Europe: A History (170 page)

Historians must also address the problem of why, in a continent brimming with popular nationalisms, a number of countries did not follow the general trend. Why, for example, did an effective national movement fail to develop in nineteenth-century Scotland? The Scots, after all, were exposed to intense modernization at an early date; and as junior partners within the United Kingdom they could easily have found early cause to resent English domination. But they did not. The answer must lie partly in the divisions between the Gaelic and the Lowland elements within Scottish culture, which impeded the growth of a common identity, and partly in the powerful attractions of British state nationalism. Like Cardiff or Belfast, Scotland’s principal city, Glasgow, thrived mightily from the enterprises of the British Empire. Scotland’s attachment to a successful Union would not decline until the Empire itself began to fade. The pioneer bard of Scottish nationalism, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), did not start to write until the 1920s. The key political tract of the movement, Tom Nairn’s
Break-up of Britain
, was not published until 1977.
³⁸

In the meantime, one of the most prescient observers concluded that nationalism was no more than a phase. Speaking in 1882, Ernest Renan made the startling observation that no state or nation was eternal. Sooner or later all would be supplanted by something else, ‘possibly a European confederation’. Metternich had once said, ‘For me Europe has long held the essence of a fatherland.’
³⁹
The hope was planted that such sentiments might some day return in more practical form.

Socialism
, like Nationalism, was a collectivist creed. It opposed the exploiters and manipulators for the protection not just of the individual but of society as a whole. It took its name from the idea of fellowship or, in the modern idiom ‘solidarity’—
socius
in Latin meaning ‘companion’. It maintained that the poor, weak and oppressed could not be guaranteed a tolerable life except by the pooling of resources, by the equitable distribution of wealth, and by the subordination of individual rights to the common good. Unlike liberalism, it did not fear the modern state; on the contrary, it looked to the state as the arbiter and often as the prime mover of compassionate measures. Socialism was to be directed against oppressors both at home and abroad. The feeling of international solidarity made it the natural opponent of nationalism. Nineteenth-century socialism is generally considered to have drawn its strength from four separate sources: from Christian socialism, from the trade union movement, from the co-operative movement, and from the ‘utopian’ socialist theorists. (See Appendix III, p. 1308.)

Without ever using the label, Christian socialism had a centuries-old tradition. Christian doctrine had always urged service to the community and the renunciation of personal wealth. The Sermon on the Mount had been regularly invoked to justify collectivist economic schemes, from the practical workings of the monastic orders to the utopias of More, Campanella, Harrington, and Morelli. In the nineteenth century, Protestants generally showed the most initiative, through figures such as J. F. D. Maurice (1805–72), first principal of the Working Men’s College (1854), Charles Kingsley (1819–75), Adolf Wagner (1835–1917), or the Kaiser’s preacher, Adolf Stoecker (1835–99). The Oxford Movement also had a socialist streak, which came out in its ‘missions’ to city slums. The Roman Catholics were more inhibited until the publication of
Rerum novarum
in 1891. In Russia, the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, the collectivist traditions of the peasant communes, and existence of an all-powerful state all furnished fertile ground for the reception of socialist ideas.

The trade union movement grew out of the vulnerability of wage-labourers in the free-market economy. From the days of Dorset’s Tolpuddle Martyrs, working men and women painfully won the right to form unions, to bargain collectively over pay and conditions, and to strike. The critical launch dates are seen as 1834 in Britain, 1864 in France, 1869 in Germany. By 1900 most European countries possessed an active labour movement. From the start, the trade unions adopted a variety of structures and ideologies. Apart from the non-ideological unions of the British type, there were ‘horizontal’ craft unions, which grew out of the old guilds, ‘vertical’ industrial unions, anarcho-syndicalist unions on the French or Spanish
model, liberal workers’ associations, pacifist ‘yellow’ unions opposed both to strikes and to war, and Church-based Christian unions. In many countries, as in Belgium, several different types of union worked alongside each other. In Russia, the initiative was taken by the Tsarist police, who decided to outflank various illegal organizations by forming official unions of their own. This experiment in ‘police socialism’ came to a bad end on 5 January 1905, when a demonstration headed by Father Gapon, a police agent, was fired on by the police. ‘Bloody Sunday’ launched the revolutionary outbreak of 1905; and Father Gapon was murdered. Russian trade unionism enjoyed barely one decade of independent existence before being suppressed by the Bolsheviks.

The formation of co-operatives, which sought to protect their members from the evils of big business, took place in three main sectors—manufacturing, consumption, and agriculture. In 1800 the experimental textile settlement of New Lanark Mills was set up in Scotland by the visionary Robert Owen (1771–1858). It guaranteed a ten-and-a-half-hour working day and sickness insurance, but did not outlast its founder. In 1844 the first consumers’ co-operative, the Rochdale Pioneers, appeared in Lancashire. Agricultural co-operatives, which first emerged in Germany at the initiative of F. W. Raiffeisen (1818–88), were to have a broad future wherever peasant farmers were free to organize, and especially in Eastern Europe.

Socialist theorizing had been in progress ever since the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ was organized in Paris in 1796 by Francois-Noël Babeuf (1760–97). Like Babeuf, who was executed by the Directory, all the founding theorists were French Utopians. They included Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Charles Fourrier (1772–1837), Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–81), Louis Blanc (1811–82), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65). Saint-Simon, a Christian socialist who had been close to Comte, sought to mobilize science and technology for an ideal community governed by experts. His
Nouveau Christianisme
(1825) led to the foundation of a sectarian Church, model communes, and trials for immorality. Both Fourrier and Cabet established model co-operative settlements in the USA. Fourrier’s
Theorie des Quatre Mouvements
(1808) envisaged a scientifically ordered society, free from all government, which would ascend through various stages of perfection on the road to ‘Harmony’. (It is often regarded as the source of Marx’s ideas on the stages of history and the withering of the state.)

Blanqui, known as ‘ľEnfermé’, ‘the Interned’, was a Babouvian class conspirator, who spent a total of 33 years in prison for persistently organizing insurrectionary cells against monarchy and republic alike. His seizure of the Hotel de Ville in Paris for two days in 1839 was a disaster; but his followers played a leading role in the Commune of 1871. (He missed the event himself by being arrested the day before its outbreak.) His motto was ‘Ni Dieu, ni maitre’ (Neither God, nor boss). Louis Blanc, in contrast, argued for the creation of egalitarian, worker-controlled, and state-funded workshops, where the workers were to contribute according to their ability and be paid according to their needs. The scheme outlined
in
ĽOrganisation du Travail
(1839) was briefly put into practice during the Revolution of 1848, before its author was exiled in England. Proudhon was in some ways the most influential of them all. His attack on (excessive) private property in
Qu’est-ce que c’est la propriété?
(1840) was a sensation, especially when its most famous phrase, ‘Property is theft’, was quoted out of context. His
Philosophie de la Misère
(1846) provoked one of Marx’s more trenchant retorts in
La Misère de la Philosophies
whilst his
Ideé générale de la Revolution
(1851) described a future Europe free of frontiers, central governments, and state laws. Proudhon was the founder of modern anarchism, which soon led his followers into conflict with mainstream socialism; but his support for direct action by workers against the state became the corner-stone of French syndicalism.

French influences were strong in the thought of the early German socialists. Ferdinand Loslauer (Lassalle, 1825–64), a Silesian Jew, who was killed in a romantic duel after founding the first German socialist party, spent a formative period in Paris. The two inseparable exiles, Friedrich Engels (1820–95) and Karl Marx (1818–83), who met in Paris, based many of their arguments on study of the French Revolution. Their
Communist Manifesto
(1848) was well timed. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, it claimed, ‘the spectre of communism. Let the ruling classes tremble … The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains … Working men of all countries, unite!’

Marx and Engels were an odd pair. Expelled from Prussia for their radical journalism, they settled in England. Engels soon established himself as a prosperous capitalist, managing a cotton factory in Manchester. Marx eked out a penurious living in London, supported as a private scholar by a stipend from Engels. His life’s work,
Das Kapital
(Capital, 3 vols., 1867–94) was the fruit of thirty years’ lonely study in the Reading Room of the British Museum. It was a sustained exercise in speculative social philosophy, a rambling jumble of brilliant insights and turgid pedantry. It borrowed a number of disparate ideas current at the time, and reassembled them in the original combination of ‘dialectical materialism’. Marx aimed to create the same sort of universal theory for human society that Darwin had done for natural history; and he had hoped to dedicate his first volume to Darwin. He took the subject of materialist history from Feuerbach, the class struggle from Saint-Simon, the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he soon rejected) from Babeuf, the labour theory of value from Adam Smith, the theory of surplus value from Bray and Thompson, the principle of dialectical progress from Hegel. All these components were put together in a messianic doctrine whose psychological roots are thought to lie in the Judaism which his family had deserted during his childhood. Marx was the Prophet; the Proletariat was the Chosen People; the socialist movement was the Church; the Revolution was the Second Coming; Communism was the Promised Land.
⁴⁰

Marx had little to do with practical politics. He helped found an International Working-men’s Association, a phantom body later eulogized as ‘the first International’, for which he wrote a constitution and some fiery addresses. In his later years he attracted a substantial following among German socialists and their
Russian disciples, but not in Britain. When he died he was buried in Highgate Cemetery, in a tomb which faces that of Herbert Spencer, with the inscription: ‘Philosophers have so far explained the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.’ Engels wrote up the last two volumes of
Kapital
from Marx’s notes, thereby completing a joint oeuvre whose individual elements cannot always be disentangled. But he had ideas of his own. He was more familiar with social conditions than Marx, and more concerned with the practical implications of their theories. By expounding the ‘withering of state power’, his
Anti-Dühring
(1878) and
The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State
(1884) gave great encouragement to active revolutionaries.

Latter-day commentators tend to be rather dismissive of Marxism’s credentials. Marx, they say, was ‘illustrative of liberal Europe’, or ‘a typical mid-19th century social theorist’.
⁴¹
They may be right; but they miss the point. The intellectual rigour of Marxism proved to be far inferior to its emotive power. The great majority who came to believe that Marx had provided a scientific basis for their dreams of social justice never gave a moment’s critical thought to his writings. Marx had unwittingly provided them with yet another substitute religion.

The obvious social constituency for socialism was provided by the new working class. In practice, many workers steered clear; and almost all socialist organizations were dominated by middle-class intellectuals. The English Fabian society was archetypal. In Eastern Europe, where the fledgeling working class remained small, socialism was taken up either by internationalist conspirators, as in Russia, or, as in Poland, by that branch of the independence movement that wished to overcome the ethnic divisiveness preached by its nationalist rivals. Attempts to mobilize socialist movements with a mass following repeatedly foundered on the rocks of local interests, governmental repression, or intellectual frangipanery. In most countries, socialist parties of one sort or another struggled into existence, often after decades of frustration. It was the 1890s before a respectable parade of parties could be consolidated (see Appendix III, p. 1308). The most important, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was permanently established in 1890, after twelve years of banishment under Bismarck’s anti-socialist law. It traced its origin to the Gotha Programme of 1875, and to the merger of Lassalle’s association with various Marxist groups. The Erfurt Programme of 1891 was largely formulated by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), and was openly Marxist. But it was soon modified both by the revisionist criticisms of Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), who rejected the apocalyptic vision of socialism, and by the pragmatic inclinations of party leaders in the Reichstag.

The internationalist branch of the movement encountered similar difficulties. The ‘First International’ fell apart amidst recriminations between Marxists and anarchists. The ‘Second International’, which in 1889 succeeded in setting up a permanent secretariat in Brussels, was soon dominated by representatives of the SPD. It organized congresses, acted as a pressure group largely in the pacifist cause, and evaporated in 1914 when none of its national branches opposed the war. Its demise left the field deserted by all except the revolutionary Russian party,
which was run by exiles like V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin, 1870–1924) and other like-minded conspirators.