Europe: A History (173 page)
European Imperialism
in the late nineteenth century differed from earlier forms of the phenomenon in several important ways. It was part of a world-wide scramble for control of the last remaining countries suitable for exploitation. It was evident that the world’s resources were finite: states which set up a colonial empire quickly stood to gain a permanent advantage; those who delayed might be excluded from the ‘First Division’ forever. In the two decades starting in 1875, over one-quarter of the land surface of the globe was seized by half-a-dozen European powers. Colonies were viewed as an integral part of the advanced industrial economies. The supply of raw materials, cheap labour, and semi-finished products was planned to maximize the benefit to the ‘mother country’. There was a qualitative as well as quantitative leap in the intensity of exploitation. In the eyes of some, including the Marxists, the growing competition for colonial resources was bound to lead to international conflict. Lenin’s
Imperialism as the Highest Form of Capitalism
(1916) was a typical work of this genre.
Political and economic imperialism was attended by a conscious cultural mission to ‘europeanize’ the colonies in the image of the mother countries. In this, Christian missionaries formed an important element, though their relationship to the political authorities and to the commercial companies was rarely a direct one. Unlike their predecessors, such as the Spanish missionaries in the Americas, they often saw their task in broad terms, encompassing medicine, secular education, administrative reforms, and technological innovation.
The imperial powers sought to exploit the military potential of the colonies. The introduction of colonial regiments to Europe was as strange as the earlier arrival of European soldiers overseas.
As the map of the globe rapidly filled up, the European imperialists were obliged to focus their attention on a shrinking range of targets. The Americans had already emerged from the colonial experience. Most of Asia had been subdued at an earlier stage. By the 1880s only Africa, Indo-China, China, and the Pacific Islands remained.
Important distinctions must be made in the various types of colony established. Britain held the largest of empires with a minimum of military force. It continued to rely heavily on native princes and on local troops. There were fewer British bureaucrats in Delhi, ruling an Indian population of 400 millions, than Austrian bureaucrats in Prague. All the larger territories settled by British immigrants were given self-governing dominion status—Canada in 1867, Australia in 1901, New Zealand and Newfoundland in 1907, South Africa in 1910. France, in contrast, followed a policy of closer integration. The Algerian and Tunisian départements were joined to France’s metropolitan administration. French migration to North Africa, especially of Alsace-Lorrainers displaced by the Franco-Prussian War, was officially encouraged. This centralizing tradition was closer to Russia’s than to Britain’s. It caused immense problems when the time came for the links to be severed.
WIENER WELT
B
ETWEEN
1848 and 1914 Vienna’s population multiplied five times over, to c.2 million. Vienna’s Jewish population increased thirty-five times, from 5,000 to 175,000, rising from c.1 per cent (1848) to c.9 per cent (1914).
Jews came to Vienna to escape from traditional Jewish life in the East, particularly from Bohemia and Galicia, and to receive a modern, secular education. For these reasons the number of Jews in Vienna’s high schools, universities, and professions, was extremely high. In the peak years of 1881–6 they formed 33 per cent of the student body. In 1914 they accounted for 26 per cent of law students and 41 per cent of medical students. They reached 43 per cent (1910) in the teaching faculty. By 1936 62 per cent of Viennese lawyers were of Jewish origin, and 47 per cent of doctors.
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Numbers, however, were only part of the story. Thanks to their special circumstances, as rising professionals, Vienna’s Jews formed a bulwark of the bourgeoisie. They were prominent patrons and activists in educational, cultural, and artistic charities. As a predominantly immigrant minority, anxious to establish their equality, they provided the backbone of liberal politics and of the socialist movement. As people who, in different degrees, had rejected their own culture, they were specially disposed to everything modern and innovative in the cultural world. Their experiences were a preview of a later wave of Jewish migration to America. The Jews of Vienna were only one of the major forces in the European avant-garde around 1900. But it was its Jews who made Vienna what it was in the realm of modern culture.’
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A selection of names might indicate the depth and variety of Jewish talent:
Music:
Mahler, Schoenberg, Korngold, composers; Guido Adler, musicologist; S. Sulzer, liturgist; Ed Hanslick, critic; J. Joachim, violinist.
Philosophy:
T. Gomperz, L. Wittgenstein, and the
Wiener Kreis;
Frank, Hahn, Neurath.
Law:
J. Glaser, J. Unger, jurists; E. Steinbach and J. Ofner, social legislators; A. Loeffler, S. Türkel, criminologists.
Medicine:
Zuckerhandl, anatomist; Schenk, embryologist; Steinoch, physiologist; Gruber, hygiënist; Landsteiner, haema-tologist; von Basch, pathologist; Pick, pharmacologist; Benedikt, neuropathologist; Karplus, neurologist; Freud and Adler, psychotherapists; Kassowitz, paediatrician; Klein, ophthalmist; Mandl, surgery; Halban, gynaecologist; Neuburger, medical historian.
Literature:
A. Schnitzler, J. Roth, S. Zweig, R. Beer-Hofmann, M. Herzfeld, writers; M. Szeps, M. Benedikt, T. Herzl, F. Austerlitz, editors and journalists; K. Kraus, critic.
Politics:
N. Birnbaum, Jewish autonomist; T. Herzl, Zionist; Eugenie Schwartzbach, educational reformer; Josephine von Wertheimstein, liberal hostess.
The relationship of Vienna’s Jews to Judaism was not simple. A strong religious group supported the city’s synagogues under their forthright Chief Rabbi, Moritz Güdemann (1835–1918). There were also Sephardi and Hasidic congregations. Yet many people seen as Jews would have thought of themselves more as ‘ex-Jews’. Mahler was one of a large contingent who had converted to Catholicism. Freud was one of those who rejected all religion. ‘I gladly and proudly acknowledge my Jewishness.’ he wrote, ‘though my attitude to any religion is critically negative.’
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One must also remember that the Jews did not form either the sole or the largest of Vienna’s immigrant groups. Vienna received more Slavs and Hungarians than Jews, many of them on the lowest rung of the social scale. Considering Austrian anti-semitism at the turn of the century, one cannot overlook the generalized xenophobia of which it was part. As shown by Vienna’s best known anti-semite, Adolf Hitler, the hatred of Jews was accompanied by, and often confused with, contempt for Slavs. The paranoia about ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ had deep Viennese roots.
Nor should one forget the Jews’ own prejudices. Westernized Jews were tempted to look down on Jews from the East: ‘The Frankfurt Jew despises the Berlin Jew; the Berlin Jews despise the Viennese Jew; and the Viennese Jew the Warsaw Jews.’ All tended to look down on the Jews from Galicia, ‘the lowest of all’.
4
Even the Chief Rabbi could express dubious sentiments. Responding to a Catholic lady who asked him to read her pamphlet on anti-semitism, he replied in psychoanalytic vein, saying, among other things, that ‘Christianity finds itself in the unsatisfactory role of a hermaphrodite’:
The Christian kneels before the image of a Jew, wrings his hands before the image of a Jewess: his Apostles, Festivals and Psalms are Jewish. Most free themselves from [this contradiction] by Anti-semitism. Obliged to revere a Jew as God, they wreak vengeance on the rest of the Jews by treating them as devils…
You may say, dear Madam, that the Aryan people have emancipated the Jews. This is not the case. The Aryan people have emancipated themselves from the Middle Ages. This is one of the quiet and gradual influences which the Jewish Bible has exerted on mankind.
5
The Chief Rabbi urged: ‘Judaism bids me love and respect everyone.’
The bitter-sweet climate of Vienna mixed gall with gaiety. The Emperor had to hold the balance. When an openly anti-Jewish politician, Karl Lueger, was elected Lord Mayor in 1897, Francis-Joseph refused to confirm. Relenting after two days’ reflection he accepted Lueger’s appointment, whilst awarding a medal to Chief Rabbi Güdemann.
Africa, ‘the Dark Continent’, retained many of its geographical secrets until a surprisingly late date. European colonies had been planted on the northern coast from ancient times. But the source of the Nile, which watered the land of the Pharaohs, was not properly identified until 1888. Missionary explorers such as David Livingstone could still be lost in the 1870s for years on end. Contrary to European belief, Africa was devoid neither of organized government nor of ordered religion; and a huge variety of languages and cultures belied the idea that all Africans were Stone Age savages. However, the ‘scramble for Africa’ took place on the assumption that the land and the peoples were there for the taking. Such was the discrepancy in military technology that even the venerable kingdoms of West Africa could offer no more resistance than the Aztecs and Incas. Abyssinia was the only native empire to maintain its independence, perhaps because it adhered to Coptic Christianity.
China, which possessed the most ancient civilization in the world, also possessed an Emperor whom the European governments recognized. Formal colonization of the African type was not permitted; so leases of territory, and of trading concessions, became the order of the day. Such indeed was the value of the Chinese Imperial Government to Europeans that in 1901 it became the object of a joint European protectorate. This humiliating episode provided the impetus which led ten years later to the creation of the National Republic of China and the beginnings of modern Chinese history,
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China’s neighbour, Japan, was totally closed to outside influence until 1855; but so learned the essence of European ways that within a short time it was able to establish a colonial empire of its own, first in Korea and then in Chinese Manchuria. Japan’s comprehensive defeat of Russia in the war of 1904–5, both on land and at sea, provided one of the sensations of the age, undermining many of Europe’s most cherished delusions.
The Pacific Islands remained immaculate the longest. The final steps in the imperialist story saw Germany take Western Samoa (1898) and the USA take Hawaii (1900), whilst an Anglo-French condominium was established in the New Hebrides (1906).
If European imperialism, through ‘europeanization’, furnished one of the most powerful formative experiences of the modern world at large, it also subjected Europe itself to a wide range of stresses and influences. It divided Europe’s nations into those which had been proved
imperiumgültig
or ‘empire-worthy’ and those which had not, adding an extra tier onto the older category of ‘historic’ and ‘unhistoric’ nations. It gave a marked boost to the economies, and hence to the military potential, of those countries which had acquired empires, tipping the strategic balance in the favour of Western Europe. It greatly increased Europe’s familiarity both with non-European cultures and with exotic ‘colonial’ products. In some cases, such as Britain, it made people more familiar with Tibet or Bechuanaland than with their European neighbours. Yet it also strengthened Europe’s religious and racial prejudices, creating barriers and complexes that lasted as long as the empires themselves. Those prejudices were sufficiently extreme, for example, that in 1904 the city of Hamburg could exhibit a bevy of Samoan women in an enclosure of the local zoo.
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BOXER
ABOUT 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 14 August 1900, a multinational relief force fought its way into Peking after a ten-day march from Tientsin. It raised the siege of Peking’s stockaded foreign quarter, which had been cut off from the outside world for the previous eight weeks.
China in the twilight of the Dowager Empress was gripped by the Boxer Rebellion—a xenophobic movement which was bent on expelling all ‘foreign devils’ and all their works. The Boxers, whose English name derived from their Chinese emblem—’the fist of righteous harmony’—were enraged by everything European, from railways to Christianity. They believed that the foreign legations exercised a nefarious influence over their own government. In their attempts to expel them they had not hesitated to murder European missionaries and diplomats, to massacre Chinese Christians, and to burn down much of the old city. They were aided by the collusion of at least part of imperial officialdom, and were joined by regular Chinese troops.
In European history, the China expedition of 1900 was unique in that it briefly united all the powers in a common enterprise. British, French, Germans, Italians, Russians, Americans, and Japanese joined forces to suppress the common threat. The defence of the foreign quarter was undertaken by a body of marines of various nationalities under the British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald. The relief column, 20,000 strong, was led by General Sir Alfred Gaselee, and consisted of Russians, Americans, Japanese, and a brigade of the Indian army. A permanent expeditionary force of 20,000 German troops under Field Marshal Count von Waldsee arrived at the end of September, only to be promptly withdrawn.
For the solidarity of the Europeans broke down as soon as the immediate emergency was saved. Germany and Italy insisted on reparation claims far in excess of their partners. Russia refused to participate in moves to prosecute Chinese responsible for the massacres. Indeed, the Russian troops who had taken control of Manchuria had perpetrated large-scale massacres of their own. Britain and Germany interpreted the concluding convention in widely differing ways. Not for the first or the last time, all the participants demonstrated that European unity, if it existed at all, was best described as a flash in the pan.
1
As predicted by the pessimists, colonial conflicts began to occur at the turn of the century. In 1898 Britain and France almost came to blows after their expeditionary forces came face to face at Fashoda in Sudan. In 1899–1902 Britain’s war against the two Boer Republics in South Africa was complicated by Germany’s support for the Boers. In 1906 and again in 1911, French moves to gain control of Morocco fired active German protests. But on no occasion did colonial rivalry result in all-out war. It certainly added to the sum total of resentments; but it could usually be defused by the sort of ‘open-door policy’ for commercial interests as adopted both in China and in Morocco.
