The Transformation of the World (197 page)

(5) The nineteenth century was also a century of
emancipation
. This will hardly sound surprising. We read again and again about an Age of Revolution, stretching either from 1789 to 1849 or covering the whole period down to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and also about “emancipation and participation” as basic tendencies of the epoch.
²²
This always refers to Europe alone. The word “emancipation,” derived from Roman law and emphatically European, is far less
likely to be applied to the world as a whole. Emancipation means, in the words of a political scientist, “the self-liberation or release of groups in society from intellectual, legal, social, or political tutelage or discrimination, or from forms of rule that are perceived as unjust.”
²³
The term also often refers to national liberation from the rule of an empire or neighboring state. Should we then extend to the rest of the world Benedetto Croce's idealist view of 1932, in which the drive for liberty was a major motivating force of nineteenth-century Europe?
²⁴
To some extent, yes.

A number of emancipation processes were successful. They led to greater freedom and equal rights, more rarely to actual equality. Slavery disappeared as a legal institution from the countries and colonies of the West. European Jews to the west of the Tsarist Empire achieved the best legal and social position they had ever had. The European peasantry was released from feudal burdens. The working classes fought for and won the freedom of association and, in many European countries, the right to vote. The balance sheet is harder to draw in the case of women's emancipation, which first became a theme of public debate only in the nineteenth century. Here the British dominions and the United States led the way in terms of political rights and opportunities. But it is not possible to say in general, even for Europe, whether the position of women in relationships and the family also improved. The bourgeois family brought constraints of its own into play.

If we assume that the revolutions of the age were also about emancipation, the successes are more conspicuous than the failures—perhaps an illusion, given that history prefers to remember the victors. There were ambiguous cases, such as the French Revolution: its early goals of representative democracy were finally achieved in the Third Republic after many system changes, whereas the direct democracy model of the Jacobin dictatorship foundered and sank, making only one brief reappearance in the Paris Commune of 1871. Nor were the revolutions of 1848–49 unequivocal in their effect; complete failures they were undoubtedly not, if compared with such abortive and ultimately inconsequential experiences as the Tupac Amaru uprising in Peru or the Taiping Revolution in China.
²⁵
In the interplay between revolution and reformist prophylaxis or postrevolutionary absorption of revolutionary impulses, Europe did in the end—at least west of the Tsarist Empire—achieve a gradual broadening of constitutional provisions for civic involvement. The fact that representative government had deeper roots here than in other parts of the world made this evolution easier. But on the eve of the First World War there were not so many democracies in the late-twentieth-century sense of the term. Not every state that had given itself a republican form, as most Latin American countries and China recently (1912) had done too, thereby provided the substance for democratic politics. The vast colonial sphere was divided between the very democratic British dominions (by now essentially independent nation-states) and the invariably autocratic colonial systems of what was then known as the “colored world.”

All in all, the picture is ambiguous and contradictory even for Europe. In 1913, with regard to the trends of recent decades, it was possible to speak of the spread of democracy but not of its irresistible triumph, while political liberalism already had its best years behind it. Nevertheless, it was a century of emancipation or, more plainly put, a century of revolt against coercion and humiliation. Traditional forms of domination were less routinely perpetuated than in previous ages. The development of a huge federal polity in North America showed that contrary to all theoretical prognoses, a major country was capable of surviving on the basis of citizenship and participation. Monarchical absolutism was in crisis far beyond the borders of Europe—seemingly least in the Tsarist Empire, but all the more dramatically there as things turned out in 1917–18. Where the legitimation model of divine right persisted (as it did in Russia), major propaganda efforts were required to make it palatable to the population. Strong monarchies, such as Japan's system of imperial rule, did not rely on an uninterrupted continuum with the past but were self-consciously neo-traditionalist. European constitutionalist theory found serious and enthusiastic advocates in large parts of noncolonial Asia and Africa. The British Empire, by far the largest, sported constitutional rule in its dominions and, shortly before the First World War, indicated a willingness to consider timid constitutional concessions in India.

Emancipation pressure kept mounting “from below,” from a “people” that, by virtue of the great revolutions at the beginning of the period, had become a real player as well as a legend that was often evoked. Slaves put up resistance, therefore making modest but incremental contributions to their own liberation. The Jewish population of Western Europe did not wait for effusions of grace from enlightened rulers but set in motion a great project of self-reform. Social interests organized themselves on a permanent basis; never before had there been anything like labor unions or mass socialist parties.

Even at the height of colonialism and imperialism, the concept of emancipation was not entirely out of place. Despite the fact that things quieted down in many colonies after the wars of conquest, perhaps even bordering on something like internal peace, foreign colonial rule could base itself on scant legitimacy. There was a thoroughly pragmatic reason for this, since the most popular justification—the “civilizing mission”—could easily be measured by its results. The colonized peoples might accept the self-serving rhetoric of the colonizers if the intervention actually brought the much-heralded benefits: security, justice, a little more prosperity, slightly better health care, and new educational opportunities not offered in exchange for complete cultural estrangement. Alien rule is an age-old phenomenon in history. So, in the eyes of many of its subjects, European colonialism was not more objectionable per se than any other kind of foreign rule: that of the Moguls in India, the Ottomans in Arabia, the Manchus in China, and so on. But if the promised advances failed to materialize or if living conditions became worse, the colonial reserves of legitimation soon ran out. This was the case in many places even before the First World War. The liberation
movements of the later Third World—whether or not we call them “nationalist” for the early twentieth century—emerged in response to this credibility deficit. It was not difficult for critical intellectuals in the colonies or in exile to uncover the contradictions between the West's universal principles and its often deplorable behavior on the spot. After the Age of Revolution, colonialism was therefore ideologically unstable (and controversial also among the public of the colonial powers);
²⁶
and even before any nationalist program entered the equation, pressure for emancipation was part and parcel of a colonial system resting on inequality, injustice, and hypocrisy—on “the unblushing selfishness of the greatest civilized nations” (as the outspoken naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace put it in 1898 in his review of the period).
²⁷

The nineteenth century did not end abruptly in August 1914, before Verdun in 1916, or with Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd in April 1917. History is not a theater where the curtain suddenly falls. In autumn 1918, however, it was widely noted that the “world of yesterday” (the title of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's important memoirs, posthumously published in 1942)
²⁸
had gone up in smoke. In Europe some felt nostalgic for it, while others glimpsed the opportunity for a new beginning beyond the now disenchanted “belle époque.” The US president Woodrow Wilson and his supporters around the world hoped to have finally overcome the discredited past. The twenties became the decade of global reorientation, a hinge period between the centuries, at least in a political sense.
²⁹
Economically, they turned out to be the prelude to the Great Depression, a crisis more global still than the World War. Culturally, they prolonged in Europe the artistic avant-garde of the prewar period, while elsewhere they marked the start of something new in aesthetic terms. Whether it serves historical understanding to apostrophize the years between 1914 and 1945 as a “Second Thirty Years' War” must remain undecided. In any event, the analogy could apply only to Europe.

Let us try a different tack. Between 1918 and 1945, the world came up with unusually few constructive and durable solutions. The First World War had revealed many problems of the nineteenth century, while the interwar period offered not enough responses to those that still persisted. Many questions that had arisen in the nineteenth century retained their virulence even after 1945. Tendencies carried over from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The
second
postwar period attempted a reset—not always successfully, but on the whole more so than the first. Some of the older men and women looking for new directions after 1945 had been born and socialized in the nineteenth century. Many had already been politically influential, or at least gained political experience, in 1919 or the years immediately after: for example, Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, John Foster Dulles, Joseph Stalin, Yoshida Shigeru, and Mao Zedong. Others, such as John Maynard Keynes and Jean Monnet, had been active as advisers. Great philosophers, scientists, engineers, writers, composers, painters, and architects who had left their mark on the times before 1914
continued their labors. The nineteenth century had paved the way for the disasters since 1914; the philosopher Hannah Arendt and others held it responsible for them.
³⁰
But other traditions in readiness after 1945 (liberalism, pacifism, trade unionism, or democratic socialism, for example) were not completely tainted or decrepit. From the retrospect of 1950, the year 1910—when, as Virginia Woolf once quipped, human character changed—appeared to be infinitely remote. In many respects, however, it was closer than the horrors of the most recent war.

ABBREVIATIONS