The Transformation of the World (108 page)

Shared but seldom openly formulated by most of the political class in the powerful states of the day, including the United States, this bleak and fatalistic worldview consisted of the following elements:
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1. A struggle for existence marked not only society and nature (as the highly popular theory of social Darwinism now preached) but also the international stage. To stand still meant to be left behind. Only those who grew and expanded would have a chance of survival in a viciously competitive environment. Political systems had to be designed in such a way that they steeled the country for the battle of the giants. (Conversely, the ever sharper rhetoric of competition encouraged a reading of Darwin that emphasized the element of conflict in natural selection.)
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2. Success in these conflicts would depend on an ability to combine industrial strength and scientific-technological innovation with colonial possessions and a national fighting spirit.

3. The planet was becoming more and more “closed.” The space in which new dynamic forces might seek an outlet was diminishing all the time. International conflicts would therefore increasingly result in struggles to divide up the world and to redivide what was already divided.

4. Weaker nations would not necessarily disappear altogether (the popular talk of “dying nations” should not always be taken literally), but their limited clout showed that they were not in a position to take control of their
destiny. Lacking the power to shape themselves politically and culturally, they should count themselves lucky to come under colonial tutelage.

5. International competition would demonstrate, somewhat tautologically, the superiority of the “white race.” The uncommonly successful Anglo-Saxon race had a particular vocation to lead the rest of the world, whereas even southern Europeans or Slavs could not really be trusted to establish a viable order. The nonwhite races were not all equally capable of learning and being molded, but neither could they be categorized in terms of a static hierarchy. Special caution was needed with regard to the “yellow race.” It was demographically stronger than the others, characterized by an aggressive business sense and, in the Japanese case, a feudal warrior ethic. If the West did not watch out, it would be threatened by a “yellow peril.”
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6. The global sharpening of the struggle between the races meant that the militarized nation-state could not remain the only, all-embracing entity for the resolution of conflicts. The Anglo-Saxon nations of the world would have to strengthen their ties with one another; the Slavs to place themselves under Russian leadership; and the Germans to learn how to think “pan-Germanically,” beyond the limits of the Bismarckian Reich.

Such thinking made the First World War possible, if not actually inevitable; the specter was conjured up and fantasized about—without any remotely realistic forecast of the carnages to come. Social Darwinism was not confined to “the West” (a term it increasingly used for itself), but reappeared across borders in different, though in many ways related, forms. It also resonated among the victims of imperialist aggression, although it did not then come with all the ideological baggage associated with it in the West. Japan, which at the latest by 1863 thought it enjoyed excellent relations with the Western Great Powers, suffered a mighty shock when France, Russia, and Germany—in what diplomatic history knows as the Triple Intervention—denied it some of the fruits of its 1895 military victory over Qing China. Among the Japanese public, this sowed distrust of visions of international harmony and replaced them with ideologies of heroic effort and readiness for war.
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In China, then under quite different kinds of imperialist pressure (from Japan, among others), rising nationalism had tragic overtones, since the predatory world of the turn of the century threatened the old empire's very existence as a unified state and people. Internal reforms were thus mainly designed to strengthen China in the international struggle for survival. This was, for example, the view of the important scholar and journalist Liang Qichao, who was thoroughly modernist in other spheres and should not be regarded as “right-wing” in a European sense.
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In a Muslim context, the no-less-complex and contradictory intellectual Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani also sought ways to overcome the lethargy
of tradition and to awaken new political energies—for example, through the propagation of pan-Islamic unity.
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These visions of an international jungle took hold at the end of a century that had seen the diplomatic linking of the globe. Today even the smallest and poorest country maintains a worldwide network of missions; ministers are constantly meeting with one another, and heads of state attend regular summits. But this kind of diplomacy is only a product of the period after the First World War. The nineteenth century prepared the way for it, by spreading European theories and practices around the world; whether diplomacy was actually “invented” in Renaissance Italy or among ancient Indian princedoms is here irrelevant. For a long time the Ottoman Empire was the only non-Christian power involved in such relations: Venice, France, England, and the Viennese emperor all had missions in Istanbul. Practices were not uniform across cultural boundaries, however. In North Africa, French consuls of the eighteenth century conducted a flexible diplomacy in accordance with local conditions.
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Japan allowed in only Dutch and Korean (not even Chinese) diplomats throughout the early modern period. China channeled its external contacts through the lavish ritual of tributary missions, and sometimes these were also sent out from Portugal, the Netherlands, and Russia. A less costly form of permanent contact, in some ways akin to diplomacy, took place between “supercargoes” (representing European East India companies in Canton) and the official Chinese “Hong merchants” resident there. This practice continued up to the Opium War.

In none of these early modern instances did either side insist on symbolic equality. Things changed only with the “new diplomacy” of the revolutionary age, sparser in protocol and resting upon symmetry and equal rights. One highly charged moment was the refusal of Lord Macartney, head of the first British mission to China in 1793, to perform the expected kowtow (
ketou
) or ninefold prostration before Emperor Qianlong, on the grounds that a freeborn Englishman did not indicate submission to an Oriental despot. The emperor remained surprisingly calm and saved the situation by acting
as if
the envoy had correctly observed the ritual.
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At least Macartney bent his knee—a ceremonial gesture taken for granted even at European courts, although in those very years it was being discredited in the wake of the French Revolution.
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In the Maghreb, the rituals of abasement that French consuls once reluctantly performed—for example, the unilateral kissing of a Muslim ruler's hand—were abandoned after the revolution. Whereas in principle European diplomats had previously accepted local customs, the rules of European diplomacy now came to be seen as generally binding. It was not possible to enforce these everywhere at once. State gifts of a tributary nature were replaced with “practical” tokens, such as the prosaic products of the English steel industry with which Lord Macartney disappointed the Chinese. In such small details too, there was a new attention to reciprocity. The spread of general norms also meant that diplomatic recognition was taken more seriously than in the past, with the result that it became possible to question the
legitimacy of certain states whose sovereign existence had previously been tacitly accepted. The bey of Tunis was one case in point.

A set of rules for European diplomacy, partly written, partly unwritten, had taken shape by 1860. It was also expected of Oriental powers such as China and the Ottoman Empire that they would allow permanent missions in their capital cities and maintain their own missions in the capitals of the West. Ambassadors would have direct access to the head of state and top government circles—an unprecedented idea in China, for example, where no mortal had had the right to approach the emperor. Foreign ministries, hitherto known only in Europe, came into being and began to take charge of diplomatic contacts; but this, too, was far from a matter of course, so that even in such a centralized country as China governors of coastal provinces often meddled in foreign affairs until the very end of the empire in 1911, despite the creation in 1860 of the Zongli Yamen (a department with a lower rank than others in the bureaucracy, which gave way to a true foreign ministry only in 1901). Missions were also supposed to include a military attaché, who was not always above suspicion of espionage. Diplomatic immunity did have traditional roots in many parts of the world, but it was now strengthened and made explicit. An attack on a diplomat of any rank could even be a casus belli. In 1867 a British expeditionary corps was sent to Ethiopia to free the consul and several other imprisoned hostages; there could be no repetition of what happened in 1824 (in time of war), when the governor of Sierra Leone was overwhelmed by Ashanti warriors and his skull became a cult object in African rites.
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The most dramatic of all conflicts directly involving diplomats was the siege during the Boxer Rebellion in summer 1900, which after the killing of a German and a Japanese diplomat escalated into an international war. Insurrectionary peasant militias, tolerated by the imperial court and eventually reinforced by regular Chinese troops, would probably then have massacred Western and Japanese representatives if the improvised fortifications had been breached before relief forces arrived on August 14. Thereafter, foreign troops were stationed for decades in Beijing and its surroundings to ensure the protection of diplomats. But “barbarians” overseas were not the only ones guilty of violating conventions. During the French Revolution, foreign diplomats were sometimes set upon by mobs, and envoys of Portugal and the Holy See were even temporarily held prisoner; a number of French diplomats actually met their deaths in Rome and Rastatt.
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The new diplomacy of the revolution broke old rules, insofar as French emissaries openly interfered in the internal affairs of the country in which they were posted.

The new set of rules governing diplomacy and international action that took effect after 1815 was extolled as a normal product of advanced civilization. After the opening of non-European countries, treaties ensured that they would recognize civilized standards and observe them in practice.
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Some elements in the package were therefore explosive, because they provided a basis for deviations from the general norm of noninterference in the internal affairs of another state.
Tricky situations could arise, for example, if European diplomats took the side of Christian groups in religious quarrels. From 1860 on, representatives of Western powers intervened everywhere in favor of European and North American missionaries. Sometimes they did so reluctantly, because many missionaries relied on such protection to engage in ill-considered provocations. Power politics then came into play, when European states proclaimed their role as defenders of Christian minorities. The French Second Empire did this in Ottoman Syria and Lebanon, and the interference of the Russian tsar in Levantine religious matters became the immediate cause of the Crimean War.
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A second source of interference was the protection of foreign property. Since the seventeenth century, the rights of foreign merchants in Europe had been formulated more and more clearly. But the problem became more acute as the development gap between countries grew wider and foreign investment more substantial. New legislation was passed to safeguard foreign-owned port installations, factories, mines (and later oil refineries), and valuable real estate. It is possible to interpret the early Chinese treaty system after 1842 not only as a bridgehead of imperialist aggression (as Chinese nationalists usually do) but also as a relatively successful attempt to contain foreign demands. It lost its effectiveness after 1895, when foreign investments were increasingly located outside the treaty ports and it became ever more difficult for Chinese authorities “up country” to ensure their protection. The Great Powers were tempted to take matters into their own hands; this is what happened wherever railroads had been built by foreign concessionaires or funded mainly by foreign investors.

A related problem arose if a debtor state failed to meet its financial obligations on time, or at all. Hardly a single country—Venezuela was an exception—did this with provocative intent, yet a new means of control was put in place. International supervisory bodies (often including representatives of private banks) insisted on prior approval of government financial measures and directly transferred large sums of revenue (from duties or a salt tax, for example) into the coffers of creditors. This is what happened, in various ways, between 1876 and 1881 in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Tunisia. By 1907, forms of international public debt tutelage were also operating in China, Serbia, and Greece.
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In the nineteenth century, government default took the place of the dynastic insolvency or former times, but under the conditions of financial imperialism it was a highly risky strategy that entailed various unpleasant consequences. No one yet dared to take the revolutionary step of expropriating foreign property, as occurred in the early Soviet Union, 1930s Mexico, and China after 1949. In the face of minor local infringements or nonservicing of private loans—the typical flashpoints in Latin America and China—Britain, as the leading investor nation, behaved with some restraint in comparison with the United States in the twentieth century. At first it was left up to private creditors to find ways of recovering their money, much as today's multinationals largely conduct their own diplomacy. The British state enforced legal claims to compensation, with the Royal
Navy as its most effective instrument of pressure, but it tried to avoid a situation where overzealous intervention would unleash a spiral of violence.
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