Historia de las Civilizaciones

Lecture 28: The End of the Cold War, 1961-1991

2008-01-31T07:40:00.002-08:00

In the lecture on the Cold War’s origins and course during in the 1940s and 50s, we noted that it must be understood as a strategic competition rather than a shooting war. Two mutually exclusive economic and political systems confronted each other and began competing for influence around the world. This competition began with the occupation and reorganization of Europe after the Second World War and then extended to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although the United States and Soviet Union did not engage in a shooting war, the essence of their conflict was military. Both sides occupied large areas outside their respective countries. The Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe and the United States had troops in Western Europe and Japan, as well as an array of military bases around the globe. In addition, by the late 1950s both sides had nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them on ballistic missile platforms. This strategic balance of terror made the Cold War possible, in that it restrained both powers from engaging in direct conflict. This was good, in so far as it helped to avoid another world war, one that would have been more destructive than both of the World Wars combined. Nonetheless, it also brought with it other problems that would not be resolved for fifty years.
In order to understand the Cold War’s rise and decline more clearly, we must divide it into two stages: 1945-1961, and 1961-1991. We covered the first period in the lecture on the Cold War’s origins. In this lecture we will consider mostly the second period. 1961 was a crucial year in many respects. First, it marked Soviet Communism’s high-water mark politically. During the 1950s, it seemed that the Soviet Union and its allies, including China, were slowly taking over the world. To those living in the United States and Western Europe, their countries appeared as outposts in a hostile sea. The Soviets had gobbled up all of Eastern Europe after World War II and used force to keep their economic system in place. In 1953, Soviet tanks crushed riots in East Berlin. In 1956, the Soviet military also put down an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. In 1949, Mao Zedong led his Communist Party to victory and then promptly signed an alliance with the Soviets. In 1950, Communist North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea, and China also invaded Tibet. In 1959, Fidel Castro and his small band of followers overthrew the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista and promptly allied with the Soviet Union.
The United States responded to Soviet activity with a system of alliances that included NATO, SEATO, and CENTO, as well as a massive aid programs such as the Marshall Plan and other forms of direct aid to countries around the world. Although the United States had resisted Soviet attempts to increase its influence around the world throughout the 1950s, it was clear by 1961 that a national consensus against the Soviets had emerged. In his inaugural presidential address John F. Kennedy set the tone, saying, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty.” The bi-polar world of the superpowers was now the stuff of daily politics.
Second, 1961 was also the highpoint of Soviet science’s world leadership. In 1949, the Soviets had exploded their own atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb followed in 1953. The rapidity of these Soviet advances was impressive. In atomics the United States had had the lead for four full years from 1945 until 1949. The gap between the two superpowers narrowed more rapidly, however, with the hydrogen bomb: the US exploded the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, and Soviets caught up almost right away. When both acquired the H-bomb, the world entered an even more dangerous phase, since the destructive capacity of a hydrogen bomb was orders of magnitude greater than ordinary atomic weapons. (The United State’s explosion of an H-bomb in the south Pacific blew a hole in the ocean that was seven miles deep.)
In addition, the Soviets clearly had the lead in ballistic and space technology. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik into orbit. Sputnik II, which carried a dog inside, went up only a month later. These launches gave the Soviets valuable experience in understanding space flight’s effects on living bodies. The United States responded quickly, if frantically, launching its first ballistic missile at the end of the year, and putting its first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit on January 31, 1958. The race for space was on, but the Soviets seemed to be winning. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, spending 1 ½ hours in space. The United States responded on May 5 by sending Alan Shepard into space for a brief 15 minutes, and then only on a sub-orbital path. Once again, the United States was behind. The first American to achieve full earth orbit was John Glenn in 1962, and it is in this context of perceived backwardness that we must understand John F. Kennedy’s famous call on May 25, 1961 to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. The Americans feared losing the technological edge to the Soviets and were willing to spend a lot of money to make up the distance. The difference between the two powers was that, ultimately, only the Americans had the money to wage this technological war.
Finally, the Soviet Economy seemed to be outperforming the American one during the 1950s. Although we now know that Soviet growth rates were not real, there was great anxiety over Soviet Economic performance in America at the time. Whatever its limitations, the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1951-55) increased national income by 71%. The Sixth Five-Year Plan (1956-60) shifted some of the traditional emphasis on heavy industry toward consumer goods, though a subsequent Seven-Year Plan (1957-1962) rearranged these priorities yet again. This latter plan emphasized chemical industries and heavy investments in farming in the eastern Soviet Union and seemed to enjoy some initial success. National income increased 58%. Gross industrial production rose by 84%. Producer goods production went up 96% and consumer goods 64%.
Overall, Soviet annual growth rates between 1928 and 1955 were, supposedly, over 12%. Comparable western figures were 10%. By 1960, official Soviet statistics showed an annual growth rate of 10%, though those rates dropped steadily through the succeeding decades. These rising numbers even led the General Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev to predict that Communist economies would, one day, surpass the capitalist ones in wealth. By the mid-80s, however, growth rates were officially estimated at 2.2%, with GDP coming in at $2.4 trillion. Just for comparison, in 1985 the American economy grew at 7.3% (4.1% in 2000 dollars) and its GDP was over $ 4.2 trillion. Moreover, it was becoming common knowledge that Soviet numbers were a lie. In 1988, the General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev reported to the Central Committee that the Soviet economy had in reality not grown in twenty years.
In retrospect we can see, however, that by 1961 the Soviet Union’s rise was over. Economically, its main problem was that it could not match capitalist economies in the production of wealth, which was increasingly measured in terms of consumer goods. This was already clear in 1959, when then Vice-President of the United States and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev debated the relative merits of their respective economic systems in a mock-up of an American kitchen in Moscow. However silly the debate may appear to us today, it is clear that people living behind the iron curtain not only had few consumer goods at their disposal but also less vacation time. Moreover, at the same time that the Soviet people had to work harder just to fall behind, the Soviet economy had to make huge sacrifices to its military budget. In today’s dollars the US spent about $320 billion per year on military defense to defeat the Soviet Union, which comes to about 8% of its GDP for 30 years. By the mid-80s, the Soviet Union was devoting 15-17% of its GDP to defense and could not increase its expenditures any further, when Ronald Reagan increased the American defense budget in the 1980s. In this sense, the Cold War military competition between the two societies had a disproportionately negative effect on the Soviet Union, since it had to compete against the United States with fewer overall resources at its disposal.
The success of NASA is an example of the gap that emerged between the two powers after 1961. NASA was created in 1958 in response to Sputnik, as an organization devoted to space exploration and to catching up to the Soviets. Although the program existed before John F. Kennedy entered office in January 1961, this president’s unwavering support for it, both in words and money, gave the program a significant boost and it began feverishly to build space vessels with the intention of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The progress toward a moon landing was deliberate. From 1961 until 1963, NASA pursued Project Mercury, which put a one-man capsule into space and then retrieved the pilot and capsule after a splashdown in the ocean. Mercury was succeeded by Project Gemini, which ran from 1964 to 1967. The Gemini system put a two-man capsule into space and recovered it and the pilots from the ocean. NASA’s world historical moment came, however, with Project Apollo, which was announced in 1961, but actually began in 1967. The Apollo Program sent a three-man capsule to the moon on top of the world’s most powerful rocket, the Saturn V Booster. On July 20, 1969 NASA put the first human beings on the moon with the Apollo 11 flight. The last moon landing occurred in December 1972, with Apollo 17. In this respect, the Soviet Union never matched America’s success.
The Apollo Program is an important example of the difficulties that the Soviet Union faced in trying to keep up with the United States. Overall, the program cost $ 25.4 billion, a sum of money that only the United States could afford, given the growing economic differences. In 1971, for example, US per capita income was the highest in the world at $18,842. For the Soviet Union the figure in that year was $1,385. Moreover, the space program spun off a series of important skills and inventions that the American consumer industry rapidly took over. For example, much of the impetus for miniaturization stemmed from NASA’s need to stuff as much electronic gear into as small a space as possible. America also gained vital experience in writing complicated computer programs. The codes that were loaded into the Apollo computers would have extended for miles, had they been printed out and laid end to end. The transfer of these programming skills to industry is an essential backdrop for the software revolution that undergirds modern computing.
In addition, the US space program’s relative success continued. The Soviets made a big push in the 1970s to surpass the United States by building a space station, and enjoyed great success in keeping the station working. The US matched the Soviets in 1973, though only barely, by building its own orbiting space lab. US superiority in space technology became clear, however, when it built the Space Shuttle, the world’s first reusable space vehicle, which was first launched in 1981. The latter two NASA programs were both scientific and business failures. Skylab, the American space station, never produced the kind of scientific breakthroughs that some scientists originally promised. In the end, it fell into the earth’s atmosphere and burned, due to an unforeseen problem in its orbital trajectory. The Space Shuttle, in particular, was supposed to be paying for itself by now by launching satellites into space, though it is now clear that the program is too expensive to cover its costs. Still, the Soviets were never able to do more in space than force their Cosmonauts to spend a lot of time in orbit. In the end, their technical abilities were always limited by their economic weaknesses.
In politics the first clear sign of the Soviet Union’s limits came with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev promised to defend Cuban sovereignty with nuclear arms. Given the tensions that existed between the two powers, this was a dubious policy move. Had the United States promised to defend Hungary with nuclear weapons after it rose up against the Soviets in 1956, there could very well have been a nuclear war. Nonetheless, in 1962, Khrushchev took the Soviet Union on what can only be described as a foreign policy adventure, sending nuclear missiles to an island that was only 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The missiles’ proximity to the US border meant that United States would have had no warning of a nuclear attack, were the missiles ever launched. The only proper military posture in this case would have been a higher alert status that brought with it, in turn, a greater likelihood of an accidental launch against the Soviets. To understand how foolish Khrushchev’s policy was, consider how the Soviets would have reacted had the United States put nuclear missiles in Japan. They would rightly have seen this as a provocation and would have increased their alert status. President Kennedy was, therefore, right to respond forcefully to Khrushchev’s provocation and did so by blockading Cuba and forcing the Soviets to back down. In exchange for this retreat the United States agreed never to invade Cuba.
In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power. This was due mostly to the dramatic failure of his agricultural policies, though the Cuban Missile Crisis had not helped matters. Under Khrushchev’s “Virgin Lands Campaign,” the Soviets invested huge sums of money in planting uncultivated land in the eastern Soviet Union. The plan was a fiasco, as the farms never produced much food, due to bad weather and even worse management. Khrushchev was replaced by a much more cautious man, Leonid Brezhnev, who became First Secretary of the Communist Party. Brezhnev was more business-like than Khrushchev and less prone to silly outbursts. Khrushchev had once said that the Soviets would give up their revolutionary ambitions only when shrimp learned how to sing. Brezhnev, however, resisted the temptation to rock the diplomatic boat.
Although Brezhnev ruled with an iron fist within the Communist world—he put down a mild reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968—he also tried to normalize relations with the West. The diplomatic result was a series of meetings and agreements that are now called détente. Brezhnev’s desire to bring more realism and less tension to the competition between the two great powers was mirrored in the United States by President Richard Nixon and his close adviser Henry Kissinger.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had sound fiscal reasons for wanting to negotiate rather than to compete. The Soviet economy had ceased to grow and the United States had dramatically increased its public spending in the 1960s. On the one hand, President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic expenditures increased with the passage of a series of social initiatives that are known collectively as “the Great Society.” On the other hand, Johnson’s expansion of US involvement in the Vietnam War led not only to an increase in deaths but also to a major increase in military spending. By Richard Nixon’s election as president in 1968, Americans had grown weary of paying for the war, and Nixon began winding down US involvement in order to cut American losses. By 1973, the United States had signed a cease-fire with the North Vietnamese. This policy change came too late, however, for the American economy, as Nixon’s own fiscal policies combined with those of his predecessor to overheat the US economy, bringing nearly a decade’s worth of double-digit inflation.
Nonetheless, the Nixon administration also brought with it a new foreign policy realism to match Brezhnev’s. Both Nixon and Kissinger were willing to climb down from the traditional binary US-Soviet opposition out of practical concerns, and Nixon’s history of vocal anti-Communism gave him sufficient domestic political cover to pull this change off. We have already discussed Nixon’s famous visit to China; his negotiations with the Soviets over nuclear arms limitations were equally historic.
Between 1969 and 1972, both sides began to negotiate with each other in earnest to lessen political and military tensions. The American idea was that it would get the Soviets to moderate their international behavior by offering favorable economic deals. This came to be known as linkage in the West. Access to US money was deliberately linked to Soviet internal and international policies. The Soviet side, for its part, also wanted to restrain American military spending and fell back on an idea that had originated with Khrushchev, “peaceful coexistence.” The diplomatic result of these trends was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT. First suggested by Lyndon Johnson, these talks produced two agreements on the limitation of strategic weapons, SALT I and SALT II. Signed on May 26, 1972 in Moscow, SALT I was a complicated collection of agreements, the most important of which were the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Interim Agreement and Protocol on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons. The ABM treaty limited both sides in the development and installation of anti-ballistic missile systems. The fear was that if either side were to have such a system, the other side would have no choice but to produce more missiles in order to overwhelm the system. The Interim Agreement froze both sides’ inter-continental (ICBM) and sea-launched (SLBM) missile systems. This was thought to be fair, since the Soviets had the lead in ICBMs and the United States in SLBMs.
President Nixon submitted SALT I to the United States Senate, where it was ratified. SALT II, which was negotiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, suffered a different fate. Signed in June 1979, this agreement expanded SALT I’s reach, limiting the number of MIRVs (Multiple Impact Re-entry Vehicles), heavy bombers, and the total number of ballistic missile launchers. President Carter was forced to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however. Nonetheless, both sides voluntarily observed the limits until the signing of subsequent agreements.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979 soured superpower relations for the next decade. First, the invasion raised again the specter of an aggressive Communist ideology that was bent on world domination. Public opinion in the United States rapidly turned against any further negotiation with the Soviets. President Jimmy Carter famously responded by boycotting the Olympics in Moscow and stating that he had learned a lot about the Soviet Union. Second, and at a much deeper level, technological change had overwhelmed SALT I and II’s basic premises.
During the late 1970s the Soviets developed a new intermediate-range ballistic missile called the SS-20, which could deliver a nuclear warhead about 5,000km. It then stationed these new missiles east of the Ural Mountains, which meant that the Soviet Union could blow up all of Europe in less than ten minutes. Some of America’s European allies responded by pressuring the United States to develop its own intermediate-range ballistic missiles and to station them in Western Europe. The results were the Pershing II and the Tomahawk Cruise missile, both of which could reach Moscow from Western Europe within 10 minutes. In spite of tremendous protests across Western Europe against their deployment, NATO put Pershing IIs on the Continent in the early 1980s. Taken together these weapons systems destabilized the fragile agreement between the two superpowers. The result was further talks and the signing of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, in which both sides pledged to eliminate their IRBMs.
American technological superiority also undermined the rough parity in inter-continental ballistic systems enshrined in SALT I. Until the 1980s, the United States had relied on two sea-borne missile systems, the Poseidon and Polaris, which were based on 1950s-era technology. After roughly 30 years in service, however, these systems needed to be updated, if for no other reason that they could no longer be maintained properly. During the late 1960s, the Americans began designing a new SLBM called the Trident I. This system was deployed during the 1980s and 90s. The Trident system was problematic for the Soviets for two reasons. First, the Soviets had no idea where American ballistic missile submarines were. The new Ohio-class submarines, which first appeared in 1981 were not only too quiet to be tracked by the Soviets, but they also carried 24 Trident missiles, each of which had eight MIRVed warheads. Since each warhead had an explosive capacity of 100 kilotons, only one submarine parked off the Soviet Union’s eastern coast could have wiped out half of the country. Second, by the time the Trident II was deployed in the early 1990s, American SLBMs had become so accurate that they had not only great range (7400km) but also hard-target kill capabilities. Each Trident II missile had ten 475-kiloton nuclear warheads, which meant that the United States could obliterate most of the Soviet Union’s land-based missile silos from just about anywhere in the Atlantic or Pacific, while keeping its own land-based forces in reserve.
What this meant for arms control was that the United States needed fewer launchers and fewer land-based missiles to threaten the Soviet Unions ICBMs. Thus, the basic logic of arms limitation was no longer applicable to the strategic situation, and one sign of this was the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. Begun under President Ronald Reagan in 1982 and completed in 1991 by President George Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, these talks led to a treaty that reduced strategic stockpiles in both sides for the first time.
Against these various backdrops we now need to consider two of the most significant among the Cold War’s many leaders, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Ronald Reagan swept into office in November 1980 with a landslide election victory over the incumbent Jimmy Carter. The US economy’s dismal performance during the late 1970s sealed Carter’s fate, but dissatisfaction with his foreign policy was also a significant factor in the defeat. America wanted a more assertive leader, and Reagan entered office promising tax cuts, cuts in social programs, and an increase in defense spending. He delivered on all these promises, though there is much disagreement about their effects on the US economy.
Some people hold that Ronald Reagan jeopardized America’s financial health by increasing annual federal deficits. Others hold that his tax cuts liberated the American economy and made growth possible. Regardless of which side is right, by 1983 the American economy was growing rapidly. In 1984 the American voters gave Ronald Reagan credit for it, sweeping him back into the White House in another landslide victory and this time with an astonishing 59% of the popular vote. Thus, during his second term, Reagan not only had the support of the American people, but also a growing economy that boosted America’s spending power. The Soviets could not keep up with America’s increasing military spending and eventually had to bow out of the game entirely.
Mikhail Gorbachev confronted a decidedly different political and economic situation. In 1985, he became the Soviet Union’s leader amidst complete stagnation. The Soviet economy was not growing, and things such as alcoholism and infant mortality were on the rise. Recognized as a reformer, he instituted deep-seated structural reforms in Soviet public life and the economy. These reforms fell under two rubrics glasnost, which means openness, and perestroika, which means restructuring. Gorbachev opened the economy to more individual initiative and public life to more debate, in an attempt to compete more effectively with the United States.
Unfortunately for Gorbachev, his measures merely succeeded in destroying the old Soviet Union. Russians began to demand more freedom and democracy than Gorbachev was willing or able to give--for even Gorbachev’s limited reforms were outraging old-line Communists in the government and army. The apparent softening of Soviet politics led events very rapidly to get out of control. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and most of Eastern Europe declared its independence from the Soviet Empire. Gorbachev allowed these states to go their own way, even negotiating the former German Democratic Republic’s absorption into the Federal Republic of Germany. Gorbachev’s perceived weakness, however, spelled the end of his regime.
In 1991, old-line Communists held an unsuccessful coup, which not only broke Gorbachev but also the Soviet Union. Within a few months an imperial tradition that dated back to Peter the Great disintegrated, as peripheral Soviet Republics became independent states for the first time. Unable to muster enough strength to compete with the United States, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a poor and sick Russia in its wake.
It was believed at the time that the Cold War’s end marked the end of history. The two great adversaries had finally become friends. The new Russia would now become capitalist and prosperous, and the world could now live at peace. This dream was not to be fulfilled.

Lecture 27: China in the 20th Century

2008-01-31T07:40:00.001-08:00

China began the 20th century in disarray and ended it as world’s second most important power, behind the United States. That is quite a journey in only a century, and to understand how this came about we need to look back. China boasted the world’s most advanced civilization through the seventeenth century. In technology, philosophy, statecraft, and trade, the world had much to learn from China, and the Chinese knew it. By the eighteenth century, however, Europe had caught up. Developments in this area between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries particularly in science, technology, and economic life made even single European states such as Britain more capable of projecting power around the globe than the vast Chinese Empire. This may have been due to growing Chinese introspection: they thought there was nothing to learn outside their borders. Thus, although China invented steel and gunpowder centuries before anyone in Europe, the Chinese did not consider the ways those inventions could be put to use. Moreover, the Chinese navy and merchant fleet were extremely advanced, and China never struck out into the wider oceans, seemingly happy to remain the center of world civilization.
China began to lag well behind European states by the middle of the nineteenth century. Between the rise of industry and the centuries-old imperial competition among states, Europeans proved able to project power around the globe. The British and French, for example, first began exploiting China fully in the wake of the Opium Wars. The British fought the first war alone from 1839 to 1842. The second, which saw the British and French allied against China, went from 1856 to 1860. After losing these wars, China essentially lost control of its borders, as French and British merchants controlled the terms of China’s trade with the outside world. More powers soon joined Britain and France, and by the end of the nineteenth century, China had essentially been dismembered into multiple spheres of influence.
As I noted in a previous lecture, only Japan among the Asian states proved able to resist the onslaught of Europe’s aggressive, industrialized powers. Unfortunately for Asia, Japan soon behaved just as badly as the rest and also carved out its own sphere of influence in China. Seen from the perspective of Japan’s growing power, the two world wars were Japan’s attempt to evict western powers from its perceived sphere. Japan, ultimately, lost that competition, and it was not until after 1945 that China determined its own destiny again and asserted itself as a world power.
In this lecture, I am going to divide Chinese history in the twentieth century into two parts. The first will cover the period from 1911 to 1949. The second will begin with 1949 and end in 1989. I begin with 1911, the year of China’s first revolution. In 1911, the weakened Imperial Regime decided to nationalize China’s railway system. This inspired revolts throughout China, and large regions of the country became independent of the central authority. This revolution marked the end of an epoch, as roughly 2,000 years of imperial Chinese tradition came to an end. The nineteenth century had stripped the monarchy and Chinese tradition of its authority, and many Chinese began to feel that the only way to save China was to follow western examples. The revolution’s main problem, however, was that it soon descended into factionalism.
On February 12, 1912, the last Chinese Emperor abdicated and Yüan Shih-k’ai, a powerful imperial minister was elected president. A Chinese parliament was set up and in the next year China’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, was formed. Sun Yat-sen, a powerful member of the Kuomintang who is today considered the father of modern China, collaborated with Yüan until 1913, when the latter attempted a coup d’etat, and Sun had to flee to Japan. In response, Sun reorganized the Kuomintang on the model of a secret society and later a revolutionary party. Yüan remained in power until 1916, when political pressures defeated him. Yüan was never able to solve China’s biggest problem: in the absence of a strong central authority, warlords had taken over much of China. Between 1912 and 1928, for example, there were over 1300 of them controlling various parts of the country.
For the next decade the regional warlords divided China up. There was a government in Peking, but since it was made up of warlords, anyone outside the ruling clique did not have to listen to it. Sun returned to China in 1917, but was chased out again by a warlord. He returned again in 1923 and was able to make himself China’s de facto leader, thanks to the increasing power of the Kuomintang, though he died of cancer in 1925, leaving China in a state of flux.
Sun was important in popularizing the nationalist cause in China, but its intellectual leadership and the future came from elsewhere. Whereas, Sun spent most of his time in exile, fomenting revolution, new ideas and currents were beginning to appear in Peking. In 1916, a Chinese intellectual Chen Duxiu founded a journal called New Youth that preached the rejection of Chinese culture and the acquisition of western skills. Chen’s magazine was not a notable success. Chinese nationalism was as likely to turn on the west, as it was to embrace it. And Chen never had a solution to China’s real problem that the peasants could not have cared less one way or the other. The strongest impetus for change in change came with the end of World War I, with Japan’s acquisition of a mandate in China’s Shantung province. As you will recall from the lecture on Japan, Germany had controlled this province, but the Japanese took it from them. Given Japan’s strength, there was little that the European powers could to dislodge them. The Chinese government was so outraged by Japan’s mandate that the government refused to sign the treaty.
Public opposition to Versailles sparked a national movement that became know as “The May 4th Movement.” Beginning with students in Peking, this movement spread across China and morphed into a series of strikes and boycotts against Japanese goods. All sorts of city dwellers, from intellectuals, to politicians, to workers joined the movement. The movement failed to dislodge the Japanese, but it showed that new intellectual currents were forming.
It is in this context that we must consider the rise of Communism in China. In 1918, a Marxist study group appeared at the University of Peking in response to the Russian Revolution. Many members of the May 4th Movement joined this group, and one important name among them—though he was not important at the time—was Mao Zedong. By July of 1921, the group of intellectuals in Peking founded China’s Communist Party in Shanghai. This party actively fought Chinese inertia, and it became an important weapon against the west, since it was officially against capitalism, which was a western import.
During the 1920s, China slowly reacquired control over its territory. The western powers and Japan gave back their mandates, though they retained their commercial rights. Still it appeared that China was emerging again as an independent state. China’s new status was, however, only as good as the United States’ willingness and ability to guarantee it. And after 1919, the United States spent more energy disengaging from the world than engaging in it. In this context, Marxism became an ever more powerful force in China. Even Sun Yat-sen began moving closer to Marxism, believing that its collectivist vision was appropriate for China’s history and economy. Sun was fond of saying that the nation always had to be more important than the individual.
Sun Yat-sen’s attitudes and his willingness to take advice from the Soviet Communist Party made cooperation with the Chinese Communists possible. China was not yet united, and for dogmatic reasons, the Soviets did not want a Communist revolution in China at that point. Believing that a nationalist bourgeois revolution was necessary first, the Soviets ordered the Chinese communists to make common cause with the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang accepted members of the Communist Party in their ranks. One of them was Mao Zedong. And Sun’s chief deputy Chiang Kai-shek went to Moscow to study. Sun also founded a military academy that created soldiers for the new China.
Sun’s death in 1925 changed the fundamental situation. Sun’s lieutenant, Chiang, accepted Soviet help, but was determined not to allow the Soviets to interfere in Chinese politics. Unity persisted initially, as the Kuomintang’s army had eliminated most of the warlords by 1927. Indeed, as the Kuomintang became more powerful, the British even gave up their trade concessions in China, and the United States gave up its share of the indemnity from the Boxer Rebellion. The nationalists seemed to be winning the day.
Nonetheless, while Chiang was organizing the army and the cities, the Chinese Communists were busy in the countryside. Mao Zedong, one of the party’s leaders wanted the Communists to organize the peasants, because he believed that they were an untapped source of power. This required a break with Marxist dogma, since only the proletariat could lead the revolution according to Marx. Peasants were out of the picture. Nonetheless, by 1927, the Communists had organized over 10 million peasants. They gained peasant loyalty through practical things such as forcing landlords to lower the rents and forgive excessive debts.
The differences in emphasis between Chiang and Mao led to new conflicts. Chiang had allied himself with capitalist and merchant powers within Chinese cities. With access to money and having control of China’s finest military forces, by 1927 he felt that it was time to deal with the Communists. He attacked the Communists militarily, decimating their armies, and outlawed the Communist Party. This put the Soviets in an interesting position. They wanted a state that was hostile to Britain, but also had to follow Marxist dogma. After the Kuomintang appeared to win, the Soviets withdrew their advisers from the Chinese Communists.
Chiang’s attack merely led to a Civil War, as the Communists retreated to the countryside. This had two important consequences. First, the war allowed the remaining Chinese warlords to flourish, as Chiang did not have sufficient forces to take on all his enemies at once. Second, the war weakened China just as Japan embarked on its policy of aggression. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1932, Japanese forces invaded Shanghai. In 1937, Japanese forces took much of China’s coast and began moving inland. The Kuomintang retreated to Nanking. At this moment, however, the Nationalists became more conservative and authoritarian, reaching back into Chinese traditions to justify their policies. This led China’s intellectuals to withdraw their support.
Meanwhile, the Communist Party continued its work in the countryside, deposing warlords and organizing peasant soviets. By 1930, the Communists had organized a large peasant army in the province of Kiansi and declared the foundation of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The Kuomintang responded in 1934 by attacking the Communists in their sanctuary in Kiansi and forcing them to flee south. This is the famous “Long March,” during which Mao Zedong led a few thousand followers on a difficult retreat to Shengsi. The Chinese Communists seemed to be finished as a force, but the march made Mao a hero to his movement and cemented his authority. The in 1937, the Japanese attacked and China was once again thrown into chaos.
The war was a disaster for the Chinese economy and the Kuomintang. By 1940 the Burma Road that the British and Americans had been using to supply the Kuomintang was closed. By 1941, inland China was completely cut off from the outside world. The basic problem was that Chiang refused to use his troops against the Japanese invaders. He expected the United States to defeat Japan and wanted to keep his army whole for the fight against the Communists. This was a stupid policy on two levels. First, his army got soft. So when the battle did come, his soldiers did not fight well. Second, Communist guerilla activity against the Japanese gained them enormous national prestige in China. When the Japanese were finally defeated, the Communists looked like national heroes.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, China was plunged into another civil war. This time, however, the Communists had the better of it, inflicting a series of defeats on the Nationalist forces. By late 1948, Chiang was forced to flee the mainland for the island of Formosa. He took with him most of China’s gold reserves and the artifacts in the National Palace Museum, promising to continue the fight against the Communists from the island. (The appropriation of the national museum collection remains a major sticking point between the two countries.) In the end, Chiang was merely able to found a small authoritarian state with an incredibly productive economy that is now called Taiwan. It has had the military support of the United States since 1955, when President Eisenhower gave Taiwan a military guarantee. Taiwan occupied the Chinese seat in the United Nations until 1971, when the People’s Republic of China was admitted and Taiwan was expelled.
Mainland China’s modern history begins with Mao Zedong’s declaration on October 1, 1949 of the People’s Republic of China. This marked the end of multiple historical epochs. First, it represented the final end of the Confucian bureaucratic tradition. The Communists, borrowing from Europe, developed a wholly new vision of the individual and his or her relationship to the state. Second, the industrialized, imperial powers were finally thrown out of China after 150 years of interference. Europe, the United States, and Japan no longer had any influence over China’s internal politics. Of course, the irony is that China was now ready to interfere in everyone else’s business.
The Communist Party’s radical program for social and political change required it to monopolize power. A Central Committee controlled the People’s Congress and the Politburo controlled the Central Committee. On top of that, the people who controlled the Communist Party controlled the Politburo. The man who controlled the party was, of course, Chairman Mao. An example of how important this position was is that Mao was Chairman of the People’s Republic of China only until 1959, but he controlled the Party until his death in 1976. His influence on policy making will be apparent throughout this lecture. Mao created a top-down, dirigiste system, in which dissent and individual rights were not respected. Between 1948 and 1951, he and the Communists instituted a vicious purge of all Nationalist elements, sending tens of thousands of their enemies to work camps, where they usually died. In economic and social terms, the government insisted on rapid collectivization of the land and industrialization. In 1955, following Soviet models, the Chinese instituted the first Five Year Plan, which set priorities for the entire Chinese economy.
China decided to spend its money on developing infrastructure, building roads and power plants, as well as heavy industrial plants that produced steel and chemicals. In this project they received valuable assistance from the Soviets, who sent advisers and built entire plants for the Chinese. Unfortunately, China also reorganized farming along Soviet lines, taking over all land and controlling the food market. In 1958, Chairman Mao announced what he called the “Great Leap Forward.” This policy was as big a disaster as Stalin’s collectivization had been. Taking away the peasants’ land and controlling the food market meant that less food was produced. Perhaps 20 million people died as a result of this policy and a series of floods that made a critical situation worse.
The Communists break with the past was not all bad. There were some policy changes that seem advanced to modern eyes. The government extended healthcare and education deeply into the countryside. Millions of people now had access to doctors and books. What was in those books may not always have made sense, but to the people experiencing the change it seemed like a gain. In addition, the Communists officially extended equal rights to women—theoretically, at least. They also outlawed the tradition of forced marriages and the ancient practice of food binding, and legalized divorce and abortion. The latter policy would have its dark side, too, as later Chinese governments practiced forced abortions as part of their population policy.
At the same time as these domestic changes were going on, the Chinese government changed the foreign policy landscape in Asia. China and the Soviet Union immediately moved closer after the revolution. In 1950, the two powers signed a Sino-Soviet Treaty that guaranteed thirty years of aid and friendship. In this context, China accepted a secondary role in the Communist hierarchy, in exchange for Soviet military and industrial equipment. Much of this equipment then made its way to Korea, where the Chinese troops pushed a US-led UN force out of Communist North Korea. For their part, in addition to giving aid, the Soviets promised to campaign for China to receive the UN seat that Taiwan was occupying.
Troubles soon began, however, as the Soviets often subordinated their friendship to China to other foreign policy concerns. China routinely felt slighted. They were sending 50% of their exports to the Soviets and seemed not to be getting as much as other powers were. For example, the Soviet Union arranged a loan for the Indian government that dwarfed the size of the loans they had extended to China. In addition, the Soviets often acted arrogantly toward the Chinese, telling them what to do, rather than providing technical advice. Part of the problem was ideological differences. Mao’s revolution had been based on the peasants. The Soviets believed that revolution had to come from the proletariat. Chinese hurt feeling became important as a border dispute arose between the People’s Republic and India.
In 1951, Chinese troops re-occupied Tibet. The Tibetans had won their independence early in the twentieth century thanks to the force of British arms. This period was now over. In response, the Tibetans started a resistance movement, and the Chinese blamed the Indians for supporting it. The Soviet Union declared its neutrality in the dispute, and this angered the Chinese even more. In 1959, the dispute degraded into border conflicts. To make matters worse, in 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew its aid from China. So now China was confronting famine and a border conflict. In 1962, a war broke out that the Indians lost very badly. By 1964, China had become openly hostile to both India and the Soviet Union.
China’s shift was crucial on two levels. First, India, which had claimed some leadership over the Third World, now had a Chinese rival, as the Chinese offered their support to resistance movements everywhere. Second, China challenged the Soviet Union in the Cold War, even going so far as to explode a nuclear device, also in 1964. The way was now open for one of the biggest diplomatic shifts of the post-war period, the rapprochement between China and the United States. That would come a little later. First, there was more killing to do.
The Great Leap Forward hurt Chairman Mao’s reputation badly. Voices began to rise within the party to allow more competition and reward for initiative within the system. Mao dealt with the problem by removing the dissenting voices from power and instituting what he called the Cultural Revolution. This Revolution ran from 1966 to 1969 and it involved the complete denigration of intellectuals as a class, lest they think differently from Mao. Mao closed the universities and made everyone engage in physical labor, as a way of enforcing solidarity. He also unleashed his Red Guards on society, which were essentially a group of thugs that went around knocking the heads of anyone who might think differently. All thought was to be subordinate to Mao’s, who had become something of a communist prophet. By 1969, even Mao realized that the campaign had gone too far and he shut it down.
At this point, we must return to the level of international relations. Tensions between China and the Soviet Union opened a door for the United States. The United States had been opposed to the People’s Republic from the beginning. The government was, after all, Communist. Indeed, there was a vicious fight within the US government over who had “lost” China to the Dark Side that ended a few government careers. The rapprochement between China and the US was the product of two important diplomats, Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger. Zhou was a long-time Mao ally and an important figure in the Communist hierarchy. Only he had the social and political standing to reach out to the United States. Henry Kissinger was the US Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon. Here the president was most important. As an ardent anti-Communist in the 50s and 60s, only he had sufficient prestige to reach out to the Chinese. In July of 1971, Kissinger visited China to negotiate the President’s subsequent visit. In February 1972, Richard Nixon made his dramatic and historic visit to China. The Soviets hated this, and it was an important backdrop to what was called Détente between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s. We’ll talk about that in another lecture.
Zhou Enlai was an important figure not only for his diplomatic role but also for his activities within the party. Zhou was never quite as doctrinaire as Mao, and he worked hard to rehabilitate some of the party leaders who had crossed Mao by calling for economic reform. One of the rehabilitated was Deng Xioaping, the architect in effect of today’s China. Deng was a long-time Communist. He had studied in France during the 1920s, where he joined the Communist movement. He participated in the Long March, and served in many key Party offices during the 1940s and 50s. He was, however, something of a pragmatist on policy and his response to the Great Leap Forward led to conflict with Mao. Deng was one of those people who wanted more incentives for production. Deng came under attack during the Cultural Revolution and lost all his high party posts. In 1973, Zhou rehabilitated him, and Deng rose to join the Politburo. When Zhou died in January 1976, however, Maoist elements purged Deng again. He was out until September 1976, when Mao, died. At this point, the establishment turned on the remaining Maoists and the path was clear for Deng. By 1980, Deng had assumed Mao’s former position of Chairman. Deng’s supporters became Premier and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Deng instituted a number of fundamental reforms in the economy. He decentralized economic management and made centralized planning more flexible. Essentially, regional managers and factory heads now had more freedom to institute policies and seek profits. China’s farmers got control over their own production and were allowed to keep their profits. Food production promptly exploded. Deng also expanded cultural contacts with the west and allowed foreign investment in Chinese enterprises. Not everything was now rosy in China, however. Deng was also responsible for the most aggressive population control policy in the world, which included forced abortions for those women who wanted to have more than one child. In addition, when Deng’s policies created a yearning for greater freedoms among the young, he supported the traditionalists in cracking down. Although Deng stepped down from the Chinese Central Committee in 1987, he gave his blessing to the use of forces against student demonstrators in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
So Deng has created, in no small measure, the China that we are left with. Economically prosperous and militarily powerful, China now plays a full role in the international game. Their recent launching of a man in space suggests that they will be the next great rival for the United States. The United States vanquished the last one. We will see how things go with this one.

Lecture 26: The End of European Dominance and

2008-01-31T07:39:00.001-08:00

The year 1945 marked the end of European world dominance. In the sixteenth century, Europeans established colonies around the globe. By the nineteenth century, they had turned much of the world into a European Empire. By 1945, however, both the power and the self-confidence on which Europe’s world-wide empires had been built were completely shattered. Two world wars and Nazi Germany’s savagery reduced the continent to the second rank of powers, and real power shifted to the United States and the Soviet Union. (It was, of course, ironic that these two states were, in many ways, created by Western Europe. The United States had been a British colony, and Russia became a European power largely through borrowing heavily from Europe.)
The new power relationship created a new rivalry. The two superpowers divided the world between them, competing for every possible advantage, whether it was in politics, economics, science, or even sports. This competition was regulated, however, in a way that Europe’s conflicts had never been. First, there were only two superpowers. Each watched the other jealously; each had the power to annihilate the other. The United States became the first and only country to use nuclear weapons in war, when it obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949, and in 1957, it became the first country to launch a satellite, called Sputnik, into space. Sputnik’s launch announced the arrival of a new world, as thereafter both the Soviet Union and the United States were able to put nuclear weapons onto missiles that could strike any point on the globe. The world soon entered the grips of a new strategic vision called M.A.D., or Mutual Assured Destruction. Also called “the balance of terror,” the theory was that each side’s nuclear arsenal checked the other, with the result that both sides now had to be cautious on security matters.
Although the US-Soviet competition was fierce, both sides’ need for security ensured their minimal cooperation in a new international institution, the United Nations. Created in 1945 by the Treaty of San Francisco, the United Nations Organization was meant to address the weaknesses that had been so obvious in the League of Nations. Where the League had no enforcement power, the United Nations Organization had a Security Council that could use force to keep the peace. The lessons of Munich had been learned well. The Security Council originally had 11 members, five of which were permanent. (Since 1965, the council has had 15 members.) The permanent members—the United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and the United Kingdom—each held a veto on the council. The other members are elected to the council for two-year terms. With the two superpowers sitting in the Security Council, it was virtually assured that no fundamental threat to post-war arrangements could arise. Hence, the balance between the US and the Soviet Union was essential for keeping revisionist powers in line.
The post-war situation leaves us with a fundamental paradox: both sides competed fiercely with each other, while also needing each other to maintain the rules of the game. We can understand the general rules by considering Poland and Germany. For the Soviets Poland’s fate was non-negotiable. Not only had the Soviets liberated the country, but it was also an historic invasion route into the Russian heartland. Both Napoleon and Hitler had traversed Poland to strike deep into Russia, with the most recent attack leaving behind 20 million dead. For its part, the United States also had an historic interest in Poland. Woodrow Wilson had insisted on an independent Poland after World War I, and the country was carved out of both Polish and German territories. The United States also hosted many Polish immigrants, who were deeply concerned about the fate of their homeland. Moreover, at the level of policy, a democratic Poland would be less likely to follow Soviet orders. Hence, both general historical situation and the strategic realities guaranteed the two sides would be at loggerheads.
On no country was the superpower conflict written more indelibly than Germany. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and the Communist government was determined to prevent another such attack. A long-term Soviet occupation of German soil was, therefore, inevitable. The Unites States, for its part, was tired of coming to Europe to end Europe’s wars and wanted to ensure that Germany became a stable, prosperous, democratic, and peaceful state. (It was believed, of course, that these things went together.) Also convenient from the American point of view was that a democratic Germany would be less likely to follow Soviet orders. Overall, therefore, both ideology and security concerns guaranteed not only a partition of Europe in general but also Germany specifically. Ironically, however, the fact of partition exacerbated the basic tension. The two powers peered suspiciously at each other from their respective positions on the border, each waiting for a surprise attack from the other. That both sides had nuclear weapons after 1950 only intensified the mutual suspicion.
Against this backdrop we can begin to consider Cold War’s nature and history. The basic problem of the Cold War was its status as a zero-sum game. The Soviet Union and the Unites States had few common interests, beyond defeating Nazi Germany. After V-E Day two countries with radically different economic systems, political systems, and security concerns now confronted each other. Europe was divided in half, with the Soviet Union setting up a host of client states in the east. Still, although there were many crises after 1945 between the two powers, none of them degenerated into war, as every weapon short of open hostilities between the two superpowers was put to use. For example, in 1947 the Soviets’ desire for absolute security led them to support insurgencies in Greece and Turkey, and the United States began to send money to both governments in response. In 1948, there was a Soviet-sponsored coup in Czechoslovakia, which put that country firmly behind the iron curtain. Also in 1948, the Soviet Union blocked allied access to West Berlin. These heavy-handed tactics unnerved Western Europe, which led to the development of the mutual defense alliances called NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
So who is to blame for this situation? It has been fashionable for some time among scholars in Europe and the United States to confidently affix blame to one side or the other. Left-wing academics claim that United States was at fault. Right-wing academics blame the Soviets. The arguments between the two sides can be lots of fun. However, as was the case with our discussion of World War I, the blame game is unhelpful, since it obscures the fundamental role of national interest in all states’ behavior. Friends and enemies are determined by the strategic situation. There were, for example, deep tensions between all the allies during and after the war. Great Britain and France both had interests different from the United States and the Soviet Union, which created problems right through the Cold War’s end. The situation was, of course, worse between the Soviet Union and the United States, who had almost no common interests before the war; it was only Nazi Germany that united them, and after the German defeat, no common vision united the two sides.
Having set the general context, I will now consider the problem of the Cold War through two conflicts, the Cold War in Germany and the “hot” war in Korea, since these events shed light not only on the basic situation I have outlined, but also point to tensions that affected world politics from the 60s through the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
Germany was a problem even in defeat, because of the war’s tremendous destruction and dislocation. Initially, the problems were largely practical. How was one to manage an area that had been so thoroughly devastated? Germany’s big cities were almost completely destroyed. In the case of Dresden, for example, which had been one of Europe’s most beautiful cities before the war, 95% of all the city’s buildings were mostly or completely destroyed. Seven million Germans also died in the war, with a full 25% of the generation that had been born in 1924 killed. Without young men, how was the country to rebuild? There was also a massive refugee problem, as some 10 million Germans were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Russia. And then there were also millions of non-German refugees, many of them Jews, whom the Allies had put in camps in Germany for processing. The Jewish refugees often wanted to go to the United States, though the Americans would not take them. And getting them to Israel was problem best put off to another time, since other questions beckoned. Where were all these people to be housed? How would they be fed? (In one of history’s great ironies, many of the Jewish refugees settled in Germany, because they were initially not allowed to leave the country.) In short, Germany had become the victorious allies’ problem.
The problem of defeating Germany turned into the problem of occupying it. Soviet, American, British, and French troops divided what was left of Germany into four zones of occupation. This division had been planned during a series of conferences that the Allies held during the war, and the various negotiations point directly to the Cold War. On January 14, 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Casablanca and announced the Allied policy of unconditional surrender. This war was not to end like the last one. In October 1943, the foreign ministers of the various Allies met to discuss Austria’s fate, which they decided would remain an independent state. They also announced that an Advisory Commission would be set up to coordinate post-war policies and to try war criminals. In November and December of 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Josef Stalin met in Teheran, where they agreed on Poland’s future borders, with the so-called Curzon Line marking the border between Poland and the Soviet Union, and the Oder-Neisse line the new border between Germany and Poland. (Poland, as a result, moved about 200 miles to the west.) In January 1944, the Advisory Commission decided on three post-war zones of occupation.
In February 1945, another conference was held at Yalta that essentially finalized the post-war picture. Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that Poland would come under Soviet domination. Some people, later, argued that Roosevelt and Churchill had betrayed Poland. This charge was unfair, since no other outcome was possible. The Soviets had troops in Poland, and that fact was not going to change. It was also agreed at this conference that Germany would be partitioned, though an Allied council was set up to manage the occupation. The Allies asked that a French zone be added, but the Soviets rejected the request, since they did not believe the French had earned one. The French zone of occupation was, however, carved out of the existing British and American ones. It was agreed that Berlin would be jointly administered by the Allies. In addition, it was also agreed that all the liberated populations should be allowed to choose their own governments. This was, of course, a joke, since the Soviet Union was not going to allow elections in any country that it deemed essential to its security.
The Yalta Conference set the stage for the ultimate post-war conference, even though the major political players had changed by then. On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died and was succeeded by his Vice President Harry S. Truman. (The “S” stood for nothing. Truman was never given a middle name, and he added the initial, because he thought it made his name sound better.) In July 1945, Clement Attlee became Prime Minister of England, after the British people made his Labour party the majority in Parliament. Hence, when the three major powers met in Potsdam from July 17 until August 2, 1945, only Stalin remained from the original negotiators. Now, however, the problems of the post-war divergence in interests loomed. The Potsdam agreement represented nothing more than the most minimal consensus that could be achieved under the circumstances. It was agreed that Germany would be considered an economic unit, and that the Allied Control Commission would oversee future German governments. These points were meaningless, of course, as their application depended on whose troops were in control. The only policies on which all were in agreement were the final drawing of the Oder-Neisse line and the permanent removal of Germans in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, these things would have happened anyway, since the Soviets controlled the East and had no desire to encourage German irredentism. (The Soviets also had old German communities that lived on the Volga. These “Volga” Germans had come to Russia in the eighteenth century at Catherine II’s invitation. They no longer had a strong connection to German culture and, in fact, no longer spoke German, but the Soviets sent them to Siberia anyway.)
The United States and the Soviet Union had few mutual interests, and this is why the post-war settlement was so minimal. In order to understand the gap between the two powers, we need to look back to the summer of 1945, which was when the new Cold War realities first appeared. On August 6 and 9, the United States used nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombs used in these attacks were the direct result of the Manhattan Project, a super-secret research program led by the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Ironically, perhaps, Oppenheimer’s father was a German immigrant, and Oppenheimer himself had received his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen.) The Manhattan Project began officially in 1942, but its origins dated to 1939, when the German-Jewish émigré physicist Albert Einstein warned President Roosevelt that German physics was advanced enough to build a nuclear weapon. Stalin knew of the program by 1943, thanks to his network of spies in the United States. In response, he also threw significant resources into an atomic research program, and when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the danger that one side could annihilate the other became the central backdrop to the competition between the two superpowers.
The Cold War’s intellectual foundations were built between 1946 and 1947. During this time, both sides maneuvered to extend their political control as far across Europe as possible. This scramble for influence convinced each side that the other was an enemy, and in 1946, both Truman and Stalin gave hard-line speeches that established the mutual incompatibility of their respective systems. The next year, the Soviet Union set up a series of militarized satellite states, whose existence worried both the United States and the other Western powers. The reactions in the west were severe. In March 1946, for example, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” Speech in the United States, in which he argued that the Soviet Union had established its hegemony over Eastern Europe by dropping an “Iron Curtain” that extended from Stettin to Trieste. In the United States the key reaction was the so-called “Long Telegram,” an 8000-word report written by George Kennan, an American diplomat who worked in Moscow. Kennan argued in this note that the Soviets would only understand force and the only way to combat them was with equal force at their point of expansion. Kennan’s ideas gave birth to the policy of “Containment,” which was fundamental to American foreign policy until 1991. The idea was that the US would use money and troops at whatever point the Soviets expanded. The US would not attack the Soviet Union but would combat the spread of its influence point by point.
The first clear policy to emerge from Containment was the so-called Truman Doctrine, which called for the US to support any government that was menaced by Communism. On March 12, 1947, President Truman offered the governments in Greece and Turkey over $400 million in aid to prevent the spread of Communism there. Greece had been fighting since 1944 against a Communist insurgency that was being funded by Yugoslavia, while the Turkish government had been under pressure from Soviet activity in the Mediterranean. The massive aid prevented both governments from falling, and henceforth money would be the United States’ most significant weapon. The next great policy to emerge from Containment was the Marshall Plan. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University that outlined massive foreign aid plan for Europe. All the nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union and its satellite states, were invited to apply for the funds. In the end, the U.S. disbursed $13 billion dollars over the next four years for the European reconstruction effort, and the result was a powerful economic recovery in the west, as by 1951 industrial output in Europe had hit prewar levels. Things were different in the east, as the Soviet Union refused to apply for the funds and forbade its satellites from doing so as well. It saw both the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine as capitalist plots to interfere in its zone of authority. The Soviets responded in January 1949 by founding an economic development program called Comecon, to which all its satellites had to belong.
American attitudes toward the Soviets were no less paranoid, which accelerated the great division between the two. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia (1948) and Mao Zedong’s declaration of a Communist Chinese state on October 1, 1949 transformed US concern into paranoia, and this had effects on Europe, for it accelerated the US policy of creating a separate German state. Already on January 1, 1948 the United Kingdom and the United States merged their two zones of occupation into one economic unit, giving the new entity the catchy name Bizonia. In March the French merged their zone into Bizonia, and the Germans received control of daily administration. By June of 1948, the Allies were beginning to talk of an independent West Germany, and this state was essentially created on June 18, 1948 with the issuance of a new currency, the Deutsche Mark. The moribund post-war German economy sprang to life almost immediately, a moment that marked the start of an almost two-decades-long economic recovery. The creation of the Deutsche Mark was, however, a clear violation of the war-time agreement to treat Germany as an economic unit. The Soviet Union responded by trying to push the Allies out of Berlin and on June 24 announced that the four-power administration had ended. A blockade of West Berlin was the next logical step. In addition, the Soviets walked out of the Berlin Commission and did not return until after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The Western powers refused to be pushed out of Berlin, and an awkward non-war ensued. The US could not shoot its way to Berlin, since the Soviets had seventeen divisions in Eastern Europe to the US’s four. (During the blockade the Soviets would bring their troop strength to forty divisions. The US increased its commitment to eight, and added three bomber squadrons.) An idea came up for an airlift to supply the city. On July 1, 1948 the United States and the United Kingdom committed to feed the city by air. Berlin needed about 4,500 tons of food per day to survive. That July the Allies shipped an average of 2,226 tons of food per day. In August the average increased to 3,830 tons. By October the number was up to 4,760 tons. This contest was a test of wills, and the US won by showing both its resolve and old-fashioned American pluck. In order to impress on the Soviets how serious they were, the Americans planned and executed a special “Easter Parade” in April 1949. From noon on Saturday until noon on Easter Sunday American planes flew 13,000 tons of supplies into Berlin and made certain that the Soviets knew about it. This show of western resolve and an Allied embargo on Eastern European products brought the blockade to an end by May 12, 1949. The post-war division of Germany was set for the next forty years.
Post-war tensions, mutual provocations, and growing paranoia extended the US-Soviet split through the rest of Europe. The result was the creation of two new defensive alliances, each headed by a superpower. On April 4, 1949, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which held that “An armed attack on one shall be construed as an armed attack on all.” West Germany, Greece, and Turkey joined the alliance later. The eastern states responded on May 1, 1955, with the Warsaw Pact Treaty, which organized a common defense against the West. The treaty included the People's Republic of Albania, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People's Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic, the Rumanian People's Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Czechoslovak Republic. These two alliances faced each other down in Europe until the Warsaw Pact was dissolved in 1991. NATO still exists, though its role in the world remains unclear.
Europe’s division into mutually hostile alliances paralleled Germany’s division. The former cannot be understood without the latter. In Germany, the years 1945 to 1949 saw a slow rebuilding of the political party system that had been destroyed by the Nazi era. In 1946, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) was founded. The FDP (Free Democratic Party) appeared in 1948. Meanwhile, the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) returned from exile. On May 23, 1949, the western German parties met in a conference to promulgate the Germany’s Basic Law (Grundgesetz), and on September 15, 1949, Konrad Adenauer of the CDU was elected Germany’s first post-war chancellor. This new state then rapidly gained international legitimacy by tying itself to the west. In 1950, it became part of the European Coal and Steel Community, the ancestor to today’s EU. In 1952, it joined the European Defense Community, which was the Continental antecedent to NATO. In 1954, West Germany joined NATO. And on May 5, 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany declared itself a sovereign state.
Accompanying these political changes was a great economic revival. In 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany’s gross domestic product exceeded that of all Germany in 1936. Average real wages had already reached pre-war levels in 1950. In that year, Germany’s industrial growth rate was 25%. In 1951, it was still a stunning 18%. By 1960, overall industrial production was 25-times what it had been in 1950. By 1962, West Germany’s total foreign trade was $25.4 billion, which ranked it second in the world. This tremendous rise in production was due to a number of reasons. First, the Marshall Plan gave Germany $4 billion, which it used to rebuild its devastated infrastructure. Second, the Korean War (1950-53) increased demand for German products. Third, the war had not fully destroyed Germany’s industrial plant, since so much of it had been moved underground. Finally, the ten million refugees were immediately absorbed into an economy that was desperately short of labor, which helped to keep labor costs low. When Konrad Adenauer resigned in 1963, Germany was a stable, prosperous, and democratic state.
East Germany’s history was quite different. Free political parties were not welcome there. On April 21, 1946, the KPD and the SPD were forcibly merged into the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), a party that existed only to follow Soviet orders. Other parties were allowed to exist, but suffered constant harassment. On October 7, 1949, the Democratic Republic of Germany was founded in direct response to the appearance of a German state in the west. Another dictatorship had appeared in German soil. For all its political limitations, however, the new GDR was the jewel in the Soviet Bloc. Eastern Germany had a long industrial tradition, and its optics and weapons were always the best in the east. Nonetheless, the East German economy also had severe handicaps. First, the Soviets spent the first few years after the war removing all the industrial equipment that was undamaged. Unlike its sibling state, East Germany really had to start from rock bottom. Second, the GDR was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan funds, which slowed any future recovery. Finally, the East German economy remained centralized and state-planned. As a result, by 1960, the East German economy was lagging well behind the FRG in both general wealth and overall productivity. By 1989, the East German economy no longer belonged to the first world.
The picture I have just painted of German history is one of general stability within the superpower conflict. Although both sides were suspicious of each other, they had more to gain by avoiding war in Europe than in starting one. This new situation helped Europe avoid another war, but it also shift the US-Soviet competition to other areas, especially Asia. In 1950, for example, the conflict that everyone feared would start in Europe broke out halfway around the globe in Korea, when North Korea launched an unprovoked attack on South Korea. Korea had been a victim of a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation during the Second World War. During the war, the Allies agreed that Korea would be freed, and peninsula-wide elections would be held. This never happened, since the Soviets occupied the North and set up an undemocratic puppet state.
On August 10, 1945, the United States unilaterally decided to make the south an independent state with its capital in Seoul. This maneuver irritated the Soviets, the Chinese—who had recently become Communist—and the Communist government in the North. On June 25, 1950, the Communist North shocked the world by invading the capitalist south, calculating that the world would do nothing in response to their attack. In doing so, however, the North Koreans surprised their Soviet and Chinese sponsors, and this created an opening for the west. (There is evidence that Josef Stalin knew of the invasion plan and approved of it, but he did not know that it would be launched so soon.)
On June 27, 1950, UN Security Council called for a cease-fire and requested that its member states provide assistance to the beleaguered South. It was here that the North’s secrecy cost it dearly, for the Soviets were at that point boycotting the UN Security Council meetings to protest mainland China’s exclusion from the UN. Taiwan had been occupying China’s seat, since the revolution. Hence, when the Security Council called for a vote, the Soviets were not there to veto it. This mistake would never be repeated. Nonetheless, on the same day, President Truman ordered US forces into Korea. Together with a smattering of allies, the US forces pushed the North’s army back not only to the 38th parallel, but also to the North Korean border with China. However, as American forces advanced to the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, China was forced to respond. On October 26, 1950, Chinese forces crossed the Yalu River basin, and with Soviet military aid, pushed the allies back to the 38th parallel. On July 27, 1953, the two sides signed an armistice. A peace treaty has yet to be signed.

After three years of fighting and 3 million people dead—including 140,000 Americans—the war ended with a rigidly patrolled status quo ante bellum. Nonetheless, although nothing fundamental had changed in Korea, the war had worldwide effects. Since both the Soviet Union and Communist China were associated with this war, Communism came to be seen by many states as a world-wide menace. The effects were dramatic. First, the Korean War and the Berlin Crisis convinced many Europeans that the only way for NATO to be able to stand up to the Soviet Union was if Germany were to rearm. Given Germany’s recent behavior was quite a conceptual shift. By 1955, however, Germany had its first post-war military and was a member of NATO.
Second, the fear of Communist aggression pushed many states to seek collective security arrangements with the United States that were modeled on the NATO treaty. On September 1, 1951, the United States, Australia and New Zealand signed the ANZUS pact, which committed each to the defense of the others. This pact was in force until 1986, when opposition to nuclear weapons in New Zealand led the US to suspend its responsibilities under the treaty toward that state. On September 8, 1954, SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization) was formed. This treaty committed the Unites States to joint security arrangements with Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Republic of the Philippines, and Thailand. Pakistan withdrew from the organization in 1968. France ceased providing financial support in 1975, and the organization formally ended operations in 1977. On February 4, 1955, what became known as CENTO (Central Treaty Organization) was formed. Its history is complicated. It was originally composed of Britain, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq. In 1956, the US became an associate member. In 1958, Iraq withdrew from the group after a coup, and the group’s headquarters were moved to Ankara. It became inactive after the withdrawal of Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran in 1979.
By the end of the 1950s, the Cold War was in full swing. Two nuclear-armed superpowers competed for influence, acquiring allies as best they could to prevent the other side from getting to them. Much of the world was carved up into treaty alliances that made the post-war world ever more rigid and tense, and the world found itself in a situation that mirrored the pre-World War I arrangements in Europe. All it might have taken to spark another Great War was another futile act of stupidity in some overlooked part of the world. As we will see in the lecture on the end of the Cold War, there were many futile acts of stupidity, but none of them led to war. That this never happened is probably due to the “balance of terror” that the superpower’s nuclear arsenals created. Neither side had any incentive to try for major changes in the world’s security order, since the other side could always blow up the world in response. This situation constrained both powers, but it also guaranteed that their great power game would be played out in less developed parts of the globe. The results did not lead to a general conflagration, but were often a bloody disaster for the people actually involved.

Lecture 25: The Rise of Japan and War in the Pacific, 1850-1945

2008-01-31T07:38:00.000-08:00

In order to understand Japan and the War in the Pacific, we need to approach the region’s history in much the same way that we have considered European history, namely as successive bids for hegemony. Until the mid-19th century, China had occupied the preeminent position in Asia, often controlling most of Asia and keeping other powers as tributaries. When the Europeans arrived in force, however, during the 19th century, China’s period of undisputed leadership was over, and every Asian society had to come to terms with the new power structure. The Europeans had better ships, better weapons, and powerful industrial economies, and they used these advantages to wrest economic and political concessions from the entire region. Among the Asian nations, only Japan rose to challenge the European powers on their own terms.
Nothing in Japan’s history suggested that it would be better able to withstand European aggression than any other country. In 1638, the third Tokugawa Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604-1651) closed Japan to the outside world, with the exception of Nagasaki, whose trade with foreigners was strictly controlled. This policy stayed in effect until 1854, when American naval power cowed the Japanese into opening their ports to trade. In 1853, the United States sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open trade talks with Japan, which he did by threatening to blow up the Japanese port of Uraga. In 1854, he returned with a larger naval force and negotiated an agreement on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors, the rights of US ships to buy supplies, and opened the door to future trading privileges. In 1858, the Japanese were forced to sign a broader trade agreement with the United States that later also included Great Britain, France, Holland, and Russia. The repeated retreats by the Shoguns before the force of western arms made the Shogunate look weak and doomed the institution.
In 1867, a group of reformers held a coup in the emperor’s name and ousted the last Shogun. In the same year, Emperor Komei died and was succeeded by his son Meiji Tenno (1867-1912). Emperor Meiji was a driving force behind Japan’s rapid modernization. During his reign Japan abolished feudalism, founded a post office, developed newspapers, built a school system, and reformed the army. In addition, Japan industrialized very rapidly. The government funded new industrial concerns and then sold finished factories to the private sector, often at a loss. Thus, by the start of the First World War Japanese manufactured goods were competing well on the world market. In 1897, Japan put its currency on the gold standard, which was a ticket to economic respectability. In 1899, the Japanese negotiated a deal with the European powers to eliminate any special rights they had on Japanese soil. By the turn of the century, Japan had fully joined the industrialized club.
In joining the club of powerful nations, however, Japan also began to act like one of them. In 1895, Japan annexed the island of Formosa, right from under a weakened China’s nose. In 1902, the British thought Japan worthy enough of an alliance; this was really a recognition by the British that Japan had become powerful enough to threaten their interests. Japan’s power became clear in 1904, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur, China. The subsequent Russo-Japanese War went badly for the Russians, and only American interference restrained the Japanese and saved the Russians from complete embarrassment. The Japanese were not, however, sated and in 1910, they took Korea on account of its strategic value.
Thus, by 1910 Japan had clearly become an aggressive industrialized power. Then two important things happened. First, in 1911, the last Chinese emperor was deposed by a revolution and China descended into complete political chaos. Second, in 1914, war broke out in Europe. These two events had important strategic implications for Japan, as well as direct effects on its economy. Strategically, the lack of a powerful government in China invited further Japanese aggression, while the outbreak of war in Europe made Europe’s imperial settlements appear to be ripe for the picking. In 1915, Japan presented China with its famous “21 Demands,” which was merely a long list of concessions that would have made China a Japanese protectorate. In addition, Japan seized all German colonies in China, something that the Entente Powers could hardly have objected to. The war was also good economically for Japan, since Europe’s need for supplies kept Japanese factories busy. Overall, the war was good for Japanese interests.
American and British intervention checked Japan somewhat in China, but they still got most of their “21 Demands.” After the war, Europe and America concentrated more intently on Japan. This included limiting Japan’s wartime gains in the Treaty of Versailles and making Japan an original member of the League of Nations. Japan got to keep its Chinese colonies, for example, but only as League protectorates, not as conquered territory. The United States also tried to restrain the Japanese through further diplomacy. In 1921, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and France signed the Four-Power Pact, which stipulated that all signatories would be consulted on any “Pacific Question.” In 1922, two more agreements were signed. The first was the Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty, in which the United States, Britain, and Japan agreed to a formula of 5:5:3 for the relative size of each navy. France and Italy were also included, but their navies were not strategically important. Next came the Nine-Power Treaty, signed by the five powers plus the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and China, which guaranteed China’s sovereignty and granted the nine signatories equal access to Chinese markets. Japan was boxed in diplomatically, for the moment, but it was never completely happy with the outcome and rapidly became a revisionist power like Germany and Italy.
Japan was not a sated power, and its subsequent aggression was a natural outcome of this situation. During the 1920s, Japan concerned itself mostly with internal reforms, and the Japanese economy grew along with the world economy. This period of expansion ended, however, in 1929 with the American Stock Market Crash and subsequent Depression. As the Depression deepened, 50% of Japanese factories shut down and national exports dropped by two-thirds, leaving Japan wholly dependent on its Asian markets. The next step was predictable. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and set up a puppet state called Manchukuo. The invasion was ostensibly a response to the bombing of a Japanese-owned railway, though it turned out later that the Japanese had done the bombing themselves. The League of Nations was, as always, useless. In February 1933, it issued a report that called the Japanese invasion unjustified, but also proposed a settlement that would have made Manchukuo an autonomous state, theoretically under Chinese sovereignty, but under actual Japanese control. Offended, nonetheless, Japan left the League in March. Their behavior became a model for Italy and Germany. In 1937, Japan engaged in further aggression, invading China after a border skirmish and occupying most of the Chinese coast. The Chinese nationalist government was forced to retreat inland to safer country. By 1938, Japanese forces controlled Canton and much of central China.
Given Japan’s expansionist mood, the war in Europe provided an excellent opportunity to create more mischief. With the defeat of France and the Netherlands, and Britain’s strenuous efforts against Germany, much of Asia became a power vacuum. The situation was very tempting for the Japanese, for were they to take French Indochina, British Malaysia, and the Dutch East Indies, they would be self sufficient in almost every important raw material, especially oil. Japan’s only diplomatic problem was to figure out how to grab all of Asia while keeping the United States neutral. In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a pact of mutual aid that stipulated all would come to the aid of any power that was attacked by the United States. Included in this treaty was a clause that gave Europe to Italy and Germany, with Asia going to Japan. In April 1941, the Japanese also signed a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union. The United States was Asia’s only defender.
In September 1940, Japan occupied northern Indochina, inspiring protests from the America. The pressure became more intense in July 1941, when Japan moved through southern Indochina, occupying all French bases on the coast. This action was too much for the United States, which responded by freezing all Japanese assets under U.S. control and imposing an embargo on oil sales. The oil embargo was a major threat to Japan, since they had no domestic sources of oil and no colonies that produced oil. On September 6, 1941, the Japanese government decided that if an accommodation could not be reached with the United States within a few weeks, then war would be the only alternative. Japan had to have oil—war or no war. Talks continued through October 1941, though without success. The United States made unpalatable demands that included calling for Japan to renounce its treaty with Germany and Italy, to withdraw all Japanese troops from China and Southeast Asia, and to open trade in China. Given the situation, the demands were unreasonable, since Japan was not about to do any of these things. On November 26, 1941, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull made matters worse, sending a letter to the Japanese government bluntly telling them to evacuate China and Indochina. The Japanese saw no point in talking further.
Needing to eliminate the United States from Asia, Japan launched a surprise aerial attack on the United States’ largest Pacific naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack was devastating. Five of the Pacific Fleet’s eight battleships were sunk and the other three took significant damage. Three cruisers and three destroyers were also sunk. 180 aircraft were destroyed, and 2,330 troops were killed. At the same time, Japanese planes also attacked an American airbase in the Philippines, destroying more than 50% of the U.S. Army’s Pacific air fleet.
For all the destruction, however, the attack was a failure. First, it did not knock the world’s premier industrial power out of the war, but steeled its commitment to fight and win. On August 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked the U.S. Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, which promptly followed. On August 11, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini did the United States the favor of also declaring war. Now the United States was in both wars, and from that moment the outcome was decided. Second, in a bit of bad luck for the Japanese, the United States’ three Pacific aircraft carriers were out to sea on the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack and survived. These carriers became the foundation of the U.S.’s counter attack. Third, most of the ships that were sunk were repaired and returned to service. You see, it does no good to sink a ship in a harbor, where it can be raised easily. Only a direct hit on a gun magazine or fuel tanks can truly destroy a ship in this situation. This happened to the USS Arizona, which is still at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
One of the war’s biggest opponents in Japan was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (1884-1943), the very man who planned the Pearl Harbor attack. At the time the government decided on war, Yamamoto told his superiors that a successful attack would allow him to run wild in the Pacific for six months, but after that Japan faced defeat. Yamamoto was right on both counts. Japan did run wild for six months. By January 1942, Japanese forces had taken much of Burma, as well as Guam, the Gilbert Islands, and Rabaul in New Guinea. By February, it controlled most of oil-rich Indonesia, and the Philippines fell by May of 1942. Japan planned to take New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, Samoa, and Midway, but by this point the United States and Britain had begun to recover their equilibrium.
Initially, things looked bleak for the Americans; most of their offensive fleet was sunk or under repair. Nonetheless, smarting from the Pearl Harbor disaster, the Americans were desperate to seem like they were doing something. So American forces planned and executed a daring, if symbolic, attack on Tokyo. On April 18, 1942, 16 U.S. bombers took off from aircraft carriers on a one-way mission to Tokyo. Let by the soon-to-be-famous Commander James Doolittle, they successfully bombed the city and flew on to an airbase in China, where most of the planes landed safely. The raid was of no strategic importance, since 16 bombers could only do so much damage. It was, however, a significant morale boost for the American side.
While the Americans were rebuilding their fleet, the Japanese made a few strategic blunders that helped to even the conflict. Japan desperately wanted to take the island of Midway, since its naval and air bases afforded strategic control of the central Pacific. The idea was that if Japan took Midway, it might knock the US out of the war. In June of 1942, seeking a final showdown, the Japanese attacked the island with the better part of their fleet. The Japanese did not know, however, that the United States had broken their codes and knew, thus, where and when the Japanese fleet would attack. The battle did not go well for Japan, and within three days, four of Japan’s six heavy aircraft carriers and one heavy cruiser went to the bottom of the ocean. This was the war’s turning point, since the Japanese had lost not only most of their first-line aircraft carriers but also their best pilots. From this point forth, the Japanese and American navies were on equal footing, and Japan could not hope to outproduce the United States’ industrial machine.
With Japan’s defeat at Midway began the great island-hopping march to Japan. The Japanese had spread their troops across many islands in the Pacific, trying to control as many points as possible. The United States responded with a strategy of only taking the most important islands. They would attack a strategic location that had an airfield or major port, but would leave less significant islands alone. The first true test of American arms in the Pacific came in July of 1942. On July 6, the Japanese landed troops on one of the Solomon Islands, called Guadalcanal, and began constructing an airbase. The Americans responded almost immediately, and a six-month battle ensued that was fought on land and sea. The Japanese lost more than 24,000 dead on the land to the United States’ 1,600. On the sea the losses were roughly equal, with each side losing multiple cruisers, battleships, and at least one carrier. This battle was important, however, because it stopped the Japanese drive south and meant that New Guinea and Australia were no longer threatened. There were also major engagements in Burma at this time, and many British soldiers faced serious opposition. These engagements were not, however, central to the course of the campaign, since the only way to end the war was to take Japan’s home islands.
The U.S. military had to claw its way across the Pacific in order to get to Japan. American forces took the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, the Marshalls in February 1944, the Marianas in July 1944, and the Philippines in April of 1945. The battle in the Marianas was both important and foreboding. It was important, because taking the island of Saipan, which was part of the Marianas, gave the United States an airbase that was within flight range of Japan. By this point, the United States had developed the most sophisticated four-engine bomber in the world, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. This bomber had more weaponry and greater range than its predecessor, the B-17 Stratofortress, which had been used in Europe to pummel German cities. American B-29s then began pounding Japanese cities regularly, reducing much of Tokyo to ashes with the resulting firestorms. The foreboding aspect of the fight for Saipan was the fanaticism of Japanese defenders. Almost 50,000 defenders were dug in so deeply that it took a division of Marines plus an army division to defeat them. (This was at least 40,000 people.) The Japanese defense was so fanatical that it ended with a suicidal counterattack on July 7, 1944, in which most of the Japanese soldiers ran willingly and enthusiastically into American weapons. Overall, the Japanese lost 46,000 killed in the Marianas to the United State’s 4,750.
The United States’ most important and difficult island battles were, however, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Iwo Jima was important to military planners, because it was about halfway between the Marianas and Japan and would have provided a much better air base than Saipan. With a base at Iwo Jima, American fighters would be able to escort bombers to Japan and back, making the bombing runs more effective. The American attack on Iwo Jima began in February 1945, and the soldiers encountered stiff resistance. 20,000 Japanese defenders had dug in even deeper than in the Marianas. In spite of repeated pounding with naval artillery Japanese defenders held firm, and Marines had to land on the beach in the face of severe Japanese resistance. By March, the island was completely taken, but the U.S. had lost 6,000 men. The Japanese had fought to almost the last man.
With Iwo Jima in hand, the Americans turned to Okinawa, the last stepping-stone to the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu. After pounding the island for days with bombers, the Americans launched an amphibious assault in March of 1945. The resulting battle lasted until July and was the deadliest for American forces since Guadalcanal. The Americans lost 12,000 dead and 36,000 injured, along with 34 ships sunk and another 368 damaged. The Japanese lost the greatest battleship on earth, the 72,000-ton Yamato, along with 100,000 dead. The nature of the battle and Japan’s desperate measures are awful to comprehend. The Yamato had been sent on a suicide mission, with only enough fuel for a one-way trip and no air cover. In the end, repeated hits by American bombs and torpedoes sank her and her crew. Japanese kamikaze pilots repeatedly hit American ships. And then Japanese fighters also introduced a new suicide weapon, the Baka, which was a rocket-propelled glider full of explosives. Japanese bombers towed these gliders to the target area, where the pilot turned on the engine and directed his flying bomb to the target. The difficulties of this campaign had a strong effect on America’s military planners, as they comprehended what an invasion of the home islands would cost in men and material.
Throughout July of 1945 the Americans bombed Japan to rubble. Night after night, American napalm raids torched Japanese cities, often creating firestorms in which thousands of people died. (A firestorm occurs when the flames are so intense that the fire consumes all the surrounding oxygen. Thus, people asphyxiate, even if the fire never actually gets them.) Coastal defenses in particular were attacked repeatedly, as if preparatory to an American invasion. The Americans, however, had decided not to invade, hoping to end the war quickly by a massive show of destructive power.
Just two weeks before being sworn in as president of the United States, Harry S. Truman had learned of a secret American program call the Manhattan Project, which had successfully developed the world’s first atomic bomb. As the United States planned the invasion of Japan, its most conservative estimate for soldiers killed was 100,000. The United States had lost 170,000 dead to that point in the Pacific War. Given the casualty estimates and the emerging rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, Harry Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. This would end the war quickly and give the Soviets something to worry about.
On August 6, 1945 a single B-29 called the Enola Gay took off from the Marianas Islands and headed toward Hiroshima with only one bomb in its bay. When that bomb exploded over Nagasaki, it destroyed five square miles of the city and killed 70,000 people, while injuring another 70,000. With the war clearly in its final moments, the Soviets joined in, declaring war on August 8 and sending an invasion force into Manchuria. The Soviets may have won the war in Europe, but they were nothing more than vultures in the Pacific. The Soviets took the Kuril Islands as payment for their tremendous efforts in defeating Japan. This was justified to the extent that the Japanese had stolen them from the Russians in 1855. (Japan still wants the southernmost Kuril Islands back.) At this point, the United States confronted a problem: the Japanese did not respond to the bomb, and no declaration of surrender was offered. So on August 9, 1945, another B-29, this one named Bock’s Car, took off from the Marianas for Nagasaki. This bomb was different from the first; it was made with plutonium, rather than uranium. The results were, however, no different. 1.8 square miles of the city were obliterated and 40,000 more people were killed. On August 10, the Japanese government issued a letter, agreeing to the United States’ call for unconditional surrender. The formal surrender ceremony was held on September 2. The most destructive war in the history of the world was over.

Lecture 24: Extermination

2008-01-31T07:37:00.000-08:00

Having covered the diplomatic collapse that led to war, as well as the course of the war in the west, we now turn our attention to the war in the east. The most important thing to understand about this war is that it was truly a war of extermination. When the Wehrmacht’s armies attacked the Soviet Union, it started a battle not only between economic systems but also races. The resulting brutality of the conflict is an important contextual factor in understanding the two armies’ conduct, as well as the horrors that Germans perpetrated in seeking to exterminate the world’s Jews. In the east, barbarity begat barbarity, and the human cost of this cycle is not easy to contemplate.
In spite of the treaty Germany and the Soviet Union had signed, both Hitler and Stalin saw it as a mere truce that put off the final battle to another day. Adolf Hitler had always intended to deal with the Communists, and the Soviets long believed that a final reckoning between Fascism and Communism was inevitable. Hitler’s original (secret) timetable had called for Germany to invade the Soviet Union during spring of 1941. The Wehrmacht’s generals thought Hitler was insane for taking on the Soviets before the British were undefeated. Soldiers to the core, however, they planned the campaign thoroughly, in spite of their private misgivings. The resulting war plan was delayed crucially, however, by problems in the Mediterranean, where Benito Mussolini had gotten himself into trouble, and in Yugoslavia, where a coup had ousted a pro-German government. Mussolini had been watching with growing jealousy, while Germany advanced almost unimpeded through northern Europe. In search of glory for himself and Fascist Italy, Mussolini sent troops to invade Greece in the spring of 1941. As usual, the invasion was a disaster, and the Germans had to bail out the Italians against stiff British resistance. Moreover, the Yugoslavian coup drew German troops into the Balkans, where they installed a pro-German government. By the time all this was done, however, Hitler had lost three months on his original timetable. This delay would prove fateful.
The invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, waited until June 22, 1941. On that day began the eastern half of the Second World War. And here we need to keep two things in mind. First, as I have already mentioned: this war of extermination. Adolf Hitler had long talked of the German need for living space (Lebensraum) in the east. In fact, Hitler’s ambitions had been published in Mein Kampf for all to see. And there was also a long tradition in Germany of seeing Slavs as an inferior race. With these two factors at work, the end result could only be that the Slavs would die and the Germans live. Second, however, we must also understand that the Soviet Union won the Second World War. However great both the aid and the sacrifices of the western powers were, only the Soviet Union confronted the Wehrmacht in all its fury. Until the allied landing in Normandy in June of 1944, the Germans sent 80% of their forces against the Soviets. It took the Soviet Union four years and the loss of 20 million people to achieve victory.
Now let us consider the conduct of this eastern war. From the German side, racism pushed the Germans into making a strategic error: they dismissed Ukrainian help. When the Wehrmacht arrived in the Ukraine, it was greeted as a liberator. You must understand here that the Ukrainians had long aspired to have an independent state. They were not ethnically Russian and would never consider themselves to be such. Moreover, the Ukrainians had suffered deeply under Josef Stalin, who in the 1920s had systematically starved the entire region, killing seven million Ukrainians died—a number still not forgotten. Other Slavic peoples also welcomed liberation, and there were Slavic soldiers in the German invasion force. Nonetheless, Nazi racism turned many potential allies into determined enemies.
The German assault caught the Soviets off guard, and Soviet losses in men and material were staggering. Although Stalin believed that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war one day, he had never actually prepared the Soviet armed forces for the coming conflict. In fact, the Soviet army got worse between 1939 and 1941, and when the conflict began it was completely outclassed in tanks and aircraft, though this would change. Its skills honed by training in Spain and Poland, the German army struck so swiftly and deeply that Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown and went into seclusion for 10 days, before reemerging in public life through a radio address. Stalin’s collapse only made things worse, as now there was no one to organize an effective defense. The Nazi attack was so hard and the Soviet collapse so complete, in fact, that Soviet trains filled with raw materials sent to Germany under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact kept heading westward, because no one told them stop. Luckily for the Soviets, they had a big country and simply retreated before the German advance, as had their ancestors did in the war against Napoleon. This had two important effects: it lengthened the German supply lines, and staved off defeat until the arrival of the notoriously harsh Russian winter. (When winter came it was a complete disaster for Germany, since the Wehrmacht had arrogantly and inexcusably failed to plan for a longer campaign. Thus, when it got cold, the Germans had no proper cold weather gear.)
As I noted earlier, the war took four years, and without going too deeply into the details, I note a few key moments in the conflict. The first was the battle of Leningrad. The Germans surrounded the city very quickly but it refused to surrender, keeping the Wehrmacht at bay until almost every last citizen starved to death. This battle signaled Soviet resolve to fight against the invaders and presented Germany with a strategic problem: it needed to capture Moscow, but it was bogged down in Leningrad. German generals told Adolf Hitler that it was better to leave Leningrad as it was and concentrate German forces against Moscow. This was the second key moment, as Hitler decided against his generals’ advice to split German forces and go after both Moscow and Leningrad. This assured that neither goal could be achieved, and the German offensive made it to Moscow only to find that city was empty. Hitler had not learned Napoleon’s bitter lessons, and now German forces had to confront cold, snow and ice without adequate supplies.
The next key moment came in early 1942 with the Battle of Stalingrad. Fought for most of 1942 and into 1943, this battle became a personal contest of wills between the two dictators, with Germans and Soviets killing each other over every last room in every last house on every last street. Strategically, the Germans should have fallen back and dug in for the winter. Once the weather cleared it would have been possible to take the city. Hitler’s zeal for total victory, however, doomed German troops to defeat and capture. More than anything else, this battle determined the course of the Second World War. Hitler’s stubbornness, even when it was clear that the battle was lost, allowed the Soviets to launch a counterattack that cut off the entire Sixth Army. Under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, the army surrendered in February 1943, costing Germany 300,000 trained soldiers. This loss could never be made good, and it was now clear that the tide had turned.
The Soviets’ long march to Berlin began with the victory at Stalingrad, and they pushed back the German army back relentlessly over the next two years. The most important battle in the Soviet offensive came in July 1943, when the largest tank battle ever fought in history occurred outside the city of Kursk. 6000 tanks, 4000 planes, and 2 million soldiers took part. Led by General Georgii Zhukov, the Soviets smashed the German army with a powerful pincer movement, hitting German forces from two sides with massive firepower. The was no coming back from this defeat, and at this point, even Nazi fanatics such as Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbels saw that the war was lost. Nothing could stop the Soviets from getting to Berlin, which they finally did by May of 1945.
Now we turn briefly to the end of the war in the west. The trend was already clear after the Battle of Kursk in 1943. Germany could never rebuild its army, and a long march to Berlin ensued, though the Wehrmacht miraculously managed to recover from repeated hammer blows to mount a defense until the very end. The war’s final end was hastened, however, with Operation Overlord, the allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, which was also called D-Day. Although the western allies had sent large quantities of material aid from 1941 on, this was the first time that the Soviet Union received direct military help from the allies, and it was a huge effort. The allied armada included 1,200 ships, 10,000 planes, 4,126 landing craft, 804 transport ships, and hundreds of amphibious and other special purpose tanks. 156,000 troops were landed in Normandy, 132,500 came by ship across the English Channel, and 23,500 were dropped by air. By comparison, the British fight in Africa and the allied invasions of Italy at the end of 1943 had been hard-fought, but they were not essential. After the landing, allied troops broke out and advanced steadily on Berlin, with one exception. From Dec. 16, 1944 to Jan. 28, 1945 Germany waged a counterattack in Belgium called the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler had marshaled his reserves and then sprang them on allied troops. The German advance put a good scare into everybody, and there is some evidence that the Soviet Union briefly considered suing for peace. If Germany still had such reserves after fighting for so long, what else did the Wehrmacht have in store? This attack ultimately failed thanks to some steady leadership on the American side and a lack of fuel and ammunition on the German side. More importantly, Germany now lacked any material or human reserves. Although the fighting continued, with both sides advancing on the German capital city, the war clearly over. Germany’s surrender came on May 5, 1945, so-called V-E Day.
Now that we have reached the end of the war in Europe, we can consider some of the horrors that the Germans perpetrated between 1939 and 1945. Suffice it to say that combatants and non-combatants alike suffered under this regime, being subjected to things such as systematic rape, mass slaughter, physical torture, cruel medical experiments, slave labor, and for Europe’s Jews genocide. Genocide was not new to the world at the time, and the Holocaust certainly was not the last time that one people would try to exterminate another on the basis of race. It was, however, the first and only time that an industrialized, civilized, nation-state had tried to exterminate an entire group of people. At the war’s end six million Jews had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Now we must bring together this awful fact with some of themes I have discussed during the last few lectures.
Nazi Germany’s war on the Jews must be considered from two perspectives. The first was Germany’s vicious anti-Semitic politics. As we have already discussed, anti-Semitism had deep roots in Germany, but the political and racial anti-Semitism that motivated the Holocaust began in the Imperial area and was intensified by defeat in WWI. The other factor was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, for with it, Hitler’s government now had control over most of the world’s Jews. With that we will now trace the fate Europe’s Jews from the rise of the Nazi party through the end of the war.
As we have already discussed, the Nazis were an anti-Semitic party and they used anti-Semitism as a political weapon in the Weimar era. The Nazis seized power in January 1933 and by March of 1933 the first concentration camp opened in Dachau, though it originally housed primarily the regime’s political opponents. Also in March 1933 the Nazis organized boycotts of Jewish businesses. By 1935, with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, Jews lost all civil rights in Germany. (Jews were defined as anyone who had one Jewish grandparent.) In 1938, these laws were extended to Austria. On Nov. 9, 1938 the Nazis organized an attack on all Jewish property in Germany in a pogrom called Kristallnacht, which means crystal night, in reference to the broken shards of Jewish store windows. At this point, prominent Jews were being sent to Germany’s growing network of concentration camps as both political and racial enemies.
Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism became even more horrible, however, after the invasion of Poland. Confronted with large Jewish populations the Nazis ordered mass executions of Jews by the military and began experimenting with new ways to kill people that were deemed more efficient than bullets to the head. The key moment in the Holocaust’s evolution was, however, the invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, Germany had control of all of Eastern Europe, and Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s more prominent henchman, was already calling for a “final solution of the Jewish question.” In that year, the gassing of Jews with the chemical Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous concentration camp in southern Poland. However horrible these killings were, they were still not reflective of a full-blown policy of genocide; that would come later. On January 20, 1942, a conference was held outside of Berlin at a lake called the Wannsee. At this conference the Nazis made the fateful decision to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, whom they estimated to number around 10 million. After this meeting an entire network not merely of concentration camps but also of death camps appeared throughout Europe, bearing names such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. The distinction is significant, since most of the Holocaust’s victims (probably 80%) were killed within the relatively short period of 18 months. The Holocaust was also a process--one that became more intense and deadly at the war progressed. By the time Nazi Germany was finally defeated, 6 million people had been systematically murdered for being Jewish.
The world began to hear about the horrors of these camps as the Soviets liberated them one by one, during their long march to Berlin. To this day, there is still no complete explanation for the camps themselves, nor has there been any way to derive any meaning from them, nor from the war in general. In the context of previous lectures, one thing we can say is that the Holocaust destroyed the last bit of optimism that was left in Europe. As the German-Jewish refugee and member of the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno put it, “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
As for the war in general, it completely shattered the remnants of Europe’s power. The colonialism and imperialism that had marked Europe’s rise from the sixteenth century on was now definitely over, as France, Britain, and Belgium in particular could no longer afford their empires. (For example, it is no accident that British colonial rule in India ended just a few years after the war’s end in 1947.) These empires had been valuable resources for the west, providing men and material for the war effort. Many subject peoples recognized this and began to see independence as something they had earned through their efforts. We will talk more about de-colonization and the third world in another lecture. Nonetheless, to return to the big picture, Europe had put the world at its disposal for the last time. Overall, 61 countries fought in the war and 1.7 billion people, three-fourths of the world’s population at the time, took part in it in some way. 110 million people were mobilized for military service. A rough consensus has emerged about the war’s costs. In terms of money spent, the cost came to $1 trillion dollars, which made it more expensive than all previous wars combined. The human cost, not including the 6 million Jews killed in Nazi death camps, is estimated at 55 million dead, roughly 25 million military and 30 million civil. Much of this war was fought in Europe, so the direct economic costs could not but have fatally weakened the Continent. In another of history’s ironies, it was Europe that made the United States and the Soviet Union into superpowers. As the only two powers with almost inexhaustible reserves, they were the only ones left standing when the war ended, and it was the competition between the two behemoths that dominated world politics until only 15 years ago.
And then there were the cultural costs of the war’s horrors. Germany, which had developed one of the world’s most admired cultures in the nineteenth century, had sunk into barbarism for which there was neither explanation nor excuse. In addition, many other societies were implicated in Nazi Germany’s crimes through their collaboration in rounding up and killing Jews. After this horrible conflict Europe lost whatever moral authority it had once possessed. Ellie Wiesel’s Night will give you some sense of both the horror that the victims confronted and the difficulties that Europeans later had to process them. Contemplating the war and the Holocaust meant that nineteenth-century optimism was officially dead for good. European civilization seemed to have little left to offer. The only true feeling that was left to anyone was, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, la nausée. Next time we will complete our discussion of the Second World War by considering the war in the Pacific and the birth of the nuclear world.

Lecture 23: Diplomacy’s Failure

2008-01-31T07:36:00.002-08:00

Last week we talked about the origins of fascism and our two key examples were Italy and Germany. Today, we want to bring together our understanding of fascism with Germany’s behavior between 1933 and 1945. As we have already discussed, Germany was a revisionist power from 1919 on. Rather than integrating Germany into a European-wide security system, the Versailles Treaty isolated Germany and repeatedly inflamed national passions. Had Germany been only as powerful as, say, Rumania, Versailles’ effects would not have been a problem. Germany was, however, Western Europe’s most powerful state, and as such its revisionist agenda could only cause trouble. When Germany’s power and grievances were wedded to an aggressive nationalist ideology, European and worldwide instability was the result. Things were supposed to have gone differently. The Treaty of Versailles was supposed to end all wars. It didn’t, and the main reason for this was the Nazi German state. When war broke out in 1939, no one in Europe, including many if not most Germans, wanted another war. In fact, no one could even conceive of another war. Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler understood this state of affairs better than anyone else, and as the head of a powerful and revisionist power, he was in a position to exploit the possibilities it presented.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in a country that confronted significant internal and external problems. Internally, its economy and politics were a disaster. Externally, it had a list of foreign policy grievances. Hitler would address all of Germany’s problems—one way or another. Internally, Hitler alleviated many of Germany’s economic problems, at least in the short term. To that end, he used public works programs, a massive rearmament program, and public scapegoating of Jews to convince Germans that he was their economic savior. Hitler’s economic policies were unsustainable over the long term, however, though most people failed to recognize that fact. And the personal effect on Germany’s Jews, who were often super patriots, was horrible. (One of history’s more vicious ironies is that contrary to what the Nazis may have believed, one effect of German unification was that Jews in central and eastern Europe embraced the glory of German culture completely, becoming the most conservative of German nationalists. On the one hand, many Jews were deeply sorry to see Imperial Germany disappear. There were Jews in Berlin, for example, who celebrated the Kaiser’s birthday every year, during the Weimar era. On the other hand, German Jews cultivated their own national hierarchy within German nationalism. Newly arrived Jews from eastern Europe who spoke German with a Yiddish accent and clung to Jewish culinary and sartorial traditions were referred to dismissively as Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews.) These realities aside, Hitler was not content with simply rearranging Germany in accord with his demented ideas about race; he also wanted to rework the post-World War I order. To understand how he achieved this, we must turn to the successes of his diplomacy and the failures of his counterparts’ diplomacy.
Adolf Hitler was a genius when it came to judging the strength of other people’s will. He understood that no one in Europe, least of all its major statesmen, was willing to challenge his demands. Rather than stand up to Hitler, other countries responded by trying to understand the nature of his grievances before giving him everything that he wanted. This was known as appeasement and was supposedly a more rational way of doing business. For many European policy makers war was the ultimate evil, which meant that it was better to talk and yield than enforce one’s will and risk war. (The term appeasement has an interesting history of its own. Before WWII it had a positive connotation. After WWII, of course, this word has taken on a negative connotation. Whatever else states may do, they do not appease other states, for fear that it will lead to further bad behavior.) Thus, Adolf Hitler brilliantly exploited the Western powers’ desire to avoid war by constantly threatening them with it.
In this diplomatic environment, revising the most onerous aspects of the Versailles treaty was the first item on Hitler’s agenda. His first big move came in 1933, when he pulled Germany out of the League of Nations. Germany had only been admitted in 1926 as part of the rapprochement unfolding between Germany and France. This was a fatal move for the League, since it now lacked Europe’s most powerful state. (It already lacked the world’s greatest power, the United States, since the U.S. Senate had refused to ratify American entry into the League.) The world had already seen how weak the League was, when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and the League fulminated while doing nothing. This set the diplomatic tone for the 1930s. The Soviet Union gained admission in 1934, but by then Italy had stopped attending council meetings and would go even further. In 1935, Benito Mussolini sent troops into Ethiopia, essentially daring the League to do something about it. It did nothing. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland and was expelled from the League for its behavior. Stalin did not mind, and over the next few pages we will see exactly why.
An example of the League’s fundamental weakness was its relations with Germany and the Soviet Union. During the 1920s both countries were diplomatic pariahs. Germany had been saddled with responsibility for the First World War and was denied admission into the League of Nations. The Soviets, for their part, were reviled for being Communist. None of the other major powers wanted to do business with a state whose official ideology called for violent overthrow of the capitalist system. Thus, the two biggest powers on the Continent were isolated and angry, a situation that ultimately drove them together. In 1922, Germany and Russia reached a series of agreements now called retrospectively the Treaty of Rapallo. The essence of the deal was that Germany offered military training and industrial expertise to the Soviets in exchange for the right to train its armed forces and test its weapons on Russian soil. Thus, although the German army remained small, its tactics became ever more lethal, and when Adolf Hitler increased military spending in the 1930s, the German armed forces quickly became the world’s premier fighting force.
Against this backdrop we can better understand Hitler’s aggressive policies. His next step after leaving the League was to gain full control of German territory. In 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland by sending in German troops. The Treaty of Versailles had demilitarized the Rhineland, in response to France’s pronounced desire to secure its borders. This was a legacy of France’s defeat in 1870-1. When Prussia unified Germany, one practical outcome was that the French could not counter German power by themselves. They needed allies, and if they lacked them at any given moment, had to choose between backing down, or suffering military defeat. Nonetheless, Hitler’s move into the Rhineland is often considered one of the greatest lost opportunities in the history of international relations. Although the fundamental strategic situation was in Germany’s favor, the remilitarization was a giant bluff. Hitler knew that at that moment Germany was not strong enough militarily to oppose a concerted allied response. German troops were, in fact, given orders to retreat at the slightest sign of resistance. The allies, not knowing this, did nothing, and German troops entered the area amidst great fanfare.
Hitler’s political triumph had important diplomatic consequences. The Belgians were a French ally and had agreed to build an extension of the Maginot Line through their country to the sea. France’s lack of nerve and German diplomatic pressure, however, convinced the Belgians not only to cancel the alliance but also to pull out of the Maginot project. (In France’s defense, we should also note that the British had made quite clear that they were unwilling to go to war over the Rhineland issue.) The upshot was that France’s great defensive network simply stopped at the Belgian border, which made it easy for the Germans to sweep around it later and pin the French army against its own defenses. The French could have simply completed the line within their own borders, but here two problems arose. First, the French feared that cutting off the Belgians would drive them into Germany’s arms. Second, France completing the original section had already strained French finances and the potential diplomatic consequences of completing it made the cost seem extreme.
From the Rhineland Hitler then turned to the next great diplomatic problem, Austria. Prussia had denied Austria a central role in German politics by its victory at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866. Thus, from 1866 until 1918, Austria was a multi-national state centered on a German-speaking region that was excluded from Germany. After World War I, however, Austria-Hungary was broken up into a series of smaller states, the largest among which were Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Austria was now a rump state without access to the ocean, and many believed that it was too small and isolated to be economically viability. This impression was false. Today’s Austria has exactly the same boundaries and is quite wealthy. Austria’s main problems were the Treaty of Versailles, which saddled Austria with a reparations bill that it could not pay, and the general economic crisis of the 1920s.
Adolf Hitler was, of course, an Austrian native and adding it to his great German Reich was a heady dream. Austria’s political economic problems made it an easy target; like Weimar Germany, it had descended into chaos during the 1920s and 30s, which pushed Austrian politics to political extremes, with rival left-wing and right-wing armies clashing in the streets of Vienna. One result of these troubles was the victory of authoritarianism. Austria had always been a conservative region, but during the 1930s politicians such as Engelbert Dollfuss arose who believed that authoritarianism was the only way to save Austria. Dollfuss was a member of the conservative Christian Social Party and became Chancellor in 1932. Borrowing heavily from Italian fascism he founded an authoritarian umbrella organization called the Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front) that was supposed to unite all the conservative parties against the left. Dollfuss kept the left at bay, but he was not able to control the right.
As the Nazi party became more powerful in Germany, so too did the Austrian Nazis. In 1934, the Nazis held a coup and executed Dollfuss. The coup failed, because Benito Mussolini forced Adolf Hitler to disavow the conspirators. Dollfuss’ conservative successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg enjoyed more success early on in controlling the right, but was unable to maintain Austrian independence against German pressure. In 1936, the Austrian government signed an agreement that unified its foreign policy with Germany’s. In February 1938, Schuschnigg went to Berchtesgaden intent on getting Adolf Hitler to stop supporting Nazi plots in Austria. Adolf Hitler humiliated Schuschnigg, flying into a wild rage and demanding a series of unpalatable concessions, before sending him home. Schuschnigg tried to save his government by calling for a plebiscite on unification with Germany. Hitler responded quickly, however, ordering an invasion in March 1938. This is what the Germans call Anschluss: Austria was now part of the German Reich. In spite of the Versailles treaty’s specific prohibition of such unification, the allies did nothing while Nazi Germany revised Europe’s territorial arrangements.
As before, however, Hitler remained unsatisfied. Another one of the great historical problems left over from WWI was the presence of roughly 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia. Created after the breakup of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia was a multi-national state that included Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians, in addition to many Germans in a mountainous area known as the Sudetenland. Here we really begin to see Hitler’s genius for bluster as a negotiating tactic. He began by making vague threats against the Czechoslovak state, trumping up charges about discrimination and violence against the resident German minority. It is instructive to note that Hitler never actually asked for anything nor threatened any specific action. This would have made his position a matter of negotiation. No, instead he raged against a small neighboring state and waited for the western allies to give him everything he wanted—which, of course, they promptly did. In late September 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister flew to Munich and betrayed the Czechoslovak state in the name of peace. Together with the French Premier, Édouard Daladier, Chamberlain gave Hitler everything he wanted, turning the entire Sudetenland over to Germany. Chamberlain then returned to Britain triumphantly waving the treaty he and Hitler had signed, proclaiming that it guaranteed “peace in our time.” In exchange, the Czechs got a promise that the British would defend what was left of their state. It was an empty promise.
One could argue that the Sudetenland was full of Germans and if they wanted to be in Germany they should be allowed to join. (National self-determination was, after all, a basic principle behind Wilson’s Fourteen Points, though it had been unevenly applied with respect to Germans.) But whether there were sufficient Germans in the Sudetenland to justify this is beside the point, since true national determination by the Germans was a practical impossibility. Without the Bohemian Mountains under its control, the Czech state had no defensible borders. Hitler’s charge that Germans were being sorely mistreated was bogus, but the Sudeten Germans did have legitimate grievances, as local Czech officials openly practiced ethnic discrimination against the German minority. Discontent over their treatment led to the rise of a German ethnic party called the Sudeten German Home Front (Sudentendeutsche Heimatfront) under the leadership of a man named Konrad Heinlein. Heinlein actively campaigned for German annexation of the Sudetenland and in 1935 his party received 2/3 of the Sudeten German vote, making it the second largest party in the Czech chamber. Under domestic and foreign pressure, the Czech government yielded to almost all German and Sudeten demands, granting the Sudetenland almost complete autonomy. Unfortunately, there was no reaching an accommodation with Adolf Hitler, especially after the Munich agreement. Annexing the Sudetenland was not Hitler’s real goal; he wanted all of Czechoslovakia. On March 14, 1939, Nazi troops invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia while the West again did nothing. Britain did not want war, and France, fearful of confronting Germany all alone, let her Czech ally be dismantled.
Having reached this point we need to consider how Hitler’s triumphs emboldened not only Hitler but also all Germans. Hitler saw each of these victories as vindication of his foresight and diplomatic skills; that is, his head kept getting bigger. Domestically, too, Hitler was looking more and more like a genius. He had remilitarized German soil, brought distant Germans back into the Reich, and increased employment, and all of this was done without firing a shot. One historian has even suggested that had Hitler never gone to war, he would be considered an even greater statesman that Bismarck.
As you already know, this was hardly the end for Hitler, since the problem of Poland still existed. As part of the Versailles treaty a Polish state with access to the sea was created. The problem was, however, that in order to give this state access to the sea, the new Poland had to go through majority-German territories, specifically the city of Danzig. Thus, East Prussia was split away from Germany and Danzig was declared a free international city. The Danzig issue was a real thorn in the German nationalist eye. Not only was German territory being taken away, but it was also given to the Poles, a people whom many Germans had never liked. The feeling was, of course, mutual. The Poles, proud of their new independence, refused to return the so-called Polish Corridor, even though they did not really need it. Thus, national pride kept both sides from cutting a reasonable deal.
This was not, however, Poland’s real problem. The bigger issue was that both Germany and the Soviet Union had designs on Poland. On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union reached a wide-ranging accord on matters such as the future of Poland and economic cooperation. The accord had two parts. The first was a non-aggression pact that was to last for ten years and included a trade agreement that was very favorable to Germany. The second carved up Eastern Europe. Germany got 2/3 of Poland, while Russia took the other third, as well the Baltic States and Finland. This accord shocked the world. Mortal enemies had signed it. That Nazism and Communism, two totalizing and hostile worldviews with a deep antipathy to each other, could make a deal threw everybody’s worldview out of whack. Moreover, these two states had agreed to make the Polish state disappear from the map once again, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and occupied roughly half the country. Immediately thereafter, the Soviet Union invaded from the East not only taking over the rest of Poland but also snuffing out the Baltic States’ experiment with democratic freedom. When Britain and France responded with a declaration of war, World War II was officially underway.
The war’s early months of the war are best characterized by two German words, Blitzkrieg and Sitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, was a method of attack that Germany had perfected during the Spanish Civil war, and which relied on heavy aerial bombardment and concentrated use of armor. Germany’s Blitzkrieg in Poland was savage and quick, as Nazi dive-bombers and artillery hammered Polish cities into submission, and German armored columns smashed brave Polish resistance. The battle for Poland war lasted ten days.
Confronted with yet another act of naked aggression, Britain and France were finally forced to fight a war their policies had encouraged. Only, once again, neither side could demonstrate sufficient will to fight. Instead, British and French troops hunkered down behind the Maginot line, expecting that the German army would be smashed on the complicated network of defenses. Thus, began what the Germans called Sitzkrieg, or sitting war, as the Brits and the French did nothing, while the Germans on the other side of the Rhine waited until the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were finished with Poland in the East.
Although he did not send troops to attack the Western Allies right away, Hitler kept busy in other areas. In April 1940, he launched attacks on Denmark and Norway. Denmark could offer no resistance and surrendered immediately. In Norway, the Germans launched a large amphibious invasion, but suffered heavy initial losses, due to determined Norwegian resistance. Nonetheless, German airpower was so overwhelming that the Norwegian resistance collapsed within a few days. On May 9 and 10, Hitler turned west, invading Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. This invasion allowed German troops to swing around the Maginot line and cut off a host of British and French troops, who then fled to Dunkirk, where they were evacuated on anything that would float. The German army’s failure to pursue the retreating troops to the beach was an enormous blunder, as basically the entire French and British armies were evacuated to fight another day. The equipment that the allies left behind could be replaced, but dead soldiers and POW’s could not. The decision to halt the advance would haunt the German war effort, though on June 14 German troops still entered Paris. On June 22, France surrendered. The north of France became occupied territory and the south became a puppet state, led by Marshal Pétain in the city of Vichy.
The problem for Hitler now was, however, that the Brits refused to give up. Germany had no way to invade the British Isles, so it hoped that air attacks would force the Brits to their knees. Unfortunately for the Nazis, Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister on May 11, 1940, and under his leadership that simply was not going to happen. This set the stage for the great air war that became known as the Battle of Britain. The battle’s early stages went rather well for the Germans. German bombing raids concentrated on airfields, factories and radar installations, which almost did bring Britain to its knees. But this was not working fast enough for the German leadership, so the Germans changed tactics, turning on British cities—the idea being that a terror campaign would break the British will. This shift in tactics allowed the British to survive, since they could now produce enough aircraft to meet their losses, find German planes with their radar, and send their own planes up on airfields that were still working. The Germans, by contrast, were flying over hostile territory. By the summer of 1941, the Brits had clearly won this battle; like Napoleon before him, Adolf Hitler found that invading Britain was an impossible task. A strategic stalemate ensued that would only be altered by the entry of two greater powers into the war, the United States and the Soviet Union. We will trace these events and what they meant over the next two lectures.

Lecture 22: The Spanish Civil War

2008-01-31T07:36:00.001-08:00

In 1898, Spain and the United States went to war. The outcome was never in doubt, as Spain had long ceased to be in the first rank of world powers, and the United States would soon openly join it. In the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, Spain renounced all claims to Cuba and ceded Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States. In addition, the United States paid Spain $20 million dollars for control over the Philippines. This war marked the final stage of Spain’s long decline into political and economic impotence, which had begun with the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659.
Spain’s decline was rooted in long-term structural problems in the Spanish empire and economy. The Spanish Empire was never as commercial as the British or the French; it was always based more on plunder and extraction than trade. Moreover, Spain had never industrialized with the same vigor as the other European powers; it lagged badly behind Italy, for example, which was the weakest of Europe’s major industrial states. Thus, with the last of the empire gone, Spain’s economy virtually collapsed. Gross income inequality and little industrial or agricultural production left Spain in a cul-de-sac, from which it would not escape until the European Union financed its modernization in the 1990s.
The war with the United States had significant effects on Spanish politics. After the loss, Spain’s constitutional monarchy appeared weak and ineffectual, and numerous calls came from both the extreme left and extreme right for drastic political change. This was not good news, since Spain’s constitutional monarchical government had already been born into instability. The constitution went into effect in 1878, after a tumultuous period of conflict in which liberals of various stripes and rural traditionalists known as Carlists fought for control of the government. The Carlists were put down in the end, but the upshot was that the Spanish military became ever more central to daily Spanish politics, since the need for order began to overwhelm desires for liberal democracy. The military accepted the Constitution of 1878, but over the next decades it watched carefully for signs of weakness. One person who watched closely was a young military man named Francisco Franco. Franco came from a naval family and wanted to pursue a naval career. Unfortunately, the Americans had sunk the Spanish navy in the year of his birth, which caused the Naval Academy to scale back its admissions. Thus, in 1914, Franco chose to enter the Military Academy, a decision that would have important consequences thirty years later.
In 1902, Alfonso XIII came to throne amidst promises to uphold the constitution and provide moderate reform. The trouble was, however, that the constitution was being attacked from all sides. The strongest attacks came from the left, as Socialists, Catalonians, and Basques all wanted a new constitution, though for different reasons. The Catalonians and Basques, for example, both wanted independence from Madrid. To this mix were added Anarchists and Syndicalists, who both wanted to overthrow all government. The only difference between them was in the choice of method. These two movements later merged, becoming a destructive force in large part because they did not shy from using violence. And there were, of course, still remnants of the traditionalist right that had caused so much trouble from the 1830 to the 1860s. Thus, by the early twentieth century Spain witnessed street violence of all sorts, coming from all sides and aimed against the existing constitution.
The unstable political situation was then exacerbated by the pressures of two wars, only one of which Spain joined. In 1909, Morocco, Spain’s last colony, rose up in rebellion, and the Spanish instituted a military draft. This offended an already agitated population and threw much of the country into turmoil. The Catalonians, for their part, used the turmoil to gain more provincial autonomy. Then in 1914 World War I broke out and the Spanish government remained neutral. This had three important effects. First, many saw this as a national humiliation: the biggest fight in the world was going on and the great conquerors were sitting it out. Second, Spain now entered a period of rapid industrialization, as the Entente Powers ordered large quantities of materials from the Spanish. Third, industrialization brought to Spain, for the first time, a large working class that, in turn, became a source of political agitation. This was particularly the case later in the war, as European inflationary pressures caused real wages to fall.
In the meantime, the war in Morocco was not going well. Morocco’s tribes were not so much interested in independence as some form of autonomy. Spain’s politicians were willing to cut a deal, but Spain’s generals felt that military victory was preferable, so they launched a further attack that resulted in a major defeat and massacre. In 1921, local armies destroyed a Spanish army at the Battle of Annual. Opposition party leaders were determined to use the massacre against the royal government and parliament launched an investigation that was to be published. Before it could be made public, however, a Spanish general named Primo de Rivera staged a coup and established a military dictatorship. The Spanish King Alfonso XIII supported the coup, since he was tired of politicians bringing nothing but disorder to Spain.
Rivera’s military dictatorship was both brutal and efficient in its search for stability. The new government worked quickly to put down local revolts and strikes. The repression was extensive. People on both the left and the right were routinely executed through asphyxiation. Universities were closed. Catalonia was retaken. In Morocco the government showed a similar iron fist. In September 1925, Spanish troops landed at Alhucemas and defeated the most powerful tribal leader Abd el-Krim. By 1927, Spain had occupied all of Morocco.
Policies favorable to the Catholic Church were also put in place in order to control the populace better. The Spanish Church was an extremely conservative institution. It dominated education, which meant that very little science was taught in Spanish schools, and the poor were not even taught to read. As late as 1927, Spanish schoolchildren were taught that voting for the liberals would damn them to Hell. The Spanish church was also a major property holder, having control over many Spanish farms and even 1/3 of Spanish industry. Thus, revolutionary forces in Spain were fighting not only the state but also the church. When the government finally fell, much violence was directed at the church and its properties.
The government also sought stability through economic reforms. Internally it tried to reform local government structures and supported extensive public works programs to curb unemployment and improve Spain’s rotten infrastructure. Rivera also tried to help businesses by protecting local industries. But he also did a good deal of damage to local business through an intrusive bureaucratic government. More importantly, perhaps, Rivera was lucky. During the first years of his rule a European–wide economic expansion increased demand for Spanish products. As economic depression loomed, however, Rivera came to be expendable. Both the army and the king abandoned him, and on Jan 28, 1930, he was forced to resign.
Alfonso XIII was now left with few options. His support of the dictatorship made him extremely unpopular, and the subsequent military regimes of General Dámaso Berenguer and Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar were too weak to keep order. Plots to overthrow the monarchy proliferated among political liberals and the military. Then municipal elections held in April of 1931 showed that public sentiment was turning Republican. Alfonso abdicated and left Spain rather than fight a civil war.
Thus, in 1931, Spain became a Republic for the second time. (The first Republic had lasted from 1873 to 1876.) Under the new constitutions, the Catalans were given their long sought autonomy, and a major land reform program was put into place. Unfortunately, this did not bring long-term stability. Anarcho-syndicalist violence continued to plague public life, and the Spanish economy did not have enough strength to provide consistent growth. In addition, an anti-religious backlash turned many Catholics away from the new government. Catholics were deprived of public office and all religious groups were prohibited from engaging in business of any sort. Ironically, the constitution’s extension of the franchise to women also created problems. Traditionally, the Spanish church had provided one of the few options for women to engage in public life. The government’s attacks on the church, thus, turned Spanish women against the government. In addition, the government also tolerated a slate of church burnings in 1931, which outraged even political moderates. One result of this outrage was the creation of an umbrella conservative party called CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.) These two factors had a significant effect on the next few elections, as conservative majorities were elected, which only emboldened the extreme left to engage in more violence. Spain, like Italy and Germany in the 1920s was becoming ever more politically polarized.
An example of this polarization is the growing battle between the Anarcho-Syndicalists and right-wing groups. In 1932, José Antonio Primo de Rivera (the dictator’s son) founded the Falange, Spain’s fascist party. This party engaged in a series of terror operations against the Anarcho-Syndicalists, making Spain’s problems with street violence even worse. The rise of right-wing violence then culminated in another attempt coup on August 10, 1932 in Seville by the Spanish general José Sanjurjo, which was successfully put down. At the same time, however, the Republican government confronted even more serious problems on the left, as the Spanish Socialists left the governing coalition, because they were tired of having to negotiate with the liberals. In the elections of November 1933, the left was split by its division into hardcore Communists, Anarchists, and Socialists, while the right under the CEDA umbrella was becoming ever more unified.
In October 1934, Asturian miners rose up in revolt against the conservative electoral victory. This was a crucial moment in Spanish history, because it set the political landscape for the rest of the republic. On the one hand, the fear of a Red Rebellion now galvanized the right and led the conservative government to repress the strikers brutally. The left responded by creating its own umbrella organization, the Popular Front, which was expressly opposed to fascism. So now both the extreme left and right were represented by umbrella groups, while support for the political center withered away. In the elections of 1936, the popular front won a very narrow victory over the right. The policy result was that the government engaged in more land reform, and gave autonomy to both Catalonia and Basque territories. If that were not enough to outrage the right, the Popular Front was also hostile to business, which depressed the Spanish economy and led to greater unemployment. The result was more instability and greater violence. The rightists engaged in a terror campaign against the government. The Communists refused to give any support to the government, since they wanted a complete revolution. In the countryside things were out of control, as Spanish peasants spontaneously seized all the land they could get their hands on. Political murders also proliferated: well before the Civil War actually began 269 prominent people had been murdered by political enemies.
On July 17, 1936, the Spanish government had clearly lost control of the situation and the military moved to seize power. The military wanted to strike swiftly, but it had a problem: the Spanish army was in Morocco and the Spanish navy was sympathetic to the political left, which meant that the troops were stuck where they were. The resolution to this problem came from Germany and Portugal. Adolf Hitler sent cargo planes to Morocco that then flew the troops back to Spain, and Portugal’s dictator Antonio Salazar allowed aid to flow through his country. The military landed in Spain expecting to win easily, but they were surprised by workers uprisings in Spain’s major cities against the coup. When the smoke cleared, Spain was divided in half, with the Nationalist forces, led by a thirty-eight year old general named Francisco Franco, holding the West and Republican (or government) forces controlling the East.
The stalemate in Spain invited intervention from Europe’s great powers. Spain was in a strategic position from everyone’s point of view. Great Britain wanted access to Spain’s natural resources, especially its iron reserves. (This was an old story, as both the Romans and Carthaginians had coveted those reserves as well.) France wanted a friendly government on its borders, and since the French government was led by the socialist Leon Blum, a left-wing government was a natural ally. Nazi Germany, for its part, wanted to box the French in by installing a hostile government in Madrid. Italy wanted a conservative government in Spain both as a practical political matter and as a chance to gain foreign policy prestige. Finally, the Soviet Union, which was still a diplomatic pariah, wanted at the very least a left-wing government in Spain if not a Communist one.
In the end, however, only the German, Italian, and Soviet governments provided any real assistance. This was a bigger problem for the Spanish left than the right. Great Britain was under a conservative administration that found the idea of supporting a proto-communist government distasteful. In France, Blum was under political siege from France’s right wing and was in no position to offer support. And then the Soviet Union’s aid was not very useful. Soviet forces flew planes, drove tanks, and offered logistical advice, but they were under strict orders not to engage directly in battle. Moreover, the Soviets sold materials to the Republicans, rather than donating them, demanding gold in payment. This depleted the Republicans’ gold reserves at the very time when they needed them most.
The Germans and the Italians, however, provided direct support. 12,000 German troops went to Spain, and the Germans provided over 80% of Spain’s air power. The Germans were especially interested in testing their equipment and battle techniques, since unlike the French and British they had no colonial empire that could be used as a military training ground. The most infamous such test was the bombing of Guernica in April 1937. This bombing was much less deadly than has been portrayed, but it became an anti-fascist icon, particularly with Pablo Picasso’s unveiling of his famous painting. The Italians, for their part, sent 70,000 troops, who were officially volunteers, to fight on the nationalist side, though they were miserable failures. There was also another source of outside support, foreign intellectuals and activists who joined the International Brigades. About 40,000 foreign writers, thinkers, journalists, and activists flocked to Spain to fight fascism. Among the people who made up this contingent were Ernest Hemingway, W.H. Auden, and George Orwell. The war was hardly a glorious affair. In Homage to Catalonia (1938) George Orwell offered a stark picture of the war, depicting it as both a boring and bloody affair, marked as much by internal fights as military engagements in the mud. During 1937 and 1938, 500,000 people died before the Nationalists took Republican strongholds in Barcelona and Madrid in early 1939.
The war’s end was anticlimactic. Once having defeated his opponents, Franco sent the Germans and Italians home and observed strict diplomatic neutrality in the coming conflict. This was due largely to Spain’s particular political circumstances. Franco may have been right-wing, but he was not a fascist and claimed no spiritual connection to world fascism. Instead, he was an authoritarian leader of a conservative coalition that included fascists, as well as churchmen, aristocrats, monarchists, Carlists, and military men. The Republican side was just as diverse. Its coalition consisted of liberals, socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, Basques, Catalans, and Communists. Had either the fascists or the communists been able to gain control of the Spanish government, things might have been much worse for Spain in the coming years. Ironically, however, the fractured nature of Spanish politics also provided the justification for continued political repression. Franco saw no way out of his coalition other than a dictatorship. Keeping the various factions in line, from the right and the left, mandated, as he saw, it a strongman. And this form of politics dominated Spanish public life until 1975, when Franco died.

Lecture 21: Mussolini and Hitler: Dictators as the Icons of Modernity

2008-01-31T07:35:00.001-08:00

Fascism was a global cultural and political phenomenon in the 1920s and 30s. Like Communism it was a reaction to the crisis of Liberalism that we have already discussed, rushing into the cultural vacuum left by the Great War. Although it began in central and eastern Europe, it eventually extended around the world into many different countries and national traditions. Put broadly, fascism was a mass political movement that dominated central, southern, and eastern Europe between the period 1919 to 1945, as well as enjoying significant support in western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North and South America. Fascism was never an ideological movement, but its individual national components shared a number of important characteristics. First, all fascist movements were based in the nation. Second, all fascist movements contained an element of socialism. Third, all fascist movements were popular, emphasizing the state’s concern for the people’s welfare. Fourth, all these movements were officially classless; that is, fascism adopted from communism the dream of a classless society, but dressed it up in nationalist rhetoric. Fifth, fascist movements were all centered on a single leader. The two most famous leaders are, of course, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and their respective paths to will be the basis for today’s lecture.
I will start in Italy, since Fascism originated there. Our first question is, therefore, why Italy? What was it about the Italian situation that encouraged this kind of politics? We must begin by considering Italy’s late unification. Unified only in 1870, Italy had a great deal of catching up to do, when it entered the world stage, and its political and economic development was compressed into a relatively short time. Thus, as I discussed in the lecture on Italian unification, traditional forms of social organization were rent asunder by the new economy, which meant that the country was in turmoil before fascism arrived. To this we must add Italy’s weak constitution. A product of many compromises, the post-unification constitution provided for a weak constitutional monarchy and a legislative body chosen through proportional representation. We have already seen the pitfalls of proportional representation in our discussion of Weimar. Things went no better in Italy, where finding a political consensus proved difficult. There was, thus, a rapid succession of governments after 1870, and Italy’s politics descended into political extremism.
In addition, we need to mention the broader problems of nationalism and imperialism. Like Germany, Italy entered into the imperial game late, and played it no better. In 1881, the French and the British frustrated Italian ambitions in Tunisia. (This, you will recall, was the start of the great “Scramble for Africa.”) In 1896, desperate to gain an African colony, Italy invaded Ethiopia and was defeated by the native defenders. These were both major embarrassments, but they revealed a brute fact: Italy did not have the economic resources necessary for playing the international game. Nonetheless, Italy tried to play the game repeatedly and lost each time, which irritated Italy’s wounded nationalism even further, making it both unstable and aggressive. It is no accident that Mussolini would embark on his own program of colonial expansion after seizing power in 1922.
Italy also suffered from weaknesses in its political culture. Democratic politics in Italy was famous for its venality and corruption. At the time, Italians described their political system with two terms: combinazione and transformismo. Both were pejorative. Combinazione referred to how little actually changed when new governments were elected. Italian politicians had a long-standing policy of buying off the opposition with bribes or offices. This meant that a change in government meant very little, as the same people kept showing up in the new governments. This policy of extensive and universal bribery was what the Italians called transformiso. Thus, one could transform a political opponent into a friend by buying him off. Viewing all of this, the average person was forced to conclude that the political elite merely traded favors, rather than offering any genuine alternatives. One can see how the Italians became cynical about politics.
We find a good example of the problem in the career of Giovanni Giolitti. Giolitti was a powerful political force in turn-of-the-century Italian politics, and his brand of politics heavily emphasized corruption and violence as means for influencing policy decisions. Giolitti’s reputation for using personal connections and making back room deals even inspired a new word, giolittismo. Giolitti first became Italian prime minister in 1892, but immediately became embroiled in a major bank scandal that also implicated other Italian politicians. He was out of office by 1893, but stayed in politics and had a damaging fight with his successor, Francesco Crispi, which helped to bring down that government by 1896.
Here, however, we can really begin to understand Italians’ attitudes toward their government, for Giolitti kept coming back. He was Minister of the Interior from 1901 to 1903 and prime minister again from 1903 to 1905. He resigned over a labor dispute, but then saw to it that a political supporter of his held office 1905 to 1906. In 1906, he was back again as prime minister, resigning again in 1909. In 1911, he returned and started a war with Turkey, which ended in 1912 with Italy taking Libya. In 1914, he resigned again. By 1920 he was back as prime minister, and during this administration he tolerated the Italian fascists, not because he was one of them, but because his government needed the fascists to stay in power. In 1921, he resigned again as prime minister and gave moderate support to the fascists, though he later withdrew it. Giolitti seems to have wanted to make a political comeback thereafter, but the fascists took over in 1922, finally closing the door on his career.
Now we can understand more clearly, perhaps, the popular yearning for something different, for amidst all the supposed changes, nothing seemed to change. In this context, we see the development of hyper-nationalist movements and also the desire for a different future. One cultural example of this desire was Futurism, an Italian artistic movement that emphasized energy, power, speed, and violence rather than feelings or abstract philosophical concepts. Like the other movements we have discussed, its roots go back to before the Great War. It was first officially announced on February 20, 1919 in a manifesto published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro by an Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti coined the term Futurism, wanting with it to look beyond static and plodding art to a future full of motion and energy. The Manifesto emphasized the recent burst of technological progress, glorifying things such as the speed and power of the automobile. Marinetti also praised the virtues of violence and conflict, calling for people to repudiate institutions such as museums and all traditional values that tied people to the past. Marinetti then became the center of a brief but powerful artistic movement that always yearned for more, though it was never sure what the more was. Some Futurists became fascists, and it is no accident the Futurist movement became the official art of the fascists.
Now we can turn to Benito Mussolini. Before World War I, Mussolini had been a socialist. He edited the socialist newspaper Avanti and was publicly against Italy’s war with Turkey, calling it a capitalist conspiracy. But during World War I he, like some others who went to the front, became an extreme nationalist. In a story that we have heard before, Mussolini’s wartime service left him feeling alienated from post-war society. In particular, he was disappointed with how little Italy got out of Versailles. All of these factors made him a prime candidate to become an opponent of the status quo. After 1919, he moved toward syndicalism, a type of socialism that emphasized union organization and strikes as a way to control the nation’s economic systems. At this point Mussolini was still a socialist, but syndicalism allowed him to include nationalism within socialism. This was the first real step on a new and dangerous political path.
In 1919, Mussolini founded a new movement that he called Fasci di Combattimento (Fighting Groups). He took the name and the party’s symbol from an ancient Roman emblem in which a bundle of sticks is tied around two axes. This is an appropriate symbol, in so far as it stressed violence and conformity to a larger group. Unfortunately for many Italians, just as there is no room at all between any of the sticks, there was no room in fascist Italy for those disagreed with the fascists. In this respect, Mussolini’s timing was impeccable, as 1919 was a tumultuous year for Italy. Peasants and workers rose up in various parts of the country against post-war economic deprivation. The government was weak and could not stop the violence. Thus, the fascists, who had their own private army and were more than willing to knock heads, came to be seen as the only hope for order in Italy.
By March 1922, feeling that his time had come, Mussolini organized what he called his “March on Rome,” sending 17,000 fascists to Rome in a bid for power. The government collapsed and Mussolini simply assumed political control. By 1924 he had written a new constitution that eliminated both the king and parliament and put the entire country under the rule of a so-called “Grand Fascist Council.” Violence became ever more central to daily life in Italy, as Mussolini and the fascists jailed or simply beat to death their political opponents. Then, during the 1930s, and having dispensed with his internal enemies, Mussolini turned to foreign policy adventurism. In 1935, he sent Italian troops into Ethiopia, using poison gas on the native defenders to avenge Italy’s earlier defeat. An emerging relationship with Adolf Hitler then made Mussolini even more aggressive and dangerous. Between 1936 and 1939 he intervened in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1940, he declared war on France. This was Mussolini’s final mistake, since it dragged Italy into a war that it could not win. By 1940, Italy had been reduced to an appendage of the much larger and more dangerous German fascist state.
Now, we turn to the other example of fascism, Nazi Germany. Germany offers some significant parallels to the Italian situation. As you know, there was great disappointment among Germans over World War I’s outcome. The economic dislocation of the inter-war years fatally wounded what little credibility Weimar’s democratic government had left. There was, however, also a significant difference. Nazi Germany exploited a rising tide of anti-Semitism that dated back to the economic difficulties of the 1870s. Mussolini never needed anti-Semitism to gain power. In Germany, however, when economic problems became completely unmanageable, the Nazis were able to use anti-Semitism an organizing principle. Thus, Germany was a troubled and unstable state—a bad recipe if the state had great economic potential, as did Germany.
Into this milieu, we must place Adolf Hitler. Hitler was born Braunau am Inn, in a small town that is located in upper Austria. His father, Alois, was a distant man and died while Adolf was young; his mother, Clara, spoiled him. In 1909, Adolf Hitler moved to the great city of Vienna and tried to enter the Vienna art scene. He failed twice to gain admission to the prestigious Vienna Academy of art. (You need to recall here that along with Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, Vienna had become a leading city for the arts in the world.)
Vienna is particularly important for understanding Adolf Hitler, because it is here that he was first exposed to political anti-Semitism. During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, Vienna changed dramatically, as Jews and Slavs from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire moved there in search of work. The demographic change sparked a nativist movement, which had strong anti-Semitic and racist overtones. The most famous example of this movement’s importance is the career of Vienna’s long-time mayor Dr. Karl Lueger, who though neither a racist nor an anti-Semite himself, was still willing to exploit these trends to keep his party, the Christian Social Union, in power. It was during Lueger’s tenure in office that Hitler first saw the power of anti-Semitism.
In 1913, Adolf Hitler left Vienna for Munich, where he lived the life of a penniless artist, painting postcards for sale. In the summer of 1914, his life was changed by the outbreak of World War I. Hitler had been denied admission into the Austrian Army earlier that year, due to his small stature. But after the war’s outbreak, he enlisted in the German army. Hitler was a brave soldier, working mainly as a messenger in the front lines. In combat he earned two iron crosses for bravery, one of which was “first class,” an unusual distinction for a corporal. When Hitler returned to Munich after the war, like so many others, he found a world to which he could not connect.
In 1919, Adolf Hitler entered politics, joining a new party, the German Worker’s Party (DAP), which had been founded by Anion Drexler. Hitler was both a great orator and fundraiser for the party. By 1920, he was one of the party’s leaders, even laying down what became its fundamental principles. In April 1920, under Hitler’s leadership, the party changed its name to National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), and he personally chose the party’s emblem, the swastika. Also important was the acquisition of a newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer) in that same year, because it served to distribute Nazi propaganda. In 1921, Hitler assumed complete control of the party, bringing modern party discipline and organization to what had, until that point, been a bunch of drunks. It was during this time that he attracted an inner core of supporters whose names would become infamous: Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher.
In 1923, Hitler and a former Prussian General Erich von Ludendorff led the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, declaring the Weimar government deposed and trying to take over the city. Unlike in Italy, however, the government fought back, arresting the conspirators and trying them for treason. As we have seen, however, the German legal system was no threat to right-wing extremism, as Hitler was sentenced to only five years in jail, of which he served a mere six months, and that in the relative comfort of a castle. These six months were crucial, however, as they gave Hitler the leisure to dictate his infamous text Mein Kampf, a long rant against a long list of imaginary enemies.
Although Mein Kampf was hardly a roadmap to Hitler’s success, it does offer an early glimpse of the worldview that would later wreak such destruction. In Hitler’s view there was a basic hierarchy of races, with the “Aryans”, of course, at the top. The people (Volk) were the basic unit of humanity, and the state served the Volk. Weimar did not serve the needs of the Volk. Even worse, it was democratic, which meant that individual voters determined policy, and the individual was completely unimportant for Hitler. As far as he was concerned, only a single leader (Führer) could lead a people to greatness.
Of course, you may imagine that Hitler also took aim at the other great totalizing worldview, Marxism. If democracy was bad, Marxism was pure evil. Internationalist and class-based, it had no place for race. In addition, since many prominent Marxists in Germany and the Soviet Union were also Jews, Hitler railed against the Jews while going after the Marxists. You may have already noted that this is hardly a consistent position, since Hitler’s ideology also saw Jews as capitalist parasites. This was a contradiction, but coherence was not Hitler’s greatest concern.
When Hitler returned to the streets after his five-month sentence ended, he did so having learned a very important lesson. Power could not be seized by force, but had to be acquired through legal means. Between 1924 and 1932 Hitler built his party into a large, national organization. Much as we did with Weimar, we can consider the Nazi party’s rise in terms of stages. The first stage was 1924-1928. This was a difficult time for the Nazis, as growing economic prosperity made it difficult to get votes. Between 1924 and 1928 the Nazi vote tally dropped from 2 million to 800,000, leaving them with only 12 seats out of the Reichstag’s 491. During the second phase, however, between 1928 and 1932, the Nazi party’s growth was explosive, as the economic and social chaos of the post-crash period proved to be a vote getter. As the credit market dried up in Germany huge layoffs followed and many of the jobless turned to the Nazis. In 1930, the Nazis polled 6.4 million votes, becoming the second largest party behind the Center Party.
Here we need to consider how exactly the Nazis were able to take advantage of this unstable situation. The Nazis successfully styled themselves the party of the future. The Nazis used mass rallies, music, speeches, flags, and posters to get their target audience. These were pioneering political techniques and many are still in use today. The message was not so much the political content, but the sense that the party was where the action was. The Nazis made politics a fun social gathering, with plenty of beer and knockwurst to go around.
Of course, these are not the only reasons that the party became so successful; they also spoke directly to people’s economic concerns. For workers they promised full employment, and when they came to power they delivered. The building of the Autobahn was an example. In 1934, 52,000 people were at work on the project, and this was just beginning of state-led employment projects. The Nazis also spoke to farmers, promising to support their farms. They also promised Germany’s middle and lower middle class a more stable economic world, where money would retain its value. The centrality of economic concerns is important here, because economics opened the door for the Nazis’ vicious anti-Semitic politics. The average worker or shopkeeper was desperately afraid of speculators and market manipulators, people who in their view competed unfairly and did not produce anything. These people were usually Jews in their minds, since Jews had a long history in financial markets, and the Nazis played on these fears, encouraging people to blame their problems on Jewish speculators.
As we take note of the concerns that the Nazis addressed in their political platforms, we should also note another problem the Nazis resolved, though in an ironic way, street violence. It is more than ironic that the Nazis would promise to end the violence, since they were causing it. But as a form of politics, programmatic hooliganism was effective. Throughout the 1920s Germany had seen a series of violent street battles, in which Nazi and left-wing private armies beat each other up. A saying even appeared which ran roughly “Better and end to fighting, than fighting without end.” Thus, for many people, it did not matter who won, just as long as the fighting stopped. In these ways, the Nazis addressed a great many needs, while using all the tools at their disposal to gain political power.
This brings us to Hitler’s actual rise to power. In February 1932, Hitler ran for Weimar’s presidency against Paul v. Hindenburg, the popular war hero. In March 1932, after a runoff, Hindenburg won with 53% of the vote to Hitler’s 36.8%. But the political situation remained unstable. Recall from the Weimar lecture how the electorate progressively polarized. By June 1932, with all the economic and political problems that Germany confronted, the incumbent Chancellor, the Center politician Heinrich von Brüning resigned. Paul von Hindenburg then appointed Franz von Papen to become the next Chancellor and set the next elections for July. In this vote the Nazis made yet more gains at the polls, winning 13,745,000 votes and 230 of 608 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler demanded to be named chancellor, but Hindenburg refused, fearing what Hitler would do in office.
The situation then went from bad to worse. In September 1932, Hermann Goering was elected speaker of the Reichstag and then engaged in a series of parliamentary maneuvers that forced von Papen’s resignation on November 17. Again Hindenburg refused to appoint Hitler chancellor and turned to a conservative schemer Kurt v. Schleicher to make a government. Schleicher could not find a majority in the Reichstag, so he resigned on Jan 28, 1933. On Jan 30, with seemingly no other option Hindenburg reluctantly named Hitler Weimar’s last chancellor.
At this point Hitler was still merely Chancellor. But then on February 27, 1932 the Reichstag burned. The Nazis probably set the fire, but Hitler immediately blamed the Communists, and the Nazis arrested some poor Dutch Communist, Marius van der Lubbe, who had been living in Berlin, and blamed the blaze on him. Next all the communist deputies in Reichstag were arrested, and Hitler got President Hindenburg to declare a state of emergency, which gave Adolf Hitler broad powers to crush dissent and shut down Germany’s free press. Hitler used to opportunity to call for new elections and engaged in a brutal repression of all opposition. On March 5, 1933 elections were held and the Nazis got 44% of the total vote. This was not enough, however, as Hitler needed a 2/3 majority to change the Weimar Constitution. In order to get around this problem, Hitler had the increasingly docile Reichstag pass the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933. This act gave Hitler complete dictatorial power for four months. He only returned it twelve years later.

Lecture 20: In the Shadow of Versailles: The Weimar Experiment

2008-01-31T07:34:00.001-08:00

Last time we considered how the carnage of the Great War fractured European culture. After the war little of old Europe seemed worth keeping, and a general sense of hopelessness spread. Today, we want to look at how the problems of the immediate post-war period affected Germany. Although Germany had lost some territory to the Versailles treaty and was now a republic, it was still Europe’s most economically powerful state. A marginalized and unstable Germany was, therefore, a political problem for everyone.
When talking about Germany between World War I and World War II we are referring, of course, to Weimar. Weimar enters the scene, because after the Kaiser’s fall and the declaration of the German Republic, it was decided that Germany needed to break with its imperial past by writing a new constitution outside of Berlin. (At least that was the official position; the brute fact was that the delegates would not have been safe.) In February 1919, delegates retreated from Berlin to write a new republican constitution in Weimar, a small town in southeastern Germany that once boasted the likes of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, and that had served as the epicenter of Germany’s literary self-discovery in the eighteenth century. Writing a constitution in Weimar was, however, a huge blunder. Although Germany was still a new state, its capital had definitely become Berlin, which was one of the world’s great metropolises and also harbored most of Germany’s political symbols, such as the Reichstag and the famous victory column that Bismarck built to memorialize Prussia’s victory over France in 1871. In defining itself through Weimar, the new government gave up the most powerful symbols it had at its disposal, which meant that these were left for others to appropriate. Thus, when Germany faced economic and political unrest during the 1920s, the government in Weimar appeared to be no more than a collection of inveterate talkers without legitimacy. Those who best appropriated Germany’s national symbols were the Nazis, and it is no accident that they quickly rid themselves of the Weimar constitution after having seized power.
The story of Weimar is, thus, a story of failure, and we are going to trace the nature and scope of that failure here. Put another way, we are going to consider just how many things had to go wrong before Adolf Hitler could come to power. I have divided this lecture into three parts. The first part will cover the period 1919 to 1923. The second part will run from 1924 to 1928. The last part will follow Weimar’s final collapse between 1929 and 1933.
In many ways, the first period was Weimar’s most difficult, as it confronted a series of crises, any one of which could have brought it down. The Weimar Republic came to power in the wake of Imperial Germany’s fall, and event that was a great blow to many Germans, since the Empire was the first institution to unify most Germans in a single state. The sense of disappointment among many was great. Weimar also had other problems, however. The Great War had cost Germany tremendously in people and material, leaving the economy exhausted. In addition, the Versailles Treaty, which was signed in 1919, was punitive and harsh. Given Woodrow Wilson’s talk of peace without victory and peace among equals, its strictures came as quite a shock to many Germans.
Weimar’s obvious weakness and the general instability of the post-war period invited multiple Putsch attempts. In 1919, an extreme left group known as the Spartacists rose up to declare that Germany had become a communist republic and was put down brutally. In 1920, a former military officer named Wolfgang Kapp led a right-wing revolt in Berlin that was stopped only by a general strike. Finally, in 1923, Adolf Hitler made his famous bid for power in Munich, leading the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch.” This Putsch was also put down and the chief organizers were jailed, though they served ridiculously short sentences. That the Weimar Republic survived this period at all was due to the rise of great politicians, such as Friedrich Ebert, a pragmatic socialist and Germany’s first president, and Gustav Stresemann, a pragmatic entrepreneur and Weimar’s most important Foreign Minister. These two men, among many others, put Weimar on as secure a footing as was possible under the obviously difficult circumstances.
Weimar’s biggest problem during its early ears was, however, the great post-war inflation. Before World War I there had been hardly any inflation in Europe, as money supplies remained relatively constant. But the war changed things, especially in Germany. The Imperial German government had followed a reckless economic policy, paying the costs of the war by printing money, rather than increasing taxes or taking out debt. The British were in a slightly better position after the war, since they had raised taxes and borrowed hug sums both from their own people and the United States. Nonetheless, at the war’s end, a lot of worthless money was coursing through Germany. The Versailles treaty made this situation even worse, because it robbed Germany of key industrial areas in order to pay reparations to the French and the British. The German Saarland, a coal producing region, was given to the French for 20 years, so that payments could be extracted. In the end, the Weimar government was forced to print more money, which led to political disaster because inflation hit exactly those people who should have been Weimar’s strongest supporters, the middle class. During the late nineteenth century a rentier class had developed across Europe. This class of people lived on the interest they earned on fixed sum of capital. If inflation was low, the rentiers could live a very comfortable, worry free life. Unfortunately, these people were destroyed by the great inflation, which did not leave them well disposed toward the new regime.
Let us consider the inflation problem more closely. Between 1914 and 1918 the Reichsmark lost half its value. This was no worse than in other European countries; the British pound also lost 50% and the Franc and Lira lost 83%. From 1919 on, however, things got serious. In January of 1919 the Reichsmark was 8.57 to one US Dollar. By December 1919 that ratio was 48.3 to 1. In November of 1921 the ratio was 245 to 1. A year later it was 7,350 to 1. By November 1923, the ratio had hit 72.5 billion to 1. In this environment political stability was almost impossible to achieve and popular resentment increased. The middle- and lower middle classes were wiped out by the inflation, as small businesses across Germany were destroyed. Large debtors and especially large corporations, however, did quite well. This bred resentment among the smaller operators, who believed that the wealthy were profiting at their expense. A good deal of sympathy for right-wing causes among the German population was one unfortunate result.
Weimar’s political weakness was particularly apparent in the rise of political murders. Between 1919 and 1922 there were over 400 killings of political figures. In 1922, for example, the German foreign minister Walter Rathenau was assassinated while leaving home to go to work. These murders had a pronounced political tone, as most of them stemmed from disgruntled partisans of the old regime. For example, between 1919 and 1922 there were 22 murders of political conservatives by left-wing extremists. In that same period, however, there were 354 murders of liberal politicians by right-wing extremists. Perhaps even more startling is the different ways that the German government reacted to these murders. Of the 22 left-wing murders, the police gained 0 confessions, but the courts convicted 22 times. In the case of 354 right-wing murders, the police gained 50 confessions and the courts convicted 24 times. What we can see here is that many in Germany’s bureaucracy were still loyal to the old imperial system and showed clear sympathies with right-wing violence against the new government.
The Weimar government then confronted its biggest crisis with the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923. The German government had ceased paying reparations in early 1923, claiming that it could not afford to pay them. The French promptly invaded the Ruhr, which was Germany’s most important industrial zone, and began shipping back to France whatever the regional economy was producing. The German government responded by calling for passive resistance. Germans in the Ruhr were encouraged to go on strike, and the government promised them an income. Unfortunately, the government did not have the money to pay for passive resistance and it was forced to print more money in order to support the strikers. This only exacerbated Weimar Germany’s already fragile economic situation. Germany only averted a complete collapse by calling off the campaign in late 1923.
Luckily for Weimar, however, the German economy recovered just as things looked bleak. The period 1924 to 1928 is considered to be Weimar’s golden age, and the economic turnaround was rooted in two factors. The first was a necessary currency reform that was based on a novel legal fiction. Hjalmar Schacht, director of Germany’s Reichsbank dealt with the inflation by issuing a new currency, the Rentenmark. The central problem for the new currency was, however, that Germany had no gold to back it up with. The war and the German reparations bill had depleted Germany’s gold reserves, and since money was then backed by gold, Germany had nothing to inspire confidence in the new bills. Schacht came to the rescue with a neat fiction, holding that the Rentenmark was backed by all the land in Germany. This seemed to work as Germans accepted the currency and began doing business again.
The second factor in Weimar’s rise was Gustav Stresemann’s brilliant diplomacy. Stresemann was an old imperial man. He had made money in business before entering the government, and remained loyal to the Kaiser. Stresemann changed his mind, however, after the war, deciding that the Empire was gone. All that was left was to make the best of the new situation. One way of making the best of things was to gain revisions in the Versailles treaty. Rather than simply opposing all reparations, Stresemann approached the problem through negotiation. These efforts bore fruit in 1924, as the Dawes Plan was negotiated, which lowered the total reparations bill and extended the payment schedule. Stresemann also negotiated a French withdrawal from the Ruhr, and in 1925 signed the Treaty of Locarno, which (supposedly) forever set Germany’s western boundaries. Stresemann and the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand (1862-1932) shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in negotiating the treaty. In 1926, Germany also gained admission to the League of Nations, which was the final signal that the new Germany had been accepted diplomatically by the world’s states. Finally, in 1929, there was another revision of the reparations bill in the Young Plan, which not only lowered the bill, but also injected foreign (especially American) capital into the German economy.
Weimar Germany still had deep problems, however, as much of its elite culture was reviled by the average German. This is one of Weimar’s great ironies. Although we moderns revere the cultural explosion that occurred there in the 1920s, most Germans were deeply uneasy about the changes, and this had political implications. Let us take, first, a broad overview of the cultural scene. Germany’s cultural flowering happened across Germany, but its center was Berlin. Berlin was both a large and a “new city.” First, it had witnessed a period of explosive population growth. In 1850, there were 419,000 people. By 1910, the population had reached 3.7 million. Second, for the first time since the 15th century, Berlin existed without the Hohenzollern. There was, thus, no imperial impediment to cultural change anymore, and Berlin rapidly became the most socially permissive city in the world, where everything was possible.
No matter the field, Berlin became the world’s leading center for the arts. Modern movie making, for instance, began in Berlin, as directors such as Fritz Lang set up shop in Babelsberg, a town just outside the city. The German movie industry was so new and vibrant that people flocked there to study the art of movie making, including two famous Americans, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. In painting, literature, theater, and music, Berlin led the way. The Expressionist painter George Grosz, for example, emerged from the Dada movement in Berlin to become a leading light in the development of Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Realism,” a movement that blended art with social criticism. The writer Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 for his book the Magic Mountain. Mann’s transformation was remarkable, as he started out as an imperial supporter, but rapidly became a social and political critic. Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright, came to Berlin in 1924 to work with that city’s leading directors and musicians. He changed modern theater through his theory of “epic theater,” which meant for him that the audience should not be brought into the story, as others had believed before, but should be encouraged to view it with critical detachment. This was a break with old Aristotelian notions of theater that had held that people must identify with the heroes. For Brecht, however, such direct identification pushed social criticism to the margins, which he as a Marxist could not allow. In music, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg expanded artistic frontiers, Weill with his collaboration with playwrights such as Brecht, and Schoenberg with his new 12-tone system of music.
Weimar’s tremendous burst of creativity stood in stark contrast to many popular attitudes toward it. As we have seen with Grosz and Mann, the German Avant-Garde was often radically leftist, something that many Germans did not take well, especially those that were still loyal to the empire. In this context, culture became inherently political, and being against the Left’s perceived degeneracy became a way to oppose the recent political changes. Not only was Weimar incapable of bringing the political stability that had characterized the imperial regime, it also allowed these degenerates to say and do whatever they wanted.
An example of how widespread the fear of Weimar culture was among Germans was the development of the term Kulturbolschewismus. This was a catch-all word, designed to impugn all the people on the left who were critical of Germany’s social and political arrangements. Its particular resonance lies in the way that it united fear of the Avant-Garde with abhorrence of Communism and traditional Anti-Semitism. Many leading figures in the Russian Revolution had been Jewish, as were many leading German Communists. In addition, prominent members of the German art scene were also Jewish, particularly in Berlin. And it didn’t help that some of these German Jews were harsh social critics. One example is the German-Jewish writer Kurt Tucholsky, who attacked nationalism and militarism harshly. He believed that modern society was so corrupt and dehumanizing that he publicly stated that treason was acceptable. The growing sense that Jews, Communists, and artists were an alien and subversive population only exacerbated the basic tensions that were behind the general opposition to Weimar.
Confronted with these dangerous cultural currents, many Germans fled into the Völkisch Ideology. This ideology was a flight from Weimar cultural criticism in that it tried to find certainty in the German nation and, increasingly, the German race. The basic argument was that people were created by their environment. Germany was a land of forests and streams, which meant that the people who lived there were shaped by the forest. There is more than a hint of the Romanticism here, in that the emphasis on environment posited a mystical connection between blood and soil (Blut und Boden). Thus, the way to get in touch with one’s true self was to go tromping about in the forest. A classic example of this is the rise of the Wandervögel, a Boy-Scout-like organization that sent people hiking and camping in the forest. None of this is necessarily anti-Semitic, though it slowly became so, as the rise of race theories led to the explicit exclusion of Jews from Germanness. Jews originated in the land of Israel, which was a desert, and this meant that the Jews were by definition a desert people and had no place in Germany.
Weimar’s final downfall between 1929 and 1933 brought these many themes and troubles together. The basic problem was economic. The general increase in prosperity that I discussed earlier came to an abrupt end in 1929 with crash of the American stock market. This crash precipitated a world-wide crisis, as the Americans were forced to call in the loans they had made to Germany, Great Britain and France. Suddenly, there was no money in Germany, and the effect on businesses was predictable: either they laid off most of their employees or simply closed, which led to a huge spike in unemployment. Consider these statistics. In September 1928, Germany had 650,000 unemployed. One year later that number had increased to 1.32 million. In September 1930, the number had more than doubled again to 3.0 million. By January 1933, it was 6.1 million, which translated into an unemployment rate of roughly 50%.
The political consequences were harsh. In 1928, German politics looked to be settling down. The extreme Nationalist Party lost 30 seats that year going from 103 to 73 seats. The lost votes on the extremes then went to the center. The Social Democrats went from 131 to 153 seats, which when combined with the Democratic Party and the Center Party to give Germany’s moderate parties almost an absolute majority. The Nazis, a party of cranks and drunks were a marginal force, having only 12 seats. In 1930, however, the center disappeared. The Nazis increased their representation from 12 seats to 177. The Communists, who had been stronger than the Nazis also increased their levels of representation, going from 54 to 77 seats. Proportional representation was at fault for much of this rise. In a single-member district system, the Nazis would have won only 20 seats, since their votes never totaled a majority in any one district. However, Weimar’s capacious constitution encouraged political extremism by tallying votes nationally, rather than regionally. In the elections of July1932, the Nazis augmented these gains and won 230 seats, making them the largest party in the Reichstag. The Nazis lost some seats a few months later in a subsequent election, dropping to 196 seats, but they still remained Germany’s largest political force.
Thus, was the stage set for Weimar’s final collapse. With votes fleeing the political center, a majority of the Reichstag’s delegates soon opposed Weimar itself. Beleaguered by attacks from both the left and the right, Weimar succumbed to the pressure by becoming almost dictatorial itself. In 1932, the German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning convinced President Paul v. Hindenburg to invoked article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed him to rule by decree, rather than having to go through the Reichstag. This set a bad precedent. After Adolf Hitler came to power on January 10, 1933, he used the same article to grant himself dictatorial powers. Weimar never recovered, and the world would bear the cost.

Lecture 19: World War I and European Culture

2008-01-31T07:32:00.000-08:00

As we have already seen, World War I was an enormous catastrophe for people across Europe. It was seen at the time as the decisive turning-point in defining both Europe’s values and the sense it had of itself. The war wiped out a large percentage of a generation. It brought down three empires in Europe, the German, Austrian, and Russian. It changed the balance of power in the world, too, for now the United States began its ascendancy to a dominant position that it still holds. .
The war shaped almost all intellectual work of modernity in the West. The ensuing reorientation of thought is often described as a shift away from the optimism of the 19th century, that is, a shift away from the belief in Liberalism, progress, and the universal faith in positivism. Critical tendencies that had already been at Europe’s cultural margins, with the literary Avant-Garde, suddenly became central intellectual positions. The belief in the explosive power of the irrational became one of the new dominant assumptions of European thought. As is evident in the work of Sigmund Freud, psychology became a central way of understanding human behavior, casting aside previous beliefs in the power of reason on which Liberalism and the Enlightenment had been built. Now Freud and his colleagues became gurus for a society that wanted to understand behavior that appeared to be inexplicable in rational terms.
In this lecture, I want to concentrate on three areas in which World War I had its greatest impact. The first is the crisis of Liberalism. The second is the popularity of cultural pessimism. The last is the extension of the pre-war Avant-Garde into post-war cultural predominance.
Let us consider, first, the post-war cultural context. The dominant thread of meaning that emerged from WWI was its complete meaninglessness. Originally, there was some enthusiasm for the war, though this enthusiasm has been badly overstated by some historians. The summer of 1914 is the period that Germans called the Days of August, and it was supposedly the time when everyone came together to fight a war against national enemies. This is not quite true, as there was much trepidation throughout Europe at the thought of the coming war. Nonetheless, as the killing increased, even the strongest war partisans soon forgot why it was being fought at all. Indeed, when Europeans looked back on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the alliance system that together had brought about the war, the whole thing seemed absurd. The Triple Alliance stood against the Triple Entente. So what? Could there really be a point to this?
As you know, the war began with the Russian invasion of Germany and thereupon followed the German invasion of Belgium. Following the Schlieffen plan, the Germans swept through Belgium and had been in sight of Paris when their advance was stopped cold by new defensive technology: machine guns, cannon, and barbed wire. Hence, from 1914 to 1918, the war was essentially a stalemate, and took an unbelievable toll in human terms. This was due in part to the stupidity of many generals, who failed to see that the defensive situation could not be overcome easily and held that only an offensive spirit would be enough to push back the enemy. This was the case for both sides, but the British and French leadership truly distinguished themselves through their obtuseness. At the battle of Verdun from Feb/Dec 1916, that is 300 days, both the French and the Germans counted 500,000 casualties. At the Somme, a British offensive that lasted 140 days cost the Brits 600,000 men for 6 miles of territory. Then, of course, the Germans won it all back and then some.
There had never been a war like this before. The magnitude of the slaughter and its apparent pointlessness fostered cynicism and bitterness everywhere. By Nov. 1918, there were 30 million wounded on all sides. The Germans had lost a total of 6 million dead, the French 5.5 million. In addition to this, with the collapse of the German, Austrian, and Russian governments any hope in the progress that Liberalism had promised was all but destroyed. Europe had lapsed into chaos, and now no one could believe in progress. Too many traditional values seemed to have no point. What was the point in “progressing,” if the starting point was already absurd? Let us turn, thus, to what historians call the crisis of Liberalism.
The Liberal tradition had dominated economic, political, and social thought across much of Europe in the 19th century. The fundamental belief was that the individual was autonomous and special. His (and increasingly her) rights ought to be respected as the foundation of society. The war, however, overwhelmed all this naïve individualism. Why talk about the importance of one person, when so many were dead and wounded? And why prize the individual’s role in the economy, when it seemed to bear no direct connection to real events. During the war, the government had intervened in economic life to an unprecedented extent, as all national economies came under state control. There was rationing and extensive price controls, while the government managed the production and distribution of the most important goods and services. The laissez-faire state, which Liberalism had cultivated, was now gone for good, and government intervention in individual economic activity would now be the norm.
The war also disrupted the Liberal social order. It created a huge group of alienated war veterans, who had no stake in the old order. In fact, this group became a breeding ground for anti-liberal causes and groups. Existing gender relations were also undermined as women, who had discovered a work life outside the home, were now required to return home and liked it not at all. Politically, the war undermined the Liberal conception of the individual life. The state now assumed control over all aspects of a person’s life, as people had grown used to being told where and when to work. The values of free speech and a free press were no longer held quite as dear in a context where there was little work and much destruction. Thus, in general, European society broke with its liberal past, a break that culminated with the Russian Revolution, perhaps the ultimate repudiation of liberal values.
Liberalism also came under attack, however, from the intellectual realm, where one would actually have expected a good deal of support for it. For any post-WWI writer, the war was the only reference point, and the key that arose therefrom was pessimism, a sense the Europe had entered an irreversible crisis. The intellectuals became obsessed with an extraordinary sense of loss, feeling that a glorious past was gone and that brightest had been wiped out by the war. In many ways, this sense was exacerbated by feelings of guilt and disorientation that came from survival. How could one explain the rationality of random survival? Since it was not clear why they had survived—there was no real explanation for it—the intellectuals came to stress how an entire world had been lost to them. An example is Robert Graves’ work Goodbye to All That (1928). In this book Graves argued that the old faiths and beliefs were made obsolete by the shattering post-war crisis, and called for new ways of explaining why people do what they do. For Graves, people did not seem to be in control of their lives or even their desires. In his view, the only possibly explanation was medical and psychological: Europe had fallen ill.
Cultural pessimism was especially clear in the work of Oswald Spengler. His main work The Decline of the West (1918) challenged the liberal progressive view of history by returning to an older cyclical view. As he saw it, history does not progress, move to higher levels of human achievement. In fact, all cultures rise, decline, and die. And as far as he was concerned the West was trapped in a process of decline so enormous and so powerful that the individual was entirely lost, merely afloat in historical forces that paid no attention to human reason, or human desires.
We see a similar decline of optimism in Modernist Poetry. W.D. Yeats and T.S. Eliot began to stress the experience of transition and collapse in their works. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and Yeats The Second Coming (1921) both encompass a general sense of decline, a sense that life was out of control, that there was a fundamental emptiness at the heart of the human experience. We see the fullest expression of this in Eliot’s The Hollow Man (1925). Thus, the belief that pessimism was the only intellectually honest position became fundamental to European culture. This happened, in part, because there had already been precursors in European culture. The literary avant-garde in Paris and Vienna had already begun its attack on Liberalism and Progress, at the twentieth century’s turn. For them, the only way to make sense of the world was not to try to represent it. In art, literature, and poetry it was assumed that only a leap into the irrational could explain anything. With that, we turn to the Avant-Garde.
The war moved the most extreme movements of art and literature from the margins to the center. In order to understand this, let us take step back into the pre-war literary scene. The pre-war Avant-Garde emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a critique of liberal values. In particular, writers turned on Liberalism’s faith in reason and enlightenment. You have already seen some of this in Nietzsche, who emphasized striving and war over contemplation and the settled life. You can also find similar critiques on Dostoevsky. For example, the protagonist in his famous psychological novel Crime and Punishment carried the name Raskolnikov. In Russian the word raskol means schism, and a man who bears within him a schism can hardly be called rational. The Avant-Garde began to push this radical thought further, bringing in aesthetic elements from the Romantics such as Gustav Flaubert and reveling in the irrational, or better perhaps, the non-rational nature of human experience. In this context art became liberating, stressing the priority of personal insights over a collective discussion of objective reality. All truth became subjective and perspectival. Truth, the Avant-Garde said, came from inner vision.
Literary Modernism takes as its governing theme the belief true reality is not external but is based in internal experience. We can trace the origins of this movement to the symbolist movement in France. For example, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) held that everything we can see can be taken as a symbol for something else. To reach a deeper understanding we must interpret and imagine the world. Symbolist poets such as Stephan Mallarmé (1842-1898), Arthur Rimbaud (1838-1889), and Villiers de L’Isle Adam (1838-1889) were obsessed with the problem of symbols. Mallarmé was at the center of this movement. He wrote complex poems for only a small audience. In his view, poetry had to convey the inner language of a poet, which was of necessity personal and not subject to wide understanding. The internal was the real, the external an illusion. Many of the symbolists turned to drugs and alcohol to help them plumb the depths of the inner world. Others turned to primitive cultures, such as Gauguin, who went to Tahiti, and Rimbaud, who fled to Africa and then Asia, before renouncing writing all together.
This modernist tradition then became intensified during the First World War. One famous example was the Dada movement. The Dada was founded in 1916 by a Swiss poet name Tristan Tzara, who was an irrationalist poet, writing words down in a random fashion. (He would even go so far as to pull words out of a hat and write them down.) This suggested that all of civilization was random and absurd. (You may recall Nietzsche’s line in Twilight of the Idols that we will continue to believe in God as long as we believe in grammar.) The idea was that cultivating randomness was the only rational response to a world that had become absurd. Dada tended to be mostly destructive in its effects and did not last beyond the war. We can see the longer-term impact of the war, however, in the painting movement known as Surrealism. This movement emerged in the 1920s and its most famous exponent is, of course, Salvador Dali. This art movement went back to some of the themes of the symbolist poets. Led originally by the French painter Andre Breton, the movement held that painting must explore the subconscious world, must use the things of daily life as mere symbols of a deeper reality.
We can also see similar trends in the literary world. The common point among writers there was that external reality did not work. Novels in the period demonstrated skepticism toward the external world, especially the world of politics, and many writers simply judged the world of politics to be irredeemably corrupt. Left with nothing in public life, these writers consoled themselves by turning to the personal exploration of artistic truths. For that reason, the modernist novel wanted to alienate the reader entirely, that is to take away him or her away from all comforting truths. It tried to redefine the familiar by breaking up common assumptions such as the unity of time and space. Novelists in this period did not care for chronology or order. When they bothered to describe them, external events seemed nothing more than random happenings and completely irrelevant to interior life. The key events in the modernist novel were inside the person and were explored by narratives that probed only the inner world
In French Literature, a good example of this is Marcel Proust (1871-1922). Proust is notable for, among other things, retiring at the age of 30 to a cork-lined room so that he could do nothing more than write and drink massive quantities of coffee. He died young. His six volume work Remembrances of Things Past (1913-1922), which he wrote while locked up in this room, is a monument to interiority. While France was at war, he sat in his room and explored every last memory he had and developed as his main theme that the self is the ultimate. What we are in ourselves is isolated and ineffable; it cannot be communicated to other people, though there is a small hope that other people can access us through art. Art cannot fully communicate our thoughts to others, but it is the only alternative to complete isolation in a cork-lined room. Another French writer to keep in mind was André Gide (1869-1951). He lived a more public life than Proust, but also believed that the individual was completely isolated. For him, morality had been torn asunder by the war and art was the only thing that could restore it. It was left to the artist had to create a new morality for a broken world. That both these writers were also homosexual in a world that had no place for homosexuals merely accentuated their sense of isolation and marginalization.
We can find similar themes in English literature. There we see the same interest in interiority and the emphasis on the marginal. James Joyce (1882-194) is a classic example. Joyce was also marginalized, but by a life in exile. Although he was Irish, he spent many years living in Italy, Switzerland, and France. His work is marked by an extended exploration of the interior world, as is apparent in his great novel Ulysses (1919). Written during WWI, the novel’s fundamental problem was time: it was 800 pages long and devoted itself to exploring the random events packed into a single day. What action there is in the text is more internal than external. More importantly, to describe this inner world, Joyce used a literary innovation called the stream of consciousness style of writing. There was no logic to time, thought, or even narrative, as the text moved randomly from one theme to the next. Another key writer is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Woolf looked for reality in language as opposed to actions. She was not totally detached from public life, but still insisted on removing herself from it from time to time. A member of the group called the Bloomsbury Circle, which had strong ties to Cambridge University, she and her colleagues saw truth as transcendent, above simple reality. Hence Woolf’s work does not pay much attention to external events, while inner thought is considered in excruciating detail. As a result, there is no clear narrative in her work, and the emphasis is on sudden internal discoveries and emotional breaks.
We can see a similar disorientation in German literature, as well. In no case is the crisis of literature clearer than in Franz Kafka (1883-1924). A German-speaking Jewish intellectual living in Prague, he worked as a state insurance inspector. This was, no doubt, dreary work and, perhaps for that reason, his characters are always portrayed as alone in the world. For Kafka, there was no meaning to the social world and everyone was always alienated from everything and everyone. Social and political processes had no meaning other than to frustrate everyone’s ambitions. For those of you who have read his work The Trial, this sense of frustration and alienation will be particularly clear. Kafka’s alienation is extreme in German literature, but even less extreme writers such as Thomas Mann (1875-1955) followed similar themes. Mann saw a Europe in a crisis, and this sense dated to even before the war, as is apparent in his classic work Death in Venice. In this text he explored how official culture had stripped away people’s vitality, leaving only illness and death. For Mann illness became a metaphor for modernity. Initially, he saw World War I as a way to revitalize culture, but soon it became only another symptom of the root disease. He analyzed this shift in his work The Magic Mountain (1924), which is set in a tuberculosis hospital, with patients from all over Germany dying a slow, painful death. The hospital is in the mountains and is, therefore, remote from all culture. Perhaps, for that reason, the novel presents the reader only with ideal types. The general sense that emerges from the remoteness of the space and the emptiness of the characters is that Europe needs to find a way to affirm life. This was a fundamentally Nietzschean theme, but it identified a new central problem: people were lost and needed something new to believe in.
We have seen how the First World War left an entire generation rootless and bereft of the ability to explain or connect to the world. One element of this was the flight into the irrational and the unconscious, and it is not coincidental that Freud became something of a guru for the world. (It is also not coincidental that European culture, such as it was, became horribly boring in the 30s and 40s.) The thing to keep in mind, however, is that as people floundered about, looking for something new to govern their world, they wound up looking in dubious places. Communism and Fascism are two examples, and the combat between them would dominate Europe for almost the next thirty years. But the literary nihilism and elite alienation became a permanent part of the European cultural scene. Its effects would be addressed by the Europe’s next series of messianic ideologies, anti-nuclear sentiment, environmentalism, internationalism, and anti-Americanism.

Lecture 18: The Russian Revolution

2008-01-31T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Russian Revolution was a direct product of the First World War. As you know, that war killed an entire generation, devastated Europe’s economies, and spread misery across the Continent. The political fallout in Eastern and Central Europe was revolution in Germany, Austria, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia.
What we call the Russian Revolution was actually two revolutions. The first one began in March of 1917 and resulted in the Tsar’s abdication. The second started in November and brought Russia’s Communists to power. The first Russian Revolution began on March 8, 1917, when the St. Petersburg military garrison joined food riots that had broken out across the city. Without military support Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on March 2, and more than 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia ended. Russia had broken with its autocratic past, or so it seemed.
A power struggle began immediately, as rival political bodies fought for control over the government. On the one hand, the Russian Duma, a representative body that had come into being through a previous revolution in 1905, appointed the Provisional Government. On the other hand, workers and soldiers in Petrograd had organized themselves into the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a body of 2,500 members that had been elected by workers and soldiers in Petrograd. In the Duma a group called the Mensheviks emerged in a leading position by July of 1917 and set up a Provisional government, which promptly instituted a policy of continuing the war against Germany. At that point, the western allies were sending large amounts of aid to Russia, and the government wanted to keep that aid flowing.
The Petrograd Soviet soon showed, however, that it had greater authority. On March 14, the Soviet issued its famous Order Number 1, which directed the military to obey only the orders of the Soviet. The Provision Government was unable to countermand this order, and the Petrograd Soviet only refrained from declaring itself openly as Russia’s real government for fear of provoking a conservative coup.
Between March and October the Provision Government reorganized itself four times. The first government was composed entirely of liberal ministers, with the sole exception of the Menshevik Aleksandr Kerensky. The subsequent governments comprised coalitions of various factions. None of these governments was, however, able to cope with the two major problems that confronted the country. First, peasants, who had always lived in the verge of starvation in Russia, began seizing land without government approval. This put the countryside in a state of chaos. Second, the Russian army was collapsing, making an organized defense against the Germans impossible.
The Provisional Government continued to insist, nonetheless, that Russia prosecute the war further. This was a bad strategy, since the war had become increasingly unpopular. When Aleksandr Kerensky became the head of the Provision Government in July 1917, he first had to put down a coup attempt by the army commander-in-chief Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov, though he was still unable to halt Russia’s slide into political, economic, and military chaos. Kerensky’s Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s Party suffered under the strain, too, as a left-wing splinter group called the Left Socialist Revolutionaries eventually left in protest. While the Provisional Government’s power waned, the Soviet government’s power was increasing. By September, the Communists, also known as Bolsheviks, and their allies the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had overtaken the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets.
The Russian Revolution included two Civil Wars. One was between the Czars and the Socialist Revolutionaries. The other was within socialism, between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The two groups were originally part of the same party called the Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s party. In 1903, however, a split emerged between Vladmir Ilyich Lenin and his followers and another group around a Socialist named Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum, who went by the pseudonym L. Martov. Martov wanted the party to be a mass organization modeled on western European Social Democratic Parties. Lenin, however, wanted the party to be a tight-knit group of professional revolutionaries that were devoted to overthrowing the economic and political system. When Lenin and company gained a majority on the party’s central committee they also gained editorial control over the party’s newspaper. This position afforded them the privilege of naming themselves Bolsheviks (those of the majority), while the other side became Mensheviks (those of the minority). The labels stuck, even though the reverse was actually true.
On the night of November 6, 1917 the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries staged a nearly bloodless coup, occupying government buildings, telegraph stations, and other strategic points. Kerensky’s organization of resistance proved futile and he fled the country. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which convened in Petrograd at the same time as the coup occurred, approved the formation of a new government that was composed mainly of Bolshevik Commissars.
Now we need to consider just who these Bolsheviks were. The Bolsheviks were an orthodox Marxist party whose avowed goal was the overthrow of capitalism. Their leader, known today as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was born Vladmir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870 into a comfortable middle-class family. (He took the name Lenin in 1901, as a cover for his revolutionary activities.) His father was a schoolteacher who had risen within the hierarchy to the status of school inspector. His mother was the daughter of a physician who had also received a small inheritance. Lenin was a good student, and it looked for a time as if he would become a classicist. Two events, however, change the course of his life. The first event was the Czarist government’s attack on public education. Having grown suspicious of all potential sources of subversion, the government bullied and threatened people like Lenin’s father.
The second event was his brother’s execution by the Czarist government for conspiring to assassinate the Czar. In Russia, this was a far worse event than one would expect. Not only had the family lost someone to the Czarist police, but since the family had produced a criminal against the state, it was also stigmatized. Lenin’s sister was, thus, banished to Siberia as a potential source of sedition. In 1887, Lenin was nonetheless able to attend university in Kazan, but he was soon expelled for taking part in illegal associations there. This also got him banished to Siberia. He was eventually allowed to return to Kazan, but could not get readmitted to the university.
With nothing better to do, Lenin began reading Marx and joined revolutionary Marxist reading groups. By 1889, Lenin had converted to Marxism. Later that same year, Lenin’s family moved to Samara, where he was able to study law. He later moved to St. Petersburg and opened up a legal practice, though his revolutionary activities continued on the side. In 1895, Lenin was sentenced to fifteen months in jail for sedition and after serving out his term was exiled to Siberia again. In 1900, Lenin left Russia and moved to Munich, where he founded the revolutionary newspaper Iskra, which means “The Spark,” and organized a revolutionary political party that would, ultimately, defeat the Mensheviks. With the outbreak of World War I, he left Germany to hide in neutral Switzerland, where he remained until 1917. In that year the Germans allowed him to cross their territory by train, hoping that he would fatally weaken their enemy’s government. Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg on April 16, 1917 and set to work.
Lenin was a dogmatic Marxist. He firmly believed in the overthrow of capitalism, the development of a classless society, the withering away of the state, the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, and the ultimate spread of communist democracy, promising all of these things before the revolution. Marxist dogma held that revolution would come only through war, though when the Russian Revolution finally did come, it seemed that everything would run peacefully. The Communists seized power and then property, with little resistance. The people who had opposed the Communists were given amnesty, and reprisals were discouraged. Soon, however, the situation began to change, as the government became dictatorial. In early November, the Bolsheviks seized control of all Russia’s newspapers, leaving only Pravda and Izvestia to publish the news. (Pravda means “Truth,” and Izvestia “News.” A joke eventually spread among Russians that ran: “In the news there is no truth, and in the truth there is no news.”) On November 22 the government authorized house searches without the need for warrants. On December 11 it took over all of Russia’s schools. On December 14, the banks were nationalized. On December 21, the government empowered Revolutionary Courts to try enemies of the revolution. On December 24, the government nationalized all factories. On December 29, all bank accounts were frozen and the charging of interest was banned. Thus, in a very short time, the government had taken over the essentials of private life. Homes were no longer safe. The news was controlled. Money and property were now under state control. A series of kangaroo courts then made sure that no one did anything about it.
The most important government change was, however, the replacement of the Czar’s secret police the Okrana by a revolutionary secret police known as the Cheka. At first, the Cheka was limited in scope. It had only 120 agents and during the first six months of the revolution was responsible for 22 deaths. Nonetheless, even this trend was worrying, since under the Czars the government had killed only (!) 17 people annually. By 1919, however, the Cheka was killing 1,000 people per month. Two years later it had 250,000 full-time agents, whereas at its height, the Okrana had only 15,000. In addition, the Cheka became a government unto itself, setting up its own secret courts and penal camps for punishing the state’s enemies. (The Cheka’s ability to strike fear into the average Russian is evidence by the word Chekist, which was a pejorative term used by the populist for anyone who worked for the Soviet Union’s internal security forces.)
It is important to understand that Lenin knew about and fully supported this slaughter. His slavish adherence to dogma meant that the bourgeoisie had to be eliminated as a class, lest they impede the revolution. People were, therefore, arrested and shot, solely because they belonged to the wrong class. This attitude eventually led to the wholesale execution of the Tsar and his family on July 16, 1918. Nothing, not even pity for the Tsar’s children, would stay the hand of revolutionary justice.
Lenin’s dogmatic desire to kill his enemies was succored by the difficult political situation in which he and the revolution found themselves. After the Bolshevik Revolution got under way, Russia rapidly descended into chaos. At one time, eighteen different governments existed in Russia, all claiming sovereignty over the whole country. The result was a massive civil war, particularly between Loyalists, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks. Lenin responded by declaring war on everyone and essentially turning himself into a Marxist czar. In this sense, the Bolshevik turn to violence was inevitable, as the new government confronted a series of problems on all sides. First, the Germans won the war and imposed a harsh peace treaty on the Russians as Brest-Litovsk. Many people within Russia objected to the treaty’s terms, and this peeled support away from the government at a crucial stage. Second, the western allies invaded Russia from all sides. The British and Americans landed troops in the north at Archangel. The French came in from the south. And the Japanese took Vladivostok in the east. The Communist government was in deep trouble.
At this moment, however, the Bolsheviks reacted creatively to the many pressures they confronted, including making the prudent decision to end the repression. In 1919, the Bolsheviks suddenly declared the Mensheviks to be legal again. Meanwhile, the Czarist forces engaged in their own repression, shooting Communist sympathizers with abandon, which made them appear worse to the many people who had previously removed their support from the Bolsheviks. By 1921, the Russian Civil War was over, and Leon Trotsky began reshaping the Russian army to defend Mother Russia. He would later pay for his loyalty to the revolution with his life. The allies had no real purpose in Russia other than to prevent the supplies they had sent from falling into the Germans’ hands. When the Civil War was over, they left, too.
The Civil War’s resolution was, therefore, the perfect moment to restart the repression. This was deemed necessary, because even good revolutionaries were turning on the new government. In Petrograd-Kronstadt, for example, which is an island in St. Petersburg’s harbor, navy sailors demanded that Lenin fulfill his previous promises about devolving power to the local level. (Lenin had originally begun the Revolution with the cry, “All power to the Soviets!”) Bolshevik armies massacred the sailors, even though they had been at the revolution’s center, and the need for repression intensified as the government’s policy of “War Communism” took full effect. Under “War Communism” the government took over the economy. It outlawed all unions, the official view being that since the Soviet Union was a worker’s state, the government already had the workers’ best interests at heart. In addition, the government took over agriculture, going into the countryside and stealing all the food that the peasants produced to give to the workers in the city. In a preview of the devastation that Mao Zedong’s policies would wreak on the Chinese economy, “War Communism” caused the Russian economy promptly to collapse. By 1920, St Petersburg had lost 75% of its population, and Moscow 50%, while the industrial labor force shrank by 75% overall. Many workers died in the fighting, others starved to death, most simply returned to the land. Thus, industrial production halted and total manufacturing fell to 87% of 1913 levels. This was a reversal of a trend toward industrialization that had begun under the Czars. Twenty years of economic progress was destroyed in one fell swoop.
The Communists soon realized that they had to adapt or perish. So in 1921, they announced the New Economic Policy, which represented a temporary retreat from full implementation of the Communist program. Lenin, in effect, became a temporary and tactical capitalist, declaring that it was perfectly all right to allow small businesses to be run independently as part of a larger transition. In 1922, the state even reintroduced money, which had been outlawed earlier in the revolution. As for larger operations, the party took over all big industries, because these were crucial to the economy and had too much power to be out of government hands. Thus, party heads assumed control of factories without having any expertise in industry, and workers were allowed no voice in daily management, since the party was, after all, on their side.
The NEP succeeded in stabilizing the Russian economy, and capitalist policies were allowed to persist for a number of years. A fixed tax on income of 20% was instated, which by historical standards is quite low. Agriculture revived slowly and food production increased, though famine did strike across the country. This famine’s worst effects were alleviated, however, by a massive relief effort led by future US president Herbert Hoover. (In later polemics between the United States and the Soviet Union over who started the Cold War this fact was often forgotten on the Soviet side, while a great deal of attention was given to those allied armies that had landed in Archangel.) Even large factories had to work according to vague capitalist practices. Companies paid workers wages, and talented managers even got slightly higher pay. It was even legal to fire people who refused to work. Unions also began to appear and gained the right to bargain collectively, though only with privately held companies. The revolutionary potential of these new unions was dampened, however, by the requirement that the leaders be members of the Communist Party.
The NEP also sparked the return of public life. Since it was now legal to buy and sell goods for profit, lively local markets and small stores began to appear. Middlemen began to appear as well. Known as NEPmen, they played the market by positioning their money in particular products or places. Most striking, perhaps, was that cafés opened in Moscow, a notoriously dour town. And there was even that ultimate signal of capitalist enterprise, interest. Interest was still officially illegal, so the government began issuing bonds that were priced at 95 rubles and could be redeemed for 100 rubles after the passage of a fixed amount of time.
Russia was, however heading for trouble, since capitalism and Communist Party dogma could not exist over the long term, as Mikhail Gorbachev was to find out much later. As some people began to get rich and independent, a government crackdown became inevitable. Already in 1921 Lenin publicly denounced free speech, calling it deviationism. In addition, he kept his system of authoritarian control in effect. Lenin had promised during the revolution that the Cheka would be disbanded after the dust had settled, and he kept that promise, more or less, when he disbanded the Cheka and renamed it GPU in 1922. Later this organization became world famous under the initials KGB, or Committee on State Security. The need for the tools of oppression never disappeared while the Soviet state existed.
Lenin died in 1924, leaving behind a most unstable political situation. There was no clear procedure for succession and a battle for power ensued. By 1928, Josef Stalin had managed to maneuver himself into a position of supreme power, and the authoritarian trends that had begun with Lenin reached their fullest development. In 1928, Stalin ended the NEP, because it never resolved the problem of supplying adequate quantities of grain to the cities. He then imposed on the Russian people a massive forced collectivization program that killed millions. Throughout the late 1920 and early 1930s the government forcibly deprived all Russian peasants of their land, leading to famine in the countryside. In addition, by 1931 the state reimposed its controls on all production and commerce. The Soviet Union was now without any economic freedoms at all. It was also a police state and would remain so until its final dissolution in 1991.

Lecture 17: A New Type of War

2008-01-31T07:24:00.000-08:00

World War I is the fundamental disaster of the twentieth century. Without it the bitterness and hatred that led to World War II is inconceivable. That is because the first war destroyed three things. First, it cracked what had been, to that point, a common European culture. For all of Europe’s nationalisms, there still was a common set of beliefs in how business in Europe ought to be done. Second, the war wrecked for a decade an economy that had been growing ever larger and more productive. Finally, it brutalized an entire generation of young men, whom Europe would need in the days to come, but who had little left to offer.
Our main question is then, how did it come to this? We have already discussed some of the big issues that led to this modern catastrophe. Economic and social factors pushed Europe out into the globe, making any competition between states a prelude to war. The arrival of two new states, Germany and Italy, upset the diplomatic balance that had existed since 1815. The temptation to use nationalism for domestic political reasons was too great, and too many European statesmen encouraged their peoples to believe in national political aggression.
At the center of this mix was William II, who had made the key blunder of firing Bismarck in 1890. Firing Bismarck was not, however, the issue. The problem was that William II was incapable of understanding Bismarck’s diplomacy. This was based on two principles. First, France and Russia must never join. Second, Great Britain must be cajoled into remaining independent. William II’s diplomacy after 1890 was, however, based on bluster and the eternal search for prestige victories, which unsettled Europe’s other great powers. Thus, by 1892, France and Russia had signed an alliance. By 1904, Britain and France also signed an alliance. By 1907, Bismarck’s nightmare scenario had appeared; France, Russia, and Great Britain were all allied. Germany had its own alliances, joining with Austria and the Ottoman Empire in the center. Thus, Europe descended into rigid alliance systems, in which both sides pledged to go to war, if the other side started it. When on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the alliance system pulled Europe into the maelstrom of war.
The first thing we must realize about the war is how destructive it was, by comparison to previous wars. When France and Prussia last went to war in 1871, the conflict was over quickly and with relatively few casualties. This was because armies, for all their technical improvements since the Napoleonic period in fire-power, were still weak by comparison to what would come. World War I was different. Buoyed by their powerful economies the combatants produced huge quantities of guns and cannon that could fire further and more rapidly than anything seen before. This led to a stunning historical result: for the first time in the history of warfare, more soldiers were killed by enemy fire than disease.
The development of machine guns and cannon and their proliferation was the focal point of to this process. Consider this fact: whereas British military doctrine in 1870 had called for 2 machine guns per battalion, by 1914 that number had increased to 50. And the war had yet to begin. More guns alone did not, however, mean more killing. Guns appeared in context with other innovations. One invention of great importance, though not often recognized, is the invention and mass production of barbed wire. It had been invented in the United States in 1874 to keep cattle in place, but then it spread around the world and found other uses. One of them was, of course, military. With sufficient guns and barbed wire, it became possible to hold down large swaths of territory by making it completely inhospitable to human life.
Even more important than guns and barbed wire were, however, the appearance of ever more sophisticated cannon. Cannon are what made WWI as destructive as it was. During the 1870s cannon had grown more sophisticated, developing greater range and accuracy. The most important aspect of these developments was the introduction of dampers to the guns themselves, which reduced the weapon’s recoil and made aiming better. (It should be noted at this time that the German cannon were generally better than anything the other side had to offer. This is one reason why French casualty figures were so horrible.) The appearance of these weapons also led to another stunning historical result. For the first time, more soldiers were killed in action by cannon than by gunfire. This was due in no small measure to the system of machine guns, barbed wire and trenches that kept the lines static. As a result, people did not move much. Nonetheless, thanks to better technology, each side’s cannon could reach and blow up those on the other side. There were, of course, other technical advances in weaponry, such as faster, more powerful ships, airplanes, tanks, and poison gas. They were important to the war and brought many deaths, but none of these weapons ended the stalemate that had been created by the combination of machine guns, cannon, and barbed wire.
The war began on the eastern front on August 1, as the Russians invaded eastern Germany. This was a surprising turn of events, since the Germans had felt that the Russians would not be able to move for months. It was also a crucial moment in the war, since it required the German Supreme Commander Helmuth von Moltke (1848-1916) to divert two divisions to the East, that is away from the intended attack in the West on France. The Russians advanced on this front until August 27, when their forces were shattered at the battles of Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes. The war in the East was not over, but the Germans now had the initiative.
The Germans began their attack on France on August 4, 1914. Sweeping through Belgium (an act that made certain Britain would fight the war), German troops rapidly defeated Belgian and British forces, before heading toward Paris. They were in sight of the city, being able to see the Eiffel Tower, when they were stopped at the Marne in a series of battles that decided the course of the war. Until that point Germany had advanced steadily and expected a rapid victory. After being stifled at the Marne, however, the Germans sacked von Moltke and replaced him with another General, Erich von Falkenhayn. He changed strategies slightly, deciding that if he could not get a rapid victory over opposing troops, he would try to get around them. The German army, thus, made a series of attacks in the Argonne forest, and in the cities of Lille and Antwerp, but was foiled at every turn. This is what has come to be called the “race to the sea.” Neither side could defeat the other head on, so both raced to the ocean to turn the enemy’s flank. Eventually, both sides ran out of territory and dug a complicated network of trenches that cut across northern Europe.
At the same time that the Germans entered Belgium, the French entered German territory in Alsace. The German attack plan had been predicated on this happening. In the late 19th century, a German Chief of Staff named Alfred von Schlieffen articulated the Schlieffen plan. It held that in a two front war, Germany must defeat France first and then turn on Russia, since that country would mobilize more slowly. We have already seen how the Russian prediction turned out. In France’s case, however, Schlieffen’s assessment turned out right. He felt that the French would be so preoccupied with regaining the territories in Alsace and Lorraine that they would attack there first. So the idea was to wait for them in Alsace and go around them through Belgium. Since the Germans were waiting for the French they were able to counter-attack fiercely to stop the advance. Thus, by the end of September this attack failed and both sides dug in. By the end of the year, Northern Europe was one big trench from the Atlantic to the Rhine.
Having reached the end of the calendar year, let’s take stock of the situation. Both sides had failed to gain a swift victory. Strategically, the situation was slightly better for the Germans than the French or Brits, since the German army was on foreign soil. But the human toll was awful to comprehend. By the end of 1914, France had lost 300,000 men, with Britain and Belgium losing another 25,000 together. Germany had lost 85,000. And this was only the beginning, since the trench warfare system encouraged further slaughter. To overcome the trench lines, it was felt that artillery bombardment and infantry charges were necessary to overwhelm the enemy. Thus, thousands of people were thrown into a meat grinder (the German’s called it a Wurstmachine) that produced moderate and ephemeral gains.
The situation in the East was a little different by the start of the New Year. The Russians had lost all their early gains and were being pushed eastward by the Germans. Things were going a little differently in the southeast, where the Russians were pushing into Austrian held territory. But even here no one struck a knockout blow, as the Austrians made good their losses and began to push back into Serbia. After the front had settled down in the west, the first military initiative came in March 1915 from the Brits in an attack on a town called Neuve Chapelle, but the attack failed and the Germans held the town. The German response came at the Belgian town of Ypres, and their artillery attack was so furious that the town became uninhabitable.
Looking for a way out of this stalemate and responding to calls for help from the Russians, the Brits decided to attack the Central Powers’ weakest link, the Ottomans. During the months of March and April, they attacked the Dardanelles with ships, but were repulsed. They then tried a landing at Gallipoli, which also failed. One of the leaders in the Turkish defense was a young Mustafa Kemal, who became the founder of modern Turkey. That attack finally failed in August. This is an important moment in the war, since it announced to the rest of Europe’s states that the Ottoman Empire was up for grabs. Italy, sensing that it could gain territory against its traditional rivals Austria and the Ottoman Empire cut a secret deal for territory and joined the war on the Entente powers’ side in 1915.
The Brits sought to gain the initiative in the West by attacking at the Belgian town of Loos in September. The Brits used poison gas for the first time at this battle, but it made no difference. German superiority in machine guns ended the attack. There was also an offensive in modern Iraq, but the stifling heat halted the advance. The Austrians did a little better in Serbia. By the end of 1915, Austrian troops were in Belgrade. Bulgaria, which had been neutral, entered the war at this point, hoping to steal territory from the Serbians. This invited a British-led invasion through Greece that brought mixed results, at best. By the end of 1915, therefore, little had been accomplished beyond killing more people. During the year the French had lost another 210,000 soldiers killed, the Brits 66,000, and the Germans 113,000.
As we turn to 1916, we see Austria going on the offensive, taking Montenegro and Albania. This was the high tide of the Central Powers. The Anglo-French invasion at Gallipoli had been a disaster and the evacuation was under way. An Anglo-British attack in Iraq was another disaster, as Turkish troops defeated the invaders and took 11,000 prisoners. And during this time Germany also began to overrun the Russian Empire. German troops moved into Poland and Lithuania, as anti-war strikes began to occur in various Russian cities. This empire was dying; three others would eventually join it. Also in 1916, the Germans began their offensive on the fortress at Verdun. The French had long held that they would never give up the fortress, and the German generals figured that they would use this to their advantage by bleeding France to death through their stubbornness. Since the French would hold onto this fort beyond reason, the idea was, they would lose many men and have to move reinforcements from other parts. This truly was a Wurstmachine. The battle lasted until the summer, when the Germans wound it down. At that point, the Germans had lost 71,000 men dead or missing and the French 160,000.
On July 1, 1916, the Brits made their contribution to the slaughter by attacking over the river Somme in northern France. Throughout the summer the Brits marched into German lines and were destroyed. The statistics are nauseating. On the first day, the Brits suffered 57,000 casualties, 19,000 of them dead. By the end of the year, in just this battle the Brits had suffered 500,000 casualties of all types and the French another 200,000. The Germans suffered 235,000 of their own. To give you a little more context on the bloodletting involved in this battle. During the year 1916 the Brits had lost a total of 150,000 people dead, the French 270,000, and the Germans 143,000. The total killed to that point in the war for the Germans, French and Brits reached 1.4 million. And there were still two years of war to go.
1917 is a crucial year in the war, because it brought the end of the Russian Empire and saw the US’s entry into the war. We’ll begin with the Russians. By 1917, the Russian army was finished. More than 1 million Russian soldiers had been killed in action, another 500,000 were wounded, and another million had deserted. Things had not been going well on the home front either. Already at the end of 1916, in October and November, there were almost 200 strikes by 200,000 working men against the war. Things steadily eroded from there. By March 3, 1917 there was a massive strike at the munitions plant in St. Petersburg. The strike spread and by March 9, 300,000 workers were on strike. The unrest spread to other areas and by March 15 the Czar had abdicated. A provisional government was set up under the Menshevik socialist Alexander Kerensky. This government made a crucial mistake, however, in that it decided to continue the war. (We can understand this decision a little, if we keep in mind that the Russian state was being kept alive by massive western aid. Not wishing to give up this aid, Kerensky decided to continue the war.) This only made matters worse and by November 1917 there was another revolution led by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin’s government ended the war with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Signed ultimately on March 3, 1918, it was a punitive arrangement that took from Russia a third of its population and agricultural land, as well as all of its oil. We will pick up the Russian Revolution’s tale in another lecture. For now, we need only remember that Czarist Russia was gone and the Germans could turn their forces to the West.
The German defeat of Russia would have been a tremendous advantage to the Central Powers, except for the United State’s entry into the war in April, 1917. Germany had long had a fundamental problem. It could not challenge British naval supremacy, which meant that the Brits could strangle German trade, but the Germans could not do the same to the Brits. (We must also add to this the German navy’s unwillingness to put is precious battleships to the test. There was only one naval battle during the First World War, the battle of Jutland in 1916. The idea was to open the North Sea by defeating the British. The battle was inconclusive and both sides lost ships. The German navy’s response was to leave all its ships at anchor for the rest of the war.) After its great military push during 1916, Germany believed that it could finally knock out the Brits by strangling her trade. Since the German surface fleet was in dock, the way to do this was “unrestricted submarine warfare.” If the Germans could not defeat the Royal Navy on the surface, they could destroy the merchants delivering goods to Britain from below. Germany had used submarine warfare earlier in the war, but suspended attacks on Merchant fleets after the US protested the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. In March of 1916, however, the German government changed radically in character, when Erich Falkenhayn was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg as Chief of General Staff. Hindenburg took as his deputy Erich von Ludendorff. These men were the heroes of the battle of Tannenberg and they immediately set about militarizing every aspect of German society, including wartime production and diplomacy. The Kaiser now no longer made policy, but was merely a figurehead.
In February 1917, under this new leadership, the Germans made the disastrous decision to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare. By April 6, the US declared war and soon ships and men began to head for Europe. Eventually, the US put 2 million men into Europe. (What the Germans inexplicably did not know is that the Brits were about to collapse financially. Their credit with the US had reached its limits and they would not have received new loans without the US’s entry into the war.) This marked the beginning of the end. Without US intervention, Germany would have won the war. With the additional resources, however, there was no way that Germany could win. Nonetheless, the fighting continued. By the end of 1917 another 500,000 German, French, and British soldiers had died.
On January 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, president of the US, issued his 14-point peace program, setting out a liberal democratic vision for Europe based on national self-determination. It fell on deaf ears. All countries were in so deeply now that the only conceivable end to the war was to make the other side pay its costs. (The Brits had, for example, rallied under the banner Hang the Kaiser!) Germany, for its part, decided to make one last offensive in 1918. It had signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March and was convinced that the US could not contribute greatly to the war before the summer of 1918. Thus, in their view a race to end the war quickly was now on. On March 21 the first of three great German offensives began. The first was an attack on British positions near Laon. They were initially quite successful, virtually obliterating two British armies and taking back all the territory that the Brits had gained at the Somme. Then the Germans unleashed another attack on the area around Ypres. Casualties were massive. In the five weeks since the start of the attack, the Brits had lost 150,000 dead or missing. (At the so-called third Battle of Ypres, which had been a British offensive, the Brits lost roughly the same amount, but that battle had lasted 5 months.) The French lost another 60,000, and the Germans 105,000. Then in May, 1918, the Germans turned south, taking Soissons and heading toward Paris once again. This advance was only stopped by the Americans. The Germans tried to attack again in July, but could not overcome the recent importation of American strength.
On July 18, the French were able to launch a counterattack that finally broke the German lines. 30,000 German prisoners were taken on that day. Among the soldiers who took part in the retreat was a young corporal named Adolf Hitler. On August 4th Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class for personal bravery. But this was merely the start of a general collapse. Entente powers attacked again on August 8. By August 14 Ludendorff recommended that the German government sue for peace. On August 17, the French attacked and took 10 miles of territory in a single day. On September 26, there was a new offensive near Cambrai. The Austrian Army was in freefall, too, and had begun to seek peace. By the end of September Bulgaria had signed an armistice and was out of the war. In mid-October, the Brits made another advance, during which young corporal Hitler was wounded again, this time blinded by a poison-gas artillery shell. On October 28, the Austrians asked for an armistice. On November 2, the Americans launched another offensive, using mustard gas for the first time. On November 11, the Germans signed an armistice as well. The most destructive war in history--to that point—came to an end at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Through it all in four years of fighting the French lost a total of 1.2 million soldiers killed, the Brits 620,000, and the Germans 670,000. The complete death toll on the West for all combatants reached 2.5 million. This is the context against which you will need to consider next week’s lecture about culture between the wars.
Before we end, however, let us take a step back and try to put this war into a broader context. First, looking back, we can see that this was a great national war. Nation states and peoples clashed, in a way that had not been possible before, and a new series of nation states appeared in the war’s aftermath, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Second, this great national war finally destroyed the conservative powers in the eastern and central Europe. Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey all succumbed to the war. The map of Europe would be forever changed by these political upheavals. Third, the war revolutionized European economies, though whether it was for the better is disputed.
Thanks to the war’s enormous material needs governments intervened in their economies in ways never before seen. By 1915, governments were directing whole economies. First, they took over foreign exchange and investment. Then, since conscription affected the labor force, the state became involved in assigning labor. As supplies became ever scarcer during the war, the state entered the economy by rationing available materials, and soon it was directing what was to be produced. The Germans had their War and Raw Materials Board and instituted National Conscription early in the war. The English first set up a Ministry of Munitions, which was instituted only to guarantee the supply of artillery shells. Later, however, they created five new departments to run the entire economy. Wealthy property holders also saw the war take a bite of their wealth. The Brits increased their income taxes dramatically and the Germans finally instituted one. Landed property came under increasing regulation as all available land had to be used for growing crops. In many ways, these wartime governments were early experiments in state socialism, and they point us to a new interrelationship between the state and the economy that would run right through and beyond the Second World War.
Toward the end, the war had become something absolute, as all of society—willingly or unwillingly—was mobilized for victory, whether it was in the people’s, the government’s, or the autocrat’s name. Noncombatants became involved in the war in a way that was new. Civilians became the target of economic and psychological warfare. Home governments began to ration food in the name of the war. Germany began the trend in 1915, Italy followed suit in 1917. The great expansion of civil liberties under the post-1850 liberal tide turned back, as war-time government meant the suspension of constitutional liberties and parliaments. After 1916, Germany was under a military regime. In Austria, parliament did not meet until 1917. In Britain and France, elected officials still ruled, but in an increasingly autocratic manner, as policy became simply a means for finding victory. In addition, class hatreds were exacerbated, as people began to complain that the burdens of war were not being equally distributed. In the end, the War points us to a much more dangerous world than the one it destroyed. Liberalism had come under attack. Stable governments had fallen. The social resentments were never overcome. That is why, unfortunately, what contemporaries simply called the Great War is now called by us World War I.

Lecture 16: The European State System up to World War I

2008-01-31T07:22:00.001-08:00

Over the last few weeks we have been following a dual track. On the one hand, we have considered the history and politics of some of Europe’s individual states. On the other hand, we have put these histories into broader contexts, considering the effect of forces such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, as well as the group of “isms” that came out of the post-revolutionary period. In this lecture, I also want to broaden our perspective, but with reference to international relations. Although individuals played an important role in international relations throughout the nineteenth century, with people such as Klemens von Metternich, Otto von Bismarck, Benjamin Disraeli, and Napoleon III setting the agenda, their decisions were shaped by problems created by the competition among states for influence, a competition that dated back to the fifteenth century. Thus, World War I’s outbreak in the summer of 1914 may have been due in part to diplomatic blundering, but that the resulting conflagration was so large and lasted so long was a product of the vicious, long-term battle between European states for world preeminence. In this lecture I want to trace how that longer battle was fought and who the major actors were.
I begin by discussing international relations in the sixteenth century. You are already familiar with my way of describing the international scene in accord with “problems.” Thus, as I have already discussed, during the nineteenth century France was one of Europe’s major problems. What was one to do, after all, with a country that between 1789 and 1870 had repeatedly exported revolution and war to the rest of the Continent? After 1870, of course, the central “problem” became Germany. Things were different in the sixteenth century. For one thing, different players were in the game. Germany did not exist as a state, and England, France, Spain, and Austria were the only real players. During the sixteenth century the central problem was Spain. Spain had emerged from the reconquista of the fifteenth century as a powerful, aggressive state bent on domination. By 1492, when Granada the last of the Islamic states on the Iberian Peninsula fell, Spain’s monarchs had a good deal of expertise in taxing and fighting. Moreover, the union of the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile through the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand in 1469 created a large, centralized state that was ready to make mischief on the world stage. When Spain’s destiny became entwined with the dynastic ambitions of the Habsburgs, Europe was destined for multiple wars.
You already know where Spain made much of its mischief, namely in the New World. Spain’s colonial empire in North and South America was crucial to European politics, because the silver that it extracted from there financed a series of wars against other European states. In 1495, Spain joined with England to invade Italy in the name of booting out the French, who had invaded the year before. In 1503, they took Naples, which they kept for two centuries, part of a long trend of outside interference in the Italian peninsula that not only dated back to eighth century but would also continue until 1870. In 1588, Spain tried to invade England, but its fleet was destroyed by better British seamanship and the Atlantic’s treacherous weather. And then there was the problem of the Habsburg inheritance. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I of Austria had aggrandized Austria through a shrewd, if lucky, marriage policy. One of his marriage bets paid off in the acquisition of the area that is now Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Later, another of his bets paid off handsomely, bringing the Spanish throne into the Habsburg fold. Thus, it was that in 1516 Maximilian’s grandson Charles not only came to the Spanish throne but also into possession of what would be called the Spanish Netherlands.
Charles V’s rise to power offers an opportunity to consider two factors that would be important for the course of the seventeenth century. The first was religious conflict. Martin Luther got things off to a roaring start in 1517 by nailing his 95 theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. Luther was saved from martyrdom by German politics, as Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony locked him in a castle, thus allowing Luther to become the first successful heretic since Jesus of Nazareth. The resulting religious ferment upset Europe’s political balance, which resulted in a series of wars. This leads us to the second factor. One of the most important of the sixteenth century wars was the Dutch Revolt of 1567-1579, in which the Dutch gained their independence from the Spanish crown. During the sixteenth century the Dutch had become Calvinists. Spanish religious oppression and high taxes led the Dutch to revolt against their prince and found a republic. This is important, since the Netherlands was a densely populated area that was heavily invested in Atlantic trade. As the Dutch got rich, they also got belligerent, going to war not only against Spain but also Portugal, and all in the name of commerce. Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had become a major player in the great race for colonial and mercantile advantage.
As we enter the seventeenth century, we have six major players in the European state system: France, Spain, England, Austria, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden. England, for its part, had had more than its share of problems through the fifteenth centuries. First, the French booted them out of northern France in 1443. Second, during the late fifteenth century civil war broke out, the so-called War of the Roses, which began in 1455 and ended only in 1485. It was only with the accession to the English throne of Henry VIII (1491-1547; r. 1509) that the English could project power outside their borders. They began in the sixteenth century by joining the Spanish invasion of Italy, but with the coming of the Reformation in the 1530s the English left the catholic fold and increasingly saw their interests in aligning themselves with the Dutch. Phillip II’s attempted invasion of England was, in part, a response to English aid to the Dutch during the latter’s revolt. However, during the seventeenth century, the English became much more aggressive. As we have already discussed, growing English interest in commerce led them fight three wars with the Dutch during the seventeenth century. And by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the English were the preeminent mercantile power in Europe.
The French had been on the rise even since the end of the Hundred Year’s War (1337-1453). In 1477, they took the lower half of Burgundy from the Habsburgs. In 1494, they invaded northern Italy. During the sixteenth century they set their sights on Germany, occupying key cities in Lorraine in 1552. France’s true rise to prominence came, however, in the sixteenth century with the reigns of Louis XIII (1601-43; r.1610) and Louis XIV (1638-1715; r.1643). Under Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu, France became involved in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), seeking to harm the Catholic Habsburgs by fighting on the side of Germany’s Protestants. (I note parenthetically here that the Thirty Years’ War saw the rise and fall of Sweden, particularly under their Great King Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632; r. 1611). Adolphus led Sweden into the war in defense of Protestantism, but after his death it became clear that Sweden did not have the means to maintain a belligerent foreign policy. The issue would be decided, in the end, by Russia’s arrival.) Nonetheless, now I must return to France. During Louis XIV’s reign France went on the offensive, attacking the Spanish (1648-59) and the Dutch (1672-78), before becoming involved in the Nine Years’ War with the English, Dutch, and Austrians from (1688-1697), and then facing the same coalition in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713/14). Louis XIV’s reign changed the strategic situation in Europe. From this point forth the English, Dutch, and Austrians would forever be looking for ways to control France. The fundamental problem was that France was the most populous country in Europe, having 20 million people during Louis XIV’s reign, and its economy was very productive. Thus, right through Napoleon’s time, France was so powerful that it always threatened Europe with expansionism.
By the start of the eighteenth century, the European system had lost three major players and gained two. The English, French, and Austrians persisted, while Spanish, the Dutch, and the Swedes exited the first rank. In exchange, Europe saw the rise of the Russians and the Prussians. The French broke Spain with the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, which came at the end of a war that had been going on since 1648. Spain remained an important European power until the War of the Spanish Succession, but after the other powers dismantled Spain’s overseas empire its time on the European stage was over. The Swedes were already overextended in the Thirty Years’ War, but with the Great Northern War (1700-21) they were finally excused from the first rank of powers by the sleeping giant in the east Russia. Russia had made great strides under its reforming Czar Peter the Great (1672-1725; r. 1696) who moved the capital to St. Petersburg, reformed the Russian army and built the navy. By the end of Peter’s reign, and with the victory over the Swedes, Russia was the preeminent power in the Baltic. It would also become the preeminent power in the Balkans under Catherine II (1729-1796; r. 1762). The Dutch were also excused from the first rank by their wars against the English and the French. By the eighteenth century they were essentially a prosperous English satellite. There is also one other thing that we must take not of, however. By the end of the seventeenth century, religion had ceased to be a major cause for war. France’s cynical support for Protestant German powers in the Thirty Years’ War against its co-religionists in Austria was already a signal that things had changed. In 1697, when Louis XIV officially recognized the accession of William III and Mary II to the English throne, religious matters had been excreted from power politics. For better or worse, all wars would now be fought for reasons of state.
We have already discussed the rise of Prussia in the eighteenth century. Frederick II’s Machiavellian attack on Austria in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) and his good fortune in surviving the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) meant that Prussia became a power of the first rank, if only barely. Until well into the nineteenth century, Prussia was the one great power that could have been dissolved by a single military defeat, so it was understandable that Europe’s powers tended to be more worried that Austria would dominate Germany. The rise of Prussia signaled, however, two things. First, an important parting of the ways occurred on the Continent. From this point forth Europe was divided into two spheres: a western sphere dominated by England and France, and an eastern one dominated by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 were a clear signal that the west had little say about affairs in the east. Second, Austria now had legitimate competition for leadership in the German sphere. That Prussia won this battle would have important consequences for all of Europe. We will talk more about those in a moment.
We have already discussed the French Revolution and Napoleon in detail in another lecture, so I will pass over these events and limit my comments to their broad implications. First, with Napoleon’s “final” defeat at Waterloo, it became clear that Europe would now be dominated by the two powers no one could hope to defeat, Britain and Russia. Britain’s navy made it invulnerable to invasion, and Russia’s eternal steppe made any invasion pointless. These two powers, in particular, oversaw Europe and tried to ensure that the French did not stir up trouble again. It took a long time before anyone could forget the 15 years of war and four coalitions that had been necessary to defeat Napoleon.
This desire to keep the French in a box is the real foundation of the second implication to which I just alluded, the birth of the Congress System. Led by Austria, the so-called Concert of Europe tried to maintain the peace on the Continent by developing a system of obligations and rights that bound the various powers into the system. This concert included Britain, France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. As you know, the Congress system was not a restoration, since many of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic changes persisted. This may be the reason why the new system managed to keep the peace, in spite of series of crises that could have ignited a major war. In 1820-1, there were revolts in Spain, Naples and Piedmont. In 1821-5, there was a revolt in Greece against the Ottoman Empire. In the 1810s and 20s a host of Spanish colonies revolted against their imperial overseers. In 1826-29, there was a crisis over a Russo-Turkish war that the Turks had lost badly. In the 1830s there were revolutions in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Poland. In 1832-41, there was another Near Eastern Crisis, in which the Concert of Europe actually propped up the Ottomans.
Here I need to make two points. First, the rise of the eastern powers (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) sucked the Ottomans into the European system. The Ottoman Empire originated in the thirteenth century, and had been a menace to Austria since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, however, it was clearly decaying and this became a problem, since both Austria and Russia wanted to aggrandize themselves at the Ottomans’ expense. This was a problem for every other power in Europe, but especially for the British, who did not want the Austrians and Russians to compete with them in the Mediterranean. Second, although the British theoretically pulled out of the Congress System in 1828, the habits and beliefs that coalesced after 1815 persisted right until 1914. That is, the great powers always feared a major war and strove to avoid one through the deft, and sometimes amoral, use of diplomacy. The belief was that a major conference was preferable to war. Things did not always work out that way, there was a major war in 1853, but given Europe’s history of incessant warfare during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was not a bad record at all.
The Congress System dissolved in the end, and here I want to pursue three reasons why. The first reason is the rise of nationalism. Between 1848 and 1861, as we have seen, nationalist movements appeared across Europe, and this allowed certain opportunistic leaders to undermine the stability of the European system. A good example is Napoleon III, whom we have already discussed. Napoleon’s behavior toward Italy and Austria was a major factor in diminishing other power’s interests in maintaining the status quo. Second, is the Crimean War (1853-56). Napoleon III was in the thick of this situation, virtually assuring that a war would come. Napoleon wanted to break the Austro-Russian alliance that both parties had developed in the Congress of Vienna’s wake, so he risked a major crisis in order to gamble on a diplomatic triumph. The Turks, for their part, were sick of the Russians attacking them every few years. Russian aggression began under Fyodor III in 1676 and continued under every subsequent Czar, ending only in 1878. The British, in turn, were unclear on what their goals were in the area, having no clue beyond the certain belief that the Russian could not have control of the Black Sea. In the end, the Turks declared war on Russia, followed by France and Britain. Austria, in spite of being pledged to help Russia remained the sidelines, refusing to join either side. The fighting was inconclusive, though the Russians suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat at the peace conference in Paris.
This war had important long-term consequences. First, the Russians were angry and accelerated their process of financial and military reforms, which merely increased the competition within Europe. Second, the French were seen as meddlesome and, therefore, unworthy of support. Third, the Austrians came to be viewed as untrustworthy. Third, the British were so embarrassed by their abysmal performance that they reached a political consensus on the absolute need to fund their Navy. Finally, the mistrust and bitterness the war created left an opening for Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont. Both Italian and German unifications were products of the major shock to the Congress System caused by the Crimean War.
This leads me to the third reason for the Congress System’s decline and fall, the rise of Imperial Germany. In 1862, Otto von Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia. As you know from the lecture on German unification, Bismarck used every diplomatic opportunity placed before him to unify Germany on Prussia’s terms. I won’t go into the details of this process, since you already know them. What I want to discuss here is the basic instability that a powerful state in the middle of Europe created for the old Congress System. German unification changed the strategic landscape. Britain now had a competitor on the open ocean, which it could not tolerate. France was, of course, very unhappy, since a larger, more powerful army sat next door. It is true that the French wanted Alsace and Lorraine back, but the deeper problem vis-à-vis Germany was that they had no hope of defeating the Germans in a fair fight. Germany was Europe’s most populous state and had its most powerful and dynamic economy. Let me give you one example: in 1890 Germany’s second largest coalfield, in Silesia, outproduced the entire French coal industry. This meant that the French could only find security in alliances, which they sought assiduously. A measure of just how threatening the new Germany was is that the French and the Brits, historically mortal enemies, signed an alliance in 1904, the so-called Entente Cordiale. The Austrians were still a formidable state, but they were in reality a German appendage, which meant that they had no real diplomatic freedom. The end result of Austria’s weakness was the defensive alliance between Germany and Austria in 1879. The battle lines of 1914 were already drawn in the late nineteenth century.
Now we are in a position to understand both the genius and the folly of Bismarck’s new state. Bismarck understood that Europe was fast becoming a pressure cooker, so he constantly tried to divert Europe’s energies to peripheral regions, such as Africa and the Balkans. Two congresses are important examples here: the first is the Berlin Congress of 1878, which revised a Treaty of San Stefano between Russia and Turkey over their final war for the Balkans. Basically, Bismarck forced the Russians to give some territory back to the Turks so that the British and the Austrians would be happy. The next was the Berlin West Africa Congress of 1884-5. This Congress met to decide the fate of the Congo. Portugal had claimed rights to the Congo River estuary, but the Congress declared it a free navigation zone, largely to keep the British and French happy. You will recall that the Scramble for Africa began in officially in 1881 with the French invasion of Tunisia. What I should like to note here is that the French received a good deal of encouragement in their antics from one Otto von Bismarck. And his later efforts to regulate the competition in Africa were a continued recognition of the need to keep Europe looking to other parts of the globe.
So Germany was now the center of European diplomacy. But a long-term problem ran through all of Bismarck’s maneuvers: the Congress System had been replaced by a rapacious competition for territory in Africa and the Balkans. As you well know, eventually the territory available for plunder had to run out, and then the old tensions would return to Europe with a vengeance. A terrible war was, thus, inevitable, and its outbreak was only a matter of when. In 1890, William II fired Bismarck, declaring his intention to rule, rather than merely to reign, unwittingly bringing a final military conflict that much closer. A worse turn of events could hardly be imagined. William II was full of bluster and rapidly became the Napoleon III of his day. Whereas Bismarck tried to avoid war and maintain Germany’s gains through a policy of limited aims, William II was only out for the next diplomatic triumph. We won’t go into the details here, but the point is that suddenly German foreign policy became a source of instability in Europe. With Germany no longer playing the cautious arbiter, Europe’s descent into a system of mutually hostile alliances was predictable. It is in this context that a ridiculously small event such as the assassination of Austria’s heir apparent, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could have sparked a European war. How that came about is a topic for another day.

Lecture 15: Bismarck: Prussia Acquires Germany

2008-01-31T07:19:00.001-08:00

Last time we talked about Italy’s process of unification, and I used the opportunity to reflect on bigger historical themes, connecting Italy to Romanticism, Liberalism, and Nationalism, as well as the emerging great power politics in Europe that would soon export a series of problems around the world. Against this backdrop, Prussia’s path to German unification is important for us on two levels. First, its rise to great power status fundamentally changed the map of Europe. From the moment the German Empire was founded in 1871, the rules of international competition changed, as a new and powerful rival entered the game that the British thought they had won. Second, Prussia’s rise came at Austria’s expense. Austria, which had been a great power since the sixteenth century, moved into the second rank. It was now a vassal state, capable only of doing what Germany allowed. So now I want to consider the problem of the German Empire from the perspective of the battle between Austria and Prussia for leadership of the German nation. We will see that once this problem had been resolved, a whole host of new ones appeared.
I will begin with the year 1848. In the German speaking areas of Europe, the eve of the revolution of 1848 witnessed a surge in emigration. This was due in part to the continued political repression that had become characteristic in Germany overall. But it was also due to the economic troubles that much of Europe faced in the mid-19th century. In 1846, 95,000 Germans left their native land; in 1847, it was 110,000. The revolution and ensuing political reaction only intensified this trend. Initially, the number of emigrants was reduced: between 1848 and 1850, they fluctuated between 80,000 and 90,000. After the Revolution failed, however, the flow of emigrants increased again. In 1851 there were 113,000; in 1852, 162,000; in 1853, 163,000; and in 1854, 300,000. One of the central tales of Germany in the nineteenth century is of the German middle class’ reaction to the disappointment of 1848.
This increase in German emigration after 1848 had little economic basis, as the economy had been expanding for a while. The real source of this emigration was political. A large number of liberal leaders left the states in which the old regimes had been restored. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, poets, musicians, and even officers left, taking their fortunes with them, which were collectively worth at least nine hundred million gold marks. These people had agitated for more liberal governments and a national state. Not all of the liberals left, however, and their ideals persisted in German political discourse. These ideals consisted of dreams of unification, a constitution, and even of socialism. But as we will see, nationalism in the German context would change what these words meant, for in Europe’s epicenter of Romanticism, the nation came to embrace all. The new Germany included many aspects of the liberal dream, but in a politically conservative context, and the mastermind behind these changes was Otto von Bismarck, who ultimately unified Germany in 1871.
To all appearances, the development of Germany after 1848 continued along the same old lines. But unification by Bismarck created an autocratic empire that differed markedly from the hopes of 1848. The state Bismarck created was of a new kind, the product of what we might call creative conservatism. Based on Prussian military and industrial power, not the communal explosion and renewal that happened in France in 1789, it combined autocratic means with social programs that alleviated the evils of capitalist production. In fact, Germany under Bismarck achieved a modicum of social progress well in advance of other European states that included broad schooling, medical, work, and old age insurance. Thus, Germany became an odd hybrid. The state was not founded on the same democratic principles that Germany’s liberal revolutionaries had espoused, but its social achievements far outpaced that of more liberal countries.
This hybrid state was a product of a series of competing forces. First, we have the desire of conservatives to maintain control of the state. Second, we have liberals who wanted a liberal constitution and a unified German state. Third, we have the impersonal social and economic difficulties associated with industrialization. Otto von Bismarck placed himself in the center of these forces, seeking to unify Germany without yielding to liberal and socialist demands for more power. In his search for unity Bismarck was always very flexible. Thus, he dissolved the German customs union (Zollverein) when free trade seemed to be the order of the day. Then in 1878, he became protectionist when he needed agrarian support to keep his government in power. German farming had been hurt badly by cheaper imports from Canada, the United States, and Russia, so he put up tariff barriers. In the same way, between 1883 and 1889, Bismarck extended accident, sickness, and old-age insurance coverage to workers, addressing many of their basic concerns. An he did all this while outlawing the Social Democratic Party between 1878-1890.
The middle-class revolutionaries who had demanded revolution in the German nation’s name often accepted Bismarck’s actions. In their view, Bismarck had obviously succeeded where they had failed, since he not only unified Germany but also instituted social policies that they had long advocated. Some of the middle-class yielded to these conditions, others fought them. The point for us to keep in mind, however, is that all the forces we have been tracing clashed most fiercely in Germany. Here we will see most clearly the social and political divisions that helped to make the twentieth century such a bloody one.
Otto von Bismarck had to fight three wars to unify Germany. In 1864, a war with Denmark helped him to consolidate his position in Prussia. Then a war against Austria in 1866 ousted the Habsburgs from Germany for good. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 brought the southern German states under the Prussian eagle and established that France no longer exercised hegemony of over the Continent. After Germany was unified in 1871, the news magazine the Economist opined that, “Europe has lost a mistress and gained a master.”
The situation in Denmark highlights how nationalism united liberalism and conservatism. Liberal sentiment in Germany had always wished to separate Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. These two regions were duchies that had come under control of the Danish Crown. Holstein was entirely German and Schleswig was mostly German, with a significant Danish minority in the north. In 1852, in order to deal with rising German opinion against Danish control, an international agreement was signed that allowed the Danes to run the duchies as long as they did not attempt to integrate them into the Danish state. The Danes, however, violated the agreement by integrating Schleswig into the Danish monarchy. Bismarck then used the Danes’ behavior as a pretext for aggression.
Because the Schleswig-Holstein question was a German issue, Bismarck brought in Austria to legitimize his attack. On January 16, 1864, the two powers issued an ultimatum to Denmark that demanded the Danes withdraw within 48 hours, or face military action. Denmark, counting on the support of the European Powers, rejected the ultimatum. The English were sympathetic to the Danes, but refused to act alone. The French had no desire to attack Prussia, since they saw it as a weapon against Austria. Thus, the great powers did nothing. A brief attempt at mediation failed, and Denmark yielded to Prussian and Austrian military force.
In the Treaty of Gastein (August 1865) Prussia and Austria disposed of the acquired duchies. The two powers would rule the two duchies jointly, with Austria administering Holstein and Prussia administering Schleswig. Prussia was given certain military roads through Holstein and command of Kiel, which was to be a port for the German Confederation, in which both Prussia and Germany were members. (You will recall that Klemens von Metternich had set up the Confederation in 1815.) Both duchies were compelled to join the German customs union, which was to Prussia’s benefit since she controlled it. But that was not all. Prussia also annexed Lauenburg, though she paid 2.5 million thalers for it. The German claimant to the throne of the two duchies, Prince Augustenburg, was completely ignored. All this seemed fair enough, though Prussia obviously got the better end of the deal, as it solidified Prussian control over northern Germany, and became the foundation for future aggression. Unfortunately for everyone, Bismarck had no intention of leaving things as they were.
Bismarck believed that war with Austria was inevitable. His entire policy from 1863 to 1866 was predicated on this belief. He had assured that Russia would not intervene in this impending conflict by sympathizing with Russia’s brutal repression of a Polish revolution in 1863. He maneuvered Napoleon III of France into a favorable position by all kinds of vague promises for territorial aggrandizement. An alliance with Italy was even made in April 1866, through Napoleon’s assistance, which stipulated that Italy would come to the aid of Prussia, if a war with Austria broke out within the next three months. All told, Bismarck manipulated every major statesman on the Continent into an awkward diplomatic position. When war finally did come with Austria, he defeated the Habsburgs without any outside interference.
Bismarck then moved towards the showdown by accusing Austria of arming Bohemia. He called it "seditious agitation" and further accused Austria of supporting the unlucky Prince Augustenburg. Strangely enough, when the Prussian king pressured Vienna, Austria seemed willing to disarm, but false rumors that Italy was arming scared Austria and moved her in the opposite direction. So Austria mobilized first and, at the same time, brought the various minor problems which had developed over Schleswig-Holstein before the Federal Diet, in order to gain the support of the other German states.
Bismarck immediately cried that this was a breach of the Gastein Convention. When Austria shortly thereafter convoked the Holstein diet, Prussian troops marched into Holstein. Austria called on the armies of the Confederation to act against what it called illegal actions of Prussia in Holstein. Meanwhile Bismarck presented a new plan for the reorganization of the Confederation. This was laid on the table about the same time that Bavaria proposed to choose a commander for the Confederate armies and to mobilize the forces of the smaller states. When the Bavarian proposal won by a vote of 9 to 6, the Prussian delegate declared the Confederation dissolved and announced a state of war.
It was a quick war--three weeks in duration. Sadowa or Königgratz, which is in Bohemia, was the crucial battle that turned into victory for Prussia, thanks to excellent organization and the famous needle gun. (This gun made it possible for the Prussians to fire seven rounds to every single round from the Austrians, though the gun’s influence on the battle has been overrated.) The Prussian king, who had been hesitant about the war now wanted to invade Austria. But Bismarck, the ever-calculating diplomat, demurred. He knew the value of restraint and was not interested in crushing Austria, only in removing her from German politics. Instead, Bismarck formed something called the North German Confederation, annexing various smaller states and pulling the larger states north of the Main River into Prussia’s orbit. Contemporary observers thought the whole thing was a revolution. What Liberals had dreamed of for five decades, Bismarck achieved in three weeks. The important point here is that success turned many of his former enemies into friends and admirers.
But much like Italy in 1861, Germany was not yet fully unified. The South remained outside the fold and here is where France and Napoleon III came into the picture. Traditionally, the French policy toward Germany had called for the French never to allow a large state to appear in Germany, lest it become a threat to France. Napoleon modified this policy, because he wanted to use the forces of nationalism against Austria. This strategy was two-fold. On the one hand, Austria was a multi-national state, and setting up a German rival would, theoretically, weaken Austria’s foundations. On the other had, Napoleon seemed really to believe some of the nationalist rhetoric. This led him down a cul de sac, since he could never decide what was more important: his belief in national self-determination or the need to keep France stronger than a new Germany would be.
Bismarck helped Napoleon III to decide by outmaneuvering him on a series of diplomatic issues. The disappointments that Bismarck inflicted on Napoleon made him yearn ever more for a major diplomatic triumph. This meant that French policy in the 1860s was jittery and erratic, reflecting Napoleon’s uncertain position at home. The French government made premature threats of war and impudent demands for submission from the Prussians. Its actions in Italy had made the British nervous, which meant they were not going to support Napoleon against Prussia. Moreover, French public opinion began to turn on him as the economy worsened, intensifying the perceived need for a war. Napoleon did not know it, but he was leading France into a war that it could not win.
Strange as it may seem, the Franco-Prussian War actually began in Spain. The Spanish Queen, Isabella, was dethroned by a military coup in 1868, and the Spanish parliament began to look for a replacement. Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, head of the Hohenzollern family’s southern branch, became one of the candidates. Bismarck became the prince’s chief promoter, since he believed it would bring on war. The news of Leopold’s acceptance of the Spanish crown hit France like a bombshell on July 2. Gramont, the French foreign minister, immediately began making vague threats in the French Corps Legislatif, saying things such as, "We should know how to do our duty." Such bluster only made it seem to others as if France was coming unhinged again.
On July 9 the French ambassador Benedetti interviewed King William, who was then in Bad Ems, in Southwest Germany enjoying the baths. Apparently, Benedetti persuaded William to force Leopold to retract his candidacy. On July 12 Leopold recanted, being a good and obedient member of the Hohenzollern family. The matter should have rested there. But the French began to blunder, and Bismarck's ingenuity tricked them into a war. Gramont was not satisfied with Benedetti's accomplishment, so Benedetti was sent to see the king again to demand an unequivocal promise never to allow Leopold to renew his candidacy. Gramont was out for a big diplomatic triumph. But such a diplomatic need is usually a cover for domestic weakness. Napoleon III needed something to restore his weakening grip on power. Both Gramont and Napoleon were, thus, engaging in a very risky game. If they won, they would stay in power. A loss would, however, mean the end of their state. Unfortunately for France, the government’s fervent need for diplomatic success blinded its leaders to the trap that Bismarck had laid.
On July 13, as the king was taking a stroll through the park, Benedetti suddenly materialized from among the trees and accused the king of dishonesty. He demanded a definite promise that Leopold never be allowed to renew his candidacy. The king refused to make such a promise, and a report of the affair was sent to Bismarck in Berlin. Bismarck cleverly abridged this now famous Ems Telegram in a way that made it look like an outright provocation on the part of France. He then had it published in the newspapers, saying that it would have the effect of a red cloth upon the Gallic bull. That is exactly what happened, since the French considered the doctored telegram a provocation and on July 19, France declared war on the North German Confederation.
Bismarck’s previous diplomacy now paid dividends. Among the German states, only Bavaria hesitated to join Bismarck’s war. Russia promised neutrality. England became neutral after Bismarck published Benedetti’s secret plan for annexing Belgium, which had been worked out with Bismarck’s benign approval right after the Battle of Königgrätz. This war did not last long either. The fortress of Sedan fell on September 2, 1870, and the Emperor Napoleon walked across the German lines with his hands high in the air. Now a revolution broke out in the city of Paris, which refused to surrender until January 28, 1871. The Peace of Frankfurt was concluded on May 10. It was a harsh one, requiring France to pay an indemnity of 5 billion gold francs, in addition to stealing back Alsace and Lorraine, territories that the French had successfully stolen two centuries before. Although Bismarck initially showed no great enthusiasm for taking these lands, some industrialists convinced him that they had both economic and military value. (Lorraine had massive iron deposits.) This latest thievery poisoned Franco-German relations right through the First World War. Northern France was occupied until 1873, when the indemnity was completely paid.
The new Germany was built on French national humiliation. On January 18, 1871 William I was crowned as the Emperor of Germany in the French Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. This was, no doubt, adding insult to injury, and it laid the groundwork for future wars. At the time, Victor Hugo predicted that France would, one day, retake Alsace and Lorraine and make Germany a republic. He got it half right. France did get back Alsace and Lorraine, but this was for two reasons. First, Britain and Germany could never reach an accommodation in their global rivalry. Second, an even greater power was forced to enter the European scene as a result. This was United States of America, and we will trace these two themes over the next few lectures.

Lecture 14: Italy Unifies

2008-01-31T07:18:00.000-08:00

In the previous two lectures I talked about the role France and Britain played in the larger world. They were both powerful, unified states, capable of projecting tremendous power around the globe. Their internal strengths and weaknesses became political issues for all of Europe and much of the rest of the globe. In this lecture I want to consider the arrival of a new nation-state, Italy. Italy unified officially in 1870, and its experience of national unification--called the Risorgimento--is worthy of close scrutiny on a number of levels. First, it allows us to consider from another perspective the ways that Romanticism, Liberalism, and Nationalism interacted. Second, it shows us how domestic economic and political problems interacted with the larger European state system. Much like its more powerful neighbors, Italy exported its domestic problems to other parts of the globe. Finally, the Risorgimento was an enormously important event for Europeans’ worldviews. In general, people saw the Italian struggle as the final break with the Old Regime. In spite of all the revolutions—in 1789, 1830, 1848—it was the Italian drive for a unified nation-state that signaled to contemporaries that the last link to the past had been cut. It is no accident, I would add, that the artistic movement we call Modernism originated in Italy.
In order to understand the importance of all these changes, let us consider briefly how Italy was before unification. The first thing we need to understand is that Italy had been the focus of great power rivalries since the fifteenth century. At various times, Spanish, French, and Austrian troops all vied for control over different parts of Italy, while the British fleet made sure that no one became too powerful on the peninsula. By the eighteenth century Spain had dropped out of the competition and France and Austria became the major powers competing for influence. Thus, when the French Revolutionary Wars broke out French troops entered Italy and immediately reorganized its small principalities into various republics. This process was extended under Napoleon, who set up different kingdoms and then put his friends and relatives on the new thrones. By 1815, as political reaction set in across Europe, most of the old Kingdoms and principalities were restored and the revolutionary reforms were overturned.
The year 1815 is central for understanding the Italian Risorgimento, because it marked the high-water point of Austrian influence in the region. The Austrians had come to see Italy as the central bulwark against French aggression, and they were determined to maintain political control over most of the peninsula. Thus, the Austrians annexed Lombardy and Venetia. The Duchy of Tuscany went to the Austrian Emperor’s brother. Parma went to his daughter. Modena and Massa went to other relatives. There were, however limits to Austrian demands. This was an age of legitimism, so other traditional principalities went to families with historical dynastic claims. A Bourbon princess received the Duchy of Lucca. The reigning Bourbon line took back the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. The Kingdom of Sardinia Piedmont was returned to its former ruler Victor Emmanuel I.
The legitimist restoration of Italy’s traditional rulers created an unstable situation. Italy was a poor country in 1815 and it continued to be poor right through the revolutions that rocked the peninsula in 1848. The north was traditionally richer than the south, based on its merchant wealth, and the Napoleonic Reforms had opened large sections of the northern economy to a world market. But the Napoleonic reforms had also hurt many small farmers, who now saw their lands bought up by larger, more successful farms. This increased the number of landless peasants, whose anger grew in proportion to their belief that the local governments were not helping them. The situation was even starker in southern Italy, where the land was poorer than in the north. Here market reforms and the enclosure of fields deprived many small farmers of social protections on which they relied to get them through difficult times. And if the landless peasant in the north had difficulties, they were much more intense for peasants in the south, where the soil was much poorer. Thus, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Italy was plagued by insurrections. There was a major uprising in 1820-21, that toppled Victor Emanuel in Sardinia Piedmont. In 1831, there was an uprising in Bologna that was crushed by Austrian troops. Sicily rose up unsuccessfully in 1837 and 1841. This discontent with conservative governments rose until January, 1848, when the Sicilians rose up again, leading the Sicilian King Ferdinand the II to extend a constitution to his Kingdom. This uprising, as well the one in Paris, led to a series of revolts across Italy in areas such as Tuscany, Piedmont, and Parma. In Venice and Lombardy, in particular, Austrian troops were pushed back both by popular uprisings and troops from Piedmont. (Piedmont’s rulers, the House of Savoy, had a long-standing interest in booting out the Austrians.) All over Italy local princes granted constitutions in response. By March 1848, it began to look like Italy would have a completely new order. It was not to be. Austrian troops rallied and put down the revolts not only in their own territories but also in those ruled by Habsburg relatives. With this show of strength, the Revolution of 1848 in Italy reached its end.
Within this context we can now highlight two crucial elements that led to Italy’s unification: first, the House of Savoy; and second Giuseppe Mazzini, the father of Italian nationalism. One thing that many princes learned from the Revolution of 1848 was that conservative reform could head off demands for even greater autonomy. No house understood this better than the House of Savoy, which began an aggressive campaign of conservative reform. Its first step on this path was to retain Piedmont’s constitution after 1849, the so-called Statuto. This constitution called for an elected parliament that shared some governmental responsibilities with the monarchy, and for that reason it became a rallying cry for many reformers. Keeping it was the smart thing to do. Piedmont’s Old King, the reactionary Charles Albert (1831-1849) had been overthrown by the Revolution of 1848. The new King Victor Emanuel II (1849-1878), however, used the peace that the Statuto guaranteed him to push through major economic reforms in Piedmont, and it was due to these reforms that Piedmont took the leading role in Italy.
To this we must add Italy’s most important politician during the period, the Count Camillo Benso di Cavour. If there is an architect of Italian political unity, he is it. In the 1850s, Piedmont became the leading industrial and economic region in Italy, due to the free trade and reform policies that Cavour guided through the Italian government. Born of a noble family, Cavour entered politics in 1848 as a member of the Piedmontese parliament. In 1850, he joined the cabinet as minister of trade and agriculture. Cavour saw to it that Piedmont signed trade agreements with a dozen different states. The government got other governments to lower their tariffs in exchange for Piedmont lowering its tariffs. This meant that local producers of things such as wine and silk could sell more of their products, while cheap manufactured goods suddenly became available to local consumers. The results of Cavour’s policies were impressive. Piedmontese trade tripled between 1851 and 1861, as foreigners bought large quantities of wine, rice, oils, and textiles. This rise in trade made possible huge new investments in infrastructure. The kingdom’s railroad network, for example, which had not existed in 1851, was Italy’s largest by 1861. Thus, by Cavour’s death in 1861, Piedmont had become the most powerful and economically advanced state in all of Italy, a model that others soon sought to emulate.
Against this backdrop, Piedmont became Italy’s main engine for unification. But unlike what would happen in Germany, where Prussia unified Germany by actually winning wars, Piedmont did it by losing them. I noted earlier that Piedmont tried to boot Austria out of Italy during the Revolution of 1848. It failed in the attempt, because Austria was better armed, and it received no real assistance from other powers. Piedmont was, therefore, in a unique diplomatic position. France wanted Austria out of Italy, but it could not risk an open conflict with the Austrians, since that would bring in the British. Moreover, France also considered Piedmont a necessary buffer state. This meant that Piedmont was free to attack Austria as much as it wished, without any fear for post-war consequences, since France would not allow Piedmont to disappear. The knowledge that the French would always back Piedmont, led Cavour to launch an openly aggressive policy between 1856 and 1859. In 1857, he broke diplomatic ties with Austria. In 1858, he reached a secret agreement with the Napoleon III of France that ceded Savoy and Nice to the French in exchange for support in a war against Austria. In 1859, war came, but the French backed out under pressure from the British. Piedmont was, thus, only able to take Lombardy as a war spoil. Cavour left the government in protest, but he returned in 1860, at which point he proposed a series of plebiscites whose positive outcome allowed Piedmont to annex Venetia, Tuscany, and Modena. This new grouping of states now became the Kingdom of Italy, with the House of Savoy on the throne.
We are now only half-way through the process of unification, but before we can go further, we need to look back and consider the career of the second factor in unification that I mentioned before, Giuseppe Mazzini, the spiritual founder of Italian Unification. Mazzini is particularly important, because he brings together so many of the political currents that I discussed in the “isms” lectures. Born in 1805, Mazzini was influenced by Romanticism, though he was not a true Romantic himself. The Romantics created the nation, seeing it as the founding element of all cultural experience. Mazzini was part of an early liberal trend within Romanticism, in that he saw himself as a leader in an international struggle to emancipate all the peoples of the world. As evidence of his Liberalism, we must note that he included women, serfs, and slaves in his international mission. But Mazzini was also Italian. He wanted to unite the many Italians into a single nation-state, believing that organizing peoples into contiguous states was the only way to bring peace to Europe. (He was wrong on that, of course.) Mazzini’s romantic approach to politics made him an opponent of both Liberalism and Marxism. He saw liberals as too concerned with individual rights, willing to allow the nation to suffer at the expense of individuals. He also believed in private property, though he did not like big business. So Mazzini was a very complicated figure, and tracing his influence on Italian unification will allow us a glimpse into some of the complications and contradictions within the new Italian state itself.
Mazzini spent his early years in Genoa. He disliked the post-revolutionary order and engaged in political subversion while a student, joining the Carbonari, a secret society devoted to liberal reform. In 1831, he was found out and had to go into exile. He settled in Marseille, which had become a haven for Italian exiles and surrounded himself with like-minded individuals. His central contribution was the founding of a famous journal La Giovine Italia, or Young Italy, which propagandized for revolution in Italy. A large movement emerged from this paper called “Young Italy,” with cells across Italy. (The organization became the model for the “Young Turk” movement that founded modern Turkey.) In 1833, the Genoese cracked down on the organization, putting some of the local leaders in jail and forcing others to flee. Mazzini responded in 1834 by sponsoring an invasion of Savoy that turned into a fiasco. This got him expelled from France. He went to Switzerland and later to Britain, where he continued to conspire against the many Italian governments. By the 1840s, Mazzini had become the most famous Italian nationalist, and an entire generation of future political leaders learned their nationalism from him.
Mazzini was active throughout the 1840s, trying to start rebellions all over Italy. During this time, he recruited an Italian soldier-adventurer named Giuseppe Garibaldi to lead a series of failed invasions and other escapades. Garibaldi had been influenced early in life by Mazzini, but his politics got him exiled to South America, where he basically made a living as a pirate. In 1848, Garibaldi returned to Italy with Mazzini’s encouragement, bringing 60 men with him to lead the fight for independence. Most of Garibaldi’s operations were failures, but with each one both he and Mazzini became more famous and more determined to lead Italy to unification. In 1859, when Cavour led Piedmont to war against Austria, Mazzini was still in England, but he rushed to Italy after learning of France’s betrayal, intent on making trouble. Unfortunately, Mazzini made trouble, above all, for Cavour, since he hated monarchy and disliked Cavour’s conservative brand of unification. Nonetheless, the irony is that Mazzini’s machinations actually assured that Italy would be unified on Cavour’s model.
Mazzini was convinced that an uprising in the south would lead to democratic change across Italy. When he learned of an uprising in Sicily he convinced Garibaldi to lead an expedition there, in order to expel the Bourbons who still held the throne. In a brilliant campaign, Garibaldi defeated the Bourbons and entered Naples. Unfortunately for Mazzini, Garibaldi had joined the Piedmontese army and he only ruled Naples in Victor Emanuel’s name until Piedmontese officials arrived. When the time the Piedmontese took over, only the Papal States and Venice remained outside Italian hands.
The period from 1860 to 1870 marked the waning of Italy’s Risorgimento. The only outstanding issue was Rome and the Papal States, which the Pope still ruled. What we need to keep in mind here, however, is that Italy was now largely unimportant from a European perspective. Beginning in 1864, Otto von Bismarck embarked on a series of three wars that ended in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian war. As the world watched these events, the Italian situation came to mean much less. In 1866, the Italians used war between Prussia and Austria as an excuse to attack Austria, hoping to steal some territory in Tyrolia that had a few Italian speakers. They lost again, in spite of Prussia’s stunning success. (The Italians would not get this territory until 1919, when the victorious Entente Powers gave it to them at the Versailles conference.) It is this inability to keep pace with the other European powers that shows us the limits of both the Risorgimento and Italy’s economy. The Risorgimento was much more important culturally than politically. With the rise of Prussia, the old Franco-Austrian battle came to mean less, and Italy ceased to be a strategic battleground. In fact, it was hardly important at all, since Italy did not have the resources to compete with Germany, Britain, or France. Thus, when Italian troops entered Roman on September 20, 1870, ending the Pope’s territorial rule, it was something of an embarrassment. There was no real battle, and the Pope retreated rapidly to the Vatican, where he remains. Italy now had a capital city, but no one seemed to care. The great Italian theorist and historian Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) said of the Risorgimento that until 1870 Italian history had been poetry. After 1870, however, it descended into prose. This represents some disenchantment with the political world. In Croce’s lifetime nationalism changed from being a rhetoric of liberation to a justification for state power and violence. We will follow a similar theme next time.

Lecture 13: Britain and the Scramble for Empire

2008-01-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

Last time we talked about French instability as a problem for all of Europe. In 1789, the French had their revolution. In 1799, they acclaimed a dictator who plunged Europe into another war. The memory of the Napoleonic wars would not die easily among Europe’s other powers, and for much of the nineteenth century European diplomacy was centered on keeping France in her place. In this lecture I want to take a different approach and consider England as a problem for European security, as well. People have long had the idea that Britain brought stability to Europe. It was not an aggressive power, but was interested in maintaining the status quo. British diplomacy was about maintaining the balance of power, or so the story goes. There is an element of truth in this, but Britain’s interest in European stability had less to do with its emerging democratic institutions than it did with its world-wide interests. If France and, later, Germany brought war to the Continent, Britain brought war and exploitation to the rest of the world. In this sense, although Britain wanted political stability in Europe, there was no altruism involved here, since a powerful European state could threaten Britain’s world-wide interests. This is why the British were against France keeping Belgium. It is also why Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914 brought Britain into the First World War.
During the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, Britain became an aggressive colonial power, seizing trading posts and colonies around the world from other European powers. Whereas Spain, Portugal, and some Italian city-states acquired great colonial empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Holland, France, and England began to compete directly with these older powers during the seventeenth centuries. Initially, the Dutch and the French enjoyed a great deal of colonial success, setting up trading posts and colonies in areas around the globe that included North America, Africa, India, and Asia. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, Britain had become the most formidable colonial rival of all.
Britain fought three wars with the Dutch during the seventeenth century over commercial rights, one from 1652-1654, another from 1664-1667, and the last from 1672-1674. In the process, the Brits took much of the Dutch colonial empire, including India, and a
North American city called New Amsterdam that they renamed New York. With the Dutch out of the picture, Britain fought two more wars during the eighteenth century that also resulted in major colonial gains. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1711), the Brits took Gibraltar and Minorca from Spain, as well as gaining the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonial empire with slaves. Then in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which I mentioned in a previous lecture, Britain shut the French out of the colonial business in North America, taking France’s settlements in what is now Canada and the northern United States. Thus, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain was an aggressive colonial power, determined to fight its European neighbors for every commercial and maritime advantage. By 1800, no other country could rival Britain’s control of world commerce or the seas.
Before we continue into the nineteenth century, we need to consider an important terminological distinction. I have been talking about European Colonialism so far, but as we head into the nineteenth century, I will begin using the term Imperialism. The two terms are closely related, but in the end there are some important distinctions between them. Colonialism as a phenomenon dates back much further than Imperialism. It is already evident in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and describes the establishment of trading networks. Usually, a colony was some outpost near water that was dedicated to increasing trade with the mother state. Only rarely did colonial powers reach beyond the individual trading networks to attempt to take over an entire country or region. This was usually due to concerns about political control. Colonial powers could only control so much foreign territory, before the people living there got their own ideas. There was, for example, a constant struggle between British powers and American colonials over the extent of European settlement. Officially, Americans were not supposed to settle land beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States, and the British did all they could to prevent such expansion. These attempts at control failed.
Imperialism is a much looser term than Colonialism, but it is important to us, because it describes a key change in Europe, namely the industrial revolution. What is different about Imperialism is that industrialized states (in the nineteenth century, this came to include Russia, Japan, and the United States) could now project power into all parts of the globe, taking over huge swaths of territory without needing to colonize it with their own citizens. These industrial states needed access to raw materials to run their industries, so they were not as interested in trade, as they were in simple extraction of raw materials. (One of the most oppressive and vicious Imperial powers was tiny, though heavily industrialized Belgium, which looted raw materials from the Congo for its industrial base.) In addition, imperial powers exerted great economic and diplomatic pressure on areas that they did not wish to control directly. Thus, imperialism describes an entire system of domination that industrialized powers used to get what they needed out of non-industrial regions and powers.
Having defined Imperialism, we now need to place this broad term into a particular time frame. Imperialism as a period begins in 1880 and runs until 1945. It is characterized by the massive increase in industrial might, fierce competition among states for access to natural resources, strident nationalism. It also has an additional characteristic: it marks the end of Euro-centrism, as Japan and the United States joined the imperial club. The rise in both the total power and the number of competing countries increased the political pressure around the globe, as the various actors kept bumping up against each other. Between 1870 and 1900, Britain increased its territory by one half and its population by one third. The new state of Germany, which we will discuss in another lecture, acquired 1 million square miles of territory between 1880 and 1900. France acquired 3.5 million square miles, during the same period.
Now let us turn to Britain’s position within the rise in Imperialism during the 19th century. Imperial Britain, as opposed to Colonial Britain, appears during the Crimean War (1853-1856). This war was fought over Russian demands for the right to protect Orthodox Christians living under the Ottoman sultans, who were Muslims. Fearing Russia’s desire to extend its influence into the Ottoman Empire, the British and French declared war on Russia. The war was a complete disaster for everyone, with many people killed to no apparent purpose. Each side lost about 250,000 men, with most of the deaths due to disease, rather than enemy activity. In the end, Ottoman Turkey’s boundaries were confirmed, and the Russians got a diplomatic black eye. This had long-term implications for Europe on a number of levels. First, Austria had supported Britain, France, and Turkey, though it did not join the war. This meant that Russia withdrew all diplomatic support from Austria. Thus, when Austria battled Prussia for leadership over a new German state, she could only call on France and Britain for help, which amounted to receiving no help at all. Second, from the British perspective this war established how essential a strong navy was to the defense of British interests around the world, and it also made the navy a focus of national pride. There would now always be a consensus within British national politics that the Navy had to be funded properly. The British Empire, in addition to being a giant economic enterprise, was now also every Englishman’s birthright.
The Crimean War’s political effects must be understood in terms of British experiences in other parts of the world. Let us begin with India. The British East India Company had been working in India since the eighteenth century. (You will recall that the Brits stole the Dutch interests in the region.) The East India Company was, however, in serious financial trouble by the mid-nineteenth century, and its only hope for survival was to give it access to more of India’s territory. Thus, between 1848 and 1852, Britain annexed a series of Rajas that greatly increased the East India Company’s total resources. This process of annexation soon took on a life of its own, as resistance appeared. In 1857, the Sepoy Rebellion broke out against British Imperial rule. This rebellion was actually sparked by religious objections to Britain’s gun ammunition. The British used a particular kind of gun cartridge that was lubricated with animal fat. The problem with this system lay in how the cartridge was used. In order to load the gun, a soldier had to rip open the cartridge’s wrapper with his teeth. Hindus and Muslims both objected to the use of this cartridge and rose up in rebellion. This rebellion then led to further occupation, a process that came to an end in 1876, when the British Prime Minister declared Queen Victoria to be Empress of India.
What you need to understand about this process is that the Britain’s economic interests impelled her toward a greater empire. With India firmly under British control, Egypt became central to British imperial policy. The French had completed the Suez Canal in 1869. Finding common interest in keeping the canal open, the Brits and the French initially managed it jointly. In 1882, however, locals rose up against imperial rule and the British occupied Egypt. This exacerbated tensions between Britain and France, setting the stage for an imperial competition between the countries in Asia. France had developed an extensive empire in Asia and the Pacific. Already in 1847, the French took Tahiti. In 1853, they acquired New Caledonia. In the 1870s, they took all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Rumors that the French were moving into Burma finally led Britain to annex that region in 1886.
European leaders were not unaware of the dangers this situation created. There were, in fact, attempts to regulate the Imperial competition, so that the major powers could avoid war. In the drama that ensued, Otto von Bismarck was one of the central manipulators, and the Continent of Africa was the main victim. We begin with 1876. In that year, King Leopold of Belgium invited a group of geographers to a conference in Brussels to talk about exploiting Africa’s natural resources. In 1877, the King set up a private company, called Association Internationale du Congo, which would explore the Congo River and set up trading posts. By 1884, this committee had signed treaties with over 450 local tribes, and on this basis it asserted the right to control the entire region of what it today Zaire.
Before we continue with Africa, we need to go back to Europe, because here we can see that one of the fundamental strategic problems in the nineteenth century was the rivalry that emerged between Britain, France, and the new Germany. In 1877, war broke out again between the Russians and the Ottomans, as the Russians came to the aid of separatist uprisings in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. Russia and her allies won, and in January 1878, the treaty of San Stefano was signed, ratifying Russia’s gains in the Balkans. This alarmed the British and the Austrians, who felt their respective interests were threatened. In order to avoid an international crisis, a congress was held in Berlin that revised the treaty of San Stefano, giving some of Russia’s gains to Austria. Otto von Bismarck presided over this conference, doing his best to assure that no power became too powerful to threaten the new political status quo that he had created in Europe. (We will talk about the rise of Prussia in another lecture.) What I want to show you today is that the pressure was getting too great within Europe, and it had to be vented somewhere. Bismarck helped make sure that it would be vented in Africa.
Now we return to Africa. In 1881, partly at the connivance of Britain and Germany, the French invaded Tunisia. Both the British and the Germans wanted to direct French foreign policy away from the public desire to avenge their defeat by Prussia in 1871. While the French were engaged in North Africa, Belgium was still busy in the Congo, extracting raw materials and oppressing the local population. Belgian gains made the Portuguese unhappy. The Italians were already unhappy with French gains in Africa, and the spread of envy led to another conference in Berlin called the Berlin West Africa Conference. This conference created the so-called Congo Free State and inaugurated the largely peaceful carving up of the entire African Continent. Within twenty years, 95% of Africa would be under European control, as Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Portugal established empires. These empires were products of European political and economic rivalries. When Africa was finally cut up, and there was no place else to go, these rivalries returned to Europe. It is, therefore, no accident that the First World War would begin with a small crisis in the Balkans.
Now we must step back for a moment and consider European rivalries through Britain’s empire. The first thing we note from a British perspective is that Britain’s mercantile and maritime policy created a constant need to push Britain’s borders out into the world. By the time the Crimean War began, Britain already had 200 years of colonial experience behind it. When other European countries got into the act, the impulse to defend an existing colonial network was transformed into an imperial agenda. The British did not annex certain regions because it added to their total wealth; they acted defensively to prevent other European powers from threatening their global interests. This is what the Congress of Berlin was all about. Here we get back to a theme I mentioned earlier: central to this development was the spread of industrialization. As industries appeared across Europe and then, later, the United States and Japan, imperial competition became more intense. If Britain was to insure that it remained the premier imperial power, it needed a strong Navy. Thus, no other power could be allowed to grow strong enough to challenge British Naval supremacy. This is why the Brits pursued a status quo policy on both borders and military spending on the European Continent. When Germany emerged as a powerful naval and imperial competitor, the foundation of the next great war in Europe was already laid.

Lecture 12: Permanent Revolution: France and the Origins of the Bourgeois State, 1815-1871

2008-01-31T07:14:00.000-08:00

We have been discussing a series of abstractions for the last few weeks. Today, we want to return to practical politics, and we will begin with the Europe’s fundamental problem in the nineteenth century: what to do with the French? Unlike England, France was unable to avoid political revolution during the nineteenth century. Between 1789 and 1989, France had five republics, three monarchies and two empires. Now contrast France to Britain, whose Parliament and Monarchy have survived the French Revolution, Napoleon, two World Wars, and the loss of a colonial empire. We should also include the United States here, whose Constitution has been in place since 1789, surviving not only a Civil War but also a Depression, in addition to two World Wars.
France’s instability during the nineteenth century is even more perplexing, since the Industrial Revolution offers little in the way of explanation. Industrialization occurred at a much slower pace in France than elsewhere in Europe and was, therefore, less disruptive. During the nineteenth century, Britain’s average increase in Gross Domestic Product was almost double that of France’s. This was not necessarily a bad thing. The French did not need great growth rates, since their population was not expanding as rapidly as that of other countries. Nineteenth-century France’s birth rate was only 60% of Western Europe’s average. This meant that there was not as much pressure on agricultural and industrial resources, a fact that is evidenced by France’s notoriously low rates of emigration. Unlike the English, Irish, Germans, and later the eastern Europeans, the French tended to stay in their own country. If we are going to find an explanation for France’s tumultuous nineteenth century, we must look elsewhere, that is into politics, and specifically into the continuing Revolutionary and Napoleonic legacies. The history of nineteenth century France is, in many ways, the story of France’s inability to a draw line under the revolutionary period.
The return of the Bourbons after Napoleon’s initial defeat was doomed from the start, as France and its nobility had parted ways. In 1789, princes of the blood and their royalist supporters fled France, often settling in the German city of Koblenz. When they returned after 1814, their country was deeply changed, and many of them never accepted the New France. As the French diplomat Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, “They have learned nothing. They have forgotten nothing.” This was something of an exaggeration. When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, he had serious problems that would have been difficult for anyone to overcome. It does, however, point to a lack of political consensus in France. And this would be the central theme of nineteenth-century French politics.
Louis’ first problem was that although Napoleon was gone, the Napoleonic state remained, as the entire army of bureaucrats Napoleon created was still in office. Louis needed these bureaucrats, and so he practiced a conciliatory policy, refusing to purge the bureaucracy. This incensed the King’s most fervent supporters. Led by the Comte D’Artois, the King’s younger brother, the faction known as the ultra-royalists, or ultras, demanded that all post-Revolutionary changes be swept away. So Louis was caught between groups that wanted to turn back the Revolution and groups who owed their status to it. This was a difficult position, but he managed initially to steer a middle course between these opposing factions, trying to heal the political rift that the revolution created. Unfortunately for Louis, Napoleon returned and reconciliation became impossible.
Napoleon escaped from his prison on Elba in 1815, and marched across France during the “Hundred Days.” The Emperor’s return intensified France’s already deep political divisions. First, many of Napoleon’s former supporters rose up against the new government, including a few armies that the King had sent to stop him. Second, the final peace with the victorious powers, who had initially offered France lenient terms, was harsh and painful. Thus, after Louis XVIII’s second restoration reprisals followed, with the government purging many Napoleonic officials whose loyalty to the King was in doubt, and executing those that had actively joined the other side. Finally, the “Hundred Days” also whipped up public anger against the Napoleonic holdovers. In southern and eastern France roving bands meted out vigilante justice against people who had been on the wrong side. This produced an important short-term radicalization in French politics that resulted in August 1815, in the election of a reactionary Chamber of Deputies.
The post-“Hundred Days” reaction created new problems for Louis XVIII. Although he was happy to see a conservative Chamber of Deputies—he initially called them the “Matchless Parliament”—this group proved too reactionary even for him, as they demanded the return of all property to its pre-Revolutionary owners, the complete abolition of the Napoleonic bureaucracy, and church control over schooling. The ultras, the most reactionary segment of society, even became so strident in their calls for reaction that the occupying foreign armies became nervous. The King tried to deal with this situation by continuing on his middle course, and he appointed a moderate government led by Elie Decazes. Unfortunately, this solved nothing.
By September 1816, the situation had become intolerable and Louis called for new elections. This election produced a more moderate Chamber of Deputies, in part because the results were heavily manipulated. Three broad groups appeared. On the left were the liberals, a group that contained Republicans and Bonapartists. In the center were the royalists, people who were for the most part committed to some form of constitutional monarchy. On the right were the ultras, the people who wanted to return to the Old Regime. (Just to give you an idea for how volatile this situation was, the ultras later split again into the ultras and the so-called ultra-ultras.) Unfortunately, the next four years only brought further polarization as the liberals gained strength in subsequent elections and the ultras became more hysterical in their opposition. There seemed to be no political middle ground.
From 1820 until 1830, the ultras controlled the Chamber of Deputies and essentially ran France, exacerbating all the political divisions that I have discussed. In addition, Louis VXIII became ill and removed himself from the government, leaving the Comte D’Artois, his brother and leader of the ultras in his place. The Comte then embarked on a policy of repression. Things got even worse in 1824, when Louis died and the Comte ascended to the throne as King Charles X. Under the new King the Chamber of Deputies passed a series of reactionary laws that, among other things, compensated Revolutionary émigrés, made sacrilege a capital crime, and restricted the freedom of press. In addition, in 1829, he appointed the extreme royalist Prince Jules de Polignac to form a government.
You can imagine that with all the things that had changed in France, this regime’s long-term prospects were not good and it finally fell in July 1830. The fall of the reactionary regime is important because it highlights from another angle how the revolutionary legacy continued to poison French politics. Two issues dominated the political scene in the 1820s: the problem of political compromise with the liberals, and the role of religion in French daily life. As I mentioned earlier, the Ultras eventually split into the Ultras and the Ultra-Ultras. The French Prime Minister, Comte de Villèle, was an ultra, but he was willing to compromise with other groups such as the Liberals and Moderates. This infuriated the Ultra-Ultras, who came to loathe Villèle in spite of everything that they had in common, and they constantly collaborated with the Left to create problems for the government.
Religion then further destabilized the situation. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods had secularized France, with many people turning away from the church and open expressions of piety. The problem was, however, that the nobles who had fled France after 1789, the so-called émigrés, had become more pious the longer they were out of the country. Thus, when they returned, they demanded the reestablishment of the church control over all aspects of life. And, once again, this was simply not compatible with the post-Revolutionary situation.
The reactionary nature of the new regime led to the appearance of a Liberal opposition. Louis Adolphe Thiers is one of the most prominent examples of the liberal opposition to Charles X’s regime. He had risen from a common background to become co-editor of Le National, a liberal daily paper. Thiers and his paper relentlessly campaigned to get both Polignac fired and Charles X removed from the throne. Thiers and Le National’s public opposition led a general trend in French politics against the reactionary government. On July 19, 1830, new elections were held, and the political power base shifted strongly to the left. Charles X responded harshly, issuing a series of ordinances that prohibited the distribution of political pamphlets, that dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies, that called for the elections to be held again, and that restricted the right to vote to only France’s wealthiest people. Having completed his work, the King left Paris to go hunting. He was never came back.
On July 27 demonstrations against the government broke out in Paris, followed by two days of bloody rioting. These three days became known as the July Revolution. The end result of the demonstrations and riots was that France got a new King, another Bourbon Louis-Philippe. Charles X’s opponents succeeded in deposing him and called on Louis-Philippe to become a true constitutional monarch. For his part, Louis-Philippe was hardly excited at the prospect of becoming King. He initially only accepted the title of Lt. General of the Kingdom, since his cousin had not really abdicated. After being celebrated in the streets of Paris, however, Louis changed his mind, even attending a rally at the famous Hotel de Ville where he held the Tricolor aloft and then embraced the Marquis de Lafayette.
Not much changed under Louis-Philippe. Louis accepted the Constitution of 1814 and expanded the franchise. (Under Charles X only about 90,000 people could vote. Under Louis-Philippe it was expanded to 170,000.) Louis-Philippe became known as the bourgeois King. He was very good at wielding political symbols, pointedly refusing to be crowned amidst the pomp that had characterized earlier coronations. As King he made sure to be seen walking through the streets of Paris in a suit and a hat. He worked hard and lived frugally, two virtues the French were not accustomed to seeing in their kings. The problem was that Louis could never decide between being a bourgeois King or a Bourbon. He wanted to play an active role in government, something that liberals such as Thiers would have denied him, but he also wanted to dispense with the old traditions of kingship.
Unfortunately for Louis, he tried to find a golden mean between incompatible traditions. This weakness in his rule was particularly apparent in the 1830s and 40s, as he constantly faced challenges to his legitimacy. The extreme left and extreme right continued their battle, with neither side willing to compromise. The ultras, for example, became more legitimist after 1830. Having a Bourbon King was not enough, and only a true Bourbon succession would do. The ultras’ hopes lay with the Duchess de Berry, wife of the Charles X’s dead son. In 1832, the Duchess left her exile in Italy and landed in southern France, hoping to start an uprising in favor of her legitimate Bourbon child. None was forthcoming, and she was captured. Unfortunately, for legitimism, the Duchess also turned out to be pregnant. And since her husband had been killed in 1824, it was unlikely that it was his child. In the end, the Duchess de Berry had to admit that she had remarried, and the entire restoration project collapsed.
Louis-Philippe confronted other challenges, as well. The Republicans never accepted his rule, staging a series of uprisings between 1831 and 1834. These riots were usually touched off by some labor strife, the worst of which occurred in Lyon in 1831, where 15,000 workers battled the National Guard in the streets. The government arrested the riot’s leaders and banned republican associations, and this merely embittered an entire population.
And the Bonapartists were still around, too, pining for their emperor. In the years since his death, Napoleon’s memory had taken on a new shape. He was no longer the ruthless dictator that had been run out of an exhausted France, but had become the little corporal who rose to top and defended the common man. However silly it may have been, this view of Napoleon as defender of the people proved to be a powerful myth. Napoleon’s son and heir, the Duc de Reichstadt, died in 1832 of tuberculosis. (After his father’s downfall, he lived in the Habsburg castle of Schönbrunn. His pet canary was stuffed and is still on display there.) One would think that the myth would have died with him, but then another Bonaparte showed up to claim Napoleon’s mantle, Louis Napoleon, the supposed son of Napoleon’s brother. The irony is that Louis Napoleon was not French. He had been raised in Germany and spoke only German, never really mastering French. In 1836, Louis Napoleon invaded France with a small army and headed toward Strasbourg, where he persuaded the local military commander to join him. Louis Napoleon was arrested and convicted for his crime, and was deported to the United States. Eventually, he wound up in England, where he plotted to try again.
Despite everything, Louis-Philippe survived and things seemed to settle down after 1840. He was fortunate in that much of his opposition had succeeded in making itself look ridiculous. The Duchess de Berry’s pregnancy had killed Legitimism. The Republicans had discredited themselves with their violence, and Bonapartism appeared to be joke. And for most of the 1840s there was stability, prosperity, and peace.
The situation changed dramatically in 1846. Bad weather led to crop failures, and the price of food went up. Add to this an economic crisis that caused factories to close, and general dissatisfaction with Louis-Philippe rose throughout 1847. Since the political opposition had been outlawed, the most common way of protesting the government was the scheduling of banquets. At these events people would eat and complain about the government. Louis-Philippe’s downfall began on Jan. 28, 1848, when the government cracked down on one such banquet, claiming that it was a prohibited political event. There were protests in response, which then turned into riots, and riots into a revolution. The result was that the Bourbons fell for the last time and a second French Republic was proclaimed in their place.
The provisional government tried to win over the population by declaring universal manhood suffrage, which amounted to about 9 million men, most of whom would vote for the first time. Unfortunately, the elected government failed to resolve France’s economic problems, which led to another revolution in June 1848, the so-called June Days, which then spread across Europe, toppling governments as it went. Klemens von Metternich, the reactionary Austrian minister was forced to flee Austria for England. The Revolution was put down brutally and a new government was set up, with new elections planned. Thus, was the stage set for Louis Napoleon. Napoleon entered French politics, legitimately this time, and was elected president in 1848 with a huge majority. He enjoyed immediate popular support thanks mostly to his name, and he wanted to turn it into permanent power. The new French constitution prohibited, however, his reelection as president. So Louis Napoleon held a coup in 1852, bringing back the legacy of Napoleon I by calling himself Napoleon III. At the time, Karl Marx noted that history seemed to be repeating itself, or as he put it “first time as tragedy, second time as farce.” But Marx missed something important; Louis Napoleon’s government made possible fundamental changes in the European political landscape.
I will discuss most of the political changes in separate lectures on the rise of Italy and Prussia. What you need to know for this meeting is that Napoleon III’s reign was characterized by two important themes. The first was stability. Napoleon III brought political certainty back to France, which allowed the economy to grow. Napoleon’s economic policies were actually enlightened. He made sure that bread was accessible to the poor and built hygienic public housing. The second was an irresponsible foreign policy adventurism. Although Napoleon III was not as militarily aggressive as his uncle, he did see himself as Europe’s power broker, wishing to make sure that if any country gained, France must gain something as well. This policy worked well in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War (1853-1856), but it proved disastrous when Napoleon intervened in Italy and Mexico. I will discuss Italy in another lecture, but for now I should point out that Napoleon’s desire to weaken the Austrian Habsburgs by attacking them in Italy backfired badly, since it only weakened Austria for its conflict against Prussia. The Mexican adventure was almost as bad. In 1861, Napoleon III proposed the Austrian Archduke Maximilian as ruler of Mexico. Napoleon wanted to counter the growing power of the United States by setting up friendly governments in Latin America. Initially, the French supported Maximilian’s return to power, but when the United States emerged from its Civil War in 1865, Napoleon was forced to retreat. Napoleon also had other plans in northern Germany. He saw the rising state of Prussia as a perfect foil against the Habsburgs. Unfortunately, that rising state wound up defeating him and took away his empire in 1870. No matter where Napoleon III tried to interfere, he always got less than he wanted and more than he bargained for. We will talk more about the implications of this in the lectures on Italy and Prussia.

Lecture 11: Marxism

2008-01-31T07:13:00.000-08:00

In order to understand Marxism’s origins properly, we need to go back to the lecture I gave on the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The many changes that I discussed in the means of production did not go unnoticed at the time. Almost immediately people began to criticize the social and economic changes that were underway. The earliest attacks were linked to Romanticism. Especially in England Romantic poets and writers criticized a system of production that devalued both the human being and nature. Shelley and Wordsworth, for example, rebelled against the dehumanization that they saw. Their opposition was, however, largely aesthetic and they offered no social theories. Other conservative Romantic critics also attacked industrial change, but they were simply opposed to any modernization. Again, no real theories emerged.
Another line of critique appeared, however, that would lead to sophisticated social theories, or what we call early socialism. Early socialists attacked the industrial revolution from many different angles. Some opposed industrialization entirely; others wanted to see it controlled. The most important attacks came from those who wanted to control industrialization by reorganizing it. In this approach, theorists attacked capitalism for its exploitation, but they embraced the new means of production. The idea was to make industrialization more humane. Here we must take note of the three great Utopian Socialists, Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and Henri Duc de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). These men had very little in common other than their opposition to industrialist exploitation. Karl Marx called these people Utopians, because they had no theory of history. We’ll talk more about Marx later. But, first, let’s take a look at each of these thinkers.
Robert Owen was a rich mill owner. He disliked the methods that his mill used to exploit workers, and thought that the exploitation was destroying workers’ moral qualities. In his view, neither capitalists nor the church were doing enough to help the problem. Thus, Owen wanted to create the ideal factory that would allow workers to develop their full personal potential within a work environment. He set up this ideal in a community called New Lanarck. Here work hours were limited, working conditions improved, and worker-owned stores founded. Children attended corporate schools, rather than working in the factories. Owen’s theory was that happy workers would be more productive. And he was right; productivity in New Lanarck was well above that in traditional industrial communities. Unfortunately, the costs involved were so high that New Lanarck could not be reproduced, nor did it provide sufficient profits for investors. Owen also tried to bring his reforms to the United States. In 1825, he bought 30,000 acres of land from a religious community in Indiana and named it New Harmony. The community seems to have functioned well, but it also cost Owen 80% of his fortune. This brand of reform had no financial future.
Charles Fourier proposed a much different way of reorganizing work. He was convinced that the best way to alleviate poverty was to organize people in small agricultural communities, which he called phalanges. These communities would be perfectly balanced to provide support and harmony for all. A phalange would have no more than 1620 people. Apparently, this was the maximum number of people who could live together amicably in a community. Each person in the community would work a job that suited his or her basic nature. For example, Charles Fourier thought that little boys should be put in charge of garbage management. The most productive people in the community would, then, receive the most pay. A few communities were founded along these lines, though without Fourier’s involvement. One community in Massachusetts, Brook Farm lasted from 1841-1846. Another community in Red Bank, New Jersey was also a failure. Social theorists would have to look elsewhere.
The Duc de Saint-Simon is the last of our early socialist theorists. Saint-Simon might be called the founder of modern economic planning. He thought that industrial communities would work better, if they were planned better. Thus, the political elite would determine how resources were best used and everyone else would work at a particular job. Saint-Simon also had a very strong faith in technological progress. In his view, work would get better as technologies became more advanced. These two ideas were to have a significant long-term impact, as the belief in scientific management and technological progress extend through capitalism into later Marxism. Those among you who study economic history will recognize that this became a central issue that separated Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the twentieth century.
Now we need put these developments into perspective. The Owenites were managers, more interested in making factories more efficient than in changing the system at its foundations. Fourier and Saint-Simon were just as interested in working out the implications for the French Revolution as they were dealing with industrialization. Indeed, the two things went together for them. Although all three men made proposals for change, what was missing from them was a thorough-going philosophical and historical rigor. It is in this context that we need to understand Marx, for he represents both a resolution of this particular philosophical problem and a coming together of important national traditions. (In the interest of saving time, I am going to leave out Friedrich Engels.) In Marx we see British economics, French Revolutionary theory, and, finally, German philosophy coming together to create a new vision of the industrialized world.
Before we turn to Marx directly, however, we must take detour into German intellectual history, since Marx drew so many key ideas from this context. Among the most important consequences of the French Revolution was the new conception of history that appeared in Germany. People had been studying history as a field for a long time. During the Renaissance, history was studied for its moral implications; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new interest in collecting facts appeared. There was, however, no systematic way of analyzing the disparate themes and events in history from a single perspective. Religion no longer held the allure it once had. Moreover, you could look at morality and facts all you wanted, but what did human activity across time really mean? The new German conception of history emerged out of the French revolutionary period as a way of processing and explaining the great historical changes that were underway. This conception of history was a mixture of philosophical idealism, Romanticism, and the western metaphysical tradition.
As you know, Romanticism was the most significant intellectual reaction against the Enlightenment, as European thinkers broke with the Enlightenment’s rigid rationalism. What this meant practically, is that people broke with the idea of a rigid mechanical universe. For Romantics nature was filled with forces and spirits. The key thinker in this transition was Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854), an idealist philosopher and close friend of Hegel’s, Schelling combined Immanuel Kant’s philosophical Idealism with Romanticism. He was especially eager to expand on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s conception of Spirit, agreeing with Fichte that Spirit was present in the world. But he wanted to include nature within Fichte’s philosophical concept. He saw nature as the unconscious expression of Spirit, while Man was its conscious expression.
We come to history through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s thought emanated from the German idealist tradition. But rather than concentrate on nature and art, Hegel looked for Spirit in history and explored the relationship between Spirit and History. He was driven to pursue this agenda by both the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Revolution as event and Napoleon as a trans-historical figure required explanation. In order to give some sense to the destruction that ensued after 1789, Hegel drew on Romanticism and Idealism. Romanticism put an emphasis on process in Hegel’s thought. The great Revolutionary cataclysm was, thus, a sign of growth and power, rather than degeneration. Idealism provided Hegel with a way to put reason in this great historical process. To explain the meaning of great historical events was itself evidence that reason was somehow driving them. This combination allowed Hegel to take a universal perspective on the great events of his day, which he encapsulated in his version of the dialectic. Put most simply, history produced an idea or thesis, which provoked an antithesis. In the end, a synthesis was created from the two that superceded both. Marx borrowed this dialectical process, but as we will see, he put his own unique spin on it.
In 1848, two obscure German radicals, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published one of the nineteenth-century’s central political documents, The Communist Manifesto. This little text was the culmination of a long meditation on the lessons of the French Revolution and it represented the application of the revolutionary élan to the Industrial Revolution’s social and political effects. The Manifesto had an enormous impact on the way people thought. It was short, direct, and offered a coherent way of thinking about modern society. Looking back on the previous fifty years, we can say that it encapsulated much Europe’s thought between the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848.
Let us begin by understanding Marx in his historical context. Marx was born in 1818 in the German city of Trier, a small city that sits on the Moselle River. He came from a family of secularized Jews. His father, Heinrich Marx, was a successful local lawyer and man of the Enlightenment, dedicated to Kant and Voltaire. Heinrich Marx had converted to Protestantism the year before Karl’s birth, and young Karl was baptized at six. After going to school in Trier, Marx studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin. It was particularly in Berlin that he confronted both the new Hegelian philosophy and an emerging academic atheism, which saw man’s enslavement in religion rather than his liberation. In the early 1840s, this combination of philosophy and religious criticism became the staple of a group known as the Left-Hegelians. This group, which included Marx, accepted Hegel’s notion that history is a grand unfolding of a rational process, but they rejected the notion that the present world was rationality’s final expression. In the Left-Hegelian view, Hegel had misinterpreted history by seeing it in terms of Spirit. They said spirit existed in human activity alone. History does change, but it is human beings—not abstract forces—that bring change about.
The Left-Hegelian shift away from Spirit is clearest in the work of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). Feuerbach was a Left-Hegelian who had actually studied under Hegel, though he applied Hegel’s ideas to theological issues. In 1841, he published his most famous book Essence of Christianity. This text was extremely influential, as it helped to shape Karl Marx’s thought, but also had a profound impact on another important anti-Christian writer David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874). In the text, Feuerbach analyzed religion in terms of psychology and anthropology, arguing that religion was merely a projection of human consciousness onto the world. Humans created and idealized the concept of God. The history of religion is, therefore, really a history of the human species writing its ideas about God onto the world.
Karl Marx was extremely impressed with Feuerbach’s inversion of Hegel, and it became the foundation of his philosophical approach. The Germany of the 1840s was not, however, a hospitable place for a left-leaning critic. So in 1843, Marx left Germany for Paris, taking his radical philosophical ideas with him. In Paris Marx studied a completely different intellectual tradition, reading French history and early social theory. Later, he went to London, where he encountered British economic thought. The result was a new approach to the two great revolutions of the modern era, the French and Industrial. But Marx came at his studies from a particularly German perspective, one that included an extensive and complicated theory of history.
Early hints of Marx’s basic approach appear by 1845. In 1844, Marx wrote The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In 1845, he wrote The Holy Family. Marx’s basic critique in these works of both French political and British economic thought was that each approach lacked a sense of history. For example, in Marx’s view, although the French Revolution claimed to support the universal rights of men, it merely represented the interests of one group, property holders. Thus, French universalism was grounded in ignorance of their own historical specificity, which meant that early French theorists, such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, created their socialist approaches without any connection to historical forces. Marx’s assessment was, therefore, that although the French understood politics, they did not understand history. A theory of politics without a theory of history was a theory of politics without a place for change.
Marx saw many of the same problems British economic thought. He claimed, for example, that the English economist David Ricardo erred in assuming that the economic conditions for capitalism were natural and universal. Ricardo had formulated something called the Iron Law of Wages, which held that wages would always remain near the subsistence level. Marx responded, however, that the current prevalence of subsistence wages was merely a specific moment in capitalist development. You see, Marx read Ricardo and Adam Smith, among others, in the same way that Feuerbach had read theological texts. Where religion describes the alienation of God from man, economists describe the alienation of the economy from man. For Marx, this position is ahistorical, as it results from a created system. The system can, therefore, be changed. Marx did not completely dismiss British economic thought entirely. Even if the Brits were, ultimately, wrong, their basic instinct had proved correct: economic relations determine the structures of social life. Armed with Hegel, Marx held that the British economists had not understood the historical dimensions of their thought. This was economics without history.
Now, we turn to the German aspects of Marx’s thought. Marx turned the tables on Hegel and his philosophical allies, arguing that the German philosophical history lacked any connection to political or economic arrangements that French and British thinkers had described. Hegelians understood history, but their thought was upside down. Hegel’s dialectic had shot up into the world of ideas, when it ought to have been applied to the material conditions of life. History was not a story of unfolding Spirit; it was a process of social relations that were determined by economic relations. In the end, economic conditions—not ideas—drove history. This meant two things for Marx. First, the Hegelian dialectic had lost touch with the material world. Second, the material world can only be understood with the dialectic. For Marx, economic and political systems move through necessary historical stages, which Marx described as the progression from feudalism to capitalism to communism.
This leads us to Marx’s mature concept of Dialectical Materialism. Bringing together all the strands of thought that we have discussed, Marx announced that socialism would inevitably supersede capitalism, because it was a more rational way of doing things. Writing from exile in Paris and then London, Marx tried to develop a materialist response to German Idealism that, nonetheless, made extensive use of Idealism’s approach to history. Marx held that true alienation is man’s separation from what he produces. If there is anything essential in humanity, it is that people’s productive activities take place within social structures. Thus, in capitalism, workers lose contact with the things they produce. Yet Marx also added that this alienation is not permanent, because the economic system can be changed. This change will happen as a matter of logic and history. Since change is historical and inevitable, however, it is also supra-national. Socialism can and will be spread across political borders, since the German system of economic production ran according to the same laws and the French, and the British, and so on.
Marx represents, thus, one of the most important cultural syntheses of the nineteenth century. He offered a coherent account of history, politics, and economics in one grand system. This was important on two levels. First, Marx’s theory of history was fundamentally optimistic. In this sense it filled void left by the Enlightenment critique of religion. Whereas, Christians could once have been certain that their judgment would come in the next world, Marxists could be certain that the proletarian revolution would come. Second, Marx’s ideas met the perceived needs of an emerging intellectual community that sought connections without reference to national origin. Thus, one could be a Marxist in Paris, London, Berlin, or Rome. Through its comprehensiveness and optimism Marxism very rapidly became Europe’s most dynamic and far-reaching ideology. Workers of the world and their intellectual counterparts could now unite in search of another totality.

Lecture 10: Liberalism

2008-01-31T07:11:00.002-08:00

Liberalism was the most widespread ideological response to the French Revolution. Its main virtue seemed to be that it could reconcile both the Industrial and French Revolutions in a single political approach. Liberalism emphasized both economic and political freedom. On the economic side, it advocated a limited government that allowed people to engage freely in economic activity. The term to describe this position is laissez faire. On the political side, it emphasized the civil liberties that had originally been part of the revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Liberals could, thus, claim that their ideology fit the latest historical conditions. They were not against recent economic or political changes; they were simply realists in a changing world. Here liberals distinguished themselves from a host of enemies, such as Conservatives, who wanted to turn back the clock, diehard Revolutionaries who wanted political terror, and an emerging group of social critics that we now call Marxists. We will talk about Marxists in the next lecture.
The term Liberalism emerged in the nineteenth century. It derived from the Latin word liberalis, or “pertaining to the free man,” and was a reaction to what many liberals saw as revolutionary excesses. (The gendered nature liberalism persisted throughout the nineteenth century, as liberals generally did not include women in their worldview.) Nonetheless, Liberals did profess that they wanted to increase personal autonomy. Yet, for them the expansion of autonomy could not come through the cataclysm of revolution. Liberals countered both conservatives and revolutionaries with an emphasis on the idea of progress. For liberals, all change in the political and economic system had to be predictable and controllable, which is why they emphasized constitutions and procedures. Liberalism was, therefore, about channeling the forces of change through a legal process that alleviated bad conditions without yielding to mob rule.
Fear of the mob is what drove Liberalism’s break with much of the Enlightenment. Like Burke, Liberals disliked the Enlightenment’s penchant for abstractions. They opposed a broad doctrine of natural rights, seeing it as politically dangerous. Instead, they took a pragmatic view. Borrowing from Burke, they believed that rights have evolved historically. For Liberals, the point was to make sure that the evolution continued and was both smooth and predictable. This emphasis on procedural change was rooted in two beliefs. The first was that free people are generally better people. The second was that even the best people can be overcome by passion. Thus, the way to make people free without lapsing into chaos was to have clear constitutional procedures that allowed measured change. In essence, Liberals believed that the end of more freedom could never be separated from the means used to gain freedom. This was the only way that the twin specters of conservative reaction and revolutionary excess could be avoided.
There were two centers of liberal thought in the nineteenth century, Britain and France. There were other Liberalisms in Europe, especially in Germany, but these debates borrowed much from France and Britain, and were weaker politically than the two main schools. Nonetheless, although British and French Liberalisms were alike in their basic ideas, each had different origins. British Liberalism derived from the enlightened tradition of Utilitarianism. This tradition of thought emphasized the application of reason to social and political problems. The emphasis on reason combined with a long tradition of parliamentarism to make public politics fundamentally about creating rational laws. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, British liberals strove for better laws. The French tradition, in contrast, was rooted in the failures of the Revolution and the post-Napoleonic Restoration. French liberals felt that France needed better state structures than the existing ones. Thus, in France thinkers emphasized plans for designing a better and more liberal state, setting aside the problem of individual laws. We will see how this difference in emphasis sent French and British Liberalisms in different directions.
I will begin with the British tradition. Here we turn to Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the last great theorist of the Enlightenment. In 1789, Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Moral Legislation. In this book, Bentham set down, in effect, a road map for all future Liberalism. Bentham believed in the power of reason to effect change. Thus, he argued that people needed to apply reason to all social and political problems, with the goal of reforming both state and society along more rational lines. How does one judge what is a rational policy? Bentham held that people should apply one principle to politics: the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number of People. This meant breaking with a long corporate tradition that balanced the interests of different orders against each other. Who was truly happy had traditionally mattered very little, especially if the unhappy people were also peasants.
This was a powerful intellectual approach. For Bentham, the best policy was the one that allowed the most people to follow their own self interest. This approach had two effects. First, it undermined traditional conceptions of social privilege. If people had to be allowed to follow their own interests, then they must also be allowed to free themselves from arbitrary laws. Second, this approach was also an attack on the Enlightenment’s belief in Natural Law. Self interest is rooted in the given conditions of a society; it is not an abstraction that is subject to multiple interpretations. This led Bentham to what he called his felicific calculus, or the calculus of pleasures and pains. The Greatest Good could, so Bentham believed, be determined by weighing pleasures against pains. What brought the most pleasure and least pain to the largest number of people was, therefore, the best policy. You should note here that this idea completely undermines Romantic politics. Counting up pleasures and pains was, at root, an emotional process, nor did it allow for tradition or hierarchy.
Thus, Bentham held that laws should give people the freedom to pursue their own interests. This meant that the best political system was one that was based on universal manhood suffrage (Bentham left out women) and print freedom. Ideas had to flow freely if people were to decide what was in their interest. To that end, Bentham wanted to expand suffrage and end censorship. These twin pillars of Bentham’s thought became the foundation of nineteenth-century British Liberalism. Two of Bentham’s more famous followers are the economist James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill. James Mill did more than any other person to spread Bentham’s ideas. He was a prominent public writer and vociferously opposed both the French Revolution and Romanticism. His most famous works include an article entitled “Government” that appeared in the first editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his book Elements of Political Economy (1821). The article “Government” was particularly important, because it provided the philosophical underpinnings for Britain’s first major reform in the voting system of the nineteenth century, the Reform Act of 1832. A series of reforms would follow this one, with the result that by 1928 every Briton that had reached the age of twenty-one had the right to vote.
Although he had a difficult relationship with his father, John Stuart Mill joined the liberal cause. J.S. Mill went much further, however, than his father in considering the nature and foundations of society. He was a multi-faceted thinker, but his greatest contributions came in political economy and political philosophy. During the 1840s he published series of works on political economy in which he considered whether property relations were themselves becoming a problem for society. Mill studied the emerging socialist literature carefully, and although he was not a socialist, he did believe that politics needed to provide solutions to what he called “social questions” before unrest made a rational form of politics impossible. His most famous work, however, is On Liberty. Published in 1859, this text is the cornerstone of all subsequent Liberal argument on freedom of thought. In the context of what I have said about Utilitarianism, it is notable for two reasons. First, it holds an absolute belief in the ultimate good of free expression. Even if some people will use this freedom badly, overall more good comes from free debate than does bad. Second, it is terribly elitist. One of the text’s main concerns is to argue that free thinkers needed protection from social pressure to conform. Whereas previous thinkers had been concerned about state censorship, Mill was now concerned about the censorship that the uninformed or uneducated could practice. You should keep these things in mind as you read the text.
Now, we turn to the French school of Liberalism. As I mentioned earlier, French thinkers were not interested in how to pass more rational laws; they wanted to understand how to create stable political structures. I begin tracing this theme with Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). Born in Lausanne, Constant was Franco-Swiss, and his father was a minor official in Dutch state service. Constant traveled widely as a youth and also studied in Germany, England, and Scotland. During the 1790s, he was a partisan of the French Revolution, but later he joined the Napoleonic government. He was soon disappointed by Napoleon’s authoritarianism and left France to live in exile in Geneva.
Constant believed in individual freedom above all. In this respect, he was heavily influenced by the German Romantics. He spent time in Weimar, where he met Goethe and Schiller, and became friends with Friedrich and August Schlegel. He also had a long relationship with the French discoverer of German Romanticism Madame de Staël. Having seen both the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, he concluded that the France needed a state system that protected individual liberty. In his view, the masses could be a dangerous force, which meant that a state was necessary to keep freedom within bounds. But Constant was also deeply disappointed by the Bourbon Restoration in 1815. The behavior of Louis XVIII showed that if a King had absolute power, personal liberty could be destroyed as well. Constant favored a constitutional monarchy that balanced the powers of the legislative and executive parts of the French government, and he also favored strict constitutional guarantees for personal freedom, such as freedom of the press and religion.
Constant’s ideas became the foundation of French Liberalism between 1815 and 1830. When a Revolution did come in 1830, the people demanded the kind of state that Constant and his liberal allies had planned. Fittingly, it seems, Constant died in 1830, at exactly the moment when his ideas triumphed. Constant’s followers set up a constitutional government that was called the July Monarchy. (I will say more about this in a future lecture.) Under the new constitution, France had a constitutional monarch, and an active chamber of deputies. Unfortunately for the Liberals, the Chamber of Deputies was perceived as being too elitist, because very few Frenchmen met the stiff property requirements for voting. During the next two decades, the Constitution of 1830 became ever less popular, as greater segments of French society demanded the right to vote. This led, eventually, to another revolution in 1848, which established the second French Republic and expanded the franchise dramatically. With each revolution, French Liberals believed that France was moving toward liberty. The problem, however, with his process was that each new regime had legitimize itself anew, which encouraged opponents of the government to engage in ever more radical critique.
The instability of French politics between 1815 and 1848 led to the emergence of another liberal critique from Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville became increasing suspicious of the political changes, holding that France was now confronting a new problem: the liberal state was turning toward democracy. Tocqueville disliked democracy, because he felt that the yearning for equality that had characterized French politics since 1789 endangered liberty. In a Democracy the majority always overwhelms the individual.
It was no accident, of course, that de Tocqueville was an aristocrat. He had certain nostalgia for the aristocratic life. But he also realized that the ancien régime was gone for good. His famous travels in America had convinced him of this fact, and he published his thoughts in his classic work Democracy in America. Tocqueville saw America as a vanguard of the future, because it suffered from the leveling tendency that afflicted his own country, but it was also stable. This meant that the United States would survive, but it also showed how democracy was haunted by the tyranny of the majority. Democracy discouraged eccentric behavior, and required of people that they fit in. Tocqueville concluded that democracy was more equal, but also less free than aristocratic regimes. Thus, the real question for liberals was how to maintain freedom within democracy.
To find an answer to this question, Tocqueville turned to aristocracy. Aristocrats have the freedom to be unusual, he held, because they have family traditions that defend them against social pressure. Thus, for Tocqueville, the key to freedom was to maintain intermediary groups that protected the individual from democratically elected governments. In Tocqueville’s view, Liberalism could not survive without these kinds of protections. He held that Americans found such intermediary groups in the church. The problem for Europe was that the church and the aristocracy were gone. Thus, Europeans needed to create secondary institutions that provided protection for freedom. This is an echo of the general liberal dislike of abstraction. Tocqueville wanted intermediary organizations to be founded in daily experience, not broad doctrines. This was especially important to him, since another Napoleon came on the scene in 1848. Napoleon III, the great general’s nephew, traded on his uncle’s name in an attempt to gain power in France. Ultimately, he succeeded and France dropped its liberal constitution in exchange for another empire.
This is the context in which we need to understand Tocqueville. He knew that the Old Regime was gone, but he also recognized that other dangers to freedom had presented themselves, such as democracy and tyranny. The key was, therefore, to seek traditions that still functioned and to use them against these new dangers. It never quite worked out in France, but Tocqueville’s ideas are still influential. He and the other liberals that I have discussed continue to inform our understanding of politics today.

Lecture 9: Conservatism

2008-01-31T07:11:00.001-08:00

Conservatism is one of the three post-revolutionary ideologies that I mentioned last time. In general, post-revolutionary Conservatives rejected the uncertainty and violence unleashed by the French Revolution and sought to establish as stable social and political order. Although there were many sources of conservatism in Europe, its origins as an intellectual movement lie in England with Edmund Burke (1729-1797). Edmund Burke was the first European to see the French Revolution as both a social and intellectual event. In his view, the Revolution brought not simply a change in regime, but also fundamentally altered the foundations of French society. This meant for him that the revolution’s impact could not be contained within France. It was a challenge to every society that had an aristocracy, a church, and a monarchy.
Burke made his case in his famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This book was written very early in the revolution, and represents Burke’s thoughts only on the Revolution’s first six months. Knowing the timetable is important, because it shows us that Burke’s opposition to the Revolution was philosophical, rather than reactionary. Many so-called conservatives came to oppose the revolution, but only after seeing the resulting violence and bloodshed. Burke, however, published his opposition before the worst violence and destruction had occurred. For that reason, his doctrines are more considered and coherent than the screeds later opponents would write in moments of terror.
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was an all-out assault on the revolution’s official doctrines. The foundation for this assault was his opposition to political abstraction. For example, in the text Burke rejected the idea of natural rights, holding that all rights derived from the history of a given society. In his view, rights are an inheritance passed on to the present generation by previous generations. For that reason governments cannot be thought into existence. Political and legal structures evolve slowly in accordance with a country’s history. As Burke considered the revolutionaries’ attempt to build a new, perfect government, he responded that a government is not a machine that can be taken apart and put back together; instead, it is an organism that has grown slowly over a long time and is rooted in a country’s traditions and practices. In Burke’s view, the revolution’s greatest mistake was to break France’s organic relationship to its history and institutions.
Burke saw the past as a source of wisdom. It tempered political judgments and prevented change from getting out of hand. In this context, even prejudices could prove useful, since a prejudice that had worked well in the past was better than an untested idea that threatened anarchy. (You will note, based on the previous lecture, an early hint of Romanticism’s rejection of abstract reason. Burke was no Romantic, but his opposition to abstraction was later incorporated into Romanticism.) In Burke’s view, a Revolution that had lost touch with a national past would descend into chaos and make a military strongman necessary. He wrote, “In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself….But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic.” Given the French Revolution’s ultimate course, and its final end in Napoleon, Burke could have claimed no small degree of vindication, had he lived to see the final outcome.
I have mentioned Burke’s anticipation of some Romantic themes, because there is an important connection between later conservative politics and English Romanticism. I have already mentioned William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in a previous lecture. Both men went from being partisans of the French Revolution to opponents as the revolutionary violence progressed. They represent the spread of a conservative sentiment across Europe that abhorred Revolutionary violence. Wordsworth, for example, moved closer to the traditional authorities such as the British monarchy and the Church of England, even if his politics remained subdued. Coleridge’s anti-revolutionary sentiments were more overtly political, as he extolled the virtues of the old society of orders. In his view, each order played a valuable role in society. If people tried to act outside of their order, social and political chaos would result. This position had fundamentally political implications in that it meant, for Coleridge, that if people not trained in politics tried to join in public debate, or even worse to vote, the state would collapse. Thus, Coleridge thought it better for the orders should to live together harmoniously, with the nobles running the politics, while everyone else fulfilled their duties. This idea would have a great effect on such future leaders as Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill.
After Napoleon’s defeat another generation of conservative writers came to the fore, particularly in France, that wanted to vindicate Burke’s attacks on the Revolution, but also parted with it in significant ways. Many of the new conservatives reacted strongly against the Revolution’s excesses by demanding greater security for the state. The problem was, however, that the French Revolution and Napoleon had destroyed so many traditions that the past could seemed to provide little stability. Moreover, some stabilizing traditions that had worked well in Britain, such as Protestantism, could play no significant role in more Catholic countries. Thus, a redefinition of Burke’s conservatism was necessary before it could be applied elsewhere, and in some cases this pushed conservatism into the realm of political reaction.
Much of what post-Napoleonic conservatives in France did can be described as a re-appropriation of tradition. French conservatives gravitated toward the Catholic Church as a source of stability and tradition. The church brought a sense of hierarchy and organic order back to daily life. (There is, of course, an implicit connection to Romanticism here.) Catholicism would not have fit well with Burke’s worldview, since he was a Protestant. But in Europe’s Catholic regions, especially in France, Italy, and Spain, this kind of religious conservatism had an inherent appeal. The Franco-Italian Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) is a good example, as he has come to represent most fully the alliance between throne and altar. De Maistre took a much more pessimistic view of politics than had his enlightened predecessors. Rather than finding the state’s origins in reason, as John Locke had done, he emphasized violence as its fundamental aspect. In his view, all political systems originated in violence. Before there was a state, there was anarchy. The state keeps anarchy out of daily life by centralizing the violence that had once been randomly distributed. In this context, it is the threat of state violence keeps anarchy out of daily life.
De Maistre’s concentration on violence then combined with his doubts about reason to lead to a major intellectual innovation. De Maistre was the first thinker to expressly theorize the political importance of public ritual. In order to persist, de Maistre argued, a state needs rituals. These rituals are not rational, but are designed to inculcate belief and teach lessons. That is, public rituals of whatever sort declare allegiance to the state. (De Maistre’s analysis was on target. It is no accident that the French Revolutionaries were constantly inventing new public rituals to secure their state. Some of those rituals were violent, as the steady use of the guillotine attests.) In particular, de Maistre felt that religion was central to maintaining daily security, since it was founded on rituals. Thus, a new political approach emerged. The state is both founded in violence and permeated by the irrational. If rituals keep the state together, then religious rituals, which were the most powerful and pervasive of all public rituals, had to be protected by the state.
This basic philosophical position put Maistre in conflict with almost the entire eighteenth century. He was opposed both to the Enlightenment’s rationalism and the French Revolution’s abstractions. He detested the French philosophes’ attacks on what he considered to be the true foundation of human life, religion. De Maistre was a believing Christian, and he saw history and politics in terms of God’s divine will. In attacking the Catholic Church’s authority, the Enlightenment poisoned the social community, and caused France to lose sight of its Christian mission. The French Revolution was merely the predictable end to this sad tale, as the pain and suffering it caused were God’s punishments for irreligion. This gave the revolution meaning, in so far as all violence could be interpreted as symbolic action that represented God’s plan. According to this perspective, the Reign of Terror was a ritual sacrifice that purified France and returned it to the proper path. Now that the purification was complete, France could rebuild itself along traditional lines.
In his work de Maistre identified what became a central problem for many post-revolutionary thinkers, how does one rebuild shattered authority? De Maistre’s answer was to hold that a monarchy was the best form of government, since it best approximated God’s will. Monarchy controls the kind of egoism the revolution had set free, by showing people that state power is anchored in mystery. Mysteries are, of course, things that simply must be believed, which meant that Voltaire had no place in Maistre’s world. For de Maistre, however, banishing Voltaire and reason also made possible a return to morality. Now, the church would assume its rightful place in politics. With the political system anchored firmly in religion, individuals could live in peace within the new hierarchy.
De Maistre became enormously popular in France and across Europe. He provided a meaningful way of understanding the destruction the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had brought. He seemed to provide a better explanation for the violence than the Enlightenment could. The Enlightenment had preached that man was basically good. But how could that be, given the Reign of Terror? De Maistre provided an alternate ideology to the ideas propounded by Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. For him, people are basically evil and need to be held in check by systems of authority. Only the traditional institutions of church and state could prevent future horrors. This approach became the basis for all future conservative arguments about the about the need to protect traditional institutions.
We cannot go into all Europe’s conservatisms here, but before concluding this discussion, I want to discuss another conservatism that began before the French Revolution and was then radicalized by it, German Conservatism. In order to understand Conservatism in Germany, you must recall now my earlier discussion of Germany’s unique political structure. Until the first unification under Bismarck in 1871, Germany was divided into many principalities of different shapes and sizes. As late as 1648, there were still 365 separate German states. Some, like Prussia and Austria, were large. Others, such as the Duchy of Weimar, and Germany’s many city-states, were quite small. The diversity of institutions and states was enveloped by an ancient institution called the Holy Roman Empire. The empire was supposedly founded on Christmas Day, 800 AD, and grew organically for over 1000 years, until it was dissolved by the Austrian emperor Francis II in 1806. I want to trace the history of German Conservatism through three people Justus Möser, Friedrich von Gentz, and Carl Ludwig von Haller.
German Conservatism originated in local opposition to political change within the system. Change was defined largely through the aggression of large states toward smaller states. Thus, across Germany, voices of protest arose every time a large state—most often Prussia—tried to change existing political arrangements. Justus Möser offered one consistent voice of protest. Möser represented well the concerns of Germany’s smaller states. Born and raised in a small town called Osnabrück, in the northwest Germany, he spent his entire life there working in local government. In a weekly paper that he published, Patriotic Fantasies, Möser argued tirelessly that the German spirit lay in the organic reality of the Holy Roman Empire. He defended regional diversity, traditional liberties, and ancient wisdom against the forces of political change. These ideas would be very important later to critics of the battle between Berlin and Vienna for control over all of Germany. But Möser also influenced German literature greatly. He put the importance of diversity and local traditions onto a cultural plane in his famous History of Osnabrück. In this text he argued that culture was rooted in the daily practices of ordinary people. If you want to find authentic Germanness, you must go the peasants and listen to their language and folk tales. This idea had a great impact on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, to whom the later Romantics would turn.
If German conservatism was rooted in local opposition to political change before the French Revolution, it became increasingly nationalistic after the Revolution. Here we turn to Friedrich Gentz. A Prussian, he was born in Silesia, the province that Frederick II had stolen from Austria, and his father worked there in the Prussian administration. Gentz grew up and was educated in Berlin, particularly by the city’s French Huguenots. Gentz’s mother was from this expatriate community, which meant that Gentz spoke and wrote both German and French. Gentz had studied philosophy under Immanuel Kant in Königsberg and was an early partisan of the French Revolution, but he soon turned against the revolutionary violence and bloodshed. In this context, it is notable that Gentz was the first person to translate Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France into German. In 1791, he read Burke’s work in English, initially with distaste, but later with growing admiration as the Revolution became more violent. Gentz then translated Burke’s work into German and published it in 1793. The translation was a hit and made Gentz instantly famous as an anti-revolutionary writer. He spent the next decade railing against the revolution in a series of conservative journals. In 1802, driven in part by personal scandals, Gentz left Berlin for Vienna, where he became part of Prince Klemens von Metternich’s stable of conservative propagandists. As a member of Metternich’s growing team of writers, Gentz brought together anti-French propaganda with conservatism and an emerging nationalism.
From Gentz we turn to the most influential conservative of the immediate post-Napoleonic period, Carl Ludwig von Haller. Haller was born in 1768 in the Swiss city of Bern. His father had been a local official in the city government, and Haller joined the city government, too. In 1786, at the young age of eighteen, Haller began working for the city government. Haller’s quiet life changed dramatically, however, with the French conquest of Switzerland in the 1790s. Haller struggled against the French occupation, but was ultimately forced to leave Bern. He returned later, but was forced to leave again, when it became known that he had converted to Catholicism. (The Bernese are very Protestant.) Like many young conservatives, the destruction of Haller’s political and social world led him to search for order in the Catholic Church.
Haller’s most important work is Restoration of Political Science (1816-1822). In this text, Haller wanted to overcome the revolutionary social contract theory with an emphasis on social inequality. In Haller’s view, society is based on social inequality. Everywhere the weak are dependent on the strong, and this chain of dependency runs right up to the prince, whose strength protects everyone. Thus, the prince’s authority was inalienable, and he made all political decisions alone. Haller was not completely dogmatic on this question. In contrast to de Maistre, he did not emphasize the church’s role in the state, nor did he claim that the prince’s power was unassailable. Even the prince had rules to follow, since he was simply a prince but was a father to his people. In emphasizing inequality, however, Haller put a strong conservative trend into German political thought. This would later combine with nationalism to give German politics a particularly anti-French flavor.
To conclude, Conservatism is a product of both the pre-revolutionary and French Revolutionary periods. It has many roots and appeared in many countries in different forms. But if there is one thing we can say about its history, it is that the French Revolution provided the impetus to make Conservatism a movement. Those who had railed against any change before 1789 suddenly came to seem like prophets. The Revolution’s wars and killings made God, King, and Country seem like a good combination to for keeping social and political order. Next time, we will talk about another approach to order, Liberalism.

Lecture 8: Romanticism

2008-01-31T07:10:00.000-08:00

Today, we begin a series of four lectures that examines the “isms” the nineteenth century brought the world. If there is one thing that were can say about Europe in the nineteenth century, it’s that it seemed consumed with ideologies. The world after 1789 became increasingly political. At the level of cultural discussion, almost everyone seemed to be explaining the world, re-imagining the world, or just taking critical positions for or against this, that, and the other thing that irked, irritated, pleased, or satisfied. I want to begin our discussion of this post-revolutionary intellectual ferment by discussing one of the most difficult “isms” to define, Romanticism. What is this thing? If we look critically at the movement that scholars today called Romanticism, we see a grab bag of people with different politics, religions, nationalities, creative specialties, historical attitudes, and the list could go on. Therein lies the problem with talking about Romanticism, it is an “ism,” but it is not like the readily identifiable movements such as Marxism, Liberalism, or Conservatism. It seems to hover above politics, touching it without actually being political.
Romanticism is best described as a style, mood, or even emphasis. This new mood had a significant impact on every aspect of European society, bringing change to art, music, literature, the human sense of self, the approach to nature, and even altered how people thought about politics. We will discuss all these areas throughout this lecture, but first we need to gain a clearer understanding of Romanticism by comparing it to what came before, the Enlightenment. You will recall from the first few lectures that I described the Enlightenment as a critical movement that was concerned with understanding and also reforming the world. Central to this mission was the cultivation of reason. Romanticism was a reaction against this emphasis on reason. Enlightened writers, musicians, painters, and politicians emphasized elegance, restraint, proportion, and taste. This combination of characteristics represents, in a nutshell, eighteenth-century salon and court life. In contrast, Romantic writers, musicians, painters, and politicians emphasized authenticity, desire, energy, and subjectivity.
What we begin to see as we move from the Enlightenment into Romanticism are major shifts in emphasis: a shift from universal to individual, from detachment to passion, from human-cultivated environments to nature. One example of this is the change in garden styles. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people prized French Gardens, which were carefully cultivated and usually laid out in a geometric pattern. By 1800, however, the soc-called English Garden had become the rage. Here nature was supposed to be set free, with trees planted at random, and paths laid out to meander through the park. There is no real distinction between the two; to plan any garden is to intervene in nature. But that people thought this distinction between the unnatural and the natural to have been important tells you something about the new mindset.
From here, I am going to pursue different aspects of Romanticism in the cultural realm. I will discuss music, art, architecture, and literature. Then I will finish with a brief discussion of politics.
If we can identify an origin for Romanticism it is to be found in Germany, beginning in the 1790s. Writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck built on the interest in subjectivity, sensibility, and emotion that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller had introduced into German literature in the 1770s. In their younger days, before they became stodgy conservative types, Goethe and Schiller were at the center of a literary movement that came to be known as the Storm and Stress, or Sturm und Drang. The Sturm und Drang had, in turn, been heavily influenced by the interest in sensibility that characterized the work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. You should note, however, that the German Romantics were much younger than Goethe and Schiller, and this is something that will unify all Romantics. Their relationship to the world had been shaped by a combination of youth and the French Revolution. The Revolutionary era had a way of making it seem that all the old things were outdated. Hölderlin, for example, tried to integrate his religious yearnings with classical literary models and became very interested in mystical forces, even dedicating himself in one poem to what he called the forces of the night. The German Romantics were, as a group, intensely emotional and self-centered. Hölderlin tried to make off with another man’s wife because of the spiritual connection he and she felt; he failed and began a long slide into insanity. Friedrich Schlegel, however, succeeded in luring a different woman, Brendel Mendelssohn, away from her husband, creating a major scandal in the process.
The Romantics emphasized subjective experience heavily, always concerned with documenting what they felt and why, and then acting on those feelings. Along these lines, one of the stranger things the German Romantics did is to have busts made of themselves that they sent to their friends. Each friend would then write a detailed letter about what contemplating that bust’s visage made them feel. (There is, as you can guess, a deep connection between the aesthetics of Romanticism and the nineteenth-century pseudo-science phrenology.) This early group of Romantics then gave way to a second, even younger group that included Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Joseph Görres, E.T.A. Hoffman, and Joseph von Eichendorff. What we see in these later writers is a growing interest in the supernatural and the horrible. E.T.A. Hoffmann is a good example, as his stories and novels were populated with ghost, specters, and evil spirits that moved back and forth between the natural and supernatural world.
A similar literary awakening occurred in England, though a little later. English Romanticism supposedly began in 1798 with the publication of William Wordsworth’s famous poetical work “Lyrical Ballads.” I have already mentioned Wordsworth in a previous lecture, because he helps us identify the importance of youth to Romanticism. Referring to the French Revolution, he wrote in Book 11 of The Prelude, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Wordsworth was part of a group of very young men that met regularly to discuss poetry and plumb the depths of their souls. The list of characters includes Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, and the scientist Humphry Davy, who mistakenly fancied himself a poet. One of the strange things Coleridge, Southey, and Davy did was to inhale the recently discovered gas nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. You can imagine the fun they must have had getting high and writing poetry. These writers then inspired another generation of Romantic writers. Names such as John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley come to the fore. Lord Byron was so passionately committed to a better world that he went to Greece to foment an uprising, where he died of a fever in 1824.
There were more Romantic writers in other parts of Europe, but due to the limits on our time, we must now consider art. It is in art that we can really see how important subjectivity and personal passion were to the Romantics. In this next part of the lecture, we will consider important Romantic painters from the English, French, and German traditions. We will begin with the Englishman Joseph Turner and the Swiss-born English immigrant Henry Fuseli. Turner brought English landscape painting to its height, and he particular signifies the new importance of nature to the artist. In Maggiore (1819) he made subtle use of colors and drew the viewer into the scene. Contemplating nature was meant to evoke a feeling within the viewer. Henry Fuseli points our attention to supernatural themes that we have already discussed. His painting The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1796) depicts the Greek Goddess Hecate being drawn to an infant whose blood was the object of magical desire. Here the strange and wicked reminds the viewer of dark and evil forces that permeate the world.
In France, Théodore Géricault provides another good example of the Romantic emphasis on depicting and inspiring feelings. His painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) was based on a contemporary shipwreck, in which French sailors floated on a raft for days off the Senegalese coast. The canvas is full of emotion and despair. It is difficult to be unmoved by the story of suffering in this picture. (Géricault was also no fan of the Restoration.) Another French painter who emphasized emotion, though in a way different from Géricault, is Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). His 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People on the Barricades is an optimistic and liberal interpretation of France’s Revolution of 1830. Here
emotion entered battle, while on a world stage.
In Germany, we find similar themes, the emphasis on emotions, and the inclusion of spirits in the world. In no case is this clearer than Philip Otto Runge’s work. In Morning (1808), Runge includes both landscape imagery and angels all over the place, a melding of the yearning for both the natural and the spiritual. Perhaps the most famous of the German Romantic painters is Caspar David Friedrich. In his work we see the emphasis on loneliness and the attempt to evoke a particular feeling in the viewing subject. Two paintings are particularly illustrative. The first is the Lonely Tree (1822) in which Friedrich places something completely normal, a tree, into an open area whose open space conveys separation and loneliness. Friedrich’s use of loneliness as a theme encapsulates the yearning for totality that characterized much of Romanticism. Art was now the way to heal what had been broken. We see find the same theme in the famous The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Here the viewer is invited to contemplate his or her own sense of difference and separation by considering the feelings the wanderer had while looking out over nature’s panorama.
From art we turn to music. There is a difference between Classical eighteenth-century music and later Romantic music, though it is difficult to place it exactly in time. Some composers included elements of both Classical and Romantic music in their work, and it can be difficult to pinpoint clear differences. Fore example, although there is a world of difference between Bach and Beethoven, Beethoven and Mozart share important characteristics, even if Mozart was no a Romantic. The main element of Romantic music is its emphasis on originality and freedom over form. Older, more rigid musical arrangements were thrown aside and a series of new forms appeared such as the capriccio, the intermezzo, the lied, the mazurka, the nocturne, and the prelude. Two new interests also appeared that were of fundamental importance for nineteenth-century music, the human voice and the piano. As older forms were rejected, the voice became ever more prominent in Romantic music and was intermingled more extensively with a variety of instruments. Franz Schubert’s Lieder are a classic case, as the piano and the singer were brought together almost as one instrument. Ludwig van Beethoven’s inclusion of song in the Ninth Symphony is, perhaps, the most famous example. In France, Frédéric Chopin took the piano to new heights, making his music personal and intensely emotional. Romantics followed other important themes as well. Pyotr Tchaikovsky put the world historical event Napoleon’s War of 1812 to music, and later in the nineteenth century Edvard Grieg did the same for folk tales.
Now, let us take Romanticism into the political realm. We will begin with history and philosophy. As we consider history and Romanticism, it immediately becomes apparent that Romanticism did not support any particular ideology. The French historians Jules Michelet and Alphonse Lamartine supported the French revolution, seeing it as passion written into historical events. We have already seen this kind of sentiment in Delacroix, who was both a Romantic and a liberal. However, the conservative Frenchman Francois Chateaubriand turned against the French Revolution and began to seek certainty in religion. In 1802, he published a famous book The Genius of Christianity. This is an important text for us, because it highlights a central concern of conservative Romanticism, namely the search for political authority in realms outside of politics. For Chateaubriand, the glory of Christianity was found not necessarily in its truth, but in its rituals and in the hierarchy it created. Many Romantics who yearned for hierarchy became both political conservatives and Catholics. Friedrich Schlegel is a good example. But there were also Romantic Catholics that followed a liberal line, such as Johann Joseph Görres. We can trace Romanticism’s ambiguous political effects even further in the British Romantics. William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey all began as young French-Revolutionary liberals. Yet all of them were ultimately disappointed by it. Wordsworth withdrew from politics, retreating into an aesthetic realm. Coleridge, for his part, followed much the same line, but also became an even firmer Christian. Finally, Robert Southey became an unabashed English Tory.
Now let us conclude, by summarizing and looking ahead. Romanticism rejected the classical enlightened ideals of order, harmony, and balance. It emphasized the individual, the irrational, and the imagination. It found beauty in nature, not in human-created order. It was often deeply interested in the past for its own sake. It also worshipped genius of all types, whether the artist or the world-historical political figure, such as Napoleon. These characteristics also led Romanticism in to more troubling realms, however. The tendency toward irrationalism also turned Romantics toward the folk past, which became one of the foundations of modern nationalism. Romantics became interested in the ways of the people, collecting folk tales and national poems. The modern disciplines of folklore and historical linguistics find their origins, for example, in the work of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who collected German fairy tales and legends. In prizing the natural and the historical, Europe’s Romantics helped to propel Europe on what was, ultimately, a destructive path. It was the Romantics who discovered the nation, and nations would become a central problem for the new regime.

Lecture 7: Picking Up the Pieces: Metternich and the Congress of Vienna

2008-01-31T07:08:00.000-08:00

When we first talked about Napoleon, I pointed out how his constant need to export the French Revolution led him deeper into Europe until he collected so many enemies that both he and the Revolution were pushed back into France. This was a great victory for the so-called fourth coalition of Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia. However, having finally succeeded in defeating France the coalition now had the problem of what to do with liberated Europe. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods had wrought so many changes—politically, socially, and economically—that there was no way to go back to the pre-1789 world. Thus, when the victorious powers met at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, they had to walk a difficult line between the old world and the new, between dampening the forces of disorder and not going so far as to incite new revolutions. They did restore political order to Europe, but it would constantly be challenged by the forces that Napoleon and the French Revolution had unleashed.
Today, I want to consider one force that the victorious powers struggled with: the belief among Europeans that governments were, in some sense, answerable to the people. Whereas Louis XVI, the King of France, had been King by the grace of God alone, all future European rulers would have to construct their right to rule along more worldly lines. For example, when Louis Philippe became the French King in 1830, after his predecessor Charles X had been expelled by yet another revolution, he pointedly accepted the title “King of the French” and not, as had been the case for his predecessors, “King of France.” This shift in terminology highlights what I will call the problem of legitimacy. For the next century, European states tried to maintain political stability, in the face of a political settlement that had no political legitimacy.
The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna confronted a new world—one in which the myths that had supported previous regimes no longer held sway. The problem was that the negotiators attempted, nonetheless, to bring stability without reference to this change. They succeeded in part, as Europe would avoid another great Continental war until World War I broke out in 1914. Yet even in 1919, when yet another conference tried to pick up the still smaller pieces that another war had left behind, the negotiators at Versailles blithely ignored the same lessons that the participants at Vienna had proved incapable of grasping: only governments that were legitimate in their people’s eyes could maintain domestic peace. Unfortunately, this second time around, with millions already dead, the mistakes made at Versailles’ negotiating table contributed to many millions more dying.
I have couched my discussion of the Congress of Vienna in terms of its failures, but we should keep in mind that those failures were also a product of the French Revolution and Napoleon. That is to say, that what may appear to us as one-dimensional conservative reaction was, in fact, something new in the history of Europe. The participants in Vienna worked in a difficult, unstable world. Some of their “reaction” may have been overdone, but a good part was the result of legitimate security concerns. So we want to be sure not to view the entire process of negotiation and reorganization in a wholly negative light.
A little perspective will help us understand the difficulties more clearly. Consider, for example, that when the Congress began on November 1, 1814, barely seven months had elapsed since Napoleon had left an exhausted Continent for his exile in Elba. Thus, we cannot forget that Napoleon and the French Revolution’s shadows loomed over the entire event, and it is fair to say that this Congress was as much a product of France’s dark side, Revolutionary aggression, as it was a regressive reorganization of the Old Regime.
In discussing the Congress of Vienna, we confront, thus, a complicated world whose outlines were forged in a desperate struggle for survival. You will recall that after France first declared war in 1792 it took multiple coalitions and 21 years of war to achieve final victory. This system of coalitions conditioned both the structure of the Congress itself and the participants’ attitudes. While on their march to Paris, the chief members of the Fourth Coalition met in the French town of Chaumont to sign a treaty that committed each participant to negotiate a post-war order. After occupying Paris, the major powers agreed, in accord with this Treaty of Chaumont, to meet in Vienna for formal negotiations. Thus, war of liberation itself was the inspiration for an attempt to keep wars at bay. The result was what has been called the Congress System. This system was founded on the belief that European states should work to avoid wars and that the best means to do so was to negotiate before hostilities actually broke out. (Notice that there is no talk of legitimacy, or democracy here. It was diplomats, not peoples, who worked to end war.) Between 1814 and 1822, there would be four more conferences that aimed at mitigating conflicts.
1818 Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle
1820 Congress of Troppau
1821 Congress of Laibach
1822 Congress of Verona

These conferences were very early signs of international co-operation, and they reveal how confused the post-war situation had become. Political reaction brought us international cooperation. This opposition to war was not, however, the product of a humanitarian instinct, nor did it represent a philosophical desire to end “war.” Rather, it stemmed from the realization among Europe’s political elite that wars destabilized governments, which threatened their positions.
Seen from this perspective, the Congress of Vienna was an attempt to ensure that France would not threaten stability again. Although the major powers tried to pick up the Old Regime’s pieces, they recognized that the previous 25 years had brought irreversible change. In particular, they recognized the power of French nationalism, which was evident in their offering France a lenient peace settlement for fear that the French would spill over their borders again. Thus, France was required only to return to the borders of 1793, which meant that the former Austrian Netherlands, an area that would later become Belgium, remained under French control. France was not required to pay an indemnity. Finally, all the art treasures that Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had looted from across Europe were allowed to remain in Paris for their own protection, as it was said.
The victorious side’s leniency toward France evaporated, however, when on March 1, 1815, Napoleon returned for his “Hundred Days.” This policy reversal suggests how central security was for the negotiators. Napoleon escaped his prison island of Elba, and after landing in southern France raised an army. He marched north, acquiring troops as he went, and by March 20, he was in Paris again, confirming the coalition’s worst fears about French aggression. We should not, however, overstate French support for Napoleon. Although he attracted many enthusiasts, usually veterans pining after the good old days, most of the French kept a cool distance, preferring to see whether Napoleon would win before joining him. This was not going to happen. By June 1815, Napoleon’s dreams were dashed, as a combined Prussian/British force defeated him at the Belgian town of Waterloo. Napoleon abdicated once more on 22 June 1815, and was sent into exile again, though this time his prison was more secure, being on a cold and wet island in the Atlantic called St. Helena. Peace could return to Europe again. But this time it was of a markedly different kind.
Napoleon’s renewed adventurism brought a much harsher peace to France. After the Congress of Vienna met again, France was reduced to the borders of 1790. (Belgium was added to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in order to create a buffer state that would keep the French in line.) The victorious powers also exacted a large indemnity and required the French to pay the costs of a 150,000 man occupying army. But the Hundred Days also made firmer the resolve to maintain political stability against any threat of disorder. As a result, the Congress of Vienna restored monarchies and redistributed territory without reference to any local conditions, or to calls for more democratic involvement. Belgium is a good example of this trend. Even though most of Belgium’s residents were Catholic and many spoke French, this region was given to the King of Holland, a Dutch-speaking, Protestant country. Fundamentally, security interests often clashed with emerging national consciousnesses. The gap between these two was a key element the Vienna settlement’s ultimate instability.
With this in mind, let’s consider the Congress of Vienna’s redrawing of the maps more closely. We will begin with Great Britain. As a result of the final treaty, Great Britain acquired the island of Malta, and a small island that they had stolen from Denmark called Heligoland. (This island was ceded to Germany in 1890.) The British also became protectors of the so-called Ionian Islands, which were Greek-speaking territories off Turkey’s coast that had been under Turkey’s control. They also acquired Mauritius, Tobago, and St. Lucia from France. Britain took Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope from Holland. Finally, the British took Trinidad from Spain. These were important acquisitions, and they completed a trend that had been underway since the end of the seventeenth century. By means honest and dishonest Britain had become the world’s largest commercial power, dominating the world’s oceans. This would have important consequences after 1850.
Prussia was another big winner, distinguishing itself at the conference of Vienna through naked greed. Prussia received half of Saxony, the entire Duchy of Berg, which as you will recall Napoleon had created only a few years before. Prussia also received part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, and a large swath of territory on the Rhine’s left Bank that included Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle. (The Germans call this city Aachen.) In addition, Prussia acquired Pomerania from Sweden, ending a Swedish presence in this German-speaking area that dated back to the seventeenth century. Finally, Prussia also retained the territories it had already acquired in the three partitions of Poland. This included the region known as Posen and, in particular, the cities of Danzig and Thorn.
In many ways, however, Austria was an even bigger winner than Prussia. This was not because Austria acquired new territory (the post-1815 Austria was about as large as the pre-1815 Austria), but because the Habsburgs succeeded in consolidating their once far-flung empire into a contiguous territory that could be defended and managed. This was a major advance, and we need to take note of it, because it essentially allowed the empire to endure for another 100 years. Only in 1919 was the Austrian empire dissolved for good.
Belgium provides the clearest example of Austria’s success. This territory had once been known as the Austrian Netherlands. The Austrians never liked having this territory. It was too far away to be managed effectively, and the people did not exactly welcome Austrian oversight. In fact, during the eighteenth century the Austrians tried repeatedly to arrange a swap with the Wittelsbachs, the Bavarian royal family. Twice during the eighteenth century, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs came close to swapping these territories, but each time Frederick II, the King of Prussia prevented the deal going through.
Rather than dealing with a sullen people far off in Europe, Austria concentrated on gaining territories that were nearby. It took back lost territories in Venetia, Trieste, and Dalmatia, while keeping the Polish province of Galicia. In addition, the Alpine region of Tyrolia was acquired, as well as the Bishopric of Salzburg. To top it off, the Duchies of Tuscany and Modena were given to Habsburg relatives. A glance at the map shows just how compact and powerful Austria had become. Reaching far into the East and with direct access to the Mediterranean, Austria’s immediate future looked bright.
If we consider the rest of Germany it becomes clear how central security issues were to the negotiations in Vienna. Although Napoleon was gone, Germany did not return to its previous political arrangements, where over 300 separate princes ruled. In the Act of Confederation, which was part of the final Vienna agreement, these 300 some odd principalities were reduced to 38. The proliferation of small principalities that had characterized the Holy Roman Empire was over for good. From this point on Germany’s future belonged to the larger, powerful states.
Russia also received significant amounts of territory. The old Grand Duchy of Warsaw that Napoleon had set up was dissolved and the territory was turned over to Russia. In addition, Russia kept Finland, which it had taken from Sweden in 1808, as well as Bessarabia, which it had taken from Turkey in 1812.
Italy was left in a condition similar to Germany’s, deeply divided. In the south, Ferdinand IV became King in the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, with the capital in Naples. The papal state survived Napoleon’s annexation, and also added Bologna and Ferrara to its domains. Genoa went to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which would, incidentally, unify Italy in 1870. Finally, as I noted before, Tuscany and Modena went to Habsburg princes.
The Low Countries also changed dramatically. The Kingdom of the Netherlands was expanded beyond Holland to include Belgium under King William I. William I was also made Grand Duke of Luxembourg, which made him part of the German Confederation.
Switzerland was also back, after having been defeated by Napoleon. The original 19 cantons were restored and three more were added, Geneva, Wallis, and Neuchatel.
Even Sweden and Denmark got into the act. Sweden kept Norway, which it had taken from Denmark in 1814. Denmark was compensated with Lauenburg, which it would have to give up to Germany in 1864.
Spain and Portugal were the conference’s big losers, as Spain lost Trinidad to the Brits and Portugal lost Guiana to France.
To conclude this part of the lecture, if we consider how Europe’s political boundaries changed after Napoleon’s final defeat, we see security concerns taking precedence over national sentiments, which in many cases undermined the existing governments. The period after 1815 was, thus, not an attempt to go back to a pre-1789 world, but was dominated by the need to prevent another revolution.
Now I’m going to change focus slightly and consider the Congress of Vienna from the perspective of the individual negotiators. The major players were:
For Austria: Klemens von Metternich

For Prussia: Prince Karl August von Hardenberg and Wilhelm von Humboldt

For Russia: Count Karl Robert Nesselrode

For Great Britain: Viscount Robert Castlereagh

For France: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

I don’t have time to go into all the people I have mentioned, so I will constrain my comments to the man who dominated the entire negotiation and, indeed, dominated European diplomacy for the next 33 years, Prince Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the Austrian minister of foreign affairs from 1809 until 1848. He spearheaded the diplomatic drive to build a coalition against Napoleon and he manipulated the entire Congress of Vienna to make sure that such a war would never happen again. One way he did this was through dancing. Metternich was a very good dancer and he enjoyed being the center of attention, the perfect character trait for a nineteenth-century diplomat. But Metternich was also cunning and he used the various dances and parties that he had arranged to keep the smaller countries of Europe busy, while he and the other major powers negotiated the important deals. For this reason, the Congress of Vienna is also occasionally known as the dancing Congress.
Metternich was politically conservative, but he also knew that for the Congress to be successful he had to be flexible. He was behind the formation of the German Confederation, a group of German states that included Prussia, that was dedicated to maintaining the political status quo. Metternich assured that this body would be dominated by Austria by having keeping the presidency in Austrian hands. Moreover, using the Congress, Metternich was able to weaken France, keep Prussia locked into the German confederation, while preventing Russia from gaining too much power. Thus, on one level, if we consider what preceded it, the treaty was a tremendous success. There was not another major war in Europe until 1914. But this also gives the diplomatic “system” that Metternich and his cohorts had set up too much credit, since it did not actually last very long. By 1822, the alliance system set up to prevent French revanchism had collapsed. When Europe was rocked by another revolution in 1848, the system was all but gone. Moreover, if it had any life left at all, the congress system was dead by the time the Crimean War broke out in 1853.
The Congress of Vienna was part of the Old World. It was itself something new, brought on by the forces that Revolutionary and Napoleon France had unleashed. The repressive measures that it used were the same ones Napoleon had used. This time, however, these methods were put at the service of political stability rather than war. The Congress system failed, but as I will talk about over next few lectures, it failed because problems that it was never designed to address made its continued existence impossible.

Lecture 6: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Reorganization of Europe

2008-01-31T07:07:00.000-08:00

Napoleon Bonaparte is both an heir to and an end of the French Revolution. He encapsulates the complexities and tensions that made French politics so volatile after July 14, 1789. These tensions were the result of the Revolution’s attempt to join two incompatible traditions. One was the Republican tradition of liberty, equality, and fraternity; the other was an authoritarian strain that sought to control all aspects of people’s lives, including their political opinions. This authoritarian tendency became most obvious during the so-called Reign of Terror (1793 to 1794), when the Revolution’s leaders, Maximilien Robespierre foremost among them, kept Paris’ guillotines busy with a procession of enemies, real and imagined. Thus, there was a battle throughout the Revolution between an egalitarian instinct and an authoritarian one. Napoleon brought these trends together, but Europe paid a terrible price for it.
On the 9-10 of November, after returning from Egypt, Napoleon held a coup d’etat, ending ten years of war and chaos under the Republic. This change had been coming for some time. In fact, it had already been predicted in 1789, when the British writer Edmund Burke wrote that the Revolution’s contradictory goals made a strongman inevitable, saying, “that he will draw all eyes upon himself, and that will be the end of your whole Republic.” The real problem was that French people were tired of the internal chaos, and many of them concluded that a strong executive authority was the only thing that could keep chaos at bay. Although Napoleon’s rise to power reversed part of the Revolution, it did not augur the Old Regime’s return. It was rather an attempt to find a consensus among the French people based on the need for security. After the Revolution, many people became property holders for the first time, and they saw Revolutionary unrest as a danger to their new status.
Napoleon’s early years in the position of First Consul were an attempt to come to terms with the forces of disorder in France. In 1801, Napoleon reached what was called the Concordat with the Catholic Church. In it the church recognized the loss of property to the state and allowed Napoleon to appoint church officials. In exchange, the state assured that all church officials were paid. This was an important historical moment, because it reconciled the church to the revolution. The church was now subordinate to the French state and bound to it.
Napoleon also settled the problem of France’s debt, which had ballooned during the wars of the “First” and “Second” coalition. Wars are expensive enterprises, and France desperately needed money to pay its expenses and to repair its credit. Until that time, the state had resorted to seizing property, when it could not buy what it needed. Napoleon addressed this issue by setting up the Bank of France, which was modeled on the extremely successful Bank of England. The Bank of France controlled monetary policy and provided sufficient stability to allow the French economy to grow again, which is usually a consensus-building phenomenon. The bank would also be important later, because it also allowed Napoleon to float loans that paid for his wars. In the meantime, however, Napoleon needed to end the war of the Second Coalition, which had been going since 1799. He rapidly defeated Austria, signing a treaty known as the Peace of Lunéville in 1801. He was unable to defeat the British, so he came to terms with them in the treaty Treaty of Amiens, signed in 1802. Thus, three years after his coup, Napoleon brought peace to France.
Finally, and most importantly, Napoleon continued the process that had begun under the French Revolution of instituting new legal codes in criminal, civil, and business proceedings. This new Códe Napoleon was the final manifestation of the French Revolution’s interest in Egalité, as it made all French citizens equal before the law. In addition, it regularized all legal proceedings, getting rid of the bewildering array of courts that had characterized the Old Regime. Thus, Napoleon signaled that the Old Regime was gone.
One thing to keep in mind here is that Napoleon’s efforts at consolidating the Revolution while reigning in its excesses were quite popular. Napoleon was the first European statesman to make plebiscites a tool of statecraft. He held his first plebiscite in 1802, asking the people whether he should be named First Consul for life. The French people approved the measure by 99%. Napoleon’s various elections were rigged, of course, and not everyone could cast a ballot. The issue for us, however, is that even Napoleon felt his legitimacy emanated from the people.
We have considered how Napoleon changed and did not change France. Now let us turn to the ways that Napoleon changed Europe, for his wars and administrative innovations made Europe seem a much different place in 1815, when he was defeated for the last time, than it seemed in 1799, or even 1789. Napoleon was a product of the shift from defending the Revolution to exporting it. He was, in fact, the main reason that the French did so well in battle, since he was the commanding general. From Napoleon’s perspective, military victory had been the key to his rise and it would be the key to his political legitimacy. From the time he became first consul in 1799, he followed a policy of conquest and annexation. This had the dual purpose of allowing him to appear strong, but it also meant that wars were not fought in France. As long as victories kept rolling in from wars in foreign lands, the French supported Napoleon.
So we can see that Napoleon always had the problem that he needed new enemies and new victories. In the end, his enemies became too large in number. Let us consider how he collected them. By 1803, war had broken out again between Britain and France. The two had always retained a deep mutual suspicion. The problem for Napoleon was that he could never match British sea power, so when war broke out again, his Navy could do no more than run and hide—and this they didn’t even do that well. In 1805, at the battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson, destroyed the remnants of the French and Spanish navies, and the sea battle was over.
Having lost at sea, Napoleon turned to what we today would call economic warfare. His troops occupied Italian and northwestern European ports, preventing the importation of British goods. This merely added to Napoleon’s list of enemies, as the occupations irritated Austria and Russia, who then joined Britain in the war of the Third Coalition (1805). Things went no better this time, as Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia, setting the stage for the Treaty of Pressburg, which reduced Austria significantly and extended Napoleonic France all the way from Amsterdam to modern-day Croatia. (See map) After dispensing with the Austrians and Russians, Napoleon turned on the Prussians, whom he defeated at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt in 1806. Having defeated all these continental enemies, Napoleon expanded his economic war on Britain by establishing the “Continental System,” which banned all British goods from continental Europe. In 1807, he signed the peace of Tilsit with Russia. This treaty made Russia a French ally and closed the continent to British commerce, at least in theory.
Now Napoleon controlled the entire European continent. Let us consider how the measures he took to reorganize this huge swath of territory. Napoleon’s efforts built on the French Revolution’s pattern of setting up sister republics. In 1805, he reorganized the previous Cisalpine Republic and turned it into the Kingdom of Italy. He then conveniently had himself crowned as King. After French troops pressed further down the Italian peninsula, they overran the Papal States and later annexed them to France. Finally, what had been the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, was renamed the Kingdom of Naples, and Napoleon put his brother Joseph on the throne. Thus, by 1810, France controlled, in one way or another, the entire Italian peninsula.
The political changes were even more dramatic in Germany. Before 1789, much of the area that we today consider Germany was included in an ancient organization called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Founded on Christmas Day in the year 800, the empire was loved by many on Germany. It was, however, completely useless on the international scene, as it lacked any real taxation power and, thus, had no army. This old institution collapsed under the weight of Napoleon’s military might. In 1801, Napoleon had signed a treaty with the Austrians called the Treaty of Lunéville. As part of this treaty the Habsburgs recognized France’s annexation of all territories left of the Rhine. Since most of this territory was German and had been controlled by princes of the Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, in effect, ceased to exist. The treaty compensated the displaced German princes by giving them territory that lay further west. In 1805, when Austria was defeated yet again, the Empire’s remnants were completely swept away. In 1806, Emperor Francis II, who had already renamed himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria, declared the Holy Roman Empire defunct.
Without any effective opposition, Napoleon was now free to remake Europe in his own image. We will begin with Germany. In addition to annexing everything to the left of the Rhine, Napoleon turned to Germany’s medium-sized states, Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria, binding the new rulers to him with major land grants. He also gave each of them new titles. The Margraves of Baden became Grand Dukes, and the Dukes of Württemberg and Bavaria became Kings, respectively. In addition, Napoleon created two new German states, the Kingdom of Westphalia and the Duchy of Berg. These states were to be model French states. Not coincidentally, Napoleon put his brother Jerome on the throne of Westphalia and he put a favored general in the Duke’s seat in Berg.
Napoleon, of course, did not stop with Germany. In 1805, the Batavian Republic was renamed the Kingdom of the Netherlands and another Napoleonic brother, this time Louis, was put on that throne. Two years earlier, the Helvetic Republic had been reconstituted as another Swiss Confederation, but this time Napoleon was its official protector. He also put a favored General, named Bernadotte, on the throne in Sweden, in addition to putting yet another brother on the throne in Spain. Finally, after Prussia’s defeat in 1807, Napoleon carved the ethnically Polish regions out of Prussia and set up the Duchy of Warsaw, which was intended to be a friendly support for France in Eastern Europe. Thus, Napoleon set up an entire ring of puppet states that would support him, sometimes more and sometimes less.
Now let’s step back on look at the Napoleonic system from a broader perspective. Although the Napoleonic system had its problems, by comparison to what had come before, it also had advantages. The new Napoleonic administration restored order, reduced brigandage, and rebuilt the infrastructure. There were high taxes and heavy conscription, but the new system also seemed to respect legal norms, and in general its benefits outweighed the costs for many. The first decade of the nineteenth century saw good harvests and high grain prices, which kept the countryside happy. In addition, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, manufacturing activity was 50% higher than during the Old Regime. This upsurge occurred in France, but also in parts of Belgium, Germany, and Bohemia. The period 1802 to 1812 saw full employment for urban craftsmen, which made Napoleon extremely popular among the so-called sans-culottes. Only military defeat would remove Napoleon from power.
Napoleon was finally brought to his knees by the never-ending conflict with Britain. No matter what he did, the Brits still hung around, and in fact grew stronger. Although the Continental System hurt British commerce initially, the value of Britain’s products on the European market far outweighed the risks of running afoul of Napoleon’s laws. The result was a huge smuggling operation that sneaked British products onto the Continent at enormous profits. In fact, the system became so regular that insurance companies even began writing policies to cover smugglers’ losses. The Continental system was too porous, and this led Napoleon to take drastic actions to prevent further incursions of British goods.
Napoleon’s problems began in Spain in 1807, where a series of uprisings against French occupation occurred that took thousands of additional troops to control. Austria took this as its cue for action, having concluded not only that France was vulnerable but also that French nationalism had to be fought with German nationalism. The problem with this call to nationalism was that the other German princes felt threatened by it. The princes in Napoleon’s confederation of the Rhine contributed 100,000 troops to the army that Napoleon would lead against the Austrians. By May 1809, Napoleon and his army were in Vienna and the Austrians had to sue for peace.
Napoleon’s problems in 1808-09 caused him to extend his control even further into Europe. First, as part of the peace treaty with Austria, France seized the Illyrian coast (roughly today’s Croatia). Napoleon then annexed the entire North Sea coast from Holland to Hamburg. In addition, he also annexed the Papal States, extending his control deeper into the Mediterranean.
Unfortunately for Napoleon, his economic woes soon mounted. The harvests of 1810 and 1811 were bad, and the prosperity on which so much of his empire had been based vanished. Europe’s coastal cities were already unhappy at their economic situation and now more places and people were added to the discontented. We can see how serious the situation had become for Napoleon, when we consider that in annexing Holland he displaced his own brother from the throne. Moreover, Bernadotte, Napoleon’s former general and King of Sweden balked at the embargo, and he was Napoleon’s friend. It was, therefore, no surprise that Russia refused to continue with the embargo any longer.
Russia’s decision to back out of the embargo gave Napoleon the perfect pretext for war, which was of course what he was really good at. In 1812, he collected what at that point was the largest army in the world 650,000 men strong. 300,000 of the men came from Napoleon’s allies, the other 350,000 were French. This was a massive undertaking, but the very size of the army hindered its performance. The Russians exploited Napoleon’s weaknesses brilliantly. They rarely offered battle and simply retreated into Russia’s great mass of land. As they did so, they scorched the earth, burning anything that Napoleon’s army could eat.
Napoleon did make it all the way to Moscow and took the city. But this accomplished nothing, since the Russians had evacuated the city and burned it, too. Napoleon sat in the Kremlin for a month waiting for the Russians to sue for peace, but they never showed up. With his army exhausted and poorly fed, and with winter approaching, Napoleon ordered a retreat in 1812. The exit was not easy. The Russian army dogged the retreat and an early winter savaged the men. By the time Napoleon crossed the border into Prussia, only 100,000 of his original 650,000 men were left. Napoleon hastened back to Paris to set up a new army for the attack that he knew was to come.
Here we can see just how efficient the Napoleonic state was. By the spring of 1813, Napoleon had another sizeable army at his disposal, although many of the men were untrained. Nonetheless, blood was in the water. Johann Yorck von Wartenberg, a Prussian general who had led an army during Napoleon’s march to Moscow, switched sides and called for a German national uprising against Napoleon. Yorck had committed treason, since he had switched sides without his king’s permission, but the Prussian king nervously joined him. The Austrians also joined the coalition against Napoleon, and along with the Russians, the new coalition defeated Napoleon in October 1813 in a battle outside of Leipzig that came to be called the Battle of the Nations. At this point, the entire system collapsed. All of Napoleon’s German allies switched sides. Sweden declared war on France. The British and the Spanish united to throw the French out of Spain. By March 1814, Russian, Prussian, and Austrian troops took Paris. Napoleon was forced to abdicate and he went to the Mediterranean island of Elba, though he later staged a comeback that led to his ultimate defeat at Waterloo. After this battle, Napoleon and the French Revolution were finally over.
So what does all this mean? How are we to understand the role Napoleon played on the world stage? Above all Napoleon represents the end of feudalism. The French revolution had ended feudalism in France, but Napoleon exported those changes across Europe. It was Napoleon who institutionalized the changes wrought by 1789, and he provided the stable environment in which those institutions could become permanent. For the first time, people were able to enjoy the benefits that ending feudalism brought. From this point on, too many people had a stake in retaining the revolutionary changes to allow the Old Regime’s return. In addition, for the first time, European states, especially France, had a large cadre of highly trained bureaucrats who would never consent to a return to the old ways. Their positions were based on the equality of law and they had grown accustomed to making decisions that affected the entire state, not just the one group over which they had control. In sum, although much had remained the same, in important and fundamental ways, the world had changed under Napoleon and there was no going back. The famous German historian Thomas Nipperdey began his three-volume history of Germany with the words “Am Anfang war Napoleon.” (In the beginning, there was Napoleon.) Napoleon was both a beginning and an end. In our next hour, we will consider one of many beginnings that lurked in the New Regime that Napoleon had helped to bring about.

Lecture 5: Other Kinds of Revolution: Agriculture and Industry, 1780-1850

2008-01-31T07:06:00.001-08:00

For the last few lectures, we have been talking about revolutions as discrete events that have a long-term impact. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s hegemony were felt right away, because they were political events. People all over Europe immediately took note of the Bastille’s fall; it happened on July 14, 1789. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815 provides another distinct reference point for us. It is, therefore, easy to talk about these revolutions. We can place them in a period that begins in 1789 and ends in 1815.
Today, I am going to talk about revolutions in a different sense—one that takes a long view of history. Putting aside political events, I will emphasize deep structures that ultimately affected almost everyone in Europe, although many people may not have noticed what was happening at the time. Specifically, I will consider economic and demographic forces in the period from roughly 1750 to 1850. The forces involved were often invisible but very powerful, and you will want to take note of the vast changes that economic and demographic developments brought to daily life. In 1815, it was possible for many people, peasants for example, to look back to 1789 and wonder whether anything had really changed. In 1850, however, it was almost impossible to look back to 1750 and say that nothing had changed. The structure of Europe’s economy and society had altered so dramatically that everyone had to recognize that a fundamental break with the past had occurred.
I want to begin with a perhaps the most boring thing an historian can talk about, population growth. Beginning around 1750, Europe began a long period of population expansion that ran right into the twentieth century. Between 1750 and 1800, Europe’s population grew at .54% annually. In 1750, Europe had 140 million people. In 1800, that number had increased to 180 million. During the next fifty years, from 1800 to 1850, population growth rates almost doubled, reaching .98% annually. By 1850, Europe had an estimated 265 million people. Now we need to ask two important questions. First, why did this happen? Second, what does this mean?
There are two schools of thought among historians for explaining this demographic upsurge. One side holds that this population growth was due to an increase in birth rates. More women were having more babies. The other school holds that the population increase stemmed from a decrease in death rates. Since the average person lived longer, Europe filled up with more people with each passing year. Now, the fact is that we do not have sufficient information to make a judgment on which explanation is right, nor does it really matter. What is important is that Europe’s population increased and this had dramatic consequences. In a moment, we will discuss the underlying reasons for this growth.
Before we continue, however, we need to consider the second question: what does the population increase mean? Its meaning emerges when we compare Europe to the rest of the world. Europe’s percentage of the world population increased steadily from 1750 to 1900. In 1750, Europe had 19.3 percent of the world population. By 1900, that percentage had grown to 23.2 percent. From there it began a steep decline. In 1995, Europe had less than 14 percent of the world population, and even that share is declining, a fact that will have important implications for international relations in the coming years. What this suggests for the period we are considering is that part of the explanation for European dominance from the eighteenth until the twentieth century is its steady population growth. This does not explain everything, of course, but it is an important factor in the expansion of European Imperialism. One reason why the Europeans could project power was because they had sufficient people to do it.
Now we will consider the underlying causes of this population increase. Historians emphasize two: first, the reorganization of agriculture; second, the development of industrial methods of production. We will begin with changes in agriculture. Agricultural methods in seventeenth century Europe were not much different from methods people used in the fourteenth century. Farmers used the same tools, grew the same crops, and had the same worries. Famine was always one bad harvest away. The bleak farming situation was due largely to how agriculture was organized. First, grain was Europe’s main crop and it depleted the soil rapidly. In order to deal with the soil’s depletion medieval farmers developed the two field system: they planted one field with grain and left the other fallow. This was inefficient; half of Europe’s productive soil was unplanted in any given season, which limited the total food supply.
During the eighteenth century, a number of factors encouraged agricultural reorganization. The first was the increasing use of alternate crops, such as turnips, clover, and vetch. The second was the switch from the old two-field to a three-field system. Rather than dividing their fields in half, farmers now divided their fields into thirds. The first third was planted with grain. The second third was planted with the new crops. The last third was left fallow. The new crops brought two distinct advantages. They fixed nitrogen in the soil, replacing what the grains had taken out, which meant higher yields of grain the next time the field was planted. These new crops were also suitable for animal feed, which meant that farm animals had more to eat. Well-fed animals produced more manure, which farmers then used to fertilize their fields, bringing even higher crop yields. The results were impressive. In England, which led Europe in its reform of agriculture, the average return on seed was 10:1. For the Continent, which was slower to accept the new methods, it was roughly 4.5:1 (Just for comparison, today’s return on seed for the average farmer is 25.5:1)
All told, farmers could now produce more food and keep more animals, which meant Europe could support a larger population. This is what historians call an agricultural cycle. More food means more people, which means more land comes under cultivation. Between 1800 and 1860, for example, the amount of land under cultivation in Europe increased by 75%. Having more land in production also created a broader agricultural marketplace, as a new, non-subsistence farming market appeared. In the South, for example, farmers began to specialize in growing grapes for wine and brandy. Others grew mulberry trees for the production of silk, or olives for oil. In the North, farmers grew sugar beets, hops, and flax. These specialized products then went to market where they fetched better prices and allowed farmers to buy other things they needed but could not produce. As a result, in many areas, people gained greater access to a variety of foods, and food production became regional rather than local.
This all sounds very nice and smooth from the perspective of hindsight, but the process of agricultural change was slow and uneven. Resistance to change was embedded in the communal nature of farming. Before the agricultural revolution took hold farm plots were organized into small fields that radiated out from a commons. The commons provided grazing for farm animals and the fields were so small that they had to be farmed cooperatively. It made no sense to turn a team of oxen around and around while plowing one’s tiny field. Thus, a village would own one team of oxen and plowing would happen at the same time every year. This meant, however, that all farmers in a given village had to cultivate the same crops.
The new methods broke up the traditional social interconnections on which farming had been based. The commons was distributed and individual farmers made their own decisions about what cultivate and when to plant, plow, harvest, etc. Moreover, as farms became more productive and integrated into local markets, they also needed fewer workers, which created a surplus pool of labor that we will discuss in a moment.
Before continuing, we need to step back for a moment and remember two things. First, this was a very gradual revolution. For a long time agricultural growth was so slow and fitful because markets were limited by the perishable nature of agricultural goods. It would not be until after 1820, when the railroads appeared, that a great market for such goods could be created. Moreover, the Old Regime still persisted in many areas. In Eastern Europe, many peasant farmers were still serfs, which prevented any real reform in methods. In Western Europe, the Old Regime persisted also, but in this case, because the peasants wished it so. Traditional rights, called “servitudes,” such as windfalls and grazing persisted. This meant that, in essence, people still had rights to other people’s land, even though a clear owner had been legally established. For this reason, the agricultural revolution was uneven, at best. When changeovers did occur, there was more food. But without a complete legal revolution, farmers could not take full advantage of new methods. In many ways the legal revolution came to the European Continent only with Napoleon.
Before we shift to manufacturing, we need to anchor the agricultural revolution more clearly in historical events. In all these developments Britain led the Continent. The main reason for this was a late seventeenth-century phenomenon called the enclosure movement. The English royal chancery and then Parliament issued a series of decrees that required all farmland to be fenced in. Small farmers who could not afford the cost of the fence were essentially driven from their land. In this way, British farms became ever larger throughout the eighteenth century, which allowed greater experimentation. As a result, the Brits soon led all of Europe in agricultural innovation. One example was the development of the Norfolk four-course system. Under this system of planting, the fallow year completely disappeared and different crops were grown sequentially. In the first year, grain was planted. In the second year, turnips came. In the third year, barley, rye, and clover were sown. This system spread throughout Britain in the eighteenth century and then moved over to the Continent.
The British agricultural revolution spurred population growth in Britain. Between 1700 and 1800, wheat yields increased by one quarter. By 1850, they increased by half again. More food meant more people. In 1750, Britain had about 5.7 million people. By 1850, that number had reached 16.6 million. (Today the number is about 60 million.) In addition, as agriculture became more efficient, fewer people needed to work the fields. By 1850, only 22% of the British population worked in agriculture, the lowest percentage in the world at the time. So now more labor was available to support non-farm production, which leads us to manufacturing.
Let us begin by considering how products were produced before the industrial revolution. Manufacturing had been mostly craft-based. In the cities individual shops, led by a master, would produce the shoes, cloth, iron, barrels, etc. for the local marketplace. These masters were organized into guilds, which protected the members from competition. Masters then took on journeymen, who would eventually become masters themselves if there was enough of a market to justify a separate shop. In essence, the entire system was meant to prevent competition.
The protective guild system came under attack from two directions. First, there was an important change in the structure of craft work. During the seventeenth- and eighteenth- centuries rural manufacturing, or outworking, appeared. Business people in search of cheaper labor sent unfinished products to the countryside and got back finished ones, which they would then sell in town. For example, an entrepreneur would buy some cotton from a supplier and have it spun by rural peasants. He would then take the finished twine and have it woven into cloth by other peasants. At the end of the journey, the entrepreneur would have a finished product that he could sell at a lower price than cloth produced in the cities. This created a lot of fights, as local guilds tried to prevent the sale of goods that were not made in their towns and cities. The second development was, however, the truly deadly one. By the middle of the eighteenth century, mechanized production began to appear, and this is what we really mean when we talk about the industrial revolution. People began to use water and, later, steam power to drive machines that produced finished products.
The Industrial Revolution did not happen overnight, but its effects were so widespread that even contemporaries began to notice it. Between 1780 and 1850 huge productive centers appeared that employed large numbers of people. These centers usually started out in a small town and then as the industry grew, the city grew with it. Good examples are the English cities of Manchester and Sheffield, which came from out of nowhere to dominate industrial production in Britain. Although such industrial cities centers were few in number, by the 1820s social reformers were already decrying capitalist production. Manchester, for example, became a regular stop for social critics who wanted to reform the ills of this new system of production. In another lecture I will discuss one of Manchester’s harshest critics, Karl Marx.
The new system of industrial production appeared in two phases. Textiles came first, and then coal and steel followed. In 1780, Samuel Crompton invented what was called the “mule-jenny.” It was a hybrid of two different kinds of spinning machines, hence mule, that was run by a steam engine, hence “jenny.” Between 1780 and 1820, this jenny expands across Britain, multiplying the quantity of cotton produced. Now there was too much cotton and not enough weaving. This supply of cotton had to be worked, so from 1780 on there was actually an expansion of the number of weavers. (This is important to consider, since here we see how crafts and the Industrial Revolution could, for a short time, work together.) Unfortunately for the weavers, the power loom appeared in the 1820s, putting a great many weavers out of work, while also dramatically expanding the quantity of materials available to everyone. In 1829, there were 55,000 power looms in Britain. Only four years later, there were already over 100,000. This system of power spinners and looms then spread from Britain across to the Continent. In Düsseldorf, for example, a small German town in the Rhineland, there were 6,000 mechanized spinners in the 1820s. By 1850, there were 12,000.
Before we switch over to coal and steel, it is important to keep something in mind. There was a deep interaction between the Old World and the New Industrial world. Recall the outworking system that I discussed earlier. New industries would settle in areas where such outworking had been prevalent. This happened for two reasons. First, there was a ready supply of experienced and cheap labor in these rural areas. Second, excess materials could always be sent for finishing to rural outworkers who were not already working in the mills. In this way, entrepreneurs could make maximum use of both their materials and the local labor pool. What this shows is that in some areas industry and rural labor went together. As fewer farm laborers were needed to produce the food, entrepreneurs made use of the surplus labor.
The Industrial Revolution’s second phase also started in Britain. During the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century there was a rise in the production of iron and coal in Britain. Britain is very rich in coal deposits, and its relative ease of use made iron production more efficient. Before coal appeared, iron had been produced with charcoal, which does not get as hot as coal, nor does it burn as long. Napoleon actually contributed to this process of change, because his wars created a market for metals, encouraging many areas in Europe to expand their iron and coal production. There was a drop in demand for steel and coal after 1815, but the appearance of railroads in the 1820s stimulated new demand. After 1820, the real takeoff came, as rails and steam engines required massive quantities of steel. As before, the trend began in Britain and then spread to the Continent. By 1850, a full-blown railroad boom was underway in areas of France, Belgium, and Germany.
The boom in coal, steel, and railroads had a significant impact on many parts of European society. Peasant farmers could do quite well, as the trains opened new markets for their products. Winemakers, for example, were now in an excellent position to send their products to areas that were willing to pay higher prices. Some craftsmen did well, too. Skilled craftsmen who provided sought-after goods and services to the railway or manufacturing industries were paid well. Overall, however, many people were harmed by the explosive growth in manufacturing, as they lost any control over their work. Unskilled laborers were worst off, since there was little demand now for their physical labor. But even those people who had some skills and worked in steel or textile mills saw their wages drop and their working conditions worsen. The work schedule was brutal, as workers were required to put in twelve to fourteen hour days in terribly noisy, hot, and dangerous conditions. Even more significant, this emerging group of workers was totally dependent on wages. Unlike in villages, there was no social network that distributed resources to the needy, nor was there any opportunity to grow extra food. In general, the agricultural and industrial revolution destroyed the social bonds on which many people relied to get them through tough times.
The revolutions I have been discussing were revolutionary not for the immediacy of their effects, but for the depth of the changes they brought to daily life. Overall, here is what these two revolutions brought. The agricultural revolution brought a sharp increase in the total production of food, and created a surplus labor pool. The industrial revolution then exploited this labor pool. Initially, entrepreneurs used the surplus labor to build things, and then later they used the labor to oversee the functioning of machines. The social consequences were great. Local societies broke up and traditional social bonds disappeared. And then industrial centers arose, which brought all sorts of social ills, such as crime, disease, alcoholism, and prostitution. By the 1840s, two reactions to the changes appeared. The first was emigration and the second was unionization. In the 1840s, for example, 400,000 Germans left the Continent for the United States. And all across Europe workers began to agitate for the right to organize and bargain collectively. We will talk more about responses to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, as well as the French Revolution over the next few lectures.