The New Penguin History of the World (165 page)

This social phenomenon underlay the growing control of his environment and the improvement of his life which were so easily grasped by the layman. This was what made the nineteenth century the first in which
science truly became an object of religion – perhaps of idolatry. By 1914, educated Europeans and Americans could take for granted anaesthetics, the motor car, the steam turbine, harder and specialized steels, the aeroplane, the telephone, the wireless and many more marvels which had not existed a century previously; their effects were already very great. Perhaps the most widely apparent were those stemming from the availability of cheap electrical power; it was already shaping cities by making electric trams and trains available to suburban householders, work in factories through electric motors, and domestic life through the electric light. Even animal populations were affected: the 36,000 horses pulling trams in Great Britain in 1900 had only 900 successors in 1914. Of course, the practical application of science was by no means new. There has never been a time since the seventeenth century when there has not been some obvious technological fall-out from scientific activity, though, to begin with, it was largely confined to ballistics, navigation and map-making, agriculture and a few elementary industrial processes. But only in the nineteenth century did science begin to play a truly important role in sustaining and changing society other than through a few obviously striking and spectacular accomplishments. The chemistry of dyeing, for example, was a vast field in which nineteenth-century research led to sweeping innovations, which flooded through the manufacture of drugs, explosives, antiseptics – to mention only a few. These had human and social, as well as economic, repercussions. The new fast dyes themselves affected millions of people; the unhappy Indian grower of indigo found that his market dried up on him, and the industrial working classes of the West found they could buy marginally less drab clothes and thus began to move slowly forward along the road at the end of which mass-production methods and man-made fibres all but obliterated visible difference between the clothes of different classes.

This already takes us across the boundary between sustaining life and changing it. Fundamental science was to go on changing society, though some of what was done before 1914 – in physics, for example – is better left for discussion at a later point. One area in which effects are easier to measure was medicine. By 1914, advances had been made which were huge. In a century, a skill had become a science. Great bridgeheads had been driven into the theory and control of infection; antiseptics, having been introduced by Lister only in the 1860s, were taken for granted a couple of decades later, and he and his friend Louis Pasteur, the most famous and greatest of French chemists, laid the foundations of bacteriology. Queen Victoria herself had been a pioneer in the publicizing of new medical methods; the use of anaesthetics during the birth of a prince or princess was important in winning quick social acceptance for techniques
only in their infancy in the 1840s. Fewer people, perhaps, would have been aware of the importance of such achievements as the discovery in 1909 of Salvarsan, a landmark in the development of selective treatment of infection, or the identification of the carrier of malaria, or the discovery of ‘X-rays’. Yet all these advances, though of great importance, were to be far surpassed in the next fifty years – with, incidentally, huge rises in the cost of medicine, too.

Enough impact was made by science even before 1914 to justify the conclusion that it generated its own mythology. In this context, ‘mythology’ implies no connotations of fiction or falsity. It is simply a convenient way of calling attention to the fact that science, the vast bulk of its conclusions no doubt validated by experiment and therefore ‘true’, has also come to act as an influence shaping the way men look at the world, just as great religions have done in the past. It has, that is to say, come to be important as more than a method for exploring and manipulating nature. It has been thought also to provide guidance about metaphysical questions, the aims men ought to pursue, the standards they should employ to regulate behaviour. Above all it has been a pervasive influence in shaping popular attitudes. All this, of course, has no intrinsic or necessary connection with science as the pursuit of scientists. But the upshot in the longest term was a civilization whose élites had, except vestigially, no dominant religious belief or transcendent ideals. It was a civilization whose core, whether or not this was often articulated, lay in the belief in the promise of what can be done by manipulating nature. In principle, it believed that there is no problem which need be regarded as insoluble, given sufficient resources of intellect and money; it had room for the obscure, but not for the essentially mysterious. Many scientists have drawn back from this conclusion. All of its implications are still far from being grasped. But it is the assumption on which a dominant world view now rests and it was already formed in its essentials before 1914.

Confidence in science in its crudest form has been called ‘scientism’, but probably very few people held it with complete explicitness and lack of qualification, even in the late nineteenth century, its heyday. Equally good evidence of the prestige of the scientific method, though, is provided by the wish shown by intellectuals to extend it beyond the area of the natural sciences. One of the earliest examples can be detected in the wish to found ‘social sciences’, which can be seen in the utilitarian followers of the English reformer and intellectual Jeremy Bentham, who hoped to base the management of society upon calculated use of the principles that men responded to pleasure and pain, and that pleasure should be maximized and pain minimized, it being understood that what was to be taken into account
were the sensations of the greatest number and their intensity. In the nineteenth century, a name for a science of society was provided by the French philosopher Auguste Comte – sociology; and Marx was to be described at his funeral as its ‘Darwin’. These (and many other) attempts to emulate the natural sciences proceeded on a basis of a search for general quasi-mechanical laws; that the natural sciences were at that moment abandoning the search for such laws does not signify here, the search itself still testifying to the scientific model’s prestige.

Paradoxically, science, too, was thus contributing by 1914 to an ill-defined sense of strain in European civilization. This showed most obviously in the problems posed to traditional religion, without doubt, but it also operated in a more subtle way; in determinisms such as those many men drew from thinking about Darwin, or through a relativism suggested by anthropology or the study of the human mind, science itself sapped the confidence in the values of objectivity and rationality which had been so important to it since the eighteenth century. By 1914 there were signs that liberal, rational, enlightened Europe was under strain just as much as traditional, religious and conservative Europe.

Doubt must not loom too large. The most obvious fact about early twentieth-century Europe is that although some Europeans might be sceptical or fearful about its future, it was almost never suggested that it would not continue to be the centre of the world’s affairs, the greatest concentration of political power in the globe and the real maker of the world’s destinies. Diplomatically and politically, European statesmen could usually ignore the rest of the world, except in the western hemisphere, where another nation of European origins, the United States, was paramount, and the Far East, where Japan was increasingly important and the Americans had interests which they might require others to respect. It was their relationships with one another that fascinated most European statesmen in 1900; for most of them there was nothing else so important to worry about at this time.

2
The Era of the First World War

Against the one clear and favourable fact that great wars had been successfully averted by European states ever since 1870 could be set some political evidence that the international situation was none the less growing dangerously unstable by 1900. Some major states had grave internal problems, for example, which might imply external repercussions. For all the huge difference between them, united Germany and united Italy were new states; they had not existed forty years earlier and this made their rulers especially sensitive to internal divisive forces and consequently willing to court chauvinistic feeling. Some of Italy’s leaders went in for disastrous colonial ventures, keeping alive suspicion and unfriendliness towards Austria-Hungary (formally Italy’s ally, but the ruler of territories still regarded by Italians as ‘unredeemed’), and finally plunged their country into war with Turkey in 1911. Germany had the advantages of huge industrial and economic success to help it, yet after the cautious Bismarck had been sent into retirement its foreign policy was conducted more and more with an eye to winning the impalpable and slippery prizes of respect and prestige – a ‘place in the sun’, as some Germans summed it up. Germany had also to face the consequences of industrialization. The new economic and social forces it spawned were increasingly difficult to reconcile with the conservative character of its constitution, which gave so much weight in imperial government to a semi-feudal, agrarian aristocracy.

Nor was internal tension confined to new states. The two great dynastic empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary each faced grave internal problems; more than any other states they still fitted the assumption of the Holy Alliance era that governments were the natural opponents of their subjects. Yet both had undergone great change in spite of apparent continuity. The Habsburg monarchy in its new, hyphenated form was itself the creation of a successful nationalism, that of the Magyars. In the early years of the twentieth century there were signs that it was going to be more and more difficult to keep the two halves of the monarchy together without provoking other nations inside it beyond endurance. Moreover, here, too,
industrialization (in Bohemia and Austria) was beginning to add new tensions to old. Russia, as has been indicated, actually exploded in political revolution in 1905, and was also changing more deeply. Autocracy and terrorism between them destroyed the liberal promise of the reforms of Alexander II, but they did not prevent the start of faster industrial growth by the end of the century. This was the beginning of an economic revolution to which the great emancipation had been the essential preliminary. Policies designed to exact grain from the peasant provided a commodity for export to pay for the service of foreign loans. With the twentieth century, Russia began to show at last a formidable rate of economic advance. The quantities were still small – in 1910 Russia produced less than a third as much pig-iron as the United Kingdom and only about a quarter as much steel as Germany. But these quantities had been achieved at a very high rate of growth. Probably more important, there were signs that by 1914 Russian agriculture might at last have turned the corner and be capable of producing a grain harvest which would grow faster than population. A determined effort was made by one minister to provide Russia with a class of prosperous independent farmers whose self-interest was linked to raising productivity, by removing the last of the restraints on individualism imposed by the terms of serfdom’s abolition. Yet there was still much backwardness to overcome. Even in 1914 less than 10 per cent of Russians lived in towns and only about 3 million out of a total population of more than 150 million worked in industry. The debit side still loomed large in Russia’s progress. She might be a potential giant, but still one entangled with grievous handicaps. The autocracy governed badly, reformed unwillingly and opposed all change (though forced to make constitutional concessions in 1905). The general level of culture was low and unpromising; industrialization would demand better education and that would cause new strains. Liberal traditions were weak; terrorist and autocratic traditions were strong. Russia was still dependent on foreign suppliers for the capital she needed, as well.

Most of this came from her ally, France. With the United Kingdom and Italy, the Third Republic represented liberal and constitutional principles among Europe’s great powers. Socially conservative, France was, in spite of her intellectual vitality, uneasy and conscious of weakness. In part, a superficial instability was a matter of bitter exchanges between politicians; in part it was because of the efforts of some who strove to keep alive the revolutionary tradition and rhetoric. Yet the working-class movement was weak. France moved only slowly towards industrialization and, in fact, the Republic was probably as stable as any other regime in Europe, but slow industrial development indicated another handicap of which Frenchmen
were very aware, their military inferiority. The year 1870 had shown that the French could not on their own beat the German army. Since then, the disparity of the two countries’ positions had grown ever greater. In manpower, France had fallen further still behind and in economic development, too, it had been dwarfed by its neighbour. Just before 1914, France was raising about one-sixth as much coal as Germany, made less than a third as much pig-iron and a quarter as much steel. If there was ever to be a return match for 1870, Frenchmen knew they would need allies.

In 1900, one was not to be looked for across the Channel. This was mainly because of colonial issues; France (like Russia) came into irritating conflict with the United Kingdom in a great many places around the globe where British interests lay. For a long time, the United Kingdom found it could remain clear of European entanglements; this was an advantage, but it, too, had troubles at home. The first industrial nation was also one of the most troubled by working-class agitation and, increasingly, by uncertainty about its relative strength. By 1900 some British businessmen were clear that Germany was a major rival; there were plenty of signs that in technology and method German industry was greatly superior to British. The old certainties began to give way; free trade itself was called in question. There were even signs, in the violence of Ulstermen and suffragettes, and the embittered struggles over social legislation with a House of Lords determined to safeguard the interests of wealth, that parliamentarianism itself might be threatened. There was no longer a sense of the sustaining consensus of mid-Victorian politics. Yet there was a reassuring solidity about British institutions and political habits. Parliamentary monarchy had proved able to carry through vast changes since 1832 and there was little reason for fundamental doubt that it could continue to do so.