The Undivided Past (13 page)

These transnational flows of people were accompanied by equally unprecedented transnational flows of capital and commodities, resulting in a global order of
industrial interdependence extending from Birmingham to Toronto, from San Francisco to Berlin, in which national boundaries and national differences often seemed to dissolve and disappear. By the late nineteenth century, visitors to the advanced industrial regions of the Old and the New World were not so much impressed by their differences, but rather by their marked similarities. They were generally to be found astride coal-bearing seams, extending from the Ruhr to Belgium and northern France, across the English Channel to the “Black Country,” Manchester, and the Clyde, and thence across the Atlantic to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.
⁸⁶
They spawned a new breed of monster city or urban agglomeration, increasingly populated in both Europe and North America by recently arrived immigrants: in the German Ruhr, for instance,
over a quarter of the miners spoke Polish in 1890, and in
Andrew Mellon’s Pittsburgh twenty years later, the same proportion of the city’s population was foreign (i.e., European) born.
⁸⁷
With an attendant growth in trade unionism, engaging in ever more bitter disputes between employers and workers, organized
labor also assumed an unprecedentedly international perspective. During the 1880s, the organizers of the American Knights of Labor canvassed for recruits in the English Midlands, and in the decades that followed,
British and American fraternal delegates traded places at their respective annual labor union gatherings.

Likewise, when politicians, professors, policymakers, and pundits addressed the
social problems of industrialization and urbanization, they did so as part of an international rather than a nationally specific conversation. Factory legislation pioneered by the British in the 1840s was replicated in
France and Germany in the 1870s; Danish old-age pensions were imported (via
New Zealand) to Britain: these are but two examples of a widespread pattern of national legislative borrowing that formed “a crazy quilt of transnational influences and appropriations.”
⁸⁸
Many individuals with particular interests and expertise in contemporary social issues moved from nation to nation and from continent to continent. Among them was
William Pember Reeves, the architect of the late-nineteenth-century New Zealand labor reforms. Forced out of government in 1896, he gravitated to London, where, absorbed into Fabian circles, he lectured widely on New Zealand welfare policy. Another was
William Dawson. A British economic journalist, he was dispatched to Germany in the 1880s and wrote a series of books explaining German welfare reforms to a British audience. Ties between American progressives and policymakers in England and Germany were equally close. None of these figures would have considered the nation to be the best unit of collective existence or identity in which to treat, analyze, or assess contemporary social issues: they thought about them in transnational and global terms.
⁸⁹

As
Frederick Jackson Turner put it in 1891, “ideas, commodities even, refuse the bounds of a nation.… This is true especially in the modern world, with its complex commerce and
means of intellectual connection.”
⁹⁰
Twenty years later, in words reminiscent of
Joseph Chamberlain’s,
Franklin Jameson made the same point: “the
nation is ceasing to be the leading form of the world’s structure; organizations transcending national boundaries are becoming more and more numerous and effective.”
⁹¹
He was aptly articulating the spirit of an era that saw the establishment of a host of new international bodies, among them the first European common market in 1860, comprising Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Prussia, and Austria; the International Red Cross, which was set up three years later and based in Switzerland from the 1880s; and the Latin Monetary Union of 1865, involving France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, and Switzerland.
⁹²
To be sure, these transnational initiatives and organizations were unable to prevent the outbreak of the
First World War. But they do serve to remind us that there was a great deal more to the history (and to the habits of thought) of the nineteenth-century world than the fact of the nation-state—and the attendant national identities and national enmities.
⁹³

This interconnected world, characterized by multinational empires and composite monarchies, and underpinned by the relatively unhindered movements of people, money, goods, and ideas across the oceans and around the globe, crashed and burned in 1914–18, with the defeat and disintegration of four great transnational, land-based, polyglot, multiethnic empires: the
Russian, the German, the
Austro-Hungarian, and the
Ottoman. And it was
Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States—one of the surviving land-based empires, with an increasingly diverse population—who insisted that the problem of pre-1914 Europe had been too many empires but too few nations.
⁹⁴
Hence the task of the peacemakers was to reconstruct Europe (and the
Middle East) according to “historically established lines of
allegiance and nationality,” by creating nation-states out of the wreckage of the former empires, as the most compelling units of collective
human loyalty and identity, in which all citizens would speak the same
language and come from the same stock. By better aligning
nation-states with national identities, on the basis of rational principles and democratic ideals, Wilson believed that he would bring into being a new, better, and more stable world.
⁹⁵
Hence the appearance (and in some cases the reappearance) in central and eastern Europe of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland,
Austria,
Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (to which, farther west, would soon be added the Irish Free State), and the creation in the
Middle East of a Turkish nation, and also of the
League of Nations Mandates of Syria,
Lebanon, Transjordan,
Iraq, and Palestine.

Never before had so many names so suddenly appeared (or reappeared) on the maps of Europe and the Middle East, but in truth the peoples of these regions were still so mixed up that it was impossible to create such coherent nations (and with them identities) as envisioned by Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination in all its simplistic grandeur. In 1919, the American secretary of state,
Robert Lansing, asked himself, “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?”
⁹⁶
These were good questions, which were never adequately addressed or satisfactorily answered. Sometimes strategic and diplomatic considerations were too urgent to yield to the claims of nationality: as when Germany lost lands to
France and Poland, Austria to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Italy, and Hungary to
Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia; and as when any union between Germany and Austria was explicitly forbidden, in defiance of the principle of self-determination. For such reasons did France and Italy obtain large German-speaking populations (in Alsace-Lorraine and South Tyrol), while in Romania the acquisition of Transylvania and large swaths of Hungarian territory meant the number of native inhabitants declined from 92 percent of the population in 1914 to 70 percent in 1920.
⁹⁷
But by far the greater obstacle was that the nations that were reestablished or newly created were themselves unavoidably
multiethnic and multilingual. Poland, as reconstituted, contained more than two million Germans and three million Ukrainians and Belorussians; Czechoslovakia, according to
Lloyd George, was a “polyglot and incoherent” amalgam of Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Ruthenes, and Germans;
while Yugoslavia was populated by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes,
Albanians, and Hungarians. So much in practice for
Woodrow Wilson’s much-vaunted principle of “
national self-determination”: as a basis for redrawing the boundaries of postwar Europe, it was utterly impracticable and did not work.
⁹⁸

Matters were no better when the victorious powers turned to creating new nations in the
Middle East, as the
Ottoman Empire was partitioned with little cognizance of existing tribal solidarities or ethnic identities. When Turkey became independent, straddling Europe and Asia across the Dardanelles, it still included substantial minorities of Kurds and Armenians, who in 1920 briefly but unsuccessfully set up their own autonomous states.
⁹⁹
The new nations of
Lebanon, Syria,
Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan were administered by
France and Britain as
League of Nations Mandates, but they were effectively colonies, all of them artificial constructs, devoid of any shared sense of national unity or historic or collective identity.
King Faisal, the first ruler of Iraq, a nation in which
Arabs and Kurds,
Sunni and Shia had been summarily bundled together, was well aware of the problem:

It would be even worse in Palestine, where in accordance with the
Balfour Declaration of 1917, the
British resolved to establish “a national home for the
Jewish people,” while at the same time doing nothing to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing inhabitants, 90 percent of whom were Muslim Arabs.
¹⁰¹

The result of this meddlesome mapping was that much had changed—yet very little had changed. Before 1914, the land-based polities of Europe and the Middle East were not so much nations as
imperial agglomerations, with many ethnicities,
languages, and
religions; after 1919, the new nations of Europe and the Middle East were smaller political units, but each contained many ethnicities,
languages, and religions, making it difficult to achieve any viable identity or collective sense of solidarity. At the same time, the creation by
Lenin of the Union of (fifteen)
Soviet Socialist Republics successfully perpetuated most of the tsarist multinational and multiethnic empire under a new
Communist despotism.
¹⁰²
Nor was it believed that nation-building, to the extent it was accomplished, would suffice to keep the peace that had proved so fragile in a simpler world of a few empires related by royal blood and terrifyingly inflexible alliances of mutual defense. Even
Woodrow Wilson, for all his (flawed) faith in the principle of national self-determination, recognized in national autonomy a danger of national aggression that needed to be checked, and he fought to establish the
League of Nations, in the hope of providing some structure of global governance.
¹⁰³
The Republican administrations that succeeded Wilson were in their own way no less internationalist, as they sought to restore the global system of finance and
trade, based on the gold standard, by which money and goods and people moved easily across national boundaries, as they had done before 1914. And in a very different idiom, when
Eglantyne Jebb established the
Save the Children Fund in 1919, she did so specifically to help alleviate the widespread postwar famine that had broken out in central and eastern Europe as a result of the Allied blockade, but more generally as “an effective assertion of the oneness of mankind [and]…our common humanity.”
¹⁰⁴

The inadequacy of the nation as a redemptive
form of human solidarity was thus doubted virtually as soon as it was revived; but in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash and the ensuing
Great Depression, these transnational endeavors were effectively given up, and it is often argued that the 1930s suffered from the vigorous reassertion of national interests—diplomatically, militarily, and
economically—amid the fatigue and fecklessness of global efforts at harmonizing the world’s political and economic aspirations. The League of Nations failed to restrain national aggressors, especially Germany,
Italy, and
Japan, while the international financial system that had been so laboriously reconstructed during the 1920s collapsed into ruins, as autarky and national self-sufficiency became the new economic doctrines. In reality, though, it was not so much national as
imperial
interests that again reasserted themselves,
the ensuing hostilities of the Second
World War amounting to another global battle waged by and for empires, rather than a struggle of nations. However intense their galvanizing nationalistic rhetoric, Germany, Italy, and Japan sought to enlarge their territorial dominions in, respectively, eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. Meanwhile, Britain and
France sought to defend their empires in Africa from
Mussolini and
Hitler, and to win back the colonies they had lost to Japan in the Far East.
¹⁰⁵
And in victory the United States and
Soviet Russia greatly expanded their empires, not only as maritime powers, with their mighty fleets dominating the oceans, but also as land-based hegemons, as the ostensibly free nations of western Europe became increasingly dependent on American financial aid and military protection, and as the new nations of eastern Europe were annexed into the
Communist sphere. The First World War had been a conflict of empires disguised as a conflict of nations, and the same was true of the Second.

Just as the years after 1919 had witnessed the flawed creation of nations and national identities in Europe and the
Middle East, the three decades after 1945 saw similar developments, over a longer time span and a greater area of the globe, this time in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the
Third World. The
British Raj in South Asia was given its independence and divided up between
India and
Pakistan; the Far Eastern dominions of Britain, France, and the
Netherlands were dismantled; the African empires of the European powers were brought to an end; and most of the islands in the
Caribbean and the few colonies in Latin America became independent. In virtually every case, following what would become a familiar pattern, the indigenous leaders of the fight for freedom and liberation would seek to define their new nation and unify their followers by exploiting and fomenting resistance to the imperial metropolis and its local proconsular agents. And in most cases, the former colonies were launched on their way to independence with the familiar and essential accoutrements of national autonomy and identity: not just a state structure and government bureaucracy, but also flags, anthems, stamps, currency, and ceremonials, as well as foundation myths and founding fathers, all in due course to be celebrated in new statues and new national histories.
¹⁰⁶
The singular irony is that these new
nations and postcolonial identities were modeled on those very same European nations and identities as had allegedly evolved in the decades before 1914, and whose domination they had struggled to overthrow.