Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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128 woodruff d. smith
to take over the administration of the Congo rather than see it divided up among
the powers.
19
In most European countries with colonial empires, the period leading up to World
War I also saw significant attempts to regularize policy and administration in the
colonies themselves. This was generally accomplished by creating colonial services
staffed with trained bureaucrats on the models of the domestic civil services and the
Indian Civil Service, by establishing standard administrative and financial procedures
throughout the colonies, and by adopting a standard ideology of colonialism that
could simultaneously frame colonial bureaucrats’ conceptions of their missions and
legitimate colonial rule to various political audiences at home. The symbolic central
figure in this process in the British Empire was Lord Lugard, conqueror of Uganda
and Northern Nigeria and, from 1912 to 1919, first governor of a united Nigeria.
Lugard was a major exponent of large-scale economic development projects, but he
was most famous for expressing what came to be the central features of the ideology
of the twentieth-century British colonial civil service: the ideas of the “dual mandate”
and “indirect rule.” The dual mandate meant that colonial administrators should
regard themselves as trustees both for the interests of their home country (interests
that were primarily economic and envisioned in terms of the needs of the industrial
and consumer sectors) and for protecting and advancing the wellbeing of colonial
subjects. Indirect rule was Lugard’s generalization from Britain’s experience with the
princely states in India. Wherever possible, British administrations should operate
through traditional native intermediaries and should attempt to maintain the integrity
of existing political and religious institutions, as long as these were compatible with
British hegemony and orderly modernization.
The classic model of indirect rule was the system Lugard set up in Northern
Nigeria, where the Hausa states, with their Fulani ruling families, that Lugard had
defeated in conquering the area were kept in power under British oversight. Islam
was recognized as the official religion, Islamic law was kept in place, and Christian
missionaries were prevented from establishing themselves. Lugard’s articulation of
enlightened colonialism played very well at home and was extremely popular among
the colonial authorities of other countries (France especially) between the world wars.
It became the core of the official view of the historical mission of Britain as colonizer
that remained in place up to – and after – the time the British Empire was disassem-
bled starting in 1947. It was also part of the ideological framework of the League of
Nations mandates system that was set up to justify the distribution of the colonies
seized from the Central Powers among the winners in World War I. Lugard, who,
like most conscientious colonial officials between the wars, took the dual mandate
and indirect rule very seriously, was himself an active member of the League’s
mandates commission.
20
In the French overseas empire a similar process of regularization of colonial admin-
istration occurred, although the governing ideologies were more varied and tended
to be formulated somewhat differently from that of the British colonies. In places
like Morocco, which was technically an independent state under French “protection,”
an approach very similar to that of Lugard was developed by the best-publicized
French proconsul, Marshal Lyautey, for use in outlying areas. In other territories
official policy veered between attempts at “assimilation” (the full absorbing of at least
indigenous elites into French culture, to be followed by close political union between
europe’s world 129
the colony and France) and “association” (the maintenance of formal political
differences between a colony and France, matched by a recognition that complete
cultural assimilation was impractical.)
21
Imperialism and Identity
If the experiment with imperialism did not often meet the political needs of its
proponents and had so many deleterious side-effects, why was the whole thing not
abandoned? This question is similar to one commonly asked about the origins of
World War I: why, if so many of Europe’s leaders realized the dangers and the poten-
tially awful consequences of what they were doing between 1900 and 1914, did they
persist in doing it anyway? It appears that at least part of the answer to both ques-
tions lies in the ways in which imperialism (and the kind of foreign policy that took
the need to expand and protect empires as one of its central elements) was accepted
into the public cultures of the major European states as a device by which individuals
and groups defined their identities in relation to the nations to which they belonged.
Regardless of the success or failure of specific overseas initiatives, the tropes of impe-
rialist discourse, the icons of imperialist imagery, and the logic of imperialist reasoning
came to be widely, and often subtly, adopted by Europeans of differing class and
political outlook as means of identity formation. Groups with particular interests,
such as the oil companies that wanted European governments to establish control
over petroleum producing areas after World War I, or the white settler populations
of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia who wanted assurance of their privileged positions,
were able to take advantage of the extent to which imperialism informed identities
within public culture to make strong arguments for the maintenance of empire even
when empire seemed a dubious proposition on other grounds. What would it mean
to be British without the British Empire? Governments believed that abandoning
even unproductive or marginal colonies would at the very least undermine their
credibility with voters. Moreover, many political leaders (Winston Churchill, for
instance) strongly and sincerely believed that their nations were defined by an impe-
rial mission. In Germany, after the loss of the colonies in World War I, the return of
the overseas empire became a significant theme across the entire political spectrum
except on the far left – at least as important a theme as colonialism had been between
the 1890s and 1914. The importance of empire was articulated in terms of a number
of fictions, including the supposed capacity of the former colonies to support the
nation’s economic independence and the role of colonies in providing a setting in
which the “new German” could develop as a cultural type and in which German
cultural superiority could be demonstrated through the “civilizing” of indigenous
peoples. These fictions spoke to a constructed identity for Germans as citizens of an
autonomous great power and members of a uniquely gifted people with a world-
historical mission to advance humankind. The identity was particularly in need of
reinforcement in the 1920s when public opinion in many other countries vehemently
disparaged it and when Germany lacked the conventional instruments of power.
22
In recent years the process of constructing identities around aspects of empire has
become a major subject of imperial studies. The shaping of national identities has
received perhaps the greatest amount of attention. Linda Colley has argued that
identification with the empire supplied the finishing touch in the creation of British
130 woodruff d. smith
nationality in the first half of the nineteenth century, permitting Britons to see them-
selves as members of component nationalities (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish) while
sharing a common Britishness with regard to the empire. British nationality could be
extended to encompass the populations of the white colonies and dominions – or at
least the segments of those populations that spoke English. Moreover, the empire
supplied a variety of attractive meanings to the fact of being British. The conquest
of overseas colonies provided comforting images of power and authority which
individual Britons could see themselves as sharing. Stories of heroism in defense of
the empire, which throughout the nineteenth century were built around cultural
stereotypes of British character, contributed to constructing the self-images of Britons
of all social classes. Some of the policies associated with the empire – especially the
abolition of slavery and the various overseas humanitarian projects associated with
it – contributed to defining British nationality as a moral benefit to the entire world.
All these forms of national identity-building through imperialism were fully articu-
lated by the middle of the nineteenth century and were available for use in assembling
support for a wide variety of political initiatives that could be attached to
imperialism.
23
John Mackenzie has shown that, significant as imperialism was in shaping popular
culture and national identity in Britain earlier in the nineteenth century, it had its
greatest effect from the 1890s through World War I and into the interwar years. This
was in part because the rivalry of other imperial states and the difficulties Britain faced
in running its own swollen empire elicited a defensive response, a jingoistic insistence
on imperial identity. But mostly it resulted from a vast growth of institutions that
deliberately set about propagating British imperial identity as a means of manipulating
popular culture and political opinion. The goals of such manipulation were frequently
conceived in terms of the greater good of the nation. The Boy Scouts, for instance,
and a number of rival youth organizations that ultimately withered in the Boy Scouts’
shadow, were an outgrowth of imperialist themes, featuring the skills and character
traits supposedly needed to dominate new territories. Their institutional mission was
not, however, formulated in overtly imperialist terms. Rather, its aim was to develop
discipline, self-control, physical health, and decency among young men, to generalize
the ideals of the vigorous part of the British elite across class lines so as to create a
people worthy of an imperial democracy and thus avoid some of the dangers of class
conflict, proletarianization, and modernization. If the natural leaders of all classes in
British society could be persuaded to identify with the nation and its empire through
a framework of Boy Scout virtues and attitudes, it might be possible to reach peaceful
understanding with the equivalent groups in other countries through the interna-
tional Scout movement. Like the Rhodes Scholarships, the Boy Scouts were presented
as an instrument not just for establishing national identity, but also for building a
common identity among the useful citizens of the various empires into which it
looked like the world was being divided.
24
Empire was a means of building national identity in other countries as well. In
France, colonial expansion and the French “civilizing mission” were regularly
connected in public discourse from about 1880 to 1914 to a renewal of French
nationhood in the context of democracy and the recovery of national self-respect
after defeat by Prussia. In Germany the idea of overseas settlement was employed
even before actual colonies were acquired in order to define an identity for Germans
europe’s world 131
as a people with the global mission of raising the cultural levels of others. Recent
studies of colonialism in Germany have also shown how groups representing particu-
lar segments of the population, including but not limited to ones that were politically
marginalized in the Kaiserreich, attempted to identify themselves and their constitu-
ents with imperial patriotism as a means of enhancing their positions. Lora Wildenthal
has explored the ways in which women’s groups attempted to develop a distinctive
women’s role in Germany’s colonial enterprise as a way of establishing a collective
political presence in the country in general. In so acting, the colonial women’s
movement was partly responsible for the particular emphasis within German colonial
reform on the prevention of miscegenation. Other authors have investigated similar
uses of colonialism by eugenicists, anthropologists, and southwest African white
settlers. In all countries with colonial empires, the early twentieth century also saw
a substantial tightening of the connection in public and scientific discourse between
imperialism and biological racism. Attempts to reorder and render coherent the
systems of control that had been created in the colonies encouraged the assignment
of rulers and ruled to fundamentally different human categories, while translating
the dominance of Europeans over non-Europeans in the colonial world into
racial terms could be turned to advantage at home – for example, by politicians
wanting to justify global expansion on terms that transcended considerations of mere
profit and loss by claiming that the survival of no less than the white (or Teutonic
or Slavic) “race” was at stake in the confrontations of empires with their subjects or
with each other.
25
Overseas empire was a vital part of the public life of many European nations in
the first years of the twentieth century, deeply embedded in the dynamics of political
culture as well as in the functioning of modernizing economies in a changing global
economy. In many respects, the shape of European imperialism between the world
wars was laid out in the two decades that preceded 1914, which is an important
reason that these decades have recently attracted considerable attention from histo-
rians approaching colonialism in new ways.
NOTES
1 Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne: Knieppenheuer und
Witsch, 1969).
2 See, for example, Wolfgang Mommsen,
Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1969).
3 For example, E. J. Hobsbawm,
Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since
1750 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).
4 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins,
British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914
(London: Longman, 1993); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and
Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London: Longman, 1993).
5 Niall Ferguson,
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
6 See Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds,
Das Kaiserreich transnational.
Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004).
7 See Michael Havinden and David Meredith,
Colonialism and Development: Britain and
its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993); A. G. Hopkins, An Economic
History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 124–236;
132 woodruff d. smith
Woodrow Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), pp. 76–8.
8 See Polly Hill,
The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana, 2nd edn (Oxford: James
Curry, 1997); Sara S. Berry, Cocoa, Custom, and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western
Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
9 See D. K. Fieldhouse, “The Metropolitan Economics of Empire,” in Judith Brown and
W. Roger Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 88–113, esp. pp. 93–5.
10 See Glen Balfour-Paul, “Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East,” in Brown and
Louis, Oxford History, pp. 490–514.
11 Paul Kennedy,
The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism (London: Allen and Unwin,
1980).
12 The classic statement of this approach is W. L. Langer,
The Diplomacy of Imperialism
1890–1902, 2nd edn (New York: Knopf, 1965).
13 The many vital contributions of W. Roger Louis to our understanding of twentieth-
century imperialism can be categorized in this way. See, among other works, Imperialism
at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978) and The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–
1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Post-war Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984).
14 See Smith,
Ideological Origins, pp. 41–140; Richard A. Webster, Industrial Imperialism
in Italy, 1908–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Claudio G. Segré,
Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974); Ronald Hyam, “The British Empire in the Edwardian Era,” in Brown and Louis,
Oxford History, pp. 47–63; Raymond Betts, Tricolour (London: Gordon and Cremonesi,
1978); David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
15 See Havinden and Meredith,
Colonial Development; Smith, Ideological Origins, pp.
112–40.
16 See Lora Wildenthal,
German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham NC: Duke
University Press, 2001); Smith, Ideological Origins, pp. 112–65.
17 See Hyam, “British Empire,” in Brown and Louis,
Oxford History, pp. 47–63; G. R.
Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study of British Politics and Political Thought,
1895–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971).
18 Janet R. Horne, “In Pursuit of Greater France: Visions of Empire among Musée Social
Reformers, 1894–1931,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in
French and Dutch Colonialism, Julia Clancy-Smith and Francis Gouda, eds (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 21–42.
19 A. Hochschild,
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial
Africa (Boston MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999).
20 See I. F. Nicolson,
The Administration of Nigeria: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969), which classifies much of the Lugard story as “myth.” See also
John Cell, “Colonial Rule,” in Brown and Louis, Oxford History, pp. 232–54.
21 See Raymond Betts,
Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
22 See Smith,
Ideological Origins, pp. 196–230; Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, pp.
172–200.
23 Linda Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven CT: Yale University
Press, 1992); Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London: Tauris, 1990);
Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in A. Porter, ed., The
Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
europe’s world 133
Press, 1999), pp. 198–221; John MacKenzie, “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures,” in
Porter, Oxford History, pp. 270–93.
24 John M. MacKenzie,
Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion,
1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s
Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996).
25 See Horne, “In Pursuit of Greater France”; Susanne Zantop,
Colonial Fantasies: Conquest,
Family and Nation in Pre-colonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 1997); Wildenthal, German Women for Empire; Pascal Grosse, Kolonialismus,
Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1850–1918 (Frankfurt: Campus
Verlag, 2000); Daniel J. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and
National Identity in Namibia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); Alice L. Conklin,
“Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in
France and West Africa, 1914–40,” in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the
Empire, pp. 65–83; Frederick Cooper and Anna Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Max Beloff, Imperial Sunset, vol. 1: Britain’s Liberal Empire, 1897–1921, 2nd edn (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1987). The standard study of British imperialism in the early twentieth
century.
Raymond F. Betts, Tricolour (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1978). French nationalism
and imperialism. And Uncertain Dimensions: Western Overseas Empires in the Twentieth
Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). A comprehensive survey in a
major series on imperialism.
Judith Brown and W. Roger Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A collection of articles (several of
them extremely good) covering a wide range of topics on the twentieth-century British
Empire.
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990
(London: Longman, 1993). And British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914
(London: Longman, 1993). These two volumes present a thoroughly supported thesis about
the nature of British imperialism as a function of “gentlemanly capitalism.”
Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and
Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1998). Gender and family studies, including excellent contributions on identity
formation.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). An extremely influential
collection sampling postmodern approaches to colonialism, with a very useful
introduction.
Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical
Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993). A good one-volume survey of develop-
ment and development policy in the British Empire.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion,
1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). A major study of the con-
struction of imperialist culture.
Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Princeton NJ: M. Wiener, 1997).
A useful contemporary examination of colonialism from the standpoint of theory.
134 woodruff d. smith
Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999). Contains articles on the late nineteenth century.
Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986). Examines relationships between German colonialism and domestic politics,
with a focus on ideology.
Chapter Nine
Social Reform or Social Revolution?
Gary P. Steenson
Was there a serious possibility of social revolution in Europe in the roughly twenty-
five years preceding World War I, or is the legacy of this period in European history
primarily that of social reform? That this question is even posed reveals a certain bias
about the nature of European society during these years. After all, the last major
European social upheaval worthy of the name “revolution” came in France in 1870–1
with the rise and bloody suppression of the Paris Commune. Given the relative social
tranquility that prevailed from then until 1914, why should there be much question
about the matter?
Numerous possibilities come to mind. First of all, powerful movements among
the workers emerged during the years before 1914 that, in their propaganda at least,
proclaimed the coming of a great revolution in western society. Perhaps most promi-
nent among these were the working-class socialist parties that appeared everywhere
in Europe beginning in the 1860s; by 1889, several of these parties had joined
together in an informal alliance popularly called the Second International which,
while never publicly declaring itself an instrument of the coming revolution, certainly
let the impression stand that it was at least potentially a revolutionary body. The
vehemence of the governmental assault on these several parties and the repeated
denunciation of them in the bourgeois and official press as dangerous threats to the
stability and tranquility of society further promoted the notion that they were, in
fact, what their intellectuals often claimed them to be, namely, the vanguard forces
of an inevitable revolution. Second, perhaps the most powerful source of the notion
of revolution was the influence of Marxist thought in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Marxists everywhere saw revolution to overthrow capitalism as
an inevitable result of the development of capitalism itself; the sophistication of
Marxist theoreticians at the time, and long after, made this a very seductive theory.
Third, in addition to the organized socialist, working-class parties there were other,
even more radical groups of anarchists, syndicalists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc., all of
whom frightened the dominant society even more than did the socialists. Many of
these latter groups engaged in violent activities, including assassination, on a suffi-
ciently frequent basis to rouse the forces of law and order. Fourth, in the aftermath
136 gary p. steenson
of the war a long period of widespread social disruption and even several revolutions
– Russia first of course, then Germany, Hungary, and elsewhere – occurred.
Furthermore, given what came later in Europe in the form of the rise of various
fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, is it not reasonable
to seek the roots of these upheavals in the years before 1914 as well as in the impact
of the war itself?
The “Admirable Century” and Origins of the War
This last question lies at the root of a significant historiographical problem that per-
sists to this day. Namely, if the nineteenth century was such a marvelous time, whence
the disaster of the twentieth? John Keegan, author of the best single-volume military
history of the war, left no doubt about his view when he called his opening chapter
“A European Tragedy” and referred to the war as having “destroyed the benevolent
and optimistic culture of the European continent.”
1
Frederic Morton specifically
identified this problem by concluding his review of Peter Gay’s book on pre-1914
Viennese culture with these words: “[Gay’s] coda acclaims the Victorian age as ‘an
admirable century’ whereas ‘one thinks back on the twentieth century with horror.’
So swiftly, so smoothly, then, was the horrible sired by the admirable? There is some
novel demonology here. There is also much competent hagiography. Only the his-
toriography is wanting.”
2
This apparent disconnect between what came before the
Great War and what came after is a problem that has plagued historians for nearly a
century.
Older histories discuss almost exclusively the diplomatic activities of these years
and their relationship to the war with little or no reference to social, economic, and
intellectual matters that might shed some light on the question of continuities in
European history across the great gap of 1914–18.
3
Later studies, especially the per-
tinent volumes of the Rise of Modern Europe series, did indeed emphasize the social
and economic changes that took place during the years immediately prior to the war.
4
But despite the promise of Oron Hale’s title and much of his text, especially his
concluding chapter which deals with the origins of the war, the author once again
fell back on diplomatic relations to explain the origins of the war. This approach
suggests that the causes of the war resided not in broad social-economic develop-
ments of prewar society but in the failure of leadership to cope with diplomatic ten-
sions. After reviewing the qualities of major European diplomats at the time, Hale
leaves the reader with little doubt about his position when he observes: “No wonder
Europe slid easily into war in 1914.”
5
More recently, two British authors, Norman Stone and Eric Hobsbawm, while
much subtler and more meticulous in their treatment of economic, social, cultural,
and even diplomatic developments, still are largely at a loss when it comes to explain-
ing how such dreadful developments came out of a period of such real advancement
and even more promising hope. Stone’s book is an unusual piece of work. In an
effort, apparently, to capture the spirit of the times rather than to offer critical analysis,
the author runs into some problems when it turns out that sources at the time made
some serious misjudgments. For example, Stone apparently reports the contention
of the German general staff that by 1917, only Russia would be in a position to
challenge Germany on equal military grounds. But because we now know the relative
social reform or social revolution? 137
military strengths of Germany and Russia in 1917, this statement now seems more
than a little absurd.
6
Another problem Stone presents, but does not sort out, is the
apparent contradiction between the oft-repeated anti-war position of the organized
socialist and trade-union movements in Europe and the eagerness with which worker
populations everywhere seemed to greet the outbreak of the war.
7
Investigating the
extent to which the movement was the workers and the workers the movement is
one of the fields of research that needs to be developed considerably. Stone’s work
is an interesting and sometimes dramatic extended essay, but it includes little critical
judgment of the events it covers.
Hobsbawm’s work is rather different. For example, he asserts somewhat circu-
itously (but plainly enough) that “the idea that somehow or other, but for the
unforeseen and avoidable intervention of the catastrophe of 1914, stability, prosperity
and liberal progress would have continued, has not even the most superficial plausi-
bility.”
8
He further denies that imperialist conflicts of the era were directly responsible
for the war, but does contend that destabilization of “the periphery of the single,
interdependent world system which [western bourgeois society] had created” inevi-
tably involved this society in “the global revolutionary upheavals” which, he holds,
began even before the war itself, namely in Mexico, Persia, Turkey, Russia (1905),
and China.
9
In fact, when it comes to explaining the specific origins of the war,
Hobsbawm, while again much subtler than most of his predecessors, ultimately refers
to the failure of diplomacy, albeit a diplomacy forced to cope with the much more
complicated and open-ended situation that was the product of the emergence of a
world capitalist economy. While this is a considerably more nuanced version of the
crude Marxian view that capitalist economics led to war, it still does not offer much
help in understanding how the promise of pre-1914 European society gave way to
the disaster of the interwar years. Hobsbawm does toward the very end of his account
make passing reference to the increasing inability of governments to control the
activities of “subjects in the process of turning into democratic citizens,” but without
much elaboration, and finally, he quite specifically rejects the idea “that in 1914
governments rushed into war to defuse their internal social crises.”
10
Still, the Marxian
case for the economic origins of World War I has never been more persuasively
made.
More recent works, including revised and updated versions of earlier studies, often
include some discussion of the impact of economic and social developments on the
origins of the war, and, more specifically, passing mention is often made of the role
of the urban masses as a factor shaping the Europe that gave rise to the war. For
example, Malcolm Anderson, despite making a seemingly obligatory reference to “the
wonderful century which ended in 1914,” argues that the end of “the old Europe”
was at least in part a result of “the only half-understood destructive powers with
which its own achievements had endowed it.”
11
Without much elaboration, Anderson
specifically refers to three examples of these powers: the apparently serious contem-
plation by the crown prince of Germany of a Junker-led coup d’état in 1913 in
response to the continued growth of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland
(SPD), the socialist working-class party that had grown so rapidly since the 1880s;
the disruptive power of popular nationalism in the Habsburg Empire; and “the
growth of the streak of violence and intolerance” in Italy represented by Mussolini’s
success at the 1912 Reggio congress of the Italian socialist party.
12
These references