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ethnicity. The independence movement was ignited by a radicalized clerical leadership in iSio but was soon suppressed by the Spanish. It was successfully resumed a decade later by ambitious military leaders—some claiming traditions of a populist and decentralizing left, others pressing the centralizing and briefly (under Augustin de Iturbide) imperial claims of the right. Iturbide, who had helped Spanish forces defeat the revolutionaries of 1810, led the new rebellion when Madrid fell under the control of the liberals in i8zo, claiming the title oi emperor until exiled and ultimately executed. However, the continuing turbulence and warfare undermined the prosperity achieved at the end of the era of Bourbon reform. Catholic conservatives and liberal anticlericals replaced each other in power as the cynical and populist military strongman, General Antonio Lopez Santa Anna, repeatedly switched sides, claimed the presidency, or j mi shed forward candidates he hoped to control.79
As the strongman in charge of a pro-Catholic conservative dictatorship in 1836, the general could not prevent the secession of Texas, but he fended offi French expedition to Veracruz in 1838 and briefly restored some of his luster. He returned to lead a weakened state that still claimed vast territories in the American Southwest although it only nominally controlled Anglophone Texas settlers and the feared Comanche federations of the borderlands. The Comanches' devastating raiding, carried out both to secure livestock and to exact vengeance, exposed the fragile hold of the Mexican state over its northern territory, including the contested area in today's southern Texas that led ambitious Texans and American nationalists—President James K. Polk in the lead—to press extensive border claims. Santa Anna s recourse to war in 1846 was an abject failure, and the Republic of Mexico had to surrender large swaths of territory to Washington.
This war on the margins of the settled world had profound ramifications for both republics: for the United States it undermined the 1810 Missouri compromise on the extension of slavery; in Mexico, following another conservative coup by Santa Anna, it opened the way to the Revolution of Ayutla and the great liberal anticlerical government under Benito Juarez of the second half of the 1850s. The constitution of 1857 outlined the constitution of a liberal and secular state with constitutional liberties and civil marriage. The Lerdo Law of 1856 pushed through a rigorous secularization of church properties but also the abolition of all corporate property, including the communal rights or fueros and collective holdings,
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ejidos, that still prevailed in many rural and Indian communities. In effect they carried through the last of the eighteenth-century revolutions, deeply dividing the country and igniting a three-year civil war, the War of the Reform, followed in turn by French invasion. Napoleon III believed he might take advantage of the turmoil (and of the United States' great internal conflict in the 1860s) to try to set up an imperial state under a Habsburg cousin, Maximilian of Austria. Maximilian found significant support among those resentful of Juarez's reforms, but the Juarez government rallied, and after the Battle of Puebla the French withdrew, leaving their well-meaning creature to be defeated and then executed. Liberal government meant an end to the threat of military dictatorship although not to the periodic warlordism that would grip the country from time to time.
Liberal government, even when headed by an Indian, too often meant incomprehension, not of the almost mystical pre-Columbian legacy, but of the social and economic organization that many still chose. The ramifications made themselves felt in the southeastern corner of the republic, the Yucatan Peninsula. Yucatan ladinos (including Creoles and mestizos but not Indians) had attempted to secede from the republic following the turmoil of the late 1830s, but had to come to terms in the early 1840s, only to have the port city of Campeche (vulnerable to US gunships) seek its own independence, which was then followed by a renewed secessionist uprising in the interior. In January 1847 the Indians, economically hard-pressed by the country's attack on communal rights, including \rater claims, staged an uprising soon seen in the most lurid images of race war :nd cannibalism. Ladino Yucatan seemed lost to the Indians by 1849-1850, but Santa Anna ground down the Mayan rebels by 1855. The liberals who ousted the general had no more tolerance for the indigenous vision of government and common property, and suppressed renewed revolt, even selling some of the defeated insurrectionists into Cuban slavery. Still, rebellion continued to smolder beyond the ladino cities, rooted in own quasi state of "the Cross" through the rest of the century.80 Indifferent government gave way to the tightening control of the president chosen in 1876, Porfirio Diaz, who would subdue the opposition and rally a group of cientificos, or business elites, who worked with American and British investors to lay down a modern railroad system.
Diaz would rule for almost 35 years, until a new generation threw off his autocratic regime. During that period Mexico would advance industrially, although
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with firms dominated by foreign capital. It would remain poor (in fact it had regressed in comparative economic terms since the late eighteenth century), but less poor; Catholic, but secular in its institutions; recognizing in theory its indigenous heritage, but indifferent to its current condition. The elements its history wove together—wars of national consolidation, hardheaded leaders who dominated politics and simultaneously the channels for capital, and the new railroads and industry; the persistence of popular religiosity at the village level, but the secularization of church lands; reform of the educational system to take it out of Church hands; a free market in land that undermined any residual collective rights of the indigenous population; the use of railroads to knit together a vast, if largely arid, territory—were in fact the ingredients that transformed the mid- and late nineteenth-century state. But like other Latin American states, it had to rely on British, and later on US, capital and its elite had fundamentally divided over ideological alternatives.
Further to the south, the dream of a unified South American republic had fallen apart during the wars of independence led by Bolivar and Jose de San Martin. But all the Spanish-speaking lands remained with powerful armies, underdeveloped national or local assemblies, and a tradition of military strongmen and powerful landlords. The era of the independence struggle also tended to divide the successor elites into conservatives who wished to preserve relatively strong "centralist" institutions with respect for the Church, and "federalists," who saw themselves as liberals and supporters of decentralization and access to British capital. In effect, the Latin American republics froze, until deep into the nineteenth century, in the kind of confrontation that briefly separated American Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans in the late 1790s— but with the confusing difference that in South America the term federalist signified the decentralized option that Jefferson and Madison defended toward 1800. And no Latin American statesman could have said, as Jefferson said o. Republicans and Federalists in 1801, we are all centralists, we are all federalists.
In Argentina the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas had drawn on the backing of the independent cattlemen of the pampas, the vast grazing lands around Buenos Aires, to intimidate the liberals in the port city, who sought to maintain their leadership of the republic and their commercial connections with the British. Nominally a federalist, Rosas and his provincial supporters established :i
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dictatorship during the 1830s and 1840s that depended increasingly on violence and terroristic elimination of his enemies and was ousted only in 1851. Like Andrew Jackson to the north, Rosas made his reputation fighting the indigenous inhabitants. But unlike the US president, he never had to contend with the former colonial power's armies. Nor did he ever have to come to terms with an emerging popular democratic movement as Jackson did. Finally he estranged even his own rancher supporters, who had benefited from his grants of little rural despotisms, by the costs of his wars and the conflicts with France and Britain over control of Rio de la Plata trade. The victory of the porteno (Buenos Aires) British-oriented liberal elite under Bartolome Mitre, Domingo Sarmiento, and Nicolas Avellaneda in the 1860s and 1870s brought the victory of liberal principles, British investment and railroad development, and an agrarian-export prosperity, followed by a massive immigration of southern European labor. A generation of cohesive state development followed, but Argentina remained a polity where a reactionary military and caudillo legacy remained a jagged ideological alternative. In Colombia, too, a conflict between military and liberals set the pattern for decades of civil strife. Army officers and churchmen who had sought to continue the Spanish ruling institutions described themselves as centralist; the liberals tended to speak for states or provincial rights. Politics seesawed between the two.
Brazil's economic and ideological conflicts were softer. The legacy of the Portuguese court and the presence of Braganza dynasty heirs as emperors from 1822 to 1889, as well as the unity needed to maintain a slave population, helped form a coherent oligarchy. So too did the coffee boom and the common intellectual formation of many in civil law and then as state administrators—a contrast with the theological and anticlerical conflicts inherited elsewhere in the Catholic Americas. The state cohered although its project remained administration, not development. The liberals' moves in the 1870s toward abolition of slavery did mobilize the conservative opposition of the coffee provinces in the south, but the liberals included sugar interests in the northeast and no major confrontation of economic interests compelled either political extremism or grand state wagers on one sector or another. The landed elites fed the state bureaucracy.81
The United States completed its first east-west railroad line four years after its Civil War ended. For Canada the equivalent epic accomplishment followed
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in the i8Sos with the building of the Canadian Pacific. The history of its railroads and its political federation had been intertwined for a generation. Following rebellions in 1837 against the British colonial government in French Lower Canada and the Anglophone Tory oligarchy of Upper Canada, the British mission of Lord Durham recommended self-government and unification of the two provinces into a Canadian Union. The financial strains of building the Grand Trunk railway designed to link the St. Lawrence's goods to US ocean ports, and US revocation of free trade for Canadian products, caused financial strains and exacerbated the tension between the linguistic communities. A series of conferences and negotiations in the mid-i86os produced the British North America Act and the creation of the self-governing Dominion of Canada under the Crown and comprising a new federation that redivided the old Upper and Lower Canadas and attracted the maritime provinces, and provided a basis for adhesion of the western lands. The Anglophone elements saw the hope for nationa. domination; the Francophones secured control of a provincial unit, including the cities of Montreal and Quebec.
It is instructive to think of the alternatives that might have been. Suppose Lee had won at Gettysburg in July 1863, for example, then marched toward New York, discouraged the North and allowed a peace-minded Democratic Party to eke out a victory in the presidential election of 1864 and negotiate a settlemen that allowed at least de facto autonomy within a regionally decentralized United States—united though in name only. A secessionist Confederate States woulr have had a social structure more akin to that of Brazil. It would have formed in effect part of a Caribbean geopolitical unit based for several decades more 011 plantation agriculture and servile labor. The southwestern territories won two decades earlier from Mexico would have remained dependencies of this southern slave republic, and California might ultimately have been divided between its once-Hispanic south and its Pacific-oriented north. Far-fetched? That depend1* upon whether we believe all counterfactuals are far-fetched by the very fact that they did not come to pass. Some historians, myself included, are more willing to live, so to speak, in the hypothetical or subjunctive mode. The point is that the political and social units that shaped global institutions in fact rested on particular outcomes that came together in a decisive series of events. As the poet Robert Frost wrote, the road not taken made all the difference. From 185^
to 1880, alternatives were progressively shut down by virtue of the advance of evolutionary ideas, the progress of technology based on iron, steel, and coal, the emerging social groups that grew in tandem within these innovations, and the military decisions that these impacted.
Given the variety of experiences that revolution or modernization from above can refer to, 1 prefer the very loose term controlled transformation—a process in which a group of ambitious and powerful men, whether political leaders or economically powerful, or often both, attempted to direct policy to achieve a more vigorous national development. They could attempt this within the shell of ancient empires (where they encountered fierce conservative resistance), or under the ground rules of popular elections. Without the new opportunities of railroad and communications, and rapid-fire weaponry, they would have found their moments less favorable. Without the widespread belief in the inevitability, and even the "hygiene" (as one Italian imperialist termed it), of military conflict, they would also have played a less obtrusive role. And of course they reinforced the charged ambiance of war and industrialization that made their policies seem so essential and natural. Bismarck was right: the great issues of the day were to be resolved by blood and iron—and by strong and determined national strategists such as himself.
In the Middle of Europe
From at least the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 through German reunification in 1990, the state structures of Central Europe have been, in effect, part of an implicit European constitution, central to issues of war and peace and the representation of ethnic communities. The Habsburg empire rested on two dominant national groups—its German-speaking west, then including today's Austria and the hilly perimeter of Bohemia and Moravia (todays Czech Republic), and, to the east, in the kingdom of Hungary, the Magyar-speaking landlord class who dominated an extensive countryside through a county organization with courthouse politics, not so different, as noted, from the plantation class in the American South. Instead of black slaves, the Magyars drew on peasant laborers—in some districts Ukrainians, Poles, Slovaks, or Romanians—who were still enserfed until 1848. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, after serfdom had
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formally ended, they constructed a voting system that ensured that the Slavic groups and Romanians would not capture significant political power. Geographically the kingdom of Hungary contained today's Slovakia, western Romania, and today's Croatia. Outside the kingdom of Hungary and its Austro-Bohemian heartland, the dynasty also ruled Lombardy, with its capital Milan, and Tuscany, and, from 1797 to 1866, Venice and its hinterland. To the northeast the Habsburgs ruled today's Slovenia and beyond the Carpathians the plains ot southern Poland or Galicia with the city of Lemberg (later Polish Lwow an>l today's Ukrainian Lviv), taken during the Polish partitions, and even the region of Czernowitz, taken from the Ottomans. When the remains of the Holy Ronin.i Empire had been dissolved under Napoleon's pressure, the Habsburg rulers had reconstituted their diverse territories as the Austrian Empire, not as a unified unit but with different constitutional arrangements. All in all there were about ten different linguistic units, not including the dense Yiddish-speaking Jewn h populations in Galicia. Between then and 1945, the Jews would emigrate or dis appear in the Holocaust, and the three million Germans of Bohemia and Moravia would be expelled at the end of World War II, as would millions of Germans from the then eastern territories of Prussia further north. But major territori.il and border changes would take place earlier, in the late 1860s and at the end of World War I in 1918-1919, as well.
The Habsburg empire thus comprised many linguistic groups. Increasingly they would feel the attractions of nationalism, the notion that they each shouid be able to govern their own communities in a national state. Or at least their intellectual and political leaders had this conviction. In fact many of the population spoke two or more languages—the local vernacular at home and in the village but German or Hungarian in the more public world of officialdom, and in the armies. And forming new states would not be easy in areas where populations were mixed. It was in the interest of the rulers to hold back the belief in nationalism, which would tear apart this patchwork into a welter of contending peopl.> and places. And even if the dynasty was a German one, it would survive only h\ leading a multiethnic unit; its rulers learned Hungarian and Italian as well .is the French so current in European diplomacy. The Austrian chancellor from 1810 to 1848, Prince Klemens von Metternich, understood the potential vulnei-abilities of his state, large with respect to its population of fifty million but vm-
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nerable in its site and its multiple ethnicities. But he also understood how to leverage Austrian power. The tsar of Russia and the king of the major state in northern Germany, Prussia (which had a significant Polish-speaking minority in the east), shared a common interest in social and territorial stability in the early years after the Congress of Vienna. They signed a common program of religiously based stability, the Holy Alliance, consulted together with British and French in periodic "congresses" on the state of Europe, and through 1849 agreed to act in common against revolutionary outbreaks. And they established a German Confederation—a loose structure that included the German territories of Austria and Prussia as well as the smaller German states that emerged from the Holy Roman Empire. Austria and Prussia alternated in the presidency of this unit. And the whole geopolitical machinery was in effect anchored by the implicit power of Russian armies, which supported Metternich's program of conservative stabilization. Notably, in 1848-1849, when the Hungarians had threatened to successfully wrest their independence, Russian armies had intervened to help the Austrians suppress the revolt.
But within a generation of 1815 the structures were increasingly fragile. The sentiment of German nationalism and Italian nationalism grew among the growing middle-class elements of the region, in particular among younger literate students. Demonstrations on days of historical significance, monuments of national allegorical figures—a Germania, for instance—celebrations of Italy or Germany in literature increased. Moreover, the Prussian kingdom's officialdom grew restive with the deference to Austria that the system entailed. The western parts of the kingdom grew as coal and iron production increased. They had inaugurated basic education for their village population in the eighteenth century. The monarch/ policy of religious toleration helped attract qualified Huguenot and other persecuted minorities. After defeat by Napoleon, they had adopted a French system of universal military conscription. They recovered and augmented their territory in 1815 as a member of the coalition against Bonaparte. Smaller in population than Austria, Prussia had a vigorously growing economy and its cities, including Berlin, were increasing in size. As early as 1819 its civil servants designed a customs union, or Zollverein, for their own state of Prussia that eliminated the internal tariffs, and in the decades to come they signed up the other midsize states in this free-trade area. The Habsburg realms not only faced internal
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tensions; increasingly their claim to control the German Confederation wax under challenge.
So too the Italian territories in Lombardy and Venetia increasingly chafed under Habsburg rule, and many of the middle-class elements in central and northern Italy developed schemes to unite an emerging Italian nation. Many intellectuals, poets, and writers took up the cause, which was still suppressed by the Austrian authorities and other conservative rulers in the divided peninsula. But the ferment of ideas and discussion was to become known as the Resurgence or Risorgimento. Memoirs of anti-Austrian agitation and schemes for unification crystallized discussion. Nationalism was increasingly chic—British Romantii poets wrote lyrics for the Greek rebellion of the i8zos. Poles, too, had national aspirations, and soon the Czech-speaking intellectuals of Bohemia would a< well, as would various southern Slav groups. But they were more directly under Habsburg control. German nationalism could prosper because of the divergence between Prussia and Austria, and the growing attractiveness of nationalism to the elites of the other states.
How was national unification to be achieved? In 1848-1849, the revolutionaries had tried and failed. The mass uprisings and demonstrations in Italy, Cen tral Europe, and Paris threatened a social revolution and soon alienated the socially respectable middle classes. Moreover, the Habsburg court rallied and rs generals suppressed the uprisings in the various cities—Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Venice—one by one. As noted above, the king of Sardinia, who took up the national cause, was defeated twice, first in 1848 and then in 1849. When the Hungarian revolutionaries took up arms again in 1849, tne tsar's troops obligingly intervened, and their leader, Kossuth, was left to become a salon hen in America. The Roman revolution, in which Mazzini served as one of the three triumvirs, frightened the pope and was suppressed in 1850 by the newly elected president of the French Republic, Louis Napoleon, who wanted to please Catholics at home. The Frankfurt Assembly could not solve the conundrum of Centr.i European organization—the reviving conservative forces in Austria, led by the tough-minded prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, brusquely told the Frankfurt libei-als that Austria would enter a Germanic federation only with all its territories, including the Hungarian and Polish domains, or not at all. The Prussian monarch, approached as a second-best alternative, refused to offend the Hat sb
and take a crown that depended on popular legitimacy. The nationalist and revolutionary enthusiasts of 1848 were scattered and suppressed after their second wave of uprisings in 1849. Prussian troops dissolved the remnants of the Frankfurt National Assembly in early 18 $0.
But nationalist aspirations were quieted less than a decade. By the 1850s, Central Europe was in flux anew. First of all, economies rebounded vigorously: railroad construction and industrial development surged ahead, in Prussia and in France, as in the Americas. Even the Prussian court was prepared to adopt a more assertive policy, The tsar vetoed early plans in 1850 and 1851 for a Prussian-Ted union of North Germany as potentially too unsettling; St. Petersburg did not want to undermine Austria's conservative presence in Central Europe. But within Prussia the Zollverein and railroads advanced; now, too, there was a Prussian legislature since 1848, which allowed middle-class liberals a forum. In Piedmont, with its capital in Turin, the new monarch was willing to abandon the sleepy clerical conservatism of previous decades, and under the constitution of 1848 (the "Statuto") a vigorous liberal elite, under the leadership of Count Camillo Cavour, sought to emulate British parliamentary practice and French anticlericalism. The kingdom secularized Church and monastic lands and pressed forward with various reforms. Increasingly Piedmont became the hope of the Italian nationalists for leadership in unification. Earlier republican ideas, or the notion of an Italian federation under the presidency of the pope, were abandoned as unrealistic and juvenile. Moreover, Pius IX, who had begun his papacy in 1846 as a possible liberal reformer but was scarred by the Roman revolution, would gravitate toward condemning liberalism and nationalism. The Italian National Movement that was founded in 1859 united a determined cohort of middle-class and aristocratic supporters in the northern and central towns of the peninsula. No longer students or activist members of the secret carbonari, they were now a bourgeois movement. Similarly in Germany, the national enthusiasts confessed that they had been too generous and idealistic in 184S; they must accept the states that existed as a basis for action and work with the princes. The restored state structure of Central Europe was cracking open and the initial repressive reaction loosening up in the late 1850s. In Prussia the restored monarch Frederick William IV—who had refused a "crown from the L'utter" (that is, from the Frankfurt parliament)—was removed as insane in 1858,
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and his brother was made regent (to inherit the Prussian throne as William I h 1862). No liberal, he did, though, appoint a new cabinet that backed off from rlu-harsh approach following the revolution and called for new Landtag eleci/ons, inaugurating a period of renewed political discussion, the so-called New Era.
With respect to ideology and social origins, nationalists were prepared: to abandon republicanism and find monarchical patrons, whether in Turin or Berlin, They were certainly not prepared to embrace socialism. But how should they solve their geopolitical dilemma of Austrian power, seconded by the tsar anil prepared to intervene in Germany, Bohemia, and northern Italy? Cavour's strategy was to persuade Bonaparte (now after a coup d'etat in 1851, and a plebiscite the next year, governing as Napoleon III, emperor of the French) to take up the Italian cause. Napoleon III fancied himself the champion of nationalities,;but he was also preserving the rule of the pope in the middle of Italy.
It was the Crimean War of 1853—1855 that transformed the international political possibilities. Ostensibly this was an arcane struggle, fought by the Frencii to protect their influence in the Levant and the Roman Catholic religious guard ianship of Jerusalem against Russian Orthodox claims over the same holy places. But for London the underlying preoccupation was Russian pressure on the Ottoman Empire, weakened by earlier losses in its European territory, the curlier campaigns of Muhammad Ali, and probably by the ramifications of its ,mv,\ effort at reforms, the Tanzimat. St. Petersburg aspired to military hegemony i-i the Black Sea and the Straits of Marmara, and free entry into the Meditcri 1-nean; London saw a threat to its own maritime role and was determined to kcc.i the Ottoman Empire a viable structure. As discussed above, the war—largely fought for control of the ports on the Crimean Peninsula—turned out to be a protracted and messy struggle, revealing the weaknesses of both sides. It al* ■ revealed the overextension of the Austrian Empire. The Russians expected th a: Vienna would repay its help in suppressing revolution in 1849 by interdictir: g ;t iv Anglo-French military movement in the Balkans; instead the Austrians occupied the Danubian provinces the Russians agreed to vacate. But Cavour in' I urn threw in Piedmont s forces with the British and French, hoping that in the peace settlement to follow, London and Paris would compel Austria to surrender it-, hold in northern Italy. Fearing the loss of its Italian provinces, the Austrian-, sought to appease the French and British by "tilting" toward them and threaten:1 if.
'-"arrographic teleology: The advance of the modern nation-state, as seen in Italy, 1S15-1870.
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the Russians with intervention unless they accepted their enemies' pc.v.c tei m, Cavour would be disillusioned at the 1856 Congress of Paris that concluded peace; he received no concrete commitment from Napoleon III or London to take up the question of Piedmont's aspirations to unite northern Italy against Austria. On the other hand, Russian policy makers were angered by Vienna's ap. parent ingratitude. They had to accept that the clauses kept them from reconstituting a naval force in the Black Sea; the Straits to the Mediterranean \u closed to them. If challenged anew, Vienna could not count on St. PetersbuiL;'.. help. Prussia's star rose instead. Under the young Bismarck's forceful :idvoi.\u:\ Prussia adopted strict neutrality and made it clear that France could not intervene in Russian Poland across its territory.
Although Cavour was disappointed at Paris, events were in the sort of thy that occurs only once a generation. Within three years Napoleon would al" >■ himself with Savoy. The emperor wanted a dynastic marriage with the pi in of Savoy for his heir. The groom was unattractive and brutish; King Victor j manuel would not compel his daughter to the union, but she accepted :kt p otic duty. In addition an assassination attempt on the emperor by an It;:!, n radical, ostensibly frustrated by the opposition to unification, raised issue! -,f personal security. By early 1859 the French pressed Vienna into war. The :wo r.i i|ur battles, Magenta and Solferino, were bloody confrontations, signaling the .Uiapc of the new warfare. Napoleon concluded a quick peace; the Austrians cor. cedtJ Lombardy (the province around Milan) to Paris, which retroceded it to I Venice was to remain Austrian until 1866, when it would be joined to a result of Prussia's victory over Austria. And in return, the kingdom of . ■ ceded to France the region of Nice and the area around Lake Geneva that 1. .1 been part of its own territory. Cavour won more than Lombardy, however I this time the pro-Piedmontese liberals throughout Italy—men of substance , r-J socially conservative, though usually liberal advocates of parliamentary po :ri; -were organizing a movement in all the small states of the Po Valley and Ci-i u.il Italy; and a wave of plebiscites ratified uniting these states with Savoy into a Kingdom of Italy. Napoleon Ill's troops still prevented annexing the ptov: . Rome, although the papal province of Bologna would join Italy, as would Tnscim Once the Franco-Austrian peace was concluded, the big question remained Lie fate of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, that is, the Kingdom of Naples, 1 *."in-
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nalist icon: A depiction of the "handshake of Teano," the meeting between Giuseppe di and King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy north of Naples on October 2.6, i860. Garibaldi, ly an advocate of a republican unification for Italy, had forced the withdrawal of the Bour-narch from Sicily and Naples, but he agreed, for the cause of unity, to recognize Prime r Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel's monarchical framework that lg extended southward from Turin. Five months later, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed i (mostly) united Italy. (Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art
lg all of southern Italy and Sicily. The Neapolitan Bourbons had been cd after the brief revolution of 1848; now in i860 they were to fall defini-to a new revolution, supported by the dashing republican leader Garibaldi is "Thousand." The question was, would the democratic republican leaders revolution in Sicily and Naples unite the region with the north? Cavour's nont was a constitutional state, but with a limited suffrage and clearly rvative—Garibaldi and his lieutenants envisaged for a while a radical re-!■ in the south that would oust the landlords, with feudal privileges and ies. But Garibaldi decided to yield control for the sake of a larger Italy, and
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in early 1861 the king of Savoy became the monarch of a united Italy. Wnu; would be gained in 1866, the province and city of Rome in 1870, the northern region of Trent and Bolzano, Trieste, only in 1918. Garibaldi would be cknju sioned in the Turin parliament, would bitterly denounce the cession of Ni. c, and bitterly attacked Cavour, who although only in his fifties was ill and would shortly die. Garibaldi would attempt several invasions of Roman territory in the 1860s, only to be checked by Italian troops. Only when Napoleon III faced t.u. Prussian invasion of 1870 would he remove his garrisons from Rome, wh!c -, r -lowed the new kingdom to take the ancient capital.
Cavour and his close colleagues who brought about the unification of 1 he Italian state were in effect gentry—largely gentlemen landowners, who admu zA Victorian liberalism and its ability for a public-spirited oligarchy to manage .1 country through a parliament and a moderate monarchy. The group of unifiers would become known in the early 1860s as the Right, and later the Old Right, but they quickly offered coalition privileges to those who termed themselves rhe Left, also middle-class men who sought a broader electorate but worked with n the gradualist paradigm of state building. As of 1862, they formed a "marri: '„ n-connubio; by 1882, the Left would win the elections. The Left then invited ilu-i defeated adversaries from the Right to "transform" themselves into liberals like themselves, a process of glossing over ideological differences that would chaui.-terize the governance of the state into the twentieth century. Trasformismo had a cost. The Italian state remained perhaps too cozy; it viewed its peasant masses as sullen adversaries, and the 1860s were spent combatting widespread peasant resistance (the brigantaggio) in Sicily, which cost more lives than the wars or vilification. A great inquest in 1874 revealed how impoverished the rural masses remained in the Po Valley lands as well as in the south. But the unifiers \ re perhaps understandably enough, also preoccupied by making their new -tare .> viable contender in European great-power politics. That meant completing the north-south railroad lines and having a military—both of which entailed heiv \ taxes on milling wheat, to be borne primarily by the masses. The more r.uhca. Left, those who flocked to Garibaldi and his southern lieutenant Crispi, remained outside the system until the 1880s. So, too, did the upper reaches of the ai istoc-racy in both the north and the south: the novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa niemc-rably re-evoked their quasi-feudal world in The Leopard. And so, too, c.d ilw
Catholic faithful, who were instructed by their clergy not to participate in the regime that had taken Rome and confiscated their properties, leaving only the Vatican territory. Until 1900 or so they remained aloof from politics, then gradually were allowed by the Vatican to vote for the Liberals and even to run "clerical" candidates to keep the socialists from power.
The Italian process contrasted with what was occurring in northern Germany. There too in 1858-1859, middle-class nationalism and Prussian administrators saw the chance to take up the German national banner with themselves in the lead. But whereas the Piedmontese monarchy accepted a British-style constitutional role, the Prussian monarchs were habituated to far more executive authority and drew on a stronger identification with the military, which had a more powerful role in government. The new king in fact wanted to strengthen his professional army and diminish the role that the liberal militia had come to claim. In 1861-1862, he urged an army enlargement and reorganization that the liberals resisted for ideological and fiscal reasons. Not having the votes to ram it through the Prussian Landtag, under the advice of his generals he summoned Otto von Bismarck to take the office of minister president. Bismarck was also a noble, a Prussian Junker, who in 1848 had been resolutely conservative and supportive of Austria's role in the Confederation. In the interim he had served as ambassador to Russia and as Prussian representative on the Diet, where he came to resent the Austrian leadership. Bismarck came to Berlin and was willing co collect the necessary taxes without parliamentary approval, in effect an unconstitutional recourse, although he found the legal authorities to justify it on dubious grounds. The Prussian Liberals were incensed, but within a few years Bismarck had managed national military victories that would reconcile them. The German-speaking province of Holstein with its port, Kiel, was nominally a fief of the Danish king, but concurrently a member of the German Confederation. The Confederation Diet deputized Austria and Prussia jointly to compel the new king of Denmark to renounce succession plans for removing Holstein from the Confederation so that he could preserve its traditional administrative unity with the neighboring Danish province of Schleswig. At the conclusion of the short war in 1864, Denmark had to concede both duchies to the Austrians and Prussians as agents for the Confederation, an administrative condominium doomed to conflict and one that enabled Bismarck to provoke a war with Austria two years later.
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By the mid-i86os Austria rightly understood that Bismarck wanted to esvu-l Vienna from any significant role in the non-Habsburg German territories. Austrian forces, however, proved ill prepared and in the brief war that ensued Ilk.. decisively to the Prussians at Königgrätz (Sadová) in early July 1866. Austria sued for peace to avoid further losing battles on the road to Vienna.
Bismarck exacted no territories from the Habsburgs, but forced the end of the German Confederation in which they had shared power. Prussia won tl.c right to organize the north German states in a North German Federation, wit!-a parliament. The southern states of Bavaria and Baden remained outside, but were compelled to sign a military alliance that would subordinate their aixiu-s to Berlin's in case of another war. Bismarck did get to annex German ternio-ic within the North—the wealthy city of Frankfurt and the north-central city of Hannover, among others. His Italian allies were awarded Austrian Venetia dcsp w having lost a naval battle in the Mediterranean. Just as important as the sicce->s in external policy, Bismarck won the retroactive parliamentary approval for h.s tax measures and the army expansion. The Liberals, enthusiastic supporters of a united Germany, saw the minister president as filling their dreams of 1848. Their voting bloc divided into those willing to approve his policies—known hc:-.i i--forth as National Liberals and including some of the ambitious members of the annexed state government of Hannover—and the smaller number of those w-o refused to support him, the so-called Progressives. Bismarck expected a rapid completion of German unification with the absorption of Bavaria, Baden, f. id Württemberg, states now outside any regional federation. But he underestimated the growing Roman Catholic resistance to his program. Catholics \ve-c concentrated in the south and Prussia's own Rhine provinces and Silesia in the southeast. The Catholics identified with Austria as a guardian of Catholic in:u-ests and they feared the triumph of a state identified with Protestantism.
But the chancellor knew how to exploit these divisions: Catholic hostility made Protestant Liberal support even stronger than it would have been, and within a few years the Prussian leader was willing to wager on a third m !:itai\ adventure, this time a risky war against Napoleon Ills France. By exploiting v:: 1-ous issues, the German leader made Napoleon appear as an enemy determi ncd tn block German unification and even conspiring to seize the duchy of Luxembuii
The French emperor was facing a rising tide of political opposition at home and felt he could ill afford to appear weak and indecisive. A pretext for war was found pi a contest over Spanish politics. Spanish parliamentary and military forces were trying to stabilize a new regime after deposing Queen Isabella in 1868; the par-l:ament rejected a republic and with General Prim sought to find a suitable monarchical candidate, inviting a cousin of the Prussian Hohenzollerns. The French .ibjected; the Prussian royal family was willing to renounce the project, but llismarck released a brusque edited version of the negotiations—the so-called I'ms telegram—that aroused Prussian national feelings, and angered the French court. Goaded on by the hawks in Paris (whom his wife favored), Napoleon III declared war—and, to the astonishment of European observers, lost disastrously. ,V French general surrendered the major fortress in Metz; the emperor himself ' ad to surrender an army on the battlefield at Sedan on September z, 1870. The .jpublican opposition in Paris declared the regime over and installed a de facto sovernment that was divided among republicans, Bourbon monarchists, and sup-orters of the emperor—who, as a Prussian prisoner, was allowed to go into exile 11 London. As Prussian troops moved on Paris, the city itself rose again against the -e\v legislature that was convened at Versailles, and for many months installed a .evolutionary commune. The assembly, under a conservative republican, Adol-!ic Thiers, negotiated a peace with Prussia, which cost it an indemnity—soon aid—and the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on the border, which Germany would hold until its own defeat in World War I, forty-eight years later. The Paris Commune remained besieged, cold, and near famine through the winter of 1871, ■incil the Assembly finally retook it in the spring, executing thousands of the Communards and exiling others to New Caledonia. Only five years later would the provisional government formally recognize that it was a republic with a "resident as a chief executive (who was deprived of any real power) and a Na-1 lonal Assembly that governed the country through a civil service.
Bismarck, however, knew how to exploit the victory and the rush of nationalist enthusiasm Germans enjoyed. The southern states were bound to Prussia by the alliances negotiated after 1866. In January 1871 the German parliamentary delegates, enjoying a victory session in the palace of Versailles, voted that the -Jng of Prussia should become at the same time "German Emperor." Essentially
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Bismarck used the institutions he had designed for the interim North Gcrm..n Confederation in 1867, but with the addition of the south German states.-The ■£ resulting governmental structure was a compromise amalgam of popular and executive instruments. Prussia and the other states retained their Diets 01 Landtags. The minister president of Prussia became the German chancellor.] 1L alone appeared before the German legislature; there was no collective cabinet responsibility as in Britain, and he held power at the pleasure of the emperor, just % as in Prussia he held power at the pleasure of the king. The military ministe b were important members of the council of ministers (as would be the case in ■ Japan), and the military budget was debated only every seven years. Nonethelcs-, Bismarck did agree that the new Reichstag (like the old Customs Union parlu-     . . ment and interim North German Diet) should be elected by universal manhood suffrage. (An upper chamber with restricted powers, the Bundesrat, was based on state delegates.) This meant that one organ in the German constitution d structure had a franchise as democratic as the American Congress and the new French Chamber of Deputies. But it could not vote to unseat the chancellor; all it could do was make his life difficult by paralyzing the budget process. Moio-over, even as he sought to placate a Reichstag majority in which, over time, liberal tj-and working-class representatives increased with industrial development, t"-r chancellor-minister president had to pass a Prussian state budget a few blocLs -.. away in the Prussian House of Deputies (and a Prussian House of Peers) that luc a far more conservative majority. For until defeat in the First World War, Pruss, retained a "three class" suffrage that gave wealthy voters a far greater proportional share of the delegates than the nonwealthy.
Bismarck had the force and the prestige to navigate within the system, but his successors found the task a growing challenge. After the end of the Thiul Reich, historians tended to stress the autocratic side of the empire—the potc <\-tial for a willful emperor and powerful military officers to intervene in politics— but recent scholarship has emphasized the vigorous quality of political debut ■ that marked national and local life. Until the end of the 1870s it pleased Bismarck to work with the National Liberals and to rally them against supposed threats from the disgruntled Catholics and the emerging working-class Socul Democratic movement. By the end of the 1870s, Germany unified its legal codi's
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Hid its monetary systems; it retained conscription and the strongest army in Europe- Its industrial development, spearheaded by the coal and steel concencra--lons of the Ruhr and newly annexed Lorraine, rapidly made it the preeminent industrial power of the continent, and it would overtake Britain in steel output
iv the 1890s. Bismarck declared that Germany was a satiated state and wanted to
»e a force for stability, but the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine had made it difficult to win a real reconciliation with France.
The Austrian Empire underwent its own structural consolidation after its Jefeat in 1866. While the new realists among the Magyar nobility had (until 1918) shelved the goal of absolute independence from Vienna, its leaders under Ferenc Deak exploited the Austrian defeat to extract a large degree of autonomy under the terms of the 1867 Ausgleich or Compromise. Henceforth, the Habsburg empire would be a dual federation: the emperor "of" the lands in the west (Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia) would be king "in" Hungary, and the country would become the hyphenated Austria-Hungary or Dual Monarchy. Dualism brought aprecarious degree of state consolidation to each half of the structure, but the two "historic peoples" each faced fractious nationalities in their respective regions. The Magyars would govern their large half the country through a rigged suffrage, much as white United States citizens in the former Confederate States of America would dominate their region. Within the kingdom, Croatia enjoyed its own partially autonomous status. Linking the two halves of the Dual Monarchy was a common foreign office, a common army and navy, with German still accepted as a language of command, and a commercial trade treaty, to be reviewed every decade, that connected the grain-growing lands of Hungary with the more industrial regions of Bohemia and Austria. Austria still retained Trieste as its port on the Adriatic Sea; Hungary held the ports of Pola (today s Croatian Pula) and Fiume or Rijeka on the Adriatic. The Hungarian parliament, restricted
n suffrage until 1911, divided between more or less nationalist elements; the Reichsrat in Vienna, which united the western half, would break down into Social Democrats, Liberals, eventually Catholic populists (Christian Socials), pan-Germans, and strong components of Czech and Polish deputies who fought over the linguistic rights of their respective nationalities and the control of school budgets. Civil servants were expected to use German in reports to Vienna, the
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local vernacular wich the citizenry dominant in the respective areas. Language issues for schools—perhaps familiar to Americans accustomed to disputes about bilingualism—continued to vex the Austrian half.
It was unclear what to call the western half: strictly speaking, Austria w, only part of the unit; the emperor retained a confusing series of sovereign ritl-«. over the various provinces (of which Bohemia was listed as a kingdom and Upper and Lower Austria as Archduchies). The designation "imperial and royal," "kaiserlich und königlich" or "k. und k.," became the term applied to officials, dug;, consulates, and so forth of the whole realm. The western half was sometiim unofficially referred to as Cisleithania—the lands "this side" of the little river Leith that formed part of the border with Hungary. Officially it remained the lands represented in the Reichsrat. As ethnic nationalism increased, the structure came under greater and greater stress, although the Austrian Social Democratic Party and the Jewish population, who understood the dangers of Germnn and Magyar, Polish, or Romanian nationalism, remained the most loyal to the dynasty as the unifying and hopefully moderating force. Historians have ofk-n viewed what also became known as Austria-Hungary as a doomed state, but it fought for four long years in World War I before finally fracturing. Its armed forces were rarely victorious unless acting together with the German mi.itui,, but they functioned as a unit despite their recruits' linguistic diversity. Its bureaucrats seemed addicted to a ponderous formalism, but they successfully reps c-sented the presence of the monarchy and its elaborate legalism. And curiously enough within this ramshackle compromise between modern prenational (and postnational) elements, likewise between parliamentary state and military-bureaucratic empire, the boldest experiments in music, philosophy, and psychi a try could flourish.82
The World of the 1870s
The world of the 1870s had been transformed—not by revolution, but by sVMi. leaders, realists who believed in railroads, property, economic development, and national power, and the inevitability of conflict and competition. Of course there were major differences. The Italians who moved their capital to Rome ir 1870 (after an interim six years in Florence, which had followed Turin) knew that
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they had chosen a course different from that of the Germans and Prussians. Their parliament was more influential; they felt the Prussians glorified war. But they -,-n- identified with a national state. The unifiers who were constructing the new I ipanese national state felt a kinship with the Germans—like them, they saw the monarchy and its civil servants and its military leaders as crucial for their state, and they were emulating the industrialization as quickly as they could, sending rheir promising diplomats and generals to study in the West. The Brazilians and Argentines, who had cooperated (with the Uruguayans) in almost obliterating :he Paraguayan Republic, which defied their access to the great rivers from the j.iterior, depended much more on Britain's commercial influence. But they overcame the old conflicts to a degree, rallied (to use the Brazilian motto) around the vJomtean ideas of "order and progress." Brazil, huge and decentralized under the emperors elevated from the exiled Portuguese royal line, slowly moved to abolish ,livery and with it the empire. Canada was completing its railroad network and negotiating a united Dominion. Vigorous US growth came at a price. The Republican Party in the United States was determined to favor manufacturing with a tariff and open up the West to farmers, ranchers, and miners—thereby forging a . wlition that would run the country for several decades once it had abandoned rs radicals' effort to remake the ex-Confederacy. But in the opportunities that abounded for farmers, industrialists, and even southern landlords in the railroads and the trans-Mississippi West, blacks, Indians, and the contract laborers from last Asia would remain severely disadvantaged, if not victims. Even the French vepublic, which had installed a powerful Assembly, would advance its railroad network and a state-run secularized school system, with a centralized prefectural system.
So throughout much of the "civilized" world—understood as Europe with its American outliers, the British dominions, and the ambitious Japanese— i:ates were trump. The recipe for governing was to develop their territory, keep I ower in the hands of men of science, expertise, and property, and prepare for a continuing military rivalry. And to resist the archaic blandishments of commu-.-.alism, dangerously close to anarchism and syndicalism, whether manifesting itself as a program to found government on village communes and collective property, advocated only by formerly servile peasants or indigenous tribes, and reject the new working-class claims to trade-union and syndical power. And to
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resist, too, any supranational claims to religious authority, whether from the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the West or the 'ulama in the Islamic world or Buddhist monasteries in Asia.
Of course, there were laggards in this process. China remained a victim: the British and French had gone to war again in i860 and forced more concessions; the Taiping had sapped imperial strength—the power of the Confucian state and the growing impoverishment of its peasant masses prevented an effecthe response, though not the effort. The Ottomans, who had lost Egypt and most of their Balkan territories, faced the severest self-contradictions: if they adopted modern principles of secular Ottoman citizenship, they undermined the rcli gious communalism that had been the basis of the Empire when it was on ihe rise. They found it hard to mobilize economic resources and extract revenues. As in the case of China, and to a degree Latin America, where mineral extraction commodity exports, and the coastal port activities generated wealth, fbrci^nciv would control much of the process and slow down self-development. Britain revealed some of the same pressure to modernize a political and educational s>s tern that had not been compelled to reform by radical shocks or military defeat. Between the 1830s and the 1870s, Britain too would adopt crucial reforms—a less paternalist approach to poverty, the reform of its military (abolishing purchase of commissions), free trade, key municipal reform—and rationalization of its great Indian possession after suppression of the rebellion of 1857. So, coo,: the Russians proceeded less dramatically, but did abolish serfdom and started rowaid representative institutions in the 1860s and 1870s. The transcontinental Russian railroad would have to wait until the end of the nineteenth century, as woi 1 Id ilv loosening of the communal hold over village lands, and a national parliame.it came only in 1905. Britain, in effect, could modernize without radically tian;-forming its state-society balance; in Russia the state remained powerful eno-.ig'* and its adherents conservative enough that modernization came slowly. But a1, these states were on a new trajectory by 1870, and so was their intellectual am: cultural patrimony. With such transformations it was to be expected that the pressure to dominate and control would press even more drastically into the colonial peripheries, and the instrumentalities for control at home would rely eve 1 more on science and measurement, steel and steam and communication. It wouh I be both gritty and glitzy, ferociously innovative, but factual as well.
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i .
t i
3 IP
But yet, the 1870s disclosed a collection of states still spread out in their ustitutional and ideological transformations. Some remained hostage to their ■ohtinuing multicultural divisions. The old empires—Auscro-Hungarian and Ottoman, Russian to a lesser degree—had to balance ethnic or religious diversity even as they sought to modernize for the harsh international competition diat ]lacj threatened them since the late eighteenth century. The once opulent Mughal Empire had finally disappeared in 1858 at the hands of its feeble princes and persistently encroaching British adversaries after the collapse of the 'ndian rebellion. The so-called Raj—which after 1876-1877 became officially die Empire of India under the Empress Victoria—found it expedient to preserve its patchwork territories and diverse communities, including the approximately iive hundred princely states preserved alongside the directly ruled presidencies ,1 iid other jurisdictions represented in London by the secretary of state for India a iid administered from Calcutta by the governor general or viceroy. The Manchu state with its allogenic dynasty could hardly embrace an unrestrained Chinese j ationalism, but its loyal officials found Confucian traditions based on the classics and a virtuous gentry too limited to carry through a successful reform program. The Germans and Japanese seemed to understand that if they morphed imperial legacies into efficient military and bureaucratic government, they might retain the nominal trappings of empire. And countries formally democratic at home understood conversely that the currency of power in the world of states was to develop empire abroad.
Historians have always emphasized the violent confrontations between highly organized states as the material of traditional "diplomatic" history. But the con--■entious world of rival states was also united in its pressure on the fragmented communities at its edges, or sometimes within its territories, whom they perceived to be obstacles to progress and civilization. These alternative communities were often desperately poor, lived sometimes in a symbiotic relationship with their animals, and periodically renewed the religions of empire, whether Christian or Muslim or Hindu, with the voices of local prophets, dissident priests, austere Sufi mystics, and healers. They were remnants, but persistent remnants— the Maya of the Yucatan borderland; the vaqueiros or herders of the Brazilian scrublands of the northeast known as the Sertao, who resisted the new encroaching republic in 1896; the American Indian nations slowly compressed into
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reservations; the gypsies of Andalusia and Romania; the Chechens of the Cauc.i-sus; the Pashtuns at the northwest frontier of the Raj and other societies of Ce. tral Asia; the tribesmen of highland Burma; Uighurs of Xinjiang; and nunier- -*S ous other peoples. Some, such as the Tasmanians, were largely exterminated early as the 1820s and 1830s; others later, as the Indians of Patagonia in the 188c 5. i still others, such as the Herero in German colonial territory, decimated in-'.iln | early years of the twentieth century—as many had been in the earlier exp;-:-.':i1 n [ of overseas empire after 1500. Many would be absorbed in encroaching cities an territories; still others managed to persist in jungle or highland sanctuaries to daunting for the victorious—waiting for chiliastic redemption or even later to -\ be discovered and often called back to mediated life by anthropologists. Tin l 1 fate caught the attention of novelists at the time and is being deservedly rco;-ered by contemporary historians. But we must carry on with the progress of th.v who continually pushed out at their once immune domains. !
3. The Human Zoo
KEEP bad news in perspective____Nine days after Custer's detachment faced
-ivift annihilation at the Little Bighorn, the United States celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its original Independence Day. As part of the centennial year, Philadelphia entrepreneurs organized the largest world's fair to date, from May 10 to November 10. President Ulysses Grant and Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro, the last monarch resident in the Western Hemisphere, opened the celebratory exhibits of technology and agricultural bounty by switching on the im-■liense Corliss Steam Engine in Machinery Hall. Steam and iron caught the imagination of the ten-million-odd visitors who came to the Exposition. Alexander Bell's telephone, patented two months earlier, was also on exhibit. Two years later an even larger world exposition opened on the Champ-de-Mars in Paris, the meadow on which the Eiffel Tower would arise for another ever-larger world s fair eleven years later.83 Again, marvels of engineering—but also a "human zoo" :ir "negro village," where four hundred indigenous peoples were put on exhibit in reconstructions of their supposed habitats.
: The 1870s saw human zoos set up in cities throughout Europe, including Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona, and London—tribal specimens displayed in the most un-nomadic conditions possible: as objects for vicarious tourism and occasionally study. The zoos presupposed the hierarchies of civilization: spectators confirmed to themselves and their children that they were superior; exhibitors
iad to acquire, transport, and then supply and manage these arenas of domesticated encounter. What those exhibited thought is hard to know. We would be hasty to attribute humiliation or anger. They were in aservice occupation, perhaps like actors, although the terms of their recruitment and service could be rigorous, as a recent historian of the world's fairs reminds us. They were on stage, not in a cage. Perhaps they retained their own sense of superiority to the elaborately clad visitors who came to see their miniature habitats.84
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Confronting the Primitive j..-. -]
Establishing allegorical meanings is, of course, a cheap trick for historians as \\ ell as literary scholars. Seek and ye shall find. Still, controlling colonial and urhjn environments, keeping potential savages safely fixed to their own turf, ensunim minimal welfare for all while reinforcing the visible signs of hierarchy, fi riding appropriate rules for what a contemporary German writer has called tod > v s "human zoo,"85 marked the evolution of states and governments from the 18705   '". = 1 until the outbreak of the First World War. Tfie zoos were reassuring; they m j. gested that the "primitive forces" of humanity—supposedly fundamentally differentiated by color and other racial characteristics, only semigoverned in theii native habitats, untutored in the basic civilizing concept of private property- -could be mastered and even made grateful for their subjection. The darker forces    " J at home, whether racial in the Western Hemisphere or working class in the in- i dustrializing world, were more threatening. As late as 1871 they mounted a revo-     ■ 1 lutionary regime in Paris, the Commune, established in the besieged capital of France by the radicals who resisted the new Third Republics willingness tr> 1 make peace with the German forces bivouacked to the east of the city. The Commune would soon come to represent, through both the suffering the cit\ : underwent and the hostages the regime would execute—the heart of darkness at ; home. In fact, within a few decades the major threat posed by the organized pro- I letariat no longer seemed to be insurrection—the aging Friedrich Engels recog- :| nized that revolutionary aspirations would not prevail on the barricades—but :l the emerging Socialist and Social Democratic political parties throughout the I West. I The peasant masses of southern and Eastern Europe also represented a reser-   " I voir of primitive and dark forces. Insofar as they could be woven into a social | drama of integration and peaceful acceptance, analogous to the human zoo, it was through the appreciation of folklore and folk art, which flourished in this period. Human differentiation and classification also contributed to heroic scholarly achievements in the social sciences. Motivated in some instances by an sumption of inequality, in others by a cosmopolitan effort to understand diffei-ence without presupposing inferiority, late nineteenth-century anthropologi' and archeologists acquired new knowledge of remote times and places. Wherea1- |
LEVIATHAN l.O
social observers a century earlier had traced curious customs and recognized that far-flung empires were as civilized as their own, the later nineteenth century pressed ahead with concepts of social structure, kinship, and religious organization. Empire allowed a collection of splendid artifacts—often entire architectural elements without parallel, to be accumulated in Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and eventually New York.86
For the white middle classes of Europe and the Americas, technological angst and second thoughts about their destined global domination were usually remote through the 1880s. By the end of the century, darker preoccupations and an edgier awareness would surface as the "positivist" confidence of the previous generation yielded to critiques of empire, social activists exposed the squalid living conditions of the tenements, and the barely coded artworks referred to as "symbolist" suggested deep sexual insecurities. As the writer Rudyard Kipling understood, empire was precarious ("Lest we forget") and the perennially gloomy Henry Adams questioned machine civilization.87 Still, the artists and intellectuals of Europe, the Americas, and Japan had not yet crossed Freud's threshold of frank insistence on Oedipal jealousy and infant sexuality. Some depicted hooded messengers of death; others, intimations of castration. Painters and composers had not entirely cast loose from the reassuring conventions of representation and tonality as they would after 1905; the world of art stood on the cusp of modernism. Intellectuals in China and India and the colonies had not yet developed sustained revolutionary critiques of imperialism. Massacres of stubborn peoples targeted by the hubris of empire—adherents of the Mahdi of the Sudan, the Armenians in the Ottoman realms in 1896-1897, the Filipinos who resisted US takeover of their islands from the Spanish, the Ovaherero in German Southwest Africa in 1905-1906, the Formosans (Taiwanese) taken over by Japanese administrators in 1895—aroused some regrets and criticism but little effective counteraction. Anti-imperialists in the United States may have braked further territorial acquisitions by force after 1898 (although the Danish Virgin Islands were purchased in 1916); the difficulties incurred in subjugating the Boer republics sobered the British; and the German policies of genocidal suppression in the later Namibia provoked parliamentary opposition, but faits accomplis were not to be undone. The unfortunate excesses of violence amounted to what President Theodore Roosevelt called the "attendant cruelties" of progress. And TR did not
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even consider the reduction of forest to rubber plantation or slash-and-buj n sugar cultivation.88 They took place on the margins.
And yet—even if the macho statesmen of the late nineteenth century n. sisted making the connection—the "pacification," and sometimes massacre, o.i the perimeter was related to those triumphant displays of progress in the great expositions and the ever greater confidence in modern statehood. The laii* nineteenth-century state was a triumph of the positivist spirit, of the materialist forces of civilization, of the social-scientific counting of populations and measurement of territory, of progress and the future. Nonetheless, it often appeared hostage to potentially the darker forces of its own proletariat, the ignorant and church-besotted peasantry of its countryside, and sometimes threatened even by its own emasculating women. The issue of female rule produced a constitutional crisis in mid-nineteenth-century Hawai'i; was accommodated in late-Victoriar. Britain, in effect, by desexing the widowed monarch; troubled late-imperial: in-stitutions in tsarist Russia and Qing China; and also emerged in growing claims for suffrage. Before World War I women would get the right to vote in Ne\ Zealand in 1893, Australia in 1901, Finland in 1907, and Norway in 1913, as well as in the American western states. US women won the suffrage for national elc tions in 1910, Britain admitted women to the polls in stages from 1911 to the Weimar Republic from its beginnings in 1919. France finally consented afcci World War II in 1944, and the Swiss at the federal level in 1971.
How to master these encroaching claims for political representation and participation—whether through repression and arbitrary rule, or through progressive concessions and greater inclusiveness—was the great political issue that hovered over the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state.
Statehood and Governmentality
When Americans talked about states, unless they had attended German universities they usually referred to the territorial subdivisions of their country. In Europe the state was a collective abstraction, referring to the legal authorities that claimed the right to legislate, enforce, and administer. The British did not use the term instinctively; French and Germans did. Other cultures had rougli equivalents that referred to polity or rule, such as the Hindi raj. Having a state in
LEVIATHAN z.o
1 he nineteenth century was an attribute of an allegedly advanced people. Colonies were allegedly not ready to claim it, but it was perhaps the highest attribute of rationality. Revived in the early nineteenth century, above all by the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, the celebration of statehood had become a Prussian juridical specialty, a doctrine that served a new sovereign unit constructed almost mechanistically across diverse German- (and Polish-) speaking territo-ies. By midcentury, heavy treatises of Staatslehre and Rechtslehre, the doctrines of the State and of law, had become legal and constitutional specialties of German-speaking Europe. Friedrich Julius Stahl from the 1830s, Otto von Gierke and the Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli in midcentury, Georg Jellinek by the end of the century, were among those contributing to the genre. Some attributed to he ruling agencies and to the law an ethical and philosophical loftiness, a spiritual reality that the associations and markets of civil society allegedly could not quite possess. "The state is a moral being and it has moral tasks in life," Blunt-jchli insisted.89 Civil society, so the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, including Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, had argued, remained associations of interests aspiring to wealth and public happiness. Continentals felt these aspirations remained inferior, whereas the state was an association of ideals, ethics, and law. Historians used to ascribe to these German thinkers some of the blame for Nazism (ironically, Stahl and Jellinek came from Jewish backgrounds), but in fact National Socialism—insofar as it could claim any intellectual pedigree— would draw on different theories, more attuned to national and ethnic celebration as well as to the gut belief that politics was war by other means. In fact, Jellinek, a liberal, denied any metaphysical reality to the state, insisting rather that the state was a legal creation that could play an active role in regulating society and the economy. States did what private associations could do—deliver the mail, build railroads, provide education, relieve poverty—but rendered these public functions.
All these treatises took care to differentiate the legal structure that was the state from the bundle of historically or linguistically formed allegiances that comprised the nation. Conceptually they also separated the state from the society it regulated. But there were important dissenters by the late nineteenth century. The idea of society had moved beyond just the notion of either a politically oriented "public" or an undifferentiated "people." Society implied a population
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structured according to their interests and allegiances or what today might be termed identities. These might include religious preferences, regional and local loyalties, and class and occupational affiliations, which, it was implied, took shapi independent of state action. Society was often depicted spatially: it was on nized from the bottom up, not from the top down, or it constituted an intermediate layer of connections more extensive than family and kinship and less powerful than the state. By the late nineteenth century some legal theorists were suggesting that these functional groups should provide the basis of the legal order. Ideas of transcendent state sovereignty should give way to a compact among interests and groups, collectively endowed with legislative power. Dismayed by the revolutionary turmoil of 1848 and after in Prussia, German liberal Rudolph Gneist looked to political administration and the development of British parliamentary representation for pragmatic representation, while Otto von Gierke examined German medieval guilds to find models of self-government. A generation late Leon Duguit, the French admirer of Comte s earlier positivism, argued that an authentic legal order had to express the "interdependence" of modern social interests, not the abstract and fictitious notions of natural rights. "Yes, the state is dead, or rather what is dying is its Roman, royal, Jacobin, Napoleonic or collect iv-ist form, which in all these diverse aspects, has been only one form of the stat< What he saw arriving was not a state as traditionally conceived but a governmei it of technical representatives based on professions and elimination of class conflict. The American "pluralists" of the early twentieth century argued similarly that politics rested on interest-group negotiations, not on constitutional forms.91
Social scientists have often tried to distinguish between strong and weak X states. The strong state "penetrated" society and could allegedly shape it by ex- I tensive measurement and regulation; neither wealthy elites nor organized r.-asses j effectively challenged its authority: think Prussia. The weak state's authority i might be extensively flouted, subverted, or ignored by families and associ;; Hon. j think Italy. But the dichotomy remains too clumsy. The relationship of state anc | society—insofar as these abstractions correspond with the messy anatomycl human institutions—is a crucial variable for understanding history and politics; j but a robust state and a strong society could complement each other. No state protected accumulated family wealth more than Great Britain; the state could be strong because it so fitted the agenda of its great families. If social discipline ~v^|
LEVIATHAN l.O
was inculcated and family cohesion emphasized, as in China, state authority might thereby benefit at times but evaporate at other times. The same held for Russia. And then again, did a strong bureaucracy serve as the instrument for a strong state, or did it develop into a powerful special interest blocking any projects for the general interest? The relationship of state and society thus remains complex and often paradoxical—nonetheless, the authorities we routinely aggregate as the state did become more ambitious about shaping the everyday attributes of the societies they governed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They envisaged a more encompassing and interventionist agenda, and the results they sought entailed a different sense of mission. The good ruler in the eighteenth century might define his objective in terms of felicity or happiness or the preservation of order. The good bureaucrat in late nineteenth might think in terms of energy or hygiene.91
Masses of people had no provision if business cycles threw them out of work; they had no access to medical care; their old age was dependent on family support. Did not the state have constructive missions? Without the state, they would experience not picturesque village assistance, but misery. Without the state, their water and food supplies would be sources of disease. It was logical that American and some British social reformers admired the emerging welfare state regulation of Bismarck's (and his successors') Germany. As Jellinek wrote, "The economic and spiritual life of the people is advanced by laws and legal compulsion, that is social results are brought about through governmental power----
Through their common rule, subjects become comrades. The advancement of communal purposes through social means has become the task of the state to an
increasing degree____The state has become the most powerful social factor, the
strongest protector and advancer of the common interest.'"3 They found in the German municipalities, Prussian state commercial ministries, and national Protestant church Diet, offices that claimed state power to limit child and women's labor and provide social insurance for the disabled and elderly, at a time when American courts struck down this sort of legislation.54 Whether or not one judges the state today as an abusive concentration of bureaucratic interference with individual freedom, the historian must recognize that as states were melted down and formed anew from 1850 to 1880, they seemed to represent civilization and progress.
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The doctrines of the state found receptive audiences in far-flung soils, ce.-tainly among the aging Japanese leaders of the Meiji Restoration, who in the 1880s and 189 os wanted to endow the regime they had constructed with lofiv conservative principles, including constitutional arrangements borrowed from Germany, which limited the scope of the new Diet, entrenched the influence of the military leadership, and exalted the monarch with an Imperial Rescript of 1893." Latin American conservatives and military spokesmen found the ideas congenial, for they prized the authority of the central state, which as a creatio-of colonial elites had often remained a precarious attainment. Roman Cnthoilr authoritarians invoked the Church's mission to enforce authority, but they als-i liked the idea of an authoritarian state, as did right-wing nationalists in Italy who imported Hegelian idealists with enthusiasm at the end of the ccnturv. In the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing empires, the doctrines certainly found approval, but they were hard to nativize because the German concept of the stat c was so transcendent that it might undermine the very real institutional claims of the monarch. The Japanese emperor might fade into the abstraction of the realm that the new ruling elite wanted to strengthen. It was harder to bypass the Russian tsar, although his civil service and their authority (thegosudarstvo) m igfi 1 become the object of loyalty for some. The conservative Chinese reformers seeking to rescue the fraying Qing state translated Hegel but turned more readily t.i the ancient Confucian and Neo-Confucian ideals that aligned the family, the gentry, and the emperor in a cosmic sense of duty. And in the Islamic world, including the Ottoman Empire, the religious mission of rulers overshadowed $n strict an emphasis on law, abstract and compelling in its own secular transcendence. The mission of the Ottoman clan (and later the Turkic ethnic core) ata) made their familial or ethnic claims too strong for the state as such to legitimizu-authoritarian rule.
After the twentieth-century experience of states (or parties that governed states) whose leaders claimed to have the knowledge and good intentions to wield great power over individuals and associations, the effort to apply legislative power for alleviating social inequality or enhancing environmental benefits-controlling floods, increasing the yields of agriculture and husbandry, and so on—suggests an enterprise that ran amok. The distortions that arose from state ambitions, even those benevolently intended, and of course those that single
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LEVIATHAN 1.0
mindedly sought to control and regulate inherently variable distributions of people, environment, and property, now dominate many of the historical narratives and political analyses. A large literatu re, exemplified by the work of theorist Michel Foucault (d. 1984) and the political anthropologist James C. Scott, now proposes that knowledge of society—whether codified in the form of censuses or cartography, or pursued for public health reasons or even public education—was not just the prerequisite of social control, but designed precisely to achieve it. Knowledge is power, Francis Bacon, the early exponent of scientific observation, had written in the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth century "useful knowledge" had become the goal of the broad Western movement called the Enlightenment. The alternative to "reason" seemed to be prejudice, backwardness, and superstition, still too often institutionalized by organized religion. But critics then and since have emphasized instead that social knowledge leads to the abuse of power even if applied benevolently. Knowledge, in this view, provides not just power but domination.96
But from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, state power seemed hardly so suspect. Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists might propose that local associations could replace central government and large corporations. They wanted to build organizations from the workshop or village "upward," del-egating only a minimum of authority to national governments. For two months, from late March through late May 1871, exponents of anarchist concepts, alongside other radicals, played a role in the Commune that seized power in Paris, which had been besieged since the preceding fall, first by the Germans, then by the newly elected conservative National Assembly that convened in nearby Versailles. The Commune would leave a reputation for revolutionary misery and terror, but its violence paled before the massive repression exacted when the city was finally recaptured. In Spain, also racked by revolution from 1868, the briefly established republic of 1873-1874 went through a "Federalist" episode of decentralization, confronting, moreover, a wave of local "cantonalist" uprisings in the southeast that sought even more total autonomy.
Of course, there was no direct causality that linked the anarchist uprisings in Paris and Spain's cities of the early 1870s with the episodes of tribal resistance on the margins of European expansion a few years later, which we cited in the introduction above. Nonetheless, along with the nomadic struggles on
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the periphery of empire, these doomed spasms of spontaneity in Europe aho demonstrated that in the world of the 1870s the organized national or imp* rial state was trump. Thirty years earlier liberals and radicals had aspired to create nation-states that would reconcile impulses of emancipation with collective self-determination. After 1870 they found that the states they had wished for served a different spirit of organization and national competition Francisco Pi y Margall, the scholarly theorist of grassroots government who served briefly as president of the disintegrating First Spanish Republic in 187;, would spend the next quarter-century of his life as a historian and parlijnnci.-tary deputy for the republican opposition and a defender of autonomy for Cuba. Sitting Bull lived out the post-Custer years on a reservation—e:u:- 1 surviving witness to a vision of collective life that the modern state had ciie tively rendered obsolete.
Anarchism did not go quietly into the night, however. After military restouv tion of the Spanish monarchy in 1874 and a cozy agreement for party alternation in the parliamentary elections, Spanish anarchists put their energies into organizing agricultural cooperatives and a union federation, the CNT (Narionr.1 Confederation of Labor), which patiently built its strength in the Andalusia 1 countryside and eventually among the urban workforce of Barcelona. It sent delegates to the national parliament but refused to join any governing co.:.it.o 1 until the second Republic, installed in 1931, was challenged by the right-wing military uprising of 1936. Spanish anarchism was exceptional in its embrace J patient and collective organization. Elsewhere the doctrine attracted impatient terrorists who believed in the power of "the deed." By the 1880s and 1890s, terrorist zealots were resorting to assassination to destroy the state, claimi:^: the lives of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the French and American presidents in iS',>4 and 1901, the empress of Austria and queen of Italy. Still, these violent gestures did not succeed in arresting the strengthening of central governments, and they were disavowed by most revolutionaries, Marxist or otherwise.'7 Other advocat s of working-class advancement, such as the European social-democratic parriss emerging by the 1890s, believed that "capturing" the state and using it to pass such reforms as minimum wages, enhanced social insurance, stricter safety ~ica sures, and limitation on factory hours, was a more promising strategy )'<::■ advancing social justice. To be sure, faithful Marxist revolutionaries condemned
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! 1
j^is "reformist" stance at the congresses of the second Socialist International, but until the eve of World War I, it attracted increasing numbers of adherents, especially among trade unionists, who played a large role in socialist parties.
Nevertheless—let's get real. For all the recent histories that suggest the state became exponentially more ambitious and powerful in controlling its citizens, nineteenth-century governments still hardly "penetrated" society. Empires left administrative power in the hands of local notables; vast areas of sparsely populated countryside had virtually no police forces. Factory owners faced virtually no challenge to their power within their enterprises. Western states taxed their citizens extraordinarily lightly; liberals had rolled back the heavy burdens that the wars of the eighteenth century and then the Napoleonic era had necessitated. Above all, as we shall see, in those offshore preserves of arbitrary power—the colonies, formal and informal, of the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Germans, Italians, Portuguese, and later the Japanese and Americans—remote states assigned coercive power to private agents. The extortionate loan, the power to evict and to fire, sometimes the lash, the knout, the switch, and the bamboo rod, not the rational state, ensured social order and the investment opportunities that would be one of the incentives for development. (The other remained the precapitalist motive of expanding strategic power for the home country and its state.) The development of European empire rested upon this happy compatibility of motivations.
But this fabric of local and non-state authority would be significantly encroached upon from the 1860s for the next century. Not entirely, to be sure, and often least significantly in those great imperial superstructures run by the Habsburgs, Romanovs, Ottomans, and Qing. Elsewhere, having rebuilt nations, the vigorous administrative elites of the late nineteenth century and twentieth, could rebuild states. To these efforts we apply a term proposed only recently: governmentality. Governmentality has become a fashionable concept in the social sciences and has begun to seep into historical accounts as well. Its recent use derives from the French social theorist Michel Foucault, who applied it to describe the growing administrative and pastoral capacity of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages and then post-Renaissance political units to regulate the behavior of those living within their borders. The Church had the mission of tending "souls" and providing the nurturing institutions that would ensure their
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salvation; the state would take over this welfarist mission. Foucault separated :ht pursuit of governability from that of sovereignty. Sovereignty, or state authority i i. the abstract, he suggested, was the concern of sixteenth-century thinkers, sjcI-as Machiavelli, but from the seventeenth and particularly the eighteenth ce^ru r\, officials were preeminently concerned with the health and prosperity of then populations. Tracts on national economies, epidemics, and trade displaced tK disquisitions on the rights of the ruler. Statistics and measurement, and the re:>-ulation (or deregulation) of national economies, became the instruments for advancing the well-being of the population.98 In effect the nineteenth century recapitulated the transition that Foucault described from the seventeenth-century theorists of sovereignty and power to the eighteenth-century Physiocrats, cam eralists, and administrative cadres, who inscribed prosperity, growth, and health of their societies as preeminent state objectives.
The discipline of sociology emerged in part as a response to the recurreir threat of revolution and working-class mass action: ideology was supposedly tc yield to science, or so conservative scholars argued. The Paris popular upheaval in June 1848 (and then again the Commune in 1870) led Hippolyte Taine: ti. displace what he felt was destructive ideology with scientific management of society through sociology/" In Britain Herbert Spencer applied what he believed were the lessons of Darwinism to reject any efforts at what he insisted was col-lectivist interference with the healthy evolution of society. His disciple in: the United States, William Graham Sumner of Yale, likewise condemned sociiil legislation as disastrous interference with the market, ßmile Dürkheim was in a far more liberal political camp, but also insisted on "social facts" to be measured statistically; and one of the major facts he analyzed was "suicide," which: he treated not merely as a psychological collapse but as a societal disease that testified to an underlying condition of social disintegration he termed anomij Whether on the left or the right, however, the new state possibilities of intervention depended on postulating an organic society that could be measured and shaped. This new confidence in the measurability of social relationships took its name from Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism—a confidence in the oh servability of natural and social phenomena that characterized the statesmen and intellectuals of the 1870s and 1880s but would erode and dissipate, at least in high culture, by the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century.
■; The new states, having been created and re-created by the 1870s, turned essentially to projects of modernization and the transformation of their societies. Numbers were the epistemological foundations of these projects. In itself this was not new. Whenever the accumulation (and avoidance) of old taxes had to be Leplaced—as early as the "Single Whip" reform of the Ming dynasty, or whenever a ruler acquired a new territory—property surveys followed (recall the pomesday Book of William the Conqueror). Romanovs, Ottomans, and other nionarchs needed to know their boundaries and their resources. Abbatial and manorial administrators, the trustees of Muslim pious foundations, Chinese eentry, and thereafter Italian and Dutch cities had to provide for public works and military expenditures. William Petty had pioneered efforts by means of "political arithmetick" to measure the wealth of the British kingdom in the late seventeenth century. The politics went on unabated; the arithmetic became more detailed. The brilliant mathematicians of the Bernoulli family, along with che French Huguenot Abraham de Moivre and later the German Carl Friedrich Gauss, developed the theoretical groundwork for statistical inference from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century, although governments clung to count-::ig and eschewed sampling until the US Census of 2.000. Censuses had ancient ;-aots—Jesus had been born in the course of one—but they became far more widespread and important.100
The censuses were numbers fixed to territorial locations—mapped quantities. The eighteenth century had seen a proliferation of cadastres—maps of land-holding and domains surveyed with an eye toward imposing taxes more systematically. Trigonometry and triangulation underlay the new techniques of measurement on the global surface as it had for celestial navigation. Rectangular grids provided the representation for locating the resources of specific sites. The British in Ireland and India undertook major geographical surveys of their still-colonial spaces; the Mexican states undertook geographical surveys as well. In 1877, President Porflrio Diaz established a cartographic commission to establish a master map, and chose a geographer who had experience in cadastral and geographic surveys, but the enterprise was underfunded and subject to imprecise Iscal knowledge, and generally lagged behind the equivalent work carried out in British India or France. Still, its ambitions corresponded to the positivist hopes of the Porfirian state: modernization from above, clarification of property, of
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lines of communication, goals that by 1896 had shifted significantly from z\ic military considerations that dominated when the project was begun.101 Half .1 world away, among a Chinese administrative elite beset by intimations of weal -ness and decline, the geographer's impulse also served the desire for state strengil -ening as the researchers interested in "practical statecraft" turned to leurnin>' about the western regions as a Qing achievement in which to take pride (csr.-cially because control over the maritime frontier was dominated by foreigners) But real differentiation of a geographic focus had to await the Republican era when Japanese territorial seizures focused attention on the threat, not jus: jr. sovereignty, but national space.102
Fixing people in space was crucial for control as well as for taxation or military defense. Foucault again emphasized the trend in Western societies to discipline social deviance by the confinement of vagrants and the insane.103 liy the New Poor Law of 1834, the British would establish the Workhouse, not the parish or village treasury, as the recourse for those who had no other support. M01 ? generally the new states depended upon fixed population: recall the defeat of :lic-nomad challenge of the 1870s. James Scott's paean to the evasive tribes of the upland colonies of Southeast Asia is a testimony to their powers to move physically; running away or melting into dense forests and high mountains was sometimes the most effective strategy of resistance.'04 When migration was no ioniser possible, collective ownership might preserve a sort of countercultural capacity to white colonizers or middle-class development, although at the cost of conven tional economic development. The capacity of indigenous peoples to shift their resource base and resist tethering to agricultural allotments they had the right to sell individually remained a fundamental challenge to the modern stat-. T ■■ United States, which had established and progressively reduced tribal reserv. -tion land, decided on a policy of allotment to individuals and families by ire Dawes Act of 1887. This allowed further reduction of "excess" reservation hind, and then a disaster for tribal society once unrestricted sales could take place. But society as a whole was intended to be counted, located, and surveyed, a task that Francis Amasa Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made his own with the 1874 publication of the Statistical Analysis of the United States, a compendium of positivist social information based upon the 1870 Cens.'v which he had directed. Ironically, the project of fixing abode seemed urgent at
- \c moment when mass migration from Europe to North and South America 1 wltiplied, at a time, too, when Chinese poured into Southeast Asia and, along v'ith the Japanese, crossed Pacific shores. The new instrumentality of passports -hd labor booklets, as well as the agencies set up to inscribe the migrants, was the states' response.105
: But consider again the new cartography. Perhaps its distinguishing feature, derived from the spatial imagination of the late nineteenth century, was the as->;(rnment of potential resources to the territorial grids. In this sense it matched the new understanding of electromagnetic physics developed at the same time by I inies Clerk Maxwell. Every point in physical space was a point in an energy field and could be assigned a proportional quantity of energy potential. So too in the emerging statistical counting every point had a quantity of human energy resources linked to it. The surveys and the censuses both counted them and as-Maned them a location. Thus nomadism and even collective rights of ownership— American Indian migrations and reservations in the US case—threatened the rationality of the modern state. On the other hand, immigration and the westward movement of the population enhanced the energy potential of previously empty areas. The empty areas of the United States, the Arid Regions, would also find their great cartographic description.106
Walker recognized that Americans did not like to be questioned and counted, but expressed confidence that in 1880 they had "outgrown the little, paltry, bigoted construction of the Constitution, which, in 1850, questioned in Congress the right of the people of the United States to learn whatever they might please to know regarding their own numbers, condition, and resources."107 By 1900 the American Economic Association elected as its president Richard Ely, who rejected laissez-faire sociology and admired Bismarck's nascent welfare state in Germany. He was in sympathy with the president of Johns Hopkins, who brought German graduate education methods—specialized research in laboratories and semi-
lars—to the United States. They spoke for experts, for quantitative knowledge, and for the state. They also represented a heightened role for gender differentia-:ion. The engineering profession, then like other specializations developing their credentialing organizations and claiming expertise and status, was a career for men, although the Census hired women, who would soon become highly repre-"ented in the clerical profession.108
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The military experience of the mid-century wars of reunification had sv:apt-j many of these men in an almost existential way. It had put their lives on the liny at a formative age, made them serious, and tested manhood. Manliness wus ,i critical theme of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first oj-.c sP| the twentieth. In a chapter on the state it may seem excessive to speculate on the roles of male companionship and homoeroticism, but the themes surface— whether in big game hunting, the French and British military excursions ■■into the interior of Africa, the menacing females of symbolist fin-de-siecle painting or, to take an achievement of naturalism, the rowers of Thomas Eakins. Bui if A subterranean temptation, such gender uncertainty was vigorously suppressed li\ rites of passage from which men such as Roosevelt and Eakins emergei". The unexamined life is not worth living, but in a pre-Freudian era the excessively examined life could seem paralyzing. Imperialism and masculine vigor beckoned as a vocation; white manliness was critical—to be formed in sports and hunLi~c large animals in remote locations. A French nationalist Pierre Coubertin would organize the 1896 revival of the Olympic games; Robert Baden-Powell would found the Boy Scouts and encourage military expansion.
Two later monuments to Theodore Roosevelt celebtate the diverse tlu.-r.ies flowing together. The visitor to Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the Potomac in Washington, DC, will come upon the oversize bronze orator with his aphorisms on tablets behind him—one of which ("The State") offers his precepts for political life. The visitor to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West in Manhattan will also find TR, again in imperial bronze but now on horseback being led by an American Indian in tribal regalia and a black African—a 1940 rendition by James Earle Fraser, most famous for his noble but exhausted Indian on horseback (The End of the Trail). The tourist who contemplates the ;S»^ bronze statue of the Meiji generation conservative Saigo Takimori near Tokyo's Ueno railway station encounters the robust nationalist in Samurai garb will; Iu> beloved dog. Saigo, too, was a military expansionist, hoping to provoke a war .to conquer Korea in 1874. But he was also a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, some times supporting but often opposing the reforms that were transforming Japan in his lifetime and finally persuaded to lead an unsuccessful uprising in 1877 tha: cost him his life. TR rode up San Juan Hill, sought to regulate laissez-faire celebration of capitalism, and pressed for American entrance into the First Work!
\\7air. A generation apart, the Japanese dismayed by modernity, the American ■ihbracing it, both were fulfilled by militant nationalism.
:: "Teddy" exemplified the synthesis of vitalism, reform, and frank imperialism. For all the volatility of this mix, it was still compatible with the reorganized state s emphasis on measuring human resources. In an age of social Darwinism • jit's meant categorization by type as well just by quantity. Racial typology enierged; the nascent criminology depended on profiling by body type—an
ffort made most notorious by Italian statistician Cesare Lombroso, who felt t [iat carlobes revealed criminal types. Measuring made sense because of underlying "type"—a preoccupation that at the end of the twentieth century might be refined as the idea of "risk" as supposedly determined by genetic factors. Mass niigrations and the arrival of diverse ethnic groups—whether the Irish in En-■land and the United States, Italians and Spaniards in France, southern and Eastern Europeans (including the Jewish migrations from Russia and Galicia) in the United States, Italians in Argentina, Chinese and Japanese in the American West, the plantation labor recruited for the colonial plantations of Malaya and southeast Asia, or the Indians relocated to South Africa—meant a confrontation with groups that sometimes seemed to bring unrest and crime and different physiques. In an era of economic expansion and industrialization, migration jbuld not be halted, was necessary—but it required control and counting, and i ntensified inter-ethnic prejudices. Anti-Semitism became more virulent as one „011 sequence, increased too by the economic adversity encountered by agricultural producers from 1873 to 1896, when deflationary pressure meant that financial interests—banks and ostensibly Jewish creditors—led to openly anti-Jewish agitation in Central and Eastern Europe, France, and the United States, as social tiiscrimination became more prevalent. Wherever there were sizable numbers of middle-class migrants and merchants, vulnerability increased. Not that these prejudices halted the trends toward the mobility of peoples and capital; rather, they provided evidence that, short of major war, the geographic and social mobility would not be reversed. Migration and measurement incteased together; the modern state could not halt the flows but it sought to classify them.
Time measurement was another project for the modernizing agenda. The development of east-west railroads made the problem critical. Sun time meant that watches had constantly to be adjusted for travel. Paris was 9 minutes and 2.0
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seconds ahead of London, Bombay 41 minutes behind Madras. In 1884, representatives of governments, railroads, and organizations concerned with standard izing time met in Washington, DC, and Paris and demarcated the twenty-four time zones (each ideally 15 degrees of latitude although with variations for loca land masses), within each of which the same time would prevail. All but iK* French agreed that the Greenwich Observatory near London, which served to anchor the Meridian or degree zero of longitude, might serve as the midpoint of Greenwich Mean Time, and twenty yeats later the French gave in. But stubborn reluctance persisted, worldwide, to abandoning the local time, usually reckons: by the sun's zenith, for the uniform hour imposed across the time zone. Local time was long-standing, governed working hours, and often was conspicuously displayed on public clocks. Where religious exercises, such as the five calls t<< prayer for faithful Muslims, were keyed to the divisions of daylight, which varied with the seasons, the coexistence of old and new time became even more com plex. But to impose standard time was seen as modern and progressive. The t-llbi preoccupied Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1878-1908), who erected clock towers in kc \ cities designed to send the empire's message to his "Well Protected Domains,? a measure perceived by traditionalists as another example of his despotic centralization of power.109
Governing by Party
Governing was different from governmentality. The French said, "to govern: w: to choose." Ultimately decisions had to be made or fudged, which meant, as it still does, essentially postponed until they were resolved incrementally. Tod.-.y'. neologism, governmentality, curiously enough, has sometimes implied that to govern wisely was not to have to choose. Such prized public outcomes in the early twentieth century as "national efficiency" or "the one best way" might emerge as a result of knowledge, not electoral contests. Science, technology, or the psychology of human manipulation would allow a painless form of government that was self-justifying. Legitimacy supposedly would flow from the wisdom of [he result, not from the process by which it was enacted—the old dream of rule b\ philosopher-kings, but now philosopher-technicians. But despite this cream,
, ritinually refreshed by different generations of social thinkers—even today, as ■ shall see in conclusion—policies had to be decided, states had to be governed. Would railroads be built? Were armies and naval forces to be expanded? Until iat age and under whose auspices would children be schooled? What preroga-es might traditional religious establishments retain? So how were choices made? In theory at least, the new states created at midcentury, like the ones con-' >,r ucted earlier, were countries in which representative assemblies played a large
I ,.le. Piedmont and Italy, Austria, Germany, and japan had introduced them
I liLtween 1848 and 1890. Other old empires were holdouts: Russia claimed to be
• ,11 autocracy, and a parliament was introduced only during the revolutionary
i turmoil of 1905; the Ottoman Empire established a parliament in 1908, Iran
,if er its revolution in 1906, China in 1911. With few exceptions only males could ,rte on the national level before World War I. Until 1885 in Britain, property iiualifications narrowed the suffrage, and varying forms of tax requirements hdped keep peasants and proletarians from exercising any sort of proportional vising rights in many areas of Europe and the United States. In the kingdom of Kungary, the suffrage was rigged to keep non-Magyars (and poor ones too) from .KJiievmg parliamentary representation. So too the American South excluded bl.ick voters by virtue of poll taxes and literacy requirements (also used in Italy 11 itil 1912.). Southern Europe, parts of Latin America, and the southern United iiates might best be described as areas in which political argumentation played r^elf out within a racially pure ruling class that dominated regional and some-rimes national legislatures. Sometimes, if even this pattern of privileged parliamentarism seemed too fragile to prevent the advance of popular claimants, pri-|} vate violence could easily be organized: atrocities against Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, lynching in the old Confederate states, and Cossack pogroms ■ i- against Jewish settlements in 1890-1910 might ensure that challengers to newly
xfurbished "traditions" were cowed into submission. Thus reinforced by occa-li inal exemplary violence, the structures of domination allowed a parliamentary oratory to flourish, replete with glorious defenses of liberty, appeals to national ■Hid regional pride, and defense of the highly inegalitarian social status quo. The discrepancy between words and deeds also afflicted those parliaments '. f        that more adequately reflected popular classes and opinions, as in France and the
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United States. No matter how broad the suffrage, the parliaments were dot. by corruption. The public financing of railroad lines, the speculative real csi uc booms in the expanding capital and industrial cities, the fusion of old ag'rUu[. tural elites with the new wealth of industry and finance and their search compliant legislators meant that the parliamentary politics of the late through the 1890s was riddled with scandal. Typical disorders included T many Hall—the Democratic Party "machine" in New York—and other US p„. litical cliques, the French corruption associated with the selling of honorsfrom the presidents office and with the btibety used by the Panama canal devel .n ment company, bank scandals in Italy, and payoffs by colonial interests.
The institution that dominated the systems of government was one written democratic constitutions would not explicitly mention until the mid-twentieth century in Germany, that is, the competitive political party. The p in/ was an association of individuals and the groups who stood behind them de .1-cated to governing on the basis of shared principles, material interests, and jmr for the sake of holding power and keeping opponents out of office. "Party" :ntv.-r ests existed in the ancient world and in the city-state republics of medieval Europe, but they often could not agree on policy without proscription, assassin.i tion, and civil war. In the modern era, the point of parties was precisely to settle affairs, often by a principle of alternation in power, without the need for repeated imprisonment, exile, and political murder. In its modern career, party originated in the postrevolutionary regimes of Britain in the late seventeenth :.:id cigh teenth centuries and in the former American colonies in the 1780s and 1790s, sometimes as rival associations of elites took organized rival networks of supporters—often with the claim to be the legitimate heirs of a profound Ins torical transformation. Rulers and those who felt excluded from such associations often saw the constellations of adversaries as cabals or conspiracies. Distinguish-ingparty from conspiracy was perhaps the signal achievement of Anglo-Amei 11 .1 r government in the hundred years from 1720 to 1820. That distinction meant th, t men might disagree over policies—war or peace, favoring of landed or commercial interests, defending or diminishing the claims of religious institutions, imposm.1, taxation or not—without seeing each other as traitors or usurpers.
This distinction did not come easily: in periods of acute turmoil it was hard to accept that the opposition did not intend to betray the state and its vital interests.
ivar for independence, as in North America, usually created a body of "patriots," d when their common adversary was no longer present and they differed among ich other, suspicions of sell-out and betrayal were hard to overcome. The United ■st.fees overcame a major hurdle when in 1800 it was recognized that one group former revolutionaries had emerged to challenge another, and took over major ices without a protest or civil strife. The French Revolution got to this stage only 1 er an interval of dictatorial rule by violence (frankly called Terror) in supposed fense of democratic principles against domestic and foreign enemies. The weak-ed institutions established to prevent such a recurrence—the so-called Directs y from 1795 to 1799—suffered repeated coups and canceled elections until fi-,, i|]y overthrown by military conspiracy that installed Napoleon with increasing :tatorial prerogatives. The British rulers of the same period used political trials to ^rablish conservative conformity and subdue chose sympathetic to the French Meals with whom they were at war. The United States seemed ready to go down 1l1.it route briefly before the elections of 1800 arrested the process. Gradually party was seen as the key instrument, not only of achieving political rule, but of ; limiting political violence. It was a key invention of the modern state.
Party as an instrument of government advanced in a major way in the late i.ineteenth century, and the United States seemed to be the key innovator. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain or the early years of the French Third Republic, parties seemed to fission and dissolve, certainly between elec-; |" tions, by the 1870s and 1880s they developed into continuing associations, manned often by professionals with permanent offices, and as important for local politics as for national politics. Political "machines" came to be the major force for organizing arenas where the suffrage was wide and cut across diverse classes : and interests. Tammany Hall was renowned as the Democratic Party machine
t i.it organized the immigrant vote in New York City. The Birmingham Caucus of Joseph Chamberlain emerged by the 1890s. Sociologists such as Max Weber Pgr™" and the Russian Moisei Ostrogorski studied the American political machine with great interest. The party manager and professional appeared to be a new type; the American primary or British "caucus," a disturbing nonconstitutional 'iinovation that had the potential to corrupt disinterested government. Roberto Michels, a German-Italian student of Weber, argued that parties of the left were all the more prone to entrench oligarchies within their own ranks.110
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The British- and American-style parties spread to the continent. By the late 1860s party was becoming important in Bismarck's Customs Union Parliament (Zollparlament) and North German Confederation—-his institutional way-stations between the defeat of Austria in 1866 and the German Empire founded in 1871. Catholics, concentrated in Bavaria and the Rhineland and Prussian Silesia, feared being dominated in a Protestant state once Austria no longer had a voice in Central European government. They coalesced and soon formed .1 "Center Party" to defend their interests. Although persecuted by anticlerical legislation, they would soon become a mainstay of government in the German Empire, thereafter the Weimar Republic, and even the German Federal Republic after 1949. Ideologically flexible, they could form coalitions with conserv.t-tives to their right or liberals to their left. On the left of the spectrum, German Social Democrats had diverse origins. Ferdinand Lasalle founded the forma: party in 1869 to compete in the Bismarckian state; Marxists comprised one strand, but not the only one. Swinging from his decade-long hostility to Catholic political organization (the so-called Ktdturkampfor struggle over civilization), which had been combined with a reliance on nationalist liberal suppoit, Bismarck decided to outlaw the Social Democrats in 1878, after an assassination attempt on the emperor, and to govern on the basis of a coalition of Catholk-s and Conservatives. Only after the old chancellor's dismissal by William II in 1890 could the Social Democratic Party (SPD) reemerge legally—to beco/.ie by 1911 the largest group in the Reichstag—intent no longer on revolution in the streets but on capturing power in the parliament. Austrian Social Democrats followed suit. French Socialists remained divided between different ideologic.il strands, but were urged by the International to merge and did so as the French Section of the Workers' International party (SFIO) in 1905. Meanwhile the French non-Socialist left had organized itself as the Radical Socialist Party in 1901 (it was fairly centrist) as a consequence of the Dreyfus affair. Parties usually had an official daily paper or at least a newspaper that tended to support their views and interpretations. Increasingly candidates for office had to be approved by the central office or, as in the United States, by a system of conventions.
The reality of political parties was disturbing to many. Again Weber mad? a contrast between an old style of politics where eminent leaders offered thcii services at elections (Honoratiorenpolitik), and the new one of mass politics wheie
LEVIATHAN l.O
party government with its backroom deals and professional organization really took government in hand. By the first decade of the new century, party government seemed to be the inevitable product of modern "mass society," by which was meant not a revolutionary or socialist movement, but the dominance of the anonymous urban citizenry, working often in clerical and retail jobs and swayed by irrational appeals to national glory. Corruption seemed to go naturally with this view of a mass society governed by highly organized political parties. Was it democracy?
Parties could function in different ways. In Latin America they still froze some of the divisions that persisted after the wars of independence from Spain. Confrontations of centralist conservatives and liberal federalists (the advocates of limited centralization and more extensive regional powers) often produced coups d'etat {prommciamentos or golpes) and periods of harsh violence. The presence of strong military leaders fed this tendency. Political parties, whether in Chile, Columbia, Mexico, or Argentina, in sum remained frozen in a situation of continuing potential civil war, as had pertained long ago in the Roman Republic. In most other arenas, however, parties were content to share out the spoils of governing. In this case parties might be nominally distinct but rather similar in terms of ideology and social support. In Spain, for instance, Antonio Canovas, the conservative prime minister who finally brought the civil wars and coups d'etat of 1868-1873 under control, helped work out a monarchical restoration under whose terms liberals and conservatives agreed to alternative power with each four-year parliamentary session. This turno politico really meant politics was directed by a rather narrow governing class. Italy remained committed to parliamentary government; it was accepted that the monarch would choose as a prime minister only a leader who could assemble a majority in the lower house—a consensual arrangement challenged before the advent of interwar fascism only briefly from 189 8-1900. The heirs to the unifiers, the expansive Liberal Party, had leaders and wings respectively more or less committed to suffrage reform and broadening the tax base, who held power at different times. Ideological challengers on the left (originally republicans and radicals and later socialists) or on the right (new strident nationalists) were largely marginalized. In Hungary, after the great constitutional settlement that provided autonomy in 1867 (the Ausgleich), liberals also dominated although conservative challengers were
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CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN l.O
important in debate. Japanese constitutional government was imported gradually by the aging Meiji oligarchs {the Genro). In 1890 they adopted a German style constitution that bestowed a limited role on a new Diet. After an unrul\ beginning, the emerging post-Meiji generation produced a rudimentary political differentiation among the elite and two party associations, Kenseito and Seiyu-kai, that were oriented around rival leaders.
Such systems functioned as oligarchies, good for sharing patronage in normal times but prone to breakdown. The elites in Hungary, Italy, and Argciuiru tended to envision themselves as a sort of idealized mid-nineteenth-centuiy Bi ir ish ruling class, cultivated and deferred to. But like their counterparts in Brita.n they found their cozy politics challenged by bitter personal rivalries and m( emerging challenges of working-class demands, and the popular passions of foreign policy that they sought to manipulate in their favor. Systems of nomin, I alternation (as in Spain), single-party electoral domination (as in the Amei ic.u South), or continued absorption of earlier opposition groups ("transformism," ai in Italy), required large reservoirs of consistently loyal voters responsive to favon, personal fealty, or ethnic allegiances. American Southern Democrats and Hungarian or Italian liberals were thus hardly liberal—they were the leaders of |>r;lit cal oligarchies who hoped to preserve power without wrenching changes. Early welfare legislation, such as that introduced by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s and then advanced by the left and many occupational groups, became a ;n;ijo. cause for political division, though more so in other countries where it enjoyed less conservative patronage, as did new land and income taxes. As controversies over social legislation grew, the issue of widening the franchise became important. Italian politics functioned because masses of the southern peasantry cor C not vote because of the literacy requirement. England faced harsh issues of whether Ireland should achieve home rule. New and ambitious political leadc 5 decided they could prevail by more-ideological appeals to the masses. The ma) 01 of Vienna, Karl Lueger, was successful in building a machine of Christi.in Socials, who claimed to govern Austria for the popular classes against the reactionaries and the nefarious Jews. Anti-Semitism and other ethnic appeals bt-c-inic more strident.
The difficulty was that toward the end of the century in the West, the old politics seemed increasingly under stress. On the one hand, the spread of indus-
trialism—of labor in mines and factories and with machines—created an activ-isr working class. It moved all sorts of occupational safety and pension issues into the forefront of politics. Even more disturbing was the emergence by the twentieth century of parties with new total claims, who did not believe they v-ould share power, such as the Committee for Union and Progress in Turkey and the Russian Bolsheviks. After the revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks, as the revolutionaries were dubbed, preached a restoration of ethnic Turkish domination. It was hard to organize the slow-moving, clientelistic decentralized empire with such a force.
But even when parties seemed to function smoothly, the contrast between tlie rhetoric of liberal parliamentarism and its shabby reality ensured that a harsh critical analysis would emerge. By the 1880s trenchant critiques of democracy were emerging from the European Right with Italian writers taking the lead. {The term Right is chosen because the writers scorned government by liberalism 1 r discussion in favor of rule by elites and also believed that an emerging social democracy was really just another hypocritical claim to exercise bureaucratized power.) These new critics from the Right no longer invoked the old traditions of ilie Church or praised paternalist and wise elites, as had conservatives almost a century earlier. Instead they pointed to the discrepancy between liberal ideals and corrupt reality to suggest that elites had always and would always rule, no natter what the nominal form of the government. Pasquale Turiello argued that ilie continuing poverty of the Italian south proved that liberal government had failed the masses; Italy needed instead a great new national cause, perhaps a new w ar, to ensure national solidarity. Gaetano Mosca's Theory of the Governed (1881) . 1 gued that the masses could never rule; elites would always be in charge. Vilfredo Pareto, teaching economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and known today for his statistical concepts, was the most cynical; his Socialist Systems (1902) argued that for all their claims on behalf of democratic reform, the socialists were just a new elite advancing a Marxist ideology designed to ensure their own narrow rule. Mussolini briefly attended his lectures. The once republican poet Giosue Carducci attacked the supposed reality of the new state and evoked the vultures flying over Rome.111
French writers also contributed to the new antidemocratic critiques and .ic.ded to them an extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. The French Right
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CHARLES S. MAIER
learned chat even in an age of* mass suffrage, a populist nationalism could v. lr them votes: General Georges Boulanger at the end of the 1880s ran and won n several of the parliamentary districts. His adherents wanted him to seize power but he lost his nerve and fled to Brussels, where he committed suicide. Still, the episode testified to the role that nationalism could play. The success, too, ,[ Edmond Drumont's rabble-rousing anti-Semitic newspaper revealed the powir of prejudice and demagogy. The Panama Scandal of the early 1890s, and t'u Dreyfus affair—in which a Jewish army officer was repeatedly prosecuted lui espionage even after it was clear that he had been framed—ignited a broad-ha.^ distrust of Jews. Maurice Barres suggested in his novel The Uprooted and othci writings that the Republican system and the influx of foreigners, among :li -ir French Jews, were corrupting the village virtues on which French history lui1. been built. Charles Maurras's Action Francaise, a movement and a newspv-pei, violently attacked Jews, extolled military nationalism, and urged that an authoritarian monarch replace the Republic, which he habitually referred to as "the .sliu" (lagimtse). Although the Right lost national elections in 189S and 1905, they iv-came fashionable purveyors of doctrine among students and made many inroiids in the national capital.
By the late 1870s nationalism manifested itself as a doctrine aspiring mote -o territorial aggrandizement than to linguistic or communal self-determination This transformation of an ideology that had accompanied liberal and revolutionary aspirations into a set of xenophobic attitudes by which antiliberal lead Jrs sought to organize mass constituencies was a fundamental development of1 he late nineteenth century. Poles might aspire to recover a national state wiped off the map a century earlier. "Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire there were sul. champions of ethnic self-determination and even secession. But nationalism n.j longer manifested itself in Western Europe as a romantic enthusiasm for grouping the members of a language group or an ancient territory. After all, Germany and Italy had already achieved unity and Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia we e recognized as sovereign nation-states. Their imagined communities were no longer imagined; they (or their nationalist elites) were merely dissatisfied with 1 h-territory they currently held. Even Austria-Hungary seemed to settle intoconstitutional equilibrium that satisfied Hungarians as well as Germans.
LEVIATHAN Z.O
The economic strains of the era from 1873 to 1896 also intensified national L jmpetition. The growth of grain imports from the Western Hemisphere—the t Jhited States, Canada, and Argentina—after the American Civil War and the L Kpansion of continent-wide railroad systems meant stagnant or depressed prices for farmers and intensified the sense of national competition for markets. The absence of new gold discoveries between 1849 and 1896, in an age when curren-
ies were being keyed to gold and the United States was "redeeming" its paper jurrency from the Civil War, meant a deflationary pressure on prices for over l ,vo decades, which in turn made credit dearer for farmers. National tariffs imposed on imported grains, and on behalf of domestic manufacturers, seemed the logical answer and also allowed log-rolling bargains between the spokesmen for farmers and for industry. The Republican Party in the United States had urged . nd inaugurated tarifFprotection since its inception in the 1850s; Bismarck instituted a tariff in 1879, and11 was significantly raised under his nationalist successors in 1897. The duties provided needed revenue at the national level, but also facilitated cooperation between rye growers and industrialists who were often .irrayed in hostile parties: Conservatives and National Liberals. But not only the Right passed tariffs: the incoming coalition of the Left in Italy sought to con-:irm its power by passing a protective tariff in 1882, and the centrist coalition in France would pass its first tariff on foreign grains in 1891. Only Great Britain
esisted tariffs in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and Britain cer-:ainly did not resist the other great trend that intensified the sense of national competition—the search for exclusive colonial domains.
The Colonizing State and the Colonial State
What does the great scramble to partition Africa and Asia and seize exclusive territorial domains overseas tell us about the state? We discuss the pattern of domination established overseas, the colonial state, below. But was the state of the colonizers decisively impacted by the experience of imperialism? How did acquisition of an overseas empire change the European, Japanese, or American regime? The question is not easy to answer. Max Weber asked in the 1890s what significance German political unification would possess if the country did not
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CHARLES S. MAIER <-»
go on to develop an overseas empire.112 Late nineteenth-century expansion f. '
lowed upon the satisfaction taken throughout Europe in national success in c 5
power that followed the preceding period of nation-state construction but the *
seemed necessary to confirm it. For a few decades at midcentury, acquisition n| !
overseas territory seemed less compelling than earlier or later. The British b ij i
acquired the Cape Colony at the Congress of Vienna. The French invaded A "%
ria in 1830. At midcentury British policy makers expressed no great urge to c> l
pand their political domains, since their economic prowess as bankers and mar- t
ufacturers seemed to ensure their easy superiority in markets and states overseas ■
By the 1870s, competition—political and economic—was perceived as harsher "T and pervasive, so that by the 1880s and 1890s remaining territory was quickl
arrogated. j
Historians a generation ago could easily demonstrate that there was no master
plan, no timetable, and even, they suggested, no intention. The British Empi.c '
was supposedly created, so John Robert Seeley had written in his influential 1881 {
lectures, The Expansion of England, in "a fit of absence of mind." Hardly: t.'.c i tracks were laid—empire had been the aspiration of large states throughout hi
tory; the wars of 1850-1870 showed that power and territory were important. -J
Napoleon III was muscling into Vietnam and even seeking to conquer Mexii 1. j
Disraeli and other conservatives signaled the need actually to control land m.-.sics. '
(and the people that went with them). Seeley cautiously affirmed the impen.-l |
vocation and its beneficial impact on the lands London ruled, and vast areas of J
Asia and Africa beckoned. The great rivers that ran from their remote int-riois !
to the sea—the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi in Africa, and the \L- I kong and Irrawaddy in Southeast Asia—allowed European gunboats to pen
trate far inland, just as earlier the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, f
Orinoco, and Amazon had opened up the Americas, and even earlier the oceans - IS
had allowed overseas exploration. Against his supposed intention, Prime Minis- ,ij
ter Gladstone intervened in Alexandria and Cairo in 1882, to enforce the claim1. |
of British bondholders who had financed construction of the Suez Can;il. Pa f
the 1890s British troops were conquering the Sudan hundreds of miles up ri\c. \ ostensibly to quell the disorder that always broke out beyond their last lin ■
penetration. |
-'■'■'^"^'^llllllli
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LEVIATHAN 2.0
A year before the British seizure of Egypt, the French moved east from Alge-rja to take over Tunisia—nominally a remote province of the Ottomans, but in fact a quasi state where Jewish and Italian traders lived among the Bedouin and Arab populations—and the competitive consuls of France, Italy, and Britain sought to interest their governments in seizing control. The French moved first, from Algeria, and established a protectorate by the Treaty of Bardo in 1881, which angered the Italians, who had their eyes on this prize across the Mediterranean. French expansion in Africa depended less on river routes. Like the Muslim conquerors of earlier centuries, they knew how to expand across the vast dry lands of the Sahara and Sahel, relying on oases and a tough corps of mercenary soldiers—the French Foreign Legion—as well as their own colorful detachments of Zouaves. In the decades from the 1830s to 1890s they took over a large Central African domain, from Senegal and the Ivory Coast to Chad, then turned toward an "inkblot" strategy of penetrating the sultanate of Morocco in the new century. The Russians also penetrated an inland terrain: the khanates of the Caucuses and of the Oxus River highlands of Central Asia. Ultimately by the :880s the Italians would establish a foothold on the East Coast of Africa, first in Somalia and Eritrea, and then would endeavor unsuccessfully (until 1935-1936) to subjugate Ethiopia. Ambitious Meiji statesmen eyed the poor and isolated Korean kingdom as well as the Manchurian littoral. American overseas ambitions excited the owners of sugar plantations in Hawai'i and fruit plantations in Central America (as before the Civil War they had stimulated cotton plantation owners in the deep South) and the fervent Presbyterians who wanted their gospel spread and women educated throughout Asia.
The years 1882-1885 comprised a crucial period of commitment to "the scramble." The stories of remote missionaries in the interior or ambitious na--s tional claimants on the coast helped create a favorable opinion for intervention at home. Bismarck, always a continental thinker, had little use for African colonies but decided it was easier to yield to the nationalist enthusiasm and his explorers' faits accomplis. Germany moved into Togo and Cameroon on the West Coast, the large territory of Southwest Africa (today's Namibia), and a swath of East Africa (today's Tanzania). The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 also adjusted boundary claims for the coastal colonies and in effect confirmed the partition of
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CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2.0
coastal black Africa as a European cooperative project, just as the Congivss of Berlin seven years earlier had established the recognition of states at the expense of the retreating Ottoman Empire as a project under Western European tutelage. Whereas the 1878 Congress of Berlin had sought to regularize the claims of newly emerging nations at the expense of a weakened but venerable Ottoman sovereign, the 1884 Berlin Conference was an effort for Europeans to expand without internecine warfare in a region they deemed to be devoid of sovereign claimants. The later National Socialist legal theorist, Carl Schmitt—we.will return to his cold-blooded lucidity later—was at least partially correct when'hi described the international law that arose from the conference (as it had earlje.-from other colonial arbitrations) as a project designed to ensure European despoliation without conflict. What happened in the vast interior escaped contiol. Vast territories, supposedly ceded to European agents by indigenous chiefs, fell into a hazy legal status between commercial control and state sovereignty. In the months before and after the conference, Leopold II, king of Belgium, won American and then British recognition to transform his Association Internationale Africaine (AIC) into the Congo Free State, which his uncontrolled managers transformed into a gigantic tropical gulag devoted to the excruciating harvesting of rubber from the tall vines of the jungle. This scandalous behavior in what was virtually Leopold's personal colonial domain finally led the other European powers to compel its takeover by the Belgian state in 1908. In the interim the French and British carved up the huge regions of West Africa, Germans established colonies on both coasts, the Portuguese pressed inward from their 0.1] coastal outposts, and British settlers and generals reached the central great lakes from north and south. Thousands of miles of frontiers were drawn and adjustec. Leviathan 1.0, so laboriously reconstructed in its ancient, settled habitations, could allow itself fantastic windfalls of appropriation.113
At the same time the French, who a century earlier had withdrawn fr:i:n India, now under Napoleon III pressed for outposts in the wealthy Southeast Asian states of today's Vietnam. Vietnam had a stormy history of kingdoms th.it at times recognized the nominal overlordship of the Chinese emperors, but then had revolted and insisted on their own independence. Consider for a moment the welter of states around the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea. Here lay the region of the globe that, from the fifteenth century to
the twentieth, was most saturated—or at least on a par with the middle of Europe between France and Russia—by claims of sovereignty, sometimes overlapping, sometimes fiercely exclusive, usually contested. Mughal, Portuguese, British, and French imperial claims impinged on a succession of sultanates and monarchies and overlapping religious loyalties—Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian. Mughal sovereignty decomposed during the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries; London's claims expanded in the West and East as British agents pushed from India into Singapore, Malaya, and lowland Burma by the 1840s, and into the highlands by the 1880s, all the while consolidating their hold on the west of India (today's Pakistan) and its northwest territories. Between the late 1850s and early 1860s, the French secured new extraterritorial enclaves in China and took over Cochin China (southern Vietnam), then in the 1880s absorbed Annam in the center and, after war with China, Tonkin in the north, as well as Laos and Cambodia in the western interior of the Mekong River watershed. Thailand preserved its independent monarchy because it served as a buffer between the two expanding European powers and perspicacious monarchs pushed through a sustained course of institutional reforms. The Dutch, who had outposts in Sumatra and Java (including the settlement of Batavia, todays Jakarta), pressed east across the Indonesian archipelago, finally subduing the Bali monarchy in 1906.
Meanwhile the United States opted for a course of annexations from the late 1890s: American sugar planters helped engineer a takeover of the Hawai'ian monarchy between 1893 and 1900, and although Democratic president Grover Cleveland resisted annexation, William McKinley supported the local planters. The 1898 war with Spain yielded a protectorate over Cuba and the cession of the Philippine archipelago as well as island bases on the routes to China. China was too huge and developed to be taken over, but Europeans and the ambitious Japanese secured territorial enclaves with rights to impose their own legal jurisdictions. Rivalries moved to the northeast Pacific region by the mid-i890S, in part because the feeble Korean state became the objective of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian ambitions. China viewed Korea as a tributary kingdom; Japan moved to claim trading rights and undermine Beijing's residual suzerainty. By the summer of 1894 a familiar escalation of incidents led to war between China and Japan, with the surprising victory of the latter. As a result of its victory, japan annexed the island of Formosa (Taiwan), imposed a massive indemnity upon Beijing, and
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CHARLES S. MAIER
secured recognition of their rights in Korea, which it would add formally to its overseas possessions in 1910. Their initial annexation of Port Arthur and the Lia-odong Peninsula had to be renounced in the face of French, German, and primarily Russian pressure, the so-called Triple Intervention. St. Petersburg won] J itself annex Port Arthur in 1898; the British and Germans would secure n?n enclaves on the Shandong Peninsula, Jiaozhou and Weihaiwei. These events hastened the anti-foreign turbulence in a beset China, where the nationalist societies known as Boxers mobilized in Shandong and by the summer of 1900 besieg \ the foreign legations and missionaries in Beijing. The Dowager Empress C:xi, who had reversed reformist initiatives and imprisoned the young emperor >. 1 1898, threw in her lot with the Boxers, but the Chinese and Manchu general, divided over what stance to take. An eight-nation expeditionary force of up :d about 50,000 European, Japanese, and US soldiers crushed the revolt, suppressed the societies, and imposed another indemnity on the hapless court. Who might represent the nation in this huge but possibly decomposing polity: a Manchu court torn between traditionalists and reformers? or nationalists angered by a feckless dynasty and apparently rapacious foreigners?
These were momentous developments that came thick and fast and of course provoked major debates about causation as well as policy. Within a few decades European states joined by Japan and the United States had claimed the right to rule hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia and Africa. The area they enclosed and bordered was many times the size in area of their own national :e> ritories, and it was often ceded in dubious and coerced claims. From one vie-w. -point, colonial territories were acquired as strategic resources for their imperial states in the struggle against other imperial states. Until recently those who wrote that history have not paid much attention to what was happening within the societies being subjugated and reorganized. They have focused on the confront v tions and transactions among the colonizers, and for generations they have argui I as to whether economic or political causation was fundamental.
Marxian notions in particular aroused efforts at refutation from diplomatic historians who stressed either traditional political rivalries or sometimes the role of missionaries—a dispute that was caught up in the greater ideological confrontations of the Cold War. Marx, and after him Rosa Luxemburg and other theorists, maintained that the falling rate of profit at home led to the search for more
•[ 184 ]•
Foreign leased aress, I 1898~
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CHARLES S. MAIER
profitable investment abroad in areas still predominantly nonindustrializ<-J Thereafter, states or monopoly enterprises—sometimes combinations of banks and industry fused in what Social Democratic theorist Rudolf Hilferding crdled finance capital—would press their states to establish exclusive zones for .'their own advantage. After the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Bolshevik leader in exile, V. I. Lenin, claimed that imperialism was in fact just the highev stage of capitalism and would have to lead to a major war.114
A related view suggests that governing elites adopted programs of imperialism because their societies were increasingly racked by social division at home and they calculated that expansion might divert domestic conflict into foreiin adventures. Hans Ulrich Wehlers study of Bismarck's imperialism a generation ago argued that the chancellor s acceptance of colonialism placed his 1 kens: of colonies in the framework of a German state under the stresses of industrialization.115 Certainly many advocates of empire, some of them on the right bu: not all, looked to empire precisely to counteract doctrines of class conflict, rkidili Tories, such as Alfred Milner, wanted a program of social imperialism, as did charismatic pastor Friedrich Naumann of the German Progressive Party. Italian imperialists and nationalists such as Enrico Corradini suggested that their own working class should recognize that Italy was itself a proletarian nation and fall into line behind the industrialists and intellectuals who wanted to advance the agenda of empire and military preparedness.
Not all Marxist theories had to lead like Lenin's to the notion that such imperialist rivalry had to culminate in a great war. Karl Kautsky suggested that imperialist powers might arrive at a "super-imperialism" or peaceful partition offv colonial world. Kautsky s argument suggested in fact the perspective that has become the major approach in the last few decades' study of colonial empires, namely, that we should interpret imperialism not as the extension of European rivalries but as a common European confrontation with the Third World. This point of view suggested that colonialism could be understood as a common c nrcr-prise of the advanced states and economies in the Northern Hemisphere wi:h respect to the less resistant states in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
The notion that the colonizers confronted the colonized in some encompassing global binary relationship, more important than the nationalist rivalries due di vided them, has in fact emerged as a dominant interpretation of the imperialist a c.
LEVIATHAN l.O
Social segregation, sexual exploitation, and political disenfranchisement lay at the base of the colonial relationship, in this view. But not only in the colonies: European institutions, concepts of citizenship, gender relations, and labor, it has been argued, were shaped decisively by Europe's experience as colonizer, just as the world of the indigenous inhabitants was structured by the experience of being colonized. To expand from the Indian historiography of "subaltern studies," all relationships were supposedly stunted by the experience of colonial subjection. Subsequent scholarship has suggested that this framework perhaps involves too radical a confrontation of colonizer and colonized and thus perhaps makes the experience of the colonized too passive and homogeneous.116 The colonial territory offered the colonizing power natural resources, minerals, and agricultural goods, and specifically tropical assets that his constricted and colder territories at home could not provide. And the colonized subject essentially offered labor power at costs far below what domestic workers imposed and sometimes with less quarrelsome attitudes. Eventually they could bargain with their masters and extract concessions that by the mid-twentieth century would undermine the colonial relationship.117 But that stage was hardly anticipated in the late nineteenth century.
Beyond the resources of territory and inexpensive labor, beyond any pride in a civilizing mission, the colonizing state provided status and prestige. Small powers along with large powers felt a sense of mission. The architecture of an imperial capital made aesthetic claims. The massive ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs in Brussels testified to the fact that a small power controlled vast overseas resources. In the case of Belgium, moreover, the overseas mission helped cement the two linguistic communities: the French Walloons staffed the colonial bureaucracies at home; the Flemish took up office in Africa. Empire did provide a dividend of cohesiveness and grandeur as long as one did not have to fight a long war to preserve it. Britain and France did extract from their dependent populations loyalties they could draw on in the two world wars ahead. For better or worse the colonizing state could never be just an agency for providing domestic services at home. Whether this was valuable or instead the source of needless violence and illusory grandeur cannot be decided by adding up the costs and benefits. For a country such as Portugal, the empire may well have provided an excuse not to modernize and to remain less developed. By the mid-twentieth century the costs appeared excessive for many citizens of Britain and France.
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CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN Z.O
As for the colonial state—that is, the regime put into place to govern i|, large territory and diverse populations taken over—it rested on particulat scrs <f institutions and processes. To seek one model is misleading, because the administrations used in the regions of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, where wealth derived from mining and the authorities ruled over many different "tribes," dit-fered from those in settler colonies with significant European populations and in the post-1919 states carved out of Ottoman regions. Nonetheless, some commonalities existed, and the admittedly overabstracted colonial state icm-in-d. dominant force over vast areas of the world in a period of increasing srnteiuss and governmentality, Africa retained only four sovereign countries by 185;.: the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia, Liberia, the white Boer Republics of South A I'ricu, and Morocco. The Boers would have to accept inclusion in the British Union of South Africa and the Moroccans would become a French colony by 1912.. G mi plex confederations had contested Africa since earlier eras but fell to Europear rule: the Asante kingdom in Ghana, the Buganda kingdom, Shaka's Zulu state, and Samouri Toure's Wassoulu empire in Mali as late as the 1880s. Less extensh l tribal communities had negotiated their trading and their security for centuries with the European settlers of the coast and river valleys, A poor and weak Korea, once the source of so much Japanese culture and nominally in a tributary relationship with China, was taken over by the Japanese between 1905 and 1910. T1k-mini-kingdoms of Oceana would also be annexed, as would the Caribbean states. In Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan evaded annexation if not great political pressure.
The colonial state was run by administrators or proconsuls who had vas: amounts of discretionary power. They were expected, however, to cover their costs of administration, if not, as in India, to send a stream of payments '.y.id home; and most of their meager budgets went to police and measures designed for security. They could not simply govern without reference to the indigenous peoples whose labor they needed and respect they demanded, so generally they administered through favored intermediaries. Mahmood Mamdani stresses chain Africa the state became bifurcated: into rural areas where the British ruled through chiefs, and urban areas where they had to confront a more complex social scale.118 The rural chain of command amounted to a new form of despotism1 colonial rule elsewhere had to become more subtle and, in effect, a series of
ransactions made by co-opting native intermediaries. There was a major distinc-
ion between tribal societies where political forms were not readily recognizable rS the European conquerors, on the one hand, and the subordinate sultanates of
lie Dutch East Indies or the extraterritorial enclaves in China, on the other. The • -rm colonial state takes us only so far in understanding the structure of the Brit-
;h Raj—that huge possession of the crown (including today's Pakistan and ISanqladesh)—where London administered a major portion through Calcutta, -he Madras and Bombay presidencies, and almost five hundred rulers as successor to rhe Mughals whose hold on the north of the subcontinent had evaporated •s the British moved west from Bengal and added to the disintegrative momentum.115 Still, a colonial regime it was: by 1900 the Indian Civil Service comprised about a thousand administrators, of which about forty were Indian, no surprise since the entrance exams were given in Britain. Of the related administrative Lorps, about half of the approximately ten thousand were Indian or Anglo-Indian, but in the lower-paying ranks. The local courts and counsels were opening to Indians—although the British resisted trial under Indian judges.120 Sovereignty, foreign policy, command of the army, and the monetary system remained in British hands. Europeans confronted the Indians, the Chinese whom they controlled, and the Southeast Asians with both contempt for their subordination and fascination with their culture and artifacts. Europeans tended to divide between those who believed the natives were children and potentially rebels, and those who for humanitarian, religious, cultural, or other reasons respected their civilization. This led to clashes among policy makers and administrators. The tough-minded who counseled sternness (often the military but not always) had contempt for the naive liberal native sympathizers who would undermine colonial rule by "the series of ineffectual compromises... the lamentable vacillations in facing open sedition or veiled rebellion."121
Africa was a study literally in black and white, although even there colonial rulers drew distinctions and lines, just as the technocrats of immigration did in America. The British encountered noble warriors (Masai), tall and attractive, versus bulkier West Africans; likewise they separated martial races in the Punjab (Sikhs) from the darker-skinned Tamils; the Belgians ascribed differences to the Hutu and Tutsi, which would lead to catastrophe many decades after their colonial rule collapsed in Rwanda. To be sure, what was taking place in the colonies
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In charge of empire: George Nathaniel, Lord Curzon, in his regalia as viceroy of India (1898-1905). Curzon was a staunch defender of the British presence in India, with all its ceremonial grandeur, and was convinced that Britain and Russia were destined for a contest of empires—"the great game"—in Persia and Ccn- -tral Asia. His aristocratic demeanor probably precluded a later nod as Conservative prime minister, but he served as foreign secretary from 1919 to 192.4. (Library j of Congress) \i
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in parallel with the reinforcement of racism in the colonizing societies, as Jim Crow legislation was imposed in the United States from the 1890s on, as old-stock Americans reacted to the new Japanese and Chinese labor and even to :he Eastern European (Catholic and Jewish) migrants. For many in Europe the emerging proletariat represented the same dark threat as did natives: after the Paris Commune of 1870, the mass execution of the Communards was followed by ihe exile of many to New Caledonia, where another dangerous class existed.122
The colonies devalued life on the basis of race, but the racial separation was in aspect of the general classificatory mania and search for new hierarchies to replace old that characterized the late nineteenth century. So the modern state developed out of that dialectical thrust—inevitable democratization and wider communication, but reconfigured pyramids of status and authority. The brilliant Polish writer of the late twentieth century, Stanislaw Lem (d. 2.006) has a delicious short story about a German SS officer who after the collapse of the Third Reich seeks refuge in a remote corner of Argentina, where he organizes a niniature state among his fellow fugitives. But entranced with absolute author-ty, he disdains reproducing the National Socialist regime as too vulgar and populist and aspires to recreate the court of Louis XVI, insisting that his fellow mass murderers all pretend to speak French and conduct elaborate court rituals in a desolate geographic milieu that mocks the effort and finally leads to the downfall of the experiment.123 It is doubtful that Lem was thinking of the colonial state when he wrote his fantasy, but it captures something about many of the states throughout the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were theaters of ceremony—Edward VII's coronation as emperor in Delhi in 1903 claimed about 0.5 percent of the public revenue (imagine a $10 billion inauguration ceremony in today's "Washington), and other grandiose state visits followed.124 Lem's parody fails us, though, in that his obsessed leaders establish no relationship with the indigenous elite; they are self-absorbed, whereas the key to colonial rule was the selection of native chiefs or sheiks in a process of "indirect rule," most famously outlined by the British proconsul in Nigeria, "rederick Lugard, and France s Marshal Hubert Lyautey.125
And although not founded by mass murderers, the conditions under which colonies were established could encourage mass murder, as some advocates accepted without qualms. "Again, another conclusion from our proposition in
CHARLES S. MAIER
reference to the mission of the Teutonic nations," wrote a contemporary leg theorist,
must be that they are called to carry the political civilization of the mncc-ii world into those parts of the world inhabited by unpolitical and barbaric i acc i.e. they must have a colonial policy... the larger part of the surface of tl globe is inhabited by populations which have not succeeded in establishii civilized states, which have in fact no capacity to accomplish such a work, ar which must, therefore, remain in a state of barbarism or semibarbarism, unit the political nations undertake the work of state organization for them..
There is no human right to the status of barbarism____The civilized state m
righteously go still further than the exercise of force in imposing organization. If the barbaric populations resist the same, a la outrance, the civilized may clear the territory of their presence and make it the abode of civilizi J
man____It violates thereby no rights of these populations which are not pet
and trifling in comparison with its transcendent right and duty to establi.s 1 political and legal order elsewhere.
The self-described Teuton who buried this license for genocide in his ::iaj«r treatise on the state was in fact no German, but the leading Columbia University professor of constitutional law.126
The German general Lothar von Trotha put down the Herero uprising i German Southwest Africa by driving the insurgents and their families into the desert, where it was obvious they must perish. The Americans who took ovtr the Philippines pursued the insurrectionary forces of General Aguinaldo with a war against the population. The Italians ferociously suppressed the Libyan irib's whose territory they took from the distant Turks in 1911; General Reginald Dyoi famously emptied his machine guns against assembled Indians in Amrii 1.11 .1 1919; the British made air attacks on Bedouin tribesmen a successful tactic border control in their new possessions in the Middle East in the early 1910s, while the French bombarded Damascus a few years later; the Italians used poison gas against the Ethiopians whose land Mussolini coveted; and in 1945, as the war was ending in Europe, French troops killed perhaps 6,000 Algerians .1 wanton reprisals, perhaps many more, in inland Setif after Muslim protes'1-turned violent and took 100 European lives. But the casualties were far away; the
m m I
' Resistance to empire: Hendrik Witbooi, ta. 1900. Witbooi, a well-educated and
effective guerrilla leader, was born and educated in the northern Cape Colony in 1830 to a family of Nama tribal leaders. Migrating norch to southwest Africa, he concluded a peace with the traditionally rival Herero to oppose the ambitious
s German colonial effort. From the 1890s until his death in combat in 1905, he led
the combined Nama-Herero revolt, which was finally crushed by the genocidal tactics of the hard-line German commander. (Getty Images)
CHARLES S. MAIER
peoples were dark and fanatic; each incident was an unfortunate excepi n .n |P a narrative of progress; dominion could not be dismantled—even the icnJu-hearted agreed—without a catastrophe for civilization.
For many of the administrators and settlers, the natives were children; thcv had to be taught lessons. Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, rector of the U • i\ cr. sity of Berlin and China explorer (although his initial encounters with C \m ,-may have come during his years in California), referred to the relationship between a master and his dog; the colonial administrator must punish .." chj. lenges to authority immediately.127 British General Barrow, who headjd tlu-British expedition to suppress residual Boxer presence, explained his dcisior to blow up the white porcelain pagoda of the Beijing Bada temple comjk. if Christians did not destroy the landmark, the Chinese would consider die i ^uds more powerful. As German general Alfred von Waldersee noted, retribtitr. c b. -headings of Qing officials (not Boxers themselves) by enlisted Chinese ;\c. r. tioners were an exercise in "moral influence of far-reaching importance."1" I customary to balance these episodes against the hospitals or railroads and oc sional schools that the European attempted. The colonial state could becoiv developmental state if it made sense to its masters. The Japanese built a vigorcui, though often brutal, colonial empire from 1895 to 1945, and in Manchuna in particular nurtured economic and industrial development, whether co;.I m us or soy farming.12' Still there was something essential to the enterprise in the relationship of arbitrary and, if need be, unfettered power far from the daily supei \ 1-sion of the state at home. Distancing was crucial to the exercise of power and its ultimate legitimation, resting as it did on the racial or ethnic distance ti separated the colonizer and the colonized, and making the colonial state a p 1-tential zone of day-to-day violence. Joseph Conrad has left us one essential a gory: Heart of Darkness—once again the fusion of violence, empire, and coiuiiij! of age. Almost sixty years later the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe left anot ler tale, Things Fall Apart, from the viewpoint of the disoriented subject. Not all these stories were allegories in which violence had to follow from absolute pov E. M Footer's Passage to India is fraught instead with the inability to a< hi personal friendship across the divide of the colonizer and the colonized, Ji.d there are many other stories of prejudice and encounter where the two sides w^h
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'■at the unmediated relationship of equals but cannot achieve it given the insuperable differences of authority.
It would be tempting to conclude that the colonial state was the arena in which all the prerogatives of power earlier inherent in Western statehood could he exercised once they were no longer permissible at home—that is, that it allowed all the surviving impulses of domination to find an outlet at a time when rhey had to yield to democratic forms and public opinion within the colonizing mate. The colonial state permitted the ceremonial staging of sovereignty and 1 nchallenged rule. It allowed the articulation of fantasies of racial differentia-fon that Europeans sometimes felt with respect to their own urban masses or t ven peasants, and that many Americans felt toward their former black slaves and new contracted labor. In an era when the concept of equal citizenship was inscribed as the norm for the Western state or those regimes that aspired to be modern, the colonial state represented the exceptionalism permitted for global governance. It established enclaves of untrammeled power but it also allowed hen of science and sensibility to see the commonalities of culture that they attempted to convey at home by studies in anthropology. This is all true, although • necessarily simplifies the myriad encounters of colonial farmers, business-len, and soldiers with the people they were assigned to rule. In fact, the colo-ial state—insofar as we can speak usefully about this generalization—was an immensely complex and contradiction-ridden enterprise. Wherever whites con-I ranted the "other," they confronted "themselves." The "other"became the fash-inable historically discursive term during the 1960s, but the colonial subject was ever simply just the other. And the colonial state was both different from the cate at home but still a domain where its possibilities for sovereignty, authority, :gislation, and violence might be tested. Ultimately what happened in the colo-iies in the way of violence and domination and exploitation did not just stay in he colonies. And it would never have happened in the colonies had it not been reamed of at home.
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4. States of Exception
"SOVEREIGN is he who decides on che state of exception." Forget the nice descriptions of the legal order, so German political theorist Carl Schmitt \> .is arguing in 1921: sovereignty belonged to whoever had the authority to set isid.-the law.130 Schmitt, however, did not mean just de facto power: sovereignty was a metalegal status that evaded the constraints of the constitution. Schmitt, who would live almost a century, into the 1980s, was never free of a desire to ram gress bourgeois norms; and he aspired to be the poster boy for countcrryvol-i-tionary legal and political theory in the decade after World War I and then the court theorist for the Nazis. His formula became all too relevant for so máiv, states in the twentieth century, as they coped with civil strife, revolution, depression, and war. The state of exception or emergency arose when the legal or even constitutional order, with all its protections for citizens' rights, could not provide for confronting a threat to the nation and had to be suspended. It was tlic moment when the ruler had to act according to what since Machiavelli-ys" s called raison d'etat or just the moment that President George W. Bush appealed to when he called himself, doubtless without benefit of reading Schmitt, "ihe decider."131
Twentieth-century history was marked by states of exception; and the scat created in those states of exception could prove exceptional in their claims and their brutality. For Schmitt, however, they were not exceptional as such, for ultimately every state had to be exceptional and politics always took place in die interstices where law failed to reach—in a democracy above all. For democracy as he would emphasize in his writings that we return to below—was not about human rights, not about resolving policy alternatives through discussion (which liberalism celebrated), but about a people defining and protecting its identity, about who constituted "us" and who "them." In that sense Schmitt's heirs are still around, shorn usually of totalitarian temptations but tending to see public life as constituted by irreducible ethnic antagonisms usually in the form of immigration
from Asia, Africa, and (in the US case) Latin America. Between the world wars \ they talked about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, kulaks and collectives,
' Jews and Germans. And of course, they didn't just talk. Threatened, as they saw
it, by fundamental internal adversaries, they moved to eliminate them.
Schmitt s formula alerts us that the twentieth-century state (and many specific states in particular) might follow two agendas, conceptually separate but often entangled, one that might be labeled "soft," the other "hard." The soft agenda involved expanding the policies associated with Foucault's idea of governmental-ity and the modernization of society. Expansion of activity along these lines would lead to the contemporary welfare state as gradually elaborated from the occupational safety legislation, pension provisions, and early social insurance begun in Europe during the nineteenth century and significantly enlarged during the post-World War II era. In this role states acted to shape society as they provided for education, investment in infrastructure, and regulation of the economy. As they competed internationally during the Cold War, states also took on commitments to modernization and development. Soft agendas did not renounce large social goals, and critics from Friedrich Hayek to James Scott have argued that the soft agenda could be as quietly coercive as the more brutal hard agenda. Still, facing a tax for future pension payments or being subject to compulsory trade-union dues hardly seems comparable to interrogation by the Gestapo. The "hard" agenda was precisely the one that invoked "exception" and emergency—political activity as a response to war, revolution, and unrest. States were not at leisure to just pursue the development of their societies: issues of sovereignty, identity, and violence intruded into history with renewed urgency once again as preeminent concerns in the first half of the twentieth century. They had been such in the seventeenth century, but had been gradually displaced by the Enlightenment's focus on civil society. As Schmitt realized, Hobbes was back.
Even for nations normally liberal at home, the hard agenda, the regime of "exception," intruded in two key sets of activities. One, as we have seen, was colonial administration; the other was the state at war. Colonial administrators and their restive subjects understood that sovereignty was or must become the underlying stake in the imperial world—sovereignty over acquired subjects, sovereignty vis-ä-vis potential rival colonizers. Maintaining sovereignty, how-. ever, involved what French colonial advocates termed "valorization" of their
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"possessions," that is, modernizing and developing their economic potential whether in terms of commodities or manpower. But so too, colonial intellectual and civil servants believed that modernization, pursuing wealth and power, w a prerequisite for standing up to the European powers. In the Pacific region Japans experience taught important lessons for both sides: The Meiji reforr.ic had consciously and successfully chosen modernization to resist possible qua colonization. But they were reconstructing nationhood precisely in an era win i most successful statesmen believed that civilizations were divided into the vigc ous and the feeble. They entered a world of states "red in tooth and claw," ar believed their own teeth and claws needed to be as sharp as any other, and thui went on within the same generation to quickly create their own Asian c-ipn After Japan's victory over China in 1895, which the European powers moved 1 limit and then exploit for their own aims, the subsequent rivalry with Russia Kjj preeminence in Korea led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and the fir. major modern military setback dealt to a European empire by an Asian sower Japan destroyed the Russian fleet, but the ground war bogged down in the siege around Port Arthur and Dalian (Dairen), finally to be mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt in remote Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Japan won Russia's rights over Manchurian ports and Sakhalin and other islands, and e- ough of a free hand to be able to annex Korea in 1910. Tokyo's new empire rested on both the harsh exercise of power and an agenda for development of Manchurian and to a lesser extent Taiwanese and Korean resources. Chinese reformers and revolutionaries seeking asylum in Tokyo were to learn a lot from Japan in the decade after their defeat at its hands. Given the vortex of imperial conflict tha-opened up where Korean and Manchu weakness sucked in Russia, Japan, and indirectly the Western powers, there is a case to be made for dating twentieth-century international history from the conflict of 1895.132
Consider the impact of the wars (including the Cold War) that would sci etch through most of the twentieth century more generally. The fiscal exigencies of war in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had helped create Leviathan 1.0: that is, the dynastic territorial state, insistent on sovereignty, determined if p;is sible to override local privileges, intent on developing its economic resources and infrastructure. The wars of the mid-nineteenth century, we have sees . we.? instrumental for the territorial and governmental consolidation of Leviathan i.e.
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S'j too the great wars of the twentieth century played a fundamental role. I yen as they originated in large measure from the expansionist role that the ^invented nineteenth-century nation-state found so compelling, so the world fits further impelled these states to mobilize their economies and societies to unprecedented degrees. War justified the accretion of power at home, and it beckoned the more ruthless leaders of the new century as a paradigm for seiz-ig and exercising it. Readers of this book will have spent their lives in states 'liose claims on individual lives and ambitions to regulate their welfare, often t lieir abodes, and sometimes even their demographic continuity and permissible utterances, were fundamentally enhanced by the world wars and Cold War juggles.
The experience of the two world wars in fact conflated the agendas of development and sovereignty. The states engaged in those long conflicts had to mobilize mass armies, coordinate their industries, their transports, and their medical arid social services, and negotiate with their labor organizations to an unprecedented degree. Market mechanisms to allocate scarce manpower or raw materials-had chaotic and inflationary results and were largely set aside for allocation jiy committees of the sectors involved. New ministries of munitions compelled industrialists who had resisted unions to accept trilateral bargaining among state bureaucrats and sometimes generals, unions, and employer confederations. Women emerged into the sphere of nondomestic work to an unprecedented degree. The warfare state became a proto-welfare state, but equipped with degrees of compulsion that were truly exceptional. The British Defense of the Realm Act (DORA) passed in August 1914 essentially turned over to the government the power to do what it thought necessary to prosecute the war. Powerful unspoken expectations of decent and liberal behavior persisted in Britain, and it was taken for granted chat such a delegation of authority would not be used to prosecute I olitical speech unless it challenged the war effort. The need to administer pensions and medical benefits prolonged the expansion of many of these services .nto the postwar eras. Although the interference with price and market mechanisms was generally rolled back after World War I, the Great Depression and the Second World War made some of the innovations into permanent features. If power in every state was defined by what happened during the exception, states ■"'f exception were no longer so exceptional.133
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The rise of the warfare state: Canadian women workers operating machine tools in a munitions factory, September 1916. Canada and the Dominions entered the war alongside "the mother country" in 1914, and as in other belligerent nations where men were called to combat service, women took up traditionally male occupations. (Getty Images)
Finally the two agendas manifested themselves in the extraordinary role 1' ,ir military rule continued to play throughout the world, certainly until the 1980s. Outside the colonial world, the governing institution that had seemed con-,[ iul ously to triumph in the course of the nineteenth century—arriving finally in Japan in 1890, in Russia in 1905, in China in 1910—was the legislative assembly or parliament. But parliaments, as conservative critics such as Schmitt or :';iil.u Gaetano Mosca pointed out, found it hard to act decisively in their role as . s semblies, and, for what decisions they could reach, relied either on a commitree system or on the party leaders who organized their majorities. As of 1900, cun-peting parties were still more clublike than cohesive, although first in the United States and then Britain, where electoral campaigns focused periodically on < linos ing the chief executive as well as parliamentary delegates, the parties been
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■niaiient regime fixtures with professional staffs and affiliated newspapers. But 'vliere these procedures were weak or very recent, or even nonexistent, twentieth-vitrify development brought instead the paramount role of the single encom-
-M^ingpart:yor rule bytne miiitary-
M ilitary rule and single-party dictatorship seemed to confirm Carl Schmitt's rou'^h lesson that real authority emerges only outside the constitution. The sov-.ii-.rn was the army or the authoritarian party. Or was this true only in the short -mi? Military rule could guarantee neither national unity nor, certainly, internal ■1 icification. In those latge countries in which weak national regimes were break-in" down under the pressure of imperialist encroachment or economic stagnation, territorial fragmentation or warlordism was a recurrent danger. Even when a unified military controlled the whole national territory, it found prolonged rule by bayonet frustrating. Increasingly it had to meet the needs of civil society— the realm of rivalries between capital and labor, free-trade and protectionist sectors, the restless voices of religious organizations, the media, and culture—and thus to enter the world of policy debate and pluralism. Some military rulers sought to do so by continued force, others by sponsoring authoritarian national parties. Decades later the generals and the dictators would find they were incompetent to deal with complex societies. They would not really know how to manage religious yearnings, consumer aspirations, and the technology of the computer age. They offered authoritarian solutions that were hard to prolong when the era of iron and steel was augmented by silicon and software. But their dismantling is the story of our own age, not the segment of time considered here.
Crises of Representation
Only in the sheltered bourgeois enclaves of Vienna or Paris or the discreet banks and clubs of London did it take the First World War to shatter the douceur de vie of the nineteenth century. From the mid-i890s on, the world of states—already reorganized in the second third of the nineteenth century, then freighted with ambitious agendas of development at home and expansion abroad—entered stormy waters and generated new, eventually terrifying experiments. Episodes of upheaval came thick and fast. Review some of them as they would have made the gray columns of the metropolitan newspapers: famine in India and a revival of
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A synthesis of culture, wealth, and power: The inauguration of the Paris Opera season at the Palais Gamier, ca. 1890-1900. The sumptuous Paris Opera House, designed by Charles Gamier and constructed in the 1860s in the opulent Beaux-Arts style of rhe Second Empire, served, like irs conn-.: terparts elsewhere, as a public showplace for the wealthy bourgeoisie, who came to play a major political role in the late nineteenth century throughout Europe and the Americas. (Library of Congress)
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anti-British violence from the late 1880s; global depression in 1893 and a mobilization of protest movements in Italy and the United States and major strikes throughout Europe. Cascading wars again—between China and Japan in 1895, between Greece and Turkey in 1896-1897, between the United States and Spain in 1898, between Britain and the Boers in 1900-1902, between Russia and Japan in 1904-1905, between Italy and the Ottomans in 1911, between the Balkan states and the Ottomans in 1912, and then among the Balkans in 1913—wars that brought the growing tendency to massacre civilians: Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1897, Africans in the German colonies in 1905, Bosnians and Albanians in the Balkans in 1911-1911. Although the wars themselves still took place "far away" from Western Europe and North America, the powers at the center extended their network of fateful alliances or commitments: between French and Russians after 1894, British and Japanese in 1902, British and French in 1904, British and Russians in 1907.
Starting with the Russo-Japanese confrontation, Niall Ferguson has chronicled what he aptly calls the twentieth century's "war of the world," which he finds fundamentally a product of racial or ethnic conflict.134 Certainly distinctions of race were held to justify imperialism and, often, license atrocities. But war did not always arise from these distinctions, and certainly not the most destructive wars between the European powers. Crucial, I believe, were the political deficiencies of empire and the continuing sense of vulnerability they inculcated among those who championed them most ardently. Conflicts arose from imperial elites on the defensive (Ottoman, Habsburg, Chinese, and British) and those more assertive (Japanese and German), Empires were praised as bringing peace within their far-flung frontiers and remote territories. But although they might defer internal violence and even war with each other, they could never do so indefinitely. The bills came due after 1900.
As in all revolutionary eras, legitimacy was at stake, and actually was wearing thin in many places by the 1890s. Legitimacy implies that authority does not rely on power alone; it rests on a moral basis that commands respect and obedience without continued coercion. By the end of the nineteenth century, legitimate states had to be representative to some degree; they had to act on behalf of the expressed or imputed interests of what the Victorians termed "public opinion." In the United States and Western Europe that had long meant deferring to a
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parliament and respecting individual rights. In the American democracy, President Lincoln put the idea most expansively: "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." By the turn of the twentieth century, representing "society" as a complex aggregation of identities and interests became the basis for legitimacy. But it was becoming harder and harder for states to represent the often conflicting interests within society.
This was true not only for autocratic states, but for countries that prided themselves on their civilized attainments, including the role played by an enlightened public opinion. The campaigns for enlarged suffrage were the most visible effort to encompass an enlarged sense of society. The European states managed slowly to concede broader manhood suffrage in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Sometimes conservative parties wagered that by-enfranchising the broader middle class they might strengthen their domestic position (as did the British Tories in 1867); sometimes conservatives and reform-: ers both calculated that reform would stabilize the society as a whole and their respective positions (as in Italy in 1912.). Sometimes bureaucratic rulers calcu-: lated they could use broader suffrage to limit the influence of powerful elites, as when the Habsburg ministers pressed a major general suffrage on the two halves, of Austria-Hungary. Sometimes political leaders conceded to massive demonstrations, as in Belgium in 1913. Often, though, there was resistance. Prussian conservatives and the monarch resisted demands to transform the franchise in the Prussian legislature from one skewed toward the wealthy to a more general one-man, one-vote system until they felt the need to enhance working-class support during the latter phases of the First World War. In Russia a mass suffrage conceded during the year of revolution in 1905 was progressively clawed back until the fall of the monarchy in 1917. And both Left and Right might resist tlu claims of new groups (as with women's suffrage or African-American suffrage in the US South). Suffrage alone, moreover, did not determine the strength or absence of democratic institutions and culture. Different parliaments had different degrees of power vis-a-vis their heads of state or military and bureaucracy. National political institutions could be located along axes that ran from demo -cratic participation (as in Third Republic France) through various admixtures oi elite influence reserved for ancient families and bureaucrats, ranging from the more liberal to the less, such as Britain and Germany or Japan. (Local and re-
gional authority might be ranged along a similar continuum, but might also fall at a different point.)
However, a single aggregate scale for ranking democracy (such as Freedom House tries to calculate for today's governments) would have made little sense. Some states remained what might be labeled constitutionally segmented, no matter what their written charters provided for. They were effectively divided into one sector of the adult population that was admitted to political participation and one or more that remained excluded. With respect to gender most polities were segmented until later in the twentieth century, but even disregarding the disadvantaging of women, other politics were segmented by regional "backwardness" and ethnic or racial exclusion. The Italian state was governed by a liberal parliamentary class that indulged in electoral competition north of Rome but depended on patronage, clientelism, and landowners' strength in the south as a sort of ballast to limit the destabilizing impact of these rivalries in the north. American politics remained segmented by race. The US Republican Party ended its brief effort to enforce ex-slaves' newly enacted political rights by the late 1870s as part of a deal to keep control of the presidency. The dualist electoral settlement that allowed manhood suffrage in the North even for recent immigrants while enforcing racial exclusion from the vote in the South permitted the country to achieve sectional "reconciliation" at the cost of acquiescing in Jim Crow segregationist legislation and local repression by unofficial lynch law. In the atmosphere that prevailed, white Americans in the North as well as the South wearily accepted the view that African-Americans were not yet "ready" for equal citizenship—it was the equivalent of European colonial attitudes toward their Asian and African subjects, and in effect the pool of black labor provided the human resources of a nonterritorial colony. The reunited United States also enjoyed the great geographical resource of western lands as a stabilizing outlet for national energy. Then, too, the massive influx of European migrants tended to focus their efforts at ethnic representation though state and city political machines rather than insist on prominence at the national level. Neither did they pose "radical" demands: northern or Eastern European workers recreated the emerging social democratic parties of Europe in a few locations, but largely streamed into the US alternatives already available, whether the Democratic Party organizations in northern cities, or the more radical Populist currents in the
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West. Even so, middle-class urban reformers, largely of northern European cth nic stock, sought to stabilize their hold in cities by taking governance out of tl e hand of electoral machines and turning them over to professional urban mana-r. ers. The settlement underlying US politics in the late nineteenth century -n sisted of a balance whereby the Republican Party usually captured a weak national government that sustained a protectionist tariff while allowing the Demccm.L Party to exploit the politics of the industrial cities and the reservoir of Southern white voters. Farmers in the South and West challenged the compromise in the 1890s but failed to dislodge it.
Racial segmentation also prevailed in the new Union of South Africa, whrre the whites who ruled constituted only a minority of the population. In cffeu the South African War (Boer War), which pitted the ambitious forces of white South African mining interests, backed by more than a hundred thousand hnt-ish troops (and a strategy of forced removals and confinement of the Afrika; li-speaking rural families), against the agrarian Boer Republics, ended with a:i 11 plicit compromise worked out between 1902. and 1910. The Afrikaans-speaking republics were forced to accept inclusion in a British Union of South Africa and an active policy of British administrative penetration under Alfred Miliicr. However, the British left the Boer republics a great deal of home rule and made no effort to challenge the segregationist political and social system they had c .instructed. In the Cape Colony, the white population of under a quarter of. the whole constituted 85 percent of the electorate; in Natal, where the whites coiT-ti-tuted 8 percent of a once Zulu-dominated region, they would make up 99 pei-cent of the electorate. A mistaken belief that the Boers believed in a rugged de mocracy as well as the importance of South Africa for the British war eflcrt against German colonial armies after 1914 (and the personal role that Boer Icarlrr Jan Smuts achieved) made it hard for London to contest the South Africans' 11-cial state, especially because so many English shared the underlying prem iscs '">f African racial inferiority.135
Segmented regimes formed one type of implicit constitution. Other :i 1 plicit constitutional settlements opened up states to extensive foreign influence— military, economic, or pedagogic and cultural. The term semkolonialism has bei. ■ used to describe the reserve power that European powers possessed in China, but authority could be less formally enshrined.136 In Latin America's large
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republics, the ritualized party competition among elites separated those oriented toward commercial and financial ties with foreign lenders, notably Great Britain, from those claiming the traditionalist power of military, church, and landed property. Expansion of export commodities—coffee in Brazil, beef and wheat in Argentina, minerals from the Andes—strengthened the liberals and allowed a relatively cozy sharing of power and influence after civil war and violence. Brazil's new republic (and with it the compensated ending of slavery by 1889) benefited from the coffee boom and agreement on a highly decentralized federal system. Onlv in the interwar period, as the prices of commodities fell and new political leaders sought to broaden the political base to include manual workers or indigenous peoples, did these equilibria irrevocably break down and populist strongmen, often drawn from the military, emerge.
Once white male suffrage became generalized, regulation of the economy became more urgent. Trade unions and working-class associations had faced political restrictions in the 1870s and 1880s on the European continent, the United States, and Mexico. The First International Workingman's Association had disintegrated after the Paris Commune; Bismarck had outlawed the German Social Democratic Party in 1878; the US Knights of Labor disintegrated after the Hay-market bombing and trial in 1886; striking workers had to face soldiers and judges in many countries. But a Second International emerged in 1889; the SPD was relegalized in 1890, and the organizing of workers increased in scope and intensity. Strike activity increased in all the industrializing countries, and after 11905 the strikes were often for greater political influence, and not merely higher wages. Russia's 1905 revolution helped to galvanize activism in Germany and France. Some of the labor movements' spokesmen envisaged that workplace organizations could displace elected legislatures and even socialist parties to become the basis for a new democratic politics. At the time of the 1905 revolution, Bolshevik leaders would describe workers "councils" (or Soviets in Russian) as the avant-garde of a proletarian order. Such anarcho-syndicalism seemed even to infect British trade unions, formerly the most oriented on narrower demands for safety legislation or wage increases. Visions of a social war exhilarated some on the left—see Jack London's lurid description of the battle for Chicago in The Iron Heel (1908). Conversely, the prospect obviously frightened conservatives, many of whom expected a bloody upheaval akin to their folk memories of the
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Paris siege and Commune. But even more ominously the coming Armageddon gave some writers a jolt of adrenalin, as they believed it would reinvigorate a tired and decadent social order. Georges Sorel, the engineer in Paris, and Vilfredn reto, the Italian economist teaching in Lausanne (as well as the young Ita! ;an student Benito Mussolini, who audited some of his lecturers), anticipated tils coming clashes with gusto, just as the contemporary artistic movement of Iial::i n Futurists looked forward to a cleansing hygienic war. Privileged French university students allegedly believed that a new war would be preferable to "perpetuj waiting." Liberalism was hostage to ennui as well as social cleavages.137
Even harder to reconcile than proletarian class demands or the literati Vim-patience with political compromise were the demands for national repre.-onc.i-tion within multiethnic units. The Irish, who in the early nineteenth century had been given seats in the British parliament at a time when only Protestants (largely landowners) might serve, wanted "home rule" or national autonomy with an Irish parliament, but Protestant loyalists resisted and compelled the Consci-vative Party and the British parliament to delay. Both sides were on the verge of resorting to armed force by the early twentieth century. Although a third home-rule bill was finally passed on the eve of World War I, it was shelved until the issue of the Protestant counties (Ulster) might be resolved. This did not happen until a period of Irish national insurgency and police suppression (the Black a.:d Tan war) followed in the early 1910s and a segment of the nationalist Sinn Fein rebels were willing to settle for an "Irish Free State" without the northern counties comprising Ulster. Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans faced far widi r ethnic rebellions than did the British, National groups progressively hived o:f the Ottomans in the early nineteenth century (Greece, Serbia, Romania), i.lien the 1870s (Bulgaria), or were taken over by other imperial contenders, as in North Africa. As for the world's largest colony, British India remained under sufficient control to tamp down calls for greater national representation. Indir.. of course, was ruled as an empire, by a government sent from London. It had no mass white population, but the legacy of multiple pre-British state structures ar d the failure in 1857 of rebellion (which was never fully articulated as a nation.il upheaval) kept the national challenge relatively weak until after the world wai. The Indian National Congress was a group that had a long-term vision bi't practiced short-term accommodation and gradualist inclusion in local organs,
especially the judicial system. It was an irony of the British Empire that the coronation of a new monarch could be celebrated with the greatest pomp in New Delhi in 1910, even as Irish factions were moving toward violence almost next door to London.
: Representation, furthermore, was a complex activity in its own right, no 'matter how much of a society it encompassed. The spatial metaphor that envis-■aged a state above trying to react to society below was misleadingly simple. Political demands did not simply flow "upward" from society to the state. Ambitious reformers pondered how states that had themselves been transformed in the nineteenth century should transform society in turn—that is, regulate it, develop it, improve and remake it. The states that emerged in the nineteenth century had a special relationship with technological modernity; they needed hreech-loading and rapid-firing guns, heavier cannon; they needed velocity, railroads, and rapid communication, the telegraph, the undersea cable, eventually the radio. Beyond their requirements for material infrastructure, states had to educate citizens and to improve their health and vigor, even perhaps through the new concept of "eugenics," or restricted breeding.
Thus the late nineteenth-century state was not, could not be, an institution built for static equilibrium. It had to ensure the development of its civilian economy, not just its military. In Britain and later in the United States, governments might rely more on the inherent vigor of civil society than direction by the state. Americans viewed their economic enterprises and their multiple associations as both the beneficiaries and the sources of modernization. The protective tariff and the distribution of national lands to railroads and homesteaders (who would be clients of the railroads) meant significant state promotion of economic development. Canada was not so different in this respect. The French and later the German, Japanese, and Russian states felt they had to intervene to a greater degree, but began at different moments, the French before their great revolution, the Germans and Japanese during the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians at the end—more rapidly and impressively than other states. Russia, still an autocracy until 1905, and guided by Sergei Witte from 1893, embarked on the trans-Siberian railroad, a program whose costs aroused aristocratic opposition and the impatience of the faction anxious to keep Korea out of Japanese influence. The monarch yielded to the pressure and eased Witte into a more
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ceremonial role, only co recall him in 1905 to cope with the aftermath of the war with Japan and the revolutionary agitation that had followed his removal. Failure to modernize could cost territory and erode sovereignty, even if outright colonization was avoided, as was vividly demonstrated in the case of Chin-which had to grant extraterritorial enclaves where the Western powers retained local legal rights, and the Ottoman Empire, which was compelled to cede "capitularies," or legal immunities, to foreigners.
Modernization, however, provoked resistance from traditionalists at lion c and sometimes preemptive intervention from the Western powers. When Chinese administrators began an effort to reform within the permitted parameters of Confucian values in the 1860s after a second war, now with France as well ,1, Britain, they faced disabling court intrigues, as did the "hundred-day" reform interlude of 1898, stymied by the empress dowager, and the attempts to institute local, then national, elections after 1905. Japanese reformers fared better. Alerted by the concessions and territory extracted by Britain from the Chv.cse in 1842, and warned by their own experience of having to open five "treaty ports" to the Americans in 1858, reform-oriented samurai began a nationalist mobilization against the perceived weakness of the Tokugawa shogunate. Conservatives were less successful in blocking reforms in Japan than in China. The court was not in the same position to play personal politics; rather, the emperor stood to gain in influence from reform. In Japan, moreover, the central state did not penetrate the autonomous domains (ban) of the reform-minded daimyd and their samurai officials, who could in effect run laboratories of rationalization. No state examination system elevated Confucian and Neo-Confucian hierarchical concepts into a portal for public service; the Japanese military traditions were conservative but allowed for emulation of modern science and technology.
Other authoritarian rulers could also save their countries from being carved up or absorbed if they were skillful and willing to modernize institutions and infrastructure. Chulalongkorn of Thailand (ruling as King Rama V, 1868-1910, almost the same span as the Meiji emperor) managed to play off the British in Burma against the more threatening French in Indochina, formed a functionally organized cabinet, reformed the military, fiscal system, and 11 tional education system, and extended rail and telegraph lines throughout the kingdom. Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia (1889-1909/191?) ruled a poorei
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Modernization for national survival: King Chulalongkorn of Thailand posing with rhe crown prince and presumably some of his seventy-seven children, ca. 1900. A contemporary of the reforming Meiji emperor in Japan, Chulalongkorn abolished slavery, modernized the Thai government, military, and judicial and educational systems, and preserved the country's independence vis-a-vis the British in Burma to rhe west and the French in Indochina to the east. {© Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis)
domain, but inflicted stunning defeats on Italian forces and established a min-lstenal system.
Global Revolution
Norman Angell had the courage to suggest in his 1910 study of international capitalism, The Great Illusion, that what historians today call the first globalization—the dense and rapidly thickening web of economic and financial ties among nations in the early twentieth century—should preclude major
CHARLES S. MAIER
war. He overestimated the strength of interests and underestimated the-fine of alliances. Globalization did not compel peace.
Without needing to predict the future in 1916, Vladimir Lenin co„Jd w mL. that the first globalization (which he interpreted as imperialism) had :., bring about a great war. We can't say he was wrong—but we can't confirm that he was right either.
The proposition that can be defended is that globalization helped ■.ircJuci revolution as regimes collapsed across Mexico, Eurasia, and China, 'ilrs meant that revolution came not to the industrial societies of Western Europe uiiJ North America (except when military defeat discredited their rulers) but to tlu. large, vulnerable states that were attracting the attention of imperialist rivals and the capital they brought with them. Skip over the machinations of American sugar interests in the Caribbean and Hawai'i and even the Cuban upr.Mnc against Spanish rule in Cuba at the outset of the period in the 1890s. But pa-, attention to the Boxer uprising in China in 1900 and the collapse of Manchn rule in 1911, to Russia's months of tumult during 1905 and then the regime changes of 1917, to Iran's constitutional revolution of 1906-1909, the Yi..unr> Turks' uprising in 1908 and the fragmentation of the Ottoman state a dei_. <li later; and then to the layered rebellions in Mexico, unfolding over a decade fuui 1910 to 19x0.
Widely separated geographically, these revolutions had each its own sources and history, but they also were products directly or indirectly of encroaching strategic rivalries and foreign investors seeking profits from local resource; 01 investments and favorably supervised by their regimes at home. With soni;-. v ception made for imperial Russia, the regimes under attack seemed to have become subservient to foreign power and foreign capital. To be sure, the foreigne s' economic activity (and accompanying schools and churches, engineering and financial expertise) brought significant economic growth. Rail lines expanded h\ multiples; oil wells came into production, new banks channeled capital into a flurry of overseas companies; investors in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and N. *\ York created local wealth even as they siphoned off significant shares for their bondholders. Socially, they nurtured in the process both a class of enriched local mediators, and countervailing forces of intellectuals, journalists, religious leaders, and military officers, who beheld a sellout of authentic national or imperial
LEVIATHAN l.O
traditions. Thus, radical ferment grew apace, sometimes organized in clandestine societies, sometimes in barracks and clubs, among circles of intellectuals and newspaper editors, and professional military officers and cadets.
These developments produced the inconsistencies of early twentieth-century revolution: Resentments and frustration were intensely nationalist because they reacted to the progress of global and international capital. Revolutionaries called for modernization along Western lines but often drew on the primitive strength of religious traditionalism. Uprisings originated less among deprived workers and peasants than among nativist elites outraged by military defeat and by authorities who seemed complicit in national dependency and even humiliation.13' But the elites that were prompted to organize and assert new programs—in Mexico by disputed elections, in the Ottoman Empire by the growth of Balkan nationalisms, in China by Qing humiliations—ended up triggering massive upheavals and civil strife. Nationalist in aspiration, they produced ten to twenty years of regional armies and territorial fragmentation. At the end of the eighteenth century, revolutions had begun as contests inside particular states, which then triggered international intervention from larger powers. Those conflicts had been articulated in the emerging language of rights and entitlements bequeathed to Americans today in their founding charters. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the revolutionary situations developed in response to perceived transnational abuses of power arising when foreign governments and investors allied with local elites seemingly to exploit local labor or extract local wealth. Out of these transnational alignments emerged the language of imperialism and underdevelopment.
From another perspective, the amazing global spectacle of failed parliamentarism, military intervention and warlordism, coup and countercoup, and the penetration of sprawling but penetrated societies by rival capitalists and would-be colonizers, formed a delayed and defective version of the successful national re-constitutions of the mid-nineteenth century. Determined elites and strong states had emerged out of the mid-nineteenth century furnace. Partial projects of modernization, conflicting ideologies and decomposing sovereignties seemed to afflict those half a century later who had not made the earlier transition as they hurtled toward protracted revolution and civil wars. Ironically enough, these belated decomposing states would help drag the successful national constructions of half a
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century earlier into the great war that overtook them all: strong and viable states and crumbling empires together.
Of course, to go from a situation fraught with antagonism to actual uprisings involved the interplay of contingency and personality. In particular, the political classes of each population were growing impatient with long-term rulers or family that seemed unwilling to listen to calls for reform. In Russia the tsarina and in China the empress dowager seemed to manipulate the feckless males who held the nominal imperial title. In Mexico and the Ottoman Empire, the aging patriarchs, both arriving in power in 1876, had promoted economic development, but became increasingly domineering and autocratic. Sultan Ab-diilhamid II, increasingly viewed as an aging despot relying on police spies, would be ousted after thirty years in 1908, in a coup that only made his empire1 more prey to territorial dismemberment. Porfirio Diaz would have to stand downini9io.
Yet these autocrats had decisively pressed in particular for major expansion of their nations' railroads—as had the Russian bureaucrats in the same period. Railroads in effect provided the sinews and axons of globalization: they enhanced the idea of a unified territory; they allowed the development of interioi markets, or the transport of distant soldiers; they required the standardization of timekeeping. Early railroads in the 1840s and 1850s had helped increase revolutionary and national pressures, whether in Prussia, where a parliament was to be summoned for their financing, or in Illinois, where they opened up the plains for wheat growing and destabilized the precarious compromises on slavery. Now railroads brought the transformative pressures of global finance and investment and the development of long-distance markets into the perimeters of the developed world. Railroads were the complement of frontiers: defending frontk rs ,< the precondition of state sovereignty since the seventeenth century—the frontier had been the prerequisite for Leviathan 1.0. The railroad promised to make the interior space of the national state a unit, economically and socially as well as politically. It was, in effect, the principal symbol of Leviathan z.o. But it exacted a price, often a fiscal one that bore heavily on a population and required new L J of taxation as in Russia, or new degrees of foreign investment as in Mexico ar.d the Ottoman realms. And it exposed the mechanisms of the semideveloped states
into which it penetrated as insufficient to realize the promises of progress it tan-talizingly held out. Finally, it created new coalitions of the privileged, composed of new and old investors, and new coalitions of protesters who felt they were being exploited by those who controlled monopoly access to privilege and power.
Ironically, however, national revolutions that erupted in reaction to global pressures often remained regionally fragmented. National parliamentary politics was quickly eclipsed. The arenas of revolution were often local, and integrated national movements emerged only after protracted and brutal military conflict. Power gravitated to rival military commanders, sometimes seeking to contest the country as a whole, sometimes just establishing their own territory. The existence of rival armies and local military rule or warlordism, often supported by dominant foreign patrons, remained a logical outcome, at least for a long intervening period of conflict. Such regional fighting often proved particularly brutal as feelings of betrayal and councerbetrayal ran high. Combat shaded into long-term feuding. Regional commanders did not always take prisoners—what should they do with them?—even if they accepted turncoats. The laws of war, weak in most circumstances, did not often temper internal combat. The leaders who seized local power might be generous, but they could also be impulsive and vengeful. Alternatively, new and ruthless parties might claim that they alone could channel the true revolutionary forces. These confrontations were often beset by internal contradiction: they mobilized working classes who were internationalist in their outlooks and middle-class or elite reformers who spoke the language of nationalism. But they were also revolts in predominantly rural countries where landlords continued to dominate the countryside, while their tenants wanted control of the land either for their households or, in parts of Russia and Mexico, for their village communes. Belated revolution, many on the left believed, meant peasant revolution—heroic and apocalyptic as in one of Diego Rivera's or Orozco's murals. In fact, countryside forces could not push through revolutionary settlements without linking up to townspeople, whether middle-class or working-class. Intellectuals and journalists, merchants and financial intermediaries, remained critical, just as religious leaders in Iran remained crucial urban-based participants. Cities and countryside forces had to reach some sort of accommodation for success.
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The Russian revolution of 1905 was in effect the last of the great European revolutions since 1789, though it was provoked by the fiscal and social strains brought on by the conflict with japan over East Asian expansion. As in the aftermath of the Crimean War, when the authorities eliminated serfdom, Russia had to make accommodations when it was overstretched. In this case the demonstrations of February 1905 and the gunfire of Bloody Sunday opened a continuing wave of protest and strikes and party formation that finally led to the tsar's agreement in October to summon a parliament or Duma. This was hardly surprising: Russia was an anomaly in the world of developed states, clinging to theoretical autocracy, which meant in effect rule by an aristocratic bureaucracy, German liberal observers, who had complacently viewed their own country as far more progressive than tsarist "despotism," were astonished to see that the Russians had acquired at a stroke a national assembly unhampered by the reactionary reserve powers that the unequal Prussian electoral system allowed. This achievement, however, was hardly to be maintained; the suffrage would be rolled back; the Dumas successively prorogued, even as social conflict increased and the financial strains of preparing for possible European conflict grew. Still, 1905 outlined the spectrum of parties—Bolsheviks, social democratic Mensheviks, agrarian "Social Revolutionary" populists oriented toward the peasants, middle-class liberals (so-called Kadets, eloquent but limited to the professional classes), and conservative "Octobrists"—that would fill the Russian political space until all were silenced after the Bolsheviks seized power at the end of 1917. The year 1905 also stimulated a decade of cultural innovation, fervent political and social debate, and continuing industrial advance.
Iran's "constitutional revolution" of 190 5-1909 took place in the shadow of the revolutionary unrest that undermined neighboring Russia and the Ottoman Empire and the larger international balance of power. Iran, the stagnant remnant of a long-lived and once brilliant empire, was ruled by the Qajar dynasty, clinging to decisive power in a country that was perhaps a third or more "tribal" and in which religious authorities played a significant political role. Shi'a clerics, dominant in Iran, traditionally stayed more distant from secular authority than did Sunni, and they increasingly denounced Qajar family tyranny, even as they remained hostile to the secularism of emerging intellectuals. Neighboring Russia
: ■ tended to take its own predominant influence for granted, especially because
J it helped train the shah's military units. Great Britain, long concerned about
Russian expansion and its supposed threat to India, had long sought commercial i advantages in Iran, but was increasingly preoccupied since 1890 with Germany's
rise to global power. The dynasty was torn between concessions to the British for the sake of economic development and reliance on the Russians for military stability. Following an abortive grant of extensive privileges in 1872. for railroad ' building, the shah allowed the British to found a bank of issue in the 1880s, and
granted a national tobacco monopoly to British subjects in the early 1890s—all concessions, of course, that enriched those close to the court. Tobacco, however, was a broadly based economic activity, and the concession led to "the first successful mass protest in modern Iran, combining 'ulama, modernists, merchants, and townspeople in a coordinated movement against government policy."140 The shah was assassinated in 1896, and the new shah, Muzaffar al-Din, found himself compelled to replace his conservative minister in 1903. The Russian revolutionary agitation during 1905 also spilled over to Iran: the Azeri region of Azerbaijan on the west of the Caspian that was divided between Russia and Iran proved a ready conduit for social democratic and Islamic organizational efforts, and protests roiled Tehran.
British and Russian interests were converging on a moderate solution for Iranian unrest. The Russian authorities were seeking to contain agitation at home, and like the British perceived a rising German threat, especially as Berlin seemed to be gaining military and economic influence in the Ottoman Empire. Both the British and the Russians sought to become patrons of the Islamic opposition and its call for a majlis or parliament. The 1905 standoff of protesters and the shah led the clerics to flee to Qum and the merchants to shut their markets. By August 1906, almost a year after the tsar had conceded a Duma, the shah agreed to convoke a legislature. The assembly was soon transformed from the role that conservative clerics envisaged for it, as a Muslim congress, to a national parliament in which minority religions would also be represented, even if the elections left it safely in the hands of clerics and wealthy merchants. Election of the majlis, however, meant that the struggle for constitutional government was only half over; the question of its future role was still open. A reluctant shah signed the fundamental laws in December 1906, but died shortly after, and divided majlis
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members prepared a contest for the all-important "supplement," which was to determine the power of the prime minister and the official role of religion. Advocates of freedom of conscience, journalists, and Western-oriented aristocrats spoke on behalf of parliamentary rights while the new shah, Muhammad Ali, and conservative clerics, who wanted to retain a large role for religious law, resisted. After a temporizing prime minister was assassinated in August 1907, the shah gave way and the constitutional supplement was passed in October, providing for a balance of executive and parliamentary power but with a council of religious notables to ensure that civil legislation conformed to Muslim law, or shari'a.
As long as the Russian authorities, cautioned by their own revolution although progressively limiting liberal gains, and the British worked together, they could secure the triumph of the moderate constitutionalists in Tehran and the consolidation of their respective interests. Thus motivated, the two great powers reached a crucial accord in 1907 that effectively suspended London's long-standing wariness of Russian imperial ambitions. The Anglo-Russian Convention provided for the nominal preservation of Iranian territorial integrity while recognizing a predominantly Russian sphere in the north and a British sphere in the south, where British exploration for oil was successful a year later. Iranian public opinion understandably beheld it as de facto partition, signed on their own soil. The agreement also forestalled rivalry over the northwest frontier of India and either side's takeover of Afghanistan. Thus the two powers adjourned their potential conflicts in Central Asia, facilitating in turn the emergence of the Triple Entente with their mutual partner, France, and potentially confronting together the Austro-German alliance in Europe and the colonial world. But having been guaranteed that Russia would not partition Iran and would not threaten Britain's frontier zone in India, London seemed to withdraw from active policy in Iran, while the Russian ambassador now urged a hard line on the shah, who deployed Cossack-led troops to shut down the parliament in 1908 after continued street agitation.
Counterrevolution was not the last word, however, and European politics impacted again. Pro-German Young Turks staged a revolution in Constantinople; Berlin in 1909 compelled a humiliating Russian confirmation of Austria's annexation of Bosnia; and Russia decided it needed British cooperation, given the threatening international situation. Again working together in Iran, the two
powers could urge a compromise constitutional settlement, which restored the majlis. Clerical conservatives recovered the theoretical right of religious review of legislation, but the provision was never implemented. The victory of secular liberalism remained provisional and precarious, however. When the Iranians brought in an American financial expert, William Morgan Schuster, to establish a modern revenue service, the Russians demanded his dismissal, on the grounds that the Anglo-Russian Convention gave the powers the final say over such an appointment, and marched on Tehran when the majlis resisted. The cabinet gave way, dismissed Schuster, and dissolved the majlis in December 1911. The constitution remained but no new elections followed until 1914. Russian forces and the Azerbaijani revolutionary movements after 1917 dominated the northern half of the country, until the new Bolsheviks decided British trade was more important than insisting on heavy-handed control in Iran. They agreed to withdraw their troops. The British may have sponsored the coup d'etat of 1921 led by the imposing military commander Reza Khan, who seized supreme power as shah in late 1925 and inaugurated the Pahlavi rule that lasted until the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Iran was a poor and backward region compared with the Ottoman Empire, although Iranian intellectuals remembered when their empires had fought each other on a level of parity. Seeking to weather the international opprobrium that the attempted repression of the Balkan rebellions of 1875 had aroused, the new Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) first summoned a new parliament in 1876, then prorogued it and suspended the new constitution within little more than a year as Russia intervened militarily to support the hard-pressed Bulgarian uprising. Over the next three decades the sultan tightened a repressive political regime even as he sought to modernize economic and military institutions and develop the sleepy southern provinces of the empire. Istanbul's reform from above, however, led to incompatible ideological programs for sustaining a multinational empire: an effort, on the one hand, to woo Arabic Muslim elites, and, on the other, to advance a Turkic national movement, the Committee on Union and Progress (CUP), or Young Turks, particularly concerned about the influence of Greeks and Armenians. With the reduction of his European domains (formal cession of Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia in 1856 and
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1878), the new sultan began to stress an ideology of Pan-Islamisrn. Finances were the weak point: attempts to collect taxes in a decade of world economic downturn had helped to provoke the 1875 Bulgarian rebellion and the disastrous war with Russia. Part of the Berlin settlement involved establishing an international public debt oversight (Public Debt Administration) in 1881.
The sultans efforts to consolidate his position by development in the Arab1 provinces and emphasis of his Muslim role, however, were destined to create vulnerability in the remaining European regions of the empire, long a site of its more capable administrators and soldiers. Rebellion and assassination seethed in ethnically and religiously mixed Macedonia, where the neighboring Balkan states and European interests all saw their opportunities. Tax revolts were erupting in Anatolia. The British and Russian monarchs, whose countries had recently negotiated their division of interests in Iran, met at Reval in June 1908, to discuss, so it was believed, intervention in Macedonia. Istanbul's humiliating feebleness provoked a nationalist reaction among so-called Young Turk officers stationed in Salonika, who formally constituted a Committee on Union and Progress, and mutinied to compel Abdiilhamid to reinstate constitutional rights-and parliament in summer 1908, and then ousted him a year later.142 The sultan who succeeded him remained a powerless monarch, appointing the ministers that the parties and military who had led the last uprising or coup d'etat imposed in the final acts of Ottoman constitutionalism until mid-1913.
CUP adherents had diverse aims: Ottomanism or a restoration of imperial control, including the compulsory teaching of Turkish, may have been dominant; some members advocated decentralization and perhaps dismantling into ethnic units; others were attracted to the idea of Turkic national leadership,: Some were secularists and Westernizers; others advocated reasserting the com-; mitment to Islam. All wanted a vigorous restoration of direction and an end to the temporizing, corruption, and clientelism they were convinced was rotting the legacy of a once great power. "What they achieved, however, was an interval of coup and countercoup.
Open elections based on territory seated a parliament that was half non-Turkish. There was a CUP majority but a strong liberal opposition; and resentment grew against CUP domination. After the assassination of an opposition newspaper editor, there followed a counterrevolutionary mutiny and the potential
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debacle of the CUP in mid-April 1909, only to be reversed when Salonica military units of the Committee marched on the capital and forced reinstatement of the Young Turk government. The renewed CUP regime quickly lost power to military commanders and a reunited liberal opposition after it had been discredited by the Italian seizure of Libya and an uprising of Albanian Muslims. Still, CUP strength in the provinces allowed it to dissolve the parliament and win a resounding victory in 1912, only to be ousted by a military coalition, the "Saviour Officers," later in the year. The military saviors did not save European Turkish territory from the Balkan League of Serbs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, and Greeks, who exploited Ottoman disarray to attack in October. Only their mutual jealousies let Constantinople recover the small strip of European coast that Turkey controls today. But the overall military humiliations of the Balkan wars gave the CUP a chance to reseize power and defend it from a counterputsch in the spring of 1913. Assassination of their vizier provided a pretext to impose authoritarian control and hammer the liberal opposition through arrests, show trials, and harsh sentences. Young Turk foreign policy was an opportunistic search for an ally: the British rejected the overture, while William II accepted it—fantasizing that the Caliphate might encourage Britain's Muslim subjects to revolt. CUP generals took over the ministry of war and the navy, brought the empire into the European war in late 1914, and made the infamous decision to massacre the Armenian minority a year later. The cadets and intellectuals who a decade earlier had organized to renew the empire ended up with a triumvirate that would ultimately destroy it.
The military option seemed initially to stabilize Turkish politics. Remarkably, the army that had so thoroughly disintegrated in the Balkan War of 1911— because of long neglect by Abdiilhamid, according to German observers—was made into a relatively efficient force by 1914-1915 under German military advisers. But the pressures of a long war on four fronts (the Dardanelles, the Caucuses, Mesopotamia, and the Palestinian coast) took its toll. The empire was left as a rump state after the end of the world war: with ruinous inflation and debts, the last feeble sultan holed up in Constantinople with Greeks and British on the Ionian coast, and Italians seeking their own slice of territory. The Arab-speaking territories were carved up into British and French provinces, an Armenian state, and autonomous Kurdistan, created in eastern Anatolia, with international
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From empire to nation: Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk in 1913. Ke-mal appears here as the successful Turkish military leader who has forced the end of the Ottoman Sultanate and negotiated with France and Great Britain the revised Treaty of Lausanne, which stabilized his country in its present borders. He is not yet wearing a business suit and homburg. The relentless authoritarian modernizer and secularize* of his country accepted the title Atatiirk (Father of the Turks) in 1934. (Private Collection/Rogcr-Viollet, Paris/The Bridgcman Art Library)
control of the Dardanelles and of Ottoman finances. Confronted with the humiliation of the Treaty of Sevres, a nationalist parliament rallied in Ankara as the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, while the vigorous military commander Mustafa Kemal, who had assumed ever greater organizational and command responsibilities in the war, emerged as the leader of a resurgent resistance. Over the next three years the nationalists secured Soviet recognition, reconquered
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Armenian territory, and eliminated serious rivalries in the West to Kemal's authority. The French came to terms over the Syrian-Turkish border, and in 1912. Kemal smashed the Greek-British forces and compelled a new treaty of Lausanne by 1913, remembered today preeminently for the massive exchange of Greek and Turkish populations it stipulated. The Sultanate and Caliphate were separated; the sultan was declared to have vacated his post and the office was abolished. The Caliphate did not survive long, neither did religious schools. The Assembly officially declared Turkey a republic and elected Kemal as president. The Law for the Unification of Education established the secular state, although it recognized Islam as its official religion. In April 1913 Kemal founded the People's Party, which, to preempt an emerging opposition, reorganized as the Republican People's Party (RPP); by the early 1930s, after a brief interval of allowing a tolerated opposition, he began a concerted drive to make the ruling party into the exclusive instrument for changing society and state. Conservatives and traditionalists remained resistant to the reforms, which included changes in dress and the status of women. By 1934 Kemal took the title Atatiirk, or father of the Turks, and the RPP was theoretically fused with state offices in the following year. Atatiirk, though, resisted following the totalitarian model as it was gaining strength around him and preserved scope for private capitalists, but his death in 1938 and the approach of the war left Turkey with an uneasy balance between a semitolerated opposition and a powerful military-supported
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statist party.
Consider finally the two revolutions at geographic extremes from the heartlands of Eurasia: in Mexico and China—the one the product of a state repeatedly contested by Europeans and North Americans; the other a sprawling empire that seemed, in the fears of its reformers, ready to be sliced apart like a watermelon. Developing states remained vulnerable because economic growth and modernization accentuated rather than overcame failures of representation. As president, Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910) progressively tightened an authoritarian regime after the long era of civil war and foreign intervention in Mexico, favoring a privileged circle of beneficiaries, including regional party bosses, industrialists, and large land and ranch owners. The ruling group became known collectively as the cienti-ficos because of the economic growth they supervised as they opened up the
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country to European and American investment in industry, mining, and railroads. But outsize rewards flowed to the favored elite. The first decade of the new century produced a host of dissatisfied claimants to a voice in government: the liberal middle classes, who had benefited from economic advance, a growing urban working class in the northern industries, spokesmen for Indian communal rights that had been eroded since the liberal victories of the 1850s, and rival generals. Diaz cracked down harshly on the labor unions; middle-class entrepreneurs resented the foreign-owned firms that remained closed to them; powerful regional families took offense at the clients Diaz favored. The increase in foreign investment (with inflationary price rises and a sharp drop in real wages in the North) gave way to an economic downturn in the wake of the US panic of 1907. The oligarchy managed to win its rigged congressional elections with implausible unanimity in 1910. Still, revolution seemed excluded by most observers—as it usually does on the eve of great uprisings, from 1789 to Eastern Europe in 1989 and Egypt in 2011—until a local uprising broke out in Chihuahua at the end of 1910. The leader of the opposition, Francisco Madero, a wealthy rancher who had denounced the regime, threw in his lot with the rebels, then accepted an agreement that provided for a now-deserted Diaz to resign before the presidential election of October 1911. Madero was triumphant, but political and territorial decomposition followed—it was not a coherent social revolution, but, so John Womack argues, "a struggle for power, in which different revolutionary factions contended not only against the old regime and foreign concerns, but also, often more so, against each other, over matters as deep as class and as shallow as envy." Looking at the results, "the victorious faction managed to dominate peasant movements and labour unions for the promotion of selected American and native businesses."144
This does not mean that different groups had no conflicting interests; they were as staunchly defended as anywhere else in this turbulent decade. But they remained unaggregated, concentrated on one or more of the regionally based armies (and often fragmented at even more local levels) that coalesced around the successive leaders seeking power. Victoriano Huerta removed Madero (murdered after stepping down) on behalf of conservative forces, including the Church, but resigned in mid-July 1915 before the threatened advance of forces led by Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa—the gifted military commander in
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Chihuahua who in late 1913 initiated a program of land redistribution. Carran-za's and Villas delegates met at the October 1914 convention at Aguascalientes, and Villa persuaded Emiliano Zapata to commit his southern army in return for further land reform, outlined in Zapata's Plan of Ayala, the most extensive agrarian program of the revolution. Zapata and Villa met as revolutionary heroes in Mexico City in late November 1914, but the strategically crucial Carranza-Villa agreement soon dissolved in acrimony. Aguascalientes had called on both leaders to stand down their military forces and renounce their own candidacy for the vacant presidency. Each imputed bad faith to the other; by 1915 their armies were involved in the fiercest fighting of the revolutionary decade.
Were there issues as well as ambitions that divided Carranza and Villa? According to Villa's biographer, a long-term historian of the revolution, they divided over the contrasting attitudes that had separated centralists and federalists in the preceding century: Carranza spoke for disciplined authority and control emanating from the capital, Villa for an improvised regionalism.145 As of 1915, Villa was more willing to deal with President Wilson s efforts to control Mexican outcomes and ensure continuing oil supplies. But fortunes and alignments could change rapidly. Villa's friendly relations with the American representatives in Mexico and his military fortunes turned sour in late 1915. Although Carranza had been a staunch nationalistic opponent of Wilson s expedition to Veracruz in 1914, once Villa attempted his raids on US soil and the United States entered the war with Germany, the White House endorsed Carranza's presidency. Zapata's alliance with Villa also frayed, and he was killed shortly after the brief, exuberant triumph in Mexico City. Carranza was elected president and inaugurated a constitution in 1917; and by late 1910 his military ally, Alvaro Obre-gon from Sonora succeeded him and began the work of reconsolidating the greatly indebted Mexican economy—providing an interval of stabilization at a moment, too, when bourgeois normalization was returning to Europe and its colonies after the global upheavals of 1917-192.1. Obregon did continue the distribution of hacienda lands to smaller proprietors or communal ejidos, although rather selectively where this program had helped to ignite revolution, as in Zapata's home state of Morelos. He also sponsored the energetic educational reforms of Jose Vasconcelos, the spiritus rector of the revolutionary state, who helped create the mythic history of Indian-Hispanic cultural fusion through
CHARLES S. MAIER j
school expansion, murals, and mobilization of the populist intellectuals. Obrc- j gons successor, Plutarco Elias Calles, supervised a major anticlerical campaign worthy of the struggles a century earlier and provoked a tenacious pro-clerical Cristero uprising by rural Church adherents. Then his four-year term as presi- i dent ended in i9z8, and the election again of Obregon (to be assassinated a day j later) threatened a shift to the left, Calles as unofficial godfather of the emerging regime managed to organize the major vehicle for stabilization, the Partido Na-cional Revolucionario (PNR), the predecessor to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) that would govern until the 1990s.146 j
... * Halfway around the world, in China, the regime finally fell only in 1911 after seventy years of defeats to foreigners, exhausting rebellion, and continued infringements of sovereignty, all of which culminated in a wave of setbacks in the 1890s and paralyzing court politics. The defeat by Japan in 1895 and the renewed I Western scramble for further territorial concessions finally jolted a widespread > but contested intellectual opening—forcibly stifled, however, by the empress ji dowager's countercoup against the young emperor and his radical advisers— :| only to throw her support to the nationalist organizations known as Boxers who j attacked the Beijing legations and provoked a united foreign intervention. Still, j. the years from 1898 to the final Qing abdication were an epoch of extraordinary jj reformist effort, which could not be kept under conservative gentry control nor i" ultimately held in check by the Europeans. The ancient examination system that had structured elite access to rule was removed in 1905; meanwhile reformers were asking for inauguration of a hierarchy of local assemblies as well as a national parliament.147 The Confucian ideologies appealed to in earlier reform efforts were superseded by images of modernization and of Darwinist national | competition, already seen by many Chinese as successful in Japan. Impatient i exiles (such as Sun Yat-sen) and military leaders converged to launch what, from the vantage of the centennial of the 1911 revolution, can be interpreted as a long trajectory that would lead, via the Republic (1911-1949), then devastating war and civil war and the vast costs of Mao's revolution, to Deng Xiaoping's emula- i tion of capitalism.148 1
In China, the parliament established in Beijing fell under the influence of Yuan Shikai, the talented military (and police) leader, who was tempted to claim j
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the imperial throne but died by 1916. His death led to a dozen years of rival claims and the emergence of powerful warlords who imposed de facto territorial governments, collected or extorted "tax" revenues, raised peasant armies, and joined shifting "cliques" or alliances, holding out longest in the Manchurian area around the Liaodong Peninsula, where the Japanese held the key ports and railroads since their wars with China (1894-1995) and Russia (1904-1905). The Japanese could help finance the leading northern warlord, Zhang Zuolin, in return for his deference to their own position, but he was ousted in 1918 after a failed effort to reorganize central-state politics in Beijing. The revolutionary forces in the south under the ambitious Chiang Kai-shek set up their own rival base, entrusting subordinate power to the graduates of the new Whampoa military academy. Chiang was more than a general: he inherited Sun Yat-sen's Guomindang (GMD, or National People's Party) and drew on Russian Bolshevik aid and counsel to create an authoritarian party. Bolshevik leaders in Moscow sharply divided on the issue of whether to instruct the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to work with Chiang or challenge him. Stalin, seeking in the rnid-192.0s to establish his own succession at home against Trotsky and other possible rivals who urged autonomy for the CCP, insisted on subordinating the CCP to the GMD. The policy led to catastrophe in 1916-192.7, for as his power increased Chiang turned on his former Communist allies and destroyed part of the party, murdering thousands first in Shanghai, then in Wuhan and Nanjing—leaving the remnants to retreat from Shanghai, and ultimately in the 1930s to trek thousands of miles to establish their mountain sanctuary under Mao Zedong in Yan'an in Shaanxi Province.
Despite the fragmentation, violence, and confusing succession of the revolutionary decade in China, the turbulence involved more than just the final denouement of a massive state structure hammered by foreigners and increasingly unable to overcome an ossified ideology, vast population increase, and ecological catastrophes and impoverishment. It also allowed a belated but energetic effort to merge traditional cultural resources with models of development frenetically taken from abroad. Warlords continued to contend for power around Beijing and in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, but by the end of the 19x0s Chiang's army, and party—now drawing on German rather than Russian advisers—seemed poised to take Beijing (a development, as explained below, that would lead the
CHARLES S. MAIER
ambicious Japanese military government of the region to establish the "puppet state" of Manchukuo under the nominal rule of the last deposed Qing emperor, "Henry" Pu Yi). Ultimately neither Chinese army leaders nor the revolutionary parties could impose a clear success without some fusing of effort, reflected still today in the strong role that the People's Liberation Army plays in the Comniu-
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niststate.
Generally economic growth and development have been viewed as an asset in the path to political liberalism. During the Cold War most American social scientists did not doubt that they went together. Perhaps this was true in eras when development had homegrown roots, but the remarkable economic and financial advances of the era from 1895 to 1914, as they unfolded in the context of global inequality that marked the age of high imperialism, could not ensure liberal outcomes. The epochal revolutions in Russia, China, Mexico, Iran, and Turkey certainly mobilized masses of rural families and workers as well as urban dwellers across all classes. They awoke new currents of nationalism and encouraged cultural awakening: intellectuals envisaged awakening nations, but were also stimulated by the very awakenings they sought to advance and shape. But the mass forces, and the breadth of the social and religious movements whose volunteers descended from their homes into the city squares across half the world, were not easily contained by constitutional and parliamentary debates. As these raw and vigorous, sometimes violent, ideological transformations worked themselves out, usually over a span of at least two or three decades, it was the determined cadres of committed parties and military corps that disciplined their sometimes generous but often intolerant forces. The twentieth-century world that emerged from the wave of global revolution was a more participatory one; but not necessarily a freer one. Or more precisely, the bonds of private subjection—to landlords, local bosses, mine and factory owners—were exchanged often, not for liberal values (which seemed to reinforce private bonds of subjection for so many), but for the bonds of public discipline. Ironically enough, it was the very countries that were exponents of liberalism at home, but also convinced of the civic virtues of economic expansion, that helped plunge the huge countries outside Europe (and its offshoots) into the turbulence of foreign-controlled development, revolutionary protest, and military and one-party solutions. Sixty or seventy years later these experiments—their own disfunctionallty having been
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repeatedly demonstrated in the years after consolidation in the 1920s—might finally be yielding to the sort of world that their early exponents envisaged.
Politics as War
No one can say what would have been the upshot of this widespread turbulence had war not broken out in Europe in 1914 and then developed into a protracted and unprecedented conflict. Where economic and voting issues were at stake, gradual compromise might have had a chance: suffrage reform and welfare legislation were all emerging before 1914. An unruly Russian republic might have settled down as of 1920. Racial minorities in the United States and South Africa might have had to wait a long time to secure voting and civil rights—as they did in fact. Nationalist aspirations might not have waited so long, and it is hard to envisage their solution without local violence—precisely the situation, however, that did ignite general war in summer 1914. The Habsburgs could not easily make their territories into a confederation of nationalities. The Germans within the Austrian half might have allowed it, but Hungarians would have resisted, and whether the Romanians and South Slavs outside the empire would have accepted such a compromise for their own irredenta within is doubtful. Would a restored and sovereign Polish nation have emerged without war? To review the alternatives is to realize that at best local clashes were hard to avoid even if better crisis management might have avoided the fatal great-power involvement that made a new Balkan crisis into World War I. Would the Ottoman state—led since 1908 by a party that feared subversion from all the non-Turkic peoples it attempted to control—have avoided continued war and decomposition? The British government's imperial compromise in South Asia with upper-class Hindus and Muslims would have gradually come undone, as it did from the 1930s on.
Historians conventionally describe decolonization as a sequel to the Second World War, an epochal transformation, compelled in part by their European rulers' interim defeat and financial exhaustion. In fact, the points of inflection came earlier. By the end of the 1920s a new generation of young nationalists came to the fore, impatient with their elders' clientelistic bargains with European rules. The economic crisis of the 1930s then brought its misery not only to Europe and North America but to the colonial economies as well. It added
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widespread labor unrest, in cities and on plantations, to nationalist sentiments ' as a potent challenge to the colonial state. By the mid-i930s, the alternatives w ei ; escalating violence or reform efforts that must ultimately lead to far more s-Jf- ^ government than reformers wished to admit.150 Of course, the interwar economu. ; crisis itself might not have assumed such proportions without the disruptions of international finance and trade that the war of 1914-1918 left behind. Histori. al ' causation is always cumulative and sequential.
Stability and representation without multiparty democracy might ■■■hat. served many states. Single-party rule, such as emerged in Mexico and laici 1 1 > many postcolonial states, might have provided transitional stability for divided I polities. Not all single parties must be repressive structures; some allow outsicc ; groups to dissent and can serve—at least for a generation or two—to represent \ different social currents and ideas. World War I did not preclude such outcomes. *| Nonetheless, even before the war, more radical party claims suggested a different ! outcome for some of the states in difficulty. The Russian Social-Democrat V 1. Lenin argued in his 1901 tract, What Is to Be Done? (echoing the title of a R .1 -sian radical's celebrated appeal forty years earlier), that revolution required I \
centralized political party demanding unswerving discipline. The single panv allegedly spoke for the proletariat, endowed the working class with revolutioi ary consciousness, and was thus summoned to impose revolutionary dictatorsh p in their name.151 Later Lenin seemed briefly to entertain the idea that a Bolshevik Utopia might ultimately lead to the end of the traditional state, but the hard politics outlined in his 1902. essay remained the agenda for the foreseeable       .™' future. The Bolshevik Party would guide the authoritarian dictatorship that would grip Russia (and its reorganized empire) from the civil war of 1917 to 19: through the death of Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, in March 1953—an. with a softer mix of surveillance and punishment, for another thirty-some ycai s until the late 1980s.
French Jacobins had outlined a concept of revolutionary terror and the rut "-less elimination of enemies under Robespierre, but the Jacobins had improvisi J dictatorship and a theory of republican virtue to rationalize the harsh measuics they were imposing. On the basis of Marx's historical dramaturgy of class con flier, Lenin transformed the ad hoc Jacobin rationalizations of 1791-1794 into a , doctrine of long-term revolution long before he could impose power. Even moie
The promise of the proletariat: A poster from 1910 depicting Russian leader Vladimir Lenin addressing workers against an industrial backdrop at a moment when the Bolsheviks still felt that their revolution might spread to the West. The caption, which reads, "A specter is roaming across L" 'ope, the specter of communism," echoes the famous opening lines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto of 1848. (Museum of the Revolution, Moscow/The Bridgeman Art Library)
disturbing than his own authoritarian claims was the assent that this theory of party dictatorship could win from many Western intellectuals. After the Revolution, sympathizers abroad claimed that the Soviet homeland after 1917 was w 'lated and beleaguered and the only site where the socialist revolution existed in practice. Any questioning of its policies must be subordinated to the cause of its survival, as defined by the leaders in Moscow.
No one can understand the history of twentieth-century political debate and e> -lerience without working through the problem of Communist obedience. 1 'id the Communist intellectuals and the nonparty sympathizers ("fellow travelers," to use the later term) somehow crave self-abasement, as critics such as the Polish exile Czestaw Milosz later suggested with his fable of the magic pills that
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made them happily yield to the charms of totalitarian power?152 Was it the merciless logic imposed, as they believed, by the unyielding laws of history? Good communists took pride in their commitment to a disciplined body that demanded obedience even as it reassured members that they alone understood and were advancing the inexorable processes of history. In his 1922. essay History and Class Consciousness, the Communist philosopher Georg Lukacs—who after a subsequent generation of Stalinist repression would actually strive to moderate dictatorship in 1956 Hungary—set out the dialectical logic of a party dictatorship already emerging in Russia as the Bolsheviks shut down alternative parties, established their Cheka or secret police, and used military force to suppress the Kronstadt fortress mutiny: "The forms of freedom in bourgeois organizations are nothing but a 'false consciousness' of an actual unfreedom.... Only when this is understood can our earlier paradox be resolved:... the unconditional absorption of the total personality in the praxis of the movement, was the on Impossible way of bringing about an authentic freedom." Praxis meant discipline and subservience, but to policies that in the long run had to be objectively co -rect (although errors might be made from day to day). "The question of disci pline is then, on the one hand, an elementary practical problem for the party, an
indispensable precondition for its effective functioning____The Communist
Party must exist as an independent organization so that the proletariat may be able to see its own class consciousness given historical shape.... [T]he fact that it is a fighting party presupposes its possession of a correct theory, for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it."153 Such reasoning and commitment could justify the visceral hatred of "bourgeois" privilege, the vituperative attacks on social democratic critics and rivals, the Nazi-Soviet pact o" 1939, and the show trials and executions of the 1930s and the 1950s. Nonetheless, it is not enough to recite a record of intellectual and sometimes moral debasement; the historian has to account for how the communist vocation could ap pear so compelling to so many adherents. They attributed their choices to the disasters they felt capitalism was accumulating, whether the carnage of the First World War or the mass unemployment and misery before which bourgeoi1 statesmen seemed so hopeless. For them communism alone offered a viable alte.-native to the fascist violence that no other parties effectively opposed, to the colonial rule that the Western countries seemed determined to perpetuate, and, in
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the United States, to the deep-seated racism that neither mainstream political party would challenge.
Admittedly, too, the lives actually constructed in the Russian society that the Party aspired to transform were far more diverse and disorderly, negotiated during an era of vast economic and social transformation, crowded, communal, and demanding, accompanied by bewildering policy shifts—and not to be simply understood as a neat working-out of dialectics. Still, at the time Lukacs was claiming this higher freedom, he was well aware that the Leninist party ruling the Soviet Union had purged—that is, at this time, expelled—tens of thousands of its early members and shut down all other party organizations as a conclusion drawn from its supposedly privileged insights into historical necessity. By the time Stalin consolidated his personal power, the term purge would also entail the waves of mass arrests, long sentences to the forced-labor camps of the gulag with mortality rates estimated at up to 25 percent annually, or execution in obscurity— one reasoned estimate suggests that over seven hundred thousand did not return. Historians have debated whether the impulse to purify the party and the organizations of culture, administration, the military and economic life came from Stalin's own continual distrust of the revolutionary movement or responded to enthusiasms and impatience from the rank and file. In any case these convulsive waves of lives blighted or destroyed came to be seen as the characteristic phenomenon of the regime.154
The Soviet Party would create the Soviet Union in 1921 and would impose allied parties in Eastern Europe from 1945 until the end of the 1980s, although there would be differing degrees of compliance. (Yugoslavia became a communist dictatorship, although it broke with the Soviet bloc in 1948.) Party structures that demanded the same discipline would govern China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia for parts of the second half of the twentieth century and seek to take power in many other states. Even where that possibility was remote, as in Britain and the United States, Soviet party emissaries would often ask local members to engage in clandestine espionage on behalf of Moscow. Even the fascist parties, and the National Socialist Party, who ran a system just as cruel, did not make party membership as such so central a component of exacting total commitment. And although by the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, the rulers of Germany were running a chain of perhaps eight hundred concentration
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camps, most of them small labor dependencies of the notorious large La-<> such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Mauthausen, they fill r| them with close to a million opponents and not usually their own membership There were two waves of the collective arrests and punishments we term ^uir^eV'-the liquidation of the Sturmabteilung (SA) leadership (and other potential opponents) initiated on June 30, 1934, and the roundup, arrest, and execuio: ol the army, civil service, and remaining democratic elements implicated in the assassination attempt of July zo,1944. Each wave was on the order of a thousand' executions were far fewer. This is not to suggest a gentle stater tens of thousands passed through interrogation and detention, further tens of thousands of "h; i,\ icapped"—so-called life unworthy of life—were murdered in state hospital, tens of thousands of German soldiers would be executed by their own anny dining the war, and, all told, millions of Jews, non-Jewish Poles, Roma andSinti, Russian prisoners of war, and captured Soviet party officials and others "were liquidated in occupied Europe.155
For the Bolsheviks, class war remained a vivid doctrine; but the term usually referred to a rather impersonal process taking place through collectivizatio/ ■ ■! agriculture from the late 1910s and of industrial production during the :910b. When national groups resisted, as in Ukraine, then class war took on dj-ien sions of genocidal starvation, as in the early 19x0s and again with even greaier force at the end of the decade and into the thirties. Warfare in the sense of imli tary combat became central to the Soviet experience in the civil and Polish war1; from 1918 to 192.1 and after the German invasion of 1941; Marx and Engels. .id been keen observers of the mid-nineteenth-century wars of national reconstitu-tion. But warfare as a dimension of human experience did not play a central .dc-ological role in European Marxism-Leninism. This would change with the anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa after 1945, as Communist leaders such . <■ Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Mao Zedong affirmed that peasant si.i up, gles and guerrilla warfare were central to the historical process of wctkei-. emancipation.
However, another ideological constellation emerging from the First Woild War did place the experience of combat front and center in personal a::d poll 1-cal life. Fascists affirmed not only that war was an experience important .'jr manhood (that belief had long had advocates), but that politics at its most Lvml
must be akin to war, was in fact a form of war itself. War called forth the essentials demanded by manhood: loyalty and comradeship, command and obedi-vce, and courage. Soldiers sacrificed themselves for their nation and for their fellow comrades. Liberal politicians in World War I had stayed at home, imli        rrmne from danger, chatting away in their feckless parliaments while the youth ul thei r societies were consumed in distant battlefields. War, the Prussian gen-t ,il Carl von Clausewitz had written, should be thought of as politics—as the Jc :     pursuit of rational policy, by other means. Wasn't it true, though, to think of r        politics as war by other means? Insofar as there was a common content to the 3t       doctrines we think of as fascist (and here I am including National Socialism), it in this belief. Political life must be waged as a struggle, a search to dominate, nyt just legislate. It was adversarial and hard, it demanded obedience to a party ji       and leader just as military organization did, and often its leaders and cadres ' donned quasi-military uniforms for party gatherings.
Several variants of this stance developed, diverse in key respects but elabo-tt        rated around this common belief. Fascists and Nazis often claimed to despise , In. race ideas, but intellectuals competed to elaborate their doctrines, and some \* eie serious thinkers. Fascism originally claimed to be revolutionary and highly rionalist: from Mussolini's organization of the Fascio di Combattimento in Mitch 1919, to Hitler's call for a National Revolution, to French fascists' belief 1l1.1t they needed a revolution against bourgeois morality. Fascists and National Sciualists alike knew what they were against: certainly the organized parties and . l-i t unions affiliated with Social Democracy, and the liberal democratic parties ■llierited from the nineteenth century. Toward organized political Catholicism 'In; remained more open, disdainful in Germany but willing to compromise, , uid ultimately courting the church in Italy with concessions on education and
1 k 1 riage that abandoned the claims of the earlier liberal state.
1 .uiism and communism cannot be appreciated just as fixed doctrines. They J timed to be revolutionary movements before they seized power. Generally the t.iv ists considered Bolshevism as their most fundamental ideological adversary, lint occasionally the two groups cooperated opportunistically, as during the cri-•>''■ 1 i the German Republic in the early 1930s. They both rejected the premises of pti. deal liberalism as developed since the late eighteenth century. Both claimed
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Collapse of the German military machine: An improvised trench filled with German dead after the hard fighting of tare July 15*18 as French and Americans retook the Soissons region in the Second Battle of the Marne. The French would lose 1.3 million, the Germans 1.8 million, in a ill ■ made military discipline, mass suffering, injury, economic devastation, and death an une.viea.-l denouement of nineteenth-century European "civilization." (Private Collection/ Ken Welsh / Hit Bridgeman Art Library)
LEVIATHAN 2.0
to leave bourgeois sentiment behind—the communists in favor of a new proletarian collectivism, the fascists on behalf of a contradictory mix of values rooted in the ancestral soil but also in the modern claims of technological innovation. Georges Sorel, the French theorist of revolutionary violence and a self-professed tlespiser of the bourgeois humanism he traced to the Enlightenment, outlined a regime of "syndicates," or unions of producers cutting across capital and labor, before the First World War. Only political combat, not necessarily sanguinary, based on "myth" or grand abstractions of Armageddon, could renew society.156 Sorel would welcome Lenin in his postwar editions; the Italian syndicalists (some of whom spent time organizing workers as "Wobblies" in the American West before World War I) and antidemocratic Right would read Sorel. But this common prewar source could invigorate political movements: constructing a state on their basis, as we shall see, required further ideas and more repressive decrees. Both fascism and Bolshevism would emphasize the single party, with its mass youth organizations and suborned cultural associations, as the insttument for seizing and exercising power. Once safely in power, however, their leaders would discipline their parties so that they took on more and more personal authority, even if they exercised it inconsistently. Both parties in power would seek to shape civil society and actually claim to remake "man." They would alternate periods of "normal" authority and the proud achievement of "consensus" with convulsive efforts to revivify their original dynamism, whether through party purges in the Soviet Union or preparations for national expansion and war in Italy and Germany. Both systems exalted the grand enterprise or project, some of which were merely hollow theatricality (the March on Rome itself) and others really transformative—the clearing of malarial lands around Rome, the German autobahns, or the industrialization of the Donets Basin, Magnetogorsk, the huge hydroelectric stations, and ultimately the rearmament programs in Germany and Russia.157 The "project" admittedly was a fixation wider than the fascist and communist states—they shared it with many regimes before and after and certainly in the 1930s, including the New Deal.
Fascist and communist movements emerged at a common historical moment— as between 1917 and 1923 political momentum arced in a trajectory from Left to Right. The Bolshevik seizure of power reinforced a worldwide explosion of radical claims—whether by industrial workers and the left in Europe or fledgling
CHARLES S. MAIER
anticolonial movements in Asia. Protests against a peace settlement that seemed to backtrack from Wilsonian rhetoric sent students and intellectuals into the streets of Beijing on May 4,1919. In India, workers were striking in Punjabi cotton mills and protesting the British refusal to relax wartime martial law. Radicalized labor unions struck throughout Western Europe. Self-declared co-viv.i-nists seized power briefly in Bavaria and in Hungary. But while the Bolshevik\ held on in Russia, the worldwide moment of the left passed. In the United States there was a crackdown on radical publications and recent socialist immigrants. Communist uprisings in 1921 and 1923 Germany proved fiascos—t/c right came back, not only in authoritarian form in Hungary, Italy, and Spain, but as a reorganized bourgeois order in which industry and state authorities stabilized Western Europe, and the colonial powers reasserted their authority from the Middle East to South Asia.158
Mussolini's small movement had no success in its original effort to win parliamentary seats in the November 1919 elections. But extralegal action became ,= more promising way to win adherents in the turbulent political and labor conditions of postwar northern Italy. Public-service strikes were frequent; workers staged sit-down stoppages in the industries of Milan and Turin; socialists organized agricultural laborers and imposed new labor contracts on resentful landowners, while militant Catholic priests encouraged small peasant proprietors to unionize. For the proprietors and lawyers and industrialists of northern Italy, it seemed that revolution was gathering momentum from the ground up. At i'.-x same time, returning veterans felt that their recent military service was devalued. The nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio organized a group of nationa.iit soldiers and seized the former Habsburg port of Fiume on the Adriatic, which they feared would be awarded by the Allies to the new Yugoslav state. The government in Rome did not approve but feared the repercussions of ejecting him. Mussolini and his early adherents could observe that grassroots nationalist activism, resentment at local labor militancy, and the weakness of Rome's pol ic i ng power in the provinces gave him an opportunity to implant fascism on the basis of local "squads" that would shatter the local unions and socialist party administrations. The emerging fascist movement thus won key support from the agrarian elites of the agriculturally rich Po Valley during 192.0-19x1, as their loci I black-shirted "squads" drove into towns to beat up local labor organizers an I
■[ }
j LEVIATHAN 2.0
devastate the union or party headquarters. The militias went from trashing ! union halls to invading city halls, compelling the cabinets in Rome—divided on
whether to exploit fascist violence against the Left or to attempt to reimpose law and order—to suspend socialist town councils and appoint commissioners. By I 1921 Mussolini had created enough of a force to reorganize his movement as the
National Fascist Party and claim a place alongside the amorphous liberal groups in the electoral coalition of 19 2.1, winning thirty-five seats in the new Chamber of Deputies (the lower and decision-making house of the parliament ever since 1848). By the autumn of 1922 he seemed the indispensable partner for the more conservative groupings of the loose coalition that still described itself as "liberal," and he was threatening to extend to the south of Italy the same quasi-insurrectionary movement his lieutenants had installed in the north.
Mussolini and his sympathizers exploited a final liberal coalition crisis by preparations for a march on Rome by his black-shirted columns when the king called him to be prime minister at the end of October 1922. For two years he governed supposedly as a legal prime minister, and held elections in April 192.4 under a revised voting law that guaranteed his supporters almost two-thirds of the Chamber. But the habits of revolutionary violence among his youthful troops were not easily disciplined, and the younger radicals in his ranks feared he might become just another party leader. Despite the coalition's majority, the old parties and parliamentary deputies that had supported him threatened to desert after close lieutenants were implicated in the kidnapping and beating to death of an opposition socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced campaign violence. As the liberal politicians and journalists chided him, while his young radical supporters urged a "second revolution," Mussolini decided that he would have to choose between his party base and political defeat. In early 1915 he imposed emergency legislation to control the press and arrest opposition leaders. The twilight liberalism of 1921 to 1924 was ended.
Over the next few years the regime leaders installed the institutions of a fascist state: a political tribunal, extensive secret police spying and eventually arrest of the opposition, and a Grand Council of Fascism that combined Fascist Party officials and cabinet ministers in a supposed fusion of the state with the single ! party. The new institutions reflected the contribution of Alfredo Rocco, who had
come from the far-right Nationalist Party that had emphasized turn-of-the-century
CHARLES S. MAIER
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functional legal theory, and would in the mid-igaos design the political nib !n ,j and press for an unchallenged state.
What observers often identified as the distinctive contribution of thei:;lbcis-state (aside from its alleged fusion with a single party) was the replacement oi parliamentary by functional or occupational representation. This took pli^e 11 stages from the mid-i9ios to the mid-thirties. Although socialist and Cathcli. trade unions were marginalized, there was a tradition of fascist unions (calkj syndicates, as unions were in French, too), who did occasionally stand up 10 employers. Their leaders had emerged from the prewar syndicalist movement ml had been active in organizing Italian dockworkers, and had sometimes even iri-grated to the American West as labor organizers, before returning with the v ,) and becoming enthusiasts of Mussolini. A major strike of northern sun-lwoil in the spring of 192.5 proved their last quasi-independent labor action undci tliu Fascist regime. The strike was ended; the labor representatives were cc.:trali?u| into a single official Fascist union federation whose official status was to'm- iec-ognized by the employers grouped in the Italian Confederation of Indiuti',— now reorganized themselves as the Fascist Confederation of Industry. Whei 1 Ik new Fascist labor federation appeared to claim too much influence, it was ■ ;■>] t again three years later into various occupational groups. Meanwhile, representatives of the different industrial sectors and the service, medical, hospit;-.!:tv, -gii cultural, and other divisions of the economy were organized into official syndicates to be grouped by the 1930s into a network of corporations.
But in many ways the Fascist state represented continuity with the older h-eral institutions. Mussolini's title remained "Head of Government" (p:i::ic :im ister), even though unofficially he became known as "II Duce," or the leader: The king remained the head of state and finally exercised his prerogative to dism.-o Mussolini as the wager on joining Hitler in the second war threatened disastrous invasion by the Allies in the summer of 1943. To enhance his own domestic tion at the end of the 1910s, Mussolini actually retreated from the secul.ir claims of the Italian liberal state and signed the 192.9 Lateran Pact with the Vaiii. 1 which restored Church control over marriage, installed crucifixes in schoolro:mn, and recognized the sovereign ministate of the Vatican. By the 1930s, Musichr.i could take pride in having achieved a certain "consensus" at home. Political .id versaries went into exile or, if arrested at home, were punished largely by beint,
•[ MO ]•
-nt into forced residence in remote southern villages (confino). There were only |iandful of executions, largely imposed for assassination efforts. Most of the lolence—beatings, some fatal, castor oil, the devastation of Socialist and trade-uiion offices—took place in unofficial clashes on the road to power. Franco's military dictatorship after seizing power, later the Argentine generals and General Pinochet in Chile, would accumulate far more corpses, with arrests and illegal torture and murder in the tens of thousands.
: But those were presented as emergency interventions. Fascists claimed that their mission was not just to defeat communists, but to rule as the stewards for an entire historical epoch; the Nazis talked of a thousand-year Reich. Fascism ■,.ould somehow fulfill man in a way the program of liberal individualism and party pluralism never could. Fascism, so Rocco agued, was rectifying the terrible wrong turn that history had taken in 1789 when the French Revolution had enshrined the rights of man and the citizen. But it did not claim to reject democracy in the name just of tradition and monarchy, as, for instance, such rightist authoritarian groups as Action Francaise did in France. It was not merely reac-tibnary: it was designed to institute a new historical stage that Mussolini— : borrowing a term from his detractors of the early 1910s—made into a particular merit: it aspired to be "totalitarian." Fascist doctrine had evolved significantly since Mussolini's demand for revolutionary renewal in 1919: now fascism was presented as a regime that reestablished a state that transcended individual or ieven group interests. How does the fascist state differ from the liberal state, Rocco asked rhetorically; "The fascist state is the state that realizes to the maxi-; mum the power and cohesion of the juridical organization of society. And society, according to the fascist concept, is not just a sum of individuals but an organism that has its own life and ends that transcend those of the individuals and its own spiritual and historical value. The state too... is an organism distinct from the citizens who compose it at any moment: it has its own life and its own ends superior to those of individuals and to which ends must be subordinated." As Mussolini put it in his contribution to the authoritative Treccani Encyclopedia in 1931: "for the fascist everything is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists—even less so, can have value—outside the state."1" Men and women fulfilled their potential, not as individuals with inalienable rights, but as members of a nation and subjects of a state with obligations and duties, among
CHARLES S. MAIER
which was military virtue. Politics was a form of war, but designed to prepare for war: better a day as a lion than a year as a jackal. Mussolini thought perjoc -cally to posture as a man of peace, but the ideology was connected with milit: \ virtues. He resorted to force over the Dodecanese Islands with Greece, and : -, I935—1936 provoked a war with Abyssinia, using air power and poison gas. . muscled in on Albania in 1937 and after casting his lot in with Hitler declared war on France in 1940, occupying Nice.
In practice the state was far from totalitarian in the sense of unremitting control through terror that later critics suggested was essential. The Church co.-. tinued as a sanctioned presence although the Party sought to undermine us youth organization, Catholic Action. The family was glorified and the Party 1 t couraged child bearing for the Duce, but the family was also a node of reshtaiK to state claims. Later apologists ridiculed the pretenses of the leader and his !■■-gime, in effect presenting the experience as a form of opera buffa, distasteii 11 b..i hardly to be taken seriously. Such a view, however, underestimates its novelty, its brutality on the path to power, its determination to silence those who did not agree. Like the glorious baroque edifices of Rome, facade was crucial to fascist politics—but like them, too, there was an authenticity to its grandiose style.1"0
The Italian model was influential and would be imitated. In 1913 the Spanish monarch installed General Miguel Primo de Rivera as a dictator, calling him "my Mussolini," but this was in the tradition of nineteenth-century strongmen-there was no ideological ambition. In Argentina the military took over in 1930, and its army strongman, General Jose Felix Uriburu, came close to asserti-g rhr fascist claims of transcendent leadership and encouraging a nationalist and au thoritarian movement.161 More durably, rhe Brazilian civilian political leadei Getulio Vargas seized power in the same year in Brazil, created a "New State with authoritarian corporatist institutions, until ousted in 194s as fascism seemed to crumble the world over, but was then elected president in 1950, governed as a nationalist dictator until 1954, when, faced with impending overthrow, he took his own life. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar became prime minister in the Portuguese military dictatorship that had seized power from the republic in 192.6 and insti -tutedhis "New State" from 1933 until 19 68, administering a Catholic authoritar:.".:! corporatism, tenaciously holding Portugal's colonies, and becoming a NATO ally
LEVIATHAN 2..0
The variant of fascism that came to power in Germany was different in key respects. Hitler understood the sort of power Mussolini was striving for, and like him adopted the paramilitary uniform—the boots, the colored shirts—and the paramilitary organization. He learned from his unsuccessful "Beer Hall Putsch" in 1923 that no matter how divided the Weimar Republic might be, if the army stood behind the enforcement of the law, he could not seize power by force. During the years of economic and political stabilization from 192.4 through 1929, his movement seemed destined to wither away, but the economic difficulties of the Protestant countryside {and the demagogic campaign at the end of the 1910s against a revised reparations plan) started raising his local voting totals even before the world depression struck in 192.9 and 1930. Like Mussolini he railed against the system, pouring scorn on the divisions among parties that led to unwieldy policy compromises over welfare or foreign and military policy. Proportional representation meant that the postwar Italian Chamber and the Weimar Republic's Reichstag were afflicted with party fragments that found it hard to coalesce into stable majorities and oppositions. When the world depression began to take its toll on employment after 1930 and no majority could be found to finance unemployment insurance, the president and chancellor had to resort to constitutionally sanctioned decree provisions (under the fateful Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution) for passing the budget. Under such conditions Communists on the left and Hitler's National Socialists on the right (though that term hardly conveyed their radicalism) could rail against "the system." They could always denounce the reparations payments imposed after the Versailles Treaty, and even the mitigation of obligations embodied in the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young Plan of 1930. They could claim that the postwar Eastern borders (and the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany) had to be rectified. And differing fundamentally from the Italian Fascists (until 1938), Nazis could excoriate the Jews as a racial minority responsible for these evils and fundamentally hostile to German interests. Although some Nazi adherents and propagandists found enough to attack without specific reference to Germany's Jewish misfortune, anti-Semitism remained a core element of the movement just as it had infected much of the other parties' discourse as well—it was the political lingua franca of the right in Central and Eastern Europe. Jews
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LEVIATHAN 2..0
supposedly controlled banks and journalism, infiltrated the university and i lie ater, exploited the peasantry, and ultimately defiled the blood of the gentile women they took to bed.
After two years of parliamentary paralysis and elections in 1930, July 1911 and November 1932, which saw the Nazi parliamentary delegation rise to almrsL 40 percent of the Reichstag (and brought them to coalitions in some kev state governments), the political system of the Weimar Republic fell apart. Rival chancellor candidates torpedoed each other and called in army generals to claim thai the country might become indefensible. The paramilitary party militias fung'.t in weekend city brawls, suggesting that civil war might threaten at home rhe coterie around the aging president Field Marshall von Hindenburg suggested that only Hitlers appointment might provide stability and that in power lu would be controlled by traditional conservative circles from the economy and the military. They underestimated his skill and dynamic populism. Hitler move. 1 far quicker than Mussolini had, although he benefited from the fascist model. Appointed as chancellor of a right-wing coalition on January 30, 1933, he dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections, which would yield the Nation: Socialists 43 percent (but not a majority) of the votes after a month of charged political events. The party used the successful arson attack against the Reichstag building in late February (blamed on the Communists by the Nazis, then attrib uted to a Nazi provocation by the left outside Germany, but probably the work of a Dutch anarchist) as a pretext to arrest the Communist deputies and clamp down on the press. What Hitler sought was a constitution-amending majority of two-thirds of the parliament for a grant of decree power, tempered only by thi.* proviso that the Reichstag would in theory remain free to reassert its role. Formally the Weimar Constitution remained in place; but this new Enabling Act served in effect as a charter for expanding domination. Having removed the Communist delegation, he came to an agreement with the Catholic Center and th Vatican. In return for a Concordat with Berlin, guaranteeing the Church's religious presence, the Center Party abstained on the decisive vote, leaving only the Social Democrats in opposition and securing the needed two-thirds majority.
In the same crowded weeks the regime set up its first two concentration camps outside Munich and Berlin—Dachau and Oranienburg—to hold politi-
i
cal prisoners (not yet Jews as such) without formal trial. Storm troopers led a bovcott of Jewish stores. Over the next months the government would announce control over the press, "reform" the civil service by removingjews from government employment and teaching positions, press the political parties to dissolve themselves—the SPD executive went into exile—replace elected state legislatures with appointed commissioners, and announce the so-called fusion of party and state. This achieved, Hitler, like Mussolini in the late 1920s, actually tended to subordinate Party autonomy. The hopes of Nazi radicals to push through a second revolution based on the SA—an aspiration the professional army viewed with contempt and alarm—was cut short on June 30,1934, when the SA leadership, a few Nazi dissidents, and several earlier political leaders were summarily executed. The army returned the favor in August when Federal president Hindenburg died and Hitler won army approval to combine the offices of head of state and head of government with the titles Fiihrer and Reichskanzler, an accumulation of powers that Mussolini never achieved. Soldiers henceforth were to swear an oath of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler.101
The process of consolidating hitherto unheard-of power against a background of racial demagogy punctuated by violence and the abrogation of civil liberties apparently made the regime more and more popular. Hitler walked out of the stalled disarmament talks in Geneva in late 1933 and held a plebiscite to approve his decision and overall course, and won the first of his staggering votes of approval—of over 90 percent. Unemployment dropped and businessmen invested again, knowing that they faced no real opposition from the official German Labor Front. In 1935 the Saarland voted to rejoin Germany after fifteen years of enforced separation; in the same year Hitler abrogated the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, announced the resumption of conscription and a German air force, and in March 1936 moved troops into the demilitarized zones bordering and west of the Rhine River, all moves that destroyed the clauses of the 1919 peace treaty designed to provide Germany's neighbors with military security. In 1938 he could triumphantly annex his native Austria after its precarious republic, as we shall see, had eliminated its own democratic institutions. By legislation announced at the Nuremberg rally in 1935, Jews had been defined as a separate group within the Reich—subjects still of a German state that humiliated and
CHARLES S. MAIER
harassed them, but not citizens of the German Reich. Persecution was im ^ ns, fled in 1938 with the pogroms and confiscations of Reich Crystal Night, jsj policies radicalized in general. After annexing Austria, then convincing ih» British and French governments to browbeat Czechoslovakia to cede 11 German-populated Sudetenland rim, awarded at the Munich conference _:\ October 1938, thereafter annexing the western Czech lands of Bohemia -..id Muia-via in March 1939, and finally securing the neutrality of the Soviet Uninn ii, August, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1,1939. By this time even■■Ne\ ilk-Chamberlain's government decided that he must be opposed and together with France responded with a declaration of war. Not, however, before Hi:ln h J ominously announced at the beginning of 1939 that if war came, it would Lv -.Ik-fault of the Jews and must lead to their destruction. Britain and France, i <o\vc\ ,. [, had no effective concept for mounting an offensive against the Germans in Ca1-. ern or Western Europe and instead met disastrous defeat when German foic« struck in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France by mid-1940.
Hitler's government was recognizably fascist with its uniformed Party supposedly fused with state offices, the paramilitary paraphernalia, the i-vcn m-ju ruthless and rapid silencing of any legal opposition, the abolition of formally independent labor organizations—although, as in Italy, the government uiuois occasionally tried to stand up against employers. Organizationally it was a lom-fusing regime; Hitler did not like clear lines of authority, and different org;, .m-tions competed for his favor. The long-standing cabinet ministries conti.i ied and pursued the activities of the German bureaucracy. However, police f::::cno -s that normally were tucked into the state governments were soon aavim1' 1 ■ d with confusing overlapping jurisdiction into the Prussian secret political pch^ (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo) headed by Hermann Goering in his capacity as head of the Prussian government, then folded into the Federal Secuiit' Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which became the commandi.ig r.g-.na for the new Security Services, or SS, that came under the command of Heir -1. h Himmler, seconded by Reinhard Heydrich. In turn the SS would eventually d iv solve into three divisions—the secret police, the military units that fough in the field during the war, and the units that ran greater Germany's cancel illation camps and the new extermination centers sited in formerly Polish tenitoi\ (Chelmno, the first, constructed in late 1941, then Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibm
' 'lictacoiship and aduiatioii: Adolf Hitler thronged by admirers at a 1938 rally. At this moment,
I - hen the National Socialist leader was probably at the zenith of his charismatic popularity, Ger-
I - ans were enjoying a rearmament boom, had remilitarized the Rhineland, had annexed Austria,
{ nil' were about to wrest the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Adulation went with absolute
rawer: tens of thousands of those who expressed their opposition were already in brutal concentra-i • n camps; German Jews were being systematicaiiy degraded and expropriated. (Private Collec-
ion/ Peter Newark Military Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library)
m
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 2.0
Majdanek, and Auschwitz, enlarged from an IG Farben labor camp by an extermination facility at adjacent Birkenau). Several million Soviet prisoners of war, opponents from the European resistance movements, Roma and Sinti, homo- ; sexuais, and millions of Jews who were systematically rounded up from "Western Europe, the Mediterranean lands, occupied Poland, and Hungary, would be expropriated, abused, and murdered.
Hitler removed the long-term career diplomat Konstantin von Neurath as foreign minister to replace him with a compliant Nazi, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1938, and the once elitist agency effectively enlisted in the service of Nazi objectives, whether preparing to liquidate the states of Central Europe or later to facilitate the deportation of Jews. Hitler removed the top army officers under the pretext of a trumped-up homosexual scandal, installed a far more compliant commander in chief, and made himself the effective minister of defense. In 1936 he overruled the economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, who insisted on the financial limits to rearmament, and appointed a Four Year Plan office to rearm the country within four years. Hermann Goering became commissioner for the Four Year Plan, adding it to his functions as minister for the new Luftwaffe. As part of the armament effort, he established a special agency called simply Orga- \ nization Todt after its director, Fritz Todt, which took on increasingly more power in the war and, after Todt died in a plane crash, was taken over by the ambitious architect Albert Speer, who effectively became economic tsar after 1941. '_, ,-The war also meant the growth of a huge directorate for the six to eight million , foreign workers, either recruited or forcibly moved to work in German factories. And throughout, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, or propaganda, headed by Joseph Goebbels, extended its influence over the organization of the media and the world of art and music.
Of course, these offices headed by ambitious men who had no compunctions : I5'.' about the conscription of millions of foreigners and the despoliation and even- -; j tual murder of Jews, were bound to clash. Goebbels and Goering, and later Goering, Goebbels, Party head Martin Bormann, and Speer, eyed each other s j authority warily. Hitler tried to avoid coming down definitively on one side or • another; he left few unambiguous directives; he knew that the zealous satraps ; would anticipate his general intentions. Ultimate power was compatible with
Major concentration and extetmination camps in Germany and German-occupied territory during World War II. The principal death camps appear in italics.
quasi-anarchic administrative practice. This paradox has led some historians to judge him as a "weak dictator"; but the term doesn't do justice to what was stake. The dictatorship could be unsystematic; it allowed vast amounts of personal influence to accumulate under officials and it also allowed interstices where intellectual and religious and artistic life could continue somewhat undisturbed unless opponents felt compelled to make a public fuss. Given, for instance, the long-standing German cultural achievements in the musical sphere, control of musical programs and commentary was naturally a potentially important arena for patronage and generating ideology; but after a while the government essentially
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CHARLES S. MAIER
I
A last stand for fascism: Anti-aircraft tracer shells illuminating the night sky above Algiers during a German air raid in the winter of 1943. Algeria as apossession of Vichy France had fallen to Anglo-American and Free French troops in the first major Allied landing against the Axis in November 1941; German and Italian troops remained in waning control of Libya and Tunisia to the east until the spring of 1943, (National Archives, photo no. m-SC-181185)
gave up higher ambitions and focused on providing "entertainment" music. Goeb-bels condemned jazz as "Nigger Music," but underground bars continued to play it and semi-alienated youth danced to swing,163
The paradox of strong overriding goals and administrative sloppiness was not confined to Germany or to fascist dictatorships. The American New Deal revealed a similar rivalry of powerful figures ensconced in different and often rival agencies: some created early on as the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and so on, known collectively as "Alphabet Soup." Faced with powerfully defended policy alternatives, Franklin Roosevelt, like Hitler, preferred
LEVIATHAN z.o
to put off clear decisions in favor of trying to compromise administrative decision. The point is that the Great Depression and then the world war (including the rearmament efforts that led up it), which presented large and powerful states with immense new challenges, met with ad hoc policy responses. Franklin Roosevelt, the outstanding democratic world leader of this challenging era, usually buoyant and generous in spirit, and Adolf Hitler, with his warped agenda of conquest and elimination, were motivated by totally different spirits, but their administrative responses to difficult government agendas had some similarities.
German state officials and those in the private sector seeking influence had to become Nazi Party members, as in Italy they had to join the Fascist Party. But alongside the various state agencies were those of the Nazi Party—its powerful Secretariat and its regional administrative officers of Gauleiter. In both Germany and Italy the Party waxed and waned in influence. The fusion of party and state was a slogan for both regimes, but Mussolini and Hitler soon sought to deprive the respective parties of real influence and make them instead into effective transmission belts of the authority they established. Neither leader was prepared to tolerate a "second revolution" that would have displaced the army for the party militia. Still, there were many parallel offices, and when Germany got deeper into a war whose demands it had not totally calculated, the government relied more on the Party Gauleiter and officials to organize welfare and civil defense functions. As Secretary of the Party Bormann thus became an influential figure. Preparation for war and wartime itself only increased the welter of organizations.
Although the Nazis learned from the Italians, and deep into the war Hitler retained a certain respect for Mussolini as a sort of ideological godfather, significant differences, too, separated the two fascisms—and not only the central anti-Jewish fixation in the German regime. In contrast to Italian fascist ideology, which exalted the state's absolute authority and an implacable legal order, Hitler's lawyers stressed the personal arbitrary power of the Führer as the expression of the Volksgemeinschaft or national, even racial, community and attributed to so-called Führer decrees, even casual ones, supreme legal authority. Let us call it a theory of legal "vitalism," an effort to attribute the most arbitrary authority to a living leader who personified the will of the national community, not to be fixed within the boundaries of any independent legal framework.
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN l.O
The most notable German thinker whose ideas helped prepare for such a theory (although he never would have formally elaborated it) was Carl Schmitt, mentioned earlier in discussion of the nature of sovereign decision. Schmitt (alas) was a powerful legal mind. He had made his reputation in the controversies over the nature of law, parliamentarism, and democracy early in the Weimar Republic, arguing among other points that what constituted the realm of politics, including democratic politics, was the existential opposition of an enemy. Schmitt was sophisticated, persuasive, steeped in the classics and in the tradition of the fierce Catholic authoritarians of the nineteenth century—Joseph de Mais-tre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortes, who believed that the revolution of 1789 was fallen mankind's recapitulation of Satan's rebellion against God. He was hopeful of being taken up by the Nazis as their official thinker, but ultimately was too intellectually arrogant to make headway in their crude infighting. The political unit he believed fundamental was not the state, which so many German conservatives and Italian fascists emphasized, but the political community— once the polis, now the nation—that coalesced in opposition to its adversaries. Politics thus was about us versus them, friends versus foes. True democracy was not the same as the endless discussion that parliamentary liberalism praised, but the regime that followed from the fundamental identity of a people. In fact, he argued, parliaments no longer served even as arenas for free and rational discussion, as earlier British liberalism had postulated, but only for the representation of concrete interests already determined before discussion began.164 Weimar constitutionalism was a defective mixture of liberal and democratic elements, a diagnosis he believed was confirmed by the paralysis of the Weimar parliament in the early 1930s, when he called for a democratic dictator.
Such views of course set Schmitt against the liberal theorists who believed that the essence of law had to lie in its general applicability, its underlying rationality and values. But Schmitt also rejected the German school of legal positivism, which said that the power to impose a law replaced any discussion of inherent normative legitimacy. He implied further that those ideas of international law based on universal values and treaties were Utopian. As it was becoming clear under Allied bombs that the Third Reich was doomed and his ideas would be discredited, he turned to argue in his astringent way that international law was a doctrine Europeans had devised to keep themselves from quarreling as they
appropriated the territories of the non-European world. This sort of international doctrine, he claimed, was realistic; it presumed a geopolitics of large but finite territorial empires and thus justified Nazi Grossraumpolitik. At the same time, however, it likewise ruled out America's Wilsonian claims of supposedly universal values as well as the former British commitment to matket liberalism, both claims to global ambitions that he felt were far more nakedly imperialist in scope than Germany's claims in Europe.1155
It was dismaying but hardly remarkable that fascism seemed to have a privileged insight into the future as the Great Depression became longer and more devastating, and as the framework of the Versailles Treaty was abandoned piece by piece. Above all in Central and East Central Europe, where the French and the British no longer seemed set on helping the smaller countries, themselves sometimes obsessed with nationalist issues, to remain independent of their large authoritarian neighbors."6 Austria, the German-speaking remnant of the Habsburg empire (leaving aside the Germans of the Bohemian Sudetenland), was ideologically divided between the Socialists, largely entrenched in Vienna and industrial upper Austria, and the deeply Catholic and conservative rural population organized by the Christian-Social Party. By the end of the 1910s, a quasi-fascist "Fatherland Front" emerged as a political contender, and contending party militias clashed in the streets. In response to the Fatherland Front, the older Christian Socials sought to retain hegemony on the right by transforming the parliament into a fascist-like chamber of corporations. The Socialists feared that the Austrian Right was prepared to liquidate the remnants of liberalism and unadvisedly began their own revolt in February 1934, only to be forcibly suppressed and jailed if they did not scurry into exile in Prague. For the next four years, the Christian Socials sought to run an authoritarian state that Mussolini could patronize. Impatient Austrian Nazi admirers of Hitler attempted to seize power in a coup in July 1934 and assassinated the chancellor. They failed in their effort—in part because Mussolini made it clear that he was not ready to countenance an enlarged Germany on his Alpine border. Over the next four years, however, semi-independent and semifascist Austria lost his protection. In 1936, angered by the West's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, the Italian dictator decided to become a German partner in the so-called Axis, a move that
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let Hitler gradually put more and more pressure on Vienna until outright annexation or Anschluss in March 1938.
Meanwhile, the Polish military transformed their republic into a military regime step by step; dictators took power in the Baltic States. Hungary, which had been governed as an authoritarian state but with continuing parliament and some degree of open debate since the counterrevolution of 1919, vacillated between the fans of England or France, who hoped to keep a semi-open government of discussion (so long as the establishment was not seriously threatened) and the outright admirers of Hitler s Germany. The king of Greece placed dictatorial power in the hands of General Ioannis Metaxas in 1936. Czechoslovakia remained a parliamentary regime under the venerated Tomas Masaryk, but after his death the internal stresses made its crises difficult, and the three million Germans in the Sudeten mountain rimland increasingly fell under the demagogic leadership of a pro-Nazi politician who presented their conditions as supposedly intolerable. By 1938 Hitler was determined to destroy the Czech republic, and the crisis he and the Sudeten Germans inflamed persuaded the English Tories, as mentioned above, that the only solution was to cede the geographic region to Germany.
The Spanish Republic that had been instituted on the wave of antimonarchi-cal municipal elections of 1931 became increasingly polarized. Its conservative forces who governed from 1934 to 1936 sought to roll back the measures for secularizing education and regional autonomy that the left had enacted from 1931 to 1933. An ill-conceived socialist uprising (a strategic miscalculation parallel to the 1934 uprising in Vienna a half year earlier) brought right-wing suppression, which in turn prompted the organization of a Popular Front, which now included Communist alongside Socialist and left-liberal parliamentary candidates, in both France and Spain. Blessed by Moscow, but against a backdrop of growing street clashes, the Popular Front won elections in Spain and then France (and in Chile in 1938) on a broad platform of opposition to fascism and advocacy of pro-labor reforms. Spain in particular descended into a period of conflict and what seemed to conservatives and Church authorities to be intolerable violence, and a military uprising, coordinated for July 1936, managed to seize the garrisons in about half the country. The resulting full-scale civil war became the emblematic ideological clash of the decade, drawing in Soviet-supported International Brigades and major Italian and German military aid on the Republican and
insurgent Nationalist sides, respectively. After two and a half years of fighting, the authoritarian coalition of monarchists, military, and fascists, organized by General Franco's Falange, prevailed. Tens of thousands of the left went into exile; and even more faced prison and firing squads. To be sure, democracy was maintained in Britain, France, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries. But increasingly it looked as if the vital political forces of the epoch were those that spoke for disciplined collectives, that praised or practiced war, and that had no compunction about locking up or even murdering dissenters.
The fact that on the other side of the globe Japanese armed forces had delivered the first major blow to the League-supervised order of collective security in September 1931 made the rise of nationalist authoritarianism all the more menacing. For the Japanese military, their bases on the Liaodong Peninsula in Guangdong Province seemed the key to controlling Manchuria, which in turn seemed essential to safeguard their Korean colony and keep Soviet Russia at bay and China deferential. All the more urgency, they reasoned, for their local army units to expand their beachhead on the Manchurian mainland, especially with Chiang's growing assertion of control in the north of historic China. Careful planning led to a staged bomb attack on the South Manchurian Railway the Japanese administered and a decisive response: the military occupation of southern Manchuria. The Manchurian "incident," quickly endorsed by the minister of war in Tokyo, was equally an attack on the forces of moderation in Japan, and the cabinet accepted the fait accompli. Those parties and leaders who had been willing to build a cooperative international order in the twenties, including moderate ministers drawn from the military, lost influence and occasionally their lives to impatient military radicals. Over the course of 1932, a cowed Tokyo cabinet decided to reorganize Manchuria as the supposedly sovereign state of Manchukuo and install the last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, as its "puppet" sovereign. League condemnation led Tokyo to withdraw from the organization in March 1933, about nine months before Berlin followed suit, allegedly over dissatisfaction with Franco-British refusal at the League's Disarmament Conference to reduce their armed forces to parity with the German military.
Whether Japan in the 1930s became a fascist regime or not has been repeatedly debated. Perhaps it was not, in a formal canonic sense, if the criteria require
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a fascist party that will take over and transform a state, but its rulers gradually imposed a very coercive militarized regime that glorified emperor and state and conquest. At home in Japan, military influence tightened over the government: the brief interlude where parliamentary politics remained active, known as Taisho Democracy (named after the reign of the Taisho emperor from 1912 to 1916) withered with the onset of the world depression. Younger officers, drawn from rural areas that were suffering agricultural poverty, and hard-line expansionists criticized decadent bourgeois liberalism and the lively urban culture and political debate of the twenties, much as did the Nazis in Germany. The nationalists aspired to a "Showa restoration," where power and property would be taken from the politicians and corrupt capitalists and would supposedly be restored to the new young Showa emperor, Hirohito. Attempted coups d'etat by radical nationalist officers (known by their dates: 5-15 in 1932., and in 1936), marked by the assassination of politicians, pushed divided cabinets ever further toward nationalist and authoritarian policies. Even though putschists (and the inspirational ideologue Kita Ikki) were executed, moderates were cowed into silence or imprisoned. The main political parties were dissolved while the rulers organized a supportive national movement, if not a formal party; the Imperial Rule Assistance Association trained youth in the military virtues (which came to include merciless treatment of enemies), elevated the state Shinto national religion that glorified the emperor, and claimed an Asian racial superiority. The new governments seemed divided by the 1930s between those suave nationalists, preeminently Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who felt it prudent to expand into Asia gradually so as not to arouse the British and Americans, and those military leaders who were convinced that a larger war with the Westerners and with the resurgent Chinese Republic was just a matter of time. Among the latter, General Ishiwara Kanji, instrumental in planning the Manchurian incident, envisioned wider and wider warfare, while Tojo Hideki would emerge as a political leader and serve as the premier who would preside over Japans fateful enlargement of East Asian hostilities against Britain and the United States in December i94i.lfi7 That step, however, culminated the self-fulfilling logic of continued aggression to safeguard the expansion already undertaken: war necessitated by war. Concerned with Chiangs efforts to modernize a Chinese republic that drew on some similar national convictions, the Japanese launched an invasion of the
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Flawed bravado? Chiang Kai-shek addressing a rally in Hankou in 1938. The generalissimo, heir to Sun Yat-sen's nationalist party, the Guomindang (GMD), used radio, the decisive medium for political leaders of the 1930s, an era of mass politics. China's authoritarian Nationalist government tried to wage a desperate war against the full-scale Japanese invasion chat had escalated the year before. (Gecty Images)
historic Chinese provinces in 1937. By 1940, deeply engaged in China, Tokyo announced adhesion to the Rome-Berlin Axis and later to the German-Italian Pact of Steel, and awaited the outcome of the war in Europe to resolve whether, as some military planners wished, to march north from Manchuria against the Soviet Union or, as the ultimately prevailing strategy envisioned, to strike south at the European colonial dominions of Southeast Asia. Moscow's free hand obtained by its Nonaggression Pact with Hitler, as well as the evident strength of Soviet armed forces demonstrated by some major border skirmishes with Japan, and the weakness of the resource-rich Dutch and French colonial possessions (whose governments had been decisively defeated in Europe in spring 1940), made the "southern way" all the more beckoning. American insistence that
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Japan pull back, not only from the bases pried from the French in Vietnam but from China itself, seemed to compel a fundamental choice between humiliation or readiness for wider war. The fact that the Dutch East Indies promised the oil required by its military once the United States effectively embargoed American exports to Japan made the option of widening the war again seem compelling. Unfortunately for Tokyo, expansion south entailed preemptive strikes against British and American bases—once again war necessitated by war. From the vantage of the early 1940s, China presented Japanese leaders with a dilemma similar to that which the Soviet Union posed for Hitler, even though China lacked Russia's tremendous offensive capacity. Still, it was a vast society whose domination the Japanese believed the prerequisite for continental leadership, but whose resilience drew them into far more costly efforts than foreseen and ultimately drew in an overseas adversary with far greater resources than their own.
As of the mid-i930S, trends were already sufficiently ominous to make either defeat at the hands of fascism or resistance alongside the communists the terrible choice for many intellectuals. American democracy seemed too remote, unconcerned with the wider world, and was itself suffering from mass unemployment. Fortunately the mass of Western public opinion resisted such apocalyptic thinking, clinging perhaps too long to hopes of muddling through, indulging in what the poet W. H. Auden would call the hopes of a "low, dishonest decade," but committed understandably enough to states that resisted the total politicization of private life and sometimes even dared to experiment with progressive social legislation. The Soviet Union claimed to be on the opposing side of the spectrum from fascism but developed a control of society that was fully as pervasive and repressive, and was probably the most thoroughly penetrating of all the dictatorships. The novelist André Gide, a left sympathizer, went to Russia in 1936 and wrote that nowhere else in the world was thought and liberty more controlled— not even in Nazi Germany. George Orwell came to understand the Stalinist pervasive concern for ruthless control of the left in the Spanish Civil War.!es Nonetheless, Western communists and their supporters could still argue (as would Jean-Paul Sartre after the war) that the Soviet Union embodied the hopes and aspirations of the world proletariat and had to be supported. The Soviet Union was also a declared dictatorship (which supposedly, according to its 1936 constitution, was a perfect democracy).
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World War II in Asia: Japanese tanks, still light and primitive, advancing rapidly as Japan invades southward from its Manchurian colony into China proper during 1937 and 193S. World War II began in Asia; by the time it started in Europe, Japan controlled a broad coastal strip of China, white the Chinese Nationalists settled down in Chongqing in the upper Yangzi Valley and the Communist forces in their stronghold in northwest Yan'an. The populations trapped between the two armies increasingly suffered famine, inflation, and disease. (©SZ Photo/ The Bridgeman Art Library)
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Even more completely than in Italy and Germany, the agencies of the Russian state were subjected to the party acting frankly as a dictatorship of (or at least on behalf of) the proletariat. Until the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, the Russian leader served as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). As was the case in Italy and Germany, the dictator himself accumulated tremendous personal authority, but Stalin would never have dared to delegate party leadership to another comrade, whereas Mussolini and Hitler both did. The German and Italian state apparatuses retained some autonomy and tradition; after the civil war and the 1920s, when the Party still recruited older officials willing to serve the Bolshevik regime, this was harder in Russia. Party officials would serve alongside commanding officers in the army during World War II, sometimes resented and subject to execution if captured. ! The potential rivals to the First Secretary were also party positions—for a while in the 1910s the leadership of the Communist International, which rivaled the j People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and increasingly the leadership of the successive political police agencies. The presidency of the Soviet Union was more of a ceremonial position. No state parliamentary organ as such remained; in theory the constituent assembly and Duma had belonged to a bourgeois state that had been displaced. The Party Congress, the smaller Central Committee, and the ruling Politburo remained the legislative organs. The Party Congress, supposedly the supreme organ although really designed to acclaim the decisions of Politburo and Central Committee, was chosen by election among Party mem- : bers. It seems paradoxical, but communist states always devoted great attention to noncompetitive elections; for they served not to choose among alternative personalities or policies, but to mobilize and reinvigorate the faithful.
Historians used to separate the Leninist period (1917-1913) and the subsequent years of changing rival "triumvirates" (1914-1919) from the arbitrary and terroristic rule under Stalin, who managed to secure his own undivided control by 1930-1931. But although Stalin's mind was filled with dark conspiracies and the apparatus of state terror did reach unprecedented heights in the mid- to late a ^\ ■M 1930s, the authoritarian potential of the state manifested itself early on. Nonetheless, the early period of the regime existed under conditions of civil war and the hostility of Britain, France, and the United States. Sympathetic observers could interpret Lenin's regime as the state of "exception" that the theorist Carl
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Schmitt had defined as the crucible of sovereignty. By the time Lenin died, after prolonged disabling by a stroke, the "white" or counterrevolutionary armies, supported by the Western states, had been defeated, and the government had backed away from the ruinous economic collectivism they imposed under conditions of civil war and had introduced the New Economic Policy or NEP (a partial restoration of market conditions and foreign investment). Briefly through the late 1910s, Moscow and Petrograd were home to experimental theater and futurist art, which attracted Western intellectuals, all the more so as the world economic crisis tightened its hold on the capitalist world as the thirties began.
But such an equilibrium, which might have left the Soviet Union, like Mexico, to stabilize its broad upheaval under a "big tent" one-party regime that held on to positions of power but without operating a police dictatorship, did not come to pass. There were historical, personal, and societal reasons. The rivalry bequeathed by a disabled Lenin meant that venomous rivalries developed above all between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky was of Jewish background, traveled, a theorist of revolution. Stalin was indigenous, a gifted in-fighter with intellectual ambitions, who saw his comrades as rivals and potential conspirators. From the end of the 1910s he accumulated power that transcended even the institutional supremacy that leadership of the party (and thereby also the state) should have bestowed. He was feared and adored. All the totalitarian leaders exercised a strong component of personalist rule—Hitler and Mussolini felt it necessary to communicate directly; Stalin less so—he was remote but watchful like some vigilant patriarchal deity.
There were differences rooted in institutions as well. Of all the authoritarian states—not counting the Chinese Republican regime—Russia had had the shortest experience with representative institutions. Italy had had a parliamentary government since i860 and Germany since 1870. The Russian Duma had sat only from 1905 until 1917 and its suffrage had been increasingly constricted. Local self-government had been vigorous in Germany and northern Italy. In addition, the Soviet Union inherited a social structure that frustrated the Bolsheviks from the outset—a massive peasantry that they regarded as a hostile and backward force. As one of their programmatic slogans during the interim republic from March to November 1917, the Bolsheviks had promised peasants the right to take over the land they cultivated as their own property. But individualized
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Iandholdings were not the ultimate form of property they envisaged, nor did small peasant holdings promise to be very productive. The economic task, as they saw it, was to raise the productivity of the agrarian sector and move the labor power released to cities for industrial development. Peasant proprietors, moreover, would always confront the Bolsheviks as a massive and sullen opposition. Some Bolsheviks, preeminently Nikolai Bukharin, advocated at least a long period of letting the peasants sell theit output on a private market and retain their holdings. Preoccupied with securing his domestic supremacy, Stalin turned on any gradualist policies at the end of the twenties. After attacking the internationalist Left in 1918, he turned on the so-called rightist leadership and declared that no cooperation was possible with Social Democrats in Europe, a policy that had disastrous consequences for German democracy. And whether as a corollary or out of doctrinal conviction, Stalin also reversed the economic compromises of the earlier 1920s and introduced a policy of collectivization in the countryside. Peasant holdings were merged into collective farms that were to retain control of tractors and implements. For over a year, the Communists wrought a devastating revolution in the countryside before they had to ease up. In Ukraine in par-ticulat there was harsh opposition, and Stalin effectively blockaded the provinc. ■ for 1931-193 2, using mass famine as a means to smash its inhabitants' resistance.169 In the same period he embarked on the first Five Year Plan, which nationalized industry and shut down the private economy, even as the governmeni embarked on vast industrialization projects in the Donets Basin (Donbass) Workers were essentially conscripted in harsh conditions to build steel mills arid hydroelectric installations. Youth were recruited as young communists to work on the Moscow metro, and at the most coercive end of the spectrum of labor mobilization, political prisoners would be sent to the Arctic for construction of the White Sea Canal.
Soviet industrial growth advanced rapidly during the first Five-Year Plan of 1932-1937 during the gray era when the capitalist economies were mired in trk Great Depression. It remained robust during the second Five Year Plan, designed to run from 1937 until 1942, at a time the Soviets moved many industrial plants back from western Russia, where they were vulnerable to German attack, to the Urals. Economic planning by the end of the 1930s came to appeal to many on the non-Communist left in the West. Whether the quality of Soviet output kept
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pace with the quantitative indices has been debated; certainly the agricultural sector did not advance—it remained a vastly underproductive and probably hostile, if silenced, sector of the country. The standard of living was far lower than in Central Europe. But even more, the regime embarked on a vast upheaval of its own supporters—a purge of the large Communist Party (several million strong), dismissing thousands, sending tens or hundreds of thousands to prison camps under appalling conditions, and culminating in show trials, where the old comrades of Stalin, and about half of his general staff, would be forced into degrading and absurd confessions, and shot, or sentenced to long terms of forced labor. And yet this regime and this dictator, who so misread Hitler's intentions in 1941, was able to mobilize unfathomable national loyalties—to Russia if not to Communism—to withstand the massive German attack and survive vast losses of territory, to incur huge sacrifices of military and civilian lives, and defeat the German military apparatus. Without Soviet efforts the Nazis might well have ruled the European continent far longer than they did. Unless they used atomic weapons on Germany after 1945, Britain and the United States would have remained offshore antagonists for decades and democracy might have flickered even more precariously than it did. The inhabitants of Eastern Europe had to pay their own heavy price for that victory over the decades from 1945 into the 1980s, but by the late 1930s there were no good choices.
Estimates of Soviet victims vary—from about seven hundred thousand officially recorded as executed or deported to labor camps, which saw mortality rates of up to one-third of their inmates each year, to millions who perished as entire peoples were deprived of food or sent into forced migrations. Only the catastrophic German invasion and the war, with its additional twenty million or more casualties, may have abated the war Stalin conducted at home. Historians have debated whether he was responding to party enthusiasts who wanted some vast upheaval or whether he engineered the purges. It may not matter. After the war, as Boris Pasternak recorded in the conclusion of his novel Doctor Zhivago, some hoped for a more normal life amid the devastation that had to be repaired, and for a few years it appeared as the worst of the terror was over. But by 1947 and 1948, the same mechanism of denunciation and show trial descended on the countries of Eastern Europe, where the Russians had helped install communist governments. When Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia—certainly as "pure" a
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Marxist-Leninist as the Soviet leader—decided not to accept Cominform "discipline," that is, not to align himself with the new international communist bureau that the Soviet Union organized in 1947 to replace the Communist International it had dissolved during the war, he was denounced by the Soviets as a traitor. Titoism became as evil as Trotskyism, a deviation in league with American capitalism just as Trotsky had supposedly connived with German fascism. By 1952. Stalin's residual anti-Semitism seemed to be building up to a purge directed at the three million Jewish inhabitants of the Soviet Union, who had remained beyond the reach of Nazi killing squads; and he may have been planning to deport them all to a Soviet Jewish homeland. His Jewish physicians, it was alleged, had plotted to poison him. Only the dictator's death, supposedly by natural causes, averted this impending purge and possible forced resettlement. Gradually his successors—fearing each other, but combining to liquidate the head of the secret service, whom they all feared most—unwound the worst of the excesses, though hardly the party-state. Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956 finally dared to suggest that the great leader had yielded to paranoid fantasy and some woeful policy choices. Khrushchev, himself caught up like his fellow survivors as an accomplice in the ruthless policies of the 1930s, intended at least in part to exculpate the party that would continue to rule. Still, it was the first real tremor in a series of shocks that over the next thirty-five years would gradually reveal how flawed the regime had become.
Political Pathology
As Western political analysts and commentators confronted the human wreckage produced by the German and Soviet regimes, they sought to make intellectual sense of these orgies of civic destruction. Marxist theorists and historians sought to separate the two: the Germans and Italians operated terrorist and thuggish regimes that had basically left the capitalist order intact, whereas the Russians were creating socialism, and if they had committed excesses, this was because they had taken power in a backward country. According to the "vulgar" theories propagated by the Third International (that is, those Marxists who had rallied to the Soviet regime), fascism was just the most brutal strategy for
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"monopoly capital" to retain power. Dissident Marxists suggested with more subtlety that fascists were politically autonomous: as "Bonapartist" regimes they arose when the different sectors of the bourgeoisie were paralyzed by rivalries.170 Still, fascists and Nazis were allegedly spurious revolutionaries because they left intact the basis of capitalist society. Later students of the fascist economy at war suggested that in fact the regime so limited the choices of entrepreneurs by controlling their investment possibilities that it represented a grave incursion into capitalism. Marxist critics in the 1930s and 1940s such as Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse sought to claim that the Third Reich was not in fact a state— that it was just the expression of the strongest naked interests inside Germany, whether industry, party bosses, or the military, and that the balance of power might evolve. This was not just a Marxist analysis. For a while Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal shared such a view: at the end of the 1930s the administration argued that fascism amounted to unrestrained private monopoly power.171 It was true that fascists rarely sought to nationalize industries unless to bail them out or develop new production. Nazi leaders did praise industrial capitalism, engineering, and innovation, although they were demeaning about finance, which they thought exploitative and often dominated by Jewish interests. But their regime was not just a puppet in the hands of monopoly capitalists. They certainly ran a state.
It also flouts ordinary language to insist that a German regime that quickly abolished parties, acquired dictatorial power, imposed legal restrictions against Jews not seen since the pre-NapoIeonic era, locked its adversaries up in brutal facilities without trial, or often guillotined them after trial, was not revolutionary. Beyond the authorities who established hundreds of labor and concentration camps, many Germans thought in fact that they were reachieving a happy society of full employment, a warm communal feeling of the Volksgemeinschaji or ethnic community, marked, for instance, by the Christmas collection for the poor (the Winterhilfe) or the sharing of an occasional simple stew (Eintopf) or workers' cruises and other well-organized leisure activities {Kraji durch Freude and the Italian dopolavoro) to demonstrate interclass solidarity. It was not the least achievement of the party to gee ordinary Germans to look away from the brutality of the regime, the humiliation and then the disappearance of the opposition parties and then of the Jews. Germany was awakening, casting off the supposed
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shackles of Versailles; one legislative restriction or another was placed on its willing or cautiously grumbling citizens, but did not the United States also impose racial segregation and make it clear that resorts and parks were reserved for whites? Kristallnacbt—the organized burning and destruction of synagogues across Germany on November 9,1938—caused some disquiet; it was clearly outright arson and violence visible in cities and towns throughout their civilized country. By then anti-Semitism had become a national ideological tenet: the Jew was enemy to the German, and any isolated dissent to this policy might be dangerous. With rare exceptions, even Christian pastors acquiesced. The regime had gone on first to humiliate and despoil and force into emigration as many German Jews as possible, then to seize the remainder of the Jews in all the lands they swept into, to transport them to the extermination factories constructed in occupied Poland, and murder them, sometimes after exploiting their labor, sometimes without any effort to do so. If for a while German policy makers did not think beyond putting the western Polish Jews into ghettos where they could manipulate mass malnutrition and let nature take its course, with the conquests of 1941 they decided they must act more proactively, first by mass machine-gunning, then by extermination camps.
This seemed different from the Soviet experience to many intellectuals. Certainly there was residual anti-Semitism in Russia and Poland, but the Russians condemned anti-Semitism as a bourgeois nationalist ideology. Even at its worst they had Jewish old communists; and many of the communist leaders of Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia who found asylum in Moscow or elsewhere were identified as Jews by the countrymen who hated their role in clamping down communism in 1946-1947. Nazism had this central preoccupation with an almost atavistic ideology—which in fact had long been central to rightist forces, hostile to capitalism and socialism and liberalism, throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Communism as an ideology was also "internationalist"—it aspired to proletarian or Marxist revolutions throughout the world as conditions became ripe, but war on nationalist grounds it condemned. Nazism—and perhaps Italian fascism—was so tied up with the celebration of martial virtue that it wanted war for fulfillment, whereas there was no equivalent Soviet eschatology. (Which did not prevent Stalin from building a massive air force and a fine tank corps.)
Leviathan's perversion: Bales of hair from female prisoners numbered for shipment to Germany, found by the Soviets at the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, January 17, 1945. Hair was shorn from prisoners, sometimes at arrival; sometimes, as at Treblinka, before gassing; sometimes from corpses, to be used for cloth, rope, mattress scuffing, insulation for boots, and more. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography/ Dokumentationsarchiv des Ocsterrekhischen Widerstandes)
But was ideology what counted? Perhaps intellectuals on the left might be excused for not understanding that the famine in the Ukraine, with its millions of victims, derived from Moscow's decision to cut off imports of food. The Italian and other consuls were not deceived, but their reports were buried in the Foreign Offices.'72 Certainly political thinkers would give particular concern to differences of dogma between the ideologies, just as once church leaders sniffed for heresy in disputes over the real presence in the Eucharist or the similitude versus equality of God and son. Still, the realization grew with the Stalinist years, and then with the opening of the Cold War, that what the regimes shared in practice united them as significantly as the ideological enmity divided them. Both fascism and communism were based on the claim of a single party to capture and then
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exercise power (more completely even in a posrrevolutlonary Russia than in Germany and Italy, where bureaucratic agencies remained relatively immune); their adherents shared the tendency to adulate the single leader, to attribute legal status to his pronouncements, and even to anticipate what further uniformity he might wish to impose even before he had articulated it himself.173
Of course, not only totalitarian states demonstrated the intolerance of opposition and the idea that it must be suppressed and silenced by censorship and punishment. There were and would be plenty of ordinary tyrannies and even murderous despotisms. Idi Amin ran a homicidal regime in Uganda in the 1970s; Reza Shah Pahlavi governed with a zealous political police; the Argentine military would murder many thousands of students and potential opponents. "What distinguished the totalitarian state was its reliance supposedly on a collective instrument of transformation. The party-state supposedly entertained grandiose projects—in physical infrastructure, reeducation, and refashioning the nation as an ethnic unit (in Germany), as the heir of empire (as in Italy), or as the homeland of a historical process of inevitable change (as in the Soviet Union). Not only did the state claim that power vis-a-vis supposed individual rights (which it claimed to be really protected), but it did so by elevating the political police into a key component of rule. The Russians founded the Cheka early in the revolution as "sword and shield" of the revolution. It morphed into increasingly pervasive intelligence and police agencies continually reorganized into commissariats and ministries—the GPU, folded into the NKVD during the 1930s, divided into the MVD and KGB in the 1950s—huge enterprises that ran the vast "gulag archipelago" in Russia or the concentration camps in Germany with their hundreds of forced-labor subsidiaries, all established before the extermination centers were constructed on conquered Polish territory. Still, there was a difference in those selected. The German state tended to define known enemies—those who dissented, who spoke out or leafleted their opposition, and ultimately all who were Jewish. The "ordinary" citizen who kept his opinions to himself was relatively safe until wartime came. In the Soviet Union arrest often seemed arbitrary and random. As later in Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Soviet Union invented categories of guilt: prosperity as a peasant, family background and connections, political moderation, so that the spectators who escaped the sus-
pect categories might be spurred into rituals of denunciation, complicity, and identification with the regime. Gazing at these nightmarish landscapes of terror, what an early postwar French writer called "l'univers concentrationnaire," the concentration-camp universe, the historian of the state must ask: Were they the perverted culmination of centuries-long claims of state sovereignty, or instead the dark cloaca of private brutality where ideas of public rationality, so long a supposed property of the modern state, never penetrated—or perhaps a coexistence of law and total arbitrariness that the German critic Ernst Fraenkel memorably termed the "dual state"?174
Public awareness in the West of what twentieth-century dictatorship entailed culminated in the Cold War before the death of Stalin. By the 1950s, analysts who emphasized the similarities between Nazism and Communism seemed more incisive than those who still tried to redeem the "idea" of Soviet socialism by emphasizing the theoretical differences. The defenders insisted that ultimately state socialism (the name I prefer to mere socialism) would transform itself and that the liberal states that were colonial powers had to take responsibility for the equally grievous sins of colonialism and racism. When pressed, they also contended that ultimately only the Soviet Union had enabled the defeat of Hitler's Germany. Those who argued by body count and not ideas argued that in fact the twentieth century had created a new paradigm of politics and the state— that of the totalitarian party-state with tremendous ambition and the willingness to sacrifice millions of individuals to its cause.
Some of the analysts excelled in describing the subjective experience of the dedicated Communist—easier to convey to Anglo-American or continental European readers because so many premises of the ideology seemed to spring from a common Enlightenment liberalism. Of the writers who sought to analyze the institutional experience, Hannah Arendt remains the most challenging and original. For all the particular comparisons or imputed origins the reader can quarrel with, Arendt understood the centrality of the imperialist experience to the ideologies of dehumanization, and likewise the importance of anti-Semitism to Central European doctrines. She identified the role of party and terror and attempted to analyze the totalitarian society as one of isolated atomization that destroyed solidarities outside the state. She probably credited the regimes with
CHARLES S. MAIER
LEVIATHAN 1.0
too much efficacy in reducing men and women to isolated beings—social networks remained to challenge all these regimes, which did not so much shatter and destroy associative life as penetrated it and subverted it.175
The label totalitarian has left a set of controversies. Were the states really so total? They did not succeed in changing human nature; after the decades of the harshest repression softened, Russians still craved the church; the Chinese still treasured family. A non-Jew could retain his irony and skepticism in Hitler's Germany if he didn't insist on publicly sporting it. When liberated from the harsh practices of dictatorship, people seemed anxious to dismantle the experiences; the number of neo-Nazis, outright fascists, and those willing to plunge Russia or China back into untrammeled violence was small. And yet the term-difficult and problematic as it was, and certainly when applied to the fatigued late socialist regimes of the 1970s and 1980s—was an effort to capture a basic state experience, that of the hyper state, or, to use the term that followed from Schmitt's decisionism, the exceptional state. The totalitarian state—related to the wartime state and the revolutionary state, both of which were usually deemed finite in time—was the most extreme application of an instrumentality remobi-lized in the 1860s and 1870s to take advantage of new communications to build cohesive national communities or overseas empires. It represented the desire to have a powerful transformative agenda—to do positive projects with government and not just quietly administer. But it also sprang from the pervasive conviction that government and social change had to be mobilized in a world of enemies who wanted you frustrated if not killed. Again, politics was war, had no choice but to be war.
The world wars—and then the long-term struggles in the colonial world, either to retain colonies or to shake off colonial powers—made these projects of magnifying power even more plausible. For wartime states took on many characteristics that in peacetime would be thought verging on tyranny: the commandeering of young men for dangerous labor, the imposing of restrictions on entrepreneurs so they produced what was needed for the national struggle, the fanning of public and patriotic loyalties, the persecution of dissent from policy, and even in liberal societies, a new recourse to mass detention. Wartime states wete dismantled when the justifications disappeared—but they were part of the twentieth century; for they made liberals and democrats believe too that states
could legitimately claim an exalted power of decision. All this had been prefigured in earlier situations: the French revolutionaries' wars against the monatchs of 1793-1803 or their own enemies within the country; the Paraguayan total war of 1864-1870; the berserk kingdom of the Taipings; von Trotha's campaign against the Herero; the Turkish massacres of Greeks and Armenians. The repertories of military commitment lay at hand, so it was hardly surprising they could be seized on when wars were in abeyance. Were the states of exception, then, no more than wartime states erected on a permanent basis? Was their treatment of opposition as racially different, as colonies within their borders, no different from their treatment of colonial subjects?
In fact, they were more absolute. Colonial massacres and colonial genocide followed what local settlers and soldiers believed was resistance. They were an effort to rule a subjugated people by terror. Some of the labor practices in the colonies rested on a willingness to impose inhumane discipline; they bore some similarity to what Nazi Germany would impose on the "slave laborers" recruited or dragooned from other countries. But the hyper-regimes at home rested on the idea that this sort of mastery, absolute hegemony, suspension of the liberal rules, glorification of decisions and devaluation of discussion, accorded with the way men and women should live throughout their lives. They extended to one's own nation the notion of differentiated humanity that race and war made "natural" when confronting others. They demonstrated that the practices that arose in "natural" situations—confronting people of color, confronting invaders—were not just grounded in racial difference or the exceptionalism of wartime antagonism, but a lurking project of purification within.176 With these projects history reached a state claim that was exceptional. Perhaps resorting to the metaphor of our title, it was no longer i.o, but somewhere between 2..1 and z.9. Our postscript will suggest what might constitute Leviathan 3.0. But first we must recall that not every twentieth-century state was a state of exception.
Although the conduct of the Second World War itself demonstrated that all major belligerents must become states of exception for the duration, the outcome of the war suggested more hopefully that the earlier states of exception might in retrospect come to seem exceptional states. Communist rule would be advanced by Soviet armies; colonial struggles would be intensified; but the war also revealed possibilities for democratic renewal. Franklin Roosevelt enunciated
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war aims, inscribed in the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter proclaimed; after his August 1941 shipboard meeting with Winston Churchill, which looked toward the restoration of democracy, human rights, and even a minimum of material well-being. The Resistance forces inside the occupied countries issued charters that echoed similar aspirations for political and economic democracy. Resistance groups also called for a regeneration of their nations as communities of emancipation in a language rarely heard since the days of Mazzini. Two of the major European leaders, who without the war would have seemed merely archaic: nationalists, provided precisely the inspiration needed to stand up to Germany:: Churchill as prime minister from 1940 to 1945, and Charles de Gaulle, resistance leader in British exile until France was liberated. Their respective defiant stances ensured that they found each other hard to bear, but together they (and Christian Democratic conservatives on the continent such as Konrad Adci::r.;cr and Alcide De Gasperi) suggested that a decent postwar conservatism mirjr: also reemerge. Neither Churchill nor de Gaulle was prepared to contemplate tb -renunciation of empire; nonetheless their anticolonial adversaries insisted that their countries were ready to fight for independence, and the European leaders had to yield—if only after prolonged conflicts in British Malaya and Kenya, and bitter wars for the French in Vietnam and Algeria. To be sure, pro-Soviet Communist leaders sought to instrumentalize the Resistance struggles on behalf of their postwar influence and to discredit opponents. (So did monarchist authoritarians, although with less success.) "People's Democracy" became Moscow ■> slogan for compliant postwar regimes. Nonetheless, new possibilities for political cooperation and discourse beckoned, to be achieved in Western Europe, including West Germany and Italy, and even Japan within a few years, and in Eastern Europe only after another half century.
A Glance Ahead: From the States of Exception to the Renormaiized State
The fascist party-state ended with the war it had unsuccessfully launched. Its authoritarian militarist kin continued in Spain and Portugal, and it would reassert itself in Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa and the Middle East and briefly in Greece during later decades. The Communist party-state in Russia
and Eastern Europe would become less harsh but still aspire to undisputed control into the 1980s. By the 1960s, however, the dominant regime in Europe, North America, and Japan was the "welfare state"—not fundamentally different from the extension of the European liberal or even conservative regime of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but with more extensive social insurance and often ownership of key infrastructural enterprises. Its antecedents could be traced to church and town provisions for taking charge of orphans and the old. In the nineteenth century, occupational safety measures were added as I well as legislation designed to prevent the worst abuses of the early factories and
S to establish minimal ages for those entering them. The growth of industrial
I towns made misery more visible than it was in rural households. It also made
I: socialist schemes for collective insurance more plausible and to Europe's conser-
vatives more threatening, hence often prompted new welfarist responses. Bismarck is credited with legislating state provisions for old age and infirmity. Civil [ servants developed self-insurance schemes. Some states, such as the Prussian, had
i a more active role; others left assistance to families and churches and occupational
: benevolent associations. After the American Civil War and the First World War,
the legacy of social needs of disabled veterans and widowed wives compelled national responses. By the new century, Europe's reformist Left had tried to set its own stamp on these schemes, as in the British Liberals' program of 1906-1914, , the policies developed by the Swedish social democratic coalitions of the 1930s,
I and the national responses that were a centerpiece of the American New Deal.
! From these patchworks it was an easy transition to envisage states that took a
■ comprehensive role in ensuring minimal standards of income and insurance
j against the social risks of unemployment, old age, and (outside the United States at
j least) disease. This agenda marked the report commissioned by the British minister
Kingsley Martin from the social reformer William Beveridge during World War II, which outlined a notion of "cradle to grave" support that would overcome poverty ind provide access to education and health. Out of these experiences would come 1 the welfare state—the accepted mix of private economic ownership and social
j guarantees that tended to mark the policies once peace returned to Europe in 1945.
j As it developed, the welfare state tended to converge with other remedies for
economic distress and perhaps economic inequality that the Great Depression of the 1930s had made acute. It would supervise social compacts between labor
CHARLES S. MAIER .51
'%
unions and representatives of industry—an initiative that had taken shape dur- f
ing"World War I, had been made compulsory by fascist and occupation regime* !■
in World War II, and was now to be encouraged as a normal political activity. , 3
Ideas of national planning had become popular on the left in the 1930s and were |
instituted for wartime industries as a matter of course by the British, Americans; jj
and Germans. After the war, the French instituted an agency for indicative plan- : ;T f
ning headed by Jean Monnet. It did not own the constituent firms but could -- |
provide strategic incentives of capital for modernization. The state, so the demo- '
cratic and social democratic left urged in Western Europe, should run key Indus--" '&
tries: certainly the banks of issue, probably the railroads (the French Popular -L-
Front had nationalized their rail network), and perhaps the mines. The Labour }!
Party had inserted a commitment to public ownership of what became know--, at : the commanding heights of the economy as Point IV of their Party Program in 1918; and when they came to power in 1945 they nationalized the steel indust rv,
the rail system, road transport, and the coal mines, and by 1948 they established the ■ j -
National Health Service. {
All these measures after the Second World War tended to be associated \vh Ti the democratic and social democratic Left. Trade Unions and leftist parties, after
all, had gained a decisive voice in politics by their moral and wartime com riju- ■
tion to the defeat of fascism. Conservative opponents were often in eclipse be- i
cause of their role in collaborationist regimes. But conservatives often generated: *
or inherited similar policies, and had often had a paternalist ideology of social * protection. The leading French welfare initiative for family allowances had grown out of Catholic and employer concepts for regional or occupational caissts. Tl..
German Christian Democrats differentiated themselves from the National So- '"
cialists but championed concepts of ordo-liberalism, which stipulated embed- " ft
ding competitive industries and business in a broader social order that provided f
for extensive welfare provisions and an overall milieu of a very structured and ! highly organized social market economy, not so different from what pottw„i Japan was developing. The Italian Christian Democrats inherited a massive state holding company—the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, or IRI—which
the fascists had created as they bailed out and took over massive shares of Italia S I coal, steel, and chemical firms and the Italian petroleum industry. A new t lire nf
LEVIATHAN 2.0
government planners and technocrats developed to supervise the Italian economic "miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s.177
The welfare state and mixed economies seemed to provide political consensus for a generation, and then from the 1970s were the object of criticism and deregulation. That forms the subject of another history. Perhaps the most comprehensive single index for the role of the renormalized state was the proportion of national spending (national income or, viewed from the production side, gross domestic product) that went through government hands, for investment in infrastructure, military expenses, and transfer payments or entitlement programs. It has been estimated that the French Ancien Regime of the late eighteenth century was spending perhaps up to 25 percent of national income on its armed forces, its roads and canals, the expenses of the Court, and the interest to bondholders. Welfare was left largely to Church institutions. But nineteenth-century government in Western Europe was largely cheap government. As World War I approached, Britain and Germany may have had public expenditures of about 12 to 18 percent divided among armaments, infrastructure and education, and national debt service. The First World War drove up state expenses drastically—up to perhaps 40 percent in France (although much was covered by foreign loans), perhaps 45 to 50 percent in Britain and Germany. This vast expansion of state claims could be covered only partially by taxation; most was taken in the form of loans, some directly from citizens, but mostly from the central bank—what today we call quantitative expansion—which raised prices and transferred purchasing power through inflation. State claims dropped off after the war, although never to the levels seen earlier, because many delayed claims of tending to disabled soldiers and soldiers' families remained. The Great Depression forced expansion of unemployment assistance, so that the Western states of the late 1930s were probably spending a quarter of their national output; with rearmament starting drastically in Germany in 1936, in Japan perhaps earlier, in France and Britain by 1938, and in the United States by 1940, the shares went up again. By the middle of the Second World War, the United States was probably spending 45 percent, the Russians and Germans well over 50 percent, and of those sums, the largest share was going to military and war-related expenses. Again, the state share retreated after the end of the war, although Britain spent large
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sums on fighting colonial wars. The United States helped finance the French struggles, but by the late 1960s and 1970s, the expansion of social programs, vvel^ fare states, and university systems was increasing the ratios for a third time, up tp 50 percent, and slightly more in West Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, but now prevailingly for social welfare and transfer expenses, as military budgets had fallen to below 5 percent of most countries' budgets. Some retrenchment in the 1980s has led to profiles of normal state expenditure at perhaps the 40 to 50 percent level. The United States, with smaller public sectors, spends probably about a third of its national income at all levels of government. The renormalized welfare state thus remains an active constituent of citizens' lives.
But the welfare state in its North American, Western European, and British dominion model was only one of three prevalent types. As of the 1950s and 1960s, the "socialist world " which passed almost all the national product (local garden crops or handicrafts sometimes excepted) through state hands, furnished an at: ternative and apparently still viable model. State socialism relied less on terror, although dissidents were hardly tolerated. The socialist state became increasingly bureaucratized, and the economic energies they possessed went largely into military innovation. The Soviet Union had to spend perhaps twice the share of public expenditure (perhaps 40 percent of the budget and up to 10 percent of GDP); compared to the United States, to remain a feared nuclear-armed adversary. .The crisis of this system is also a subsequent story. So-called Third World states, which pursued a developmental model, followed different strategies. India remained attracted by the model of state socialism (even as it continued to admire village self-sufficiency as praised by its early architect of resistance, Gandhi.) Other states borrowed models inconsistently, but in most of them until the 1970s, state-owned pilot industrial sectors remained attractive, as they did for petroleum in Mexico, Brazil, and the Middle East. Japan, on the other hand, followed two decades later: by other East Asian states, wagered on immense work effort being harnessed to technologically advanced consumer products, including automobiles and: later electronics. Family networks remained important as connective tissue among flu-most elaborate alliances of banks and manufacturers.
As for political apparatus, the third state model, growing alongside the Western renormalized welfare state and the seemingly stable single-party states of the socialist world, remained that of military rule. Government by military officers
would remain a frequent recourse throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Soldier-rulers were a prevalent form of regime since antiquity, with or without empire—justified always on the notion that emergency conditions required intervention. As we have seen, armies were often the logical winners of a revolutionary process if civilians could not arrive at unity. When civilian leaders were corrupt or paralyzed, then military leaders, perceiving themselves as the best and most dedicated core of the community, had to step in. Military organizations were by essence nondemocratic, structured for obedience, sometimes subject to civilian control, but often considering themselves more devoted to state and nation than the corrupt civilians they booted out (or locked up and occasionally hanged). Sometimes the generals or colonels returned power to civilians, but having once seized power, their renewed intervention usually threatened. The creation of the Pakistani state by partition in 1947 would collect the northwestern military castes of the Raj and give them their own domain from tribal highlands to teeming coastal and Indus River cities for repeated interventions.
Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk had provided one of the most convincing models of such rule—creating a secular and modernizing republic in the 192.0s and 1930s. And although after his death the Turkish army relinquished control, it intervened at several points into the 1960s when it feared the principles of his secular nationalist state (and their role in it) were precarious. Eastern Europe had seen the military take control of Poland, Greece, Romania, and the Baltic States in the 1930s. The Thai monarch threw in his lot with military saviors in 1932, and the Thai army remained a frequent presence in that country's governance thereafter. General Franco ruled Spain for almost forty years after his coup and civil war victory in the late 1930s. Independent Egypt fell under military control in 1952, perhaps to emerge from it in the current day.
The Argentine military cultivated its own state within a state, proud of its large territory, blessed by Catholic bishops, angry at the ultra-Europeanist cosmopolitanism of the capital. General Uriburu seized power in 1930; and the military's stalwart authoritarians remained distrustful even of their own gifted demagogue, Juan Peron, who knew how to solicit mass loyalties on behalf of their continued influence. After Peron no longer seemed to serve them, they would intervene more brutally than ever in the 1970s. Hardly lagging, the Brazilian military took power in the late 1960s, the Uruguayan military would impose its own
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terror against urban guerrillas, and the Chilean military would oust Salvador Allende in 1973. The Indonesian military moved preemptively against a feared Communist uprising in the mid-1960s and probably massacred several hundred thousand suspected opponents. Washington's perception of US national interest during the Cold War ensured American tolerance and perhaps encouragement of these authoritarian initiatives.
Generals remained attractive candidates for civilian posts in the United States, and three major commanders of the Second World War played key roles in the postwar period—Dwight Eisenhower, the European commander, served as an eminently civilian president in the 1950s, and General George C. Marshall, wartime chief of staff, as an eminently civilian secretary of defense and of state. The third, General Douglas MacArthur, on the other hand, raised the first major challenge to civilian supremacy by his public dissenting policies concerning the Korean War but was decisively removed by President Truman. In the late twentieth century military governments emerged in two milieus. In the postcolonial states they were significant in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan, and, as noted, seized power when a radical left seemed to threaten (Indonesia). They were not absent in Europe (Spain, Greece), but seemed slated for extinction there. Military regimes could be taken as relatively benign interventions when normal states had lost control and communities descended into civil war and cycles of revenge that could not be stanched. The "dirty wars" of the 1970s produced levels of internal brutality that rivaled more formal fascist regimes. And sometimes military tyrants revealed paranoid tendencies that outran even their ideologically motivated harshness (as, for instance, in Iraq, Uganda, Libya, and Sierra Leone).178
Still, it would be historically wrong to end with such deformations of statehood. By the 1990s states were becoming more responsive to claims of justice and human rights. Just as globalization had helped to bring revolution eighty years earlier, it also brought benchmarks of progress that could not be gainsaid by the 1990s. The idea of bringing tyrants to an international bar of justice advanced, as did the sense that states must examine their dark and repressive episodes through so-called truth commissions. So, too, did the conviction that to be modern was not to march in mass formations but to travel, discuss, and allow international scrutiny and to develop new structures for policy making across borders. Finally,
the fact that there were some leaders of truly heroic willingness to work for reconciliation, such as Nelson Mandela, meant hope and deserved celebration. Yet it also indicated that states were again in flux: statehood seemed almost universal by the end of the twentieth century, but states also claimed less exclusive power as regional associations were established, and nongovernmental actors took on functions of transnational governance. Still, there can be no endpoint for summing up; the long century of modern statehood merges into the continuing record of an ancient and persevering institution, sometimes oppressive, sometimes emancipatory, continually contested and transformed.
Toward Leviathan 3.0?
In the 1980s and 1990s the Eastern European Communist regimes, South Africa's Apartheid state, and the military dictatorships in Latin America transformed themselves into recognizable democracies. Economic strains, restrained leadership, and mass protest all played a role in these remarkable nonviolent transitions. The Soviet Union at least started down that path. This great wave of liberalization forms part of a subsequent history. It was nurtured by prosperity and by the dawning realization of how much private fulfillment had been postponed or diverted by the public demands of the years from 1914 through the 1950s. Perhaps it was connected to the progressive advent of intimate communication technologies that replaced the mass publics of the cinema and the radio harangue from the 1930s and 1940s: first by the family audiences for television in the 1950s and 1960s, then by the transistor and integrated circuit and software innovations that would sweep young people and their music through the era of the Walkman, to cell phones and the Internet. By the 1980s, European and American elections registered a general reaction against, not just abusive and pathological states, but state authority in general. Conservatives argued that the state was inimical to liberty no matter how democratic. And it appeared as if one might be able to outsource its functions, devolve them on what would be called the sphere of civil society.
Was there to be a Leviathan 3.0, which might in fact not be Leviathan in any recognizable sense but a form of functional association, as envisaged by many thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth century? Many analysts in the 1970s
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LEVIATHAN 2..0
and 1980s, myself included, had believed that the direct state-supervised negotiations among interest groups such as unions and employers—what was called corporatism or neo-corporatism—was slated to play a large role in public regulation. But such a role, so theorists of corporatism believed, would allegedly serve to replace the free market more than the state. They were as surprised by the revival of the liberal market as a form of economic regulation under Reagan and Thatcher (and then continued under parties of the left) as by the collapse of state socialism, which was in fact a related phenomenon.
Since the 1990s, the idea of governance has shimmered as the possible alternative to the state. It suggests a different outcome from what corporatism was intended to achieve. Governance as a term aims to sublimate politics, not economics. And rather than arriving at public outcomes through negotiations among class or interest-group representatives, governance has tended to imply that consensus can be found among disinterested experts, that is, experts who are advocates not for their own interests, but for the public welfare of humanity (or sometimes animals). Governance implied that regulation would emerge from the recommendations of NGOs and communities of knowledge. This process was not democracy per se. Schmitt had a point: democracy rested on a perceived community—a group of people who claimed an identity (perhaps territorial, perhaps ethnic, linguistic, or religious). But Schmitt implied that such an identity could exist only when a boundary separated friend from foe, us from them, whether they were within a territory or outside. By the late twentieth century, however, contemporary politics often encountered peoples with a sense of self-identification and a sense of loyalty to more than one territory, communities we term diasporas. Nonetheless Schmitt would certainly have recognized the heightened security measures we all live with today as testimony to the underlying realism of his views. Democracies, he would have argued, needed the state because their citizens had to be preoccupied by the danger that all outsiders and not just terrorists represented. Perhaps (as I, for one, hope) there are less security-oriented reasons-of-state and reasons for states.
We started this history of the modern state at the Little Bighorn in the 1870s with peoples who preserved a plastic sense of territory, of land that was theirs but with an ill-defined border; and we end by evoking communities that might
mm ■ 1
be post-territorial. "Citizens beyond borders?" But how could one organize government for such transnational communities? Perhaps democracy might be dismantled into human rights plus experts. Information on the web, private providers such as the media or Google, might play a larger public role. Still the contemporary world had institutions that collectively covered the globe, held elections, maintained armies, entered alliances, and attempted to control trade or conditions of work. The term governance, which had become so popular by the end of the twentieth century and continued to fascinate social scientists and foundations, testified to the hope for government without "stateness"—as if policy making might no longer require aggregating preferences and finally wagering on one choice or another, but could take place by consensus and the force of rational discussion. Disaggregate state offices, such as courts and regulators, and enmesh them into "global government networks," argued a leading advocate, and the result would be actually to enhance state power. Foundations, university elites, social scientists, men and women of goodwill loved the idea of governance—which suggested transparent and self-justifying administration without stateness and without tears.175 Governance was the Utopia of the Masters of Public Policy.
No historian can envisage the future, or futures. Contending nations and empires—now with the addition of the Asian powers among others—may yet reassert old patterns of rivalry that reinforce state structures. Regional associations such as the European Union may play a larger role. States currently seem to have a bad reputation. Whether tyrants or compulsive bureaucrats, their managers see the need to classify, count, and control. But as Hobbes and Hannah Arendt had stressed in their different ways, being stateless was often a worse fate: States protected vulnerable individuals and communities. They provided the legal carapace for the soft-bodied creatures of humanity, lying exposed to the cruel and rapacious or even just the profit-seeking or zealous. Power and violence do not disappear when states are feeble; rather they are exercised without the restraint of law. Teens pressed into trafficking may fear the law but are ultimately victims of state absence, not presence. Being stateless in Gaza or, even worse, in Darfur in the first decade of the twenty-first century was not an enviable condition.
Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, states had recreated themselves in many ways: They had fought for territorial cohesion; enlisted the middle classes, consolidated territory, subjugated "nomadic" or tribal
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peoples, and turned on each other in unparalleled wars. They had experimented with revolutionary parties whose members were intoxicated by visions of transformation through violence and had virtually worshipped the most brutal of leaders. And finally they had sought normalcy and a precarious equilibrium with the ever more powerful forces of the economy. Of course, states were the inherited creations of individuals, communities, and parties infused by ideas, interests, and perhaps even instincts. They acted through policies and instrumentalities that they could not fully control. We can work to diminish their constraints or their tutelage. But the needs and ambitions that created them will remain in some hands or others, and certain questions will not disappear—not only Hobbes's question: What is life like without the state? But also Aristotle's question: Do we control the state by the one, the many, or the few? Or the question posed by the American founders: How do we run it for the welfare of us all? These issues abide.
■[two]-
Empires and the Reach of the Global
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton