The Transformation of the World (91 page)

Special Paths: Japan and the United States

Not all cases of nation-state formation in the nineteenth century fall under one of these three paths; some of the most spectacular were unique of their kind. Two Asian countries had never been part of a larger empire and were therefore, like Western Europe, capable of transforming themselves without the energy input of anti-imperial resistance: Japan and Siam/Thailand. Both had always (or more precisely, in the Siamese case, since the mid-eighteenth century) been independent in foreign policy and had never fallen under European colonial rule. Whether they should therefore be considered “new nation-states,” in the external sense of the achievement of sovereignty, is questionable. For both countries reshaped themselves under considerable informal pressure from the Western powers—especially Britain, France, and the United States—the stimulus being a concern for communal and dynastic survival in a world where Western interference in the affairs of non-Western states seemed to be taken for granted.

In 1900 Japan was one of the most tightly integrated nation-states in the world, with a system of government approaching French levels of unification and centralization, regional authorities that did little more than follow instructions, a well-functioning internal market, and an exceptionally homogeneous culture (Japan had no ethnic or linguistic minorities, apart from the indigenous Ainu in the far North). This compact uniformity was the result of comprehensive reforms that began in 1868 and go by the name of the Meiji Renewal or the Meiji Restoration. It was one of the most striking instances of nation building anywhere in the nineteenth century, more dramatic in many respects than what happened in Germany.

This process was not associated with territorial aggrandizement. Japan did not expand beyond its archipelago until 1894—if one leaves aside the annexation, in 1879, of the formerly tribute-bearing Ryukyu Islands and an unimpressive naval expedition in 1874 to the Chinese island of Taiwan. Japan's closure
from the outside world since the 1630s had entailed that until 1854 it scarcely had a foreign policy in the usual sense of the term. It maintained diplomatic relations with Korea but not China, and among European countries only with the Netherlands (which in the seventeenth century had had a high profile in Southeast and East Asia). This was not due to a sovereignty deficit, however: if Japan had wanted to “play the game” in the early modern world, it would undoubtedly have been recognized—like China—as a sovereign agent.

In the case of Japan, external nation-state formation means that after its “opening up” in the early 1850s the country gradually began to seek a role on the international stage. Internally, the order that survived until the Meiji Renewal was in essence the one created in 1600 by regional warrior-princes such as Hideyoshi Toyotomi or Tokugawa Ieyasu, which clever politics consolidated by the end of the seventeenth century into a political system with the greatest level of integration ever seen in the archipelago's history. The territorial aspect of this is not easy to grasp with Western categories. The country was split up into roughly 250 domains (
han
), with a prince (
daimyō
) at the head of each. These
daimyō
were not fully independent rulers. In principle they administered their territory autonomously, but they stood in a fief-like relationship to the most powerful princely house, the Tokugawa, presided over by the shogun. Legitimacy was vested in an imperial court in Kyoto that lacked all real power. The shogun in Edo (Tokyo), on the other hand, was a worldly figure with no sacred functions or royal aura: he could not base himself on any theory of divine right or celestial mandate. The
daimyō
were not organized as an estate; there was no parliament at which they could close ranks in opposition to the overlord. This at-first-sight highly fragmented system, reminiscent of the central European mosaic during the early modern period, was integrated through a rotation system that obliged princes to reside in turn at the shogun's court in Edo. This crucially assisted the flowering of cities and of an urban merchant class, especially in Edo itself. The development of a national market was far advanced by the eighteenth century. A functional equivalent of the German
Zollverein
was thus already a feature of early modern Japan.

In another similarity with (northern) Germany, politically influential circles in Japan understood that small-state particularism was no longer viable in a rapidly changing world. This did not lead all to agree voluntarily on a federative solution, which would have involved winding up the territorial principalities, and so the initiative had to come from a hegemon. The island empire under Tokugawa rule (the
bakufu
system) was already politically unified within the boundaries of Japanese settlement. The question was who would provide the impetus for centralization. In the end, the architects of change were not
bakufu
men but circles of samurai nobility in two peripheral principalities of southern Japan, Choshu and Satsuma, who made a grab for power in the capital, supported by officials of an emperor whose significance had long been merely ceremonial.

The Meiji “Restoration” of 1868 is so called because the authority of the imperial house was restored after centuries of retreat, and because the young emperor
was thrust into the central position in the political system under the carefully chosen slogan “Meiji” (that is, “enlightened rule”). The rebellious samurai could not draw legitimacy either from traditional political thought or from democratic procedures. Behind the fiction or presumption of acting in the emperor's name lay an act of pure usurpation. In reality it revolutionized Japanese politics and society in the space of a few years; neither was it only a “revolution from above,” in the sense of having a conservative social impact or of heading off a popular revolutionary movement. The samurai modernizers soon abolished the samurai status and all its privileges. This amounted to the most thoroughgoing revolution of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It unfolded without terror or civil war; some
daimyō
put up resistance that had to be broken militarily, but there was nothing remotely like the drama and violence of the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, or the war in northern Italy between Piedmont/France and Austria.
⁷³
The
daimyō
were partly persuaded, partly bullied, and partly won over with financial compensation. In short, Japan needed relatively little force to achieve far-reaching changes: a peaceful convergence of internal and external nation-building in a protected international space outside the European system of states, without significant foreign military intervention and with no colonial subjugation.
⁷⁴

Isolation from European power politics linked Japan and the United States. At the same time, their political trajectories were quite different. In North America there were no “feudal” structures that had to be smashed. The rebellious colonies had won diplomatic recognition in 1778 from France, and in 1783 from the former imperial mother country, Great Britain. The United States, therefore, was from the outset an externally sovereign state. It was also remarkably well integrated at various levels, sustained by the unitary civic consciousness of its political elite, and appearing in every respect to be part of the modern world. The failure of these hopeful beginnings to translate into continuous and harmonious national development is one of the great paradoxes of the nineteenth century. A country that thought it had left behind the militarism and Machiavellianism of the Old World experienced the second-largest paroxysm of violence (after the Chinese Taiping Revolution of 1850–64) between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War.
Why
this was so cannot be explained here. Two processes interacted dynamically up to a point when secession of a large part of the territorial body politic became structurally almost inevitable: first, westward expansion proceeding without overall political guidance and generally in a highly haphazard fashion; and second, a broadening rift between the slave-based society in the eleven Southern states and the free-labor capitalism in the North.
⁷⁵
The breaking point came in 1861, almost contemporaneously with Italian unification and the onset (in 1862) of a political-military dynamic that led to the founding of the German Reich in 1871. But there was something far more fatalistic about the prehistory of the American Civil War than about the Italian or German unification process, in which so much depended on the
tactical skill and gambler's luck of men like Bismarck and Cavour. The breakaway of the South became ever more unavoidable in the second half of the 1850s.

First of all, the secession broke up the United States as a unitary nation-state. The open-endedness of historical developments enters the picture only in the
aftermath
of great confrontations. On the eve of the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 many people, if not most, expected that Austria would emerge the winner. With
hindsight
Prussia's victory is understandable: Moltke's mobile offensive strategy, together with the better weaponry and higher educational level of the Prussian conscript army, was the decisive factor. It was still a close call, however. If we allow ourselves a little thought experiment and imagine that the American Civil War ended in military stalemate, then the North would have had to accept the breakup of the republic. And if the Confederacy had been able to continue with its peaceful development, the slaveholder regime would probably have become a prosperous and internationally influential second great power in North America—a prospect to which even Britain's Liberal government began to warm in 1862, before the course of the war made it illusory.
⁷⁶
Dwarfing the national risings in Poland (1830, 1867) and Hungary (1848–49), the secession of the Southern states was the most dramatic instance in the nineteenth century of a failed attempt to gain independent statehood.

After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States had to be refounded. In the years of the painful construction of a liberal Italy, the Meiji transformation in Japan, and the domestic consolidation of the German Reich, the United States—saved as a unitary state, but far from united internally—embarked on a new phase of nation building. The reincorporation of the South during the so-called Reconstruction period (1867–77) coincided with a further bout of westward expansion. The United States was unique in having to negotiate
simultaneously
, during its most intense period of internal nation building, three different processes of integration: (1) the annexation of the former slave states; (2) the incorporation of the Midwest behind the gradually advancing frontier; and (3) the social absorption of millions of European immigrants. The post-1865 refounding of the United States as a nation-state recalls most of all the model of hegemonic unification. In terms of pure power politics, Bismarck was the Lincoln of Germany, although the emancipator of no one. In the United States, the reintegration of a defeated civil-war adversary proceeded along traditional constitutional lines, without changes to the political system. This highlights the absolute symbolic centrality of constitutionalism in the political culture of the United States. The oldest of the world's great written constitutions has also been the most stable and the most integrative.

Abandoned Centers

Finally we consider a new situation for the nineteenth century: the abandoned imperial center. After 1945, several European countries woke up to the recognition that they were no longer in possession of an empire. Britain would
have been more or less faced with this realization after the American War of Independence, had it not been able to compensate for the loss by building up its position in India and gaining new colonies and bases in the Indian Ocean. Spain did not have that chance: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were all it had left after the liberation of the American colonies. Although Cuba in particular developed into a lucrative colony, Spain was from the 1820s confronted with the task of changing from the center of a world empire into an ordinary European nation-state—a special kind of nation building, involving contraction rather than expansion. For half a century it had relatively little success. Only in 1874 did political conditions stabilize. But in 1898 the shock of defeat in the war with the United States and the loss of Cuba and the Philippines threw everything into turmoil again. Spain, not the supposedly “sick men” on the Bosporus or the Yellow Sea, was the real imperial loser of the nineteenth century. Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Pacific island of Guam were rich pickings for the United States; even the German Reich, which had played no part in the war, tried to help itself parasitically to a few morsels.
⁷⁷
Spain was bitterly disappointed that the British did not support it against the United States—and resentfully felt targeted when Lord Salisbury, then the prime minister, made a speech in May 1898 about living and dying nations. The trauma of 1898 would weigh heavily for decades upon Spanish domestic politics.
⁷⁸

Brazil's independence similarly reduced the Portuguese empire to Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Macao, and Timor, but this was rather less dramatic than the shrinkage of Spain's position in the world. The total population of the empire fell from 7.3 million in 1820 to 1.65 million in 1850,
⁷⁹
with only the African territories being of any real importance. It was a harsh blow when Britain demanded in 1890 that regions between Angola and Mozambique should be split off. Nevertheless, Portugal was not completely unsuccessful in building a “third,” African empire: Angola and Mozambique, hitherto settled by Portuguese only in the coastal areas, were now subjected to “effective occupation” (as it is called in international law).
⁸⁰
It was thus Spain, rather than Portugal, that became the first postcolonial country in Europe. In the looming “age of imperialism,” the descendants of Cortés and Pizarro would have to learn with difficulty how to manage without an empire.