The Transformation of the World (110 page)

Under such conditions, it was less and less possible to switch public reactions on and off as Bismarck had liked to do. A situation might arise in which politicians boosted nationalist expectations in the public that they were subsequently unable to deflate. A perfect illustration of this was the second Morocco crisis of 1911, when the German foreign secretary Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter and his men in the media recklessly whipped up a war fever.
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Classic arcane policies and secret diplomacy passed the peak of their effectiveness around the turn of the century. Thus, the Russo-Japanese peace talks sponsored by President Theodore Roosevelt after the war of 1904–5 took place in the limelight of a newly developing international public opinion. All parties to the negotiations felt the need to be skillful in their dealings with the press.

Resistance

This was also true of parts of the so-called periphery. In India, Iran, and China, anti-imperialist resistance went beyond hopeless military actions and turned to modern forms of agitation. In 1873 a number of Iranian notables and Koranic scholars attacked the extensive concession for railroad and other
investment projects that the shah's government had awarded to Baron Julius de Reuter, owner of the press agency named after him. Later campaigns mobilized much larger numbers. In winter 1891–92, countrywide protests broke out against a monopoly for the production, domestic sales, and export of tobacco that the shah had conferred on a British businessman; even the shah's wives and non-Muslim minorities took part. Early in 1892 the concession was canceled outright, prompting a huge claim for damages that forced Iran to contract its first foreign loan. The success of this mass action, encompassing Muslim clerics, merchants, and large sections of the urban population, was unprecedented in the history of modern Iran. And the telegraph meant that it could be tactically coordinated over large distances.
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It was in 1905 that this kind of nationalist public made its presence felt right across Asia for the first time, with boycotts as its most important weapon. Large campaigns were organized against the British in India, while in China a near-nationwide boycott of American ships and goods, triggered by a tightening of US immigration policy, represented the country's first modern mass movement, just a few years after the archaic excesses of violence in the Boxers' rebellion and war. In 1906 the British envoy noted a “consciousness of national solidarity, which is an entirely new phenomenon in China.”
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In the Ottoman Empire, fired up by the recent Young Turk Revolution, large crowds gathered in Istanbul in October 1908 to protest against Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (two provinces that already had been under its de facto control since 1878), blocking access to Austrian businesses. The boycott soon spread to other cities and ended only the next year, after the Porte had recognized the annexation while Austria-Hungary had agreed to pay compensation.
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All these movements, not related to one another in any obvious way, can be only superficially bracketed together as “nationalist.” There were always specific local causes and driving forces. Nevertheless, not just spontaneous anger and direct material interests lay behind them; they were also bound together by a gradually mounting awareness of something like international injustice. To see the new demands and values as existing only in the mind of Woodrow Wilson, surfacing at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, would be to overlook their earlier origins outside Europe in Asian as well as African reactions to European imperialism. In contrast to nearly all the primary resistance movements responding to the very first acts of European invasion, the overwhelmingly peaceful new mass protests were remarkably successful. Ad hoc alliances right across the urban social spectrum (the countryside was less involved) achieved more than government diplomacy could have done on its own. No Asian or African country of the pre-1914 period had the weight to protect its citizens living abroad in the West. Even Japan's influence was very limited on this count, as indicated by the failure to get US immigration laws revised. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would painfully demonstrate the limits of Japan's diplomatic clout when it failed to support Japan's push for a clause against racial discrimination in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
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5 Internationalism and the Emergence of Universal Norms

The compression and integration of the international community did not result only from the spread of European-style interstate relations and corresponding legal norms. Transnational private or nongovernmental networks developed in leaps and bounds in the second half of the century. Of course this was not a novelty of the nineteenth century. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment had all been if not “transnational” then certainly intellectual movements that spread from country to country. Music and painting, science and technology had never allowed themselves to be contained by borders. From roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, transnational initiatives of a non-state character grew in both number and reach. International nongovernmental organizations, though few and far between until about 1890, subsequently multiplied to reach a peak in 1910 (not exceeded until 1945), before falling back again in the run-up to the First World War.
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A separate history might be written about each of these initiatives; they varied greatly in their aims, their organization, and their support.

The Red Cross

Henri Dunant's Red Cross was the most successful of these organizations. It owed this to a brilliantly conceived division of labor: while the International Committee in Geneva concentrated on monitoring the world situation and verifying observance of the 1864 “Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field” and follow-up documents, national Red Cross Societies spread out from Württemberg and Baden (founded in 1863) until in 1870 they covered all the countries of western and northern Europe. A broad and highly diversified organization thus existed by the time of the First World War. What kept it going was the enthusiasm of hundreds and thousands of volunteers, with a structure sufficiently loose to draw on funding and individual commitment of every nature and magnitude. But again and again new solutions have had to be found for the relationship between national styles of work and a basic internationalist orientation. In its early phase, lack of symmetry posed a number of problems for the Red Cross: Prussia but not Austria implemented the Geneva Convention during the brief war they fought with each other in 1866; Japan but not China undertook to abide by its norms in their war of 1894–95.

In the 1870s a further issue was whether the Geneva Convention should apply to civil wars. This was answered in the affirmative with regard to the Balkans (then the scene of such conflicts), where it protected opponents of an Ottoman Empire deemed especially cruel by the West, but the Great Powers generally answered it in the negative in the period before the First World War. At the same time, the confrontation between the Muslim empire of the sultan and its Balkan enemies raised the question of whether the principles of the Geneva committee, originally
understood to be Christian, could also claim validity outside the Christian West. The solution in the long run was to emphasize the transreligious humanitarian character of the Red Cross philosophy and the international laws of war. In the bloody tumult of the Balkan Wars after 1875, when Muslims acted aggressively against people wearing the Red Cross symbol, improvised talks were held to introduce the Red Crescent as an alternative.
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The idea of the Red Cross also had an impact in more distant regions. In China, a long tradition of local philanthropic aid was revived by new social forces that saw it as a way of enhancing their reputation. The numerous civilian casualties and cases of homelessness during the Boxer uprising of 1900 led rich merchants in Jiangnan (the region on the Lower Yangtze) to send assistance to the North and to bring victims of the conflict down for care and treatment. This was the first time in China that aid had been made available across regions on a large scale. The Red Cross served as a model for this, and a Chinese Red Cross activism began to develop over the following decade.
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The humanitarianism of a number of Genevan citizens, and the Red Cross to which it gave rise, marked an important stage in the growth of an international social conscience.
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The movement for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade had been an important forerunner. Humanitarianism represented a counterbalance to powerful trends of the age, a moral corrective to the normative minimalism of the anarchy among nations and states.

Political Internationalism

The numerous strands of nongovernmental political internationalism also regarded themselves as counterweights to pernicious tendencies of the age. Among these were the First International, personally founded by Karl Marx in 1864, and the much more stable and comprehensive Second International of the labor movement and its socialist parties, founded in Paris in 1889. Both remained confined to Europe; there was no broadly organized, politically influential socialism in the United States.
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In Japan, the only non-Western country with fertile industrial soil, the first socialists—including Kōtoku Shūsui, also known as a theoretician of imperialism—suffered brutal persecution. A social-democratic party was founded in 1901, but both its organization and its press were immediately suppressed.
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In China, both socialism and an initially strong anarchist movement spread beyond small intellectual circles during the First World War, becoming linked to the world revolution after 1921 by agents of the Third International (Comintern). In its many variants, socialism was from the beginning a transnational movement; the early Saint-Simonians had already traveled as far as Egypt. The extent to which socialist movements “nationalized” themselves in their respective political contexts has remained a major question for historians. In 1914 this process gained the upper hand over internationalism. Anarchism, the twin accompanying socialism in their formative period, sank deeper roots than ever before. It always centered on exile politics and conspiratorial action; the crossing of borders was part of its essence.

The women's movement—that is, above all, the struggle of women for civil and political rights—was in principle more mobile and capable of expansion than the socialist workers' movement, which could not exist without at least the rudiments of an industrial proletariat. Political women's movements arose not as a by-product of industrialization but, almost without exception, where “democratization was on the national agenda.”
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Since this was true from very early on in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, suffrage movements developed in each of those countries. One finally appeared in Japan in 1919, at the very time when (as in China and Europe) the cultural image of the “new woman” was being discussed alongside the issue of voting rights.
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In many respects, the women's movement was more internationalist than the labor movement. Its recruitment was at least potentially greater, and it was less likely to be suppressed as a threat to political stability. By 1914 no women's organizations existed anywhere in the colonies or the noncolonial Muslim world; the dominions were another matter, as was China (from 1913). In several countries, however, women were beginning before 1920 to occupy spaces outside the home, at first often through novel forms of charity work distinct from traditional religious care for the poor.
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As in the case of most other transnational networks, it would be too simple to analyze the history of the women's movement right from the beginning as a cross-border phenomenon. A more interesting question is the threshold beyond which particular institutional linkages hardened out. Where a movement is at issue, things are relatively straightforward for historians, since they can look for its organizational crystallization. The Second International Women's Conference, held in 1888 in Washington, DC, marked one such threshold, giving rise to the first transnational women's organization not fixed on a single objective: the International Council of Women (ICW). More than a suffragette union, the ICW came into being as an umbrella organization for national women's associations of every kind. By 1907 it could claim to speak on behalf of four to five million women, although outside Europe and North America it was represented only in Australia and New Zealand (South Africa would follow in 1908). The president of the council from 1893 to 1936 (with a few short breaks) was Lady Aberdeen, a Scottish aristocrat who at the time of her first appointment was living in Canada as the wife of the British governor-general. Of course, as with all overarching organizations of this kind, it was not long before fractures began to take place. The ICW was increasingly seen as conservative and likely to shy away from conflict, and many women considered it too close to the nobility and monarchy. Yet it performed the great service of bringing together women from different parts of the world and providing a stimulus for political work in their individual countries. The continuous history of feminist internationalism dates from 1888.
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It is surprising that this new beginning was necessary, for an international women's movement had already emerged in 1830 under the impact of discussions about the role of women in politics and society animated by writers such as Mary
Wollstonecraft and a few early socialists. George Sand, for example, had embodied a new type of emancipated and socially visible woman; Louise Otto-Peters had begun her many-sided career in journalism; the socialist Flora Tristan had written critical analyses of the new industrial society; and Harriett Taylor had formulated key ideas that her husband and widower, John Stuart Mill, would later take up in
On the Subjection of Women
(1869), the most emphatic defense of liberty in the work of the liberal philosopher. That first women's movement had culminated in continental Europe in the Revolution of 1848—and then had come to an end. The politics of reaction struck at public feminism in France, Germany, and Austria as new laws forbade women to attend political gatherings. The repression of socialist or independent religious associations in which women had participated was an additional blow to the infrastructure of civil society.