The Transformation of the World (126 page)

Vision and Communication

Such typologies make it possible to take orderly snapshots, as it were, but it must then be immediately asked which kinds of political process they capture. Political orders may here be distinguished from one another in two further respects. On the one hand, each has an underlying vision and imagery of the totality, which ideologues of the system, as well as a large number of people living within it, see not simply in terms of unequal power structures but as a framework of belonging. In the nineteenth century, the nation increasingly became the largest unit with which people could identify. But, under different conditions, other conceptions also persisted: for example, the idea of a paternalist bond between ruler and subjects, or, as in China, of the cultural unity of a great empire. Apart from a handful of anarchists, no one saw chaos as the optimum state of affairs; it was thought that integration of the ideal political order could come about in a number of ways. In the nineteenth century, too, religion defined the worldview of most and was a strong glue bonding people together.
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On the other hand, actual political orders exhibited different forms of communication, and it must be asked which of these were dominant and characteristic in each case. The traffic might take place inside ruling apparatuses—for example, between a monarch and his senior officials—or within cabinets or unofficial elite circles such as British clubs or the “patriotic societies” in the Tsarist Empire. But it could also—and this became increasingly important in the nineteenth century—involve two-way relations between politicians and their electorate or following. Kings and emperors had traditionally presented themselves before their people, usually at a ceremonial distance, unless they remained invisible or absent like the Chinese emperors after roughly 1820. Napoleon III, unlike his more solitary and despotic uncle, was a past master at appeals to the nation. And Wilhelm II, who under the constitution had to pay little heed to the views of his subjects, spoke more frequently at public gatherings than any other Hohenzollern monarch.
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It was a novelty of the nineteenth century that politicians directly addressed their voters and supporters, seeking to gain a mandate from them. This style of politics first established itself during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson
(1801–9), then grew apace with the so-called Jacksonian Revolution, named after President Andrew Jackson (1829–37), which replaced the elitism of the founding fathers with a more populist or “grassroots” conception of politics, and scorn for “factionalism” with an acceptance of competition among parties.
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The number of elective offices increased by leaps and bounds, extending even to judges. In Europe, however (except for Switzerland), the practice of democracy remained much more oligarchical—even in Britain until 1867. The suffrage was more restrictive than in the United States.

To be sure, revolutions generated quite special surges of popular involvement. In periods without a revolution, the general election campaign—another “invention” of the nineteenth century—became a focus for direct communication between politicians and citizens. William Ewart Gladstone was a pioneer of this in his Scottish constituency of Midlothian, in 1879–80. Until then British election campaigns had been rather convivial affairs among a small circle of people, such as the one satirically described in Dickens's
Pickwick Papers
(1837). Gladstone was the first British politician (and the Conservative Disraeli followed in his tracks) who held mass rallies outside the context of protest actions, as a normal part of democratic life, in which the main tone was one of semireligious revival. The orator stirred up his audience, engaged in verbal jousting with hecklers, and ended proceedings by circulating among his supporters.
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For Gladstone, if all this was responsibly managed, it helped to educate the ever widening electorate. The fine borderline with demagogy was crossed where—as in Argentina under Juan Manuel Rosas and his wife, a nineteenth-century Evita—inflammatory speeches against opponents were geared to the urban plebs: a primitive, personalized form of manipulation known since antiquity but little used outside revolutionary situations.
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What was characteristic of the nineteenth century was the new taming of agitation for electoral purposes, within the regular functioning of the political system.

2 Reinventions of Monarchy

In the middle of the nineteenth century, long after the French Revolution, monarchy was still the most prevalent form of state. There were kings and emperors on every continent. In Europe the republics of the early modern period, as well as new ones summoned up in the Age of Revolution, had disappeared in a final wave of “monarchization.”
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If, as is sometimes claimed, the decapitation of Louis XVI removed the basis for monarchy as a political order and a focus of the collective imagination, its death agony nevertheless proved to be long and happy. In the years immediately after 1815, Switzerland was alone among the major European countries in not having a royalty. Monarchist sentiments were cultivated as far away as Australia—although no British monarch (as opposed to a succession of princes) put in an appearance there until 1954—and in 1901, when the Australian colonies established a federation, no one thought of
proclaiming a republic.
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There were rulers with a few thousand subjects and others with several hundred millions; autocrats in direct charge and princes who had to be content with a purely ceremonial function. A small kingdom in the Himalayas or the South Seas had two main things in common with the crowned heads of state in London and Saint Petersburg: a dynastic legitimacy that made the dignity of the monarch or emperor hereditary and an aura surrounding the throne that assured its occupant of a basic respect and veneration, irrespective of his or her personal qualities.

Monarchy in the Colonial Revolution

The labels “monarchy” and “kingdom” covered an extraordinary abundance of political forms. Even structurally similar instances varied widely in the cultural embeddedness of royalty: whereas the absolute Russian tsars cultivated a sacred aura right up to the end of the Romanov Dynasty, so that even Nicholas II cherished and celebrated a mutual bond of piety with the Russian people,
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monarchs in France and Belgium after 1830 found themselves left with no more than the daily routine of bourgeois kings. The Russian Orthodox Church zealously preached the holiness of the tsar, while the church in Catholic countries exercised greater restraint, and Protestantism had only a rather abstract notion of a state church.

Southeast Asia offers a good example of the diversity of monarchy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were:
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 Buddhist kingdoms in Burma, Cambodia, and Siam, where the monarch lived in a closed palace world and could hardly take any political initiatives because of the power of his advisers or the burden of protocol;

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 a Vietnamese imperial system modeled on China, in which the ruler stood at the apex of a pyramid of officials and customarily regarded neighboring peoples as barbarians in need of being civilized;

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 Muslim sultanates in a polycentric Malayan world, whose positions were far less elevated than those of other rulers in the region, and who governed with less pomp over their mostly coastal or riverside capitals and their hinterlands; and

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 colonial governors, especially in Manila and Batavia, who appeared as representatives of European monarchs and even sought to cultivate regal splendor as envoys of the rather frugal and republican-inclined Netherlands.

Along with revolution, European colonial rule was the great enemy of monarchies in the nineteenth century. Europeans destroyed indigenous royalty in many parts of the world, either totally eradicating it or weakening it beyond repair. Most often, the local monarch fell under their “protection” and was allowed to keep most of his revenue, together with a royal lifestyle and any religious role he had played until then. At the same time, his political powers were curtailed, and he lost both command of his army and traditional legal privileges such as the
power of life and death over his subjects. The lengthy process of subjecting non-European kings (and chiefs) to indirect rule was completed shortly before the First World War. The Moroccan sultan was the last substantive monarch to be placed under a colonial resident (in 1912) while keeping his rank and dignity.
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The decision as to whether a colonial power exercised direct or indirect rule was never made in accordance with general principles or an overarching strategic plan; the exact shape of colonial administrative despotism depended in each case on the local conditions.
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Sometimes a really serious misjudgment could be made. In Burma, King Mindon introduced a set of stabilizing reforms up to his death in 1878, intending them to remove the pretext that imperial control was necessary to end chaos and fill a power vacuum. But economic difficulties under the arbitrary rule of his successor, together with growing pressure from British economic interests, cleared the path for outside intervention. Fearing especially that the royal government in Mandalay was unable or unwilling to keep third parties out of what they regarded as their own sphere of influence, the British declared war in 1885 on the Kingdom of Upper Burma. Once the last resistance was overcome, they then annexed Upper Burma and in the following years added it to their long-standing administration in Lower Burma—and the government of British India. The Burmese monarchy was abolished. The British misjudgment lay in the fact that one of the traditional roles of the king had been to keep the large Buddhist clergy under control. The disappearance of the royal structures suddenly disempowered and devalued the whole world of the monasteries, so that, for example, there was no longer anyone to appoint a head of the hierarchy. Not surprisingly, therefore, the whole colonial period was marked by unrest among the Buddhist monks—an influential section of the population whose trust and support the colonial state never managed to obtain.
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No unified system was imposed in large areas of the colonies. The British illustrated this in India, where (a) some provinces were placed under the direct rule of the East India Company (after 1858, the Crown); (b) some five hundred other territories throughout India retained their maharajahs, nizams, and so on; and (c) a few border regions came under special military administration.
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In the 1880s the French destroyed the Vietnamese kingdom, tapping it neither at the level of symbols nor through the incorporation of its administrative personnel. In other parts of the Indochinese federation they were more flexible: indigenous dynasties were left in place in Laos and Cambodia, but they had to accept that the French decided on the royal succession. There were—as in Africa—subtle nuances under a system of indirect rule; the colonial powers did not find it easy to manipulate the charisma of the rulers. Thus, King Norodom I (r. 1859–1904) and his ministers lost most of their powers after 1884, and the king, a strong character, was reduced to the role of lead player in court rituals, yet the colonial masters went in constant fear of royal resistance and were well aware that his removal might trigger uncontrollable reactions among the Cambodian population.
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The
Cambodian monarchy was one of the few in Asia to survive the colonial period, and under King Norodom Sihanouk (r. 1941–2004, with interruptions) it played a not-insignificant role in the postwar history of Cambodia.

One of the strongest continuities anywhere in colonial history is to be found in Malaya, where no sultan was powerful enough to resist British influence effectively. The British wagered on close cooperation with the royal-aristocratic elite of Malaya, curtailing their privileges far less than those of the Indian princes. In a part of the world where, more than elsewhere in Asia, political rule did not come down to a simple matter of hierarchy, they strengthened the authority of the sultan in each of the states, simplified the rules of succession (but rarely intruded in it), laid ideological emphasis on the leading role of the Malay ruler in a multicultural society more and more dominated by Chinese economically, and eventually, on a much greater scale than in India, opened up the administration to princes from the sultan's family. Monarchy was therefore strengthened rather than weakened in Malaya during the colonial period—and yet, in the transition to independence in 1957, there was no centralized Malayan monarchy but only a set of nine thrones coexisting with one another.
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The extreme Malayan example of indirect rule, fascinating though it is, was clearly an exception. Only in Morocco does one perhaps find a parallel, and there too, monarchy clung on more successfully than almost anywhere else in the Muslim world.

Where royal structures persisted outside Europe, they did not always remain on the paths of tradition. New contacts brought with them new models of rule and new scope for the appropriation of resources. If a king or chief managed to break into or even monopolize foreign trade, he might sometimes strengthen his position. This was the case in Hawaii, where in the 1820s and 1830s, long before the United States annexed the island in 1898, rulers were able to acquire luxury goods from abroad with the proceeds of the sandalwood trade, bedecking their persons and residences with costly, high-prestige objects in a hitherto unknown elevation of the monarchy.
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In short, few monarchies lasted through colonial times, and when they did it was under conditions of especially weak indirect rule. After independence, no country restored a fallen dynasty; a small number of monarchs appeared in the guise of republican presidents, such as the Kabaka of Buganda in the years from 1963 to 1966. The royal and imperial houses of Asia and Africa that lasted into the fourth quarter of the twentieth century—and sometimes up to this day—were essentially in countries that did not fall under colonial rule: above all Japan and Thailand, along with Afghanistan (until 1973) and Ethiopia (until 1974).