The Transformation of the World (133 page)

It would have been even poorer if, of all things, the one example of a transfer of European administrative practices had not slowed the financial decline of the dynasty. After 1863 the Ulsterman Robert Hart (Sir Robert, from 1893) built up the Imperial Maritime Customs (IMC) in his capacity as inspector general, having been appointed to the post under Western pressure as the
homme de confiance
of the world trading powers. But he did have the rank of a high Chinese official, was formally a subordinate of the Chinese emperor, and interpreted his role as that of a dutiful intermediary between the two civilizations and economic systems. The IMC relied on rank-and-file Chinese assistants and even had a kind of Chinese shadow hierarchy, but it basically emulated the Indian Civil Service with its cadre force of highly paid European administrative experts. It was smaller in size than the ICS and less unambiguously under British control. The IMC ran an excellent customs service that made it possible for the Chinese state to profit from the growth in foreign trade. That would not have happened with the traditional techniques of Chinese district administration, which mainly involved exercising rule over the peasantry. Only after 1895 did the Great Powers gain a
direct
hold over the customs revenue, much to the displeasure of Sir Robert Hart. On the one hand, the IMC was an instrument of the Great Powers guaranteeing that China's customs sovereignty would remain limited under the unequal treaties. On the other hand, it was an agency of the Chinese state, operating in accordance
with Western principles of administrative probity, formal regulations, transparent bookkeeping, and so on.
¹²⁰

Hart's IMC had a limited impact on the rest of the Chinese state administration. The Qing government began to introduce reforms only after the end of the century, and although these continued in the early republic, they had scant success. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to take nineteenth-century European caricatures at face value; the Chinese bureaucracy (or the Vietnamese) cannot be simply dismissed as “premodern.” One side of it, geared to impersonal rules transcending family or clientelist relations, attained a high degree of meritocracy in the selection of personnel. The case of Korea even showed that its principles were compatible with the continuing access of a hereditary aristocracy to the top posts in the state.
¹²¹
Administrative practices were in theory performance driven, objectively grounded, productive of individual accountability, and to some extent fashioned to comply with the law. All this is
modern
by sociological criteria. Another side of the bureaucracy, however, corresponded to a society permeated with ethical principles of substantive justice, which did not regard all citizens or subjects as equal (as a modern administration must), and whose Confucian understanding of family bonds, especially the subordination of sons to fathers, played a role in shaping action. This internal contradiction was the main problem with Chinese-style bureaucracies in the age of a near-global move toward rationalization of the state.
¹²²
Finally, traditional formulas were incapable of handling political groups inspired by patriotic fervor. The bureaucratic apparatuses found themselves helpless in the face of the revolutionary movements that emerged in China around the turn of the century.

Asian Bureaucracies: The Ottoman Empire and Japan

China's bureaucratic tradition proved fairly resistant to Western influences in the nineteenth century. The structure and ethos of the state administration changed little. At least the bureaucracy could fulfill one of its main tasks, the territorial integration of the empire, until shortly before it came to an end. The path of change that the Ottoman Empire covered was rather longer. During the same period, the traditional Group of Scribes (
kalemiye
) turned into what became known after the 1830s as a civil service (
mülkiye
). It did not simply copy European examples—not even the French model, which resembled it in many respects. The need for change was felt most acutely in foreign ministry circles, where contact with the outside world was closest. But then the reform acquired a dynamic of its own, leading to the development of new norms, new role models, and new conceptions of administrative professionalism. In the Ottoman Empire, as in Europe and China, a centuries-old practice of patronage was not replaced overnight with a rational personnel policy based on objective criteria; the two orientations existed side by side in a relationship of mutual influence.
¹²³
The post-1839 Tanzimat reforms made the new civilian officialdom the dominant elite in the empire—a professional corps that would number at least 35,000
by the year 1890. Whereas a century earlier, the thousands of scribes had been concentrated in the capital, Istanbul, only a minority of the new-style senior officials were employed there in 1890. The Ottoman bureaucracy thus spread out territorially at a very late date, following a course in the second half of the nineteenth century that had been characteristic of China for many hundreds of years.
¹²⁴
Lacking in such experience, it could afford to be “more modern” than its Chinese counterpart, which, because of its strong path dependence, was less free to give up old ways and required exceptional energy to embark upon reforms.

In Japan a modern bureaucracy also took shape in the triangle formed by traditional foundations, Western models, and an indigenous modernization drive. Since the Tokugawa period there had been a large pool of administrative competence, but unlike in China or the Ottoman Empire, this had been concentrated at the level of lordly domains (
han
) more than of the central state. To an extent only really comparable with revolutionary France, the need to build a nationwide bureaucracy powerfully asserted itself after the Meiji Renewal of 1868; the administrative experience of the samurai, who had changed in the peaceful conditions of the Tokugawa period from warriors of the sword into masters of the pen, was now deployed in a growing number of fields. By 1878, just ten years into the Renewal, the state administration had been thoroughly rationalized along the lines of the professional system familiar from the Napoleonic Consulate, in which advisory bodies and any kind of self-government played only a subordinate role. A complete hierarchy of officials, such as had never existed on a nationwide level, stretched down from the chancelleries of state through the governors of newly created prefectures to local village heads.
¹²⁵
In 1881, not much later than in Britain, examinations were introduced for the upper reaches of the civil service and soon replaced the traditional practice of patronage; only the most senior positions of all were now filled by government directive—a customary procedure in Europe as well. By the turn of the century, Japan's state administration had become a textbook example of Max Weber's “rational bureaucracy”; there were few so thoroughly modern elsewhere in the world. But since in Japan (as in Prussia, Austria, and Russia) the modernization of the bureaucracy preceded the rise of a critical public opinion and political parties, the danger of unchecked bureaucratism arose as soon as the political leadership of the Meiji oligarchs relaxed its vigilance. The consequences of such a trend would become apparent in the twentieth century.

The danger was still relatively slight during the first few decades of the Meiji period, partly because of the revolutionary origins of the new order. Since the political leadership had the legitimacy neither of tradition nor of representative or plebiscitary institutions (as in revolutionary France up to the time of Napoleon), it had to show by results that it had the ability and competence to rule. This included the creation of a public service ethos transcending patron-client relations, and of a bureaucracy dedicated to the goal of making Japan economically and militarily competitive among the Great Powers. A combination of
samurai traditions of administration with loans from British, French, and German statecraft resulted, as in the Ottoman case, in something more than a simple import. Japan found its own form of bureaucratic modernity. But in fact it was a kind of semimodernity. Personal liberties and popular sovereignty remained alien ideas, and social contract theory was never understood. A monarchical patriarchalism was thus able to survive into the era of bureaucratic rationalization. The Constitution of 1889 diverged from its European models by declaring the person of the tennō to be “sacred and inviolable,” with sweeping powers inherited from his imperial ancestors.
¹²⁶

To bolster this collectivist or organicist conception of the state, the late Meiji rulers took up the idea of a Japanese national essence (
kokutai
) first developed by the Confucian scholar Aizawa Seishisai in 1825;
¹²⁷
the emperor was the head of a “family state” (
kazoku kokka
) that followed a single will, while his subjects owed loyalty and obedience to the political bodies he established.
¹²⁸
The Japanese bureaucracy, though one of the world's most “rational” in form, therefore carried out its duties less as a service to citizens than as a fulfillment of national goals passed down from on high. A modernized authoritarian state—there are many parallels with the post-1871 German Reich—offered favorable terrain for the growth of a rational bureaucracy. The state administration was highly modern, but the same cannot be said in general of its ideology or of the political system in which it was inserted. In the end, it makes a difference whether or not bureaucratization develops in the context of a liberal political order and political culture.

An All-Pervasive State?

But this can be only one analytic approach to the phenomenon of the bureaucratic state. Another, equally important focus concerns how bureaucracy is experienced at the various levels of political life, including how “the state” is expressed in the village and how relations take shape in the triangle of peasant self-regulation, local upper-class hegemony, and intervention by ground-level organs of the state hierarchy.
¹²⁹
Another important question for many countries in the second half of the nineteenth century was how the administrative integration of large territorial nation-states or empires was to be achieved. Old imperial federations, as in China or the Habsburg Empire (where military rather than civil administrators were the main lever), were successfully held together. Both Germany and Japan had to face huge challenges with regard to administrative convergence and standardization: the former after the foundation of the North German League in 1866 and, on a larger scale, after the establishment of the German Reich in 1871; the latter when the system of fiefdoms (
han
) was abolished, partly as a result of peasant revolts against their overlords, and prefectures were introduced along French lines.
¹³⁰
A focus on the respective peripheries rather than the national centers makes more apparent the obstacles and limits of stateled centralization. It is therefore worth considering the founding of the German Reich from the point of view of a small component state, or Meiji unification
from that of a
han
turned into a prefecture, or the political history of late imperial China from that of an individual province.
¹³¹

In Europe too, it was not the early modern period but the nineteenth century that saw the transition from the traditional to the rational state.
¹³²
Inevitably this was bound up with the construction of bureaucracies and the expansion of state activity—a process observable almost everywhere in the world. It was not a by-product but often a premise of industrialization, where, as Alexander Gerschenkron has pointed out, the state's structuring and initiating role increased in the case of countries that had fallen behind internationally. Russia and Japan are good cases in point. The expansion of state institutions and activities proceeded in a number of different ways. Bureaucracies differed in efficiency (hence in their capacity to process information) and with regard to the speed with which they made decisions and implemented them. The notoriously cumbersome Habsburg bureaucracy needed a long time to reform itself. If selforganization was strong in society at large, even in the construction of a capitalist market economy, then a lean state could be more effective than a bloated bureaucracy obsessed with rules and regulations; the British example is evidence of this. The pace of bureaucratization was rarely constant, and it even ran up against countertendencies. In the United States, for example, the Northern state apparatus grew strongly during the Civil War, and postwar Reconstruction was an attempt to extend this experience to the South, but anticentralist forces, sometimes hostile to the state as such, became stronger there as Reconstruction shuddered to a halt. In the last quarter of the century, the spurt of liberal capitalism in the North led to a general decline in calls for state regulation.
¹³³

In Europe, by contrast, the politically driven conception of a “night watchman” state was dominant only in exceptional cases such as Britain. By 1914 at least five characteristics of bureaucratization had established themselves in many Continental countries: (1) regular salaries for work in the government service; (2) employment and renewal of state personnel in accordance with an efficiency criterion; (3) the grouping of individual authorities into official hierarchies with a solid division of labor and chain of command; (4) the integration of all officials into a national administration (harder to achieve and less complete in countries with a federal system); and (5) a separation of powers between parliamentary politics and bureaucratic executive, although the two were everywhere closely linked at the very top.
¹³⁴

Even for Europe, however, it would be wrong to speak of an all-pervasive state such as we know it today. Many spheres of life were not yet regulated by laws and edicts; nor were there industrial standards, noise-control regulations, construction licenses, or even compulsory general education. The bureaucratization of the state had been proceeding worldwide under scarcely altered technical and media conditions. Communication in writing, already current in China at a time when no one had thought of it in Europe, had become standard. Administration meant paperwork, and the telegraph, incapable of transmitting large
volumes of data, did not bring sensational advantages for the administration of distant regions. The omniscience and omnipotence of the state found their limits in logistics.