The Undivided Past Page 9
From this perspective, the nation as a unit of collective loyalty overwhelmed and subsumed all other shared forms of human identity, as regional, linguistic, ethnic, class, and religious solidarities were subordinated to what has been called the “nationalization of the masses.” Accordingly, the years from 1870 to 1914 have been described as witnessing the transformation not only of peasants into Frenchmen (or into Germans, or Italians, or Spaniards, or Russians), but also of workers, the middle classes, and even aristocracies and monarchies into national loyalists, too.61 There were many mechanisms and processes by which this national assimilation was accomplished: the growth in universal, state-sponsored education; the gradual expansion of the franchise to include unpropertied men and even, in some cases, women; the rise of mass political parties and charismatic political leaders such as Gladstone, Cavour, and Lincoln; the provision of state welfare programs beginning in Bismarck’s Germany; the imposition by many nations of protective tariffs from the 1870s onward; the militarization of society, whereby the armed forces were no longer part of the royal household but had become the embodiment of the nation; and the invention or reinvention of a whole host of pageants, ceremonials, and festivals, centered on an hereditary or an elected head of state and providing the spectacular focus for an enhanced national consciousness and loyalty. As a result, monarchs such as the German and Russian emperors not only belonged to a pan-national, cosmopolitan, continental caste, but increasingly became the embodiment of particular nationalities.62
The result of these developments was that people were more than ever, as G. M. Trevelyan put it, “thinking in nationalities,” and to this unprecedented mode of thinking (and feeling) historians contributed substantially, with best-selling books that appealed to the new mass reading public. Hence the rise to prominence of Macaulay and J. R. Green (and Trevelyan) in Britain, Michelet and Guizot in France, Parkman and Bancroft in the United States, and Ranke and Mommsen in Germany: each wrote narrative history tracing the rise of his respective nation and insisting on its exceptionalism and providential blessing and thus its superiority to the rivals against whom it had often made war, its military triumph having set the seal on its national consciousness and its distinct, long-lived unity as one people.63 Such writers provided the carefully selected collective memory that became an essential prop to this new and widely shared sense of national identity, and this creation of a common national past in print was accompanied by the proliferation and cultivation of national images, myths, anniversaries, monuments, and heroes, from the German chieftain Arminius to England’s King Alfred to Joan of Arc of France to America’s George Washington.64
The nations thus created were widely regarded as the final stage of human history and as the ultimate form of human identity, and the phrase “secular religion” has been used to describe the veneration they seemed to inspire in the decades that culminated in the First World War—a religion and an identity that to many seemed far more appealing than the traditional sacred alternative, and also significantly more widespread and intense than any national feeling that had gone before.65 For while national sentiments and identities had existed in medieval and early modern times, especially on the part of monarchs, aristocrats, warriors, writers, and priests, they were rarely if ever shared by the population as a whole. As the historian of France David Bell has observed, in words more generally applicable, “neither…Richelieu nor Mazarin envisioned taking entire populations…and forging them all, in their millions, into a single nation, transforming everything from language to manners to the most intimate ideas.” They did not “imagine programmes of national education…, or massive political action to reduce regional differences, or laws demarcating national citizens from foreigners.”66 Yet despite its undeniable plausibility, this argument cannot be pushed too far, for just as there were significant limits to national identities during medieval and early modern times, the same was true during this later period, even as such solidarities were more developed and encompassing than before.
To begin with, the idea that the belligerents of 1914 were unified, homogeneous nations does not survive detailed examination. Consider, for example, the matter of common language, often regarded as essential to any shared sense of national identity. It certainly did not exist in the nation created by the Risorgimento. “We have made Italy,” Massimo d’Azeglio observed at the time, “now we have to make Italians.” With less than 5 percent of the population using Italian for everyday purposes, they had a long way to go. In France, almost half the schoolchildren engaged with French as a foreign language, speaking another tongue at home: dialect and patois were widespread, and in departments bordering other nations, it was often Flemish, Catalan, or German that was spoken.67 A similar picture could be found in Germany, where in the east many spoke Polish as their first language, whereas in Alsace and Lorraine many spoke French; and in Russia, educated people conversed in French, while workers and peasants used a wide variety of Slavic languages and dialects. In Austria-Hungary, the array of different tongues was even more varied, including German, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, and Greek, and many of the Habsburg emperor’s subjects were multilingual, speaking one language at school or at work and another at home. Insofar as a common tongue could be considered an essential criterion, none of the major powers that went to war in 1914 qualified as a “nation.” Apart from Portugal or Sweden, there were few linguistically homogeneous European countries.68
The reach of the late-nineteenth-century European state, and its capacity to exhort solidarity among its population, has often been exaggerated, for many people in these ostensibly unitary nation-states felt excluded from the allegedly shared practices and customs of national life.69 Universal male suffrage was limited to France and Switzerland, and in Britain only 60 percent of adult males possessed the vote in 1914, while all women were disenfranchised, which meant less than one-third of the population played any part in the process of electing the government that ruled over them: so much for those “common rights and duties” that have been described as an essential attribute of nationhood and national identity.70 Moreover, the unity of some of these “nations” was far from consensual. In the United Kingdom, there were growing demands during the late nineteenth century for independence for Scotland, Wales, and (especially) Ireland. There were similar rejections of the notion of a unified Spanish nation by the Basques and the Catalans, and of a unified Russian nation by (among others) the Finns, Armenians, Georgians, and Lithuanians. Although they owed allegiance to the same Habsburg monarch, Austria and Hungary were in many ways separate nations, and elsewhere in that empire there was growing nationalist agitation on the part of the Czechs, Ruthenians, and Croats. In reality, most countries in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe were polyglot and multiethnic—veritable stews of competing identities that constantly undermined the calls for national solidarity.71
Indeed, many of the so-called European nations that existed on the eve of the First World War still bore a significant resemblance to the composite states and multiple monarchies of the early modern period from which they had only partially evolved. The United Kingdom was a nominally unitary polity, but Scotland and Ireland retained their respective religions and educational systems, and British sovereigns crossing the border dividing England and Scotland were obliged to change their faith from Anglican to Presbyterian. The German Reich was at one level a federation of distinct princely states, with their separate royalties and legislatures, and it was further divided by religion, with the north generally Protestant and the south generally Catholic. But in addition, an unwieldy (and dysfunctional) imperial constitution, imposed in 1870, provided that the ruling Hohenzollern family were not only kings of Prussia but also emperors of Germany, thereby creating with this greater Reich conflicting loyalties even among its crowned heads. As for the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottoman sultans, their dominions were so vast and varied that it was only the person of the sovereign that held them together. In
deed, as the full titles of their rulers suggest, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman realms were not single-identity nations at all: they were land-based empires where many nationalities coexisted, with varying degrees of amity and success.72
Farther afield, this description was equally valid in the case of China, another monstrosity of territorial agglomeration encompassing many languages, ethnicities, and religions. The same was true of the United States, which had created an empire by conquering and settling a continent, and which was becoming an increasingly diverse “melting pot,” as black slaves were freed in the aftermath of the Civil War, and as immigrants poured in by the millions from southern, central, and eastern Europe in the decades before 1914. Moreover, nineteenth-century empires were not only land-based but also maritime, which further modified and undermined any clear-cut national identities. The French regarded their imperium as an integral part of their nation, be it in Indochina, Saharan or equatorial Africa, or the Caribbean, but such possessions increased the diversity and diminished the identity of de Gaulle’s or Braudel’s “France” a hundredfold. The British Empire spawned four great dominions, but those who settled in them could not decide whether they were British, or Canadians, or Australians, or New Zealanders, or South Africans.73 Indeed, the very existence and expansion of so many imperial agglomerations encouraged some politicians to suppose that the nation was becoming obsolete: as Joseph Chamberlain put it in 1904, “the day of small nations has passed away; the day of empires has come.”74 The idea of the fatherland may have been sold persuasively enough to compel millions to volunteer ten years later, but in reality the First World War was a global conflict among empires that both transcended and subverted the particular claims of national identities.75
Empire was not the only force militating against national coherence and identity in the nineteenth century; indeed, some of the very innovations and developments that served the purposes of national integration and territorial consolidation also produced powerful countervailing effects. Consider the railways. To be sure, they helped tie nations together, but as such they were not only instruments of peace but also agents of belligerence. The First World War was famously described by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as a “war by timetable”: it was the trains that transported the men and carried the matériel to the battlefronts; the Germans surrendered to the French in 1918 in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne outside Paris; and the French capitulated to the Germans in the same piece of rolling stock twenty-two years later. Railways were also the agents of a new internationalism and cosmopolitanism, crossing and transcending national borders and moving people and goods between countries and across continents on a scale and with a frequency that had never been seen before. It was the railway that enabled Thomas Cook to take British tourists around Europe in their hundreds of thousands. It was the Orient Express that linked Paris directly with Constantinople. Even Queen Victoria took to the rails, often visiting the capitals, spas, and resorts of the continent under the preposterously implausible incognito of the Countess of Balmoral.76
Like most late-nineteenth-century European royalty, Victoria became a uniquely venerated symbol of national identity and imperial greatness; but like them again, she was also very much aware of herself as a member of the continental royal cousinhood.77 They might now be national icons and imperial cynosures, but European royalty still intermarried, and continued to regard itself as a pan-continental caste, with interests and connections that transcended national boundaries. Queen Victoria herself was almost entirely of German ancestry, and her husband was a minor German prince; she married off her own children internationally rather than domestically, including her eldest daughter to the crown prince of Prussia. By the end of her reign there was scarcely a royal house in Europe unconnected with the British monarchy, the ties with Germany and Russia being especially close.78 This transnational perspective was also shared by many European aristocrats: they were brought up to speak French as the language of diplomacy and high society; they were equally at ease in London or Paris or Rome or Vienna or St. Petersburg; and many of them shared a love for Italy or Greece engendered by a youthful grand tour. No less cosmopolitan were plutocratic dynasties like the Rothschilds, with their finance houses in Austria, Germany, Italy, France, and Britain, all closely linked by different branches of the family, giving their critics to believe their first loyalty was more likely to be to their fortune and their dynasty than to any mere nation-state.79
Transnational character and internationalist attitudes were not limited to the uppermost parts of society.80 An essential element of the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology was a commitment to free trade, peace, and global amity that transcended the parochial limitations of any particular nation. The Great Exhibition of 1851 may have been the symbol of Britain’s economic preeminence, but it was also a celebration of common humanity, internationalism, and harmony.81 Sons of European manufacturers and merchants traveled the world in search of markets, and this global diaspora embraced Catalans, Basques, Germans, Danes, Chinese, Parsees, Jews, Armenians, Portuguese, Greeks, Dutch, North Americans, Scots, and English. The outcome was a cosmopolitan trading community, in which nationality was often very blurred. Nor was it confined to the distant reaches of the globe: there was a German-speaking community in Manchester and also in Liverpool, where one merchant, Alfred Horn, remembered how in the course of his education at St. Edward’s College he had rubbed shoulders with young men from Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Brazil, and Spain. “I believe,” he recalled, “the old idea in mixing the young Britisher with his brothers of every climate was to make him cosmopolitan, and naturally enough we soon learned each other’s language.”82 A generation earlier, Marx and Engels had made the same point in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,” and the result was a new world order characterized by the “universal interdependence of nations.”83
In different ways, then, nineteenth-century internationalism and imperialism both limited and undermined the nation-state and the particular national identities constructed on the basis of such territorial delineations, and it became increasingly difficult for national boundaries to impede the flow of anything during what has rightly been called an age of globalization prior to our own.84 Consider in this regard the North Atlantic world where people, goods, capital, production techniques, and ideas all “slipped across national borders” with what has been described as “the fluidity of quicksilver.” In the case of people, this initially meant immigration by Irish Catholics to the United States in the aftermath of the Potato Famine in the 1840s, followed by southern and eastern Europeans, who crossed the Atlantic in record time thanks to the advent of the steamship and the liner. Many of these millions who settled in the United States retained close family connections with their country of origin, often sending money, sometimes visiting back home, and welcoming distant relatives to join them. The result was the creation of elaborate and long-lasting transatlantic kinship networks extending far beyond the confines of any European nation, and this in turn meant the newly arrived immigrants themselves rarely assimilated as fully into the United States as the common notion of the melting pot would imply.85
These transnational flows of people were accompanied by equally unprecedented transnational flows of capital and commodities, resulting in a global order of industrial interdependence extending from Birmingham to Toronto, from San Francisco to Berlin, in which national boundaries and national differences often seemed to dissolve and disappear. By the late nineteenth century, visitors to the advanced industrial regions of the Old and the New World were not so much impressed by their differences, but rather by their marked similarities. They were generally to be found astride coal-bearing seams, extending from the Ruhr to Belgium and northern France, across the English Channel to the “Black Country,” Manchester, and the Clyde, and thence across the Atlantic
to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.86 They spawned a new breed of monster city or urban agglomeration, increasingly populated in both Europe and North America by recently arrived immigrants: in the German Ruhr, for instance, over a quarter of the miners spoke Polish in 1890, and in Andrew Mellon’s Pittsburgh twenty years later, the same proportion of the city’s population was foreign (i.e., European) born.87 With an attendant growth in trade unionism, engaging in ever more bitter disputes between employers and workers, organized labor also assumed an unprecedentedly international perspective. During the 1880s, the organizers of the American Knights of Labor canvassed for recruits in the English Midlands, and in the decades that followed, British and American fraternal delegates traded places at their respective annual labor union gatherings.
Likewise, when politicians, professors, policymakers, and pundits addressed the social problems of industrialization and urbanization, they did so as part of an international rather than a nationally specific conversation. Factory legislation pioneered by the British in the 1840s was replicated in France and Germany in the 1870s; Danish old-age pensions were imported (via New Zealand) to Britain: these are but two examples of a widespread pattern of national legislative borrowing that formed “a crazy quilt of transnational influences and appropriations.”88 Many individuals with particular interests and expertise in contemporary social issues moved from nation to nation and from continent to continent. Among them was William Pember Reeves, the architect of the late-nineteenth-century New Zealand labor reforms. Forced out of government in 1896, he gravitated to London, where, absorbed into Fabian circles, he lectured widely on New Zealand welfare policy. Another was William Dawson. A British economic journalist, he was dispatched to Germany in the 1880s and wrote a series of books explaining German welfare reforms to a British audience. Ties between American progressives and policymakers in England and Germany were equally close. None of these figures would have considered the nation to be the best unit of collective existence or identity in which to treat, analyze, or assess contemporary social issues: they thought about them in transnational and global terms.89