Europe: A History (169 page)
Both constitutional and autocratic systems could prove hostile to national aspirations. In this respect the experience of the Irish and the Ukrainians is worthy of comparison; the political arithmetic was stacked against both of them.
The Irish participated in a prominent ‘Western democracy’. From 1801, when the Union of Ireland and Great Britain was enacted, over fifty Irish MPs sat in the British Parliament at Westminster. It gave them all sorts of benefits except the one they most desired—control over their own affairs. But their political activities were incessant. The Catholic Association of Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), which organized huge ‘monster’ public meetings for years, achieved religious toleration in 1829. Discontent was later kept on the boil by the sufferings of the Famine, by the injustices of successive Land Acts, and by the lack of political progress. The complacency of English Conservatives, the tenacious resistance of the Ulster Protestants, and the violent exploits of the Irish radical wing, which was represented by the Fenians (Irish Republican Brotherhood, from 1858) and by Sinn Fein (from 1905), made for political deadlock. In the Irish countryside the long-running war between government-backed landlords and the rebellious tenants of the Land League (1879) created a pervasive climate of fear. Even when C. S. Parnell (1846–91) and his Irish party at Westminster gained the support of Gladstone’s ruling Liberals, three successive bills for Irish Home Rule were blocked in the House of Lords. The true cultural awakening of the Irish occurred late, in the 1890s, when the Irish Literary Theatre, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the Gaelic League were all founded, ‘On the necessity for de-anglicising the Irish People’. In 1900 Queen Victoria visited Dublin for the first time in forty years, rescinded the ban on ‘the wearing of the green’, and encouraged massive St Patrick’s Day parades throughout the Empire. But it was too late for symbolic gestures. In 1912, when a fourth Home Rule Bill was prepared, both the Ulster Volunteers in Belfast and the National Volunteers in Dublin raised formidable armies. As Europe approached the Great War, Ireland stood on the brink of civil war. Ireland was indeed divided. Ulster, defiant, had no sense of Irishness. ‘Ireland is not a nation,’ said a future British prime minister, ‘but two peoples separated by a deeper gulf than that dividing Ireland from Great Britain.’
37
Sinn Fein, which had always looked to the USA for support, now sought aid from Germany.
[FAMINE] [ORANGE]
GENES
I
IN
1866 Father Gregor Mendel (1811–84), abbot of the Augustinian I monastery at Brno in Moravia, published the findings of his experiments into the propagation of the common green pea,
Pisum sativum
. For several years the abbot had been observing the peas in the monastery garden. By careful cross-pollination, and by concentrating on just a few specific characteristics such as height and colour, he was able to demonstrate definite patterns of inheritance in successive plant generations. He established the existence of dominant and recessive characteristics whose recurrence in hybrids he could empirically predict. His results were totally ignored. The ‘Mendelian Laws of Inheritance’, which form the starting point of modern genetics, were separately rediscovered in 1900 by three different biologists.
1
Mendelism remained in the experimental stage for many decades. Although the presence of
chromosomes
in living cells was established early in the twentieth century, the mechanics of the
genes
, or ‘unit-characters’, as Mendel had called them, long defied the researchers. The significance of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was not realized until 1944, and the double-helical spiral structure of the DNA molecule not demonstrated until 1953. In this regard, biology lagged well behind the corresponding advances in modern physics and chemistry.
In the mean time, a Soviet scientist claimed to have solved many of the fundamental problems. Troflon Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) rejected the chromosomal basis of heredity, arguing instead that inheritable changes could be induced in plants by environmental influences and by grafting. He published experimental results showing that the germination of wheat seed could be dramatically improved by subjection to low temperature. He even tried to make wheat plants produce rye seed. It was all a scam: his results had been falsified. But having persuaded Stalin that his theories would remedy the failures of Soviet agriculture, Lysenko shaped himself a dazzling career that flourished for three decades. Elected President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science in 1938, he ordered millions of acres to be sown with grain treated by his methods. When the grain failed to sprout, the farmers were arrested for sabotage. Critics, including Russia’s leading geneticist N. I. Vavrilov, were cast into the Gulag. Teachers had to present Lysenkoism as gospel. Soviet biology was blighted almost beyond repair. Lysenko received two Stalin Prizes, the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of the USSR.
2
Western biologists treated Lysenko as ‘illiterate’. In return, Lysenko derided all orthodox geneticists as ‘reactionary decadents grovelling before Western capitalism’. Foremost among the targets of his scorn was Father Gregor Mendel.
3
The Ukrainians lived under two ‘Eastern autocracies’. Once subjects of Poland, they were now subjects either of Russia or of Austria. An overwhelmingly peasant people, their level of national consciousness was necessarily low until the bonds of serfdom were severed in mid-century. Traditionally known as
Rusini
or ‘Ruthenians’, they now began to adopt the ‘Ukrainian’ label in reaction to the misleading and insulting designation of’Little Russians’, which tsarist officialdom had invented for them. (A Ukrainian simply meant a politically conscious Ruthene.) Their cultural awakening was greatly stimulated by the poetic writings of Taras Shevchenko (1814–61); their political awakening gathered pace in later decades. In Russia they were faced by a regime which refused to recognize their existence, regarding them as a regional Russian minority, and allowing them only one religion—Russian Orthodoxy. In Austria, where they enjoyed greater cultural and political freedom they preserved the Uniate Rite, and were slow to adopt the Ukrainian label. At the turn of the century, they organized Ruthenian schooling on a large scale. But there they were faced by a strong Polish community, which held the numerical majority in Galicia as a whole, including Lemberg.
[UKRAINA]
FAMINE
B
ETWEEN
1845 and 1849 Ireland suffered one of Europe’s worst natural disasters. The Irish potato famine caused a million deaths, drove over a million more to emigrate, and reduced the island’s population of 8.2 million (1845) by at least a quarter. Although Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, the most powerful state of the era, she received little effective relief. To some observers, it was the ultimate Malthusian apocalypse: to others, the culmination of centuries of misrule.
1
The immediate cause of the disaster lay in the fungal blight
phytoph-thora infestans
, which decimated the potato crop in three successive years. The blight had been noted in the Isle of Wight a year before it crossed the Irish Sea in 1845. In England it was a minor nuisance, in Ireland the agent of death.
By the early nineteenth century, large sections of Ireland’s rural population had become totally dependent on a ‘potato culture’. A vegetable rich in vitamins and protein, it grew easily in the moist Irish earth. It sustained large numbers of poor people who were left with too much time for singing, dancing, drinking poteen, and telling stories. They had as many names for potatoes as the English had for roses. They called it the murphy, the spud, the tater, the pratie, and the ‘precarious exotic’.
Potato dependency was the product of many disorders. In the six decades after 1780, Ireland experienced a demographic explosion—an increase of nearly 300 per cent as compared with 88 per cent in England and Wales. Yet, with the exception of Ulster, she experienced little industrialization to absorb the surplus numbers, though emigration to the USA and Australia began after the Napoleonic Wars. Most seriously, Irish society was clamped by a body of repressive legislation, which blocked many obvious solutions to her distress. Conditions on the land had been atrocious for longer than anyone remembered. Until 1829, Catholic Irishmen were not even allowed to buy land, and few had money to do so. Anglo-Irish landlords, often absentees, demanded high rents or deliveries in kind on pain of instant eviction. Evictions were enforced by the military, who customarily razed or ‘tumbled’ the houses of defaulters. Irish peasants had no security, and little incentive to work. They frequently murdered their persecutors, or joined the British army. In the words of the Duke of Wellington, ‘Ireland was an inexhaustible nursery for the finest soldiers’. But it was also the home of squalor—with large ragged families living in mud huts with no furniture and the company of pigs. As a German traveller remarked: ‘it seems that the poorest among the Letts, Esthonians and Finnlanders lead a life of comparative comfort’.
2
A generous Irish historian writes that the initial policies of Sir Robert Peel’s government ‘were more effective than sometimes allowed’.
3
In 1846 prices were controlled, Indian meal distributed, and public works started to provide employment. But Peel’s fall over Corn Law repeal ushered in a Whig ministry that did not believe in intervention. ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all,’ exclaimed the Iron Duke. Irishmen paid their rent, and ate nettles.
In 1847, 3 million public soup rations were served. But they did not stop typhus, or the crowds fleeing the countryside. In the district of Skibbereen in County Cork, where a dozen landlords took £50,000 in rent, there were corpses in the fields and children dying in the workhouse; and grain was still being exported under guard to England. Robber bands pillaged the country towns. ‘What we have to contend with’, said the Treasury Minister responsible for relief, ‘is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’
4
In 1848 the potato crop failed again, and the human exodus swelled to a flood. Ragged families garnered their last strength to walk to the ports. Landlords often paid for them to go. They collapsed on the roads, perished in the overcrowded steerage holds, and died in droves on the docks of New York and Montreal. They landed racked with fever, stomach cramps, and anglophobia.
The famine put an end to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to reject the Union. But it also killed any real hopes of reconciliation. And the exodus continued:
A million a decade! Calmly and cold
The units are read by our statesman sage.
Little they think of a Nation old,
Fading away from History’s page:
—Outcast weeds by a desolate sea
Fallen leaves of Humanity!
5
This was not Europe’s last famine. It was followed in 1867–8 by similar catastrophes in Finland and in Belgium. Nor was it on the scale of the Volga famine of 1921 or in the nature of the terror-famine in Ukraine of 1932–3
[HARVEST]
.
But it was shameful for where and how it happened. The British government’s final relief measure, in August 1849, was to send Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on a state visit to Dublin.
In both empires, then, the Ukrainians had to contend with the fact that their homeland was inhabited by several other nationalities—Poles, Jews, and Russians—all of whom were hostile to Ukrainian nationalism. It was frustrating, to say the least. The potential membership of the Ukrainian nation was as numerous as the French or the English. Yet nowhere could they bring their numbers to bear. Like the Irish, they remained a stateless nation. Like the Irish, their activists began to look to Germany.
Balkan nationalism grew specially intense. The Ottoman Empire had always tolerated a large measure of religious and cultural autonomy, whilst extirpating political dissidence. Assimilation into the ruling Muslim culture, except in Bosnia, Albania, and parts of Bulgaria, was low. As a result, ready-made Christian nations were waiting to emerge as soon as Ottoman power receded. Typically, they enjoyed a long period of practical autonomy, subject to the presence of nominal Ottoman garrisons, prior to acquiring absolute sovereignty. They also tended to start life on a minimal territorial base, which failed to satisfy their aspirations, and which led to repeated conflicts with their neighbours. None of them possessed even the semblance of ethnic homogeneity. Greece won its formal independence in 1832, the Romanian principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) in 1856, Montenegro in i860, Serbia and Bulgaria in 1878. The Albanians, the only predominantly Muslim nation in the region, lacked the support of the Christian powers, and were kept waiting until 1913. (See Appendix III, p. 1302.)
[SHQIPERIA]
The Greeks’ experience was not felicitous, least of all with their monarchs. In seven reigns between 1833 and 1973, there were five abdications. The first King of the Hellenes, Otto I of Bavaria (r. 1833–62), a Catholic enthusiast for Germanic efficiency, proved more unpopular than the Ottomans. The second, George I (r. 1864–1913), was imported from Denmark to found an accident-prone dynasty. Nationalism and foreign kings did not mix. The Serbian experience was no happier: the blood feud between the rival dynasties of Karadordević and Obrenović fuelled ten royal assassinations. Russian support aroused a strong reaction from Austria, especially since the Slavs of the Dual Monarchy were increasingly impressed by the Serbian example. Serbia’s success in the Balkan Wars finally pushed Vienna into a show-down.
Unfortunately, the ethnic mosaic of the Balkans impeded the creation of stable national states. ‘Balkanization’ became a byword for political fragmentation, petty-minded nationalism, and vicious feuds. In the three Balkan wars of the early twentieth century, the Christian successor states fought no less eagerly among themselves than against the retreating Turks (see below).
