The Transformation of the World (122 page)

The Mexican Revolution was remarkable for the depth of its peasant mobilization, and also for the fact that it did not have to defend itself against a foreign
enemy. The United States did intervene, it is true, but the importance of this should not be exaggerated. Unlike the Chinese or Vietnamese peasantry at a later date, the Mexicans were not fighting primarily against colonial masters and imperial invaders. Another peculiarity in comparison with the “great revolutions” in North America, France, Russia, and China (after the 1920s) was the lack of a worked-out revolutionary theory. A Mexican Jefferson, Sieyès, Lenin, or Mao never won international fame, and the Mexican revolutionaries never claimed that they wanted to make the rest of the world (or neighboring countries) happy. Thus, despite its great length and high levels of violence, the Mexican Revolution was a rather local or national event.

Eurasian Similarities and Learning Processes

The same may be said of the “minor” revolutions in Eurasia after the turn of the century. There were four series of events:

1. the 1905 Revolution in
Russia
, which actually unfolded between 1904 and 1907

2. what is usually called the Constitutional Revolution in
Iran
, which began in December 1905, produced country's first constitution a year later, and ended in 1911 with the breakdown of the transition to parliamentary rule

3. the Young Turk Revolution in the
Ottoman Empire
, which opened in 1908 when rebel army officers forced Sultan Abdülhamid II to revive the constitution suspended in 1878, and which did not really come to an end in a clearly discernible way but marked the beginning of a long transformation of the sultanate into a Turkish nation-state

4. the Xinhai Revolution in
China
, beginning in October 1911 as a military revolt in the provinces and leading promptly and without much bloodshed to the collapse of the Qing dynasty and, on January 1, 1912, the founding of a republic; it ended in 1913 when Yuan Shikai, a holder of high office in the old regime who had participated in the toppling of the Qing, but then turned against the revolutionaries, took power and ruled the republic as president-dictator until 1916

The societies and political systems within which these four revolutions took their course naturally varied in a number of respects. It would be irresponsible to speak of them as a single type. Nor did the revolutions directly ignite one another; in no case was the key spark a previous event in a nearby country. Thus, to construct an example, the Iranian Revolution was not the primary detonator of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, but it is possible to play with the idea of certain causal chains. The Tsarist Empire would probably have remained more stable if it had not lost the war with Japan so shamefully in 1904–5 (much as Louis XVI disgraced himself with his incompetence during the Dutch crisis of 1787); and had the Tsarist Empire not been so weakened politically by the war and revolution of 1905, it probably would not have been
willing in 1907 to divide Asian spheres of influence with the British. Furthermore, if the Russians and British had failed to reach that agreement, the panic among Turkish officers in Macedonia that the Great Powers were about to carve up the Ottoman Empire would have been less pronounced and not delivered the final signal for revolt.

Although there was no domino effect in the Eurasian revolutions, the various forces did act with an awareness of the range of revolutionary options available worldwide in their time. They were also aware of the recent history of their own countries. The constitution of 1876 that the Young Turks sought to reactivate had itself been wrested from the sultan of the day by “Young Ottomans” in the government and the civil service. From these predecessors the Young Turks inherited the idea that far-reaching change would have to originate from enlightened members of the elite. In China, the Taiping no longer served as a model in the run-up to 1911, but revolutionary activists bore in mind two more recent initiatives: the failed attempt by a section of officials in 1898 to win the Court over to an ambitious reform program (the Hundred Days' Reform movement); and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1901, which had proved unable to come up with any constructive perspectives. If the former was an example of a movement whose social base was too small to impose change, the latter stood for an intemperate outpouring of popular rage that held no promises for an enlightened nationalism.

In varying degrees, the Eurasian revolutionaries had some knowledge of European revolutions. The Young Ottomans of 1867–78, consisting of reform-oriented intellectuals and high state officials, had admired the French Revolution (though not the Terror), and in this the Young Turks later followed their lead.
¹⁵⁶
Basic writings of the European Enlightenment, such as the works of Rousseau, had been translated into a number of Asian languages. In China the American Revolution was more popular than the French; historical literature about both had been published in Chinese. Most intellectuals around the turn of the century especially favored an energetic policy of modernization from above, such as that carried out by Peter the Great in Russia.
¹⁵⁷
A still more important model, in both China and the Ottoman Empire, was Meiji Japan.
¹⁵⁸
Here an enlightened elite had made the country rich and strong without undue bloodshed and presented a civilized face that impressed the West. Chinese revolutionaries saw their model partly in the political institutions of central Europe and North America, partly in the appropriation (“Asianization”) of those institutions along lines similar to those adopted in Japan, though not necessarily in every detail.
¹⁵⁹
The Young Turks warmed to Japan especially because it had just inflicted a heavy defeat on Russia, the archenemy of the Ottomans; they watched attentively the revolutionary turn of events “next door” in Russia and Iran, commenting on it in their press. In both cases, popular protests played a greater role than the Young Turks had expected in their scenarios. Developments in Russia in particular convinced them that the earlier Young Ottoman strategy of gaining the initiative inside the state apparatus was insufficient by itself.
¹⁶⁰

The revolutions in Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and China were not complete imitations of those of the West, nor were they mutual copies. But this does not mean they were unwilling to learn from one another. “Transfers,” though never of decisive importance, occurred again and again. Iranian workers in the oil wells of Baku in Russian Azerbaijan brought revolutionary ideas home with them to Tabriz.
¹⁶¹
The Chinese Revolution of 1911 had much support among affluent overseas Chinese who, in the United States or European colonies in Southeast Asia, had come to know the advantages of a comparatively liberal economic policy. Such a learning process could be complicated at times. In March 1871 the Japanese Prince Saionji Kinmochi, from the noble Fujiwara clan, arrived in Paris to study French and the law. He observed the Commune at first hand, remained in the French capital for ten years, and went home convinced that Japan needed to establish basic civil liberties without exposing itself to the danger of unbridled people's power.
¹⁶²
A friend of Georges Clemenceau, he served many times as minister and prime minister and became one of the key figures in Japan's liberal ruling elite and the longest-living elder statesman during the period of the country's rapid ascent.

In the quartet of fin-de-siècle revolutions, Russia's was in one respect a special case. Its economy was more developed than those of the other three countries, largely as a result of the modernization drive conducted under its finance minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s. Only in Russia was there already an industrial proletariat capable of giving political representation to its interests. In no Asian country would it have been possible to put together a demonstration like that of January 9, 1905, (“Bloody Sunday”) in Saint Petersburg, when 100,000 workers marched peacefully to the Winter Peace to present a petition to the tsar. The massacre by Tsarist troops that ended the day unleashed an unprecedented strike wave throughout the empire from Riga to Baku in which more than 400,000 are estimated to have taken part.
¹⁶³
Even larger was the general strike that, from October on, focused the unrest growing in many parts of the country. Where there was not yet sufficient industry and the railroad was still so rare that its paralysis could not cause major damage, another available form of struggle was the boycott: that is, the kind of shopkeepers' and consumers' strike that had already proved effective in Iran and China (where it would continue to be practiced until the 1930s). Whereas the Russian Revolution of 1905 was thus more modern in its social composition than the parallel movements in the three Asian countries, it was in other respects sufficiently like them for a comparison to be in order. In fact, the similarities among the four are at least as great as the differences, and even where there are divergences in their preconditions and national paths a comparative approach can help to bring these out more clearly.

Despotism and Constitutionalism

All four revolutions targeted old-style autocracies of a kind that had never existed in Western Europe. Traditional legal constraints on power were not entirely absent in Russia and Asia, but their force was altogether weaker there; the
nobility and other landowning elite groups had never been strong enough to counter the absolute power of the ruler in something comparable to Western European (or Japanese) feudalism. The position of the monarch in the respective political systems was less open to challenge than that of Louis XVI and a fortiori George III of England. In theory they were despotisms, in which the ruler had the last word and did not have to pay heed to a parliament or an assembly of estates. But the practice was not always completely arbitrary. More than in other systems it depended on the personal qualities of the figure who sat on the throne. Sultan Abdülhamid II corresponded most closely to the Western cliché of a latter-day “Oriental despot.” In February 1878 he brought a timid experiment with parliamentarianism to an end after just two years, dismissing the (hitherto rather ineffectual) assembly and suspending the Constitution of 1876.
¹⁶⁴
From then on he ruled the Ottoman Empire as a remarkably active autocrat. Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) was not far behind him on that score. His monarchical self-image made no concessions to liberal currents: he was perhaps a slightly less capable ruler than Abdülhamid, less in tune with the main tendencies of the age and (in his later years) increasingly prone to a bizarre obscurantism.
¹⁶⁵
In Iran, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) was shot by an assassin after half a century on the throne; he introduced virtually no reforms, but he did bring the notoriously unruly tribes under control and thereby helped to hold the country together.
¹⁶⁶
His son and successor Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907) proved to be mild and irresolute, becoming little more than a plaything of other forces at the court; he was eventually replaced by his more vicious and tyrannical son Muhammad Ali Shah (r. 1907–9). Uniquely among the four revolutions, there was a change of ruler in Iran when the revolutionary process was already under way. The new shah's completely rigid attitude, closed to the slightest compromise (reminding us of Ferdinand VII of Spain), considerably exacerbated the situation in the country.

In China the age of powerful autocrats ended in 1850 at the latest, with the death of the Daoguang Emperor. The four emperors who followed him were all incompetent, or uninterested, in the affairs of state. After 1861 the Dowager Empress Cixi (1835–1908), an extremely energetic upstart woman, played the role of autocrat—and she knew how to defend artfully the interests of the dynasty. Being formally a kind of usurper, Cixi was never as safe from attack as the great Qing emperors of the eighteenth century had been. She ruled literally as “the power behind the throne”—the curtain behind which she used to sit is still on display in Beijing—for two feeble emperors. Her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875–1908), was kept under house arrest from 1898, when as a young man he dared to show sympathies with the liberal “Hundred Days” reformers; she probably had him poisoned shortly before her own death in 1908. After Cixi the Chinese throne was more or less vacant. A grandnephew of hers, the three-year-old Puyi, was placed on it in 1908, with his father, a half-brother of the deceased emperor, stepping in as regent. At the time of the 1911 Revolution,
this Prince Qun effectively held monarchical powers. He was a narrow-minded man, and his aggressively pro-Manchu policy alienated him from the top Chinese bureaucrats.

So, on the eve of the respective revolutions, there were real autocrats in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and to a more limited extent in Iran. Against these political systems, the revolutionaries—and this was the main thing they had in common—opposed the idea of the constitution.
¹⁶⁷
Just as in Europe, with whose modern history they were familiar, it was the central plank of their political programs. In the Ottoman Empire and Iran, the Belgian constitution of 1831 (which provided for a parliamentary monarchy) enjoyed an especially high reputation.
¹⁶⁸
Republican forces, unsatisfied with anything along the lines of the constitutional July Monarchy in France or the post-1871 German Reich, were a minority in the revolutionary camp. The one exception to this was China, where after more than two and a half centuries of Manchurian “alien” rule no clandestine survivors of an indigenous dynasty surfaced to offer an alternative to the Qing, and the absence of a high nobility excluded other routes of ascent to the emperorship. Each of the four revolutions produced a written constitution. Despite unavoidable borrowing from Western models, their authors consistently attempted to do justice to the peculiarities of their political culture. Constitutionalism was therefore a genuine political strategy, not at all a shiftless or opportunist imitation of Europe. A much-admired model was the Japanese constitution of 1889, largely the work of the worldly-wise statesman Itō Hirobumi, who appeared to have wrought a perfect blend of foreign and domestic elements. Japan also seemed to have demonstrated that the constitution could become a unifying political symbol in an emergent nation—not merely a plan for the organization of state organs but a cultural achievement of which people could be proud. The main difference with Western Europe was that the Japanese had not explicitly taken in its concept of popular sovereignty. Each of the new Asian constitutional traditions had to identify other sources of legitimacy, secular and religious, on which political rule should base itself.