After Tamerlane (35 page)

This too may seem a strong claim to make of a group of states whose institutions ranged from popular democracy (in the United States), through parliamentary government on a limited franchise, all the way to the quasi-theocratic tsarist despotism at the other end of the political scale. It was certainly true that European political thinkers waged ideological pamphlet wars denouncing (or extolling) monarchism, republicanism, socialism, capitalism, anarchism, imperialism and much else beside. Histories of Europe in this period graphically convey the frustrations of liberals, radicals and socialists faced with the entrenched conservatism of kings, emperors, aristocrats and peasants. In the failed revolutions of 1848, liberal, radical and nationalist movements were defeated by their conservative enemies, who had the backing of soldiers, bureaucrats and clerics. But by the 1870s scarcely any state in Europe (not excluding Russia) lacked at least the rudiments of a liberal constitution.

European liberalism had a long lineage. But as a practical programme it owed its appeal to Europe's great political crisis between 1789 and 1815. The violent upheavals of this period contained a double warning. They showed that even the most powerful of ancie
n
reégim
e
states could be overthrown by a movement welling up from below. Old-fashioned absolutism was a feeble breakwater against popular unrest. Social and political stability required something more than simple-minded ‘legitimism' – a return to the past. The second
warning was just as dire. Revolutionary violence in France had been brought under control – but by the despotism of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Napoleonic legacy was mixed. In France and Italy, particularly, it was admired for the creative genius of Napoleon's state-building: the legal code; the administrative symmetry; the educational reform; the vision of an ordering and improving state; above all, the career open to the talents. But across the rest of Europe, and even in France, it was the terrifying force of Napoleonic ambition, the brutal erasure (and just as brutal invention) of rulers, states and institutions, the appalling ease with which the self-crowned emperor had demolished his enemies and imposed his continental domination, that left the deepest impression.
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If
ancien reégime
Europe had been vulnerable to popular unrest, it seemed practically helpless against a ‘modern' despotism.

The core beliefs of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism sprang from the contemplation of this fearful period of European history. Escape from the cycle of war and revolution required political institutions that would defend the state equally against popular revolt and parvenu despotism. Rulers must be more ‘legitimate'. They needed the loyalty of a wider range of communities and interests. Their servants and officials must be kept in check, ideally by a representative body. That raised the question of who should represent whom. Most of all it raised the question of how far a government should regulate the social and economic life of its citizens. Liberalism's answer to this was the key to its position, the fundamental premise of its political theory.

It was brilliantly sketched by the Swiss-born Frenchman Benjamin Constant, whose political writings were a fierce rejection of revolutionary violence and Napoleonic tyranny. Constant argued that ordinary people were bound to resist interference in their private and social lives and that arbitrary acts by the state destroyed the mutual trust between individuals on which all social and commercial relations depended. He distinguished between the proper (and narrow) sphere of authority and the wider realm (what would now be called ‘civil society') in which the self-regulation of private interests should prevail. Modern societies, he suggested, were too complex to be ruled politically after the fashion of an ancient city state – the model to which many earlier writers (including Rousseau) had appealed. Diversity,
pluralism and localism were the secret of stability and freedom. Secondly, the legislators, to whom the executive should answer, should be drawn from those least likely to favour the extension of arbitrary power or to be seduced by a demagogue. Politics should be the preserve of the propertied, who would exert a wholesome (and educated) influence on the ‘labouring poor'. The propertied were the true guardians of the public interest. Thirdly, it was necessary for property rights and other civil freedoms to be protected by well-established rules – an ideal that implied the codification of the law and its machinery.
⁹

Constant advanced a further crucial justification for his liberal system: it alone was compatible with social progress. All forms of arbitrary government tended sooner or later to impose uniformity. Yet without freedom of thought all societies were condemned to stagnate, since the expression and exchange of ideas was the means of advance in every sphere. Indeed, without the free circulation of ideas, governments themselves would scarcely know what course to pursue. Neither Constant nor the liberal thinkers who followed him intended to promote an anarchy of ideas. Their real concern was with the intellectual freedom of the educated, enlightened and propertied. For (or so they assumed) it was these who were the real political nation, the defenders of freedom, the engineers of improvement. Under their tutelage, civil society would be free, but also dynamic.

Of course, a sea of arguments swirled around these beliefs. Could a hereditary monarch be trusted as head of state, or was a republic the only safe form of representative government? Could women be part of the political nation, or was their ‘physical frailty' a decisive bar? Did commercial and industrial wealth confer political virtue on its possessors, or did this spring only from property in land? Was religion the enemy of freedom of thought or the vital prop of social morality? Should the laws embody the ‘custom of the country' (and become the subject of historical inquiry) or (as the ‘utilitarian' followers of Jeremy Bentham believed) emancipate society from the ‘dead hand' of the past? Then there was the question that vexed liberalism more perhaps than any other: was the achievement of ‘nationality' – a shared ethnic, linguistic and (sometimes) religious identity – the essential precondition for liberal institutions to function properly?
And what if the pursuit of nationality conflicted with the central tenets of the liberal programme: freedom of thought and the strict limitation of government power? Was nationalism a forward-looking ideology or (except in a few favoured and ‘progressive' places) a creed of the backward and benighted?

To this quarrelsome accompaniment, the main ideas of the liberal programme were diffused widely across Greater Europe between the 1830s and 1880s. That is not to say that they were uniformly adopted. Representative government was most firmly rooted in Britain and France, though not without an Indian summer of aristocratic privilege in the former and bouts of revolutionary and Napoleonic enthusiasm in the latter. In the German states, Prussia and Austria, liberal ideas helped sweep away the remnants of serfdom in 1848 and entrench forms of parliamentary government in the two great Central European states that emerged from the wars of 1866 and 1870–71: the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The new Italian nation state, founded in 1860, with its elected chamber, limited monarchy and secular ethos, exemplified the hopes of bourgeois liberalism. To its critics, the new Europe of the 1840s, '50s and '60s seemed dull, selfish, commercially minded and vulgarly materialist. Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx denounced the ruthlessness with which bourgeois capital treated proletarian labour. To other writers, impeccably liberal in outlook, the rise of ‘public opinion' as the formative influence in national life threatened to crush the individual beneath the deadweight of popular prejudice.
¹⁰
The historian Jacob Burckhardt, a member of Basle's patrician elite, regretted the disappearance of ‘Old Europe' and denounced the unreflecting, fact-grubbing and bureaucratic mentality of the new, with its complacent belief in inevitable progress.
¹¹

In the eyes of many European liberals, Russia was the grand exception in a happy story, and the absolutist claims of its tsarist monarchy were the enemy of freedom not only in Russia but wherever in Europe its influence prevailed. But even Russia was not immune from liberal ideas. To an influential group in the aristocracy, the war against Napoleon had revealed the shortcomings of absolutism and the urgency of grounding the imperial state in the loyalty of the peasant masses whose devotion had saved it in the terrible emergency of 1812. They imagined a regime in which the educated and enlightened among
the noble-gentry class would guide the government and transform the subject masses of serfdom into a loyal nation. When a premature attempt at reform collapsed in the failed ‘Decembrist' coup of 182 5 (Sergei Volkonsky, a leading Decembrist, had briefly been a member of Benjamin Constant's salon in Paris),
¹²
the new tsar, Nicholas I, embarked on a thirty-year regime of reaction. Decembrist sympathizers were exiled to Siberia, or retreated into the coded and allegorical literature that was to be a long tradition in Russia. Censorship and surveillance were intensified among the gentry. Membership of radical or revolutionary groups was savagely punished. In 1849 the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for belonging to a socialist group – a punishment commuted at the very last moment to prison-exile in Siberia. But below the political surface the pressure to remake Russia as a ‘national' community with its own national literature, music and art – in place of the old caste society in which the educated spoke French or German, and Russian was a peasant dialect – was growing apace. Its great literary inspiration was the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), whose writing exemplified the desire to conceive Russia in European terms, but with its own distinctive culture and character. The same ambition lay behind Tolstoy's
War and Peace
, originally titled ‘The Decembrists' and eventually published in 1865.
¹³
When Russia was defeated in the Crimean War, the new tsar (Nicholas had died in 1855), Alexander II, embarked upon a programme of reform.

The centrepiece of reform was the abolition of serfdom, decreed in February 1861. Serfdom had become the symbol of a backwardness that had been punished by defeat in 1856. The serfs were liberated and granted lands on their masters' estates, but on a communal tenure in the village collective or
mir
. As part of the remaking of rural society, elective bodies or
zemstvo
were created through which the gentry were meant to play an active and ‘improving' role in local life. Judicial reforms brought a ‘modern European system of justice'.
¹⁴
Jury trial was introduced, along with Justices of the Peace to disseminate modern notions of law in the countryside.
¹⁵
The university statute of 1863 gave Russian professors as much freedom as American.
¹⁶
Censorship was lightened, and the more draconian restraints on personal freedom were lifted. After 1865 it was even legal to smoke in
the street. In literature and music, the natural sciences, law and political theory, Russia converged more and more with the rest of Europe, even if – in European fashion – many Russian writers and artists asserted the aesthetic particularity and moral superiority of their native tradition (an English habit as well). Even the so-called ‘Slavophiles', who rejected the ‘cultural cringe' of the ‘Westernizers' towards European thought and manners as alienating and atheistic, imagined Russia as a Christian Slav nation whose reforming elite would be in spiritual and political sympathy with the peasant masses. With liberal reform came the spread of newspapers, the rise of urban literacy (by the 1860s literacy levels in St Petersburg exceeded 55 per cent),
¹⁷
a flowering of Russian literature, a dramatic rise in Russia's cultural prestige, and a huge increase in the intellectual traffic between Russia and the rest of Europe.

By many standards, of course, Russia was still a profoundly illiberal society. It remained an authoritarian bureaucracy, in which the freedom to criticize could be withdrawn as quickly as it was granted. But the reforms of the 1860s signalled the tsar's recognition that a partial mimicking of the freedoms extolled by European liberals was necessary if Russia was not to fall behind the other great powers and abandon the Europeanizing project with which the Romanov dynasty had been associated since Peter the Great. Both tsarist reformism and Decembrist liberalism reasserted Russia's claim to be a European state whose historic role was to colonize and civilize its vast ‘Asiatic' interior – the grand theme of Vassilii Kliuchevskii, Russia's greatest nineteenth-century historian.
¹⁸
It was no coincidence that, while Alexander II ‘liberalized' at home, his soldiers and diplomats were driving forward the imperial frontiers in the Amur basin in East Asia and into trans-Caspian Central Asia. Here was a paradox in the making. Russia's part (and it was a very large part) in the expansion of Europe was energized and facilitated by the dynamic social vision of European liberalism: its sense of continuous progress; its emphasis on economic freedom; the contrast it drew between the liberty of the West and the ‘stultifying uniformity' of the East. Yet the multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Empire, the fragility of its social bonds and its feeble infrastructure were a constant reminder that without the ‘steel frame' of autocracy the grand imperial edifice might fall apart at the first sign
of trouble. Russia, it came to seem, could be a nation state on the liberal model, or an empire, but not both.

The United States was the western wing, just as Russia was the eastern, of this liberal world. In conventional (and American) versions of the American past, it is America's isolation and detachment from Europe that are stressed: the forging of a separate political tradition; the making of an American ‘exceptionalism'. Europeans were trapped in their history, condemned to work out the consequences of dynastic, class and ethnic struggles to their bitter and turbulent end. But Americans were free to create their own future, to pursue freedom without the shackles of Old World inequalities and antagonisms. In large part this story is merely a grandiose version of settler myth: versions of it can be found in most settler societies in the nineteenth century, and in most of their ‘nationalist' historiographies in the twentieth. The American reality was more prosaic. America was the western extension of Greater Europe.