Putin's Wars (6 page)
Darwin’s theory became popular because it responded to the ideological needs of the
imperial powers of his time. Already Marx noted in 1862, “It is strange how Darwin
recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour,
competition, opening of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthus’ struggle for life.
It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.”
[19]
Although for Marx Darwin’s biological theory presented a surprisingly accurate
description
of the capitalist society of his time, for many of his contemporaries Darwin’s theory
provided rather a mandatory
prescription
of policies to be followed. This was especially the case for recently unified nations,
such as Germany and Italy, both aspiring to become colonial empires. These countries
were historical
latecomers.
It was only after unification in the second half of the nineteenth century that they
had the strength and the ambition to build a colonial empire. By that time, however,
apart from Africa, most of the territories of the globe were already occupied by the
older colonial powers. What arguments could they bring forward to claim their share?
The Christian faith? The established colonial powers had already done this before
them, and, in addition, this claim had in the meantime become obsolete. Or should
they provide support for their territorial claims by stressing their unique civilizing
mission? Could the white man’s burden not also be shared by Germany and Italy? The
other powers were not convinced. While complaining about the unbearable weight of
their burden, they were not in a hurry to share it with others. It was the new theory
of social Darwinism that provided them with a solution. Neither Germany nor Italy
needed new moral legitimation theories, such as the white man’s burden. These were,
according to them, merely hypocritical veils cast over the naked economic interests
of the old, established colonial powers. They only claimed a “rightful place under
the sun.” They just claimed
their
part of the cake. Their only legitimation was their newly acquired power and their
military strength, expressions of their racial superiority. This new social Darwinist
legitimation theory of the latecomers found a staunch defender in the German historian
Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896). Treitschke confirmed that “it was the highest
moral duty of the state to take care of its power.”
[20]
However, this was challenged by Friedrich Meinecke, because it “leads, first, to
suspending the definitive character of international treaties and, further, to inciting
the praising of the glory of war. . . . He [Treitschke] considers war the only remedy
for sick nations on the verge of sinking into egoistic individualism.”
[21]
Meinecke commented: “The new German theory says: ‘Our interest is our right,’ the
old, very old English theory is: ‘Lawfulness is our interest.’”
[22]
Germany’s and Italy’s claims for colonial expansion were based on the slogan Might
Makes Right. In Germany social Darwinism expressed itself also in
pan German
theories, which were “a racist variant of those legitimation and expansion attempts.”
[23]
“Economic advancement and the subjugation of overseas territories seemed due to
the ‘natural qualities’ of the nation, ‘that means its racial qualities.’ In any case,
massive demands could be deducted from these. Out of the racist pan Germanism, that
would heal the world, emerged a pseudo-scientifically ‘disguised legitimation’ for
permanent expansion.”
[24]
Theories of the white man’s burden, even if they might have appeared hypocritical,
still preserved a
moral
legitimation for imperial rule and justified this rule by the benefits that this
rule was supposed to bring to the colonized populations. Pan Germanism and social
Darwinism, on the contrary, did away with any bad conscience and proclaimed loudly
and without any moral restraint the right of the strongest. “The general basic values
in Imperial Germany,” wrote Helge Pross, “. . . were order, obedience, subordination,
duty, work, performance, discipline, functioning. In the thinking of very many bourgeois
men and women the state, monarchy, national greatness and [Germany’s] international
standing equally had the status of values, they were desirable and should be realized.”
[25]
“Many citizens dreamt of German greatness, German international standing, a policy
that would give Germany its rightful place as one of the leading world powers. . .
. The state became a value in itself.”
[26]
Worshipping an almighty state that was able to extend its imperial rule overseas
went hand in hand with feelings of racial superiority. According to the historian
Hans-Ulrich Wehler the logical conclusion of these theories was
fascism
: “Undeniably since the 1870s–1880s this social Darwinism has spread throughout the
western industrial nations and it has exercised a demonstrably great influence, but
it reached its apogee only in the racist radicalization by National Socialism.”
[27]
and Communism
It is now time to turn to Russia and to ask what kind of legitimation theories were
used during the expansion of the Russian empire. As was already mentioned, in the
first centuries of Russian expansion no special legitimation theory seemed necessary.
Territorial expansion was “the normal way of life” of the Russian state. It was something
akin to breathing: you are doing it, but you are not conscious of doing it. This was
especially the case when the empire expanded into quasi-empty, sparsely populated
territories. However, when the expansion began to take place in territories occupied
by foreign populations there emerged a need for legitimation theories. We can distinguish
at least three:
The Orthodox religion
Pan Slavism
Communism
Sometimes these legitimation theories overlap. But they will be represented here as
different, sequential phases.
The first, Orthodoxy, is a religious legitimation theory, and it resembles, therefore,
the religious legitimation theories that played a role in the early colonial expansion
of Western Europe, especially of Spain. In Russia religion played an important role
from an early stage. That role, however, was different from that in Western Europe,
where Protestantism and Catholicism were not the religions of one state, but of groups
of states. In 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, Russia had become the only Orthodox
country in the world. This led to a deep sense of Russian religious uniqueness
.
Moscow began to call itself the “Third Rome,” and a specific Russian messianism emerged:
Russia considered itself to be the only real source of salvation for mankind. The
resemblance here with the young Soviet Union is striking. In 1917 Russia became, again,
the only state in the world with its own creed: communism. As the only communist country
in the world, it considered itself to be a beacon for mankind. The messianism of the
early communist era, expressed in the phrase “socialism in one country” was, in fact,
a secularized version of the messianism of tsarist, Orthodox Russia, expressed in
the slogan
svyataya Rus
, “Holy Russia.” To call your country “holy” is an immense pretention. “To see oneself
as potentially ‘a holy nation’ is to link chosenness indissolubly with collective
sanctification.”
[28]
But Russia was not the first to call itself “holy.” In the West there existed a
precedent—and a competitor—in the Holy Roman Empire, headed by the emperor of Austria.
[29]
Both the emperor in Vienna and the tsar in Moscow pretended to be the legitimate
heirs of the late Christian Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire in the heart of Europe,
led by the Austrian emperor, however, was a weak and semifederal construction, a conglomerate
of German principalities that would finally be dissolved in 1806 under pressure from
Napoleon. The tsars, on the contrary, stood at the helm of a centralized and strong
military power, and they were able to conduct an uninterrupted policy of territorial
annexation.
The Russian Orthodox religion gained in importance as a legitimation theory for Russian
expansion, when, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia began its southward
expansion into the territories of the Ottoman Empire. There Russia was no longer confronting
“fellow Christians,” such as the Protestant Swedes or the Catholic Poles, but a non-Christian,
Muslim power. The peoples over whom the Ottomans ruled, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians,
and Serbs, shared the Orthodox faith of the Russians, a faith of which the Russian
tsar considered himself to be the official defender. Consequently Russian imperialist
expansion in the south took place under the banner of a defense of the Orthodox religion.
The Crimean War, for instance, started with a conflict with the Ottoman Empire and
France over Russia’s role as a protector of the Orthodox Christians and the Holy Places
in Jerusalem. The Orthodox religion could play its role of legitimation theory for
imperial expansion better than other religions in Europe because it was, in the most
literal sense, a
state
religion
.
Tsar Peter the Great had subordinated the Church to bureaucratic state control when
he introduced the lay function of Ober Procurator (
Ober Prokuror
) of the Holy Synod, which was a state official who exercised ultimate authority over
the episcopal body.
[30]
Tsar Peter, the Westernizer, wanted to
dominate
the Church, which he considered, in his heart, a reservoir of primitive beliefs. His
successors, however, wanted to
use
the Church and from the middle of the eighteenth century we can witness a growing
symbiosis of the Church and the state. At the end of the eighteenth century, under
the enlightened tsarina Catherine the Great, this symbiosis was still progressive
in nature: she appointed modern, educated bishops who shared her ideas. But under
the rule of the reactionary tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), who was called the
gendarme of Europe
, the Church became the instrument of a repressive state. The right hand of Nicholas
I, his deputy minister of Public Education, Sergey Uvarov, coined the ideological
triad Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,
[31]
which was to become Russia’s official state ideology. Priests were paid by the
state and had the status of civil servants. They were spied upon: “The church itself
was firmly under the control of the state so that even sermons were vetted by the
police.”
[32]
In their turn the priests themselves were used as informants. They reported irregular
behavior and the emergence of subversive ideas in their local parishes to the police,
acting as unofficial spies for the state. “The doctrine of the Church provided Tsarism
with a powerful ideological justification, and its priests acted as instruments of
police rule in rural areas.”
[33]
They had also “to report confessions which revealed ‘evil intent’ towards the State.”
[34]
The iron grip of the state on the Church was further strengthened under tsar Alexander
III (1881–1894), who made his tutor, the reactionary Pan Slavist Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
Ober Procurator of the Holy Synod.
However, with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century there emerged, alongside
Orthodox religion, a new legitimation theory. National expansion was no longer the
exclusive domain of ruling dynasties. It became increasingly a concern for the populations
as well. This growing popular interest in national politics found expression in the
Pan Movements
that aimed to bring peoples of the same language and culture together within the
framework of a single nation-state. In Germany this took the form of
Pan Germanism
. In Russia it led, first, to
Slavophilia
, a romantic movement that ascribed unique ethnic and spiritual qualities to the Slavic
peoples, and, then, to
Pan Slavism
, a political movement with the goal of uniting all Slavic peoples under the Russian
aegis. The reaction of the tsarist government to this movement was in the beginning
somewhat reserved. The reason for this was that the movement gave a quasi-mystical
importance to narodnost—a word derived from
narod
, which means “people.”
Narodnost
is usually translated as “nationality,” but, in fact, it was more. It referred to
a supposed quasi-mystical “essence” of the Russian people, its unique character that
would express itself in a supposed inborn, natural goodness, in its patience, in its
childlike faith, in its capability to suffer, and its quiet subservience to “father”
tsar.
[35]
The government in Saint Petersburg—especially after the revolt of the Decabrists in
1825—feared the democratic potential of the populist
narodniki
, a movement of young radicals who idolized the life of the simple Russian
.
The incorporation of the word
narodnost
into a national ideology by Sergey Uvarov eight years after the revolt was a clever
attempt by the government to appropriate the new concept of the Slavophiles and change
its potentially subversive connotation by making it a pillar of the autocratic, tsarist
state. However, the word remained a double-edged sword, because it could refer both
to a popular support of the tsar, as well as to a democratic revival. The government,
therefore, regarded with mistrust the First Pan Slav Congress, held in Prague in 1848,
the year of European revolutions. After the Crimean War, however, things changed.
The Pan Slav movement—like its Pan German counterpart—lost its already weak, liberal-democratic
credentials and started to accommodate itself with autocratic rule. There were two
reasons for this. The first reason was that, unlike in Germany, where the Pan German
ideas were supported by a broad middle class, in Russia no such middle class existed.
Pan Slav ideals were propagated by a small group of urban
intelligentsia
who were
doubly
isolated: they were isolated from the people as well as from the autocratic state
bureaucracy. There was simply not enough support in Russian society for liberal-democratic
ideas. A second reason for the Pan Slav movement’s embrace of autocratic rule was
that the task of unifying all Slavs was considered more important than internal democratic
reforms. A strong and autocratic Russia was thought the best guarantee to liberate
the oppressed “brother peoples” in Southern Europe from Ottoman rule.
