The Transformation of the World (137 page)

The “reform period” in Mexico, from the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, is also part of this context, but like the Tanzimat it did not achieve a breakthrough to solid representative structures. Even the leading liberal statesman, Benito Juárez (in office 1860–72), sought refuge after 1867 in ad hoc authoritarian measures. And, like Abdülhamid II, Porfirio Díaz took sole power in the mid-seventies and continued to exercise it into the first decade of the new century. However, a flurry of reform legislation had been passed before the Díaz era, so that at least the influence of the church (a major adversary of Mexican liberals) was curtailed, and the principle of the equality of (white) citizens before the law was respected. The paternal supervision of life by secular and spiritual authorities went into decline.
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A further example of post-reforming absolutism was the Russia of Alexander III (r. 1881–94). Many measures of his assassinated predecessor were
rescinded, and although the successful justice reforms, at once expression and guarantee of a sophisticated legal culture in the late Tsarist period, were largely preserved, the powers of the police were significantly expanded. Again paralleling trends in the Ottoman Empire, the Russian authorities now viewed models from the West—especially its political liberalism—with much greater skepticism. Tsarist rule became more autocratic and internal repression more severe.
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New conceptions of the future were bound up with the reforms, but rarely from the very beginning. In the Ottoman case, it was only in the third Tanzimat decade that the original idea of reform as a timely restoration of precarious balances was replaced with a future-oriented vision of a definitive new order. The means changed with the end. Instead of a flexible combination of old and new techniques of rule, there came a stricter centralism and a new peremptoriness that cared less about compromises with local power holders than in earlier phases of the reform process.
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The deferred chronology of particular reform projects made it possible for them to learn from one another. The grand viziers and state philosophers of the Tanzimat era were still exposed to original Western European models; they had little more than France and Britain in mind. The Meiji leadership could already be influenced by the long-term consequences of the Prussian reforms, especially with regard to increased military strength. It saw itself in the role of a rational shopper, critically surveying a collection of models from the outside world. Hardly any of the smaller countries of Asia or Africa enjoyed such freedom of choice. Ahmad Bey (r. 1837–55), for example, the enthusiastic reformist ruler of Tunis, built his army—for lack of alternatives—with the help of the French, who were threateningly close just across the border in Algeria; British assistance would not have been viewed kindly in Paris.
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As soon as the extent and success of the Japanese renewal became visible elsewhere, it set a new standard for other countries. The Chinese elite, for deeply rooted cultural reasons, did not find it easy to admit Japan's superiority, in the military field or anywhere else. But in the final years of the Qing period, Japan appeared to have caught up with—some would have said, overtaken—Europe and North America as the most attractive reference model. At the latest after its victory over Russia in 1905, Japan beckoned throughout Asia as the country that had broken the spell of European invincibility.

7 State and Nationalism

Strong State, Weak State

In the nineteenth century the strong state disappeared from political theory, at least in Europe. In the early modern period, leading theorists had concerned themselves with the greatest possible strengthening of the state, particularly of monarchies. A strong state was seen as something to strive for—a means of
curbing anarchic private interests, breaking up small power enclaves, and purposively seeking the public good. Further justifications of absolute rule were added in the eighteenth century, with visions of enlightened princes and selfless officials; cameralism and a “science of public policy” (in German:
Polizeywissenschaft
) offered blueprints for state building. The picture was very similar at the time in China, where centralism and decentralization had clashed in the political culture for two thousand years. The old tradition of administrative theory was brought to a new peak in the eighteenth century. The three great Qing emperors who ruled successively between 1664 and 1796 were energetic and competent autocrats, not a whit inferior to Frederick II of Prussia or Joseph II of Austria. They defined their role very broadly, yet tirelessly sought to preserve and raise the efficiency of the bureaucratic apparatus. The state allowed some leeway: it was by no means the “totalitarian” Leviathan sometimes conjured up in the older sinology; it allowed niches of market economy, not as an institutional limitation to its power but as a generous favor from a ruler of unfathomable might.

Doctrines of the strong state were no longer publicly discussed in the nineteenth century. Even the Napoleonic regime, otherwise not averse to propaganda, did not present itself self-consciously as a modern command system. Liberal attempts to define the “limits of state action” (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1792) were the norm at least until the second quarter. Conservatives did not openly champion “top down” neo-absolutist rule but embraced Romantic ideas of social estates, with special emphasis on the nobility's cultural leadership. Socialists and anarchists, between whom there was no fundamental difference on this point, developed few ideas about the state; the revolution would clear away the bourgeois capitalist system anyhow and institute a “realm of freedom.”

While this distrust of an omnipotent state stretched far beyond the liberal parties of the time, developments in the real world were placing more and more means at the disposal of the state. Liberal thinkers as different as Herbert Spencer and Max Weber thought they had to warn against a new serfdom resulting from hypertrophy of the state, bureaucratization, and—in Weber's view—a tendency of capitalism to petrify. Paradoxically this accumulation of power, long undertheorized in discussions of the state, was sympathetically addressed in another field: in nationalist programs. Whereas the most reactionary monarch no longer dared to claim “L'État, c'est moi,” the idea gained currency that the state was the nation: whatever served the state was useful to the nation. This displaced the basis for the legitimation of state power.

The nation-state had its own kind of reason: no longer the rightful claims of a princely dynasty rooted in the depths of history, or the organic harmony of a “body politic,” but something called
national interests
. Who defined those interests and translated them into politics was a secondary matter. So long as politicians, at least in Europe, followed Giuseppe Mazzini's influential understanding of nationalism, the interests of a country—democratic order at home, peace with other nations—appeared to be simultaneously achievable. In the third quarter of
the century, however, there was growing skepticism about such a utopian harmonization (it would be temporarily resurrected in 1919 with the founding of the League of Nations), and it became clear that the nation-state could go together with quite different political systems. Two things were decisive: internal homogeneity expressed at every possible level of integration, from language policy to religious uniformity to dense infrastructural projects such as a railroad network; and a capacity to take military action externally. Nationalism thus acquired huge importance for the theory of the state. “Pure” state theory would revive only when justifications began to be developed for the welfare state.

Divided Nationalism and State Legitimacy

The accumulation of state power in the course of the century, above all in its last quarter, was globally differentiated. The main reason for this was the extremely uneven distribution of industrialization. Whereas in the early modern period the states of Eurasia, in a great arc from Spain to Japan, grew stronger at the same time and on similar social foundations, the nineteenth-century accumulation of power was concentrated in three regions of the world housing the so-called Great Powers: Europe between the Pyrenees and the Urals; the United States of America; and, with a short delay, Japan. The strengthening of the state was thus by no means an advance in human evolution but a global redistribution of imbalances. Countries that weakened or fell behind became more vulnerable. Imperialism was the result of this power gap: weak states were in danger of being undermined or even subjugated. Europeans in the early modern period had imagined the “Oriental” state to be a crushing despotism, something it was decidedly not, even in China with its powerful bureaucracy. Ironically, nineteenth-century Asian rulers now tried to compensate for their weakness by assimilating the bureaucratic and centralist energy of the European nation-state.

Nationalism divided into two. One half became the doctrine of the strong, compact nation-states of the West, following a quite special agenda of their own; the other half appeared as a defensive program. States that had already lost their independence through conquest could do nothing other—on a larger scale after the First World War—than wage a defensive nationalist struggle within the framework of colonial rule. In other cases, defensive nationalism required a policy of self-strengthening in as many spheres as possible. Expansive and defensive nationalism thus stood in a dialectical relationship: each in its way was capable of extraordinary feats of mobilization in the name of solidarity among individuals not personally known to one another, and of drawing into politics social groups that previously had had no opportunity to participate.

More general still was the dialectic of nationalization and internationalization. Contrary to their self-image, nation-states by no means pursued their inner potential alone. Nationalism as an ideology and a program spread transnationally—across Europe, for example, through the ideas of Mazzini or the cult of a national freedom fighter such as the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth.
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During the second half of the nineteenth century, such direct transfer lost much of its importance as various nationalisms reacted to one another in antagonistic ways. However, the consolidation of national societies and the rise of a rhetoric of exclusion and superiority were closely bound up with the greater number and intensity of cross-border contacts at many levels.

Nation-states responded variously to this contradiction. Britain, for example, had long taken its empire for granted, so it was a possible strategy to simplify matters by rationalizing its variegated global presence and establishing closer links between individual colonies and the mother country. This is what the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, attempted around the turn of the century, though without success: to turn the loosely knit empire into a kind of super nation-state, a federation mainly of its “white” components. The German Reich was in quite a different situation. Founded at the very moment of a great worldwide advance of globalization, it immediately had to adapt its foreign economic policy to these conditions. It became primarily an industrial and military state because its politicians and entrepreneurs used the opportunities of internationalization to serve the national interest.
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Model Citizens and Intermediate Powers

The idea of democracy, whether direct in Rousseau's sense or within the indirect British tradition, envisaged a simplification of political mechanisms. Jeremy Bentham, the English Enlightenment thinker with a “utilitarian” leaning, expressed this perhaps more clearly than anyone else, but a basic point in all democratic programs was that accountable rule in the modern world required the elimination of intermediate powers. The people and those who governed them were to face each other as directly as possible. The link between them was to be one of representation: either democratic, through procedures of election and delegation, or a
unio mystica
, in which a monarch or dictator claimed to embody the nation, and the “people” endorsed this claim by acclamation or just supported it “virtually.” In principle, therefore, the political system of nation-states rests on national homogeneity and simplicity of constitutional mechanisms.

Nation-states or modernizing empires strive for discursive simplification insofar as they establish, and seek to realize, norms for the “model citizen.” In many civilizations, premodern debates on politics circled around the capacities, virtues, and devoutness of the model
ruler
. Modern debates center on the ideal
citizen
, defined in highly diverse ways but always expected to find a balance between the pursuit of private interests and service to the nation as a whole. Musings about national identity or “civilized behavior”—about how a Briton or Frenchman, Chinese or Egyptian, should comport himself (or herself), or what it meant to be British or French, Chinese or Egyptian—were a feature of public life in many countries around the turn of the century. They did not yet reach the collective excesses of the twentieth century, when “traitors to the fatherland,” “class enemies,” and “racial” minorities would be condemned to physical exclusion and persecution.

Nevertheless, the uniform simplicity of nations and “national organisms” remained an illusion. Empires could not conjure away their multinational character, and none took the radical step of introducing a single, “color-blind” citizenship. Whenever they attempted to create a common national foundation, they soon ran up against the contradictions that were part of their very essence. In colonial systems, political hierarchies could not fail to be complex; it was nearly always the case that many tasks relating to order and sovereignty had to be delegated. This also meant that colonial governments sometimes had to make others responsible for providing their funding. In a number of Southeast Asian colonies, compact Chinese minorities organized into
gongsi
(leagues or secret societies) helped out accordingly in their role as collective tax farmers and monopolists (e.g., in the opium trade).
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The
gongsi
were not part of a formal system of rule, yet the state was not capable of functioning without them. Thus, even in a situation where democratic participation meant nothing, organized interests of recent creation might make themselves felt.