The Transformation of the World (112 page)

In an age when migration, trade, currency coordination, and capital transfers were linking countries across the world, no global political order came into being. The most extensive of the European empires, though economically dominant for a time and normatively accepted as a model by many, was far from being a universal empire that created its own distinctive order. In 1814–15 the European Great Powers agreed among themselves on a surprisingly successful formula for peace. But something close to anarchy prevailed among the same
powers qua empires with overseas interests, even if there were no great inter-imperial wars, and the opposition between France and Britain, having marked the eighteenth century down to the Battle of Waterloo, never again flared up into military conflict.

The old regional orders stretching back to time immemorial were dissolved and absorbed into something new. The Indian state order was transmogrified into the geopolitical patterns of British India. The ancient Chinese order, perfected by the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century, receded and partly died away as its traditional tribute-paying periphery succumbed to foreign colonization. Japan did not yet have the will and the strength to shape a new order of its own; this would happen only after 1931, and all would be over within fourteen years at an untold cost in human lives. Thus, outside the Vienna Congress System, and even in Europe after the Crimean War, a kind of controlled anarchy prevailed. Its ruling ideology, around 1900, was an international liberalism inflected in a racist, social Darwinist direction. Regulation made strides in the prepolitical sphere, emanating from private, or sometimes technical-administrative, initiatives aimed at international unity, solidarity, and harmony. All this was unable to prevent the Great War, and barely a decade after its conclusion hopes began to fade again that its lessons had been learned and that a viable peace was within reach.

CHAPTER X

 

Revolutions

From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg

1 Revolutions—From Below, from Above, from Unexpected Directions

Philosophical and Structural Concepts of Revolution

More than in any other era, politics in the nineteenth century was revolutionary politics. It did not defend “age-old rights” but, looking ahead to the future, elevated particular interests such as those of a class or class coalition into the interests of a nation or even of humanity as a whole. “Revolution” became a central idea of political thought in Europe, serving as a yardstick that for the first time divided Left and Right. The entire
long
nineteenth century was an age of revolutions, as a look at the political map will make apparent. Between 1783, when the world's largest republic gained independence in North America, and the near worldwide crisis at the end of the First World War, some of the oldest and most powerful state organisms disappeared from the stage: the British and Spanish colonial states in the Americas (or at least south of Canada); the ancien régime of the Bourbon Dynasty in France; the monarchies in China, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, the Tsarist Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. Upheavals of revolutionary dimensions occurred after 1865 in the Southern United States, after 1868 in Japan, and wherever a colonial power replaced indigenous groups with a form of direct rule. In each of these cases, what happened was more than a changeover of state personnel within an abiding institutional structure. New political orders came into being, with new bases of legitimacy. Any return to the world as it had been previously was barred; nowhere were prerevolutionary conditions restored.

The birth of the United States in 1783 was the first founding of a state of the new type. The revolutionary unrest that led to this event, and with it essentially the Age of Revolution, began in the middle of the 1760s. An Age of Revolution or Revolutions? A good case can be made for either. A view grounded in a philosophy of history prefers the singular noun; a structural approach, the plural. Those who initiated or lived through the revolutions in America and
France saw mainly the singularity of the new; the events in Philadelphia in 1776, when the thirteen colonies declared their independence of the British Crown, and the spontaneous emergence of a National Assembly in France in June 1789 appeared to be without parallel in any age. Whereas previous violent overthrows had merely led to external modifications of the status quo ante, the American and French revolutionaries expanded the whole horizon of the age, opening a path of linear progress, grounding social relations for the first time on the principle of formal equality, lifting the weight of tradition and royal charisma, and instituting a system of rules that made those in political authority accountable to a community of citizens. These two revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment, however different from each other in their aims, signaled the onset of political modernity. From then on, defenders of the existing order bore the mark of the old and obsolete, of reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries, or else they had to reinvent their posture as “conservative.”

Both revolutions—though the French more than the American—polarized along new dividing lines: no longer between elite factions or religious groups, but between rival worldviews. At the same time, in a contradiction that would never be overcome, they raised the demand for human reconciliation, the “hope for the emancipation of all mankind through revolution.”
¹
Thomas Paine already set this new tone in 1776, combining a favorite theme of the European Enlightenment, the forward march of the human race, with the local protest of a British subject. “The cause of America,” he wrote, “is in great measure the cause of all mankind.”
²
Since then, what Hannah Arendt called the “pathos of an entirely new beginning”
³
and a claim to represent more than the self-interest of the protesters have been part of every self-styled revolution. In this sense, a revolution is a local event with a claim to universal validity. And every revolution has in a sense been imitative: it feeds off the potential of the ideas that first became a reality in 1776 and 1789.

Such a philosophical concept of revolution is admittedly very narrow, and it becomes still narrower if one insists that every authentic revolution must have happened under the banner of liberty and served the cause of progress. This would also be to generalize a claim to universality that was invented in the West and whose like is found nowhere else. A larger range of cases come under a concept that is not pitched in terms of aims or philosophical justifications, or the role of “great revolutions” in the philosophy of history, but bases itself on observable events and structural outcomes.
⁴
A revolution then denotes a collective protest of certain proportions: a systemic political change involving the participation of people who did not belong to the circle of the previous holders of power. In the language of a social scientist careful to keep his conceptual tools razor-sharp, it thus becomes “the successful overthrow of the prevailing elites … by new elites who, having taken power (usually with considerable violence and mass mobilization), fundamentally change the social structure and therewith also the structure of authority.”
⁵

Here nothing is said about a moment in the philosophy of history; the pathos of modernity vanishes. In this definition there have been revolutions almost everywhere and in almost every epoch. The whole of recorded history displays any number of radical breaks, including ones in which many people thought everything familiar was being turned upside down or torn up at the roots. If there were statistics for such things, they would probably show that really major watersheds have more often been a result of military conquest than of revolution. Conquerors do not only vanquish an army: they occupy a land, destroy or topple at least part of its elite, install their own men instead, and introduce foreign laws and sometimes also a foreign religion.

This also happened in the nineteenth century, all around the world. In terms of its effects colonial conquest was often “revolutionary” in a quite literal sense. In most cases the invaded and vanquished must have experienced it as a traumatic break with their previous way of life. Even where the old elite physically survived, it was degraded by the fact that a layer of new masters stood on top of it. The coming to power of alien colonial rulers through a military invasion, or less often through negotiations, was thus tantamount to a revolution for large numbers of Africans, Asians, or South Sea islanders. Furthermore, the
long-term
revolutionary character of colonialism lay in the fact that, after the original conquest, it created space for the rise of new groups in the indigenous society and thereby paved the way for a second wave of revolutions. In many countries, the true social and political revolution took place only during or after decolonization. Revolutionary discontinuity marked both the beginning and the end of the colonial period.

The idea of foreign conquest as “revolution” was more present to nineteenth-century Europeans than it is to us today. The Manchu takeover of China, for instance, which began with the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and continued for several more decades, struck plenty of early modern European commentators as a dramatic example of a revolution. The older political language of Europe closely associated the term with the rise and fall of empires. Several factors came together here, in a way that Edward Gibbon synthesized between 1776 and 1788 (at the beginning of the Age of Revolution) in his great work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: namely, internal unrest and elite change, external military threat, secession on the imperial periphery, and spread of subversive ideas and values. The ingredients were no different in what we have called the “bridge period” (
Sattelzeit
). The old European conception of politics contained a complex picture of radical macrochange that led to an understanding of the novel events of the last third of the eighteenth century: they were simultaneously of unprecedented novelty and a repetition of familiar patterns. It would be too simple here to counterpose a new “linear” and an old “cyclical” view of history. What was the Battle of Waterloo if not the terminus of a
cycle
of French hegemony? Anyone looking for “premodern” patterns in their pure form could continue to discover them. For example, exactly at the same time as the revolutionary events
in France, a drama unfolded in what is now Nigeria that could be copied straight out of Gibbon: the fall of the Oyo Empire as a result of elite infighting at the center and uprisings in the provinces.
⁶

The chronological nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1900, does not have pride of place in the usual narrative histories of revolution; it witnessed the consequences of revolutions in North America and France, but it did not produce a “great” revolution of its own. The revolutionary dice, it would seem, were already cast by 1800, everything coming later being an imitation or lusterless rehearsal of the heroic beginning, farce after tragedy, petty disturbances aping to the great upheaval of 1789 to 1794. In this view it was only in Russia in 1917 that history once again threw out something unprecedented. The nineteenth century in Europe was less an age of revolutions than a rebellious century, an era of widespread protest that rarely achieved critical mass on the stage of national politics. In particular the period between 1849 and 1905 (the year of the first Russian revolution) was almost free of revolution in Europe, the one exception being the Paris Commune, which soon ended in failure. The statistics confirm this impression. Charles Tilly counts forty-nine “revolutionary situations” between 1842 and 1891, in comparison with ninety-eight in the period from 1792 to 1841.
⁷
And in most of those the potential did not translate into action with a lasting effect.

Variants and Borderline Cases

If, however, we use a structural concept that goes beyond the founding revolutions in America and France, the myth of their incomparability loses most of its dazzle, and various other kinds of system breakdown and violent collective action come into view. This raises two preliminary questions.

First
. Should only successful revolutions be described as such? Or can the title also be conferred on power grabs which, though spectacular, did not achieve their goal? According to one of the best sociological surveys of theories of revolution, “revolutions are
attempts
by subordinate groups to transform the social foundations of political power.”
⁸
This definition, then, includes major attempts with a radical intent. Anyway, can success and failure be clearly differentiated in every case? Does not victory sometimes come out of defeat, and might not triumphant revolutions destroy their own foundations by giving violence a momentum of its own? Such questions are often posed in too academic a manner. People in the nineteenth century saw things more dynamically: they were more inclined to use the adjectival form, looking for revolutionary tendencies, whether these were encouraged, welcomed, or feared. The historian can follow this lead, by employing the criterion of
actual
mobilization. One should speak of revolution if movements seeking to change the system—and they must always be popular movements—achieved such a position on the national political stage that they at least temporarily constituted a counterpower.

Let us take the two most important instances in the nineteenth century. Since a National Assembly did gather in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, and since rebel
governments with their own army did briefly hold power in Baden, Saxony, Budapest, Rome, Venice, and Florence, what happened in Europe in 1848–49 really was a revolution. Similarly, there was a Taiping Revolution in China between 1850 and 1864, not just (in the conventional Western terminology) a Taiping Rebellion. For a number of years the insurgents ran a complex counterstate, which in many respects was a variant of the existing order with reversed polarity.