The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (9 page)

To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty… would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire… The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.

Only the newspaper’s man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:

The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need – indeed, it would be a mistake – to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman… The political views of the Dutch… will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.

The Englishman’s ‘inherited ability to rule’ was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day’s
Times
reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the ‘spirit of lawlessness’ in the Gambia, which nebulous entity was held responsible for the deaths of two British officials. That the editors shared the widely held conservative view of the Empire as militarily overstretched (or, rather, undermanned) seems clear; how else to explain their call for a revival of the eighteenth-century militia as ‘the embodiment of the principle that it is the duty of every man to assist in the defence of his country’?

A further reason for disquiet was the apparently fraught state of relations between the continental great powers.
The Times
’s Paris correspondent reported the imminent visit of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, to France, and offered two theories as to the purpose of his visit. The first was that he was coming to pave the way for the latest of many Russian bond issues on the Paris market; the second, that his intention was to reassure the French of his government’s commitment to the Franco-Russian military alliance. Whichever explanation was correct, the newspaper’s reporter saw dangers in this manifestation of harmony between Paris and St Petersburg. Since the
German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, he noted, France was ‘to-day the only nation in Europe which has some claims to put forward, and the only one which neither can nor should admit that the era of European peace is definitive… What she might do if circumstances impelled her and patriotism as well, were it a question of filling the breach made in her territory… no one knows or can know.’ Yet the most likely consequence of the Tsar’s visit would be to strengthen Germany’s rival alliance with Austria and Italy, recently under some strain because of disagreements over German import tariffs. Too strong an affirmation of the Franco-Russian ‘Alliance of the Two’ would tend to increase the risks of a war with this ‘Alliance of the Three’:

I make no allusion [the paper’s correspondent concluded darkly] to the elements which at any moment may combine with those of the existing alliances, because the hour for action has not yet struck and is not near striking. Those who at present belong to neither of the alliances have time to wait and to continue their meditations before making a decision.

To be sure, our imaginary reader might have taken some comfort from the news that the Tsar was also paying a visit to his cousin the German Kaiser on his way to France, an event solemnly described by the semi-official
Norddeutsche Zeitung
as symbolizing the shared commitment of the Russian and German governments to the maintenance of peace in Europe. Less reassuring, however, was the news of a deterioration in relations between the French and Ottoman governments, which prompted
The Times
to speculate that the Sultan was considering ‘the growing Pan-Islamic movement’ as a possible weapon against both the French and the British empires. In the Balkans, too, there were grounds for concern. The paper reported signs of a slight improvement in Austro-Hungarian relations, but noted:

The respective influence of the two Powers in the Balkans are [
sic
] based upon different factors. Russian influence is founded upon community of race, common historic memories, religion, and proximity; while that of Austria-Hungary is chiefly manifest in the economic…sphere. Nothing has happened during recent years to diminish either Russian or Austrian influence. Both Powers have maintained their old positions…

In the eyes of pacifists, certainly, the world of 1901 was not quite the Eden of Keynes’s recollection. At the 10th meeting of the Universal Peace Congress, then sitting in Glasgow, Dr R. Spence Watson prompted cries of ‘Hear, hear’ when he called ‘the present… as dark a time as they had ever known’. Warming to his theme, Watson denounced not only ‘that terrible war in South Africa, which they could not think of without humiliation’ but also ‘the swooping down of the Christian nations upon China, the most detestable bit of greed which history has recorded’ – an allusion to the recent international expedition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. An advertisement on the front page of that same edition of
The Times
lends some credibility to his impugning of the expedition’s motive:

CHINESE WAR LOOT
. – Before disposing of Loot, it is advisable
to have it valued by an expert. Mr Larkin, 104, New Bond-
street,
VALUES AND BUYS ORIENTAL ART-SPECIALITIES.

Socialists might also have questioned Keynes’s complacent claim that ‘the greater part of the population… were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with [their] lot’ and that ‘escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes’. In the week preceding September 11,
The Times
reported, there had been 1,471 deaths in London, corresponding to an annual rate of 16.9 per thousand, including ‘7 from smallpox, 13 from measles, 14 from scarlet fever, 20 from diphtheria, 27 from whooping cough, 17 from enteric fever, 271 from diarrhoea and dysentery [and] 4 from cholera…’ In Wales, meanwhile, twenty miners were feared dead after an explosion at the Llanbradach colliery near Caerphilly. Across the sea in Ireland seven members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners had been arrested and charged with ‘conspiracy, assault and intimidation’, having led a carpenters’ strike for higher wages. The number of registered paupers in London, according to the paper, was just under 100,000. There was as yet no ‘old age pension scheme… of giving State aid to those who had already in the past made some provision for the future’. The best escape from poverty in the United Kingdom was, in reality, geographical rather than social mobility. Between 1891 and 1900,
The Times
recorded, no fewer than 726,000 people had emigrated
from the United Kingdom. Would so many have left if, in truth, they had been ‘reasonably contented’?

The world of 1901 was a world of empires, but the problem was their weakness, not their strength.

The oldest, the Qing and the Ottoman, were relatively decentralized entities; indeed to some observers they seemed on the verge of dissolution. Their fiscal systems had for too long been based primarily on quasi-feudal transfers from the rural periphery to the metropolitan centre. Other sources of revenue were becoming more important – notably the duties levied on overseas trade – but by the end of the nineteenth century these had largely been frittered away. The process was further advanced in China. Beginning in the 1840s with Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, numerous Chinese ports had come under European control, initially as bridgeheads for hard-faced Scots intent on building a mass market for Indian opium. Eventually there were more than a hundred such ‘treaty ports’, where European citizens enjoyed the privileges of ‘extraterritoriality’ – living in ‘concessions’ or ‘settlements’ with complete immunity from Chinese law. The Imperial Maritime Customs Administration, though nominally a branch of the Chinese Government, was staffed by foreign officials and run by an Ulsterman, Sir Robert Hart. In much the same way, numerous Turkish taxes were collected by a European Council of the Public Debt, which had been established in 1881 and was controlled by foreign bondholders.
*
These strikingly visible limitations of sovereignty – the magnificent offices of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the Shanghai Bund (embankment), the building of
the Public Debt Administration in Istanbul – reflected both financial and military weakness. To pay for modern armaments and infrastructure that they could not make for themselves, the Chinese and the Turkish governments had borrowed substantial sums by floating loans in Europe; domestic intermediaries simply could not compete with the sums and the terms offered by the European banking houses, which were able to tap much wider and deeper pools of savings through the bond markets of London, Paris and Berlin. But the mortgaging or hypothecation of specific revenue streams like customs duties meant that these passed into foreign control in the event of a default. And defaults tended to happen in the wake of military setbacks like those suffered by Turkey in the 1870s and China in the 1890s; it turned out that simply buying Western hardware did not suffice to win wars.

It is therefore not surprising that by 1901 so many Westerners expected both these venerable empires to go the way of the Safavid and Mughal empires, which had disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with European economic influence as the fatal solvent. Yet this was not what happened. Instead, both in China and in Turkey, a new generation of political modernizers came to power, inspired by nationalism and intent on avoiding the fate that had befallen earlier Eastern empires. The challenge for the Young Turks who came to power in Istanbul in 1908 was the same as that which faced the Chinese republicans who overthrew the last Qing Emperor three years later: how to transform sprawling, enfeebled empires into strong nation states.

Somewhat similar processes were already at work in the Austrian and Russian empires, though this was much less obvious in 1901. Although similar to their Asian counterparts in their social foundations, both empires had modernized their revenue-gathering and war-making capabilities in the eighteenth century. Yet both were already struggling to cope with the technological and political challenges of industrialized warfare. The smaller Central European realm of the Habsburgs was primarily weakened by its ethnic diversity. There were at least eighteen nationalities dispersed across five distinct kingdoms, two grand duchies, one principality, six duchies and six other miscellaneous territorial units. German-speakers accounted for less than a
quarter of the population. Because of its institutional decentralization, Austria-Hungary struggled to match the military expenditures of the other great powers. It was stable, but weak. The Carinthian-born novelist Robert Musil nicely captured the contemporary sense of retarded imperial development:

There was no ambition to have world markets or have world power. Here one was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of the world’s old axes; the words ‘colony’ and ‘overseas’ had the ring of something as yet utterly untried and remote… One spent enormous sums on the army; but only just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the great powers.

There were, to be sure, periodic debates about internal reform. The ‘dualism’ that since 1867 had divided most power between a pluralistic Austria and a Magyar-dominated Hungary produced endless anomalies, like the arcane distinction between
kaiserlich-königlich
(imperial-royal) (k.k.) and
kaiserlich und königlich
(k.u.k.), which inspired Musil to nickname the country ‘Kakania’:

On paper it called itself the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; in speaking, however, one referred to it as Austria; that is to say, it was known by a name that it had, as a State, solemnly renounced by oath, while preserving it in all matters of sentiment, as a sign that feelings are just as important as constitutional law and that regulations are not the really serious thing in life. By its constitution it was liberal, but its system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, which made such vigorous use of its liberty that it was usually kept shut; but there was also an emergency powers act by means of which it was possible to manage without parliament, and every time everyone was just beginning to rejoice in absolutism, the Crown decreed that there must now again be a return to parliamentary government. [N]ational struggles… were so violent that they several times a year caused the machinery of State to jam and come to a dead stop. But between whiles, in the breathing-spaces between government and government, everyone got on excellently with everyone else and behaved as though nothing had been the matter.

Czechs in particular chafed at their second-class status in Bohemia, and were able to give more forthright political expression to their grievances after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. But schemes for some kind of Habsburg federalism never got off the ground. The alternative of Germanization was not an option for the fragile linguistic patchwork that was Austria; the most that could be achieved was to maintain German as the language of command for the army, though with results lampooned hilariously by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek in
The Good Soldier Švejk.
By contrast, the sustained Hungarian campaign to ‘Magyarize’ their kingdom’s non-Hungarians, who accounted for nearly half the population, merely inflamed nationalist sentiment. If the trend of the age had been towards multi-culturalism, then Vienna would have been the envy of the world; from psychoanalysis to the Secession, its cultural scene at the turn of the century was a wonderful advertisement for the benefits of ethnic cross-fertilization. But if the trend of the age was towards the homogeneous nation state, the future prospects of the Dual Monarchy were bleak indeed. When the satirist Karl Kraus called Austria-Hungary a ‘laboratory of world destruction’(
Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs
), he had in mind precisely the mounting tension between a multi-tiered polity – summed up by Kraus as an
‘aristodemo-plutobürokratischen Mischmasch’
– and a multi-ethnic society. This was what Musil was getting at when he described Austria-Hungary as ‘nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world’: for ‘in that country… every human being’s dislike of every other human being’s attempts to get on… [had] crystallized earlier’. Reverence for the aged Emperor Francis Joseph was not enough to hold this delicate edifice together. It might even end up blowing it apart.