The New Penguin History of the World (176 page)

Kemal, as he tended to call himself (the name meant ‘Perfection’), was something of a Peter the Great (though he was not interested in territorial expansion after the successful revision of the dictated peace) and something of a more enlightened despot. He was also one of the century’s most effective modernizers. The law was secularized (on the model of the Napoleonic code), the Muslim calendar abandoned, and in 1928 the constitution was amended to remove the statement that Turkey was an Islamic state. To this day, she remains the only Middle Eastern country with a Muslim population to adopt the principal of secularism. Polygamy came to an end.

In 1935 the weekly day of rest, formerly Friday, the Islamic holy day, became Sunday and a new word entered the language:
vikend
(the period from 1 p.m. Saturday to midnight Sunday). Schools ceased to give religious
instruction. The fez was forbidden; although it had come from Europe it was considered Muslim. Kemal was conscious of the radical nature of the modernization he wished to achieve and such symbols mattered to him. They were signs, but signs of something very important, the replacement of traditional Islamic society by a European one. One Islamic ideologist urged his fellow Turks to ‘belong to the Turkish nation, the Muslim religion and European civilization’ and did not appear to see difficulties in achieving that. The alphabet was latinized and this had great importance for education, henceforth obligatory at the primary level. A national past was rewritten in the school-books; it was said that Adam had been a Turk.

Kemal – on whom the National Assembly conferred the name of Ataturk, or ‘Father of the Turks’– was an immensely significant figure. He was what Mehemet Ali perhaps wanted to be, the first transformer of an Islamic state by modernization. He remains strikingly interesting; until his death in 1938 he seemed determined not to let his revolution congeal. The result was the creation of a state in its day and in some ways among the most advanced in the world. In Turkey, a much greater break with the past was involved in giving a new role to women than in Europe, and in 1934 Turkish women received the vote. They were encouraged, too, to enter the professions.

The most important Islamic country neither under direct imperial rule by Europeans nor Ottomans before 1914 was Persia. The British and Russians had both interfered in her affairs after agreeing over spheres of influence in 1907, but Russian power had lapsed with the Bolshevik Revolution. British forces continued to operate on Persian territory until the end of the war. Resentment against the British was excited when a Persian delegation was not allowed to state its case to the Peace Conference. There was a confused period during which the British struggled to find means of maintaining resistance to the Bolsheviks after withdrawal of their forces. There could be no question of retaining Persia by force, given the overtaxing of British strength. Almost by accident, a British general had already discovered the man who was to do this, though hardly in the way anticipated.

This was Reza Khan, an officer who carried out a
coup d’état
in 1921 and at once used the Bolshevik fear of the British to get a treaty conceding all Russian rights and property in Persia and the withdrawal of Russian forces. Reza Khan then went on to defeat separatists who had British support. In 1925 he was given dictatorial powers by the national assembly and a few months later was proclaimed ‘Shah of Shahs’. He was to rule until 1941 (when the Russians and the British together turned him off the throne), somewhat in the style of an Iranian Kemal. The abolition of the veil and religious schools showed secularist aims, though they were not
pressed so far as in Turkey. In 1928 the capitulations were abolished, an important symbolic step; meanwhile industrialization and the improvement of communications were pressed forward. A close association with Turkey was cultivated. Finally, the Persian strong man won in 1933 the first notable success in a new art, the diplomacy of oil, when the concession held by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was cancelled. When the British government took the question to the League of Nations, another and more favourable concession was Reza Shah’s greatest victory and the best evidence of the independence of Persia. A new era had opened in the Gulf, fittingly marked in 1935 by an official change of the name of the state: Persia became Iran. Two years later, the Shah’s wife for the first time appeared unveiled.

5
The Second World War

The demonstration that the European age was at last over was made in another world war. It began (in 1939) like its predecessor, as a European struggle, and like it became a combination of wars. To a far greater degree than any of its predecessors, it made unprecedented demands; this time they were on a scale which left nothing untouched, unmobilized, undisturbed. It was realistically termed ‘total’ war.

By 1939, there were already many signs for those with eyes to see that an historical era was ending. Though 1919 had brought a few last extensions of territorial control by colonial powers, the behaviour of the greatest of them, Great Britain, showed that imperialism was on the defensive, if not already in retreat. The vigour of Japan meant that Europe was no longer the only focus of the international power system; a prescient South African statesman said as early as 1921 that ‘the scene has shifted away from Europe to the Far East and to the Pacific’. His prediction now seems more than ever justified and it was made when the likelihood that China might soon again exercise her due weight was far from obvious. Ten years after he spoke, the economic foundations of western preponderance had been shaken even more plainly than the political; the United States, greatest of industrial powers, had still ten million unemployed. Though none of the European industrial countries was by then in quite such straits, the confidence which took for granted the health of the basic foundations of the economic system had evaporated for ever. Industry might be picking up in some countries – largely because rearmament was stimulating it – but attempts to find recovery by international cooperation came to an end when a World Economic Conference broke down in 1933. After that, each nation had gone its own way; even the United Kingdom at last abandoned free trade.
Laissez-faire
was dead, even if people still talked about it. Governments were by 1939 deliberately interfering with the economy as they had not done since the heyday of mercantilism.

If the political and economic assumptions of the nineteenth century had gone, so had many others. It is more difficult to speak of intellectual and
spiritual trends than of political and economic, but though many people still clung to old shibboleths, for the élite which led thought and opinion the old foundations were no longer firm. Many people still attended religious services – though only a minority, even in Roman Catholic countries – but the masses of the industrial cities lived in a post-Christian world in which the physical removal of the institutions and symbols of religion would have made little difference to their daily lives. So did intellectuals; they perhaps faced an even greater problem than that of loss of religious belief, because many of the liberal ideas which had helped to displace Christianity from the eighteenth century were by now being displaced in their turn. In the 1920s and 1930s, the liberal certainties of the autonomy of the individual, objective moral criteria, rationality, the authority of parents, and an explicable mechanical universe all seemed to be going under along with the belief in free trade.

The symptoms were most obvious in the arts. For three or four centuries, since the age of humanism, Europeans had believed that the arts expressed aspirations, insights and pleasures accessible in principle to ordinary men, even though they might be raised to an exceptional degree of fineness in execution, or be especially concentrated in form so that not all individual men would always enjoy them. At any rate, it was possible for the whole of that time to retain the notion of the cultivated man who, given time and study, could discriminate with taste among the arts of his time because they were expressions of a shared culture with shared standards. This idea was somewhat weakened when the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came to idealize the artist as genius – Beethoven was one of the first examples – and formulated the notion of the
avant-garde
.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, though, it was already very difficult for even trained eyes and ears to recognize art in much of what was done by contemporary artists. The most vivid symbol of this was the dislocation of the image in painting. Here, the flight from the representational still kept a tenuous link with tradition as late as Cubism, but by then it had long ceased to be apparent to the average ‘cultivated man’ – if he still existed. Artists retired into a less and less accessible chaos of private visions, whose centre was reached in the world of Dada and Surrealism. The years after 1918 are of the greatest interest as something of a culmination of disintegration in the arts; in Surrealism even the notion of the objective disappeared, let alone its representation. As one Surrealist put it, the movement meant ‘thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations’. Through chance, symbolism, shock, suggestion and violence the Surrealists sought to go beyond consciousness itself. In so doing, they were only
exploring what many writers and musicians were trying to do at the same time.

Such phenomena provide evidence in widely different forms of the decay of the liberal culture which was the final outcome of the high civilization of the European age. It is significant that such disintegratory movements were often prompted by a sense that the traditional culture had been too limited in its exclusion of the resources of emotion and experience which lay in the unconscious. Probably few of the artists who would have agreed with this would actually have read the work of the man who, more than any other, gave the twentieth century a language and stock of metaphors with which to explore this area and the confidence that it was there that the secrets of life lay.

This was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He thought he had a place in the history of culture beside Copernicus or Darwin, for he changed the way educated men thought of themselves. Freud himself made conscious comparisons, describing the idea of the unconscious as the third great ‘insult’ to the narcissism of humanity, after those delivered by heliocentricity and evolutionary theory. He introduced several new ideas into ordinary discourse: the special meanings we now give to the words ‘complex’ and ‘obsession’, and the appearance of the familiar terms ‘Freudian slip’ and ‘libido’ are monuments to the power of his teaching. His influence quickly spread into literature, personal relations, education, politics. Like the words of many prophets, his message was often distorted. What he was believed to have said was much more important than the specific clinical studies which were his contribution to science. Like that of Newton and Darwin, Freud’s importance lay beyond science – where his influence was less than theirs – and in providing a new mythology. It was to prove highly corrosive.

The message men took from Freud suggested that the unconscious was the real source of most significant behaviour, that moral values and attitudes were projections of the influences which had moulded this unconscious, that, therefore, the idea of responsibility was at best a myth and probably a dangerous one, and that perhaps rationality itself was an illusion. It did not matter much that Freud’s own assertions would have been nonsense had this been true. This was what many people believed he had proved – and many still believe. Such a bundle of ideas called in question the very foundation of liberal civilization itself, the idea of the rational, responsible, consciously motivated individual, and this was its general importance.

Freud’s teaching was not the only intellectual force contributing to the loss of certainty and the sense that men had little firm ground beneath
their feet. But it was the most apparent in the intellectual life of the interwar period. From grappling with the insights he brought, or with the chaos of the arts, or with the incomprehensibility of a world of science which seemed suddenly to have abandoned Laplace and Newton, men plunged worriedly into the search for new mythologies and standards to give them bearings. Politically, this led to fascism, Marxism, and the more irrational of the old certainties, extreme nationalism, for example. People did not feel inspired or excited by tolerance, democracy, and the old individual freedoms.

Such influences made it all the more difficult to deal with the deepening uncertainty and foreboding clouding international relations in the 1930s. The heart of this lay in Europe, in the German problem, which threatened a greater upheaval than could Japan. Germany had not been destroyed in 1918; it was a logical consequence, therefore, that it would one day again exercise its due weight. Geography, population and industrial power all meant that in one way or another a united Germany must dominate central Europe and overshadow France. What was at issue fundamentally was whether this could be faced without war; only a few cranks thought it might be disposed of by dividing again the Germany united in 1871.

Germans soon began to demand the revision of the settlement of Versailles. This demand eventually became unmanageable, although in the 1920s it was tackled in a hopeful spirit. The real burden of reparations was gradually whittled away and the Treaty of Locarno was seen as a great landmark because by it Germany gave her consent to the Versailles territorial settlement in the west. But it left open the question of revision in the east and behind this loomed the larger question: how could a country potentially so powerful as Germany be related to its neighbours in a balanced, peaceful way, given the particular historical and cultural experience of the Germans?

Most people hoped this had been settled by the creation of a democratic German republic, whose institutions would gently and benevolently reconstruct German society and civilization. It was true that the constitution of the Weimar Republic (as it was called from the place where its constituent assembly met) was very liberal, but too many Germans were out of sympathy with it from the start. That Weimar had solved the German problem was revealed as an illusion when economic depression shattered the narrow base on which the German Republic rested and set loose the destructive nationalist and social forces it had masked.