EPOCHS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY:

REFORMATION TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

COURSE GUIDE

Professor Geoffrey Hosking

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Epochs of European Civilization:

Reformation to the Twenty-First Century Professor Geoffrey Hosking
University College London

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Epochs of European Civilization: Reformation to the Twenty-First Century Professor Geoffrey Hosking

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Lecture content 2006 by Geoffrey Hosking Course guide 2006 by Recorded Books, LLC

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Course Syllabus Epochs of European Civilization: Reformation to the Twenty-First Century

About Your Professor ......................................................................................................4 Introduction ......................................................................................................................5 Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3 Lecture 4 Lecture 5 Lecture 6 Lecture 7 Lecture 8 Lecture 9 Lecture 10 Lecture 11 Lecture 12 Lecture 13 Lecture 14 The Reformation: Luther and Calvin..........................................................6 The Catholic Reformation and Confessionalization ................................12 The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment....................................17 Military Change and Enlightened Absolutism........................................24 Commercial Empire, Constitutional Government, and the Financial Revolution ..........................................................................29 The French Revolution and Napoleon ....................................................37 The Industrial Revolution and Urbanization ............................................43 The Rise of German Nationalism ............................................................48 The First Global Economy and Socialism ..............................................55 The First World War and Fascism ..........................................................61 Communism, the Soviet Union, and the Second World War................................................................................................69 Rebuilding Europe after 1945: The West and the European Movement ..............................................................................74 Communist Europe, 19451989 ..............................................................81 After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: New Hopes and New Challenges ......................................................................................87

Course Materials............................................................................................................93

Photo courtesy of Professor Geoffrey Hosking

About Your Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Geoffrey Hosking is a professor of Russian history, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, at University College London. After teaching himself Russian as a teenager, he has spent most of his life teaching and researching Russian history. He gave the Reith lectures in 1988 and is the author of the bestselling History of the Soviet Union (which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History), Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, The Awakening of the Soviet Union, The First Socialist Society, and many other books. For ten years, he has taught a course intended to introduce students to the main themes, institutions, and ideas of European history.

Introduction
The period stretching from the Reformation to the twenty-first century proved a time of radical change for Europeand with the continents far-reaching influence, for the entire world as well. In terms of religion, day-to-day home and work life, and national identity, this epoch of European history abounds with fascinating events that include everything from violent revolution and conflict to breathtaking scientific discoveries. This course provides a greater understanding of the role played by such influential figures as Luther, Calvin, Napoleon, Stalin, and other key figures of the period. Further, the importance of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the nation-state, World Wars, and the Cold War is expounded upon in a lively analysis bound to shed new light not only on world history, but on the present state of the world and the future of global politics.

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Lecture 1: The Reformation: Luther and Calvin The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Diarmaid MacCulloughs The Reformation: A History.

The Practice and Price of Saving Souls During the Middle Ages, the Roman Church had not succeeded in establishing secular power, but it had turned itself into a vast and highly successful international business whose commodity was the salvation of souls. Confession and penance were part of the churchs attempt to maintain harmony in the community. Absolution would not be given while the believer remained unreconciled with a neighbor. In case of serious illness, the priest would administer extreme unction, the last confession, so that the believer was in a fit condition to face his maker. After death, in return for a legacy, parish priests or monks would say prayers on behalf of the deceased. The Church invented a new concept to enable it to extend its power into the afterlifePurgatory. Most sinners would not go straight to heaven, but must endure Purgatory for a number of years. The Church claimed that it could ensure those years were increased or reduced according to endowments given to it. During the Crusades, the Church began to sell indulgences, promises that after death the believer would have so many yearsaccording to his paymentdeducted from his allotted time in Purgatory. In the early sixteenth century, there was a brisk trade in indulgences, because the pope was rebuilding the Church of St. Peter in Rome and needed the finance. There were many in the late Medieval Church who criticized it as too worldly, bureaucratic, or power-mad. Christian belief was becoming more fervent, especially after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. People were also developing their own individual faith, and there was great emphasis on the humanity of Christ. Heretical beliefs were common, and the Church gave great energy to stamping them out. Martin Luther Almost no one, however, rejected the fundamental notion that the Church was able to mediate between the individual believer and God. The first to do so consistently and seriously was Martin Luther, a young, conscientious Augustinian monk. Initially, his complaint against the Church was indulgences, which he claimed could not possibly have the power attributed to them. That was the subject of the 95 Theses he sent to the Archbishop of Mainz in 1517 and is said to have nailed to the door of the university church in Wittenberg. Luther subsequently became convinced that what was really at issue was not merely indulgences, but the Churchs entire claim to be able to save souls. This, he argued, was entirely a matter between the individual 6

LECTURE ONE

conscience and God. The individual could receive all the guidance he needed by reading the Scriptures. Luther set forth his views in three main writings: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church On the Freedom of a Christian In 1520, Luther was formally excommunicated by a papal bull, which he publicly burned. Meanwhile, the Emperor Charles V called for him to attend an Imperial Reichstag at Worms (1521). Luther apologized for the vehemence of some of his statements, but stood by their essential meaning. He refused to recant unless his opponents could demonstrate his errors to him by reference to the Scriptures. The Reichstag condemned him, but he was kidnapped by Elector Frederick of Saxony and placed in honorable imprisonment in the Wartburg, near Eisenach. Here he carried out the formidable task of translating the entire Bible into German, which he considered essential if Germans were to live a proper religious life. By this time, he had quite a number of enthusiastic supporters, many of whom thought the end of the world was approaching. The parish of Wittenberg was reforming itself in line with Luthers teachings, and other German towns were beginning to do so as well. In the end, though, Lutheran churches kept many of the features of the Roman Church, including bishops and a central organization at the national level, though it was headed by the secular ruler rather than by the pope. Priests continued to receive special training and to be specially ordained, though they were allowed to marry and have families. Other differences include the following: Having only two sacraments Giving much more emphasis to preaching the Word More emphasis on activity by the whole congregation rather than the priest alone John (Jean) Calvin Other reformers were more radical, notably Jean Calvin. His study of the Bible in the original languages convinced him that the Catholic Church was no longer truly scriptural in its practices. Calvin attributed even greater importance than Luther had to creating a church on the right foundations. He put down his recommendations in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (published 1536 and subsequently much revised). He believed the community of the faithful was the parish congregation, and for him, the Church was an association of such congregations. There was no apostolic succession and no hierarchy, no bishops or popes; central church government was carried on by elected assemblies and their executive officers. Each congregation had ministers or presbyters to preach and provide pastoral care. Calvin established a church of this type in Geneva, closely allied to the city council, whichafter a strugglesupported him.

Enthusiastic Calvinists would go to churches, removing or even smashing crucifixes and statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary as idolatrous. There were a number of attempts to negotiate agreements between Lutheran and Calvinist churches. The only one that succeeded was at the Reichstag of Augsburg in 1530. The result was the Augsburg Confession, which was presented to Charles V as the basis for talks in Rome. But the talks broke down and there was no reunion with Rome. The Augsburg Confession remained as the minimal statement of Protestantism. Ultimately, the Lutheran and Reformed churches remained distinct and unreconciled. This greatly weakened their combined capacity to resist resurgent Catholicism. Both Luther and Calvin abolished monasteries. Ordinary believers were expected to try to observe a standard of holiness previously thought appropriate for monkssecular asceticism. Why Did the Reform Faith Catch On? Despite open hostility from both the pope and the emperor, the reform movement caught on for several reasons. 1. It answered the spiritual aspirations of the newly literate, especially in the cities of England, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. During the late Middle Ages, many of them experimented with new forms of self-government, and the reformed faith, especially Calvinism, offered a religion that seemed to give spiritual justification for the experiments. 2. Secular rulers had a direct interest in adopting the Protestant doctrine of church-state relations. They could now a. Expropriate church lands and property, including those of monasteries. b. Take over tithes and turn them into royal taxes. c. Transform ecclesiastical law-courts into royal courts, regulating family and moral matters that had previously been handled by the Church. d. Appoint senior churchmen themselves. e. Take over education and welfare from the Church. This is the start of the expanding role of the modern state. For these reasons, many German princes and cities adopted Lutheranism, along with the kings of Denmark and Sweden. In England, Henry VIII made himself head of the Church without changing much of its doctrine, liturgy, or administration, leaving a confused and changing situation that persisted until the late seventeenth century. In France, Poland, and Hungary, the reformed religion was adopted by priests, nobles, or urban elites ad hoc. Local congregations, or conventicles, grew up under their protection. In Poland, Protestants achieved a majority in the sejm (parliament) and gained an undertaking from the king that he would observe religious toleration. The Hungarian monarch, under direct threat from the Ottomans, could not afford the luxury of alienating leading nobles by persecuting their religion; so Protestantism flourished there for a time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

LECTURE ONE

France France is a complicated story. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Huguenots enjoyed a precarious freedom to worship in their own way, but when they were thought to challenge the power of monarch or church, they were ruthlessly cut down. The St. Bartholomews Eve massacre (August 24, 1572) was followed by pogroms against Huguenots in other towns. Perhaps as many as 5,000 people were killed. Recent research suggests that the reformed religion was probably popular mainly among elites, rather than among the common people, most of whom were illiterate and hence unable to regulate their own piety according to the Scriptures. Sectarianism and the Radical Reformation The shaking up of religious discipline meant that many movements arose that did not either remain with the carefully ordered thinking of the main reformers or adhere to their compromise with existing forms of government. Calvin had taught that only a few people had been preordained by Gods grace for salvation. The radical reformers abandoned any claim to act for the whole of a given territorial community and explicitly accepted into membership only those they deemed worthy by their belief and moral behavior communities of saints. They would usually mark this acceptance by the adult baptism (or rebaptism). They called themselves Baptists. Many sects believed that the second coming of Christ and the end of the world were near and prepared themselves consciously for this event. Some held that true holiness was only to be found in communities of egalitarianism, poverty, and shared worldly goods. In 1525, the town council of Mhlhausen, in Thuringia, central Germany, was taken over by a fiery preacher of this kind, Thomas Mntzer, who installed his own eternal council of saints in charge of the town. They also preached in the surrounding countryside, where peasants rose in rebellion. Their motley army was defeated by the Elector of Hesse and Duke of Saxony at the Battle of Frankenhausen (May 1525). Another group of Baptists installed a council of twelve elders in Mnster in 1534 and proceeded to expropriate the wealthy in the name of the poor. They also imposed polygamy, apparently in accordance with selected parts of the Old Testament. More peaceful were the Hutterites, who renounced violence as a matter of principle and established egalitarian and communal colonies in Moravia. Rather similar were the Mennonites who settled in East Frisia and northern Germany. All of these communities believed they alone possessed Gods truth and were responsible for putting it into practice. Long-Term Effects of Protestantism It replaced reliance on the magic of the Church with reliance on individual moral self-betterment and an orderly lifestyle. Although in the early stages, Protestants preached the priesthood of all believers, in practice the emphasis on study and proper training meant the 9

professionalization of the clergy and an even greater separation of them from the laity. Protestants promoted the ideal of secular asceticism through an orderly and chaste family life and the idea of the calling in commercial and professional life. Though they theoretically accepted predestination, they believed in the power of the human will to achieve moral and social improvement. Although Protestants insisted on the equality of women, and their special and honored place in domestic life, they insisted on paternal authority within the family. They also tended in public life to reinforce patriarchal rule. By acknowledging the importance of personally cultivated piety and a direct relationship to God, they opened the way to religious freedom.

LECTURE ONE

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why did Martin Luther pose such a challenge to the teachings of the Roman Church? 2. Why did the reform movement catch on?

Suggested Reading
MacCullough, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Other Books of Interest

Gray, Madeline. The Protestant Reformation: Beliefs and Practices. Brighton, East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2003. Hopfl, Harr, ed. Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Lecture 2: The Catholic Reformation and Confessionalization The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Michael A. Mulletts The Catholic Reformation.

In the Middle Ages, most people were members of some kind of association: guild, estate, or manor, headed by a person. The relationship with God was mediated by the association and the person. By the late Middle Ages, it was becoming apparent that human beings, especially the educated, urbanized, or wealthy, were understanding themselves more and more in isolation, as separate and distinctive individuals, in more direct relationship with both the ruler (now becoming the sovereign state) and with God, and becoming more rational in their perception of reality. Protestantism reinforced both tendencies, but so also, in the long run, did Catholicism. There is still a major distinction, though: the Catholic Church continued to provide a solid framework of hierarchy, miracle, and discipline, which enabled the individual to order his or her spiritual life. The Protestant churches, by contrast, laid greater emphasis on the individuals own judgement, the capacity to search ones own heart, and the ability to order ones own life with the support of a self-governing congregation. The Catholic Church presented a picture of the universe in which God was still directly involved, intervening from time to time to produce miracles. Protestants did not believe that divine power worked in that way: they held rather that it was revealed in the ordinary workings of the universe, which could be investigated and understood through science and mathematics. Theirs was a rational and scientific worldview. Differences Between Catholicism and Protestantism One can see the difference in the practice of confession and penance. In the Catholic Church, each believer was expected, before taking communion, to confess to a clergyman. The priest would advise the believer how not to sin again and would prescribe a penance whose performance would purge the sin and reconcile him to the Church. Protestants had no such tradition: they held that believers could and should improve themselves through prayer, Bible study, meditation, or perhaps serious conversation with a pastor or family and friends. Catholics believed that, when a properly ordained priest blessed the bread and the wine, a miracle known as transubstantiation took place and the bread and wine actually turned into the body and blood of Christ. Protestants held a variety of complicated beliefs, but few of them actually held that a miracle was taking place. The Catholic Church was reshaping itself in the same way as the emerging absolute monarchies of Europe, while the Protestant approach fitted more the 12

LECTURE TWO

self-governing city-states and later on the constitutional republics and monarchies of the late eighteenth to twentieth century. Reform: The Role of the Clergy Reform in the Catholic Church was driven forward by the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563), which ended by anathematizing the teaching of Luther and Calvin and upholding the Churchs doctrine that its authority rested both on Scripture and tradition, and that salvation required both faith and the mediation of the Church. But it did abolish some of the abuses of which Luther had complained, notably indulgences. Most importantly, it set out to reform and rebuild the Church, so that it could carry out its self-appointed functions more satisfactorily. At the center of the reform was the role of the priest. Whereas Protestant churches brought their pastors and ministers closer to the people, notably by allowing them to marry and have families, the Catholic Church increased the distance between priest and congregation. The priest was to be celibate. He was to be trained in a seminary where he would study the Scriptures, Church history, Latin, and pastoral theology. He would wear distinct vestments. During the service, he would prepare the Eucharist with his back to the congregation, and he would conduct the service in Latin. The exact form of the service and prayers were laid down for each Sunday of the year in the missal. The only task the priest discharged in the vernacular during the service was to preach a sermon. He was expected to back his teachings up by running a Sunday school for children. For this purpose, he would use the New Catechism. Ordinary believers had to abandon long-established semi-pagan practices that many of them cherishedtreating a particular grove or stream as sacred, for example, and saying special prayers there at critical times, such as illness or childbirth. This kind of reform was supported by Protestants, too, in fact, even more vehemently. Recent research suggests that reformed religion, of both the Protestant and Catholic variety, was accepted with reluctance by the less educated and illiterate. The function of bishops was to ensure that throughout their diocese, the priests could do their job properly. Each bishop had to reside permanently in his diocese and make its care his major concern. The Holy City At the very center, Rome, sixteenth-century popes acted to make the city worthy of the ultimate power in Europe. Pius V tried to cleanse it morally by banning bullfighting, expelling prostitutes, and draping the nude statues in the museums. He also made Rome into a showpiece for the faith so that pilgrims to the Holy City found a worthy setting for their devotions, and also an expression of the authority and grandeur of the Church. Whereas some Protestants had banned images altogether, the Catholics made them more conspicuous and impressive.

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New Orders New orders were established at this time to carry forward the work of the reform. The most prominent were the Jesuits, approved by the pope in 1540. Ignatius Loyola, their founder, was a soldier, and his temperament was that of the medieval Spanish knight, fighting a crusade against Islam. But he supplemented it with a care for personal spiritual development more characteristic of Protestants. His spiritual exercises show great psychological insight: they set out the temptations and difficulties the Christian soul can encounter and how one should struggle against them. The Society of Jesus began as a group of young men meeting to pray and discuss the Scriptures. They took similar oaths to monks, but undertook to live and work in the world, with the supreme aim of defending the Catholic Church, holding back and, where possible, reversing the tide of Protestantism. They pledged absolute obedience to the pope, and their structure was like the bureaucracy of an absolute monarch, centralized and hierarchical. Members of the order underwent an unusually long education. Typically, they would live together in a large house near the center of the city, where they would take their meals and worship. But all members of the order had to be mobile and adaptable, ready to go anywhere and perform any service that their superiors should require. Jesuits became a formidable and creative influence on the world of the seventeenth century and eighteenth century. They set up many schools and universities, where they taught secular academic subjects to the highest level. They set up charitable associations. They sent missionaries to foreign countries, including China, Japan, and South America. Several Jesuits served as personal confessorsand therefore, in effect, as advisersto monarchs and nobles. Antagonists and Skeptics Their enemiesand they were many, even inside the Catholic Church accused them of Machiavellianism, that is, of being prepared to adopt any means, however morally dubious, to achieve their ends, to such an extent that in the end they corrupted the Church itself. There is no doubt that their influence on the religious, cultural, and even economic life of Europe was immense, and that they imported into the Church a spirit of organization, efficiency, energy, and rationality that one might otherwise think of as being more typical of Protestants. The Catholic Reformation was successful in a number of ways. It not only ensured that the Catholic Church survived the challenge of Protestantism, but it also actually reversed the tide. In a number of countries where Protestants had been gaining ground in the early to mid-sixteenth century, Catholics regained the initiative thereafter: France, Belgium, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the cities of the Rhineland.
LECTURE TWO

Similarities Between Catholic and Protestant Reformations The Catholic and Protestant kinds of reform had much in common, so much so that some historians have taken to using the term confessionalization to apply to social changes being promoted by both. These changes were typi14

cally promoted together by church and state. The Church, for example, was gaining control over all stages of marriage and the setting up of a new family, and at the same time its clergymen were acting as unpaid agents of the state in registering births, marriages, and deaths. It was only from this time that the state began to acquire really reliable information about the size and distribution of its populationinformation essential for more efficient taxation and army recruitment. In setting up and running schools, seminaries, and universities, the Church was systematizing the way in which people gained literacy, numeracy, and other skills, which fitted them for economic activity and state service. In social life in general, both churches preached a way of life that was rational, orderly, restrained, and polite. They both abhorred gambling, whoring, heavy drinking, swearing, and all kinds of vulgar behavior. Witch-Hunting For many ordinary people in Europe, the austere rationality of the new social and religious life was a great psychological strain. One can see this in the wave of witch-hunting trials that swept parts of Europe at the height of confessionalization. From the late fifteenth century roughly through to the late seventeenth century, some theologians began to preach that the devil had hatched a great conspiracy to undermine and destroy godly society, and had ensnared some members of the communityusually elderly womento conclude a pact with him. According to the story, these so-called witches would gather at Sabbaths, where they would dance naked and perform obscene rituals. In some countries, notably the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and the borderlands of eastern France, clergymen and local magistrates would arrest women and accuse them of these offenses in trials conducted in great detail, often with torture of the accused. Local people gave lurid evidence of their strange and abhorrent behavior, some of which, however, consisted merely of old popular pagan practices now condemned by the Church. On conviction, the witches would be burnt at the stake, and their remains buried outside hallowed ground. These kinds of collective panics were probably partly caused by the Churchs banning of methods that ordinary people used to protect themselves against evil, methods such as amulets and charms, faith healing, love magic, and divination. Deprived of traditional comforts, people were more inclined to give credence to tales of impending doom, brought about by neighbors whom they otherwise might have thought eccentric or even objectionable, but would not have wished to destroy.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. What are the major differences between Catholicism and Protestantism? 2. What new orders were established to carry on the work of reform?

Suggested Reading
Mullett, Michael A. The Catholic Reformation. London: Routledge, 1999.

Other Books of Interest

Bireley, Robert. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999. Luebke, David Martin, ed. The Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

LECTURE TWO

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Lecture 3: The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment The Suggested Reading for this lecture is James R. Jacobs The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 15001700.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw great change in the way people viewed nature and the place of human beings within it. The ancient Greeks, with important contributions from the Arabs, had dominated the way people had approached these questions. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, all matter was made up of four elements: air, fire, earth, and water, each of which contained its own spirit or tendency, according to which each strove to reach its natural, or God-given, place in the universe. There was a radical distinction between heaven and earth: heavenly bodies were made of air and fire and hence were purer and less gross than earthly bodies. According to the system devised by Ptolemy, a Greek scholar in Alexandria in the second century AD, they were each held in crystal spheres revolving round the earth, the stars in a fixed sphere, the planets in concentric wandering spheres. Each planet and star thus moved in a circle, and it was thought that as it did so it produced a single musical note, deeper the further it was from the earth. This derived from the system of Pythagoras, which was both mathematical and musical. A New Way of Looking at the Universe The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed a new way of looking at the universe. The view that the earth was at the center of the universe yielded to a new cosmology, in which at first the sun was the center, then nothing was: the universe became vast and unfocused, and earth became just a minor planet orbiting one of many suns. The animist view of nature was abandoned for a mechanical onethings were regarded no longer as having spirits, motives, or even tendencies, but rather as passive objects subject to external forces. Science lost its moral content. A qualitative and teleological view of nature was replaced by a quantitative and instrumental oneeverything could now be measured and expressed in terms of numbers. Nature was no longer seen as an organism, rather as a machine that could be used for human purposes. Past authority and organized common sense gave way to empirical observation, combined where possible with the experimental method, quantitative measurement, and logical or mathematical reasoning. Francis Bacon Francis Bacons (15611626) Novum Organum (1620) and New Atlantis 17

(1626) argued that all previous systems of knowledge were poorly founded. They all needed to be subjected to doubt, discussion, and criticism, and replaced where necessary. He proposed to do so by systematically observing and recording natural phenomena, measuring them, tabulating them, and proceeding by induction to build up a general theory of nature. This was the plan of his Great Instauration, which was left unfinished at his death. In Bacons view, mans knowledge of the world had been lost or distorted at the fall of Adam, and thanks to the obscurantist Catholic Church. Ren Descartes Ren Descartes (15961650) established universal skepticism as a basic principle for scientific investigation. The only certainty: I think, therefore I am. But one implication of this certainty was that even human beingslet alone natural objectsare divided into soul and body, without any obvious connection between the two. He laid the basis for the view that matter is lifeless, without spirit or tendency, a pure object of casual and mechanical processes. In this view, Deism, the universe has been set in motion by God, who then simply let it run according to the laws of mechanics. He developed analytic geometry, which proved to be a powerful mathematical tool. Many apparently irregular phenomena (the speed of a body dropping from a height, for example) can be measured by plotting observations on a graph. This was the first step toward calculus. Copernicus The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology had envisaged the heavenly bodies revolving in perfect spheres around the earth. But the observed movements of the planets were difficult to reconcile with this theory. Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik [14731543]) proposed that they could be better explained if one hypothesized that they went round the sunand the earth did, too. He knew the Church would disapprove, and his book proposing this theory, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, was only published as he was dying in 1543. It was condemned by the Church, and did not solve all the problems raised by observations of heavenly bodies, so that its full importance was not appreciated for some time. Galileo But the problems Copernicus had left open were solved during the following century by the use of improved telescopes and more systematic observation. Galileo Galilei (15641642) was the first to use the telescope systematically. He was able to observe and describe more stars than anyone previously, and to show that the sun was just one among a huge number of stars. His publication A Dialogue on the Great World Systems (1632) was condemned by the Vatican. He was summoned to Rome for trial and, when threatened with torture, publicly retracted his view that the earth moves around the sun. Galileo was also a pioneer of experimentation. It had been thought that heavy bodies fell to earth faster than light ones because they had a greater tendency to do so. Galileo demonstrated that, if one created a vacuum, then heavy and light bodies reached the earth at the same time; in other words, air resistance was the crucial factor, not any tendency. 18

LECTURE THREE

Johann Kepler Johann Kepler (15711630) cleared up the discrepancies in Copernicuss table by hypothesizing that the planets move not in perfect circles, but in ellipses. He took up the ideaproposed by William Gilbert in 1600that the sun was a giant magnet, and its attraction explained why the planets did not move in a straight line out into the depths of the universe. Keplers work was the origin of the theory of gravity. It explained observable facts well, but could not clarify what the nature of gravity was. Gravity seemed insubstantial and even occult. Descartes proposed that the universe was composed of a tenuous and rarefied substance called ether, which was arranged in vortices (whirlpools); these vortices then explained planetary motions. Isaac Newton Isaac Newton (16421727) devised a new form of mathematics that we now call calculus (though Leibniz was doing so independently at the same time and actually published his work first). This enabled one to measure curved lines, and also the spaces beneath a curve, and thus enormously extended the range of mathematics. He used his tool to analyze the heavenly motions and stated the Three Laws of Motion: 1. A body stays at rest unless a force is brought to bear upon it. 2. The change of motion is proportional to the force. 3. To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Using Keplers figures, he showed that the motion of the planets around the sun can be explained by hypothesizing that every body attracts every other both with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. He called this force gravity. He showed in his Opticks (1704) how to verify results by hypothesis, observation/experiment, and formulation of new theory. This work was also fundamental for the study of heat, light, magnetism, and later, electricity. Interestingly, Newton never fully accepted Descartes view of matter as lifeless and mechanical. He was an Arian in religion (that is, he believed Christ was a second-order deity, created by God the Father, and perhaps in some sense present as the spirit of matter). He was also an alchemist and spent much of his life looking for the philosophers stone. Like Bacon, he believed human beings had once possessed perfect knowledge of the universe that had subsequently been lost. Newtons theories were brought together in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which is probably the single most important work in modern science. Scientific Method As a result of Newtons work, the scientific method became the accepted standard of investigation into natural phenomena: 1. Review existing knowledge and identify unsolved questions within it. 19

2. Devise a hypothesis to resolve those difficulties. 3. Carry out observations, or conduct experiments to test the hypothesis. 4. Tabulate the results. 5. Revise the theory according to the results obtained. 6. Publish the findings as a paper that explains precisely the methods used, so that later investigators can replicate them. Scientific Societies Even though the new philosophy required scientists to trust only their senses, not authoritative texts, no one could replicate all experiments or verify all observations and measurements. So they needed a new version of the professional ethic. They achieved this by creating a new version of the medieval guild in which members could get to know each other well and discuss each others work openly, honestly, and fearlessly. Royal Society of London The Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660 at Geshams College by several mathematicians and scientists. It received a royal charter in 1662, but no subsidy. It was followed by the Acadmie des Sciences of Paris (1666). During the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, all the large kingdoms of Europe and some of the smaller ones set up equivalent institutions, and often also universities. In Germany, universities from the late eighteenth century were organized on the basis of seminars, where professors conducted research with the aid of assistants and communicated their results to colleagues and students. At the Royal Society, seminars or lectures could be held at which scientists would deliver their results and have them discussed. It should be noted that at this stage science was usually called natural philosophy. Those publishing were instructed to use a precise, lucid, and easily comprehensible language, so as to communicate their findings to as broad an audience as possible. Scientific Advances During the eighteenth century, through the application of the scientific method, great advances were made in many fields, including chemistry, electricity, and botany. In most European countries, by the mid-eighteenth century, institutions had been set up devoted to the systematic generation and dissemination of new knowledge. The Enlightenment: Pietism and Neo-Stoicism By the late seventeenth century, Protestantism was abandoning predestinarianism and turning to a more active, outwardgoing faith that reunited with the Stoic tradition: Confidence in human faculties, especially in the use of reason and the restraint of passions. An awakening social conscience, combined with awareness that the reformed church had not reached the hearts of the masses. 20

LECTURE THREE

 Belief in the human capacity to bring about beneficial social change through dedicated collaborative action. This is a new element that seems to go along with the scientific revolution. This first became a basis for state policy in Prussia, especially during the reign of Frederick William I (16881740). Already from the 1690s, the University of Halle became a center of Pietist teachings where cameralism was taught. August Hermann Francke (16631727) devised a method of teaching that compressed complex ideas into simple, easily memorable phrases. Frederick William I went through a conversion experience in his teens. He was very impressed with Francke and worked closely with the Pietists in reforming many aspects of Prussian life. Deism Deism is a belief in a God who has created the universe and set it in motion, but who subsequently does not intervene in its workings. God was the first cause in the scientific worldview. It is associated with the idea of religious tolerance, that all religions reveal something of the divine truth. Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (16891755), was one of the first to adapt the scientific outlook to the study of the variety of human affairs. He did so by assuming the viewpoint of the uninvolved outsider. His 1721 publication of The Persian Letters presented the customs of France and its system of government through the eyes of a Persian prince. His greatest work was LEsprit des Lois (1748), which surveyed the great variety of political systems, the causes that gave them birth, and the laws and sentiments that sustained them. Montesquieu classified political systems into three categories: 1. Monarchy: sustained by honor 2. Despotism: sustained by fear 3. Republicanism: sustained by virtue He believed in limited government and the separation of powers. A good government was one that was restricted, both by intermediate institutions and by the laws. He was very influential in the North American colonies and what became the United States. Diderot Denis Diderot (17131784) was the key figure among the so-called philosophes, who aimed to introduce the scientific method into the study of social life and use it for the benefit of humanity at large. His greatest achievement was to bring together a group of thinkers and scientists to compile the Encyclopdie. Diderots intention was that the Encyclopdie be a compendium of all useful human knowledge to be used as a weapon against the forces of obscurantism and ignorance in church and state. Voltaire Franois-Marie Arouet Voltaire (16941778) was perhaps the first professional writer, in the sense that he earned his living entirely by his publications. He was given a broad, humane education by the Jesuits. In his youth, he 21

was greatly impressed by Newton, both by Newtons method and the fact that such a figure (innovative specialist) was so widely respected in England. Voltaire applied Newtons method to all fields of human knowledge. As one of the contributors to the Encyclopdie, he wrote on history, philosophy, and comparative religion. Voltaire believed that there were certain fundamental beliefs about morality and natural law that all human beings could share. He repeatedly lambasted what he saw as the bigotry and narrow-minded inhumanity of the French Catholic Church of his day. Several times, he intervened in French politics to defend the oppressed, becoming, in effect, the first human rights advocate. In general, Voltaire believed that human beings were capable of building a better world, and that God would approve of their doing so. Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) was born in Geneva and brought up as a Calvinist, but converted to Catholicism and later underwent a second conversion experience, while resting under a tree. The result of the experience was his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. So he became a kind of inverted Calvinist. He believed that all human beings are basically good, but that society has corrupted them. This removes the moral problem from the Church and brings it into the sphere of politics. His principal aim was to help human beings recover their original innocence and spirit of community to re-create the noble savage. He also devised an educational system enabling young people to discover their true emotions by exposure to nature and to the example of humane tutors. In his Social Contract, Rousseau wrote about the need to devise institutions that would enable men to make laws for themselves. He believed sovereignty should come from the people. Rousseau very much admired the city-states of ancient Greece and recommended them as a basis for government. He despised the English parliamentary system. Rousseau held that the object of a legislative assembly was to discern and put into effect the general will. His ideal was that all citizens should gather and express their views. A vote would then indicate the real general will. In essence, the individual on the one hand, and the entire community on the other, became the basic units of politics, exactly the opposite of Montesquieu. Rousseau himself was worried that this system would not work, and added to the Social Contract an extra chapter in which he prescribed a civil religion, to which all citizens should accede. If they violated its commandments, they were to be put to death. The main problem with Rousseaus work is that ancient Greek city-states cannot be revived in the modern world. An attempt to do so would lead either to totalitarianism or chaos. The easiest way to bind atomistic individuals of all social classes together in society is by the force of nationalism. Rousseau, in his Confessions, describes his sudden and unexpected intense pride at seeing the French army marching past on one occasion. In other words, Rousseaus thinking prepared the way both for the French revolution and the national politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 22

LECTURE THREE

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. How did perceptions of the universe change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? 2. What is the scientific method?

Suggested Reading
Jacob, James R. The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 15001700. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Other Books of Interest

Henry, John. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

23

Lecture 4: Military Change and Enlightened Absolutism The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Brian M. Downings The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe.

The Reformation, confessionalization, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenmentall these developments wrought a revolution in government. They gave rulers far more confidence in their ability to intervene in the fates of human beings and to mobilize and exploit the resources of nature and population for their own purposes. What brought them all together and gave them a focus and a purpose was what some historians have called the military revolution. Broadly speaking, we can discern three types of army in Europe between the Middle Ages and the French Revolution. Feudal Levies The key figure was the heavily armored knight on horseback. He would be backed by retainershis own vassals or serfssometimes supplemented by urban militias, or even tribal hordes in the more backward regions of Europe. This form of army was more or less self-financing. Indeed, the entire medieval social and economic structure, at least in the countryside, existed to finance him and equip him with everything he needed. A monarch would call on his knights services without paying them. He would also have a much larger retinue than most, but he could usually finance it from the proceeds of his own domains. Mercenary Armies In the late Middle Ages, there were new technical developments: personal firearms, cast-iron cannon, entrenched fortifications. Artillery could now mount sustained bombardments, opening breaches in old castle walls designed to provide cover against arrows. This is how Sultan Mehmet II, the Ottoman Emperor, broke into Constantinople and finally ended the Byzantine Empire in 1453. Similarly, Charles VIII of France, in the 1490s, conquered the proud Italian cities, the home of the Renaissance. So cities and fortresses would be surrounded by ever-thicker stone walls, protected in front by a ditch and by sloping earth ramparts. At intervals, there would be a bastion, or projecting tower, from which cannon or small-arms fire could sweep the attackers as they tried to cross the ditch.
LECTURE FOUR

Costs These innovations greatly increased the cost of warfare. No knight or lord of the manor could participate on his own account in this kind of combat. Infantry and artillery had become much more important than cavalry. Even monarchs were severely stretched. They had to find new ways of conducting 24

and financing war. Soldiers needed to be highly trained and intensively disciplined. Here the innovators were Gustavus Adolphus (15941692; King of Sweden, 16111632) and Maurice of Nassau (15671625), Prince of Orange, from the Netherlands (Captain-General of Holland and Zeeland, 1585-1625). Maurice was famous for giving all his soldiers entrenching tools so they could dig themselves in quickly when needed, whether in defense or as a preliminary to besieging a city. Adolphus and Maurice trained infantry soldiers to fight in large formations, deployed either in line or in column, to advance rapidly, to change formation when needed, and to bring maximum firepower to bear on a target. To do this effectively, infantrymen needed to be intensively drilled in formation every day. This was the innovation of the French Colonel Jean Martinet, whose name has gone down in history as a byword for ferocious discipline. Soldiers and Mercenaries The easiest way to acquire such soldiers was to hire them ready-trained and led. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, mercenaries were at the center of most European armies. They would be hired in whole units under their captains or colonels, whose job it was to solve the problems of training, supplying, clothing, feeding, and leading their men into battle. The Swiss, Germans, and Scots were thought to make excellent soldiers. For them, war was a kind of commercial enterprise. After a victorious battle, a whole city or region was at their disposal, and it was normal practice for soldiers to drink heavily, rape the women, and then plunder their victims without mercy. Mercenaries were, however, enormously expensive, and if they were not paid in time, they could be extremely dangerous to their employer. The revenues of even a royal domain were utterly insufficient to provide for them. Monarchs had to find new ways of raising resources, of taxing the population more effectively, and of raising revenues on the international money markets. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mercenaries were being increasingly supplemented by state commission armies, that is, native troops called up or conscripted in some manner, then equipped and supplied by the royal treasury. It was crucial to the success of such armies that its men should be imbued with a spirit that inspired them to sacrifice themselves, or at least run grave risks, for the greater good. It might be religious beliefas seen in the New Model Army of Cromwell or the Dutch army under Maurice of Nassauor it might be patriotism. Or most potent of all, it might be a combination of the two. Soldiers had to be treated as full members of a religious congregation or a nation; they needed some education and regular attention to their spiritual condition. Further, a leader had to provision for a soldiers retirement from the army, whether from disablement or old age. So it was not principally scientific advances or Enlightenment ideology that underlay what historians have called enlightened absolutism. Rather, it was military imperatives. But monarchs still wanted to avail themselves of all the technological innovations resulting from the scientific revolution, and also of the spiritual and ideological developments generated by the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

25

Enlightened Absolutism The primary purposes of enlightened absolutism were to begin recruiting the ordinary male population for service in the army, to raise revenues to finance that army, and to improve technology to equip it. Those states that had not adopted the fiscal policies of the Netherlands or Britain had to do this by increasing taxation. The first stage was the centralization of tax collection and recruitmentin Prussia, handled together through one main body, the Kriegskommissariat, later General Directory (set up 1722). Along with tax and recruitment, it also administered the excise and controlled monopoly manufacturers. Later, separate ministries were set up for mining, forestry, and commerce, all concerned with the expansion and mobilization of the countrys economic resources. In some countries, this meant cutting the privileges of the nobility: In France, dueling was forbidden and noble fortified castles were razed. In Prussia (1653), an agreement enrolled the Junkers (landed aristocracy) into state service in return for considerable freedom of action on their estates. In Russia, Peter the Great decreed state service for the nobility. The Table of Ranks reflected their service. In Austria, Joseph II (17801790) abolished serfdom in 1781, tried to fix the rights and duties of nobles, and abolished the special privileges of the Hungarian nobility. But in general, it was difficult for monarchs to override the interests of the nobility. Nobles were usually the most skilled and experienced state servants, and their local influence made them necessary transmission belts for government. Monarchs went further in their practice of absolutism by undermining the privileged position of the church. In Russia, the Patriarchate was abolished in 1721, and the Holy Synod set up more or less as a branch of the state. Thereafter, church lands were expropriated and replaced by a state subsidy; monasteries were required to carry out education or welfare work. In Prussia, religious toleration was decreed with one resultmany Huguenots settled there (fleeing France) and became artisans or professional people. In Spain and Portugal, the Jesuits were expelled from 1759 to 1767. In Austria, religious toleration was decreed in 1781, and full civil rights were granted to Jews and non-Catholics.
LECTURE FOUR

But the state could not afford to alienate the Church completely, for similar reasons and also because monarchs were still usually regarded as ruling by divine right. Measures were taken to ease the poverty and ill health of ordinary people needed for the army: In Prussia, marshes were drained to provide more agricultural land and encourage industry. 26

 In Russia, lands conquered in the south were colonized by Germans and those fleeing religious persecution in other countries. In France and Britain, special provisions were made for maimed veterans and orphans by establishing such institutions as Les Invalides, the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the Foundling Hospital. Educational policies to remove ignorance and also to strengthen the sense of belonging to a political community (or nation) were instituted by the monarch. In all countries, an Academy of Sciences or equivalent was founded: In France, the establishment of the Acadmie Francaise and the publication of dictionaries took place. In Prussia, universal primary education was decreed in 1763. In Russia, Peter I decreed a new alphabet, set up newspapers, and commissioned a dictionary; Elizabeth set up a royal theater for opera and ballet. In Austria, universal primary education was decreed. One should not ascribe too much importance to all these changes. Absolute monarchy was far from being absolute, compared with the twentieth-century state. Monarchs could not dominate fully either the nobility or the Church, and the degree of education, prosperity, or social welfare they could provide for ordinary people was very limited in practice. All the same, it was important that they had taken up these aims. They had come to regard the national economy as a single huge enterprise, which they had to manage: this was the doctrine of materialism. They had begun to conceive of their populations as a community that had to fight together, and therefore that needed a measure of wealth, health, and education that the state had a duty to provide. Some monarchs began to see themselves not as being the state, but as serving it. This embryo was the concept of the nation-state.

27

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. How did mercenary armies affect the ruling structure of governments in the late Middle Ages? 2. What is meant by enlightened absolutism?

Suggested Reading
Downing, Brian M. The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Other Books of Interest

Bushkovitch, Paul, and Peter Baldwin, eds. Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 16711725. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Szabo, Franz A.J. Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 17531780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

LECTURE FOUR

28

Lecture 5: Commercial Empire, Constitutional Government, and the Financial Revolution The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John H. Parrys Trade & Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century.

Europes Empires Crucial to the understanding of Europe from the sixteenth century is its interaction with the rest of the world. Europe was economically and technologically far below the level of China and probably India and Islamic civilization. But Europe had certain advantages that enabled it to perfect its power externally. Europes empires were born at the intersection of the medieval crusading ideal and the modern economic world. The conquest of Granada on January 2, 1492, the final repulsion of the Moors, and the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon aroused millennial hopes in Spain. This was seen as the culmination of a successful crusade. The Spaniards insisted on the conversion of the Muslims and Jews, and conducted compulsory baptisms as a preparation for the second coming of Christ. Subsequently, Spanish troops invaded North Africa to convert the natives, but succeeded only in establishing a few fortified towns. Columbus Christopher Columbus was impelled by similar motives. He had made voyages to West Africa, and believed that by sailing westwards across the ocean he could discover a simpler route than the Portuguese to China and India. Then the conversion of the Oriental peoples to Christianity would be the prelude to the second coming of Christ. Columbus also represented the new-style financial world. He was born in Genoa and spent his early career as an agent of the Genoese banking house, Centurione. He was unable to obtain sponsorship from the Portuguese or Spanish crowns for his first transatlantic voyage, but gained it from Genoese and Florentine banks. On this first voyage, he did not of course find India, but he did land on some Caribbean islands. He was then able to persuade the Spanish monarchy to sponsor his later journeys. The pope blessed the new acquisitions and conceded to the Crown the right to appoint bishops and priests there, which was unprecedented. He laid down a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, to the west of which were Spanish territories, and to the east Portuguese. This division led to many disputes later, but in general ensured that the Portuguese gained what became Brazil. Latin American Empires The conquest of Mexico, including Aztec and Mayan civilizations, took place during the 1520s, leading to the creation of the viceroyalty of New Spain in 1535. 29

The conquest of Peru and Inca civilizations took place during the 1530s, establishing the viceroyalty of Peru in 1542. An abundance of silver was found in the mines of Potosi in the Peruvian (now Bolivian) highlands. The following are some of the results of building the Spanish empire in the New World: A huge loss of native populations caused by epidemics of unfamiliar diseases, drug use, and drinking resulting from trade; destruction of religious systems and removal (usually by death) of native rulers; destruction of ecosystems; deportations of populations, and the stressphysical and psychologicalof unfamiliar forms of labor. A huge influx of gold and silver into Spain, the rest of Europe, and into China. This led to enrichment of the elite, but also to inflation and economic instability. The empire was surprisingly easy to acquire, but proved difficult to defend. First French, then English, and then Dutch privateers would attack Spanish colonial towns and board Spanish ships to plunder them. Three Stages of Empire The European empires in the New World went through three main stages of development. First, individual trading voyages raided rival empires and traded with the natives. Second, monopoly trading companies, with their own ships and armies, acting in the name of the metropolitan monarch, acquired territories and set up trading posts, port facilities, and naval bases. Third, there was a full takeover of administrative control by the metropolitan government, usually motivated by the collapse of indigenous political systems, rebellion, or other disturbances. East India Company Takeover A period from the late-seventeenth to the early-eighteenth century saw a gradual weakening of the Mogul empire in India. This made India more turbulent and led the East India Company to hire troops and naval vessels to secure peace and order, and to defend its trading interestsin rivalry with the French Compagnie des Indes. The East India Company practiced private enterprise imperialism and defeated the French in continuous campaigns from 1757 to 1763. It established control over the rich state of Bengal, which had a successful textile industry and an experienced, well-established banking system. In the following decade, the company either defeated other Indian princes or concluded political and commercial agreements with them. In the latter case, the agreements left the princes in power and local hierarchies and laws still valid, while the company took a share of tax revenues.
LECTURE FIVE

Britain also took up trade with China, buying tea and porcelain. Because Britain at this time had little to offer the Chinese, it paid for those purchases by selling opium grown in India and Afghanistan.

30

Mercantilism The term mercantilism was first used in 1766 by Adam Smith, but there was never a coherent theory of it. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people assumed that the wealth of a kingdom could be measured by the amount of manufacture and trade that went on in and across its borders. The duty of a government was to promote and encourage this economic activity. A major part of it was overseas trading and, if necessary, the acquisition of colonies (certain raw materials and commodities were not available at home). It was then assumed that colonies existed for the benefit of the mother country. Gradually, mercantilism gave way to a broader view of prosperity, seeing it as consisting of the mobilization of all the resourcesland, minerals, money, and the population and its skillsand as part of an international trading system in which one countrys gain was not necessarily another countrys loss. This was the doctrine of free trade. Changes in Attitude to Empire By the late eighteenth century, the British parliament was becoming worried by the behavior of the East India Company officials, which it saw as being in corrupt relationships with Indian princes. Public opinion had turned toward a more pietist religion and toward free trade. The East India Company was compelled to admit missionaries and was gradually brought under the control of Parliament. By the 1840s, the company was virtually a branch of British government. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 was a Hindu reaction against missionaries, Western practices, and against the attempt to eradicate Indian practices. Indians seemingly accepted corrupt practices, but resented Western enlightenment and evangelism, which accentuated perceived racial differences. In 1858, the Government of India Act finally abolished the East India Company. In 1876, Queen Victoria added the title Empress of India to her several other titles. The products of empire became part of the economy of the metropolitan countries and supplied a new consumer civilization. At first, this was enjoyed mainly by the elite, but later spread to most of the population. Some of these exports became main staples for British citizens: tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, rum and other spirits, spices, cotton, and silks. In return, Europe supplied mass-produced manufactured goods, which drove native artisans and workshops out of business. Slavery A major and profitable aspect of the colonial economy was slavery. Colonial companies participated in the slave trade that was common in West Africa and shipped black slaves across the Atlantic to work in the plantations of South America, the Caribbean, and the southern colonies of North America. In South America, the natives had been nearly wiped out by the arrival of Europeans, and in the Caribbean and North America, whites were poorly adjusted to the climate or did not wish to do manual labor. They often argued that blacks were biologically inferior and also heathens incapable of being converted to 31

Christianity. During the voyages across the middle passage, conditions were so appalling that death rates were 10 to 20 percent among the slaves. By the late eighteenth century, Christian opinion was beginning to turn against slavery. In 1807, Britain abolished the slave trade and gradually thereafter slavery itself in its various colonies. This was part of a change in the way European societies regarded empire as a whole. Under the impact of evangelical Protestantism and Enlightenment thought, Europeans were beginning to regard both natives and slaves as fullstatus human beings, with souls to be converted to Christianity, or deserving one day to be given political rightsbut not yet because they were far too primitive and uncivilized. Public Debt and Enlightened Government The technique of public debt first used in the Italian city-states was adopted in the sixteenth century by the provinces of the Netherlands. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Italy was replaced as the focus of international credit by the Netherlands. The Netherlands was also home to a thoroughgoing religious reformation, which saw Calvinist congregations working in alliance with municipalities to provide not only the care of souls, but also social welfare. At the same time, though the Reformed Church was the established one; it tolerated discreet worship by other Christian denominations and Jews, so that the Dutch enjoyed the advantage both of a closely knit official church and that of the diversity offered by dissenters. The Dutch cities developed and extended the fiscal technique first devised in Italyfloating large public loans paid back in the form of annuities, which had a first claim on tax revenues. Bonds were redeemable and saleable. These bonds proved attractive to potential lenders, because municipal councils and provincial estates represented the real wealth of the country, and they could not afford to let their credit be undermined. Lending to them was, therefore, more reliable than lending to absolute monarchs. As a result, the United Provinces raised a long-term debt that considerably exceeded their annual income. In the late seventeenth century, this technique was extended for the first time to a major kingdom. William of Orange came to power in England as a result of the revolution of 1688. He was a Dutchman and he had experience of how a public debt was run. This experience provided the impetus for a constitutional revolution. At its heart was a new set of relationships, which laid the basis for economic growth. Through the Bill of Rights of 1689, the great landowners and London merchants bound William to a constitutional style of rule. They consented to being seriously taxed in order to establish trustworthy forms of public credit in return for control over Parliament, the army, navy, and the state budget. This was the first time the Italian and Dutch method of raising public loans had been tried at the level of a large European monarchy, and it could only be done by a constitutional monarchy whose parliament could render credible the promise to make repayment the first charge on the public revenues. The Bill of Rights provided for the regular election of the House of Commons, on a franchise that ensured the dominance of wealthy financial 32

LECTURE FIVE

and landed intereststhe alliance of the City of London and the large landowners. Along with it, the Mutiny Act restricted the kings power over the army and navy, and his right to declare a state of emergency, both of which he had to share with Parliament. The Church of England remained the established church, but a Toleration Act introduced a limited toleration for other Christian denominations and for Jews, roughly as in the Netherlands. Fiscal Revolution These measures were accompanied by a fiscal revolution that was needed to pay for the unprecedentedly expensive wars of England and the Netherlands against the France of Louis XIV. The key element in the new financial settlement was that landowners paid tax on their land, and merchants and bankers on their profits. From this revenue, Parliament guaranteed the national debt. Between them, the monarchy and Parliament had found a way of tapping revenue from the wealthiest part of the nation and of making that source of revenue utterly reliable. Public Banks It was crucial that this settlement was guaranteed by a public bank. People were reluctant to lend money to monarchs, who, after all, controlled the law courts where they might have to seek redress for nonpayment of the debt. Monarchs had to offer extraordinary security against such an eventuality. A common security was the right to collect taxes: tax farming. But such a method was grossly inefficient and usually meant that the poor paid taxes but the rich did not. Or monarchs borrowed from Jews who were helpless if they did not repay the debt. So monarchs found it better to borrow from banks, which have many public subscribers and are legally answerable for their debts. They spread risk. Banks can go bankrupt, but a monarch would not usually wish to bankrupt an institution on which he relies for his revenues. A bank also issues coins and notes that function as money. If a country sets up one bank as its public or official bank, it then gains a monopoly of minting money and the note issue, and in return guarantees the value of the currency by backing it with its gold deposits. Such public banks existed in Venice, Florence, and Genoa from the sixteenth century, and, in Amsterdam, the Wisselbank was opened in 1609, in Sweden, the Riksbank in 1651. That was the model for the Bank of England, which opened in 1694. Investors who purchased so-called gilt-edged bonds from it had their dividends or annuities guaranteed by Parliament as the first call on tax revenues. The bank had two main functions. First, it managed the governments debt. Second, it guaranteed the value of the pound sterling. It was able to issue paper money. At first, this paper money was backed 100 percent by gold held in the bank. But gradually, as public confidence increased, the bank kept a smaller proportion of the circulating notes as gold in its vaults. This is the fiduciary issue, money backed up by trust alone. These two functions gave wealthy people far more confidence in investing their money, not only in the bank itself, but also in the economy generally. In particular, they were prepared to invest in the national debt, and that enabled the government to borrow huge sums in credit. A so-called sinking fund was 33

created, consisting of outstanding state debt, and investors were invited to purchase shares in it in return for dividends or annuities. Since confidence in the bank was high, the fund was fully subscribed early on, and the national debt remained a permanent institution, almost a benefit, and a way of attracting funds. By 1750, the various bond issues had been amalgamated into consolidated debt, or what were known as consols. They had a low interest rate, because they were believed to be safe. The result was what the historian John Brewer called the military-fiscal state, far more efficient than Britains great rival France at raising both taxes and loans, so that with more modest resources, it was able to mobilize much greater economic power for war-making purposes. Other Methods of Raising Capital: Stock Exchange and Insurance Another engine for the raising of capital was the existence of an informal stock exchange for the sale and purchase of shares in private companies. It took shape in the coffeehouses around Exchange Alley in the City of London. Industrial and commercial enterprises could sell shares to investors willing to risk their money in the hope of sharing in the profits. A formal stock exchange was established in its own building in 1773. The principle gradually became accepted that investors, though technically they were part-owners of the company whose shares they bought, should have their liability limited. It was the origin of the joint-stock company, or what Americans call the corporation. Another way of raising capital and providing stability was through insurance companies. These were first launched in late-medieval Italy, and they provided cover against the risk of trading voyages going wrong. Gradually, insurance companies took on other types of risk: fire, illness, even life itself. Insurance helped to make business more predictable, but it also had another function. Funds that were not needed to compensate those who had suffered reverses could be invested in treasury bonds or joint-stock companies. Insurance companies became a major source of investmentthey not only bolstered confidence, they also became engines of economic growth. Still, many people in England were horrified at the mountains of debt being piled up by the government, at the rise of an idle rentier class living off the labor of the poor, and at the corruption of the wealthy and powerful, who provided each other with easy opportunities of becoming yet richer. Institutions that depend on trust are always vulnerable to rumors of disaster. This was especially true of colonial enterprises. The South Sea Company, set up in 1711 to trade with Spanish America, mainly in slaves, did so well at first that King George I became its governor, and in 1720 Parliament granted it the opportunity to take over the entire national debt. Merchants, bankers, landowners, Members of Parliament, and businessmen generally rushed to subscribe. London was swept by what was called South Sea fever. Actually, though, business had never been as good as expected. Gradually, the company became a pyramid scheme of the kind seen in Russia and Albania in the 1990s, no longer paying dividends out of real profits, but using recent 34

LECTURE FIVE

investments to pay off obligations to somewhat older investors. In September 1720, the bubble burst. Dividends ceased, South Sea shares became almost worthless, and many investors faced ruin. A parliamentary inquiry was held, and it was decided that shareholders should be partly compensated by the issue of Bank of England bonds paying 5 percent. Many people lost a lot of money, but total ruin and loss of confidence was averted. Confidence eventually returned to the financial markets, thanks mainly to the consols. But in France, a similar scheme was tried with even more catastrophic effects. In 1718, John Law, chairman of the Banque Gnrale, had it rechartered as the Banque Royale and combined it with a colonial chartered company, the Compagnie des Indes, which was trading in the Caribbean and the Mississippi basin. This was like combining the Bank of England and the South Sea Company, so that when the bubble burstalso in the summer of 1720it dragged the bank down with it. The French monarchy continued to depend on short-term borrowing and the sale of office, and was desperately short of funds needed for war. In trying to solve that problem, it later precipitated the French Revolution. The Dutch and British system of public finance generated forms of trust that subsequently underlay both the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Most European nations adopted the British pattern of public borrowing during the nineteenth century, along with a state bank and parliamentary control of the state budget. This is the basis of both the nation-state and of the capitalist system. The confidence that makes the capitalist system possible is generated by the fact that financial stability is guaranteed by an institution, Parliament, that represents the real wealth of the country.

35

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. How was Columbus representative of the new-style financial world? 2. What were the three main stages of development that European empires went through in the new world?

Suggested Reading
Parry, J.H. Trade & Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century. London: Phoenix Press, 2001.

Other Books of Interest

Hart, Jonathan. Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Kindleberger, Charles P. A Financial History of Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

LECTURE FIVE

36

Lecture 6: The French Revolution and Napoleon

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is William Doyles The Oxford History of the French Revolution.

During the eighteenth century, part of the growing educated elite in France was coming to view itself as a new kind of public, a potential nation of citizens that was distinct from, and more legitimate than, the monarchy and the Churchand also a more worthy embodiment of la France. The notion of a sacred monarchy was being transformed into the ideal of a sacred people. At its center was the idea of the republic of letters, embodied in the provincial academies, discussion groups, reading circles, and Masonic lodges. The implication was that literate, educated men were the real citizens, worthy to formulate the general will. Fall of the Ancien Regime The fall of the French ancien regime was caused by a deep-seated financial crisis. There were proposals to impose a land tax on the nobles; they objected and demanded the convening of the Estates-General, a parliament of the three estates (clergy, nobility, third estate) that had not met for 175 years. Louis XVI consented. When it met at Versailles in May 1789, representatives of the three estates brought with them cahiers de dolances, setting out requests and grievances. Storming the Bastille Abb Siey` s invited the other estates to join the third in a joint verification of e credentialsthey refused, though a few clergy under Abb Grgoire broke away and joined them, but the nobles stayed aloof. The Third Estate then declared itself the National Assembly and its members took the Tennis Court Oath not to disperse until they had drawn up a constitution reflecting their position as the sovereign nation. After a few days, the king confirmed the National Assembly. But he also moved troops into Paris to keep orderthe electors of Paris feared a plot and set up a militia or national guard (under Lafayette, who had fought in the American War of Independence). They called on the people to defend the National Assembly. Parisians then stormed the Bastille on July 14. The king was forced to withdraw his troops and accept the tricolor as the national flag. Shortly after, the Paris Commune was formed, representing the forty-eight wards of the city, the ordinary people. At the same time, in rural jacqueries (risings) peasants took over landed estates, burned feudal documents, drove out the landowners, and sometimes murdered them. This marked the beginning of emigration of the nobility.

37

Constitutional Monarchy On August 4, 1789, the National Assembly decreed the abolition of all feudal titles, rights, and privileges and confiscated all land held under feudal tenure, but upheld all property rights based on contract. In this constitutional monarchy, the king had the right of suspension veto only for four years. The Assembly was elected by adult males with a modest property qualificationlater on by all adult males (but not women). On August 27, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was issued: human beings are born free and equal; sovereignty resides in the nation as a whole, and all authority derives from it; law is the expression of the general will, formed by the citizens or their representatives; there is separation of powers; and civil liberties are guaranteed. Civil Constitution of the Clergy The Catholic Church would become a national church, but the king and bishops protested, so the National Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It required the dissolution of all monastic orders except those concerned with education or medical care and the expropriation of all church lands. Parish clergy were to be paid by the state and elected by the people of their parish, and they were required to take an oath to the new state. This created an immediate split in the clergy. Probably most clergy favored radical reform of the Church, to give parish priests more voice in its affairs, but many felt that the Church should reform itself and that the state had no right to do so. Crisis in International Affairs Most European governments did not consider the new regime legitimate, as it had been created by rebellion. The new regime for its part regarded monarchs as illegitimate, because they were not elected by the sovereign people. Louis XVI was in private contact with migrs, who were trying to attract support from other European monarchs. In June 1791, he fled to the frontier and was captured at Varennes near the Belgian border. The Prussians and Austrians formed an alliance to restore the absolute monarchy in France. In April 1792, war was declared against the coalitionFrench troops fared poorly, and the Prussians marched toward Paris. The Paris Commune armed the city for battle against the enemy. There was a new sense of radical mass patriotism stimulated by foreign invasion. In July 1792, the declaration La Patrie est en Danger was made. In August 1792, the Paris masses invaded the Tuileries Palace and the National Assembly, demanding the king be tried as a traitorhe was arrested and imprisoned. The Prussians were defeated at Valmy in September, but this was only a temporary easing of the pressure.
LECTURE SIX

In September 1792, France was declared a republic, and a new assembly, the Convention, was elected by universal adult male suffrage. A new calendar was decreed, with September 1792 as the start of year one. La Marseillaise was adopted as the national anthem. In January 1793, the king, now known as Citizen Capet, was tried and condemned to death. 38

In March 1793, a rising began in the Vende, in the west of France, against the execution of Louis, the military conscription, and the closure of churches. A Catholic and Royal Army was formed to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy. Foreign troops crossed the Rhine and the Pyrenees. In April 1793, a Committee of Public Safety was formed to direct the war: the principal figure was Robespierre, a disciple of Rousseau and a radical believer in the sovereignty of the people. Beginning of the Terror Moderate deputies were arrested as traitors and guillotined. Committees of Revolutionary Surveillance sought out potential traitors to bring them before revolutionary tribunals. August 1793, leve en masse (universal conscription): all able-bodied adult males were liable for military service, creating a new concept: the national army. Massive inflation (issue of paper money to finance the war) made it difficult to feed the towns or the army. The regime reacted with price controls. De-Christianization: the royal chapel at St. Denis was desecrated and rededicated to the Cult of Reason (later, at Robespierres insistence, the Cult of the Supreme BeingDeism). All over France, churches were closed and some of them rededicated. There was a split among the rulers between those who wanted even more radical measures and those who feared the measures already taken were splitting the nation. In July 1794, Robespierre was arrested by the Committee of Public Safety and executed. Price controls were repealed and inflation resumed to the benefit of contractors supplying the towns and the army, but leading to poverty for most peoplein Marxs terms, this was when the bourgeoisie seized control of the revolution. Risings by the Paris masses demanding bread were put down by an army under the command of General Napoleon Bonaparte. But the new regime, the Directory, was determined not to let things go too far the other way. Royalists had become much more popular and were elected to the Convention from some regions of France. In 1797, they were arrested and the royalist press closed downGeneral Bonaparte again had a hand in these events, though he was in Italy (French armies had conquered the Netherlands and northern Italy, and Switzerland had become an ally). In November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, with the approval of many deputies who felt the main priority was to restore order and find a middle way between royalism and anarchy. Calling himself the First Consul, he dissolved the Convention, dispersing those deputies who resisted, and announced a new constitution. Napoleonic France Napoleon tried to preserve many of the gains of the revolution, while at the same time reintegrating many Catholics and some monarchists into the body politic. His new constitution was approved by plebiscite, so he could claim to be a popular leader. He also aimed to unite the French by military victories. 39

In 1804, with the consent of the legislative assembly, he declared himself Emperor of the French. A new state council drew up most lawstwo legislative assemblies had to confirm, but their deputies were selected by the Emperor from electoral lists chosen by the voters. So the Emperor was de facto head of the legislative as well as of the executive. He also appointed the prfets, who supervised the work of local government. Censorship was reinstated and political clubs were banned. Napoleon adopted the British system of credit and established the Bank of France in 1800 by public subscription, with a new currency (the franc) and a monopoly of note issue. Treasury bonds were given first call on the tax revenues. This enabled France for the first time to finance its armies properlypart of the reason for Napoleons military success. Concordat of 1802 Catholicism was officially described as the religion of the great majority of French citizens and the Cult of the Supreme Being was abolished. In return, the pope recognized the constitutional clergy and the confiscation of church lands. Bishops were to be appointed by the government, subject to confirmation by the pope. Religious toleration was instituted: Protestants and Jews henceforth were able to worship freely. Pastors were paid and supervised by the state, though rabbis were not. Religious orders were readmitted, including the Jesuits. Napoleon thereafter expected the clergy and rabbis to preach the greatness of the French Empire and extol his dignity as emperorsomething not all priests felt happy doing. But this was not the end of church-state friction. In 1809, French troops conquered the Papal States, whereupon the pope excommunicated Napoleon. Napoleon reacted by having him arrested, and he remained in captivity until 1814. Code Napoleon (1804) The main principles of the Code Napoleon included the equality of all citizens before the law and contract as the basis of all property. A wife was not able to sign contracts, and her property was dissolved in that of her husband. She could not divorce him for adultery, whereas he could divorce her on those grounds. Only legitimate children inherited property. Education and Culture There were two main aims: (1) to strengthen the sense of a French national culture and (2) to provide trained personnel for the military, the professions, industry, commerce, and the central and local administration. This created a patriotic meritocracy, the French model of the nation-state.
LECTURE SIX

The whole educational system was placed under the Universit, which conferred the degrees and diplomas required to teach at various levels. A national curriculum was decreed, to be followed in secondary schools throughout the country.

40

Military Innovations Professional long-service soldiers were supplemented by universal military service for all adult male citizens. Generals learned to maneuver with very large armies through a combination of tight discipline, patriotic morale, and devotion to the person of the emperor. It was very effective against the royal armies of Europeless so against irregular partisan troops, as in Spain and Russia. Napoleon could have introduced social reforms in all the countries the French armies conquered, but increasingly he refrained from doing so. In practice, it was easier to treat a conquered country as a breadbasket and use existing social hierarchies to impose authoritarian order. In the end, there was a general reaction against Napoleonic France, which stimulated national feeling in other countries, notably Germany, Italy, and Spain. Overall, Napoleon accepted some of the gains of the revolution, but suppressed its excesses and its disorder. He used the gains to create a militaristic, meritocratic, and patriotic nation-state by authoritarian means. After he was defeated in 1815, France experimented with many political forms during the nineteenth century, but usually retained some kind of parliament and separation of powers. In other countries, Napoleons heritage was important as a model both to imitate and to react against.

41

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. What caused the fall of the French ancien regime? 2. What were the main principles of the Code Napoleon?

Suggested Reading
Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Other Books of Interest

Haythornthwaite, Philip J. Napoleons Military Machine. New York: Sarpedon Publishers, 1996. Schom, Alan M. Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.

LECTURE SIX

42

Lecture 7: The Industrial Revolution and Urbanization

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Phyllis Deanes The First Industrial Revolution.

In the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, most manufacture was smallscale. In the towns, it was conducted in homes or in small workshops by skilled artisans, organized in guilds. In the countryside, it was conducted as part of the household economy, usually during the nonagricultural seasons of the year and by women and children. Products were sold within a relatively restricted region. Things were beginning to change, however. The first heavy industries were emergingstate-backed arsenals, munitions, and ordnance factories for the needs of army, navy, and fortifications. Domestic industry was beginning to specialize. In recent decades, historians have summed up this process in the term proto-industrialization. There was a division of property and functions: the merchant-entrepreneur owned the raw materials, the finished goods, and the storage facilities, but the worker owned the tools of production, the premises, and the labor. During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this specialization generated what some historians have recently termed an industrious revolution, as a result of which everyday articles of consumption and retail trade became more numerous and improved in design and function. There were a number of results: Regional specialization: wares were exported out of the region. The guilds were weakened by the use of unskilled and semi-skilled labor, especially of women (and sometimes children). This increased the role of women in the economy, though men usually retained a monopoly of skilled work and heavy agricultural labor. Growth in population: villagers could survive on smaller plots, because they had an additional source of income. Growing specialization of markets and division of labor: some villages could buy most of their food, and some households could afford to buy clothes and furniture, too, rather than make them. The spread of specialist knowledge and skills among the mass population. The merchant accumulated capital. Finance Institutions that helped to raise capital for industrialization and provide a background of experience and confidence made investment not only possible, but a routine way for better-off people to create an income: 43

 National debt and treasury bonds created a sophisticated money market. State banks helped to guarantee the currency, to arrange government borrowing, and to act as a lender of last resort for other banks. Limited liability companies (corporations) took place gradually during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first in Britain, then in the United States, France, and Germany, until their formation became a routine matter. Stock exchanges enabled companies to raise capital from a large number of lenders. Insurance companies created confidence by insuring against certain types of risk, and their funds provided an abundant supply of money for investment. Factory Production As technology advanced and machines became larger and more complex, it became sensible to group workers together in a large workshop, or factory. The first nonmilitary industry to do this was cotton textiles. Empire had greatly increased the supply of cotton. Here there was a world market to plug into, created and served by the workers of Bengal up to the eighteenth century. In the 1760s, Richard Arkwright devised a water-driven frame capable of driving hundreds of spindles. It was combined with Cromptons mule, which drew out the threads to maximum length and gave them a final twist to complete the spinning. It became possible to produce large quantities of fine, tightly spun, and durable cotton yarn at very low prices. In weaving, the invention of the flying shuttle, the power-driven loom, and perforated cards for automatically changing their configuration, made it possible to produce cheap cloth of intricate patterns. Increasingly, compressed steam was combined with pistons, cylinders, and valves to drive machineryand then to power the first locomotives. The railway industry made it possible to transport goods much faster than canals and rivers, and thus to open up new markets. In military industry, at a later stage, high-precision metal boring and cutting was developed, crucial in the manufacture of guns, but later used to construct machine tools for mass production in factories. The second industrial revolution took place during the late nineteenth century: chemicals, synthetic dyes, electrical goods, internal combustion enginesGermany and the United States were in the lead, rather than Britain. Labor
LECTURE SEVEN

Industrialization tended to separate work and homein most industries, men dominated. When children were young, men went out to work in the mill, mine, or factory, while the women stayed at home to perform unpaid labor looking after the home and children. There was increasing division of gender roles. In towns, wealth and poverty were more starkly juxtaposed. There were usually no remaining feudal bonds between employer and employee. Absolute 44

poverty was no greater than in the countryside, but the relative poverty was blatant. Furthermore, workers were no longer isolated: hence the formation of trade unions and the popularity of socialism. Urbanization Industrialization usually meant also urbanization, which was even more widespread and important. Some of its effects include the following: Mass primary education was needed to give workers basic skills, literacy, and numeracy, but it raised questions such as the language used for teaching and the inclusion of religious teaching in the curriculum. Secondary education became more widespread, usually divided into academic and technical-vocational, implying a social division into a cultured elite and a middle class of experts. Public health measures became necessary so that contagious diseases were not spread from the poor to the wealthy. Public transport: towns were becoming much larger and there was an increasing tendency to separate working-class and middle-class sectors with the growth of suburbsso came suburban trains and trams, at first horse-drawn, then electric, and then omnibuses. Family life became more separated from public and economic life, especially among the more affluent. Wives were more often left isolated at home, perhaps looking after childrenyet, with the disruption of traditional social ties and the privatization of life, the family was more important to an individuals emotional life. Marriage had to bear a much greater burden than before, often for much longer, because life expectancy was improvingall this generated an increase in religious practice among women, while among men it declined. Sport, especially football, became a great public spectacle for rich and poor alike. The wealthy took holidays and tourism began to penetrate down the social scale. Shops and department stores (rather than markets) with fixed prices (instead of bargaining) became centers of the retail trade. A culture of mass consumerism developed. Religion It is often supposed that urbanization led to secularization, but it would be better to speak of a diversification of religious life. For many people, it led to an intensification of religious faith and also to its more systematic codification. For country people, resettling in the towns often generated a crisis of religious consciousness. They were used to a settled community, with its parish church at the center and a traditional, lifelong form of worship. In the towns, parish boundaries were usually much less obvious, and the community was new, raw, and sometimes transient. One result was the greater salience of nonconformist religion, especially in working-class and lower middle-class areas of cities. Some churches reacted energetically to the new challenges of urban life. There was a great deal of new church buildingchurches were conscious of being under pressure from secularism and science and felt nostalgia for a 45

pre-scientific, emotional mass faith made manifest in impressive buildings. The Catholic Church became both more social and more authoritarian. Three encyclicals: 1864 Quanta Curacondemned the separation of church and state and religious freedom; denounced the idea that non-Catholics could go to heaven; and reaffirmed the temporal power of the pope. 1870 Declaration of Papal Infallibility, which asserted that the pope speaking ex cathedra could not err. It was issued just before Italian troops entered Rome and made him the prisoner in the Vatican. 1891 De Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII) rejected liberalism and socialism, but warned of the dangers of capitalism. The Catholic Church did much in the later nineteenth century to promote social work. It also oriented itself more toward women and the family. Protestant churches also did what they could in this area. But in Russia, when the Petersburg priest Gapon organized workers to present the tsar with a petition requesting an improvement in their economic condition and political rights, they were shot down by soldiers. Still, many in the cities had a new secular and civic religion: either socialism or nationalism.

LECTURE SEVEN

46

FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. What were the results of specialization of manufacture on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries? 2. In what ways did industrialization separate work and home?

Suggested Reading
Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Ashton, T.S. The Industrial Revolution, 17601830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hobsbawm, E.J. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York: New Press, 1999.

47

Lecture 8: The Rise of German Nationalism The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Hagen Schulzes The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 17631867. Romanticism Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment and the scientific approach to human affairs, against the universalism of Enlightenment culture, and against its tendency to secularism. Herder Johann von Herder taught that each people had its own distinctive soul manifested in its language and folk culture. In other words, his doctrine brought the common people fully into the picture as part of the national community. He believed that great poets create literary languages out of the raw material provided by the Volk; he expounded on this idea in his studies on Homer and Shakespeare and applied it to medieval German epics. His doctrine implied that the strongest cultural ties of educated people were no longer with educated people in other countries, but with their own workers and peasants. Herder saw language as having been created by communities in their evolution over centuries, and as binding the elite and the masses together in a common culture. It followed that each Volk should seek its own forms of law and political authority in accordance with its own nature and its own traditions, not borrow ideals from abroad or seek a common international ideal, as Enlightenment thinkers implied. He believed that nations went through a cyclical pattern: they rose and declined. French culture had reached its peak and was about to decline and give way to German culture, which would become dominant in the next phase of European history. Herder is important as the first major European thinker to single out culture as a vital formative factor in society and to put forward a historicist view of the world. Mazzini Giuseppe Mazzini was in exile in France after the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the ancien regimes in Italy. He believed that the democratic nation should be the basic unit of international politics. He rejected monarchies, empires, and ancien regime principalities, which he believed generated constant warfare. Mazzini believed the nation is sacred. It was the natural form in which God had decreed human beings should associate themselves. He was virulently anti-Catholic and felt the nation should be guided by a Council of Humanity (men of strong moral and civic principles), to monitor the exercise of political power. 48

LECTURE EIGHT

The nation-state would be created by means of a mass insurrection of the peoplesItaly was to take the lead in creating a new international order for mankind based on the nation-state. Rome would be freed from the pope and become both the national capital and the symbol of the new international order. As a first step, Mazzini founded in 1831 Young Italy, a revolutionary society, on the model of the Freemasons. Its nationalist pamphlets soon became widely known among educated Italians and helped to prepare the way for the Risorgimento. But his was definitely not a movement of workers and peasants. His ultimate idea was a world order consisting of a league of republican nations at peace with one another. This would guarantee that tyrants, monarchs, and the church would never again seize power and start wars against one another. Nationalism Nationalism provided a new form of emotional bond, when urban society seemed to offer only contractual and instrumental relationships between individuals. A national language was needed in towns, where there was more contact between individuals who were not acquainted, and also to deal with the demands of commerce, industry, and bureaucracy. A national language was also needed for command in the armed forces and in educational systems. Governments found it expedient to employ the rhetoric and symbolism of nationalism. International Relations The Congress system established at the Congress of Vienna broke down by the mid-nineteenth century, definitively in the Crimean War, and it was replaced by a new balance of power. German Nationalism In the late eighteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of 314 territories and 1,475 free lordships, all with quasi-sovereign rights guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Westphalia. Some were Lutheran, some Catholic, and a few Calvinist. They were divided from one another by customs barriers, separate legal systems, and systems of currency, weights, and measures. All of these distinctions hindered trade, and in the economy, feudal customs often survived. Until the mid-eighteenth century, this medley was dominated by Austria and the House of Habsburg. But from 1740, when Frederick II (the Great) seized Silesia, Prussia also became a serious factor. Frederick loved French culture and despised German, but all the same, he became a hero for young, educated Germans. Although demotic German was still divided into diverse dialects, there was a Bildungsbrgertum (educated middle class) in the many petty territories, united by a single literary German language.

49

In 1775, there were forty universities in Germany, twice as many as in France. In the larger provincial towns, there were libraries and reading societies. Primary education was also introduced early. In this setting, the question of German unity was paramount. There was no single despotic monarchy to overthrow, as in France. Instead, the aspirations of the educated middle class focused on the ending of feudal barriers and privileges, the overcoming of petty statehood, and the creation of a single, perhaps federal, German state. This was also the atmosphere in which German idealist philosophy took shape, with emphasis on the contribution of the human mind toward creating the real worldperhaps in a kind of partnership with God. Napoleonic Wars The humiliation of Prussia, Austria, and the German states by Napoleon changed the whole context. The Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806. Germany was reorganized as Prussia, Austria, and about thirty southern and western territories regrouped as the Rhine Confederationafter 1815, the North German Confederation. Germans learned from Napoleon how to mobilize a nation for war. The Tugendbund (virtue federation) organized townsfolk to train for partisan warfare and an uprisingits members proclaimed love of the fatherland, an end to feudalism and fragmentation, and the establishment of a unitary German state under one emperor. German volunteers were formed, consisting mostly of townspeople, some of them took part alongside Prussian and Austrian armies in the final stages of the war. Johann Gottlob Fichte preached that Germans should do everything possible to develop their cultural unity, above all through education, to create a German state. In Prussia, Wilhelm von Humboldt, as education minister, laid down new statutes for the University of Berlin, classical and humanist curriculum to cultivate the freedom of the human spirit. Reforms in Prussia abolished the final remnants of feudalism, including serfdom and guild membership. Romantic Partisan Concept of Nation After the war, there was still no unitary German state. Nationalist movements were regarded with suspicion by rulers. The Wartburg Festival of 1817 (the 300th anniversary of Luthers theses) brought together Burschenschaften (university brotherhoods or fraternities) and Turngesellschaften (sports associations) under the black, red, and gold standard of the Freikorps (military volunteers)the message of freedom from tyrants was generally understood to include native tyrants. Many of its participants were arrested by the various governments.
LECTURE EIGHT

The year 1834 saw the creation of the Prussian-dominated Zollverein (Customs Union), which included Saxony and the south German statesan instrument of Prussian great power politics, but one that helped to advance economic unity and prosperity. There were two great problems for German national identity: (1) continuing fragmentation under rulers who were no longer feudal, but were still mostly authoritarianno constitutions on the French or American (or even Polish) 50

model; (2) Germans lived intermingled among so many other ethnic groups: French, Italians, Swiss, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and Jews; no unitary German state was conceivable that contained all Germans but did not also include many other peoples. 1848 Revolution The 1848 Revolution broke out in Germany as an echo of other revolutions in Paris, Italy, and Sicily, which were largely political and social in nature, demanding such things as a constitution, civil rights, a democratic National Guard, fairer taxes, a minimum wage, price controls, and the right to form trade unions. In some parts of Europe, the demands were for a final end to serfdom and the remnants of feudalism. In all cases, the move was toward a nation-state with representative government and a constitution. The first outbreaks in Berlin and Vienna (March 1848) were of this kind, too. Metternich fled from Vienna and the Austrian Emperor granted a constitution, including a lower chamber of parliament elected by adult male suffrage. Serfdom was finally abolished. In Prussia, a constitution and a parliament were grantedbut if the people of Prussia were free, would they not wish to unite with other German-speaking peoples in a single German nation-state, based on the model of Napoleonic France? It would be much easier for Frederick William IV to do this than for the Austrian Emperor, at least half of whose realm lay outside the German Confederation and was populated by non-German peoples. In May 1848, a German parliament met in Frankfurt, elected on a broad suffrage, with representatives from all parts of the Confederation. Its task was to lay the basis for a democratic German nation. In Bohemia, Czechs boycotted the election to the Frankfurt parliament. Instead, the Czech historian Palacky called a Pan-Slav Congress in Prague. At this stage, most of its participants were in favor of a federal Austria, which would nearly have a Slav majority. When fighting broke out between Czechs and Germans in June, the Austrian general Windischgraetz dismantled the barricades and restored order. The German left spoke out in favor of reviving Poland as a nation-state and using it to create an anti-Russian alliance in Europe. The right was in favor of continuing the partition of Poland. The Danish king ruled as duke over both Schleswig and Holstein. In 1848, Danish nationalists urged the king to incorporate Schleswig within Denmark, which he did. Germans there responded by declaring a provisional government of Schleswig-Holstein and calling for German help. The German Confederation declared war on Denmark, with the support of the majority of the Frankfurt Parliament, and charged Prussia with providing an army. Prussia occupied the duchies, whereupon Britain and Russia protested at the violation of existing international agreements. Prussia withdrew its army without consulting the Parliament. These conflicts were typical. It proved impossible to create a German nationstate on the French model, because of the ambitions of the existing states and because the aims of the various nationalists were incompatible. Prussia and Austria were able to exploit these difficulties to restore their power. 51

Frankfurt Parliament issued a Declaration of Fundamental Rights in December 1848 and in March 1849 offered the hereditary crown of Germany to the king of PrussiaFrederick William IV. However, he refused to accept it unless the other German states offered it to him. Soon afterwards, he withdrew Prussian representatives from the Parliament. Austria crushed revolution in Lombardy-Venetiaalso in Hungary, where a constitution had been proclaimed in 1848 and a National Defense Committee set up under Kossuth: here Austria called in the help of Croatian troops, and also eventually of Russia. Bismarck Prussia remained with its own constitution and Parliament, the Reichstag. In the early 1860s, the king and Parliament got into conflict over military credits: the king was determined that he alone should determine military expenditure. He wanted to reduce the national guard and increase the size of the standing army. He brought in Bismarck as prime minister to solve the problem. Bismarck carried out the military reorganization and collected taxes without reference to Parliament. In this way, he restored much of the power of the old Prussian monarchy. But he knew that nationalist sentiment would have to be satisfied in some way. He believed the best way was to harness it to the Prussian monarchy. Better that the Prussian monarchy should unite Germany on its own terms than that the liberals should. When Denmark tried again in 1863 to annex Schleswig, Bismarck agreed with the Austrian government for a joint military force to occupy the duchies and place them under joint Prussian-Austrian rule. Disputes over this condominium and over hegemony in the German Confederate led to a PrussianAustrian war (1866), in which Prussia was swiftly victorious, even though most of the other German states joined Austria. Bismarck then asked the Prussian parliament to approve his military and foreign policy retrospectively. This split the liberals irrevocably: National Liberals supported him. The new constitution of North German Confederation (Prussia plus twenty-one German states north of the River Main) had no bill of rights, no ministerial responsibility to Parliament, and no civilian supervision of the military. France, alarmed by the growth of Prussia, protested in 1870 when Wilhelm I put forward a relative for the Spanish crown. Bismarck used the conflict to provoke the French into declaring war on Prussia. This time the south German states, including even Bavaria, lined up with Prussia. After Prussian victory, a German Empire was proclaimed in 1871, with Austria excluded.
LECTURE EIGHT

In the new empire, Prussia was the dominant force. Its king was the emperor; its prime minister was the imperial chancellor. A hybrid constitution that was half Prussian and half German was developed. The civil service and the military were dominated by Prussian appointees, and they were not answerable to either Parliament.

52

German Empire Although called an empire (in imitation of the Holy Roman Empire), the new Germany was really a nation-state. But it was bitterly divided internally by religion and politics. What, if anything, was to bring unity to the new nation? Richard Wagner Richard Wagner believed that the art of his age was polluted by commercialism, which exemplified the Jewish spirit. He preached a new kind of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, which would perform the same role as religion had in Greek cities. It would (1) bring citizens together for a religious ritual; (2) evoke the legends of their heroic past; and (3) cement their consciousness of shared community. He embodied his dream in The Ring of the Nibelung, the great cycle of operas, based on medieval German sagas. To secure the construction of the new home of the Gods, Valhalla, Wotan pays the builders with the golden ring that was stolen from the Rhine maidens for him by the dwarf Alberich. The ring bears a curse: anyone who wears it has to renounce love. It represents power and money, tainted with the Jewish principle (though the Ring contains no overt anti-Semitism). Redemption from the curse can only come from the pure Teutonic hero, Siegfried. In the end, the ring is returned to the Rhine maidens, and the Rhine rises to wash away Valhalla and the old world of power, money, and contracts: this is redemption through love. Wagner was not the only apostle of anti-Semitism among German nationalists, but he did a great deal to transform a liberal, emancipatory doctrine into an anti-Semitic one, and to make anti-Semitism a permanent component of German nationalism. By 1914, Germany was a highly developed modern nation whose industrial production was soaring ahead of Britain and whose science, technology, and learning were probably at a higher level than anywhere else in Europe. But it was also a nation at a dangerous half-way stage between absolute monarchy and parliamentary government.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. What were Johann von Herders theories about the connection between language and community? 2. Why was it impossible to create a German nation-state on the French model?

Suggested Reading
Schulze, Hagen. The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 17631867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter. Music and German National Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Strmer, Michael. The German Empire, 18701918. New York: Random House, 2000.

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Lecture 9: The First Global Economy and Socialism

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is William R. Thompsons The Emergence of the Global Political Economy.

The nineteenth century saw a remarkable degree of integration of different national economies. Even as the nation-state was consolidating itself, it faced a formidable competitor: the global economy. Since the Middle Ages, first the Jews, then the Italians, then the Dutch and the English had made a specialty in conducting trade across frontiers and jurisdictions, exchanging local currencies and transporting goods, people, and money over considerable distances. In the nineteenth century, these exchanges became much easier, partly because of technical innovations in transport, but also because most European nations were adopting the financial institutions of the Netherlands and Britain. The Napoleonic wars provided an impetus to these innovations. The Rothschild family started making its huge fortune by raising funds for the needs of royal families in difficulties, and other banking dynasties with international connections sprang up at this time: the Hopes (Scots in Amsterdam), the Barings (Germans in London), Boyd and Ker (British in Paris), and then Jewish firms like the Mendelssohns, the Goldschmidts, the Seligmans, and the Oppenheimers. In the Balkans and Middle East, Greek families such as the Zarifi, Ralli, and Vlastos were prominent. After the Napoleonic wars, such firms found further outlets in financing the major transport and industrial projects that soon got under way all over Europe. British capital financed most of the early stages, but in mid-century, the French moved strongly into the market, spurred on by the founding of the Crdit Mobilier in 1852. The Crdit Mobilier was supposed to attract small savers to invest in public works, but it soon exceeded its brief and was financing not only French enterprise, but also railways in Austria, Romania, and Serbia, along with mines and ironworks strategically situated alongside them. Along with other banks, it formed a consortium to begin the huge task of building railways in Russia. Railways opened up whole new regions of the earth for systematic exploitation. Coal, iron, zinc, lead, and copper, too heavy to move by horse and cart in any quantity, could be mined and used for industrial purposes. Even diamonds and gold became easier to access. Another advantage was that railways themselves stimulated and provided a market for industrial development. One result was the spread of the idea of free trade. Some European powers began to lower tariffs and finally to eliminate them altogether, to take advantage of the international division of labor. The first half of the nineteenth cen55

tury saw the abolition of guilds in most countries, the abolition of local taxes and tolls on trade, and the opening of professions to anyone with suitable qualifications. Later in the century, though, European countries that came later to industrialization began to raise their import tariffs to protect their infant industries. This was true of Italy and Germany in the 1880s, for example. Foreign investment was not necessarily a blessing for all who received it. After all, it had to be repaid with interest. If real new wealth, returning a regular profit, had not been created, then debt repayment became a serious burden, especially because it had to be paid in a foreign currency. By 1890, a third of Russias investments came from abroad, by 1910, nearly half. One of the factors that made large-scale foreign investment possible at all is that all the major European currencies, including Russian currency from 1896, were pegged at a stable exchange rate against gold, something made possible by large finds of gold in California in the 1840s and Alaska and South Africa in the 1880s, which averted a money famine. The case of Ottoman Turkey was especially critical. There, most public works were financed out of foreign investment from the 1850s onwards. Much of the money was misused, or never reached Turkey at all, and by the early 1880s, the country was incapable of making the huge interest payments that had built up. The European powers then rescheduled the debt, but also set up and ran a Turkish Foreign Debt Administration, which demanded first claim on the countrys leading sources of revenue. In effect, foreigners were taking over the Ottoman treasury. The backlog had still not been cleared by the First World War, and was certainly a major contributory factor in the collapse of the empire and its replacement by a Turkish nation-state, which repudiated the debt. The effect was even greater in countries outside Europe, both in those that had become colonies of European powers and in those that had retained nominal independence. The advancing division of labor in Europe and the crowding of people into towns entailed seeking new sources of food and raw materials. There was not enough land, timber, or minerals in the advanced European countries to furnish the needs of their growing urban populations. International trade was highly organized through banks and international trading companies, with agencies in port cities. Many Europeans emigrated to other parts of the globe. But native peoples were often displaced or decimated by disease. Or they worked as navvies in industrial ventures that took their profits elsewhere. From the mid-nineteenth century, when the Holy Alliance had finally broken down, there was no longer an overarching pan-European system of preserving peace by mutual consultation. The European powers were in competition with each other. They felt they needed reliable access to food supplies, metals, coal, and later, petroleum, which they could only secure by establishing colonies under their own rule, or at least spheres of interest over which they had prior claim. From about 1870, large areas of Africa and Asia were carved up among them.

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Most startling, perhaps, was the domination of large parts of China, the worlds oldest continuous great power, whose economic output a mere century earlier had been ahead of any European country. But industrialization everywhere depended on European technology and investment. Western powers insisted on concessions. Russia gained the right to construct a railway across Northern Manchuria, with a strip of territory on either side of it under Russian, not Chinese, law. In reply, the Germans seized Chaio-Chou Bay in Shantung province and began to build their own railway there. Britain, France, and Japan followed suit. This open pillage of Chinese territory and resources sparked a native rebellion, led by a secret society generally known as the Boxers. Starting in Shantung province, they began to murder foreigners and Chinese Christians, or those who concluded deals with Europeans. With the secret support of the Chinese government, they eventually besieged the foreign legations in Beijing and could only be dislodged when several European powers got together and sent a combined expeditionary force to deal with them. Socialism The strongest reaction against the global economy was socialism, first among the working-class of Europe, later among the colonized peoples. It took many forms. Anarchism was a reaction against the huge scale of modern productive units, of modern financial mechanisms, and of modern cities and also against the tendency of modern financial institutions to greatly increase disparities in wealth. Anarchists wanted to abolish the state, large banks, the stock exchange, and other institutions and replace them with small-scale local institutions. Proudhon The first person to declare himself an anarchist was the Frenchman PierreJoseph Proudhon (18091865), who famously said, Property is theft. He believed that the workman should own his tools and the premises needed for his work. What he objected to was excessive concentrations of money and property, more than a family needed for subsistence and work. His ideal society consisted of self-governing cooperatives of farmers and artisans, relying for their funding on mutual credit. The central state and Parliament would be abolished and replaced by a network of self-governing, directly elected communes. Peoples arbitration would replace law courts. Kropotkin Prince Peter Alexeevich Kropotkin (18421921) had a similar vision, but adjusted to Russian circumstances. He believed in community ownership of property and community distribution of rewards. Everyone would have the right to go to a warehouse and claim what he or she needed for subsistence. Bakunin Neither Proudhon nor Kropotkin believed in violent revolution, but Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (18141876) did. He believed that it was a necessary purgative in creating a new society. He believed that the masses should take up arms to sweep away government and existing elites, and in the process, 57

they would create the mutualist associations that would function as the social units of the future. In 1864, the followers of Marx and Bakunin set up the First International. Their movement was explicitly anti-nationalist. They believed in international working-class solidarity, and they intended to prepare for an international revolution. In 1872, it broke up into the followers of Bakunin and those of Marx. Bakunins followers remained strong in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and southern France. They survived right through to the 1930s, when they played a major part in the Spanish Civil War. Marxism Karl Marx (18181883) was a materialist and atheist. He believed that all social life is struggle. At each stage in the evolution of society, the division of labor becomes more complicated and mans productive capacities greater. At the stage of Marxs time, dominated by capitalist industry, the struggle was between the capitalists and the workers for control over the means of production. Capitalists were competing with one another for profits and were compelled to hold wages down and exploit their employees ever more ferociously. In the course of this struggle, the weaker capitalists would be squeezed out and join the workers, who were becoming ever more poverty-stricken, oppressed, and desperate. In the end, the workers would rise, overthrow their exploiters, and create a new, humane society in which, for the first time in history, there would no longer be a minority exploiting a majority. There would be no need for the coercive machinery of the state, which would therefore wither away. This was the vision he put forward in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote Das Kapital, a study of British industrial life in which they endeavored to prove their theory of economic exploitation leading to ultimate revolution. In 1872, Marx broke away from Bakunin (who disagreed with Marxs view that a dictatorial workers state was needed during and immediately after the revolution). Marx set up the Second International in 1889. The strongest Marxist political party in Europe was the German Social Democratic Party. During the 1880s, it was banned under Bismarck, who established state-backed social insurance systems to save workers from the worst poverty by providing benefits in the case of accident, sickness, and old age. From 1890, the Social Democrats were again permitted to take part in elections and won a steadily increasing vote in the Reichstag, till, in 1910, it gained a third of the seats. In practice, therefore, it was acting as a parliamentary party, not as a revolutionary one. In 1899, one of its members, Eduard Bernstein, urged the party to ditch its revolutionary program. The workers, he pointed out, were not becoming increasingly impoverished by capitalism, but were sharing in its benefits as a result of parliamentary action. He was denounced by his opponents as a revisionist. The party refused to drop its revolutionary intentions, though it continued to act as a gradualist political party combined with trade unions.

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The Seeds of World War I In 1914 came the great crisis of conscience for all socialists throughout Europe. As war was about to break out, the various governments all asked for war credits from their parliaments. Would the socialist party vote against war credits, in the interests of international working-class solidarity, or would they vote for their own nation? Nearly all, including the German Social Democrats, chose their own nation and voted for war credits. The only exceptions were the Russian Social Democrats and the Italian Left Socialists (led by Benito Mussolini). Revisionism was denounced with special vehemence in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky argued that the reason European workers were not being ever more ferociously exploited was that exploitation was operating on an international scale in the form of imperialism. Lenin, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), said that the revolution must be international, and that Indians, Chinese, and others would join in on the revolutionary side. Trotsky declared that the international revolution would break out in Russia, because that was the European country where the capitalists were at their weakest. Once it had broken out there, it would then spread to other European countries, and the European workers, once in charge, would then emancipate the colonial peoples from exploitation. So Lenin and Trotsky remained adamantly opposed to Russias involvement in the First World War. Through underground propaganda, they continued to preach that the war should be turned into a general civil war of workers against imperialists. That was the revolution they believed they were launching in Russia in October 1917. After 1917, then, there were two very different kinds of socialism competing throughout Europe. Social Democracy, or parliamentary socialism, which believed in gradual social reform, working through parliaments, and using the strong position of socialist parties there to pass legislation by democratic means; this form of socialism was dominant in most of Europethough one must remember that anarchists remained strong in Spain and Italy. Communism, which believed that a disciplined and centralized party should seize power in the name of the workers and then use the power of the state to end the power of capital and install workers rule. Communists formed the ruling party from 1917 in Russia (from 1922 the Soviet Union), but were in a minority in most European countries. At times of economic crisis, however, they could become a large and threatening minority.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why did the exchange of local currency and the transportation of goods become easier in the nineteenth century? 2. What was the downside of foreign investment?

Suggested Reading
Thompson, William R. The Emergence of the Global Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Janin, Hunt. The India-China Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999. Lindemann, Albert. A History of European Socialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

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Lecture 10: The First World War and Fascism

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is David Stevensons 19141918: The History of the First World War.

After the Napoleonic wars, the powers of Europe tried to keep the peace and restrain the anarchic egoism of international affairs by establishing what was known as the Congress system (or the Metternich system). The great powers would meet regularly to negotiate and settle conflicts, and to consider how to deal with rebellions. But from 1848, the expansive nationalism of the large nations (notably the unification of Italy and Germany) and the emancipatory nationalism of the small ones, blew apart the system. The final blow was the Crimean War in which Britain allied itself with a nonmember, France, against a member, Russia. The Slide to War Thereafter, the powers of Europe acted on the principle of a balance of power secured by a system of alliances. By the 1900s, there was a standoff between an alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary and a looser entente of France, Russia, and Britain. In the Balkans, Slav nationalities, notably the Serbs, were trying to free themselves from the Ottoman and Habsburg empiresRussia supported them, but, until 1914, not forcefully enough to risk a European war. In the colonies, especially Africa, both Italy and Germany were trying as latecomers to establish themselves as imperial powers, both for symbolic reasons and to have a reliable source of raw materials. A naval rivalry grew between Britain, which traditionally kept a navy as large as those of the next two powers combined, and Germany, which was building a navy to protect its merchant fleet and as a symbolic challenge to Britain. Austria-Hungary felt mortally threatened by the force of Serbian and South Slav nationalism. In 1908, it annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina to suppress nationalist movements there. Russia felt an obligation to come to the aid of its Slav brothers: there was quite a strong Pan-Slav movement there to free the Slav nations from Austrian and Ottoman domination and attach them to Russia. In 1912 and 1913, Russia assisted Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece to free themselves and to gain territory from the Ottoman Empire in two Balkan wars. By 1914, in fact, Serbia was becoming a mini-great power in the Balkans, and it was eager to detach Bosnia and Herzegovina from Austria. That is what lay behind the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914. Austria reacted furiously with an ultimatum demanding rights of investigation on Serb territory, which would have amounted to a virtual negation of Serb sovereignty. When Serbia refused the ultimatum, Austria declared war and bombarded Belgrade. 61

The alliances that had kept peace among the powers now dragged them into war. Russia mobilized to defend its client, Serbia. Germany backed AustriaHungary and had to respond to the Russian mobilization on two fronts. The German war plan (the Schlieffen Plan) envisaged a massive early assault through Belgium on France to achieve rapid victory there and avoid a twofront war before moving its forces east against Russia. Britain hesitated before deciding to honor its commitments to France (and to Belgium, whose neutrality it had guaranteed). A New Kind of War Napoleon had won his victories by leading the nation at arms against the old royal armies of eighteenth-century Europe. All the countries of Europe now had armies on the Napoleonic pattern, so warfare was incomparably more complicated and destructive than ever before. It mobilized far more of the population, and all the nations started out in a mood of patriotic enthusiasm, with assurances that the war would be over by Christmas. The powers wielded huge armies: Germany had 1.5 million men under arms; Russia, by December 1914, had six million; conscription was needed in all combatant countries. A general staff was needed to carry the enormous administrative burden of planning military campaigns. Armies were much too large to live off the land, so everything they needed had to be transported to them by rail and road. All this was easier to manage when an army was motionless, in trenches, and on the defensive. The machine gun also made the task of defense easier. It was not until 1918 that tanks and aircraft became serious participants and restored the initiative to the attackers. Civilian government also needed to cope with a new set of problems, like the production and transport of munitions, ensuring that enough food was grown for the urban population and the armed forces, and ensuring that railways and ports were in a condition to deal with huge quantities of people and materials. The Long Slog As the war dragged on, the combatant nations sought new ways of conducting it. Germany sought a way out of the blockade imposed by the British navy: First, through unrestricted submarine warfare (this was what brought the United States into the war), and second, by encouraging revolution in Russia. The combatants also reformulated their war aims. Britain announced that it was making war to destroy Prussian militarism and to uphold the rights of small nations throughout Europe.
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Germany planned to establish its own German-dominated Mitteleuropa, to include Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria-Hungary, the Baltic states, Belorussia, and Ukraine as a secure source of food and raw materials. President Woodrow Wilson of the United States formulated an ambitious peace program, his Fourteen Points: self-determination for all nationalities, 62

serious disarmament, an end of secret diplomacy, and the establishment of a general association of nations to settle future threats to peace, the League of Nations. Germanys desperate final offensive was in the spring of 1918. When it failed and Germany sued for peace in November 1918, the Fourteen Points were the basis of the armistice and of the subsequent peace negotiations at Versailles. Results of the War There were five major consequences resulting from the First World War. The collapse of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire in Central and Eastern Europe and the creation of new nationstates in their stead: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. The Russian Revolution and the emergence of a regime committed to the overthrow of democracy, nation-states, and capitalismmessianic internationalist socialism. A generation of young men grew up who had known little but violence in the name of their nation and found it difficult to settle down to peacetime. State and people were intertwined as never before. During the twentieth century, this relationship assumed several forms: the Soviet state, the Fascist corporatist state, and the democratic welfare state. Extreme economic dislocation. Soldiers were being demobilized on a huge scale, leading to unemployment. Industries had to be reconfigured from military to consumer production to employ them. In some countries, shortages and financial instability led to massive inflation. The pre-1914 global economy, based on the gold standard, was seriously damaged as governments adopted policies designed to strengthen their own nations. Postwar Europe After the First World War, there were three views of international order: Western liberal, Communist, and Fascist. The German government sued for peace and the peace conference met at Versaillesthe result was an uneasy dualism of new idealism and old-fashioned Realpolitik. Germany was required to accept the guilt for the start of the war, disarm, and pay huge reparations. The United States Senate did not ratify the League of Nations, even though it had been proposed by its own president. The League was set up without the United States, Germany, and Russia/USSR. In the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks invaded Asia Minor to regain territory on which their forebears had always livedthe Turks drove them back, but with great bloodshed. At the end of the war, the League of Nations arranged an exchange of peoples: about 1.5 million Greeks had to leave Asia Minor, while about 400,000 Turks moved the other way. Great violence followed on both sides. As the armies of Europe demobilized, millions of men returned home, flooding into a labor market that could not absorb them easily. Even more serious, 63

international trade based on the gold standard had been totally disrupted. People needed food, clothing, and housing, but the normal ways of meeting those needs had been put out of action. Meanwhile, young men who had known nothing but war for up to four years were idle. It is not surprising that the early postwar years were extremely unstable. Ethnic groups tried to seize territory to which they felt they were entitled, but which they had been denied by the peacemakers of Versailles. Communist revolution was an even more serious threat. In Germany, revolutionary socialists, known as Spartacists, tried to create a Soviet Republic in Berlin. Nationalist and socialist rebellions were actually combined in Hungary, where the Communist Bela Kun seized power in March 1919 and proceeded to invade Romania and Slovakia to reincorporate the Hungarians living there, who had been awarded to other states by the Paris peacemakers. The Romanians responded by repelling them and invading Hungary. Kun called for help from Soviet Russia, but it failed to arrive, and by August he had been overthrown. Fascism Fascism first took shape in Italy. Even after unification in 1870, persistent problems remained, such as the economic gap between north and south. Financial institutions had proved unsuccessful, and most of the economy was still run by patron-client networks. Parliamentary parties were also run as personal cliques. Most workers and peasants did not feel themselves properly represented. There was a strong socialist party, which planned a massive general strike in order to take power. Also, a long-running battle between socialists and the Vatican alienated many Catholics. Although Italy was on the winning side of the war, it lost a sizeable population to the new state of Yugoslavia along the Dalmatian coast. In 1920, socialists seized a large number of factories and placed them under workers councils (that is, Soviets). The Fascist Party was founded in March 1919. Its leader, Benito Mussolini, was originally a leader of the left Socialists. He had become convinced, though, that the great struggles of the twentieth century would not be between classes, but between nations. He took the title of Duceleader. The party set up combat unitssquadristito protect factories against socialists. When the socialists declared a general strike in Rome in the summer of 1922, Mussolini demanded that the Fascists be invited by the king to form a government. He organized a march on Rome by the Fascist squads, and the king gave way. Mussolini demanded and was granted dictatorial powers to restore order.
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Over the next few years, the Fascists forbade meetings of opposition parties, set up rigid press censorship, established a corporate state to bring the various sections of society under direct control of the ruling party, and concluded a concordat with the Catholic Church. Mussolinis was the first Fascist regime in Europe. It believed that international life was, in essence, struggle between nations, in which the fittest 64

nation would triumph. It believed that preparation for war was crucial. It was anti-Communist. Fascists also rejected internationalism and the peace movement as something that undermined the vigor of the nation. The Fascists constructed a national economy using national capital, that is, an economy not dependent on foreign investment. They launched ambitious programs of public works. The Fascists promoted glorification of the great leader. Parliamentary politics were considered corrupt and decadent. The leader embodied the will of the people and he decided the great issues in accordance with his visions. Fascists believed in a single party with sections for young people, women, workers, farmers, and others. Colorful propaganda was produced in posters, radio, and newspapers. Fascism was especially strong not only in Italy, but also in those countries that had suffered humiliation in the world war or where ethnic conflict was especially strong. It was also prevalent where parliamentary government was still in its early stages of formation or had not managed to win the trust of the people: Germany, Italy, Romania, Croatia, and Belgium. Authoritarian, semifascist leaders came to power in Poland, Hungary, Spain, and Portugal. Anti-Semitism In the late nineteenth century, nationalism often expressed itself in the form of anti-Semitism, especially in France, Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Russia. In Russia, Jews were not emancipated, and most of them still lived in poverty-stricken shtetls, but those with higher education or in the first category of merchants were allowed to reside elsewhere in the empire. During the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 to 1907, the police turned a blind eye to antiJewish pogroms, which they regarded as preferable to revolutionary violence. In France, the Jewish question became entangled in the century-old confrontation between monarchists and the Catholics on the one hand and republicans, secularists, and radicals on the other. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the general staff, was charged by a military court with selling secrets to the Germans. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, the secrets continued to leak, and it became apparent that someone else must be guilty. Georges Clemenceau, the Radical politician, began to take up the case in public, and it turned out that some of the documents used to incriminate Dreyfus had been forgeries. But the army refused to reopen the case, supported by the entire Catholic and monarchist wing of French politics. There followed ten years of bitter polemics in the French press, exhibiting the deep divisions between the two completely different conceptions of French nationhood. It was not until 1906 that Dreyfus was finally acquitted in court, by which time the triumphant left-wing politicians had finally banned all religious teaching in French state schools. Where national feeling had difficulty in creating a nation-state (especially in the Habsburg Monarchy and Russia), there was a strong temptation to blame the Jews. And now there was a new element: the rise of social Darwinism and of racismthe doctrine of constant struggle and the survival of the 65

fittestnow interpreted to mean the biologically fittest, the most racially pure and strong. The first openly anti-Semitic party was the Christian Social Workers Party, set up by Adolf Stcker in Berlin in 1878. It favored an organic, German welfare state for the common people, to be financed by heavy taxes on the stock exchange and by reimposing the ban on usury. In Austria, Karl Lueger sponsored a Catholic anti-Jewish revivalist movement, the Catholic Social Union. In both countries, the conservative, monarchical parties began to cooperate with these anti-Semitic movements as a way of attracting mass popular support to repel the threats of liberalism and socialism, and to revive a strong monarchical state. The Depression Both Communism and Fascism had considerable appeal, even in established democracies, because of the depression. During the 1920s, in much of Europe, and especially in the United States, there was a great expansion of consumer industry based on new technologies. Individuals, investment trusts, holding companies, and banks invested enthusiastically in the tremendous boom and often borrowed money to do so. In October 1929, the Wall Street stock market crashed. Banks and mortgage companies called in their loans, but found many debtors unable to pay. Then people lost confidence in banks and tried to withdraw all their cashbanks were unable to satisfy them and some of them crashed (notably, in 1931, the Creditanstalt in Austria, one of the largest banks in Central Europe, and nearly half the banks in the United States). Germany suspended its reparations payments. Many businesses had to declare bankruptcy. Millions of workers were unemployed. Governments lost tax revenues and slashed their expenditure, including social security payments, which condemned the unemployed to extreme poverty. Most governments also decided to defend their own industries by raising tariffsthis had the effect of stifling international trade, and everywhere the gold standard was abandoned. In Germany, by 1932, there were some six million unemployed. Many of them were naturally attracted to either the Communist Party or to the National Socialists (Nazis), a German variant of Fascism. Both parties gained votes in the elections of 1932, but it was the Nazis who triumphed. The Third Reich Hitler, as Fhrer (leader) of the Nazi party, had made his aims clear in Mein Kampf, which he wrote in prison from 1923 to 1924. He was determined to avenge the humiliation of defeat in 1918, which he attributed to a stab in the back by Jews and Communists. He wanted to restore Germanys unity and greatness by creating an empire in which all the Germans of Europe could live, and he wanted to make Germans there the master nation. Once in power, Hitler acted as roughly as Mussolini had done, obtaining emergency powers to rule by decree, banning opposition parties, suspending civil liberties, and setting up a strict censorship of the media. He estab66

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lished a corporate state with its own Arbeiterfront (Workers Front), its own Reichsbauernfhrer (Imperial Peasant Leader), its own Reichskulturkammer (Imperial Chamber of Culture, headed by Josef Goebbels, who was also Minister for Propaganda), and the Hitler Youthintroducing a program of public works: the autobahns and the Volkswagen automobile factory rearming and rebuilding the German army in defiance of the Versailles peace settlement. The SS, beginning as Hitlers personal bodyguard, became an elite military force outside direct army command. The security police (Gestapo) were put in charge of detecting and dealing with clandestine political opposition and took under its command a network of concentration camps.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why did Italy and Germany try to establish themselves as imperial powers? 2. How did the depression contribute to the appeal of Communism and Fascism?

Suggested Reading
Stevenson, David. 19141918: The History of the First World War. London: Allen Lane, 2004.

Other Books of Interest

Hewitson, Mark. Germany and the Causes of the First World War. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. Morgan, Philip. Fascism in Europe 19191945. London: Routledge, 2003.

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Lecture 11: Communism, the Soviet Union, and the Second World War The Suggested Readings for this lecture are Richard Pipess Communism: A History and Martin Gilberts The Second World War: A Complete History. Messianic Socialism Lenin and Trotsky had a completely different approach from the United States or West European democrats, to the problems of Europe and the world in 1918messianic socialism. This form of socialism recognized the strength of nationalism, but considered it only a necessaryand regrettablephase in the evolution of people toward socialism. So they believed class struggle was primary. The ultimate aim was to establish an international proletarian republic. The Communists had come to power with the help of social revolution by workers, peasants, soldiers, and non-Russian nationalities. In the circumstances of civil war, however, most of the gains made by those sectors of the population had to be taken back. In 1922, nearly all of the old Russian Empire was reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ruled by the Communist Party, which considered itself the legitimate representative of the workers and peasants. Like the Fascists, the Communist Party set up branches for young people and womenand for Jews as well. Lenin died in 1924. Inside the Communist Party, power passed into the hands of Josef Stalin, who, as its general secretary, had been in charge of party organization and personnel. Within a few years, Stalin had maneuvered his supporters into the top jobs and eased out his opponents, denouncing them as oppositionists or deviationists. The leading deviationist was Lenins closest comrade during 1917: Trotsky, whom Stalin exiled abroad. A Second Revolution In the 1920s, there was a mixed economy, but during the early 1930s, the party launched a second revolution, designed to move toward full-scale socialism under the direction of the state. Industry was all placed under state control. Agriculture was collectivized. Religion, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, was subjected to unrelenting persecution. All professions were subjected to official unions controlled by the party. Strict censorship was instituted for all publications and the media. The Communist Party considered the USSR the precursor of an international republic, so they did not persecute non-Russian nationalists. In fact, most party officials considered the main nationalist danger to be Russians. They 69

regarded the Tsarist regime as a prison of the peoples, in which Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism had held the other peoples in oppression. The policy they pursued in the national question was korenizatsiia, or indigenization. This meant encouraging the non-Russian peoples to develop their own national consciousness and administer their own territories, always under the Communist Party leadership. This sounds remarkably decentralized and tolerant. But everything was under the control of Moscow, which was a Russian city, and as it became clear that there was not going to be an international workers revolution, the Soviet leaders increasingly emphasized that the USSR was a neo-Russian state with Russian imperial intereststhough certainly not the interests of Russian peasants. Socialism in one country entailed launching ambitious five-year plans for developing capital industry, collectivizing the farms, and establishing a Communist Party monopoly over the whole of political and cultural life. It also meant closing down churches and arresting and, not infrequently, shooting priests. The Soviet leaders tried to destroy the two most characteristic institutions of peasant Russia: the village commune and the Orthodox Church. Purges These policies generated acute hostilities and social strains inside the country. People were being uprooted from their familiar way of life. Peasants were streaming into the towns, looking for work in the fast-growing factories and mines, and looking for housing, too, when there was a severe shortage. Most people had to live in communal apartments. Some party leaders felt Stalin was going too fast and too ruthlessly. Stalin gradually formed the conviction that he alone had the strength of purpose and clarity of vision to ensure success. Anyone who disagreed with him was regarded as a traitor to the great cause. He came to the conclusion that he had not done enough to root out the various deviationists, and that this failing was mortally dangerous now that Hitler had come to power. So in 1937, he launched a purge inside the party. Stalin set the secret police, the NKVD, to the job of seeking out the deviationists. There followed a massive wave of arrests that engulfed not only the party leadership, but also leading figures in all walks of Soviet life. They were accused of scarcely credible crimes, like blowing up power stations, spying for Japan, or acting for an underground Trotskyist conspiracy dedicated to murdering party leaders and restoring capitalism in the USSR. Many of these purge victims were condemned to death and shot in the cellars of the Lubianka, the NKVD headquarters. Others were sent for years, or even decades, to labor camps.
LECTURE ELEVEN

Origins of the Second World War The Soviet Foreign Commissariat had to deal with other powers just as the Russian Foreign Ministry had done before 1917. At the same time, though, the USSR also set up the Communist International, or Comintern, to foment and organize workers revolutions in those countries with which it had diplomatic relations. 70

If the League of Nations had worked as President Wilson intended, then it might have been able to restrain the aggressive policies of Nazi Germany. But the League had already declined to take action against the Japanese invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931. In 1935, it similarly failed to penalize Italy effectively for invading Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Finally, in 1936, Nazi Germany sent its troops into the Rhineland, German territory that had been declared demilitarized at the peace settlement. So it was back to international alliances again as before 1914. In 1935, France, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia concluded a mutual pact, in case of German invasion. But no Western leader really trusted the Soviet Union. It had abandoned its policy of provoking revolutions, because it now really wanted the help of the Western democracies against Germanybut its ideology had not basically changed. In any case, in 1937, Stalin was carrying out his mass terror, during which he arrested and shot many of his military leaders. The USSR appeared to be an undesirable and unreliable ally. It was this mutual mistrust that made the Second World War inevitable. In 1938, the Germans had exploited the ethnic grievances of the 3.5 million Germans in Czechoslovakia and threatened to occupy the regions where most of them lived. Britain and France decided they could not rely on the USSR and instead concluded an agreement with Hitler under which Sudeten German territories were brought under German administration. In return, Hitler agreed not to make further territorial demands. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London claiming peace in our time. But Hitler soon had further territorial demands, this time on Poland, since many Germans lived in the Danzig corridor. To have prevented this, Britain and France would have needed a determined military alliance with the USSR. But no agreement was reached. Instead, in August 1939, Stalin tried to postpone war by concluding a nonaggression pact with his greatest enemy, Hitler. The Nazi-Soviet Pact left Germany free to attack Poland, and later the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and France. Both the liberal and the Communist approach to international affairs had failed completely. The Fascist approach appeared to be in the ascendancy. The Second World War In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, in unannounced violation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Its ally, Japan, then attacked the United Statess Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. To make mortal enemies of both the United States and the Soviet Union was an act of supreme folly, yet Germany was nearly successful. In the late months of 1942, when they occupied, directly or through allies, the whole of Europe, except Britain, Spain, and Portugal, and including most of European Russia as far as Stalingrad, Germany looked invincible. Three factors eventually defeated them. The refusal of Britain to conclude a peace agreement and Britains successful repulsion of German air attacks during the Battle of Britain. Britain then became the launching pad for a sustained campaign of bombing German cities, which steadily gained momentum from 1941 to 1945. The long-term recovery of the Soviet Union that, after terrible earlier 71

defeats, managed to mobilize manpower, weaponry, and industrial resources competently enough to turn the tide and eventually roll back over German-occupied territory. The intervention of the United Statesboth in Europe and in Asiaprovided the bulk of the new technology, production of machinery, aircraft, heavy weapons, and an apparently unlimited supply of fresh troops. All the same, the victory was not completed until May 1945 in Europe and August 1945 in the Far East. By that time, whole swathes of Europe were devastated. All sides in the war had learned to use the mass murder of civilians as just another tool of war. On the eastern front, the Germans had pursued a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of total destruction, which had cost twenty-five to twenty-seven million Soviet citizens their lives. Everywhere in Europe, mutual ethnic hostility had reached unprecedentedly vicious proportions. In Yugoslavia, Croats and Serbs were murdering each other as they had never done before. In Ukraine, Poles and Ukrainians were doing likewise, as were Hungarians and Romanians in Romania. Worst of all, many peoples, Germans and others, were aiding the Nazis in their plan to exterminate the Jews. The Holocaust Hitler was always determined to wipe out the Jews. He came to power and put his plan into effect. From 1933, Nazi legislation eased Jews out of professional positions, then deprived them of their civil rights. They ceased to be German citizens and became state subjects instead. They were forbidden to marry Aryans or to have sexual relations with them. They could be assaulted, arrested, and deprived of their property without having any legal recourse. Gradually, most Jews found themselves in a position where it was difficult for them to earn the means of subsistence. Those who could emigrated. Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the war exacerbated all problems. Millions more Jews fell under German occupation in the occupied territories. The German army put Jews in the occupied territories into the same category as Communistsdangerous enemies who, once captured, were to be deported to ghettos or concentration camps. If it was deemed necessary, they were shot. By the winter of 1941 to 1942, the Nazi high command made a decision, never documented, to transport all Jews from camps and ghettos to special extermination camps. There, gas chambers had been built to kill them and crematoria constructed to burn their bodies. Between May 1942 and September 1944, some 4.2 million Jews had been murdered in these death camps. It is difficult to exaggerate the destruction, embitterment, and moral degradation that had engulfed Europe by the time the war endedfar worse even than in 1918. It was difficult to conceive of the continent recovering at all. Yet recover it didnot least because of the efforts of people so horrified by what human beings had done to each other that they wanted to build a completely new world. The morale of the Allied nations, slow to be roused at first, later became a decisive force. The will to defeat despotic aggressors at all costs was a decisive factor, and it motivated terrible deeds, like the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima, but also, after the war, the determination to ensure that such things never happened again. 72

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. What was the role of the USSRs Communist International? 2. What three factors eventually defeated Germany?

Suggested Reading
Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War : A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004. Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Other Books of Interest

Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1985. Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Social Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Lecture 12 Rebuilding Europe after 1945: The West and the European Movement The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Philip Thodys Europe Since 1945.

The lesson of interwar economic depression, Fascism and war, and the Holocaust convinced the governments of Europe that nationalism and the nation-state were mortally dangerous to the future of their continent and the world. However, building an alternative appeared virtually impossible. Europe was a continent of exhausted, defeated, xenophobic, and poverty-stricken peoples who had long absorbed the platitudes of nationalist propaganda and were resentful and suspicious of foreigners. How could poverty and embittered nationalism be overcome? To that question there were two radically different solutions. From the Soviet Union came the answer: Build Communism! As it became clear that building Communism meant imposing the Soviet system on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, a deep divide appeared in the heart of Europewhat Churchill called the iron curtain. Western Europe had to evolve its own solution against that background. Much depended on the United States. If it withdrew from involvement in Europe, as after 1918, then the Soviet Union would be the dominant power there. Fortunately, leaders in the United States realized that their way of life owed a great deal to an open international economy and to the rule of law, and that the European nations were vital partners in sustaining them. The United States began by backing the establishment of a framework for the international economy analogous to that which England had set up for its own national economy back in the late seventeenth century. The Breton Woods Currency Agreement was signed to guarantee a stable international system of interchangeable currencies backed by the dollar. The International Monetary Fund was established to rescue countries facing a severe balance-of-payments crisis. The World Bank was created to put forward capital loans for major infrastructure projects that would ultimately generate economic growth. The Marshall Plan or European Recovery Program
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In June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced American financing for a European self-help program of recovery from the war, conditional on putting forward plans for reconstruction. The aid was offered to all the countries of Europe, but the USSR declined it and ordered the countries under its occupation to do likewise. This was because the required reconstruction plan demanded a degree of openness about economic matters that the USSR was not prepared to offer. It would also have required the USSR to become part of a world economic system dominated by the United States. So 74

the Marshall Plan was, unintentionally, a vital stage in the generation of the Cold War. The countries that did accept Marshall aidsixteen countries, mostly from Western Europe, but also including Turkey and Greecereceived a total of thirteen billion dollars between April 1948 and December 1951. To distribute the funds and coordinate the recovery program, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was set up, eventually including Western Germany. All the countries involved experienced growth of 15 to 25 percent in gross domestic product (GDP) during this four-year period. Finally, the United States backed the creation of a military alliance to protect Western Europe from possible Soviet aggression or subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was intended, as one wit put it, To keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. But eventually, West Germany joined, as otherwise the Alliance had a huge hole at the center. The USSR then set up its own counterpart in the East, the Warsaw Pact, which included the East German state, the German Democratic Republic. Warm Feelers in a Cold War This was the first hesitant stage toward greater cooperation in Western Europe. The next was launched by a French wine merchant who had been deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations in the early 1920s, Jean Monnet. In June 1940, as France was crumbling before German invasion, Monnet had suggested to Churchill the idea of a Union of Britain and France. After the war, he became Commissaire du Plan in the French government. In a memorandum written in early 1945, he expressed his worries that Europe was condemned to eternal warfare. It was not just a matter of avoiding mutually destructive arms races and alliances. It was also a question of economics, and the first stage was a closer association of European states. Some politicians in postwar Germany shared the same concerns and viewed German nationalism as a mortal danger to themselves and to European civilization. Konrad Adenauer had been Lord Mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933 and had been dismissed by the Nazis, kept out of politics, and briefly sent to a concentration camp. But in 1946, he felt it was the duty of all German Christians to unite to prevent the resurgence of secular nationalism and totalitarianism. He was one of the founding members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), set up for this purpose. He believed that Germans could create democracy only in the framework of a democratic Europe, and that this must mean resisting the influence of the Soviet Union. The leader of the Social Democratic Party, Kurt Schumacher, however, believed that the first priority was the re-creation of a functioning single Germany through the reunion of the four occupation zones. By 1948, the outbreak of the Cold War had made Schumachers vision impossible. The Soviet Union insisted on holding on to their zone and converting it into a Socialist state: the German Democratic Republic (1949). Adenauer too would have preferred a united Germany, but believed that in the Cold War it would inevitably be dominated by the Soviet Union. The only practical course was to create a West German state, which should then work 75

to become a full member of a democratic Europe supported by the United States. He welcomed the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. The Soviet Union tested the resolve of the Western powers by offering a united, disarmed, and neutral Germany. Adenauer rejected their proposals, pointing out that Switzerland managed to be neutral only because it was heavily armed. In Germanys geostrategic situation, if it was disarmed and neutral, it would inevitably be dominated by the Soviet Union. Understandably, though, many of his compatriots found the Soviet offer tempting. They felt Adenauers attitude would postpone reunification indefinitely. In the first West German free elections (1949), the CDU just managed to form a government, with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, but Adenauer was elected Federal Chancellor in the Bundestag by a majority of just one vote. When it got going, then, the closer association of democratic European states was only practiced in the West. A Common Europe From the outset, Adenauer supported the movement for European unity as an essential part of his program. One reason was to prevent having German industry dismantled by the victorious powers or being run by an international control commission. He formed a close relationship with French foreign minister Robert Schuman. In 1950, Schuman proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community, embracing France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries. It was intended to be the first step toward the creation of a European Economic Community. But many Germans suspected that the real French motive was to save their own declining industries and to share in the profitability of the more modern German industries. Adenauer shared this suspicion, but managed to steer the scheme through the Bundestag. In 1958, Euratom was created by the same countries to take advantage of economies of scale in developing a peaceful nuclear industry. In 1957, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Treaty of Rome, which took economic cooperation much further. The signatories agreed to establish a common market. It would dismantle all tariff barriers between them and end restrictive practices to ensure free and fair competition. Though mainly economic in its provisions, the Treaty of Rome did ultimately envisage greater political integration. Vital to the European economic project was a new mode of economic thinking current in postwar United States, Britain, and Western Europe. It can variously be called Keynesianism or the social market economy. These two theories approached the problems of twentieth-century economies from different angles, but came up with similar answers. The essence was to establish a basically market economy, with minimum regulation, and encourage international free trade, but supplemented by state intervention to do the following:
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Break up monopolies and cartels that distorted competition in favor of the wealthy and corrupt. Provide fall-back guarantees for the poor and chronically ill. Ensure the conditions for the basics without which no modern economy can function: education, communications, health care. 76

Growth of the West German Economy In Germany, this system was introduced by the first Economics Minister of the Federal Government, Ludwig Erhard. Erhard proposed a new currency to replace the old Reichsmark, in which no one had confidence. At the same time, he wished to abolish most price and commodity controls, reduce taxes, and open Germany to international trade. On June 20, 1948, he implemented his policy and introduced the Deutschmark. Later on, Erhards policy was adopted by the CDU, and thus became the official policy of the federal German government. Germans were able to put the war behind them and concentrate on rebuilding and expanding their economy. While doing so, they were also able to absorb the millions of their fellow countrymen who came as refugees from the GDR and from the eastern lands lost in 1945. Keynesian Economics The British economist John Maynard Keynes envisaged a further function for the state. Capitalism was liable to cyclical crises, which at their height led to wasteful overproduction and at their depth to mass unemployment and poverty. Keynes recommended that as an economy began to turn from boom toward recession, the state should break normal budgetary rules by injecting extra spending, even at the cost of budget deficits. It worked: between 1950 and 1973, West European economies went through the longest period of sustained growth they had ever experienced. Economic Success = Environmental Failure The provision of more widely available consumer goods entailed a much greater demand for coal, oil, gas, and other fuels. Exploration for extra supplies of fuel spread to ever more remote areas of the world, in some cases degrading the environment and the living conditions of non-Western peoples. Europe and North America became much more dependent on conditions in an unstable part of the world, the Middle East, where much of the worlds oil was situated. And the waste products of factories, power stations, aircraft, and even domestic houses began to threaten the purity of water supplies and the quality of the air. By the 1990s, evidence was mounting that the concentration of chemicals in the upper atmosphere was thinning out the ozone layer above the earth, therefore increasing the incidence of cancers. The accumulation of carbon dioxide and other chemicals seemed to be inducing global warming, which could in time cause the large-scale melting of ice packs and the flooding of low-lying land. Prosperity, in many ways so beneficial, seemed to have destabilized the balance between human activity and the biosphere. Growth Becomes Political Economic growth became the mark of a flourishing economy, because without it the social market economy and social democratic politics became difficult to sustain. State expenditure needed to fund modern health, education, and communications systems, which required constantly rising inputs. The art of economic managementindeed, the art of modern governmentwas to keep that growth, and the accompanying inflation, at a moderate level. This was the aim of the Keynesian system of economic management. 77

There was also in the long term a downside. Keyness system ended the terrible poverty and instability of the 1930s, but at the cost of building continuing inflation into the economy. Unfortunately, as politicians approached election time, it was very tempting to inject funding into the economy to provide jobs and a sense of well beingat the cost of stoking inflation. Another danger of the Keynesian model was that electorates might vote themselves social provisions so generous that they would begin to undermine the international competitiveness of the economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no danger of that; the European economies were so far ahead of the rest of the world (except North America) that they could permit themselves some excess expenditure. But by the 1970s, Britain, and by the 1990s, France and Germany, were beginning to find that they were pricing themselves out of global markets. Economic Success and Stability In spite of these difficulties, the EEC, or as it later became, the European Community (EC), and then the European Union (EU), was one of the great success stories of the twentieth century. Europestarting in the West became a haven of relative peace, stability, and prosperity. Through its Court of Justice, it guaranteed human rights and the rule of law to its citizens. Not the least of its achievements was to act as a magnet for the states around it, who were prepared to make considerable sacrifices in order to join it, including dismantling dictatorial regimes and ending ethnic oppression. Once the members of the EC abolished all tariffs between them (in 1968), most member states felt it was necessary to press on with other measures of economic integration. In 1979, the European Monetary System was agreed to. It limited the extent by which European currencies could fluctuate in relation to each other. The agreement was tightened in the 1990s, and in 1999 to 2002, it was superseded in most states by a single currency, the Euro. Trade and investments benefitted greatly from eliminating the uncertainties caused by fluctuating exchange rates. On the other hand, a single currency requires coordinating fiscal and monetary policiesa country experiencing economic difficulties can no longer, for instance, devalue its currency or reduce interest rates unilaterally. European Union In principle, the Single European Act of 1985 led by 1992 to the introduction of four freedoms: capital, goods, services, and people. It is almost impossible to classify the EU in traditional terms. It is neither a federal sovereign state, nor a confederation, nor an alliance, nor a customs union. Like a sovereign state, it has its own executive, legislative, and judicial institutions. As early as 1965, Walter Hallstein, president of the European Commission, referred to himself as Europes prime minister. Its laws take precedence over those of national parliaments, as do the decisions of its courts.

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78

Thinking about the Euro shows the limits of its sovereign power. Some of the EUs members do not share that currency. The EU has no army, no foreign minister, and no permanent head of state. Perhaps most important of all, its populations do not owe their primary loyalty to the EU. They still think of their nation-states as their homelands. To some extent, the EU still remains an elite project with shallow roots among the peoples. There are worse problems too: the lack of democratic control leading to red tape and corruption. These problems came to a head in 2005, when two founding member nations, France and the Netherlands, rejected a proposed new European constitution.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why did the USSR decline aid it could have received through the Marshall Plan? 2. Why did Konrad Adenauer support the movement for European unity?

Suggested Reading
Thody, Philip. Europe Since 1945. London: Routledge, 2000.

Other Books of Interest

Dedman, Martin J. The Origins and Development of the European Union, 194595: A History of European Integration. London: Routledge, 1996. Fulbrook, Mary. Europe Since 1945: The Short Oxford History of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 19471952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Lecture 13: Communist Europe: 19451989

The Suggested Reading for this lecture is J.C. Shamans Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe.

Soviet Socialism After the Second World War, another variant of supra-national citizenship was tried out in the countries that fell under the domination of the Soviet Union. The Soviet version of socialism was alien even to the socialist, let alone the nationalist, traditions of the peoples of Central Europe, like the Poles, the Czechs, and Hungarians. Besides, the Soviet version of socialism was tied to the ambitions of a superpower, which meant that the populations living standards routinely had to be sacrificed in the interests of maintaining a huge military establishment, including nuclear weapons. After the war, there was much optimism in Central Europe. Most people were grateful to the Red Army for having delivered them from the Nazi occupation. Many were quite willing to attempt some kind of socialism, partly as a reaction against Nazism, but also because their interwar experience of liberal democracy had been a failure in coping with economic depression and ethnic conflict. Stalin was anxious not to have trouble in his East European dominions, so the Communists assumed power gradually. In all countries, they at first entered a genuine coalition with other center and left parties, then assumed key positions such as Ministries of the Interior, and State Security and Defense, then used their control of coercive forces to strong-arm a coalition with the local Social Democrats, and finally formed a single-party government claiming to represent the interests of all social classes. Then, in all Eastern European countries, came a series of reforms designed to introduce a Sovietstyle social structure. All heavy industry was nationalized and economic development directed from above by a series of five-year plans. The retail sector was regrouped in cooperatives under a greater or lesser degree of state control. Landowners and private farmers were expropriated, and agriculture was reorganized in collective farms, which had state delivery plans to fulfill. Education, culture, and the mass media were all brought under the control of the Communist Party and were required to disseminate a MarxistLeninist-Stalinist worldview. The Communist Party and the state that it comprehensively infiltrated became, directly or indirectly, everyones employer as well as the holder of political power. In 1948, the Soviet Union instructed all the countries of its bloc to refuse Marshall Aid and instead formed its own economic alliance, the Council for 81

Economic Cooperation and Development (COMECON). With the division of Germany and the formation of NATO in 1949, the consolidation of the Cold War alliances was complete. A few years later, the Soviet leaders set up their own equivalent of NATO, the Warsaw Pact. Yugoslav Socialism Yugoslavia never quite fitted into the Soviet plan. Its leader, Marshal Tito, wanted to build socialism even more radically than Stalin thought wise, and Tito was less dependent on Soviet backing than other Communist leaders. In 1948, he broke with the Soviet leadership and pursued his own interpretation of socialism. In certain respects, Yugoslav socialism diverged from the Soviet model: Authority in the factories rested with workers councils elected by the employees. Peasants were allowed to leave the collective farms, reclaim their private plots, and enter cooperatives for the purpose of credit, bulk purchasing, and marketing. The state structure was more genuinely federal: the various constituent republics had real powers to determine their own internal policies, especially in education, culture, and social welfare. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet leaders themselves were trying to find ways to run a socialist system without mass terror. One of their initiatives was to resume good relationships with Yugoslavia, so some Soviet citizens became aware of the alternative forms of socialism being developed there. Post-Stalin After 1953, the Soviet leaders were looking for ways to make state socialism less oppressive and more productive. In any repetition of the 1930s terror, the leaders would have been victim of some new Stalin. In any case, to act as a genuine counterweight to the United States, they had to do the following: Show that socialism was more successful at generating wealth for ordinary people than American-style capitalism or the West European mixed economy. In Realpolitik terms, keep up militarily with the United States. The authoritarian style of Soviet enterprises made innovation difficult to achieve. Factories had to fulfill output plans formulated up to five years in advance, and customer satisfaction had low priority. Soviet-manufactured products tended to be old-fashioned and of poor quality. When they concentrated resources in key sectors, they could achieve remarkable things, as they did during the war and in the space exploration program of the late 1950s and 1960s. But this was not typical, and in the end, even the space program fell behind. Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (18941971), first secretary of the Communist Party after Stalin, did his best to relaunch the messianic Soviet project. 82

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 He announced a massive program of domestic housing. Between 1955 and 1964, the stock of domestic housing doubled. By the 1980s, most urban Soviet citizens had moved out of cramped communal apartments into private family units: a privatization of Soviet social life. Khrushchev gave collective farmers more freedom to produce fruit, vegetables, dairy products, and other food on their own private plots and sell them on the free market. He also announced a great campaign to open up virgin lands in south and west Siberia and north Kazakhstan. This greatly increased grain output and finally banished the specter of famine from Russia. He announced a considerable expansion in the production of consumer durables so that the everyday standard of living would rise and be more like those in the West. Khrushchev announced in 1961 that by 1980 the Soviet Union would reach full-scale Communism. At this point, the Soviet state would fade away and people would administer their own lives, though how this was to be done he never made clear. The boldest of all Khrushchevs moves, though, was to denounce Stalins crimes. He did this at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, though significantly at a secret session. Indeed, its contents were not published in the Soviet media until decades later. Khrushchev revealed that Stalin had arrested and in some cases shot many leading figures in politics, the armed forces, and the professions on the basis of fraudulent accusations. The party, he declared, must return to Lenins original ideas and socialist legality. In Poland, writers revived clubs and discussion groups demanding free speech. The Soviet Union allowed Wladyslaw Gomu l ka to lead a government committed to a Polish road to socialism. This meant private agriculture, a private retail sector, elected workers councils in factories, and most remarkably, the legalization of a Catholic political party, which was permitted to elect a few deputies to the Polish Parliament. In Hungary, Imre Nagy announced an end to the Communist monopoly of politics, a free public media, free elections with genuine opposition parties, Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and a declaration of neutrality. Soviet leaders reoccupied the country, violently suppressing the workers movement in Budapest. In the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, which in 1949 had become the German Democratic Republic, people voted with their feet, crossing the lightly patrolled sector boundary inside Berlin, and continuing into West Germany on the citys guaranteed access routes. To prevent this in 1961, with Soviet encouragement, the GDR government built a concrete wall dividing Berlin. In 1968, there was a delayed response to the denunciation of Stalin in v Czechoslovakia too, led by the Communist Party leader Alexander Dubc ek. This took a very different form from Hungary, much more gradual and consensual, but aiming eventually at political pluralism, free elections, free discussion of political issues, and the establishment of a mixed economy with a substantial private sector. Alarmed at the probable loss of Communist control, the Warsaw Pact invaded to restore Soviet-style order. 83

Polish Solidarno c s The real beginning of the end of the Soviet Union took place in 1980 in Poland, where there was inadequate food production to keep workers fed at reasonable prices. There was a sudden massive outburst of worker discontent, centered on the shipyards at Gda sk, and led by a young recently disn missed electrician, Lech Wa l esa. Before long, a nationwide strike had broken v out, organized by a non-Communist trade union calling itself Solidarity (Solidarno c). Workers and intellectuals were working together in close s alliance. The authorities could not just destroy its opponents separately; they had to face them together. For more than a year, the Polish Communist Party and Solidarity tried to run the country together, in an uneasy tandem. Then, in December 1981, the Polish army intervened to close Solidarity down and restore single-party rule. The memory of Solidarity was overwhelming, however, and its unarrested members, workers, and intellectuals stayed in touch with each other. In 1989, they were invited back to the negotiating table. Glasnost, Perestroika, and Uskorenie Even the Soviet leaders were aware that some kind of radical reform was needed. Their country was no longer admired by anyone in the West as a model of socialism. Furthermore, it could no longer keep pace with the latest American military technology. The Soviets either had to create a more flexible, responsive, and innovative economy or go under in the arms race. In 1985, the Communist leaders elected Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (1931). He took up some of Khrushchevs initiatives, but in the end was much more radical. Gorbachevs three-tiered reforms were known as glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), and uskorenie (acceleration of economic development). Under these reforms, he restored private initiative in manufacturing, retail, and services; ended the stifling system of intellectual censorship and allowed free speech in the public media; and ended the Communist monopoly of politics and allowed the constituent republics of the Soviet Union far more freedom to make their own laws. All these changes delighted Westernizers in the Soviet Union, but the Soviet system could not be reformed so simply. The economic reforms moved goods out of the state sector into private hands, where they could be sold at much higher prices. Ordinary consumers were left helpless. Political freedoms meant unlimited criticism of the Communist Party itself, and ensured that from 1989 opposition politicians began to play a serious role.
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Some of the non-Russian republics began to demand home rule, and then ultimately secession from the USSR. The Baltic Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania began the process. They were soon followed by Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and even Russias closest associate, Ukraine. Russians responded with their own backlash: If everyone hated them, perhaps they too should secede from the USSR! Yeltsin was elected president of Russia, and then drove through reforms even when Gorbachev hesitated.

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Disintegration of the Soviet Union As the Soviet Union descended into disorder, the satellites took the opportunity to go their own way. In Poland, workers strikes forced Jaruzelski to negotiate seriously with Solidarity and to restore free elections. But the most dramatic response was in Germany. On November 9, 1989, East German citizens began to scale the Berlin wall and to knock holes in it. The East German police, aware that they no longer had Soviet support, did nothing to prevent the destruction of the wall. Within a few hours, the hated wall had ceased to be a barrier. Within a few months, East Germans were free to elect a Christian Democrat government and reunite with their Western cousins. This was the defining event of the late 1980s. Within two years, the Soviet Union had fallen apart into fifteen independent national republics. Communism had proved itself incompatible with European norms of citizenship, free speech and debate, democratic politics, and a productive consumer economy.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why were many in Central Europe willing to try some form of socialism after the war? 2. How did Yugoslavian socialism differ from the Soviet model?

Suggested Reading
Sharman, J.C. Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe. London: Routledge, 2003.

Other Books of Interest

Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. Eastern Europe: Politics, Culture, and Society Since 1939. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. Hitchcock, William I. The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945 to the Present. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.

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Lecture 14: After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: New Hopes and New Challenges The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Reflections on the Balkan Wars: Ten Years After the Break-up of Yugoslavia, edited by Jeffrey S. Morton, Stefano Bianchini, Craig Nation, and Paul Forage.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany began the process of reunification, which was realized on October 3, 1990, forty-five years after the end of the Second World War. The remaining countries of Eastern Europe held democratic elections and turned out Communist governments in favor of democratic, pluralistic ones. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. This was the greatest transformation seen in Europe since 1945. On the face of it, the breakup of the USSR was a triumph for the West. Yet this too proved to have some downsides. Western, free-market economic remedies created social polarization and political instability in much of Central and Eastern Europe. A larger and poorer Germany threatened to dominate the European Community and to drain all its savings. There was at first no obvious need for the Americans to stay in Europe. Yet without the United States, the European Union was far from having the political unity or the military strength to cope with the problems and conflicts that arose when the old certainties suddenly disappeared. The Yugoslav Wars During the socialist period, Yugoslavia had been the most decentralized of the socialist states. But this thin layer concealed abiding nationalism among its constituent ethnic groups, especially between the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims. There was the additional problem of Kosovo, originally a Serb province, now overwhelmingly Albanian in population, where the remaining Serbs felt threatened and victimized. In 1992, Croatia declared independence. Serbs who lived in Croatia and Bosnia were alarmed at their vulnerability and set up armed bands, initially in self-defense, but they soon set about forming enclaves of Serb territory and attacking non-Serbs. For several years, they besieged the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo. Hundreds of thousands of refugees left regions ethnically cleansed by the opposite side. The United Nations sent an international peacekeeping force and declared safe areas, to which refugees from the fighting could go to find security. Actually, the UN forces could do nothing effective to strike against well-armed Serb forces. Their impotence was horrifyingly shown up in July 1995, when in one of its so-called safe areas, Srebrenitsa, the Serbs murdered some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men. Not until after that did NATO begin to carry out air strikes against Serb positions around Sarajevo. The Serbs were forced to the negotiating table under American chairmanship, and an agreement to partition Bosnia was hammered out. But even today, ten years later, it cannot be said that refugees have returned and are living peacefully, side by side. 87

NATO came in again in 1999, this time over Kosovo. Serbia had revoked Kosovos autonomous status in the 1980s and stationed ever more Serb troops there to keep the peace and to keep the Albanians down. Not until 1998 did serious and sustained violence flare up there. The Kosovo Liberation Army demanded full independence, and the Serbs responded with intrusive searches and eventually the torching of Albanian villages. In 1999, v c the Serb leader Milosevi seemed on the brink of launching a campaign of murderous ethnic cleansing against Albanians in Kosovo. NATO began a bombing campaign against Serb military installations. Nearly a million Albanian refugees fled the region, mostly into Albania and Macedonia. Only when United States President Clinton threatened to commit ground troops did v c Milosevi accept a peace agreement and withdraw his army from Kosovo. But this led to a reverse process of ethnic cleansing, with Albanians streaming back in and displacing Serbs. So NATO was still needed, not only to deal with the ex-Yugoslavia, but also to guard against the danger of a resurgent Russia with nuclear weapons. This danger was perceived with special sensitivity in the countries of Central Europe, which began to clamor for membership. NATO was also needed to prevent a united Germany from dominating the continent. Join and Succeed The countries of Central Europe saw their fate as being ineluctably tied in with that of Europe as a whole. The Polish Foreign Minister Boleslaw Geremek declared in 1998 that Europe and Poland have a common JudeoChristian heritage and depend on each other. So Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary pressed to join both NATO and the European Union. Both were achieved by 2004. Russia was somewhat mollified by an agreement that created a permanent NATO-Russia Joint Council for mutual consultation. All the same, serious tensions remained in Eastern Europe, for whereas the Balkan countries and even Ukraine might eventually join the European Union, Russia could never do so and would not want to, because membership would entail a serious loss of sovereignty. The EUs insistence on democratic politics, the rule of law, and respect for human rights strongly influenced countries that wanted to join. In the hope of gaining admission to the European Union, Romania dropped discrimination against the very large Hungarian minority in its territory. Similarly, Bulgarians dropped discrimination against their Turk minority, and in Turkey itself, Kurds were for the first time allowed to open their own newspapers and teach in the Kurdish language in schools. There was even some hope that Turkey and Greece would settle their long-standing conflict over Cyprus. Irelands economic success in the 1980s and 1990s offered all Irish an alternative model to that of the United Kingdom and probably played a role in the gradual easing of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This has been perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the European Union and NATO: the ending of a terrible half-century of tyrannies and mutual massacres of European peoples. The Lesson of Cooperation The European Union is still a weakling in projecting diplomatic and military power. It still has no fully common defense or international policy, and no sin88

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gle spokesperson. That is why NATO is still important. It has trained and wellequipped military forces, a command structure, and a reasonably clear, if reformulated, mission. Monetary Union In comparing economic Europe of the 1930s with its narrow, beggar-thyneighbor policies to the cooperative economic policies of the 1990s, Europe can be seen as moving toward actual monetary union. There are, of course, advantages and drawbacks to currency union. On the one hand, it is the European Unions best answer to globalization. The costs and risks of currency exchanges significantly impede business between nations, even when they are already in a customs union. The main disadvantage of currency union is that European countries experience periods of growth and recession at different times. If one European country suffers high unemployment, it can no longer unilaterally devalue its currency or lower interest rates in order to stimulate its own economy, nor can adjustment be reached, as can be done in the United States, through rapid relocation of jobs or enterprises. There is also great difficulty in reaching agreement. Many Germans opposed sacrificing the Deutschmark, which had become the symbol of a peaceful and very successful nation for forty years. The Deutschmark suffered from unification, during which huge funds had to be spent in welfare payments and investments in the former GDR. During the resultant recession in the early 1990s, the United Kingdoms pound and the Italian lira had to withdraw from the currency agreement because they could not sustain their foreign exchange values. But recovery in the mid- to late-1990s created a more favorable climate, and the final decision to set up a single currency was taken in early 1998, just before the Russian financial collapse and the Asian crisis placed new doubt on the stability of international trade. However, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and the new 2004 entrants to the European Union remain outside the Euro area. Europe Today Citizenship and the Nation-State Modern democratic nation-states have given Europeans an unparalleled sense of belonging to and participating in large entities able to project their power and wealth to real effect in the world. Yet at the same time, the nationstate has generated the most destructive wars the world has ever seen. And even today, national exclusiveness means that many people within nations still look askance on immigrants who come to live in their society. Strong national identity makes people bad at tolerating and interacting with those outside their nation. Europe has tried to rise above the nation-state, but has only partly succeeded. Even today, European peoples do not readily identify with Europe as such, but rather with their own nations or even regions. They turn out in very small numbers to elect deputies to the European Parliament. They see Brussels and its bureaucrats as them, complicating life with unnecessary regulations. When Europe tried to create a new constitution in 2005, France 89

and the Netherlands rejected it, largely because they felt they were being manipulated from above by unresponsive officials, and in particular compelled to accept forms of foreign competition they resented. Financial Institutions Pension funds, insurance companies, national banks, and stock exchanges have all proved extraordinarily successful in generating economic development and delivering wealth to large numbers of people. And if wealth creation using these institutions originally polarized society into a few very rich and a large number of poor, those extremes have been attenuated in European countries by the operation of the welfare state, which has redistributed income and created a safety net for the most disadvantaged. But where Europeans used to face risk by putting trust in families, local communities, and religious associations, they now do so through financial institutions and the state. This is undoubtedly more effective, but in doing so, Europeans surrender control over their lives to bureaucrats, accountants, and corporate lawyers. Europeans also lose the warmth of close habitual personal relations. Most Europeans, especially of an older generation, feel that a certain sense of community has disappeared. People are more individualistic. There has been an undoubted gain in freedom, but a loss in social bonds. Europe is the worlds least religious continent. In most continents, including the United States, modernization has led to changes in religious belief and practice, but not to their decline. The problem is compounded when European financial institutions are exported to the rest of the world through organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organizations. Non-European countries have little choice but to conform to their demands if they want to secure their niche in the global economy, but they find those demands incongruous in societies that rely more on personalized networks of kinship and patron-client bonds. These financial institutions can actually undermine economic processes in such countries, as we have seen recently in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Russia. They can also be felt to violate deeply held moral customs and beliefs. That is the fundamental reason why today Europe has a tense relationship with Islam. The operations of Europe in Asia, Africa, and especially the Middle East have done much to deny the peoples of those regions prosperity and self-determination. The scientific method was another highly successful European invention that enabled it to dominate the world for a couple of centuries. But again, there was a cost. Europeans no longer see themselves as being an integral part of the planet on which they live. They regard nature as something to be exploited for their benefit, with long-term consequences in pollution, the loss of species life, and ultimately, global warming. Members of non-European religions would also say that Europeans artificially split and impoverish the human being, losing touch with their own deeper spiritual life in the interests of a rational and scientific attitude to themselves and to the world in general.

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Europe, then, is a paradox. Through its concepts of citizenship and the nation-state, through its financial and economic institutions, through its deployment of science and technology, through the transfer of its ideals to international institutions, it has made life better and freer for millions of people throughout the world. But at the same time, it has proved unable to solve the problems generated by its own success. In an imperfect world, perhaps, that is the best one can expect. One thing is certain: even in a world increasingly dominated by the United States and China, the successes and failures of Europe will continue to play a major role.

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FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Questions
1. Why did France and the Netherlands reject the constitution Europe tried to create in 2005? 2. How did the scientific method enable Europe to dominate the world?

Suggested Reading
Morton, Jeffrey S., Stefano Bianchini, Craig Nation, and Paul Forage, eds. Reflections on the Balkan Wars: Ten Years After the Break-up of Yugoslavia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Other Books of Interest

Hollander, Paul. Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Stokes, Gale. The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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COURSE MATERIALS

Suggested Readings: Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Downing, Brian M. The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004. Jacob, James R. The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 15001700. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. MacCullough, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin, 2003. Morton, Jeffrey S., Stefano Bianchini, Craig Nation, and Paul Forage, eds. Reflections on the Balkan Wars: Ten Years After the Break-up of Yugoslavia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Mullett, Michael A. The Catholic Reformation. London: Routledge, 1999. Parry, J.H. Trade & Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century. London: Phoenix Press, 2001. Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Schulze, Hagen. The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 17631867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Sharman, J.C. Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe. London: Routledge, 2003. Stevenson, David. 19141918: The History of the First World War. London: Allen Lane, 2004. Thody, Philip. Europe Since 1945. London: Routledge, 2000. Thompson, William R. The Emergence of the Global Political Economy. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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