The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (42 page)

But the appearance of Italy’s Great Power status covered some stupendous weaknesses, above all the country’s economic retardation, particularly in the rural south. Its illiteracy rate—37.6 percent overall and again far greater in the south—was much higher than in any other western or northern European state, a reflection of the backwardness of much of Italian agriculture—smallholdings, poor soil, little investment, sharecropping, inadequate transport. Italy’s total output and per capita national wealth were comparable to those of the peasant societies of Spain and eastern Europe rather than those of the Netherlands or Westphalia. Italy had no coal; yet, despite its turn to hydroelectricity, about 88 percent of Italy’s energy continued to come from British coal, a drain upon its balance of payments and an appalling strategical weakness. In these circumstances, Italy’s rise in population without significant industrial expansion was a mixed blessing, since it slowed its industrial growth in per capita terms relative to the other western Powers,
²⁹
and the comparison would have been even more unfavorable had not hundreds of thousands of Italians (usually the more mobile and able) emigrated across the Atlantic each year. All this made it, in Kemp’s phrase, “the disadvantaged latecomer.”
³⁰

This is not to say that there was no modernization. Indeed, it is precisely about this period that many historians have referred to “the industrial revolution of the Giolittian era” and to “a decisive change in the economic life of our country.”
³¹
At least in the north, there was a considerable shift to heavy industry—iron and steel, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, as well as textiles. In Gerschrenkon’s view, the years 1896–1908 witnessed Italy’s “big push” toward industrialization; indeed, Italian industrial growth rose faster than anywhere else in Europe, the population shift from the countryside to the towns intensified, the banking system readjusted itself in order to provide industrial credit, and real national income moved sharply upward.
³²
Piedmontese agriculture showed similar steps forward.

However, once the Italian statistics are placed in comparative prospective, the gloss begins to fade. It
did
create an iron and steel industry, but in 1913 its output was one-eighth that of Britain, one-seventeenth that of Germany, and only two-fifths that of Belgium.
³³
It did achieve swift rates of industrial growth, but that was from such a very low beginning level that the real results were not impressive. At the outset of the First World War, it had not achieved even one-quarter of the industrial strength which Great Britain possessed
in 1900, and its share of world manufacturing production actually dropped, from a mere 2.5 percent in 1900 to 2.4 percent in 1913. Although Italy marginally entered the listings of Great Powers, it is worth noting that—Japan excluded—every other of these powers had two or three times its industrial muscle; some (Germany and Britain) had sixfold the amount, and one (the United States) over thirteen times.

This might have been compensated for somewhat by a relatively greater degree of national cohesion and resolve on the part of the Italian population, but such elements were absent. The loyalties which existed in the Italian body politic were familial and local, perhaps regional, but not national. The chronic gap between north and south, which the industrialization of the former only exacerbated, and the lack of any great contact with the world outside the village community in so many parts of the peninsula were not helped by the hostility between the Italian government and the Catholic Church, which forbade its members to serve the state. The ideals of
risorgimento
, hailed by native and admiring foreign liberals, did not penetrate very far down Italian society. Recruitment for the armed services was difficult, and the actual location of army units according to strategical principles, rather than regional political calculations, was impossible. Civil-military relationships at the top were characterized by a mutual miscomprehension and distrust. The general antimilitarism of Italian society, the poor quality of the officer corps, and the lack of adequate funding for modern weaponry raised doubts about Italian military effectiveness long before the disastrous 1917 battle of Caporetto or the 1940 Egyptian campaign.
³⁴
Its unification wars had relied upon the intervention of France, and then the threat to Austria-Hungary from Prussia. The 1896 catastrophe at Adowa (in Abyssinia) gave Italy the awful reputation of having the only European army defeated by an African society without means of effective response. The Italian government decision to make war in Libya in 1911–1912, which took the Italian general staff itself by surprise, was a financial disaster of the first order. The navy, looking very large in 1890, steadily declined in relative size and was always of questionable efficiency. Successive Mediterranean commander in chiefs of the Royal Navy always hoped that the Italian fleet would be neutral, not allied, if it ever came to a war with France in this period.
³⁵

The consequences of all this upon Italy’s strategical and diplomatic position were depressing. Not only was the Italian general staff acutely aware of its numerical and technical inferiority compared with the French (especially) and the Austro-Hungarians, but it also knew that Italy’s inadequate railway network and the deep-rooted regionalism made impossible large-scale, flexible troop deployments in the Prussian manner. And not only was the Italian navy aware of its deficiencies,
but Italy’s vulnerable and lengthy coastline made its alliance politics extremely ambivalent, and thus made strategic planning more chaotic than ever. The alliance treaty that Italy signed in 1882 with Berlin was comforting at first, particularly when Bismarck seemed to paralyze the French; but even then the Italian government kept pressing for closer ties with Britain, which alone could neutralize the French fleet. When, in the years after 1900, Britain and France moved closer together and Britain and Germany moved from cooperation to antagonism, the Italians felt that they had little alternative but to tack toward the new Anglo-French combination. The residual dislike of Austria-Hungary strengthened this move, just as the respect for Germany and the importance of German industrial finance in Italy checked it from being an open break. Thus by 1914, Italy occupied a position like that of 1871. It was “the least of the Great Powers,”
³⁶
frustratingly unpredictable and unscrupulous in the eyes of its neighbors, and possessing commercial and expansionist ambitions in the Alps, the Balkans, North Africa, and farther afield which conflicted with the interests of both friends and rivals. Economic and social circumstances continued to weaken its power to influence events, and yet it remained a player in the game. In sum, the judgment of most other governments seems to have been that it was better to have Italy as a partner than as a foe; but the margin of benefit was not great.
³⁷

Italy was a marginal member of the Great Power system in 1890, but Japan wasn’t even in the club. For centuries it had been ruled by a decentralized feudal oligarchy consisting of territorial lords
(daimyo)
and an aristocratic caste of warriors (samurai). Hampered by the absence of natural resources and by a mountainous terrain that left only 20 percent of its land suitable for cultivation, Japan lacked all of the customary prerequisites for economic development. Isolated from the rest of the world by a complex language with no close relatives and an intense consciousness of cultural uniqueness, the Japanese people remained inward-looking and resistant to foreign influences well into the second half of the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, Japan seemed destined to remain politically immature, economically backward, and militarily impotent in World Power terms.
³⁸
Yet within two generations it had become a major player in the international politics of the Far East.

The cause of this transformation, effected by the Meiji Restoration from 1868 onward, was the determination of influential members of the Japanese elite to avoid being dominated and colonized by the West, as seemed to be happening elsewhere in Asia, even if the reform measures to be taken involved the scrapping of the feudal order and the bitter opposition of the samurai clans.
³⁹
Japan had to be modernized
not because individual entrepreneurs wished it, but because the “state” needed it. After the early opposition had been crushed, modernization proceeded with a
dirigisme
and commitment which makes the efforts of Colbert or Frederick the Great pale by comparison. A new constitution, based upon the Prusso-German model, was established. The legal system was reformed. The educational system was vastly expanded, so that the country achieved an exceptionally high literacy rate. The calendar was changed. Dress was changed. A modern banking system was evolved. Experts were brought in from Britain’s Royal Navy to advise upon the creation of an up-to-date Japanese fleet, and from the Prussian general staff to assist in the modernization of the army. Japanese officers were sent to western military and naval academies; modern weapons were purchased from abroad, although a native armaments industry was also established. The state encouraged the creation of a railway network, telegraphs, and shipping lines; it worked in conjunction with emerging Japanese entrepreneurs to develop heavy industry, iron, steel, and shipbuilding, as well as to modernize textile production. Government subsidies were employed to benefit exporters, to encourage shipping, to get a new industry set up. Japanese exports, especially of silk and textiles, soared. Behind all this lay the impressive political commitment to realize the national slogan
fukoku kyohei
(“rich country, with strong army”). For the Japanese, economic power and military/naval power went hand in hand.

But all this took time, and the handicaps remained severe.
⁴⁰
Although the urban population more than doubled between 1890 and 1913, numbers engaged on the land remained about the same. Even on the eve of the First World War, over three-fifths of the Japanese population was engaged in agriculture, forestry, and fishing; and despite all the many improvements in farming techniques, the mountainous countryside and the small size of most holdings prevented an “agricultural revolution” on, say, the British model. With such a “bottom-heavy” agricultural base, all comparisons of Japan’s industrial potential or of per capita levels of industrialization were bound to show it at or close to the lower end of the Great Power lists (see
Tables 14
and
17
above). While its pre-1914 industrial spurt can clearly be detected in the large rise of its energy consumption from modern fuels and in the increase in its share of world manufacturing production, it was still deficient in many other areas. Its iron and steel output was small, and it relied heavily upon imports. In the same way, although its shipbuilding industry was greatly expanded, it still ordered some warships elsewhere. It also was very short of capital, needing to borrow increasing amounts from abroad but never having enough to invest in industry, in infrastructure, and in the armed services. Economically, it had performed miracles to become the only nonwestern state to go through an industrial révolution
in the age of high imperialism; yet it still remained, compared to Britain, the United States, and Germany, an industrial and financial lightweight.

Two further factors, however, aided Japan’s rise to Great Power status and help to explain why it surpassed, for example, Italy. The first was its geographical isolation. The nearby continental shore was held by nothing more threatening than the decaying Chinese Empire. And while China, Manchuria, and (even more alarming) Korea might fall into the hands of another Great Power, geography had placed Japan far closer to those lands than any one of the other imperialist states—as Russia was to find to its discomfort when it tried to supply an army along six thousand miles of railway in 1904–1905, and as the British and American navies were to discover several decades later as they wrestled with the logistical problems involved in the relief of the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya. Assuming a steady Japanese growth in East Asia, it would only be by the most extreme endeavors that any other major state could prevent Japan from becoming the predominant power there in the course of time.

The second factor was
moral
. It seems indisputable that the strong Japanese sense of cultural uniqueness, the traditions of emperor worship and veneration of the state, the samurai ethos of military honor and valor, the emphasis upon discipline and fortitude, produced a political culture at once fiercely patriotic and unlikely to be deterred by sacrifices and reinforced the Japanese impulses to expand into “Greater East Asia,” for strategical security as well as markets and raw materials. This was reflected in the successful military and naval campaigning against China in 1894, when those two countries quarreled over their claims in Korea.
⁴¹
On land and sea, the better-equipped Japanese forces seemed driven by a will to succeed. At the end of that war, the threats of the “triple intervention” by Russia, France, and Germany compelled an embittered Japanese government to withdraw its claims to Port Arthur and the Liaotung Peninsula, but that merely increased Tokyo’s determination to try again later. Few, if any, in the government dissented from Baron Hayashi’s grim conclusion: