The Transformation of the World (92 page)

Which of today's nation-states came into being between 1800 and 1914? A first wave, lasting from 1804 to 1832, saw the creation of Haiti, the Empire of Brazil, the Latin American republics, Greece, and Belgium. Then a second wave, in the third quarter of the century, featured the hegemonic unification of the German Reich and the Kingdom of Italy. In 1878 the Great Powers decided at the Congress of Berlin that new states should be established in parts of the Balkans formerly under Ottoman rule. The Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, was in effect an independent state, more loosely connected than other dominions of Britain. The precise status of the other dominions, between reality and legal fiction, is hard to determine; in 1870 they ran their own internal affairs by means
of representative institutions but were not yet sovereign under international law. The decades-long process of consensual transfer of powers was largely consummated in the First World War. The huge contribution in troops and economic assistance that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand made to the Allied victory, more voluntary than coerced, made it impossible for London after 1918 to continue treating them as quasi-colonies. On the eve of the First World War, the new nation-states on earth had not all come about through iron and blood—as Bismarck famously put it in 1862. Germany, Italy, and the United States did have such origins, but not Japan, Canada, or Australia.

3 What Holds Empires Together?

A Century of Empires
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Out of a world of empires, a small number of
new
nation-states struggled into existence in nineteenth-century Europe. When we turn to Asia and Africa, the picture is considerably more dramatic: here empires did triumph. Between 1757–64 (battles of Plassey and Baksar), when the East India Company appeared for the first time in India as a military great power, and 1910–12, when two medium-sized states, Korea and Morocco, were incorporated into colonial empires, the number of independent political entities on the two continents underwent an unparalleled decline. It is virtually impossible to say for sure how many such entities—kingdoms, principalities, sultanates, tribal federations, city-states, and so on—existed in eighteenth-century Africa or in fragmented regions of Asia such as the Indian subcontinent (after the fall of the Mogul empire), Java, and the Malay peninsula. A modern Western concept of the state is too angular and sharp-edged to do justice to the variety of such polycentric, hierarchically layered political worlds. What we can say for sure is that in Africa the several thousand political entities that probably existed in 1800 had given way a century later to roughly forty territories separately administered by French, British, Portuguese, German, or Belgian colonial authorities. The “partition” of Africa was, from an African point of view, the exact opposite: a ruthless amalgamation and concentration, a gigantic political consolidation. Whereas in 1879 some 90 percent of the continent was still ruled by Africans, no more than a tiny remnant was left by 1912,
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and not a single political structure corresponded to the criteria of a nation-state. Only Ethiopia, though ethnically heterogeneous, administratively unintegrated, and (until his health broke down in 1909) ultimately held together by the towering figure of Emperor Menelik II, remained an autonomous player in foreign policy, signing treaties with several European powers and practicing with their forbearance “an independent African imperialism.”
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In Asia the concentration of power was less drastic; this was, after all, the continent of ancient imperial formations. But here too, the big fish prevailed over the little. In the nineteenth century, for the first time in its history, India
became subject to a central authority covering the whole subcontinent; even the Mogul Empire at its height in 1700 had not included the far South. On the Indonesian islands, following the great nobility-led Java rising of 1825–30, the Dutch gradually moved from a system of indirect rule that had left local princes a certain scope for cooperation to more direct forms of rule involving greater centralization and homogenization.
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The Tsarist Empire after 1855 incorporated vast areas east of the Caspian Sea (“Turkestan”) and north and east of the Amur River, and put an end to the independence of the Islamic emirates of Bukhara and Chiva. In 1897 the French finally merged Vietnam (the historic regions of Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin) with Cambodia and Laos into “L'Indochine,” an assemblage without historical foundations. In 1900 Asia was solidly in the grip of empires.

China was and remained one such empire. In 1895 the new Japanese nation-state annexed the island of Taiwan at the expense of China, becoming a colonial power that followed Western methods, and soon gave itself up to grand geopolitical visions of pan-Asiatic leadership. Only Siam and Afghanistan retained a precarious independence. But Afghanistan was the utter opposite of a nation-state; it was—and remains today—a loose ethnic federation. Siam, thanks to the reforms of far-sighted monarchs since the middle of the century, had acquired many of the external and internal characteristics of a nation-state, but it was still a nation without nationalism. In official thinking and in the public mind, the “nation” consisted of those who behaved loyally toward the absolutist king. Only in the second decade of the twentieth century did conceptions of a Thai identity, or of the nation as a community of citizens, begin to take root.
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For Asia and Africa, the nineteenth century was even less than for Europe the age of nation-states. Previously independent polities, subject to no higher authority, found themselves absorbed into empires. Not one captive African or Asian country was capable of breaking free before the First World War. Egypt, governed since 1882 by the British, gained some amount of home rule in 1922 on the basis of a European-style constitution (though one more limited than Ireland's around the same time). But it remained an exception for decades to come. The decolonization of Africa began much later—in 1951 in Libya and 1956 in Sudan. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to “mandates” in the Middle East, which Britain and France, acting under the auspices of the League of Nations, treated as de facto protectorates. The first new Asian states subsequently developed out of these, beginning with Iraq in 1932, but they were all extremely weak structures subject to continuing “protection” and interference from outside.

The first genuine Asian nation-state might have been Korea, benefiting from a high level of integration inherited from its previous history. It suddenly lost its colonial master with the Japanese collapse in 1945. However, the division of the country at the onset of the Cold War blocked “normal” development. The real retreat of the European empires began in 1947—a year after the Philippines won
sovereignty from the United States—with the proclamation of Indian independence. For Asia and Africa, only the twenty years after the end of the Second World War were the true era of the independent nation-state. The degree of preparedness for such independence had varied enormously in the late colonial era: intensive in the Philippines and India, almost nonexistent in Burma, Vietnam, and the Belgian Congo. Only in India, where the National Congress had since 1885 been the all-India rallying point for moderate nationalists, did the roots of emancipation as a nation-state lie in the nineteenth century.

All this points to the simple conclusion that the
twentieth
century was the great epoch of the nation-state. In the nineteenth-century world, empire remained the dominant territorial form of the organization of power.
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This finding casts doubt on the widespread image of “stable nation-states versus unstable empires”—a trope that goes back to the basic nationalist idea that the nation is natural and primal, whereas the empire it shakes off is an artificial imposition. Both Chinese and Western antiquity already thought of empires as subject to a cyclical fate, but this rests on an optical illusion. Since all empires decline sooner or later, it was believed that the seeds of their decline must be discoverable early on; and the availability of material from three millennia encouraged greater attention to this phenomenon than to the much younger nation-state. Nineteenth-century Europeans looked ahead contemptuously, triumphantly, or elegiacally to the decline of the Asiatic land empires, seeing them as unfit for survival amid the harsh international competition of the modern age. None of these prophecies held water. The Ottoman Empire dissolved only after the First World War. There was still a sultan when the last tsar lost his throne and his life and his Hohenzollern cousin was chopping wood for himself in exile. The whole field of Ottoman studies is nowadays agreed that the value-laden word “decline” should be erased from its vocabulary. In China the monarchy fell in 1911, but after four decades of confusion the Communist Party of China succeeded in restoring the empire at more or less the maximum extent it had achieved in 1760 under the Qing emperor Qianlong.

Much like the Habsburg Empire, which survived the existential threat of the Revolution of 1848–49 (especially strong in Hungary) as well as the defeat of 1866 at the hands of Prussia, the other nineteenth-century empires withstood major challenges. The Chinese empire eventually overcame the Taiping Revolution (1850–64) and the equally dangerous Muslim risings of 1855–73, while the Tsarist Empire recovered from its defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56). The Ottoman Empire suffered its worst blow in the devastating war with Russia in 1877–78, when it lost the greater part of the Balkans, hardly less valuable in geopolitical terms than the core Turkish region of Anatolia. No other empire had to absorb such a shock, after the loss of Latin America earlier in the century. Yet the rump empire soldiered on for several decades and, in its internal affairs, displayed trends that prepared the ground for the relatively stable Turkish nation-state that would be founded in 1923. If we add to this the fact that European
colonialism survived two world wars, then the vulnerability of the empires appears less striking than their staying power and capacity for regeneration. They entered into the modern world as vastly modified “relics” from their formative centuries: the fifteenth (Ottoman), sixteenth (Portugal, Russia), or seventeenth (England, France, and Netherlands, or Qing China as the last chapter of an imperial history stretching back to the third century BC). In an early twentieth-century perspective, these empires appeared along with the Catholic Church and the Japanese monarchy as the oldest political institutions in the world.

Such survival would not have been possible without a considerable degree of cohesion and adaptability. The most successful survivors—above all, the British Empire in the nineteenth century—were even in a position to shape the circumstances in their particular space. They established conditions to which others had to respond by adjusting to them.

Types: Empire versus Nation-State

What differentiates an empire typologically from a nation-state? One possible criterion is how the elites that sustain or ideologically defend empire actually see the world—or in other words, which patterns of justification serve to legitimize the two political orders.
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1. The nation-state finds itself surrounded by other nation-states with a similar structure and clearly defined boundaries. An empire has its (less clearly defined) external boundaries where it encounters “wilderness” or “barbarians” or another empire. It likes to establish a buffer zone around itself. Direct borders between empires often have an unusually high level of military security (e.g., the Habsburg-Ottoman border in the Balkans, the borders between the Soviet and American empires in Germany and Korea).
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2. A nation-state, congruent in the ideal case with a single nation, proclaims its own homogeneity and indivisibility. An empire emphasizes all manner of heterogeneity and difference, seeking cultural integration only at the level of the top imperial elite. Core and periphery are clearly distinguishable in land as well as sea empires. Peripheries differ from one another according to their level of social-economic development and the degree to which they are ruled by the center (direct or indirect rule, dependence or sovereignty). Crises reaffirm the primacy of the core insofar as it is considered viable even without the periphery—an assumption widely confirmed in modern times.

3. Whether its constitution is democratic or authoritarian-acclamatory, the nation-state cultivates the idea that political rule is legitimated “from below”; government is just only if it serves the interests of the nation or the people. Empire, even in the twentieth century, had to make do with legitimation “from above”—for example, through loyalty symbols, the
establishment of domestic peace (
Pax
) and efficient administration, or the distribution of special benefits to clientele groups. Its form of integration was coercive, not voluntary: “intrinsically antidemocratic,”
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“a sovereignty that lacks a community.”
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In almost every case where a colonial power allowed space for elections and political competition among its subjects, the gesture unleashed an irreversible dynamic toward emancipation. Empire and democracy are almost impossible to reconcile, whereas a nation-state depends on a general political awareness and involvement of the population, though not necessarily in the garb of democratic constitutionalism.

4. People as citizens directly belong to nation-states, with a general status based on equal rights and political inclusion. The nation is understood not as a conglomerate of subjects but as a society of citizens.
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In an empire a hierarchy of entitlements takes the place of an equal citizenry. Insofar as there is such a thing as imperial citizenship that offers access to the metropolitan polity, it is restricted in the periphery to small sections of the population. Minorities must struggle to achieve special rights within the nation-state; empire rests from the beginning on the allocation of special rights and obligations by an unaccountable center.