The Transformation of the World (90 page)

Hegemonic Unification

State building through the voluntary union of allied peoples is a historically ancient model. When no single power is paramount, this involves the establishment of territorial statehood through a “multiheaded” federation of cities or cantons. The Netherlands and Switzerland are examples of such polycentric equilibrium, the basis for them having been laid long before the nineteenth
century.
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Even after 1800, facing much larger states in their vicinity, both retained a federative character that proved sufficiently flexible to cushion social and religious tensions. But whereas the Netherlands, marveled at as a curiosity in the early modern period, had become by 1900 more akin to a “normal” nation-state, Switzerland emphasized its special role by sticking to its loosely federal constitution and system of cantonal rights, with unusually direct forms of democracy.
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The United States of America was typologically more complex, combining in its origins an independence revolution with a polycephalous federation; no such opportunity existed for the leaders of the Spanish American independence movement. The new United States aimed from the beginning to incorporate additional territories into the Union, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a foundational document, laid down precise rules for this. There was nothing comparable in Europe to such a state with built-in mechanisms for further expansion.

Nation-state building in Europe at the time followed not a polycephalous but a
hegemonic
model, in which one regional power seized the initiative, brought its military strength into play, and put its stamp on the newly emergent state.
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Such hegemonic unification “from above” was not a modern European invention. In 221 BC the Qin military state, on the geographical margins of the Chinese political world, founded the first imperial dynasty and went on to unify the Chinese empire. It displayed some affinities with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussia: a crude military system (though in post–1815 Prussia less frightening than before) combined with access to the culture and technology of the neighboring civilization (eastern China and Western Europe, respectively). In much the same way as Prussia in Germany, the small border kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was the unifying hegemon in Italy, qualifying for this role as the only self-governing region of a land otherwise under the rule of Austria, Spain, or the Vatican. In both Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia, there was in charge a strong-willed political realist with a wide constitutional scope for unhampered leadership—Bismarck or Cavour—who played on international differences to create the opportunities for his policy of national unification.
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The Italians succeeded first, when a new all–Italian Parliament was established in February 1861. Austria's surrender of the Veneto in 1866, and the transfer of the capital in 1871 to a Rome wrested from Pope Pius IX in a rather symbolic conquest, completed the external building of the nation-state. The annexation of Rome was possible only after Napoleon III's defeat at the battle of Sedan robbed the pope of a reliable protector and forced the French garrison to pull out. Pio Nono grudgingly withdrew to the Vatican and threatened with excommunication any Catholic who became involved in national politics.

For all the similarities, the unification processes in Italy and Germany display a number of differences.
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First
. Although the process was deeply rooted in the thinking of intellectuals in Italy, the practical preparations were more rudimentary there than in Germany.
There were no preliminary steps such as the Zollverein or the North German League, and in general the internal nation building, “understood as economic, social, and cultural integration of a space of communication,”
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was less far advanced than in Germany. Mentally, too, there was almost nothing apart from the Catholic faith that linked together all Italians from Lombardy to Sicily—and from 1848 the church was on a collision course with Italian nationalism.

Second
. The main reason for the lack of structural prerequisites of national unity was that external forces had been intervening in Italy for centuries. The country had to free itself of foreign occupation, whereas in Germany only the influence of the Habsburg emperor had to be driven back, albeit at the price of what has been called, with only slight exaggeration, a German civil war.
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The military resolution was immediate, however: the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadová) on July 3, 1866, was the key date in the building of a “smaller German” nation-state. Prussia was an independent military power of a quite different caliber from little Piedmont-Sardinia. It was able to impose German unity by force in the international arena, whereas Piedmont had to rely on coalitions of powers in which it was always the weaker partner.

Third
. In Italy, unification from above—as Cavour, allied to Napoleon III, pursued it mainly at the negotiating table, though certainly also on the battlefield—was supported by a stronger popular movement than in Germany and accompanied with greater public debate. Here too, of course, the state was not wholly reconstituted from below, and the national-revolutionary movement, headed by the charismatic Giuseppe Garibaldi, was not above manipulating “the masses.” No constituent assembly was convened: the laws and bureaucratic order of Piedmont-Sardinia, largely resting on the prefecture system from the time of the Napoleonic occupation, were simply transposed to the new state. This Piedmontization met with considerable resistance. In Germany, constitutional issues (in the broad sense) had for centuries been at the forefront of politics. The early modern Holy Roman Empire, without any parallel in Italy or anywhere else in the world, had been less a union held together by force than an edifice of constantly honed compromise, and the same was true a fortiori of the Deutscher Bund, created at the Congress of Vienna and slowly evolving into the state framework of an emergent nation. The German constitutional tradition tended to be decentralized and federative, and even Prussia had to take account of this in its leadership of the North German Confederation (from 1866) and of the newly founded Reich (from 1871), as well as heeding for a long time anti-Prussian sentiments in the South. For the new Reich, federal statehood was “the central fact of its existence” (Thomas Nipperdey).
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In Italy there was nothing comparable to the continuing dualism of Prussia and empire; Cavour's Piedmont-Sardinia was complete absorbed into the unitary Italian state. But social-economic differences remained (and remain today) a dominant problem within Italy. True unity between the prosperous North and the impoverished South was never achieved.

Fourth
. In Italy the internal resistance was greater and lasted longer. The German princes accepted the material gifts on offer, and the population followed their lead. In Sicily and the southern mainland of Italy the rural underclasses, often allied with local notables, kept up a civil war all the way through the 1860s. This guerrillastyle struggle, officially known as “brigandage,” typically involved horseback ambushes of anyone considered a collaborator with the North and the new order, and both the ferocity of the insurgents and the reprisals directed against them are less reminiscent of the “regular” unification wars of the age than of the no-holdsbarred war in Spain from 1808 to 1813. Probably more people died in the
bringantaggio
wars than in all others fought on Italian soil between 1848 and 1861.
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Did anything similar happen in other parts of the world? Was there an Asian “founder of the empire,” a Bismarck? There had been a distant parallel when Vietnam was unified in 1802 under the emperor Gia Long, but he had resided in the central city of Hué and been content to share power with the strong regional princes in the North (Hanoi) and the South (Saigon). In itself that was not necessary a disadvantage. More serious were the failure to build, or rebuild, a strong central bureaucracy (a Chinese influence with strong roots in the country), and Gia Long's neglect of his army. His successors did not correct these omissions, which contributed to Vietnam's weakness a few decades later when it came face to face with Imperial France.
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The colonial intervention that began in 1859 with the conquest of Saigon held back the development of a Vietnamese nation-state for more than a century.

Evolution toward Autonomy

Apart from revolutionary secession from an empire—which in the nineteenth century occurred nowhere in Europe outside the Balkans and in the twentieth century was achieved in peacetime only by the Irish Free State in 1921—the other path involved gradual moves toward autonomy (or even peaceful separation) within a continuing imperial framework. Sweden and Norway ended their dynastic union in 1905, without internal convulsions or serious international tensions, after three decades of slow political estrangement and national identity formation on both sides. This amicable divorce took the form of a plebiscite on the independence of Norway, the junior partner, whereby the Swedish king lost the Norwegian throne formerly ceded to him by a Danish prince.
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By far the most important examples of evolutionary autonomy occurred within the British Empire. Apart from Canada, all the British settler colonies had come into being
after
the revolutionary independence of the United States (1783): Australia little by little after 1788, Cape Province after 1806, New Zealand after 1840. Thus, both the settlers and the imperial policymakers in London had time to digest the US experience, and until the secession of Southern Rhodesia (the future Zimbabwe) in 1965 there would be no further revolts by settlers of British origin. A critical point was reached in the second half of the 1830s in Canada (still called, more precisely, British North America). Until then local
oligarchies had been firmly in the saddle in the various provinces; the elected assemblies did not even have control over finances, and the main conflicts were between the dominant merchant families and the respective governors. In the 1820s the assemblies increasingly became the forum for antioligarchic politicians seeking to bring about a gradual democratization of political life. They saw themselves as “independent cultivators of the soil” and defended positions similar to those of “Jacksonian democracy” (since 1829 in the United States). In 1837 several violent revolts broke out simultaneously, with the aim not of breaking away from the British Empire but of overthrowing the dominant political forces in individual colonies. These spontaneous uprisings did not come together in an organized rebellion and were brutally suppressed.

The government in London could have left things at that.
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But instead, recognizing that the potential for conflict in Canada was more than a surface phenomenon, it sent out a commission of inquiry under Lord Durham. Although Durham did not stay long in Canada, his
Report on the Affairs in British North America
, issued in January 1839, was a profound analysis of the problems,
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and his recommendations became a milestone in the constitutional history of the empire. Barely twenty years after the success of the Spanish American independence movements, and following the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1822, the Durham Report surmised that the days of imperial rule in America were numbered unless skillful political management was brought to bear. At the same time, Durham sought to apply recent experiences in India, where a period of ambitious reforms had begun in the late 1820s. The paths taken in India and Canada were quite different, but the basic idea—that imperial rule constantly needed reforms to be viable—would never again be entirely absent from the history of the British Empire. Lord Durham formulated the view that British political institutions, being the best suited in theory for overseas settler colonies, should be given the opportunity to serve the growing self-determination of colonial subjects. This radical proposal, only seven years after the Reform Bill of 1832 had opened up the political system, however timidly, in the mother country, involved establishing a Westminster-style lower house with powers to appoint and bring down the government.
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The Durham Report is one of the most important documents of global constitutional history. It argued that a balance needed to be found between the interests of settlers and the imperial center, within a framework of democratic institutions open to change; that the distribution of powers and responsibilities between the Whitehall-appointed governor and local representative bodies should be continually renegotiated. Many policy areas, especially foreign and military affairs, would remain under central control, and Canadian or Australian laws came into effect only when the Parliament in London had approved them. More important, however, the new constitutional framework meant that the dominions (as colonies with “responsible government” were now called) had the possibility of developing into fledgling nation-states.

This process took specific forms in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The confluence of several colonies into a federal state marked a key stage in Australian history. Only with the Statute of Westminster (1931) did the dominions—South Africa was a special case—become nominally self-governing states, linked only symbolically to the old colonial center by their recognition of the British monarch as head of state. But in the second half of the nineteenth century these countries passed through a series of stages of political democratization and social integration, which may be described as a combination of internal nation building and
delayed
external nation-state formation. This evolution toward autonomy within an empire that was more liberal than many others saw the emergence of some of the institutionally most stable, and socially and politically most progressive, states in the world, albeit ones burdened with disfranchisement and exclusion of the indigenous population.
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The process was largely concluded before the First World War.
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