europe. This was one of “the great, hitherto little recognized, cultural achievements of the century.”
⁸⁵

Sea Power and Naval War

Eighth
. Naval warfare requires equipment and skills that are harder to disseminate than the manual tools and dexterity of infantrymen. Two technical innovations came together. One was the quite leisurely replacement of wind power
with coal-fired vessels: the Royal Navy's last great sailing ship was launched in 1848, although in the sixties the British flagships off Africa and in the Pacific still relied on wind in their sails. The other was the “ironclad revolution” in hull design, begun in 1858 and implemented at a faster pace. Soon ships were also being fitted with revolving gun turrets—a decisive advance on the wooden warship, with its more limited mobility. Ramming had no longer been practicable since the middle of the eighteenth century, and its use by Austrian and Italian iron-clads in 1866 at the Battle of Lissa was based on a curious misunderstanding of the new technical possibilities. By that time little was left of the imposing timber structures and square rigging of Nelson's age: military specialists had replaced gentlemen officers, and crews were no longer press-ganged into service or terrorized with the cat-o'-nine-tails.
⁸⁶

In 1870 the only non-Western powers that had the new-style ships were the Ottoman Empire and Japan. China had begun in 1866 to develop a modern navy, through purchases abroad and the construction of its own shipyards; by 1891 these had turned out ninety-five modern ships, and a large number of naval cadets had been trained by foreign instructors.
⁸⁷
This strengthened China's claim to be a regional great power, and indeed Western observers were highly impressed by its navy-centered military modernization.
⁸⁸
However, the Chinese navy was a motley collection of ships divided into four separate fleets and placed under the governors of the respective coastal provinces. There was no overall strategic conception for their eventual deployment.
⁸⁹
China's inferior performance in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, and its lack of maritime ambitions over the following half century, should not obscure the amazing fact that, unlike the Ottoman Empire, it had no traditions as a sea power. The celebrated oceanic expeditions of Admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century could scarcely provide any bearings for the nineteenth. After the Opium War, for which it had been altogether unprepared, China therefore developed a new concept of sea-based defense (not prohibited under the “unequal treaties”) and acquired the weaponry and know-how necessary for it. It was a huge challenge, which it seems to have almost mastered.

The situation in Japan was similar yet different. After an abortive invasion of Korea in 1592, which failed not out at sea (like the Spanish Armada of 1588) but only after bloody land battles, Japan refrained from building up its maritime armed forces. It had little reason to feel threatened, although after the Opium War numerous Western ships plied the waters around the archipelago. Commodore Perry's four heavily armed steamers were thus able to enter Tokyo Bay completely unopposed (and of course uninvited) on July 2, 1853. The largest of these was six to seven times more voluminous than anything the Japanese had in their fleet, or indeed than anything they had ever set eyes on before.
⁹⁰
Just like the farsighted Chinese provincial governors, astute minds in the Japanese political elite, even before the Meiji Renewal, recognized the need for an efficient modern navy. After 1868, and especially from the mid-eighties on, this became a high
national priority, together—and in rivalry—with expansion of the army. The naval program, not just the often-cited industrialization, was the secret of Japan's rise as a great power. Alongside a military fleet, the state supported the development of a private merchant navy that by 1910 was the third-largest in the world, after the British and the German.
⁹¹
The enormous war reparations imposed on China in 1895—a source of handsome profits for Western creditors—were comparable in their effect to France's burden after the war of 1871, helping to meet the costs of the Japanese armaments program.
⁹²
Starting virtually from zero in 1860, Japan raced ahead to become the power which on May 27–28, 1905, near the island of Tsushima in the Korean Straits, fought and won the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar in 1805. Russia, the second maritime power in Europe, was defeated thanks to a combination of excellent ships, well-trained crews, masterly tactics, and a dose of good fortune—in a manner for which the cliché “annihilating” is for once appropriate.
⁹³

The age of ironclad battleship fleets with their coastal blockades and devastating victories was surprisingly brief. It began in the 1860s and ended in the Second World War. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines then became the central elements in sea warfare. During the battleship era, the final showdowns for which the European powers had planned for decades failed to materialize. In the First World War the only (indecisive) naval battle was fought off Jutland on May 31/June 1, 1916. The Second World War saw no classic sea battles in the Atlantic, and as early as 1942 Germany withdrew its surface ships from the high seas. The theater of the last sea battles in history was the Pacific Ocean, where in October 1944 the Americans and Japanese met in a gigantic confrontation in the Leyte Gulf. But the Battle of Midway, hinging entirely on aircraft carriers, had already shown in June 1942 that the classical age was well and truly over. Herein lies an irony of history. The era of surface warfare at sea, a European specialty ever since the Battle of Salamis, ended in a showdown between the two great powers that had emerged outside Europe at the turn of the century. Japan, bereft of maritime traditions, mastered the necessary technology and strategy to the limits of its industrial capacity, becoming a naval power second only to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century—until 1942.

4 Diplomacy as Political Instrument and Intercultural Art

Visions, Mechanisms, Norms

Of the opposing currents in the international relations theory of nineteenth-century Europe, one had older roots in the idea of a regulated world peace, the other in the principle of egoistic reasons of state. As we have seen, the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 found an ingenious way of combining the two: the security of individual countries was to be guaranteed by mutually agreed conflict resolution within the system of states. However, with the turn to power politics
in midcentury, the second of these tendencies came to the fore again. Cosmopolitan liberalism, whose chief representative was the British manufacturer and statesman Richard Cobden, had expected that the free movement of people, goods, and capital would lead to greater prosperity for all and lasting peace among the nations. Free trade, arms limits, and a degree of ethical principle—Cobden vigorously opposed British intervention in China in 1856—would finally extricate the planet from the bloody chaos of the premodern age.
⁹⁴
In the political practice of Great Britain, the leading champion of free trade, this program was fraught with a contradiction: liberal statesmen such as Lord Palmerston had no misgivings about the illiberal
imposition
of worldwide freedom of movement. Until 1860 this was mostly a success: the last great act of “free-trade imperialism” was the opening up of Korea—a second-order phenomenon, as it were, since Japan appeared there as the trailblazer of the “civilized world” less than two decades after its own opening to it. The Kanghwa Treaty of 1876 between Japan and Korea was modeled on the “unequal treaties” that Japan itself had been forced to sign.
⁹⁵
In the future, cosmopolitan liberalism would never disappear from thinking about international relations; it is today the dominant theory, or at least the dominant rhetoric, in international forums. But its influence sank to a low point in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, when imperialist thinking radicalized the return of continental Europe to realpolitik and (after 1878) protective tariffs.