The Transformation of the World (124 page)

“Military dictatorship” would not be the right word for what happened in either Turkey or China. Enver Pasha, the most influential military man in the Young Turk government (which was firmly in control by 1913), was certainly strong enough to take the Ottoman Empire into war in 1914 alongside the Central Powers, but he never had absolute authority and he remained primus inter pares in a mixed military-civilian ruling coterie. In China a powerful bureaucrat and military reformer from the Qing period, Yuan Shikai, took over the presidency within months of the revolution. Between 1913 and 1915 he ruled as de facto dictator, supported by the army but not by it alone. Yuan still shared some of the old Chinese mistrust of men-at-arms. Only after his death in 1916 did the country fragment into a mosaic of military regimes.
¹⁸²

The social coalitions on which the four revolutions based themselves varied considerably in breadth. The most intensive popular participation was in Russia, where the forces seeking to bring down the autocracy ranged from liberal nobles to starving peasants made destitute by the high redemption payments following the emancipation from serfdom. In China the revolution happened so quickly that its dynamic could not spread from the cities to the countryside. In the years before 1911 some parts of China had an above-average level of peasant protest, but the Qing were by no means driven from the throne by peasant uprisings like those that preceded the fall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644. “Bourgeois” forces were more important in Russia than in the other revolutionary processes, because it was more developed socially and economically. In Iran bazaar merchants played an active role by organizing boycotts. In China one cannot really speak of a bourgeoisie at all before 1911. The label “bourgeois revolution,” as Lenin recognized, was hard to pin even on Russia, let alone on Iran, China, or the Ottoman Empire. None of the revolutions can be divorced from its international context. In all four, the existing regime was on the defensive, still reeling from military or political defeats in the wider world: the Tsarist Empire, from the war of 1904–5 with Japan; China, from the Boxer invasion of 1900; the Ottoman Empire, from fresh setbacks in the Balkans; and Iran, from the action of foreign concession hunters and the advance of the British and Russians into their respective spheres of influence. The revolutionaries did not just expect that a change or overthrow of the political system would solve their own material problems, guarantee civil liberties, and allow them a say in political life. They also hoped that a strong nation-state would be more assertive in standing up to the impositions of the Great Powers and foreign capitalists. This was less the case in relation to Russia,
however, since it was itself an aggressive imperial power, and its costly and ultimately futile foreign policy was among the targets of protest action.

Outcomes of the Revolutionary Process

Where did the four different revolutions lead? In none of them would there be any going back to the old order. Russia's medium-term future was the Bolshevik Revolution. In Turkey and Iran, noncommunist, authoritarian regimes geared to economic development were established in the early 1920s. In China a regime of this type—the post-1927 Guomindang—managed to stabilize itself, though less comprehensively than the others, and after 1949 a second, Communist-led revolution finally halted and reversed the long-term process of political disintegration that the 1911 Revolution had speeded up.

But how did the results of the revolutions look in the short term, still on the horizon of the nineteenth century, as it were? In Russia the trend toward constitutional government, which for a short time had been more than what Max Weber, a keen observer of Russian politics, called “token constitutionalism,” came to an end in June 1907 when prime minister Stolypin staged a coup d'état with the tsar's support, and the elected Second Duma—the successor to the First Duma conceded by the tsar during the 1905 Revolution—was disbanded. A Third Duma, elected on a highly skewed basis, proved to be accordingly tame and pliant, while the Fourth Duma (1912–17) was an almost total irrelevance. The all-decisive cutting short of Russia's parliamentarization had occurred in 1907.

In Iran there was a similar crushing of the blossoms of parliamentary democracy that had burst forth in the briefest space of time. The Majles (parliament) became a central institution of political life more than anywhere else in Asia and in Russia, carried along by a troika of bazaar merchants, liberal clerics, and secular intellectuals that would appear again in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
¹⁸³
The shah's putsch of June 1908 was a brutal affair. But whereas in Russia a general apathy set in after the dissolution of the Second Duma, resistance to the shah and his Cossacks led to a civil war that, in the north of the country, ended only with the intervention of Russian troops in winter 1911. Large numbers of constitutional politicians and revolutionary activists were removed from office and executed or deported.
¹⁸⁴
Clearly there are parallels with Hungary in 1849, although there the Russians left it up to the Habsburgs to take revenge on the revolutionaries. Nevertheless, parliamentarianism had sunk deep roots in Iran, and since then, through all the regime changes, it has regarded itself as a constitutional country.

China was different. Before 1911 the demand for more efficient government, both internally and externally, had been much more important than the pressure for democratization. Since 1912 China has kept endowing itself with constitutions, but right up to today it has not been able to get a parliament up and running (except in Taiwan since the 1980s). The 1911 Revolution created no stable parliamentary institutions and, more important, no myth of parliamentary
sovereignty that might be critically activated. Nowhere did an ancien régime crumble as quickly and noiselessly as in China. Nowhere did a republic arise so directly from its ruins. But nowhere either did the military, the only force theoretically capable of holding the country together, act with such little sense of responsibility. The revolution eliminated censorship and state-directed institutional conformism. In so doing, it opened at least the cities to a special kind of modernity, if only without constructing stable institutions.

In this respect the Ottoman-Turkish evolution was more successful; the transitions were smoother. The aged Sultan Abdülhamid even remained on the throne for another year, until his supporters foolishly attempted to remove the new rulers. His successor, Mehmed V. Reşad (r. 1909–18), was for the first time in Ottoman history a constitutional monarch without political ambitions. Neither the Romanov nor the Qing Dynasty would be granted such a mellow finale. It is true that the post-1908 period of freedom and pluralism ended in 1913 after the assassination of Mahmud Şevket Pasha, one of the leaders of the Young Turks, while at the same time the Balkan War plunged the empire into dire straits.
¹⁸⁵
The outcome, however, was neither temporary restoration (as in Russia and Iran) nor territorial disintegration of the core country (as in China after the Yuan Shikai interlude in 1916) but a journey full of obstacles and detours toward one of Asia's less crisis-ridden and more humane polities of the interwar period: the Kemalist Republic.

Atatürk, certainly no democrat, was on balance an educator rather than a seducer of his people—not a warmonger, not a Turkish Mussolini. The Ottoman-Turkish revolutionary process therefore displays the clearest logic of the four Eurasian revolutions. It was more or less continuous and came to rest in the Kemalism of the 1920s. In 1925, when this goal was achieved, Russia (the Soviet Union) and China were entering new phases of their stormy history. Meanwhile in Iran the military strongman, Reza Khan, ended the (by then purely ornamental) Qajar Dynasty and elevated himself as the first shah of the new Pahlavi Dynasty. His autocratic rule, from his rise as war minister in 1921 to his eventual banishment in 1941, meant that Reza conformed more clearly than his contemporaries Atatürk and even Chiang Kai-shek (who alternated from 1926 in the roles of military and political leader) to the type of the violent military dictator with some modernizing ambitions. But, unlike Atatürk, he was neither an institution builder nor a man of political vision, and the weakness of Iran made him far more dependent on the Great Powers, until they finally brought him down because of his pro-German proclivities.
¹⁸⁶
Twentieth-century Iranian history, following the Revolution of 1905–11, was more discontinuous than that of Turkey, and major goals of the revolutionaries remained unfulfilled. In 1979 a second revolution pursued a new, illiberal agenda for ten years before the order in Russia, too, was once more revolutionized. Only Turkey, through more or less the same time span as Mexico, experienced no further revolutions after the transitional years of 1908–13.

None of the four Eurasian revolutions suddenly erupted within contexts of utter stagnation and ossification. The popular European image of a “peace of the graveyard” supposedly created by bloodthirsty Oriental despots was a distortion of reality. Societies throughout Eurasia had been scarcely less in ferment than their European counterparts, exhibiting numerous forms of protest and collective violence.
¹⁸⁷
In Iran, for example, sections of the population have rebelled on many occasions and, in much the same way as in early modern Europe, tried to assert their interests through pressure and theatrical actions: nomadic tribes, the urban poor, women, mercenaries, black slaves, and sometimes “the people” as a whole, especially directed against foreigners.
¹⁸⁸
Other Asian countries were different only in degrees. In China the state had traditionally kept the population under tighter control than in the Muslim countries, using a system of collective liability and punishment (
baojia
) to hold whole families or villages accountable for individual rule breaking. But this was successful only so long as the bureaucracy remained reasonably efficient and people were not driven to desperation by conditions that threatened their survival. At the latest from the 1820s, when these premises began to crumble, China also became difficult to govern.
¹⁸⁹
Thus, apart from anything else, the revolutions were responses to problems of governability. These problems were in turn partly the result of an intrinsic dynamic of social conflict and of changes in cultural values, partly of the kind of external destabilization that generally affected “peripheral” and socioeconomically “backward” countries.

It cannot be overstated how much Western European constitutional thought influenced Asia, from Russia to Japan, or how creatively it was adapted to the needs of individual countries.
¹⁹⁰
The Ottoman constitutionalist movement of 1876 sent out a first important signal, and Japan after 1889 furnished evidence that a constitution was not merely a piece of paper but could also become, in an Asian context, a powerful symbol of national integration. The struggle for dominance and transformation in the state was invariably fueled by the rhetoric and practice of constitutionalism. The powers that be were no longer thought of as a fact of nature; power could be wrested in conflict and given a different institutional form. Time was running out for dynastic rule, now that its existence no longer seemed a matter of course. The age of ideologies and mass politics was beginning.

CHAPTER XI

 

The State

Minimal Government, Performances, and the Iron Cage

1 Order and Communication—The State and the Political

The variety of political forms was probably greater in the nineteenth century than at any previous time in history, ranging from the complete statelessness of hunting communities to the sophisticated systems of empires and nation-states. Already before the arrival of European colonialism, there was a considerable diversity of arrangements for exercizing power and regulating the affairs of the community, not all of them recognizable from a Western and modern point of view as a “state.” The colonial state only gradually absorbed, or at least modified, these older forms on a case-by-case basis. It is possible to speak of the worldwide, though by no means uniform and complete, spread of the European state for the period shortly before the First World War, but certainly not in 1770, 1800, or 1830.

The nineteenth century began by inheriting the new states that had taken shape in the early modern period.
¹
The generic term for those political orders used to be “absolutism.” Today we know that Europe's “absolute” monarchies, with the possible exception of Petrine tsardom, did not enjoy such total freedom of action as contemporary apologists or later historians liked to imagine. Even “absolute” rulers were entangled in a web of reciprocal obligation. They had to pay heed to churches or landowning nobles, could not simply brush aside established legal conceptions, needed to keep their underlings in good spirits, and had to accept that even the most authoritarian practices could not be relied on to fill the state coffers. The European monarchies of the mid-eighteenth century were the result of an evolution that had not begun before the sixteenth. The same was true of most of Asia's monarchical systems, which, in their eighteenth-century form, were the creations not of a remote past but of quite recent military empire building. The hoary idea of an opposition between moderate monarchy in Western Europe and boundless despotism from the Tsarist Empire eastward—a contrast developed most sharply in Montesquieu's work of 1748
De l'esprit des lois
(The spirit of the laws)—is not altogether aberrant. But the overriding impression we
have of early modern Eurasia is of a spectrum of monarchical states that will not fit into such an East-West dichotomy.
²

A further early modern innovation was the overseas colonial state, originally confined to the western hemisphere but from the 1760s on transplanted to India. Though it copied European state forms, it adapted to local circumstances and underwent many changes over the years. Its collapse in North America in the 1770s was soon followed by the momentous rise of the constitutional republican state. Political diversity reached its unprecedented peak in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Afterward
countries worldwide turned into territorially defined nation-states, a relatively uniform type that could be combined with various constitutional forms: democracy as well as dictatorship. The twentieth century was marked by further homogenization, so that in its second half an electorally legitimated constitutional state became the only recognized norm. Finally, the disappearance of communist party dictatorships masquerading as “people's democracies” left only one non-Western model consciously based on distinctive principles of its own: the theocratically oriented Islamic Republic.