The Transformation of the World (136 page)

A new definition of government tasks began to appear, with insurance covering the risks associated with paid employment. Sickness and accident insurance for workers in the German Reich, introduced in 1883–84 and supplemented in 1889 with disability and old-age insurance, opened the way internationally. At once, highly statist solutions placing the emergent welfare state in the hands of bureaucracies and interest groups overshadowed alternative ideas of social solidarity. Indeed, Bismarck's social insurance scheme went together with a ban on trade unions and Social Democratic endeavors (the
Sozialistengesetz
of 1878), one of his aims being to weaken the support funds autonomously managed by the labor movement.
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The welfare state did not emerge from the very beginning as a complete package; Germany had to wait until 1927 for the unemployment insurance that was set up in 1907 in Denmark and in 1911 in Britain.
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The chronology of the transition to a state-funded and bureaucratically administered structure of legal entitlements appears very uneven if we look separately at the various kinds of insurance and support. Democracies did not consistently advance at a faster pace than authoritarian or semiauthoritarian political systems. In democratic France, for instance, the age of social insurance opened only in 1898, with the establishment of a scheme covering work accidents. Governments in various European countries, together with newly emerging small groups of “social experts,” kept a close watch and learned from what others were doing, on the other side of the Atlantic too.
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This did not lead to the development of uniform systems. Rather, three different “worlds” took shape in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: a Scandinavian model that funded social security through redistribution; a British model, whose main aim was to avert poverty through tax-funded social provision; and a continental European model, financed by individual contributions and more strongly geared to social status (as in the privileged treatment of civil servants).
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Nevertheless, it may be said that nowhere in the world other than in Europe and Australasia did the traditional municipal, philanthropic, religious-ecclesiastical, and official measures of poor relief evolve through their own dynamic into a new understanding of the tasks of the state. In the United States, where private charity enjoyed high esteem but the spending of tax revenue on the poor counted as waste, there were many local instances of borrowing from Europe, but comprehensive welfare programs were not rolled out until the
1930s. Japan too, in other ways so quick to follow Europe, took its time building a welfare state; only in 1947 did it become the last of the major industrial countries to introduce unemployment insurance. In many places, checks on the morals of welfare recipients lingered on as an ideological remnant of the nineteenth century.

From the point of view of global history, the welfare state belongs to the twentieth century. It was also then that, in an extraordinary development associated with state socialism, comprehensive (if low-grade) systems of social security were established in a number of economically backward countries. In China, which passed through this stage after 1949, the post-1978 liberalization has yet to put a new system of protection in place.

6 Self-Strengthening: The Politics of Peripheral Defensive
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Perceptions of Backwardness

The nineteenth-century state was a reforming state. It is true that in the dying years of the ancien régime, some rulers and ministers had seen the need to make government more efficient—hence to gain increased access to resources and, as far as possible, to widen the base of popular loyalty. Austria under Maria Theresa or Joseph II and, above all, during the reign of his brother Peter Leopold as grand duke of the model Enlightenment province of Tuscany (1765–90), as well as Prussia under Frederick the Great, were examples of such reforming states; Turgot wanted to make France follow suit; and after 1760 the Spain of Charles III undertook a general overhaul (by no means altogether unsuccessful in the medium term) of its huge overseas empire. In China too, it was a common idea that from time to time the state needed to be methodically regenerated, the last such repair of the bureaucratic machinery having been undertaken in 1730 by the Yongzheng Emperor. In the nineteenth century the impetus for reform came more than ever from outside, as international competition generated the necessary pressure. Of course, internal reform was also related to the threat of revolution. The events of 1789 had taught one or two things about the costs of delay, suggesting that reforms might serve to prevent something much more drastic. Here and there an
unsuccessful
revolution might also sow the idea of responding to some of its demands with timely reforms. The revolutions of 1848 did not remain totally without effect.

The reforms most typical of the nineteenth century, however, were triggered by a perception of national backwardness. Back in 1759, the Bourbon overhaul of the Spanish colonial empire had already been designed, inter alia, to dispel the notion that Spain was lagging behind other countries and to win the respect of enlightened public opinion in Europe. None of these perceptions was stronger than that resulting from failure in war. In 1806, the year of the great defeat at the hands of Napoleon, parts of the Prussian power elite concluded that the survival
of the old order depended on a process of comprehensive renewal. The Crimean War had the same effect for the Tsarist Empire, as did the defeat of 1900 for the Qing Empire, when an international expeditionary force intervened against the Boxer Uprising. The actual reforms varied in each instance, but the underlying idea was that the operations of the state should be more rational, more subject to the equalizing influence of the law. Lost wars, then, did not generate only military reforms. It became a widespread view that military apparatuses could only be as good as the civilian structure of the state in which they were embedded. This was clear to the Prussian, Russian, and Chinese reformers (in the latter's case, too late), who all faced the task of transforming weakness into strength.

Behind this lay an even more general perception. Never before in history had so few societies been seen as the yardstick for so many others. To be sure, rather superficial attempts had been made to copy the outward forms of prestigious states and civilizations, as when France under the Sun King found imitators in large parts of continental Europe. The idea of political progress had also occurred to people in the early modern age. And before 1700 the Netherlands, England's great commercial and military rival, had seemed to offer a model in many areas of business, society, and politics. But these had been very limited perceptions of difference, which seldom crossed the boundaries between civilizations. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the enthusiasm of Jesuits and certain financial theorists for what they took to be the well-structured and wisely governed Chinese state of the great Qing Emperors had little transformative impact in Europe. Nor did the opening of the Ottoman Empire to Western European architectural and decorative styles during the so-called Tulip Age (1718–30) prove to have long-term consequences.
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The nineteenth century brought something new: Western European civilization became a model for large parts of the world. “Western Europe” meant first and foremost Great Britain, which by 1815 was being spoken of nearly everywhere as the richest and most powerful country in the world. Despite the fall of Napoleon and continuing political instability, France also counted as part of this Western European model. It was gradually joined by Prussia, although it took many decades to shake off its image as a Spartan military state on the eastern fringes of civilization, whose greatest king, disdainful of German literature and preferring to speak French, himself felt ill at ease there.

Outside this European core, nothing shaped the evolution of the state in the nineteenth century as much as the efforts of power elites to counter the dynamic of the West by preventively adopting elements of its culture. Around 1700 Tsar Peter the Great had already pursued such a policy of making Russia internally and externally strong, both with and against Western Europe. A century later the resistance to Napoleonic France triggered the first moves toward defensive modernization. The Ottoman Empire had already made a similar start under Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), shocked by Russia's southward expansion under Catherine II and Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. But his reforms ran up
against strong internal opposition and made little progress. Less controversial, and therefore more successful, were the post-1806 reforms of the army, civil service, justice, and education in Prussia. The construction of a military state under Muhammad Ali in Egypt, begun in exactly the same period, is another facet of this moment in world history.

The success of Egyptian military expansion revealed the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the Great Powers had to rush to its aid against its own vassal, Muhammad Ali, and that Greece came under their protection and was actually wrested from the empire, helped to push the sultan and leading statesmen in 1839 toward a bold policy of sweeping reforms, the so-called Tanzimat, which lasted for a quarter of a century.
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The fruits were the creation of an educational system (with the suppression of some Islamic elements), reform of the state administration, legal changes tending toward a single citizenship, gradual alleviation of discrimination against non-Muslims, and a fiscal restructuring to replace one-off raids and tax farming. The figures leading this drive in the Sublime Porte knew the West from personal experience and formed ideas of their own about the goals, scale, and feasibility of partial Westernization under Ottoman conditions. Mustafa Reshid Pasha (1800–58), Ali Pasha (1814–71), and Fuad Pasha (1815–69), the key members of the reform generation, had at one time or another all been foreign minister or ambassador in London or Paris. The group of those able to combine Eastern and Western knowledge was very small, with the result that their initiatives had a strongly centralist and dirigiste character. A dynamic in civil society was not at the origin of the reform. But one could develop under favorable conditions, as soon as the impetus for reform in Istanbul had created the space for it. Cities such as Salonica and Beirut provided impressive evidence of this.
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Reforms

A sense of backwardness, for which causes were always to be found, also lay behind many reform drives in the second half of the century. Meanwhile the West, at once admired and feared, did not remain unchanged. Especially in the second half of the 1860s, the political systems of Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary underwent remarkable, though not exactly revolutionary, changes. States everywhere were in the grip of reform.
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On the edges of Europe and beyond, reluctant appreciation of the West's momentary superiority and genuine admiration for many of its civilizing achievements mingled in various ways with a lack of confidence in the reformability of the respective national institutions. Often there was also a hope that basic cultural values could somehow be rescued and preserved in the new age. Examples in this respect were the Russian reforms under Alexander II, centered on the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the reform of the justice system in 1864;
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the very cautious early reforms in China after the victory of the Qing Dynasty over the Taiping in 1864; and above all the radical “reformatting” of Japan after 1868 and its “little brother,” the
modernization of Siam/Thailand.
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In each of these cases, major debates took place in ruling circles and a newly emerging public sphere. A comparative study of them has yet to be written. But the key issues were the scale and intensity of “Westernization,” and the likelihood that it would be achieved. “Westernizers” clashed with “nativists,” whether these were Russian Slavophiles or followers of orthodox Confucianism. Rulers who had previously had to bother little about such questions now found themselves facing risky political calculations. No amount of experience helped when it came to predicting the consequences of change. What was a reasonable price to pay? Who would be the winners and who the losers? Where might strong resistance be expected? What protection could be organized in the field of foreign policy? How should the reforms be financed? Where would the skilled personnel come from to implement them in different walks of life and geographical regions? The answers varied from case to case. But the similarity of the problems means that in principle the cases are susceptible to comparison.

All these reforms belong in a history of the state: that is, both in a history of how the European state spread through the world along several fault lines and with numerous modifications
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and in a history of the mobilization of extra-European state resources in response to acute survival problems, at peripheral positions of international politics, global capitalism, and the dissemination of Western European civilization. The strategies differed considerably from one another, and varied enormously in their degree of success. Meiji Japan was in a category of its own, in terms of the pace and scale of system change—and it became a model much admired on all sides, though rarely copied successfully.
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The defensive modernization of the Tsarist Empire, on the other hand, was a conservative holding operation. In the Ottoman Empire, the reform period issued in a new absolutism under Abdülhamid II, whose performance is still the subject of scholarly controversy. In China, several attempts at reform (1861–74, 1898, and 1904–11) failed to result in a viable renewal of the state and society. In Egypt, Westernization under the successors of Muhammad Ali ended in state bankruptcy and a colonial seizure of power (1882).