The Transformation of the World (32 page)

Never before the nineteenth century had so much politics been conducted from exile. Prince Adam Czartoryski in Paris, the “uncrowned king of Poland” whom people also called the “one-man Great Power,” organized Europe-wide agitation against Tsar Nicholas I and tried to swear his divided compatriots to a common strategy and objectives.
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Alexander Herzen, Giuseppe Mazzini, and the oft-exiled firebrand Giuseppe Garibaldi also operated from abroad. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule was planned by exiles. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was not simply a bastion of despotism but could itself become a place of refuge for defeated freedom fighters. In 1849, after a Tsarist interventionist force helped to crush the Hungarian independence movement, Lajos Kossuth and thousands of his supporters found sanctuary in the sultan's realms. British and French diplomats strengthened the resolve of the Sublime Porte to reject Russian extradition requests by referring to customary practice in the “civilized world” (in which, exceptionally, they were prepared to include Istanbul).
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Later in the century, exile activity also undermined the Asiatic empires—something that had rarely happened before. In the case of China, the remaining Ming loyalists in the seventeenth century had not known how to create an operational base outside the country, nor did any remnants of the Taiping Revolution of 1850–64 linger on abroad. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was heavily criticized by Turkish exiles, but only by individual dissidents at first. Even before Sultan Abdülhamid II turned to autocratic rule in 1878, critical intellectuals such as the poet and journalist Namık Kemal had been sent into exile, either internal (e.g., to Cyprus) or external. In the early 1890s an opposition movement bearing the name
Jeunes Turcs
was formed in Paris against Abdülhamid. Its work with groups of conspirators inside the military eventually paved the way for the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
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The Armenian revolutionary-nationalist organization worked out of Geneva and Tiflis from the 1880s on.
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The Western-oriented opponents of the Qing Dynasty in China had the advantage of being able to prepare their revolutionary operations directly on the doorstep of the empire. The revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and his followers based themselves in the British crown colony of Hong Kong in 1895 and later lived in overseas Chinese communities in the United States and Japan.
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In the 1890s Tokyo became for a few decades the hub of various, and interconnected, networks of exiled political activists from several Asian countries.
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The International Settlement in Shanghai, which was under international (read: Western) control, served as another base for plans and operations against the regime. When the young and politically weak Guangxu Emperor ventured in 1898 to support an attempted constitutional reform (the “Hundred Days' Reform”), only to suffer defeat at the hands of his aunt, the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi, the leaders of the movement found safety abroad under British protection. The most important of them, Kang Youwei, wrote in Darjeeling his
Datongshu
(Book of the great unity), one of the major texts of utopian world literature.
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The Americas, too, offer instances of an exile movement that managed to push out a stable regime. The fall of the aged dictator Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico from 1876, was organized from San Antonio in Texas, where his main adversary, Francisco Madero, rallied his supporters in 1910.
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All these persons and movements profited from the liberalism gap without directly becoming instruments of great power intervention.

Exile provided a degree of security (but not complete protection) from henchmen of the regime under attack, making it possible to form articulate circles of intellectuals who understood the uses of modern media, and it also opened doors to private sympathizers and financial backers. In all these respects exile politics was “modern”; it was premised on the emergence of advanced communication techniques and a global public sphere. Opportunities for active exiles discontented with a life on the margins were concentrated in a small number of places. Whereas émigrés after the French Revolution had first gathered in Koblenz, it was London, Paris, Zurich, Geneva, and Brussels that later
became the main bases for exile politics in the nineteenth century. Looking back today, one is amazed at the freedom that many exiled politicians enjoyed despite growing surveillance by the authorities (e.g., in France). In Britain not a single political refugee from the Continent was prevented from entering the country, or subsequently deported, throughout the nineteenth century.
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No one thought that Karl Marx in London or Heinrich Heine in Paris should be subject to a gag order. No extradition treaties existed with other countries. Requests for legal action to be taken against regime opponents living in London were invariably rejected and sometimes not even answered. Nor was criticism of British imperialism legally barred in any way. Politically active exiles generally were regarded neither as saboteurs of British foreign policy nor as a danger to internal security.

Exile brought together not only revolutionaries and anticolonial resistance leaders (men like Abd al-Qadir from Algeria or Shamil from the Caucasus) but also rulers who had been toppled from power. A non-place like the island of Saint Helena entered history only because Napoleon was forced into exile there. In 1833, three years after the July Revolution, Chateaubriand came across the former Bourbon king Charles X wandering like a ghost through the empty Hradschin castle in Prague. Charles's successor on the throne, Louis-Philippe, ended his days in 1850 on a country estate in Surrey, and the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel Rosas breathed his last in Southampton in 1877. But the most curious spectacle of monarchical emigration occurred in 1807, when the Portuguese prince regent Dom João, hard pressed by Napoleon's invading army, assembled his whole court and much of the state bureaucracy (a total of 15,000 persons) and betook himself with a fleet of thirty-six ships to the colony of Brazil. Over the next thirteen years the viceregal capital, Rio de Janeiro, became the center of the Lusitanian world. It was a dual premiere: it was not only the first exodus overseas by a whole system of rule but the first time in the history of European maritime expansion that a ruling monarch had paid a visit to one of his colonies. In an age of revolution, a late-absolutist court took the risk of transplanting itself to a completely different political context, in a curious blend of evident self-interest and serious patriotism. Such an exile, bedecked with tragedy and legitimacy, fueled visions of renewal and rejuvenation, and of a prosperous empire with Brazil at its center. In 1815 an attempt was indeed made to form a tightly integrated Portuguese-Brazilian empire, but it came to nothing.
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5 Ethnic Cleansing

The Caucasus, the Balkans, and Other Arenas of Expulsion

Whereas political emigration and a heroic exile were a characteristic feature of the nineteenth century, at first in Europe but later also elsewhere, the image of impoverished refugees eking out a bare existence abroad is more associated with the age of “total war” and homogenizing, racially charged ultranationalism. Yet
cross-border refugee flows triggered by government actions were not unknown in the nineteenth century. The Greek independence struggle, for example, was less a heroic enterprise—as it anticipated international solidarity with 1930s Spain—involving high-minded northern philhellenes à la Lord Byron and brave descendants of the freedom-loving ancient Greeks than a harbinger of later ethnic cleansing in the region. The population of Greece fell from 939,000 in 1821 to 753,000 in 1828, overwhelmingly because of the flight and expulsion of ethnic Turks.
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In 1822 the Turks themselves had gone on the rampage on the Aegean island of Chios, massacring part of the Christian population, selling another part into slavery, and driving thousands more into exile. Delacroix immortalized the horror as early as two years after the event. New Chiotic communities began to appear in London, Trieste, and Marseille.

The Tatars who in the eighteenth century left their homes in the Crimean peninsula to settle inside the Ottoman Empire did so because of Russian contempt for their way of life, loss of land to Russian settlers, and the growth of Russian anti-Islamism. The emigration began during the Russian-Ottoman war of 1768–74 and intensified after the annexation of the Crimean Khanate in 1783. At least 100,000 Crimean Tatars, including nearly the entire upper stratum (the notables), moved to Anatolia over the following decade and became the core of what Tatars themselves call the “first exile” (
sürgün
). The Crimean War (1853–56) then sealed the fate of those still in the peninsula, whom the Russians regarded as a fifth column of the hated Ottomans. By the end of the conflict 20,000 Crimean Tatars had been given asylum and evacuated on board Allied ships, while the same number again had fled by other routes. In the early 1860s another 200,000 Tatars are said to have left the Crimea under wretched conditions.
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It is true that in the
late
nineteenth century the Tsarist government tried to keep the Tatars and other Muslims in the country; it cannot be charged with a policy of systematic expulsions.
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The exodus of Muslim peoples from the Caucasus was much greater after the Russian army in 1859 crushed the resistance of armed highlanders under their leader, Shamil. In the conquest and “pacification” of the High Caucasus, the Russians resorted to all the methods of ethnic cleansing. At least 450,000, perhaps as many as one million, Muslims were driven from their mountain homelands between 1859 and 1864; tens of thousands died from starvation, disease, or accidents en route to the realms of the sultan. In 1860, 40,000 Chechens fled the region, and only a small minority of Muslims decided to brave it out in Georgia.
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In the midst of disaster, the Tatars had the good fortune to be welcomed by a neighboring country, which they increasingly saw as a religious homeland. The impact of the expulsions on them was compounded by the attractiveness of the hallowed “Land of the Caliph.” Messianic currents in the diaspora glorified the flight as a return home.

Such a refuge was unavailable to other persecuted ethnic groups. In early May 1877, after years of rearguard struggle and a victory the year before over the US
Army at Little Big Horn, the surviving Lakota Sioux under Chief Sitting Bull crossed into the land of the Great White Mother (Queen Victoria), who seemed a kinder ruler than the Great Father in Washington, DC, and in whose realm there were laws that applied to all. For the first time in his life, the chief met whites in Canada who treated him with respect; he thought he could trust them. But diplomacy soon thwarted his hopes. The United States, which considered itself at war with the now weak and impoverished Lakota, called for the Canadian authorities to intern the Indians. Hunger and relentless American pressure eventually forced the small Lakota community, a mere shadow of the once great Sioux nation, to make its way back to the United States, where its members were held as prisoners of the state.
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In an increasingly nationalistic Europe, cross-border refugee flows were the result of frontier changes imposed by force of arms or by political agreement. France expelled 80,000 ethnic Germans after the outbreak of war with Germany in 1870, and when the Reich annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, under the terms of the Frankfurt peace treaty, 130,000 refugees who had no wish to live under German rule packed their bags and left.
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On Germany's eastern borders, Bismarck's
Kulturkampf
against Catholicism spread to the already delicate sphere of German-Polish relations, and once the conflict died down the chauvinist character of the “struggle over language and soil” became plain to see. Pursuing a “Germanization” policy, itself supposedly a defense against “Polonization” of the eastern territories of the Reich (or swamping with Poles, as it was called), the German authorities did not shrink from using the instrument of expulsion. In 1885–86 a total of 22,000 Poles and 10,000 Jews with Russian or Austrian citizenship were driven from the eastern provinces of the Reich, many of them into the Russian-controlled “Kingdom of Poland,” where they had no chance of making a living.
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In the opposite direction, Germans were leaving a Tsarist Empire that defined itself more and more strongly in Russian national terms. Between 1900 and 1914, 50,000 Volga Germans abandoned their homes. Wherever new nation-states appeared in the decades before the First World War, and wherever a “nationalities policy” was pursued within multinational empires, the danger arose of an “unmixing of peoples.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Balkans were one of the regions of the world with the most troubled ethnic politics. During the Russian-Ottoman war, Russian troops came within fifteen kilometers of Istanbul. The Tsarist government had begun the war in April 1877, utilizing ever stronger anti-Turkish sentiments after Ottoman troops had savagely crushed rebellions in Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Bulgaria: the “Bulgarian horrors,” which stirred British opposition leader William E. Gladstone to glittering heights of moral rhetoric.
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During their advance, Russian troops and Bulgarian mobs killed 200,000 to 300,000 Muslims and rendered an even greater number homeless;
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when the war was over, roughly half a million Muslim refugees settled in Ottoman territory.
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In 1878 the Congress of Berlin tried to put some order into the political
map of Southeast Europe, but that very order would have grave consequences for religious and ethnic minorities. Refugees took to the road to escape the revenge of conquerors from a different religion or nationality, or to avoid being ruled by infidels. Christians sought refuge in the newly autonomous states or—borders being loose here—in areas under Russian or Austrian protection, while Muslims reached safety behind the shrinking frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. It is hard to see what difference there was between straightforward expulsion and unavoidable flight. By the mid-1890s, some 100,000 Bulgarian speakers had left Ottoman Macedonia for Bulgaria. Conversely, Muslim settlers and Turkish officials, but also Orthodox peasants, withdrew from a Bosnia that the Congress of Berlin had placed under Habsburg (therefore Catholic) occupation.
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The total number of people uprooted by the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78 may have been in the region of 800,000.