The Age of Empire

The Age of Empire EJ. HOBSBAWM VINTAGE BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK To the students ofBirkbeck College First Vintage Books Edition, April 1989 Copyright © 1987 by E.J. Hobsbawm All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in Great Britain, by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, and in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobsbawm, EJ. (EricJ.), 1917- The age of empire, 1875-1914 / E.J. Hobsbawm.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-679-72175-4 (pbk.) i. History, Modern— 19th century. I. Title. D359.7.H63 1989 909.81 —dci9 Manufactured in the United States of America 579B86 CONTENTS Illustrations ix Preface xiii Overture i I The Centenarian Revolution '3 2 An Economy Changes Gear 34 3 The Age of Empire 56 4 The Politics of Democracy 84 5 Workers of the World 112 6 Waving Flags: Nations and Nationalism 142 7 Who's Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie 165 8 The New Woman 192 9 The Arts Transformed 219 IO Certainties Undermined: The Sciences 243 Ii Reason and Society 262 12 Towards Revolution 276 '3 From Peace to War 302 Epilogue 328 Tables 34i Maps 353 Notes 361 Further Reading 379 Index 39i CHAPTER 6 WAVING FLAGS: NATIONS AND NATIONALISM 'Scappa, che arriva la patria' (Run away, the fatherland is coming). Italian peasant woman to her son1 Their language has become complex, because now they read. They read books — or at any rate they learn to read out of books. ... The word and the idiom of the literary language tend and the pronunciation suggested by its spelling tends to prevail over the local usage. H.G.Wells, 19012 Nationalism ... attacks democracy, demolishes anti-clericalism, fights socialism and undermines pacifism, humanitarianism and internationalism. ... It declares the programme of liberalism finished. Alfredo Rocco, 19143 I If the rise of working-class parties was one major by-product of the politics of democratization, the rise of nationalism in politics was another. In itself it was plainly not new (see The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital). Yet in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed. Its very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word 'nationalism' itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals and socialists and in favour of that aggressive expansion of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song 'Deutschland l)ber Alles' (Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. Though it originally described 142 WAVING FLAGS: NATIONS AND NATIONALISM only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word 'nationalism' proved to be more convenient than the clumsy 'principle of nationality' which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830, and so it came to be used also for all movements to whom the 'national cause' was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demand ing the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group. For the number of such movements, or at least of leaders claiming to speak for such movements, and their political significance, increased strikingly in our period. The basis of'nationalism' of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves emotionally with 'their' nation' and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it 'patriotism', and the essence of the original 'right-wing' nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with the tradition of the French Revolution. But elsewhere nationalism had no necessary identification with any colour in the political spectrum. Among the national movements still lacking their own states we shall encounter those identifying with the right or the left, or indifferent to either. And indeed, as we have suggested, there were movements, and not the least powerful, which mobilized men and women on a national basis, but, as it were, by accident, since their primary appeal was for social liberation. For while in this period national identification clearly was or became a major factor in the politics of states, it is quite mistaken to see the national appeal as incompatible with any other. Nationalist politicians and their opponents naturally liked to suggest that one kind of appeal excluded the other, as wearing one hat excludes wearing another at the same time. But, as a matter of history, and observation, this is not so. In our period it was perfectly possible to become simultaneously a class- conscious Marxian revolutionary and an Irish patriot, like James Con nolly, who was to be executed in 1916 for leading the Easter Rising in Dublin. But of course, insofar as parties in the countries of mass politics competed for the same body of supporters, these had to make mutually exclusive choices. The new working-class movements, appealing to their potential constituency on grounds of class identification, soon realized this, insofar 143 THE AGE OF EMPIRE as they found themselves competing, as was usually the case in multi national regions, against parties which asked proletarians and poten tial socialists to support them as Czechs, Poles or Slovenes. Hence their preoccupation as soon as they actually became mass movements, with 'the national question'. That virtually every Marxist theorist of import ance, from Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, via the Austro-Marxists, to Lenin and the young Stalin, took part in the impassioned debates on this subject during this period, suggests the urgency and centrality of this problem.4 Where national identification became a political force, it therefore formed a sort of general substratum of politics. This makes its multi farious expressions extremely difficult to define, even when they claimed to be specifically nationalist or patriotic. As we shall see, national identification almost certainly became more widespread in our period, and the significance of the national appeal in politics grew. However, what was almost certainly more important was a major set of mutations within political nationalism, which was to have profound consequences for the twentieth century. Four aspects of this mutation must be mentioned. The first, as we have already seen, is the emergence of nationalism and patriotism as an ideology taken over by the political right. This was to find its extreme expression between the wars in fascism, whose ideological ancestors are to be found here. The second is the assumption, quite foreign to the liberal phase of national movements, that national self-determination up to and including the formation of independent sovereign states applied not just to some nations which could demonstrate economic, political and cultural viability, but to any and all groups which claimed to be a 'nation'. The difference between the old and the new assumption is illustrated by the difference between the twelve rather large entities envisaged as constituting 'the Europe of nations' by Giuseppe Mazzini, the great prophet of nineteenth-century nationalism, in 1857 (see The Age of Capital, chapter 5, 1), and the twenty-six states - twenty-seven if we include Ireland - which emerged from President Wilson's principle of national self-determination at the end of the First World War. The third was the growing tendency to assume that 'national self- determination' could not be satisfied by any form of autonomy less than full state independence. For most of the nineteenth century, the majority of demands for autonomy had not envisaged this. Finally, there was the novel tendency to define a nation in terms of ethnicity and especially in terms of language. Before the middle 1870s there had been states, mainly in the western half of Europe, which saw themselves as representing 'nations' (e.g. France, Britain or the new Germany and Italy), and states which, 144 WAVING FLAGS: NATIONS AND NATIONALISM though based on some other political principle, were regarded as repre senting the main body of their inhabitants on grounds which could be thought of as something like national (this was true of the tsars, who certainly enjoyed the loyalty of the Great Russian people as both Russian and Orthodox rulers). Outside the Habsburg Empire and perhaps the Ottoman Empire, the numerous nationalities within the established states did not constitute much of a political problem, especially once a German and an Italian state had been established. There were, of course, the Poles, divided between Russia, Germany and Austria but never losing sight of the restoration of an independent Poland. There were, within the United Kingdom, the Irish. There were various chunks of nationalities which, for one reason or another, found themselves outside the frontiers of the relevant nation-state to which they would much have preferred to belong, though only some created political problems, e.g. the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany in 1871.

Load more