The Transformation of the World (129 page)

Courts

The convergence of monarchy and nation-state was a worldwide tendency in the nineteenth century. Some nations actually came into being through the founding act of a monarchy. In Egypt the foundations of a modern state were laid by a new dynasty that took de facto power in 1805, although it was only in 1841 that a
firman
of the sultan in Istanbul confirmed the hereditary rulership. A sumptuous court society, fusing elements of East and West, did not yet develop under the dynastic founder Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–48), a rather austere and modest general, but only under his successors from 1849 on.
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Modern Siam/Thailand was also largely the creation of an enlightened despot, King Chulalongkorn (aka Rama the Fifth). Menelik II (r. 1889–1913) played a similar role in Ethiopia. In post-Napoleonic Europe, on the other hand, the initiative for major changes seldom came from crowned heads; no monarch after 1815, with perhaps the limited exceptions of Napoleon III and Alexander II of Russia (r. 1855–81), was a self-driven grand activator, reformer, or nation builder. But, once created, nation-states sought monarchical legitimation and tolerated even such bizarre figures as Leopold II of Belgium (r. 1865–1909), an unscrupulous imperial adventurer who was able to secure a position for himself above the internal strife between liberalism and political Catholicism. Rulers of multinational realms had a harder time of it, since they had to perform their integrative role over expanding (Russian) or shrinking (Habsburg, Ottoman) empires alive with centrifugal ethnic tendencies. There was no opportunity for the kind of national monarchic compromise that made the late century a powerful imperial moment in the special British case. The strongest identification between monarchy and nation, however, was not in Europe but in Japan, where a symbolic fusion under the Meiji Emperor's grandson, the Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito, r. 1926–89), contributed to the Asian cataclysm in the Second World War.

The survival of monarchy in large parts of the world gave a last lease on life to an ancient social form. There were court societies from Beijing, Istanbul, and the Vatican down to the small Thuringian city of Meiningen, whose orchestra in the 1880s was one of the finest in Europe (it gave the first performance of Johannes Brahms's Fourth Symphony in 1885). Germany was full of courts until 1918; they were the gravitational center of high society in numerous local capitals. Elsewhere too, disempowered potentates kept up the pomp and circumstance of court life as long as it remained within their means. India with its maharajahs was in this respect not dissimilar to the Germany of Bismarck's “wrens' nests.”

None other than Bonaparte, the former general of the revolution, had revived court society in Europe from 1802 on, just a few years after the destruction of the Bourbon court; his brothers and legates would be the key players in Amsterdam, Kassel, and Naples. New liveries were tailored, new titles, offices, and noble rankings introduced, a military court established; and for her coronation on December 2, 1804, a proper empress wore a gold satin dress embroidered
with bees symbolizing a busy and productive empire. Napoleon, though personally uninterested in pageantry, put on the whole show simply to keep his entourage, including the adventurous Joséphine, occupied and under control. He also thought that the French, like “savages,” could be dazzled by displays of splendor.
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The emperor cultivated an image of himself as a sober workaholic—in the style of Frederick the Great, previously perfected by the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1712–35) in China. On the Potomac the second president of the United States, John Adams, already tried to produce something dimly resembling the Court of Saint James, but this was soon dismantled by his more easygoing successor, Thomas Jefferson, a widower bereft of a First Lady.
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A key difference between the European and Oriental styles of court life was the public role of the royal couple. Japan's adoption of this Western symbol expressed more strongly than almost anything else its claim to be entering global modernity;
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whereas nothing seemed to underline the antiquated decadence of Imperial China more than its exotic train of eunuchs and concubines instead of a settled bourgeois life at the head of the state.

3 Democracy

Whereas monarchy, as real concentration of power or mere ornament, was a ubiquitous feature of the nineteenth century, we have to look a little harder for the traces of democracy. It is not even altogether certain that more of the world's population than a century before had a direct influence on its political destiny. This was doubtless the case in Western Europe and America, but it has to be set against the unquantifiable barriers to participation associated with colonialism. Precolonial polities around the world were not liberal democracies in which all citizens theoretically enjoyed the same political rights and extensive protection against arbitrary action by the state. In many areas, however, at least among the elites, the scope for discussion and negotiation in public affairs was greater than under the authoritarian conditions of colonial rule. Democracy made advances during the nineteenth century, but it did not triumph everywhere and even in the best-functioning systems did not conform to the standards of stable mass democracy that are taken for granted today in most of Europe.

The American and French Revolutions formulated the concept of popular sovereignty and inscribed it in their constitutions. In France, in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ideal was taken as far as it has been anywhere in the world up to the present day. It is true that the authors of the US Constitution already provided for checks and balances to counter the tyranny of the majority, shielding themselves with an element of real fear from an unfiltered expression of the voters' will. The indirect choice of the president by an electoral college, which for a long time had some logistical foundation in view of the size of the country, still survives as a relic of this attitude. In Europe, memories of the Terror of 1793–94 ran deep: even property owners eager to avert princely absolutism of any
description, including the Napoleonic variant, feared nothing more than “anarchy” or “mob rule” and took the corresponding precautions. Yet, once begotten, the twofold ideal of popular sovereignty—that the voters' will should find the truest possible expression and that the people should have the power to remove any kind of government—remained in principle a yardstick of all politics. This was the real novelty of the nineteenth century: a revolution in both expectations and anxieties. The struggle over political systems took on a new kind of dynamic. The main issue was no longer how just a ruler should be, or how one could best preserve the ancient rights of one's own status group, but rather who could and should participate, and to what extent, in decisions about the common good.

To specify how democratic a country is remains far from easy.
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It may be difficult to distinguish between the reality and the democratic facade; the criteria may also be mixed up in an unclear way—for example, the legally prescribed opportunities for participation, along with the human rights record that is nowadays often the preferred measure of the morality of a political system. The oversized and diffuse question of democracy may be divided into several aspects for the nineteenth century. Here it is advisable to use a broadly defined concept. Female suffrage, for example, as a prerequisite of democracy would yield no democratic country in nineteenth-century Europe, and even an active suffrage of 45 percent of the male population—by no means an exacting criterion by today's standards—existed in only a minority of European countries around the year 1890.
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The Rule of Law and the Public Sphere

Both logically and historically, the image of the rule of law stands for all liberal restriction of power in the political system. A high value, whatever the cultural context, is placed on the protection of individuals from arbitrary official action: political power should be exercised in accordance with laws that are known to, and ideally valid for, everyone in society; some of them—especially those with a religious sanction—are binding even on the ruler and cannot be changed by an act of his will. This idea is not a European invention; it can be found long ago in China and the Islamic world, for example. But it took shape with special force and rigor in the political practice of England, where the rule of law came to be increasingly regarded as a matter of course. The core of this English conception, fully developed in the mid-eighteenth century, consisted of three points: (a) a professionally recruited and organized judiciary in charge of applying common law; (b) a real possibility of challenging government measures in the courts; and (c) a legislature and judiciary that respected the inviolability of the person and property and the freedom of the press.
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On the Continent, it took longer for a similar legal culture to spread; basic rights became an issue much later than in the English-speaking countries. In the early nineteenth century, the rule of law chiefly referred to independence of the justice system, involving transparency and the safety of judges from dismissal, and to the legal propriety of all government action. The main focus was on the protection of property.

In actual practice, such forms of constitutional order could quite easily go together with “undemocratic,” or even preconstitutional, conditions at the level of the political system. In the German states, for example, the rule of law was already widely respected before the principle of constitutional rule established itself. Indeed, according to some late-eighteenth-century theorists, such constitutionalism was a hallmark of “enlightened absolutism” that differentiated it from tyranny. The reforms of the 1860s in Russia also gradually promoted an awareness of “legality” (
zakonnost'
) in everyday life, which would coexist for half a century with the autocratic system.

In theory, European concepts of the rule of law were transferred to the colonial empires. Although special racist legislation increasingly applied to natives toward the end of the nineteenth century, nonwhite subjects of the British Crown did have chances of a fair trial that were not dramatically worse than those of lower-class people in the British Isles. The prominent role of lawyers in the Indian freedom struggle of the early twentieth century was due precisely to the significance of this nonpolitical legal sphere for the functioning of colonial society. As well as making them important intermediaries, it gave lawyers access to a realm of universal norms binding on the colonial rulers themselves. At least in the British Empire, then, the rule of law set some limits to colonial despotism. In emergencies such as the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857/58, or the Jamaican revolt of 1865, such legal guarantees were scandalously set aside. But the vehicle of empire nevertheless served to spread the British idea of the rule of law to all continents.

Despite the colonial nuances, the legal situation was not always less advantageous than that prevailing in neighboring territories under indigenous rule; a free Chinese press, for instance, developed not in the realm of the emperor but in colonial enclaves such as Hong Kong and the International Settlement in Shanghai, where British legal conceptions were in force. As to the French understanding of law, its development in the course of the nineteenth century attached less value to the legality of government action.
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Legal checks on the administration were anyway less pronounced in France than in Britain, and in the colonies the law offered considerably weaker and less extensive protection for non-Europeans.

The most important legal peculiarity of the United States was the existence of a Supreme Court, empowered since 1803 to interpret the Constitution in a dynamic of long-term constitutional change not dictated by the politics of the day. No law-governed state in Europe had such an independent judicial body to which appeal could be made against the judgments of lower courts or the government. But some rulings of the Supreme Court polarized opinion and contributed to an exacerbation of political conflict. A direct result of the
Dred Scott
case of 1857, in which it was ruled that blacks never could be citizens of the United States, was the election of the antislavery candidate Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and the eventual outbreak of Civil War.
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The fact that not even Supreme Court
judgments commanded uncritical acceptance in the name of abstract principles of government became part of the political culture of the United States.

The new political and legal status of the citizen was a product of the American Revolution of the 1770s; former subjects of the British Crown were supposed to become citizens of an American republic. By 1900 notions of citizenship were widespread in Europe too.
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In this respect the situation at that time differed from the rudimentary rule of law in late absolutist Prussia or Austria. A multiplicity of rights had given way to the idea of equality before the law—a status that presupposed the communicative compactness and homogenizing tendencies of a nation-state. Citizenship was one of the Western inventions that would prove to be universalizable in its cultural neutrality. Thus, in the Meiji reform era after 1868, all (male) Japanese were equal citizens subject to uniform national laws. Some rights were guaranteed by the state: a free choice of occupation, the right to alienate property, or freedom of movement from village to city. In other ways too, Japan in the year 1890 was not far behind European models of a law-governed state.
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Closely associated with political democratization was the rise of a public sphere of sociability and oral and written communication, located in a third space between the privacy of the home and the ceremony of organized state functions. The ongoing debates on the “public sphere,” still often conducted in dialogue with Jürgen Habermas's work first published in German in 1962, cannot concern us here; they tend toward obscurity insofar as they take the public sphere to be an element of an even more broadly conceived “civil society,” viewing it as the prerequisite, not the outcome, of democratic forms of politics. Even in an authoritarian state—to summarize a commonly used model—public spaces can emerge as the result of autonomous social development. Where they do not simply serve as an arena for acting out aesthetic visions of the political, they tend to take on certain functions of the state and to encourage the expression of antigovernment criticism. Habermas's book outlined a general model, loosely rooting it in time and space. For him the eighteenth century in Western Europe was both the formative period and the golden age of a “bourgeois” public sphere.
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In the nineteenth century, its key principle of public criticism gradually waned. The public sphere lost its characteristic intermediate position insofar as its starting point, the sphere of private life, was weighed down by the manipulative force of the mass media. By the end of this process, the reasoning public
citoyen
had turned into a pacified cultural consumer.
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The second, pessimistic part of Habermas's argument has seldom been addressed by historians; all the more eagerly has a new interest in communicative history led them to search for signs of the rise of the public sphere. Their findings, so extraordinarily rich in detail, can scarcely be reduced to a common denominator. But the following points seem to be clear.