The Transformation of the World (111 page)

Paradoxically, however, this setback that often brought personal tragedy encouraged the development of an
international
movement, since some important representatives of that generation fled to freer countries, especially the United States, and continued their work there. Women's organizations already existing in America were themselves strengthened and given new life by this influx from Europe. But the upturn did not last long: activity had already peaked by the mid-fifties. Divisions then set in over the question of slavery (many feminists thought the struggle for women's rights should take a back seat for a while), while the increasingly national stamp of politics throughout Europe in the 1850s and 1860s precluded any new internationalist impetus. In the early sixties, the international ties of the women's movement decidedly slackened. The initiatives a quarter of a century later thus amounted to a fresh start—or at least that is how it looked in terms of organized movements.
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No less important than formal organizations were the informal personal networks that tied women to one another all through the century, as travelers, missionaries, and governesses, or as artists and entrepreneurs.
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In the course of time, the British Empire became a space where female solidarity made itself felt at the levels of perception and action. Victorian feminists were active in seeking to improve the legal position of Indian women, and campaigns against the custom of compulsory foot binding found support among British and American women who came across it in China.
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Unlike the labor or women's movement, pacifists did not seek representation in national political systems.
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They might fight from within against the militarization of individual nation-states (though seldom with noteworthy success), but they stood a chance of exerting only a minimum of influence at international level. Dread of war and a critique of violence constitute an old current in European (as well as Indian or Chinese) thought. In war-weary Europe after 1815, sometimes with older roots in Quakerism or Mennonism, they found a new lease on life, especially in Britain.
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To have any public impact, pacifism needed to focus on a palpable experience of war or a strong and credible vision of the horror of future armed conflicts. This gave it strength in the 1860s, when, in an age
of renewed warfare, it gained new supporters in Europe. In 1867 Geneva hosted the first “Congress of Peace and Freedom,” which was followed by many similar gatherings on a smaller scale. In 1889 pacifism started to become a transnational lobby, and in the same year 310 activists attended the first Universal Peace Congress (in Paris). There would be a total of twenty-three congresses between then and 1913; the twenty-fourth was due to be held in Vienna in September 1914.

At the height of its significance, this international peace movement was sustained by approximately three thousand people.
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It was a European project with North Atlantic extensions; otherwise there were peace societies only in Argentina and Australia. For the colonies, unable to be belligerent parties in their own right, pacifism was less relevant as an international attitude (Gandhi's later policy of nonviolence was a strategy for disobedience inside India); while in Meiji Japan, determined to build up the nation's military strength, it remained a cause taken up by only a few writers, with little or no impact outside their immediate circle. The earliest Japanese pacifist was Kitamoru Tōkoku (1868–94), who, like nearly all others who came after him, was inspired by Christianity and came close to being accused of treason. In 1902, the Chinese philosopher Kang Youwei composed in his Indian exile a grand utopian vision of world peace,
The Book of Great Unity
, which was published in full for the first time in 1935 and failed to have any political impact.
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China and the Ottoman Empire were not a threat to other states, but they had to have a minimum of military strength to defend themselves. Pacifism therefore held no political attraction for them.

Since nineteenth-century pacifism had no natural social base or clientele and sprang above all from personal ethical convictions, it was more susceptible than the labor or women's movement to the charismatic power of individuals. This is why it was so important that Bertha von Suttner's rhetorically effective novel
Lay Down Your Arms!
(1889; Eng. trans. 1892) was an international success; that the Swedish explosives manufacturer Alfred Nobel created a prize for the furtherance of peace, which, like the other Nobel prizes, was awarded from 1901 on (the first going to Henri Dunant and the French politician Frédéric Passy, and the 1905 prize to Bertha von Suttner); and that in 1910 the American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made part of his huge fortune available for the cause of peace and international understanding. The main currents of pacifism considered their objective to be not so much disarmament as a system of international arbitration. They had no great hopes in a reign of universal peace, but they realistically contented themselves with proposals for basic mechanisms of consultation, such as there had no longer been in the anarchic world of states since the Crimean War.

The activity of the international peace movement reached a peak in the 1890s, against the background of irresponsible war talk in Europe and a sharpening of imperialist aggression in Africa and Asia. Its greatest success was the convening of the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, when the Great Powers had just descended upon China, the United States was waging a colonial war in the
Philippines, and the great struggle between Boers and British was getting under way in South Africa. Such a conference could not be a gathering of private individuals like the founding circle of the Red Cross; the formal initiative had to come from a government. Ironically, this was the government of the Tsarist Empire, the most authoritarian in Eurasia, whose motive was not a morally pure love of peace. The intensification of the arms race had put Russia in a financial squeeze, and it reacted by experimenting with new kinds of solution. A second conference followed at The Hague in 1907.

Both conferences led to important innovations in international law but failed to get any arbitration mechanisms up and running. They were not intended to reform the international state system, nor did they belong in the tradition of the great peace congresses. What reflected the real or perceived distribution of power in the international system was the fact that of the twenty-six countries represented in 1899, only six lay outside Europe: the United States, Mexico, Japan, China, Siam, and Iran. The Hague Peace Conferences grew out of closer cooperation less among states than among individual public figures—a kind of transnational peace milieu. The problem was that they achieved nothing at the level of great-power politics, and the “spirit of The Hague” changed nothing of note in the thinking of policymakers.
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If governments in the second half of the century gave any thought to international relations apart from military power games, then it was less to peace building than to the “mechanics” of internationalism.
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Insofar as international law was an instrument and medium of such concretion below the level of grand politics, there was a transition “from coexistence law to cooperation law,” the aim of which was “the joint achievement by states of transnational goals.”
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Strongly binding treaties, backed up by periodic conferences of experts, anticipated supranational legislation before any existed. The result was a historically unparalleled norm setting in countless areas of technology, communications, and cross-border trade. The unification of world time has already been discussed in
chapter 2
.
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During the same period, weights and measures, international mail (Universal Postal Union of 1874, Universal Postal Convention of 1878), railroad gauges, train timetables, coinage, and much else besides were simplified and standardized for large areas of the world.
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For large areas, but not really for the whole world: operational systems varied too much in complexity, and cultural and political resistance too tenacious. The international letter post could be homogenized more easily than the endless variety of currencies and means of payment. Not all the processes of adaptation and homogenization initiated in the nineteenth century had been completed by the First World War; many are still continuing today. The important point is that people in the nineteenth century saw the need for such regulations and took the first steps to bring them about. It is hardly surprising that much of the world was not yet integrated in this way. Once again the nineteenth century exhibits long-range continuity with the second half of the twentieth.

The continuities with the
past
were not very numerous. The early modern period in Europe knew many forms of philosophical and scientific universalism, but apart from transoceanic trade relations it created few trans-European systemic links. Its legacy lived on not so much in direct connections as in the revival of older programs. Thus, new proposals for a world language built on considerations that Leibniz had already presented. The best-known offering, alongside the Volapük invented by the Konstanz priest Johann Martin Schleyer, was the one that the Polish eye specialist Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof submitted to the public in 1887 under the name “Esperanto.” By 1912 there were more than 1500 Esperanto-speaking groups, some of them outside Europe and North America. A first world congress of the movement had been convened in 1905. This most effective kind of premeditated linguistic globalism created a truly planetary community of communication, but it never dislodged any of the national languages and did not gain widespread acceptance as a medium of scholarly exchange.
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Another initiative, which eventually proved much more successful, had roots far beyond the early modern period: the Olympic Games. Initially an obsession of a few (mostly English) philhellenes and sporting enthusiasts, joined by the Anglophile Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the revival of this ancient idea led in 1896 to the first Olympiad of modern times and went on to become one of most inclusive, prestigious, and economically viable global movements. De Coubertin's original impetus had by no means derived from philosophical contemplation of a coming age of world peace. Rather, the young aristocrat formed a conviction that Germany had won the war of 1870–71 because of the superiority of its school gymnastics. In 1892 he put such nationalism behind him and argued instead for sportsmen of different countries to compete with one another.
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The diffusion of other kinds of sport—especially the team games football (soccer) and cricket—also began in the last third of the nineteenth century.
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Like most dichotomies, the opposition between bellicose power politics and peaceful civil efforts of nongovernmental internationalists is too simple to be altogether convincing. In reality there were intermediate levels—above all, attempts by national governments to use internationalism for their own foreign policy (“internationalism to the advantage of nations,” as the pacifist Alfred H. Fried put it in 1908
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). Switzerland, and Belgium even more, pursued internationalization strategies in this way—for example, helping to create scientific and economic conferences with international participation, and letting no opportunity slip to put themselves forward as locations for international events and organizations. The key period for the founding of international governmental organizations (IGOs) was the 1860s—the same decade in which the Red Cross came into being as an international nongovernmental organization (INGO). Beginning in 1865 with the International Telegraph Union, more than thirty IGOs were established up to the outbreak of the First World War;
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most of them saw the colonies as part of their sphere of activity. A large number of technical conferences also were held to coordinate new transportation and communications
systems, such as the telegraph and regular steamship services, or to standardize legal norms in such matters as the cross-border movement of currencies. Especially important was the series of international public health conferences that began as early as 1851.
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As far as war, peace, and international politics are concerned, the nineteenth century began in 1815. It followed a long eighteenth century that for some parts of the world—Europe, India, Southeast Asia—had been an age of extraordinary military violence. In comparison with the periods before and after, the hundred years from 1815 to 1914 were unusually peaceful in continental Europe. Interstate wars had seldom been so limited in time and space, or casualties so low as a proportion of either troop strengths or the civilian population. The great civil wars took place in America and China, not in Europe. Weapons technology, railroads, general staffs, and compulsory military service revolutionized warfare. The built-up potential was discharged only in 1914, in a great war that lasted so long partly because the main belligerents had more or less the same means at their disposal. Lightning campaigns were still possible, but no longer those of the Napoleonic type that had crushed the enemy in a matter of days. Technological and organizational advances in Europe and the United States came into their own, especially after 1840, where no arms race could create a level playing field: that is, against preindustrial military cultures in Asia, Africa, New Zealand, and the North American interior. “Asymmetrical” colonial warfare became one of the forms of violence characteristic of the age. Another was the “opening-up war,” a rather selective operation designed not for territorial conquest but to ensure that a country became politically amenable and geared its foreign policy to the West. Military strength was concentrated in the arsenals of an ever smaller number of great powers, which, with the exception of Japan after 1880, lay geographically in the North and culturally in the “West.” For all the regional power differences, which made Egypt under Muhammad Ali, for example, appear a military factor deserving serious respect, this was the first time in centuries that not a single country in Africa, the Muslim world, or the Eurasian landmass east of Russia was in a position to defend its borders or to project its power beyond its own national or imperial limits. The Ottoman Empire definitively lost this capacity after its war with Russia in 1877–78. Brazil was a strong regional power as well, but no more than that.