The Transformation of the World (109 page)

For countries such as China, Japan, or Siam, it was a complete novelty to have to deal with foreign diplomats who insisted on symbolic equality, and often also came along with the affected peremptoriness of a great power. Diplomacy was changing in Europe as well during this period, but at a rather more leisurely pace. Foreign-policy apparatuses grew slowly: the diplomatic and consular services of the United Kingdom, for example, had a total staff of 414 on the eve of the First World War, fewer than 150 of whom were career diplomats. New consuls might be posted to the Americas and the noncolonial countries of Asia, where they often performed quasi-diplomatic duties more in the manner of imperial consuls than as mere representatives of their government, becoming typical “men on the spot” with enormous powers and vast freedom of action. British consuls in China had the right to call in a gunboat anytime on their own initiative.

Personnel

Since there were fewer states than today, diplomatic apparatuses remained manageable. The founding of the Latin American republics in the 1820s is said to have doubled the workload of the British Foreign Office at a stroke; it did not have to face such an experience again for a long time. Officials working in foreign capitals were not exactly busy. In 1870 the French finance ministry employed fifteen times as many civil servants as the foreign ministry. Foreign policy in Europe continued to be a domain of the aristocracy, and even in democratic systems of government it came under parliamentary control only in situations of acute crisis. The internal hierarchy within the diplomatic community reflected the changing importance of countries within the international system. The smaller ones carried less weight than previously. After 1815, countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and the Swiss Confederation gradually developed a posture of neutrality, which made foreign policy in the usual sense more or less unnecessary. For representatives of the Great Powers, the most prestigious posts were for a long time in the capitals of the pentarchy. In midcentury the French government paid its representative (of envoy rank) in Washington a mere one-seventh of an ambassador's salary in London. Only in 1892 were the European legations in the United States upgraded to embassies. There were scarcely any diplomats at all in a political backwater like Tehran, which had a British embassy from 1809 but a French one only from 1855. After an early false start, the Ottoman Empire acquired a permanent network of missions in the 1830s; the exchange of envoys between Istanbul and Tehran in 1859 was the first example of modern diplomatic relations in the Muslim world. In 1860 China was forced to send diplomatic representatives to Europe, but they were conspicuously drawn from low down in the finely graded ranking order of Chinese officialdom. Only Japan, eager to be on a par with the West both practically and symbolically, threw itself with enthusiasm into the new diplomatic game. By 1873 it had nine
legations in European capitals and Washington, and in 1905–6, in a clear sign of Japan's ascent in world politics, some Great Powers upgraded their missions in Tokyo from legations to embassies.
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The telegraph created new scope for foreign-policy communications, although not from one day to the next. When France and Britain declared war on Russia in March 1854, the Sublime Porte in Istanbul learned of it more than a fortnight later, since the news traveled by wire only as far as Marseille and then had to be conveyed by ship.
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Twenty years later, virtually the whole world was linked by cable. At first, the new medium also had the effect of shortening news reports and dispatches: it was too expensive to wire long documents around the globe.

One of the main tasks of diplomats in relation to the non-European world was to conclude all manner of treaties: trade agreements, protectorate treaties, border treaties, and so on. The idea of a treaty valid under international law was not entirely unfamiliar outside Europe (China had signed one in 1689 with Russia), but in many particular situations they led to cultural misunderstandings. The problems of translation alone could be very delicate and lead to serious complications at the implementation stage. A good example is the Treaty of Waitangi, which a British Crown representative signed on February 6 (now New Zealand's National Day), 1840 with a large number of local chiefs (as many as five hundred in the end), and which formed the basis for Britain's declaration of sovereignty. In actual fact, it was not a brutal imperialist diktat but bore the marks of the British humanitarian spirit of the age. Yet it became the most controversial element in New Zealand politics, since the English and the Maori wording were sharply at variance with each other. Given the military balance of forces at the time, the Crown could not simply have “taken possession” of the country without the agreement of the Maoris; Britain had not won a war against them (as it would against China two years later), and Captain William Hobson, the signatory to the treaty, had at his command no more than a handful of policemen. However, the interpretation of the text would bring many an unpleasant surprise for the Maoris.
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In societies without a written language, such as those in Africa or the South Seas, the conceptual gulf was by the nature of things especially wide. European notions concerning the validity and enforcement of contracts, and the sanctions to be applied in the event of a breach, were not everywhere immediately comprehensible. But even Asian cultures familiar with diplomatic correspondence in the region were not exempt from misunderstandings. Individual treaties piled up to form luxuriant sets involving a number of parties. The system of “unequal treaties” between various powers and the Chinese Empire had become so laby-rinthine by the early twentieth century that virtually no one could master it in detail, except perhaps top Chinese legal experts employed to fend off Western claims. As early as 1868, amid the confusion of regime change, Japan's newly assembled imperial government raised objections under international law (with which it had only just become familiar) against the interventionist designs of the United States and various European powers.
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The impenetrability of the set of treaties was underlined by the fact that many of them had been kept secret. In Europe, the decades leading up to the First World War were the climax and terminus of secret diplomacy; opposition subsequently raged against such practices, in the name of a new diplomacy grounded on public legitimacy, which was championed above all by Woodrow Wilson. The new Bolshevik government in Russia published documents from the Tsarist archive, and in 1919 the charter of the League of Nations prohibited secret treaties.

A new element in international relations, or rather one revived in the second half of the nineteenth century, was the personal meeting between monarchs, often attended with great pomp and circumstance. Napoleon III, Wilhelm II, and Nicholas II wallowed in such occasions and staged them for a new mass public,
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but the global radiance emanating from them was not very great. Monarchs did not even visit their own colonies—although Wilhelm II made it to Ottoman Palestine in 1898. In 1911–12 George V became the first British monarch to travel to India, in order to have himself crowned Emperor of India a year after his accession to the British throne. Meetings with non-European colleagues had rarity value. No European ruler ever saw Cixi, the Dowager Empress of China, or the Meiji Tennō, who in 1906 was ceremonially awarded the Order of the Garter as an almost routine follow-up to the signing of the Anglo-Japanese treaty of alliance in 1902.
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Oriental rulers had to betake themselves to Europe. In 1867 Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) set a precedent for an Ottoman sultan by traveling to Christian Europe for six weeks on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle in Paris—a trip whose main significance lay in the fact that his nephew, the future Sultan Abdülhamid II (an altogether weightier ruler), was a member of the party and received impressions that left a deep mark on him. The delegation was personally welcomed by Napoleon III at the Gare de Lyon, and it later met with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and visited the courts of Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna.
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In 1873 Shah Nasir al-Din (r. 1848–96) became the first Iranian monarch to visit the lands of the infidel.
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The Siamese king Chulalongkorn traveled to Europe in 1897 and 1907, meeting Queen Victoria and many other rulers. His policy aim was to raise the symbolic value of his country in European eyes, and to this end he awarded a number of honors to his hosts. He was rather put out, however, when the British did not reciprocate by decorating him with the Order of the Garter.

The cross-cultural relations were somewhat denser among other members of imperial and royal families. Queen Victoria may not have traveled to India, but Crown Prince Edward (the future Edward VII) did in her place. Empress Eugénie sailed aboard her luxury yacht to the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Chulalongkorn sent two of his many sons to be trained at the Prussian military academy. The Qing dynasty was commanded to send a prince to European capitals in atonement for the Boxer Uprising. And in 1905 Wilhelm II succeeded in charming the Japanese crown prince and princess. The international of crowned heads remained a European affair: the New World lay outside its orbit, even more
so after the Brazilians disposed of emperor Pedro II and turned their country into a republic in 1889. But at the latest Theodore Roosevelt signaled by the gravity of his conduct that American presidents were the equals of any monarchs on the planet. The Meiji Emperor, shrouded as few of his colleagues were in ceremony and mystique, is said to have been impressed in his forty-four-year reign by no one more than by the unassuming bourgeois Civil War hero and former president Ulysses S. Grant.
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There would have been more cross-cultural encounters of this kind if it had been possible to expect some gain from them. Nineteenth-century Europeans cultivated the old image of the dumb and degenerate “Oriental potentate,” fit only as operetta material. Gilbert and Sullivan's
The Mikado
(1885) evoked a fantasy-world Japan, with a fictitious ruler totally unrelated to the energetic and capable real-life Meiji emperor. In European cliché, the Ottoman sultans seemed to embody in person the “sick man of the Bosphorus.” Clichés also obscured the achievements of competent and enlightened rulers such as Mongkut and Chulalongkorn of Siam or Mindon of Burma. What interested the public most about Mindon was a picturesque detail: the fact that for decades British ambassadors followed the prescribed custom of removing their shoes in his presence. When the government of British India in Calcutta put a stop to this in 1875, it was tantamount to the withholding of diplomatic recognition from Burma. The shoe question became one of the grounds for annexation of the Burmese rump state.
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Lack of deference to rulers reflected a lack of respect for their countries. The Law of Nations, which grew in importance after 1815 and, from the forties on, was mainly developed by British jurists and promoted by British politicians, did not afford protection to territories outside Europe. It also left large areas unregulated, especially at sea. Thus, whaler captains hunting in the same grounds made detailed agreements with one another to cover conflicts over the discovery and final ownership of prey.
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Nineteenth-century European expansion tended to favor the English legal model of the protectorate. Originally all this meant was that a state transferred to a protector the task of looking after its external relations, but in colonial practice it often signified nothing less than a disguised form of annexation.
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It was so popular as a legal form because it gave the protector country every opportunity for economic exploitation, without imposing the burden of responsible administration. So long as no third party, no other colonial power, opposed the creation of a protectorate relationship, there was nothing in international law to stand in its way. It often happened that contrary to legal doctrine, a protectorate was declared over a community that could not, with the best will in the world, be classified as a state.

At the other end of the spectrum, a state might be erased from the map after centuries of existence in which it had enjoyed a stable legitimacy at least as great as that of most European states. When Korea, with a continuous statehood stretching back to the fourteenth century, was declared a Japanese protectorate in 1905, it protested to the Second Peace Conference at The Hague (1907) against this degradation of its position. But the conference presidium did not even admit the Korean
representatives, explaining that it considered Korea to be a nonexistent country. The enforcement of this view was then left up to power politics. The Japanese formally annexed Korea in 1910 and retained it as a colony until 1945. Nevertheless, decisions of this kind, so often made by ministers or a tiny group of great powers at an international conference, gradually became the object of public debates.

It is almost a commonplace that the years from 1815 to 1870 were the classical age of pure power play in foreign affairs, conducted by a narrow elite of aristocratic experts.
Previously
, dynastic considerations had often stood in the way of a “realistic” foreign policy, and the professionalization of diplomacy had still been in its infancy.
Subsequently
, the press and electoral moods would enter the picture as plebeian disruptive factors. The first Napoleon, no less than his great adversaries William Pitt the Younger and Metternich, kept the people well away from decisions about war and peace. The third Napoleon then played on the feelings of the masses, staging dramatic crises and organizing colonial conquests (as in Vietnam) to improve morale at home. Bismarck, who allowed no one a say in his external policy, did sometimes play the card of national mobilization, as in 1870 when Napoleon's declaration of war gave him the welcome pretext to weld the Germans together in the heat of patriotism. His long-term British opponent, Gladstone, who unlike Bismarck tended toward a moralistic-idealistic foreign policy, launched public campaigns in response to abuses and massacres in Italy and Bulgaria. Great waves of imperialist sentiment swept over Russia in 1877—when pan-Slav enthusiasts forced Tsar Alexander II into a declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire that he did not consider to be in the national interest
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—and later over Japan in 1895 and the United States in 1898. The “jingoist” mood in America outstripped almost everything seen in Europe during the high tide of imperialism.
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Everywhere two factors were involved: nationalism and the press.