The Transformation of the World (87 page)

Third
. The development of technology gave the new-style nation-state a destructive capacity previously unknown in history. Crucial innovations were the advanced bolt-action rifle, the machine gun, more powerful artillery and chemical explosives, the iron-hulled warship, new forms of engine-propelled locomotion (the submarine became technically feasible shortly before the First World War), troop trains, and signal systems that replaced dispatch riders, semaphores, and light telegraphy with electrical telegraphy, telephony, and eventually the radio.
¹¹
Technology as such does not breed violence, but the effects of violence do increase as a result of it. Until the second half of the twentieth century, when ABC (atomic, biological, and chemical) weapons raised the threshold of horror, every military invention was applauded by the apostles of progress and actually employed in war.

Fourth
. At the latest by the closing third of the nineteenth century, these new instruments of power were directly related to industrial capacity. The widening economic disparity between countries went hand in hand with the gap in military technology. A country like the Netherlands, for example, lacking an industrial base of its own, could no longer claim the international supremacy it had once enjoyed as a maritime power. A new kind of great power came into existence, defined not so much by population size, maritime presence, or potential revenue as by its industrial production and its capacity to organize and finance an arms drive. In 1890, before it began to strike out overseas, the United States had a troop strength of no more than 39,000, yet its position as the leading industrial power assured it of as much international respect as Russia enjoyed with an army seventeen times larger.
¹²
Size still mattered—more than in the post-1945
“nuclear age”—but it was no longer the key criterion for success. Outside Europe, the Japanese elite soon appreciated this once it set its sights after 1868 on making Japan both “rich and strong”; it was to be an industrial country with a military capability, which in the 1930s would develop into an industrialized military state. Over little more than a hundred years—from the 1870s until the arms race of the 1980s that crippled the USSR—industrial might was the factor of decisive significance for world politics. Since then, terrorism and guerrilla warfare (the old weapon of the weak) have again reduced its importance; nuclear weapons are now in the hands of industrial midgets such as Pakistan or Israel but not of substantial industrial nations such as Japan, Germany, or Canada.

Fifth
. The European system of states, created essentially in the seventeenth century, expanded in the nineteenth into a global system. This happened both through the rise of the United States and Japan as great powers and through the forcible incorporation of large parts of the world into the European empires. The two processes were closely bound up with each other. The colonial empires were a transitional form on the way to a mature international community of states. It can be argued whether they speeded up the transition or slowed it down, but in any event the global plurality of the international system was still in a kind of imperial latency before the First World War. Only later in the twentieth century did the present-day system take shape in two distinct stages: the creation of the League of Nations immediately after the First World War, which made it possible for countries such as China, South Africa, Iran, Siam/Thailand, and the Latin American republics to establish permanent, institutionalized contact with the Great Powers; and the decolonization that occurred during the two decades following the Second World War. Imperialism, it is now recognized, became the opposite of what its protagonists had sought to bring about—that is, the great realigner of political relations in the world, and hence the midwife of a postimperial international order, albeit one still burdened in many ways with an imperial legacy.

Narrative I: Rise and Fall of the European System of States

In history textbooks dealing with the nineteenth century, one finds two master narratives that are nearly always kept separate from each other: a history of great-power diplomacy in Europe and a history of imperial expansion. Generations of historians have worked on each. An initial, highly simplified overview might summarize them as follows.

The first story tells of the rise and fall of the European system of states.
¹³
It could open with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, or with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, but it is sufficient to begin in 1760. The dispute at the time concerned which countries were and which were not the European “Great Powers.” Older hegemons such as Spain and the Netherlands, large but weakly organized territories such as Poland-Lithuania, and temporarily hyperactive but middle-ranking military powers such as Sweden were unable to maintain their position. The rise
of Russia and Prussia sealed the formation of a “pentarchy” of five Great Powers: France, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia.
¹⁴
After the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) it was not necessary to reckon with external pressure from the Ottoman Empire, an aggressive and once even superior adversary. Special mechanisms of unstable equilibrium now took shape within the five power constellations, based on the principle of the egoism of individual states. There were no overarching visions of peace, and in case of doubt a smaller country could be sacrificed (as Poland was more than once to its larger neighbors). The attempt of postrevolutionary France, under Napoleon, to change this balance of power into a continental empire exercising hegemony over its neighbors collapsed in October 1813 on the battlefields near Leipzig. Until 1939 no country would risk another such grab for supremacy (if we leave aside certain German extremists in the First World War). The pentarchy was restored at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, with respect for France despite its two defeats (one in 1814, one in 1815 after Napoleon's return from Elba), but now the political elites shared a common will to secure peace and to avoid revolution. The system was stabilized and reinforced by a set of explicit rules, basic consultative mechanisms, and a conscious, socially conservative aversion from the new techniques of military mass mobilization. In a considerable advance over the eighteenth century, this new order preserved the European peace for several decades. It was shaken, though not entirely annulled, by the revolutions of 1848–49. But the Vienna system did not guarantee the “perpetual peace” for which many longed, and which Immanuel Kant, for one, had considered possible in 1795. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was dismantled piece by piece.

The Congress System, whose true architect and deftest operator was the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich, involved a kind of freezing of the situation as it existed in 1815 (or more precisely in 1818, when France was again received into the circle of the Great Powers). Thus, insofar as the respective governments opposed liberalism, constitutionalism, and any form of social change centered on citizenship, the system stood as a bulwark against newly developing historical trends and, above all, against nationalist programs and political movements. In the multiethnic Romanov and Habsburg empires (and in the Ottoman Empire, which after 1850 also belonged pro forma to the “Concert of Europe”), smaller national groups began to stir against their perceived repression and to strive for either autonomy or full political independence. At the same time, a nationalism originating mainly in bourgeois middle strata called for the creation of larger economic spaces and rationalization of the state apparatus. This tendency was especially strong in Italy and in northern and central Germany, but the various regime changes in France were also largely motivated by the quest for a more
effective
national politics.

Another new factor was the major regional differentiation associated with industrialization. But the potential that this created for power politics, in the period roughly up to 1860, should not be overestimated. The old idea that the
Congress System was undermined by the independent variables and irresistible forces of nationalism and industrialization falls rather wide of the mark. The Crimean War, which from 1853 to 1856 pitted Russia against France, Britain, and eventually Piedmont-Sardinia (the core state of the later Kingdom of Italy), is good evidence that this is so, since it was the first military conflict for nearly forty years among the European Great Powers, fought out in a region on the periphery of Western Europe's mental maps. It showed that it was a disadvantage of the Congress System not to have settled the position of the Ottoman Empire in relation to Christian Europe. The Crimean War did not solve the “Eastern Question”—the future of the multinational Ottoman Empire—or any other problem of European politics.
¹⁵
Most crucially, however, it was neither a clash between industrialized war machines nor an ideologically heated contest between rival nationalisms. It was therefore by no means the expression of “modern” trends of the age.

At the end of the Crimean War, an opportunity was lost for a timely renewal of the Congress System. It was no longer possible to speak of a “concert of powers,” and into the normative vacuum stepped Machiavellian realists (the term
Realpolitik
was coined in 1853) who risked international tensions or even war to impose their plans for new and larger nation-states. The big names here are Camillo Benso di Cavour in Italy and Otto von Bismarck in Germany.
¹⁶
They achieved their objectives amid the ruins of the Vienna peace. After Prussian-led Germany had prevailed against the Habsburg Monarchy and the Second Empire of Napoleon III (a disturber of the peace in his own way), in 1866 and 1871 respectively, it became a great power that carried much heavier weight internationally than Prussia had done. As German chancellor between 1871 and 1890, Bismarck dominated politics in continental Europe with a system of finely graduated treaties and alliances, whose chief aim was to secure the Reich, newly created in 1871, and to shield it from French revanchist ambitions. But the Bismarckian order, which passed through a number of phases, did not involve a pan-European peace settlement in succession to that of Congress of Vienna.
¹⁷
Although its core was meant to be defensive and served in the short term to preserve a given equilibrium, it produced no impulses toward a constructive European policy. By the end of Bismarck's time in office, the overly complex “balancing act” between various antagonisms was already scarcely functional.
¹⁸

As for Bismarck's successors, they abandoned the relative restraint shown by the founder of the Reich. In the name of a new
Weltpolitik
, partly based on Germany's economic strength, partly driven by ideological hypernationalism, and partly responding to similar ambitions of other powers, Germany gave up any claim to be building peace for Europe. Moreover, its foreign policy induced the other Great Powers to bury their mutual antagonisms (which Bismarck had resourcefully fomented) and to regroup in a way that excluded Germany. By 1891, just a year after his dismissal by Wilhelm II, one of Bismarck's worst nightmares—a rapprochement between France and Russia—was beginning to
come true.
¹⁹
At the same time, almost unnoticed by European politicians, a transatlantic rapprochement was taking place between Britain and the United States. By 1907 at the latest, a new power configuration was visible in international politics, though not yet at the level of alliances. France had found a way out from the isolation in which Bismarck had constantly sought to surround it, drawing closer first to Russia, then in 1904 (laying aside contentious issues in the colonies) to Britain. In 1907, London and Saint Petersburg defused their decades-long conflict in many parts of Asia.
²⁰
A split also opened up between London and Berlin, exacerbated by a provocative German naval program. Germany—which, for all its economic strength, scarcely concealed its lack of means for a true
Weltpolitik—
eventually fell back on its only ally, Austria-Hungary, whose Balkan policies zigzagged ever more irresponsibly between aggressiveness and hysteria. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 was by no means foreordained. But all sides would have had to deploy exceptional statecraft, military restraint, and curbs on nationalist sentiment in order to ward off open conflict among at least some of the European Great Powers.
²¹
The First World War completely destroyed the European international system of the previous century and a half. In 1919 it could no longer be rebuilt as it had been in 1814–15.

The new Great Powers, the United States and Japan, played only minor roles in this scenario. But Russia's surprising defeat in 1905 at the hands of Japan, in a war fought mainly on Chinese territory, triggered a Russian policy crisis that was not without implications for Europe and the “Eastern Question.” America's part in brokering a peace between the belligerents—the not always irenic President Theodore Roosevelt even won the Nobel Peace Prize for it—staked its claim to a great-power role for the third time in less than a decade, after the Spanish-American War of 1898 (in which the United States had been unbridled in its aggression) and Washington's involvement in the Eight Power expeditionary force against the Yihetuan (“Boxer”) Uprising in China in 1900. Such a role was recognized for Japan as early as 1902, when the leading world power, Great Britain, concluded a treaty alliance with the archipelagic empire.
²²
In 1905 the step from a European system of states to a global one became irrevocable. However, neither the United States nor Japan was directly involved in the outbreak of the First World War; it was a European conflict in its genesis. The European interstate system was destroyed from within.

Narrative II: Metamorphosis of Empires

Alongside this grand narrative of renewal, erosion, and catastrophe of the European interstate system, there is a second story of overseas expansion and imperialism. Although earlier versions of this history have been more strongly challenged in recent years than the standard narrative of the European interstate system, it is possible to reconstruct a sequential pattern more or less as follows. The end of the early modern period of European expansion and colonialism
began in the early 1780s, with the British defeat in the American War of Independence and the formation of a new United States of America.
²³
France, having lost its North American possessions in 1763, suffered a further sharp setback in 1804, when its economically most important colony, the sugar-producing Saint-Domingue portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, renamed itself Haiti and declared independence. The revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, which led to supremacy in Europe, were paradoxically associated with France's withdrawal from overseas positions, since Napoleon conquered no new colonies. Egypt, invaded by Bonaparte in 1798, had to be given up three years later, and nothing came of projects to challenge England in Asia. With their successful campaigns in India between 1799 and 1818, the British were able to offset their defeat in America more easily than the French could recover from their colonial debacle. It is true that the British had been present in the Subcontinent as traders since the seventeenth century, and as territorial rulers of the province of Bengal since the 1760s, but it was in their global contest with France (which sought allies among the Indian princes) that they first managed to vanquish, or at least neutralize, the remaining indigenous military forces. As for the Spanish, their rule in mainland South and Central America was at an end by the mid-1820s. All that remained of the Spanish world empire were the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.