The Transformation of the World (130 page)

First
. There is a direct interplay between media technology and the intensity of communication. Wherever the technical and economic conditions exist for a culture of the printed word, the formation of a public sphere is not far off. Thus, we look in vain for such a sphere in the Muslim world before the spread
of printing in the nineteenth century. But the development of technology was not always an independent driving force; sometimes it might be theoretically available yet fail to be matched by a demand for printed products.

Second
. Public communication and its subversive content grow by leaps and bounds in a revolutionary period. It can be debated whether communication gives birth to revolution or vice versa; one is on safer ground if one sticks to an idea of them as simultaneous and interacting. Throughout the Atlantic space, the revolutionary age around the year 1800 witnessed a sharp rise both in book communication and in critical radicalization.
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The same was observable during the Eurasian revolutionary surge after 1900.

Third
. Where public spaces opened up outside Europe in the nineteenth century, they did not always reflect straightforward attempts to imitate the West. Within state bureaucracies (Chinese or Vietnamese, for instance), in churches, monasteries, and communities of clergy, or in feudal structures such as the Japanese prior to 1868 where spokesmen for particular regional interests competed with one another, there had for a long time also been institutionalized dialogue about matters of general concern. European rule suppressed some of these communicative structures, while others migrated to a subversive underground inaccessible to the colonial masters, and yet others—among the intelligentsia of Bengal, for instance—gained a new lease on life and became a factor in colonial politics. Relatively liberal colonial regimes, such as that of the British in Malaya, might give rise to lively debate among the indigenous public, in which a broad spectrum of political views, some sharply opposed to colonialism, found expression.
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Fourth
. Public spheres could be built in the most varied of spaces. Microspheres, in which hearsay and rumor were often more important than the written word, sprang up alongside one another and to some extent overlapped, sometimes finding integration at a broader level. The public spheres of scholarship and religion crossed political boundaries quite easily; the Latin culture of medieval Christendom and the ecumenism of classical Chinese culture (which at least until the eighteenth century embraced Korea, Vietnam, and Japan) are two good examples. England and France in the second half of the eighteenth century had a
national
public sphere: anything of political or intellectual importance was acted out on the great stages of London and Paris. However, this was the exception rather than the rule. Where a single metropolis was less dominant, or where the means of state repression were also concentrated in such a center, the public sphere tended to emerge outside the royal court and the government: in Russian, Chinese, or Ottoman provincial capitals or in the newly founded states of the decentralized United States (where it was only later that New York came to be generally recognized as the cultural point of gravitation).
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Often it was a major step forward when a communicative sphere first emerged across local boundaries, making it possible to address issues of power or status and matters of general concern on a basis that overcame political segmentation.
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In the Hindu caste systems of India and other particularly inegalitarian societies, no one gave any thought to
the European ideal of communication among equals. However, European-style institutions imparted a new meaning to status differences among individuals and groups and gradually introduced new rules governing competition. The word “public” was on everyone's lips in nineteenth-century India. In the early part of the century, the English-speaking elite (initially in Bengal) created many associations that defended its own interests and criticized the colonial state in writing. The colonial regime, by no means omnipotent, was sometimes helpless in the face of civil unrest and legal challenges. The courtroom became a new arena of status competition, and spectacular trials aroused great interest among the public.
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Fifth
. In its early phases, the public sphere did not manifest itself always (or only) in explicit political criticism; the recent interest in “civil society” has also directed attention to prepolitical self-organization. In Europe or America this might take the form of religious communities or single-issue action groups; Alexis de Tocqueville registered the abundance of such associations in the United States in 1831–32.
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In China after 1860, when the controlling power of the state further declined, it was common for charitable projects such as hospitals to bring together prosperous members of the nonbureaucratic elite. In Muslim countries religious institutions might play a similar role of integration and mobilization. It was then only a short step from such initially nonpolitical initiatives to other areas of individual concern and general significance. We must keep a sense of proportion, however. The degree of long-term politicization varied greatly among the urban populations. Only in a few European countries did it rise to the level of communal democracy practiced in the cities of the United States. Also the local public sphere often remained a very elitist affair in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

Constitution and Participation

What the great political scientist Samuel E. Finer called the constitutionalization of Europe began, following influential models of the past (United States in 1787, France in 1791, Spain in 1812), after the final downfall of Napoleon and essentially concluded with Germany's adoption of the Reich Constitution of 1871.
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This process did not remain confined to Europe. In no part of the nineteenth-century world were as many constitutions written as in Latin America: eleven in Bolivia alone between 1826 and 1880, and ten in Peru between 1821 and 1867, although this cannot be taken as evidence that their political cultures were actually constitutionalist.
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The Japanese Constitution of 1889 was the climax of the formation of the Meiji state as a Japanese-European hybrid. A new wave spread to the largest countries of eastern Eurasia around the turn of the century. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 pointed even British India, though still on a tight leash, onto a path of constitutional evolution that would lead through many stages to the Constitution of the Republic of India in 1950.
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There is no need here to describe Europe's progress in detail.
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The key point is that on the eve of the First World War, after a full century of constitutionalization, only a few European countries had achieved a constitutional democracy
with general elections and a system of majority government answerable to a parliament: Switzerland, France, Norway, Sweden, and Britain (as late as 1911, when the power of the unelected House of Lords was curtailed).
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The main bastions of democracy were then, along with the United States, the newer European settler colonies of Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, the Australian Federation, and South Africa (where the black majority, however, was excluded from elections or hindered from using its right to vote).
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It is a great paradox that in a century when Europe, committed to the idea of progress, put its stamp on the world as never before, the most far-reaching political achievements were made in the colonial periphery. On the one hand, many of the world's peoples experienced the British Empire as an incapacitating apparatus of repression; on the other hand, it could operate as a steppingstone to democracy. In the “white” dominions with a form of liberal government, settler societies were able to cover the road to modern democracy more swiftly than could the mother country, with its strongly oligarchic-aristocratic traditions. The nonwhite colonies were denied such a head start toward “responsible government,” but India and Ceylon at least were drawn into a particular kind of a constitutional dynamic. Under the pressure of the nationalist freedom movement, the 1935 Government of India Act instituted a full written constitution that provided for Indian political participation at the regional level and was largely retained when the country later gained independence. In the case of its largest colony, an authoritarian empire thus created a framework for the independent evolution of a democratic constitutional order.

In nineteenth-century Europe, electoral democratization was not straightforwardly correlated with the consolidation of a parliamentary political system. To take a well-known example: all males over the age of twenty-five had active suffrage rights for Reichstag elections in post-1871 Germany, whereas a property qualification, a kind of census-based franchise, continued to operate in England and Wales. Even after the Reform Act of 1867, which extended the vote to a larger number of workers, electoral registers included only 24 percent of adult males in the (rural) counties and 45 percent in the (urban) boroughs.
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Nevertheless, English voters decided on the composition of a parliament that, being the core of the political system, was far more powerful than the democratically elected Reichstag. In England parliamentarization preceded democratization; in Germany the opposite was the case, even though alongside Reichstag voting rights an extremely unequal “three-class franchise” persisted in elections to the Prussian regional parliament.

The history of the franchise is technically complicated for every country. It has a major territorial dimension, since even equal votes can lead to highly unequal results if the constituencies are divided up unevenly. It is also important whether constituencies send one or several representatives to the parliament, and whether special representatives of the estates continue to play a role—as delegates from the universities did for a long time in England. Proportional representation was
uncommon in the nineteenth century: only Belgium, Finland, and Sweden had adopted it by 1914.
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Secrecy of the ballot was a more flexible notion than it is today, since especially in the countryside pressure could easily be brought to bear on service personnel and other dependents. France (in 1820) was the first country to introduce secret votes; the process often took considerably longer elsewhere. Its pros and cons were debated until the end of the century and beyond. In Austria legislation to establish the practice was passed only in 1907.
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A step-by-step expansion of electoral citizenship was the norm, won partly through revolutionary struggles, partly through concessions from above. Fundamental considerations of a strategic nature were inevitably bound up with the various franchise reforms. In Britain, a country with no revolutions in modern times, the three reform acts (of 1832, 1867, and 1884) mark deep fissures in its political history, the last of the three having brought not only a major expansion of the franchise to roughly 60 percent of adult males and an end to de facto upper-class control over the composition of the two Houses of Parliament but also the removal of numerous exceptions and peculiarities. For the first time Britain had something like a rational electoral
system
. But it was not until 1918 that universal male suffrage was introduced in the United Kingdom.
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As the electoral clientele expanded, the social composition and work style of Parliament changed. The mass electorate that appeared in France in 1848, the German Reich in 1871, and Great Britain after the (still not “universal”) reform of 1884 required different kinds of party organization from those characteristic of an elitist democracy of notables. By 1900 programmatically defined parties had taken shape in most European countries with a constitutional government, many of them, as the sociologist Robert Michels noted in his
Political Parties
(1911), displaying a tendency to bureaucratic bloatedness and oligarchization. At the same time, a new type of professional emerged alongside the gentleman politician—although it did not become dominant so long as parliamentary deputies had no allowances on which they could live (as in Germany until as late as 1906). The way in which the “deputy” entered the public consciousness can be seen especially clearly in the France of the Third Republic;
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his distinctive social figure, with his own independent weight, involved a rather detached relationship to direct representation. On the other hand, images of a direct expression of the popular will—if only in a Bonapartist plebiscite, not in new laws—had hung on firmly since the Great Revolution. In different political-cultural contexts, and in ways that changed over time, the election acquired a special symbolic significance. Voters may conceive of themselves as sovereign or as mere “voting fodder.” This could be a topic for a comparative cultural history of political life.
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One great exception casts a shadow over the success story of advancing democratic participation. Although the United States was the largest and oldest of the modern democracies, it was difficult for its citizens to exercise their civil rights. The situation there is all the more obscure because the franchise was and is usually regulated at the level of individual states. The difficulties began (and still
begin) with the electoral register, stretching all the way from property restrictions (whose significance receded over time) and residence qualifications to outright racist exclusion. Before the Civil War, blacks were virtually disenfranchised even in areas where slavery did not exist. After the Civil War this was hard to justify. Especially after the official end of Reconstruction in 1877 more and more inventive chicanery was tried out to prevent liberated Afro-Americans from exercising their right to vote.

New immigrants from supposedly uncivilized parts of Europe (e.g., Ireland) and Asia (China and Japan) also had major obstacles placed in their way.
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The democratization of American citizenship thus encountered a severe setback. Comparatively, the United States remained one of the most democratic countries in the world, but it had great difficulty in harmonizing the universal principles of its republican order with the realities of a “multicultural” and racially divided society.