The inheritance of the Revolution took time to mature and reveal its full strength. From 1815 to 1848, in spite of alarms and excursions, Europe enjoyed her longest period of peace between major powers for centuries. At first, this owed much to the management, by diplomacy, of the machine of security set up by the victorious powers, a concert whose operation was saved from diversion into excesses of frightened conservatism (such as a ‘Holy Alliance’ of Russia, Austria, and Prussia seemed for a time to threaten) by the rapid incorporation into its working of a restored, constitutional France and the existence of a British sea power unchallengeable by any continental state.
Notwithstanding the successful maintenance of peace between the great powers, the years down to 1848 were years of heightening revolutionary aspiration. A wave of incidents in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia — and even the language of some English radicals — showed until the early 1820s that flames kindled in the revolutionary and Napoleonic years were still alive in the Europe of Stendhal’s young Julien Sorel. But there were distinctions to be made. Some of the disturbances of these years were strongly marked by the participation of soldiers and ex-soldiers frustrated by the onset of peace; essentially these upheavals were not so very different from what much of South America and Africa were to undergo in the next two centuries, and perhaps signified little except that there were men about whose experience and abilities gave them special opportunities to act decisively whatever their ideological orientation. Others made more deliberately political efforts to exploit both the economic hard times of the early 1820s and exasperation with what one Italian historian has called ‘the mingled atmosphere of police station and sacristy’. Michelangelo Buonarroti, who has some claim to be recognized as the first career revolutionary, wished to keep alive the most socially radical traditions of the 1790s and turned to international secret societies to do so; he failed utterly for they proved at best evanescent, and usually of little substance. Yet their supposed ramifications caused much alarm. A more ambitious conspirator still, the Genoan Giuseppe Mazzini, looked more specifically to youth, not a bad bet in an age of rapid population growth. ‘Young Italy’ and ‘Young Europe’ were both launched by him in the 1830s.
Real revolutionary turmoil arose from sources other than conspiracy. Chronologically speaking, the first fuse to be lit led to the ethnic powder barrels of Ottoman Europe. A revolt against local misrule in Serbia in 1804 demonstrated that, to the pressure of great powers which had long threatened the Ottoman empire, was now to be added that of insurrection. Both came together in the Greek revolt of 1821 which opened a decade of bloodshed and international crisis. Further to inflame an issue born of the opposition of disloyal pashas and the aspirations of levantine merchants there now were added new ideas of nationality and political liberalism, the propaganda appeal of religious fervour, and the threat of great power interest. Much was archaic-some Greeks consciously invoked memories of the Byzantine empire —while the final emergence of a formally constitutional and national Greek monarchy under a king chosen by outsiders was a portent. It looked forward not only to the collapse of the Ottoman empire itself in the next century, but to the spreading into some of the most barbarous and backward parts of geographical Europe of western politics and institutions, with all their disruptive potential. It also left a Turco-Greek quarrel behind, which was still to trouble Europe in our own day.
Poland was another enduring source of disturbance. Polish revolution in 1830 found the dynastic powers united; force could contain the Poles so long as Russia, Prussia, and Austria made common cause. They managed to do so over Poland until 1914, even if Austria wobbled a little when another unsuccessful Polish revolution broke out in 1863. But wobbles were inevitable. Russia’s role in Greece, after all, had not been unambiguously conservative, and the most consistent support for the crumbling Ottoman empire came from Britain, a ‘liberal’, even ‘revolutionary’, influence in South America and the Iberian peninsula.
By the end of 1830, however, a crude and oversimple ideological categorization could be made between constitutional states, ‘liberal’ in their external sympathies and policies, and the despotisms of eastern Europe, the would-be policemen of international order. That year gave such a characterization more substance. A successful revolution took place in France (though some of its supporters almost at once denied that any such event had occurred) and another began in Belgium. Unsurprisingly, every government in Europe, including the British, was terrified by the prospect that revolution in France might lead to new great wars (the Tsar helped to provoke Polish revolution by proposing to use the Polish army against the revolutionaries in Paris and Brussels). It looked as if revolution might again roll outwards from a country which it had taken the united efforts of all Europe to subdue. But in the end it turned out that in France little had changed except the dynasty (Belgium, by contrast, became an independent nation—a radical change). Though some important constitutional innovations were to follow, the enlarged French electorate of the July Monarchy was still smaller than the unenlarged British electorate before the Great Reform Bill of 1832 changed the nature of the constitution there — and France had twice the population of Britain. France continued to be a great power, but a peaceable one. Her dominant social interests remained the same and her slow economic development towards a more industrial order went on as before. The idea that France was likely to stand beside Britain on the liberal side of the division from the eastern empires was, none the less, confirmed and made a little more plausible.
1848
Nearly two decades later, in 1848, France sneezed again, and most of continental Europe caught cold. There followed a complex, continent-wide crisis. All that is easily discerned is the strength of the hopes and fears aroused by one revolution after another. It is much harder to decide where to begin even a description, let alone analysis. Hard times had stimulated jacqueries and risings in the 1840s. As early as 1846 the Galician peasants had set to work with a will butchering their Polish landlords, believing, it seems, that their Austrian emperor wanted them to do so. The connection with a simultaneous rising in Cracow is obscure but these events may have had the paradoxical effect of ensuring that Poland, one of the most turbulent countries in Europe, kept relatively quiet in 1848. Well before that, Germany was smouldering in an anticipatory glow of revolution: ‘we lived’, wrote one German, ‘like people who feel under their feet the pressures of an earthquake’.
The year began with a revolt in Palermo in January, a protest against what was seen as misgovernment by the mainland Neapolitan Bourbon monarchy of the Two Sicilies. But this was little more than a formal precedence. The first real alarm came on 24 February; an almost bloodless overthrow of the July Monarchy set up in 1830 and the proclamation of a republic in Paris then startled liberals and conservatives alike. It was a signal to Europe. True, the new regime did little that could be called revolutionary beyond recognizing a ‘right to work’ — which had a socialist sound to it—unless the abolition of the death penalty or a proclamation of sympathy for the Poles is to be considered such. But there were soon signs that government in Paris was slipping towards a powerlessness like that which had released the violence and radicalism of 1793 and the Revolutionary wars. Meanwhile, a system of doles to the unemployed of Paris accumulated an army of discontent in the capital.
Memory (there were men alive in 1848 who had seen Robespierre in the flesh) was the source of inspiration as well as of fear. Besides haunting the thinking and shaping the style of the Paris politicians, it speeded revolution elsewhere. The wave swept through scores of German cities. All could unite against the powers that were. Constitutions were suddenly conceded and the paralysis and sometimes the overthrow of the existing order throughout Germany was soon complete; by the end of March, the Vienna government, too, was helpless. Within the Habsburg dominions revolution spread to Milan, Prague, and Budapest; there were risings in Dalmatia and Transylvania. Habsburg control of Italy crumbled as Venice followed Milan into rebellion. As much in fear as in favour of revolution, the Sardinian monarchy sent its army into Austrian Lombardy on the side of what some Italians saw as a patriotic and national, and some as a constitutional and liberal, cause — some saw it as both. When a hitherto idolized Pope remembered his position as Supreme Pontiff of the universal Catholic Church and said his forces could not fight Catholic Austria, it caused consternation.
Though two of the three members of the old Holy Alliance had their backs to the wall for most of 1848, everything in the end went wrong for the revolutionaries. They were everywhere divided: liberals and radicals moved apart, to left and to right; both came to fear the peasants whose destabilizing of the German and central European countryside had done so much to paralyse the old order’s power of resistance. The French liberals and their peasant countrymen came together in alarm at the rise of what they saw as socialism. The republic was only saved by an appalling week of street-fighting in Paris, the ‘June Days’ which Tocqueville called the ‘greatest slave-war in history’ and cost 20,000 dead. After that, order reigned in Paris as it had done in Warsaw since the 1830s. Meanwhile, the third reactionary power, Russia, like Britain almost untroubled in 1848, re-emerged as the policeman of eastern and central Europe. As the Vienna radicals contemplated with dismay events in Prague and Budapest—it had not occurred to them that the paralysis of the government might mean that Germans would no longer run the empire—the Habsburgs’ Croat soldiers and, in 1849, the Tsar’s army gradually cut the ground from under them.
Bohemia and Lombardy were again under control by the end of 1848, and the following year opened with the Habsburg forces’ reoccupation of Budapest. In the summer, the last Hungarian revolutionaries were overwhelmed; they were by then facing Serb revolutionaries and risings by Romanians in Transylvania, as well as the Austro-Russian armies. The interplay and conflict of nationality was even more marked in Germany. There, liberals who sought German national unity found indispensable the protection of a Prussian monarchy which was the epitome of conservatism. When, in 1849, the Prussian king contemptuously refused an imperial crown offered by the German constitutional assembly, it was clear that the German revolution was over.
The legacy of the upheaval was immense. It deprived Germany, through emigration, of much of her radical political leadership and it took the country a further stage towards a Prussian hegemony. Elsewhere, the shock of 1848 left the French middle class distrusting Paris, republican forms, and even the ‘career open to talent’. Italy was more securely than ever under the heel of Austria; hopes that the Papacy might lead her to national unity and political reform had been exposed as daydreams. But 1848 had also shown that enthusiasm could be aroused for the cause of nationality which might be used by conservatives to promote their ends as well as by the liberals who had so long been seen as its foremost standard-bearers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, revolution had extended to much of central and eastern Europe changes that had been brought to other countries by French occupation and example before 1815. Notably, peasants had been liberated from serfdom, bond-labour services, and much else summed up as ‘feudalism’. This was true, above all, in the Habsburg empire, where the peasant deputies in revolutionary Vienna had turned into staunch supporters of the dynasty once their demands for land and freedom from bond-labour had been met.
The Great Age of Revolutionary Wars
The 1850s and 1860s were dominated and transformed by a renewal of warfare between the great powers. This owed much to the establishment of a new regime in France. The democratic election of a president for the Second Republic, in December 1848, was followed by a coup d’etat and his assumption of unrestricted power in 1851. This was endorsed by plebiscites which turned the president into an emperor a year later. So came into being the French Second Empire under Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. There was much about this which was alarming, not least his name. He was the first democratic dictator, endorsed by popular vote. Liberals despaired. More important, if Napoleon III (as he called himself) had a consistent policy stance, or at least an outlook to which he tended to return, it was directed towards overturning the 1815 settlement and promoting the cause of nationality. Mazzini thought him a sham both as a democrat and as a nationalist. But his hold on power remained firm while many of his countrymen could see him as the guardian of social order and others could believe he had progressive ideas about the working class.
Paradoxically, he first took France to war in a seemingly conservative cause. Great Britain and France fought Russia in 1854 to protect the Ottoman empire. Russian armies had invaded the Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. This had opened a new phase of the Eastern Question—what was to be the fate of the Ottoman empire in Europe?—which released further revolutionary wars after the Crimean war, and shaped the history of Europe not only until 1918 but well beyond. Any decision about what should be done with the territories of the Ottoman empire when it fell apart, and about what should be done to speed or delay that falling apart, was bound to affect the balance of power set up in 1815. In 1854 that balance was upset and the Holy Alliance powers divided. Dynasticism and partnership in the Polish crime were huge conservative forces, but Austria could not ignore Russian encroachment in the Danube valley; though she did not go to war with Russia, she mobilized her own armies and sent them into the Danubian principalities.
The main conservative goal of the war, the safeguarding of the Ottoman empire, was achieved, but at the Congress of Paris, which met to settle the war in 1856, there were representatives of the smallest of the victorious allies, Sardinia. Her prime minister, Cavour, used the Congress to bring forward an Italian question—was Italy to remain disunited and under Austrian domination?—though he got nothing immediately for his pains. A more obviously revolutionary result of 1856 was the eventual emergence of an independent Romania (finally acknowledged in 1881). Finally, it became clear, the war brought revolution to Russia, but it did so from above. Russia had always escaped it from below, and contained it successfully in her Polish provinces even if her countryside was often turbulent. But defeat in the Crimea showed that Russia could not regain her standing as a great power without modernization. That meant at least one major change. So, in 1863, the Tsar decreed the emancipation of the Russian serfs, the largest single piece of social engineering to be attempted by any European state down to that time. Bond-labour, an institution which lay at the root of all European history hitherto, was now abolished—and, it may be noted, before it was abolished in the United States.
Russia’s eclipse as a European policeman was also assured for some years. This opened the way to revolution further west, but in ways importantly different from those envisaged in the first half of the century. Assured of Napoleon Ill’s benevolence towards changes in the map at the expense of the Habsburgs, two able conservative statesmen managed a series of rearrangements which rebuilt international order in the interests both of the vested interests they wished to uphold and, paradoxically, of the cause of nationalism. Each sought to assure the survival and, if possible, preponderance of the states they represented (Sardinia and Prussia) within larger national units (Italy and Germany). One was Cavour, the Sardinian who built on an alliance with France a policy of provocation towards Austria which enabled him to retain the support of Italian liberals disappointed in 1849. Ten years later, France went to war with Austria in support of Sardinia. Napoleon did not exact from a defeated Austria all that Cavour wanted, but the peace gave his king Lombardy, and opened the way to the unification of the rest of the peninsula. That unification was part political manipulation, part revolution, part conquest: Sardinian forces invaded the kingdom of Naples, ostensibly in support of a filibustering campaign by the radical Garibaldi, whose revolutionary language alarmed conservatives everywhere, but in reality as a way of containing what Cavour feared might be a democratic revolution threatening the Papacy and provoking a new war— this time, with France. When he died in 1861 a united Italy was in existence, formerly sanctioned by plebiscites —as was the transfer to France of Nice and Savoy, the douceur exacted by Napoleon Ill—under the former king of Sardinia. Garibaldi and Mazzini lived on, unhappy and disillusioned by the outcome; Rome and Venetia remained ‘unredeemed’ outside the new nation-state.
Bismarck, Prussia’s conservative revolutionary, began, like Cavour, with the acquiescence of France but ended fighting her. His was a much more important impact on Europe than Cavour’s, because the demographic and economic might of a united Germany was much greater than that of a united Italy could ever be. Yet his starting-point and fundamental ambition were limited: the preservation of Prussia and the interest of its ruling class, the Junker nobility and squirearchy to which he belonged. This meant Prussian predominance in Germany, which was achieved in three wars —one with Denmark in 1864, one with Austria in 1866, and the last with France in 1870. The first began the successful evolution of Bismarck’s policy towards a bid for the leadership of German nationalist opinion; the second excluded Austria from any share in the internal affairs of Germany; the third announced that France was at last displaced from her long ascendancy as western Europe’s great power. Bismarck coupled the peace he imposed in 1871 with the creation of a new German empire, a second Reich which appealed to national sentiment, seduced German liberals, and had a formally federal structure which saved the faces — and the palaces — of the German princes. But the king of Prussia was the emperor.
Defeat in 1866 had other consequences for Austria than exclusion from German affairs. She surrendered Venetia to Prussia’s ally, Italy—her only cession of territory—but this was less important than an internal change, the remodelling of the Habsburg empire into a Dual Monarchy. This, too, had its roots in the decline of Ottoman power. The Ottoman retreat and the consequent extension of Habsburg territory would mean new subjects, sometimes of national groups not hitherto represented in the empire, sometimes of groups which were and whose relations with it might therefore change. Yet, as 1848 showed, the most troublesome of the ‘subject peoples’ were the Magyars, the dominant people of the old kingdom of Hungary. Like the Germans of Bohemia and Austria, they were increasingly selfconscious as a people anxious to protect both a much-touted historical culture and their real advantages over other peoples — mainly Slav—of the historic Hungarian lands. They had long resisted a centralizing monarchy. Austria’s weakness in Germany was the Magyars’ opportunity. After defeat by the
Prussians, the Habsburgs had to concede to them the historic ‘Compromise’ (Ausgleich) of 1867 which set up a Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary. The emperor Francis Joseph was emperor in Vienna and king in Budapest. Though negotiated, this was a revolutionary change. It produced a Hungary-terri-torially including Croatia, Transylvania, and much else-inde-pendent in virtually all internal matters but, because of the Magyars’ own need to ensure that the Monarchy retained its international weight, locked into an often uncomfortable common management of foreign affairs. The Magyar response to necessity was to try to ensure that the making of foreign policy was dominated by Magyar interests. Unfortunately for Europe, they were sometimes successful in doing so.
The Great Peace, 1871-1914
In 1871 the French provisional government suppressed a movement in Paris led by a radical Commune or city council, and did so with great severity. The bloodshed was unprecedented. The damage done to Europe’s city of pleasure by street-fighting and incendiarism was striking. For a moment it seemed to some that social revolution had come again. It had not, however, nor in spite of many fears did it come in other developed nations in the decades that followed. True, there were dangerous moments in some places. Defeat in war forced concessions to revolution out of the Tsarist autocracy in 1905. In Spain, traditionally a land of revolt and rebellion, the government for a time lost control of the great city of Barcelona in the ‘Tragic Week’ of 1909. Italy seemed for a moment at the edge of breakdown in 1913. Yet what the Paris Commune had demonstrated was that there was little chance of popular insurrection overthrowing society when a government had control of its armed forces and the will to use them. Nevertheless, the fear of revolution did not diminish after 1871. It was even enhanced by new bogies. Socialism and communism-words vaguely and widely used about ideologies and aspirations implying a more equal distribution of material benefits and social power-appeared as open, organized threats. Trade unions were their most obvious manifestation. Two socialist ‘Internationals’ of working-class organizations appeared to have international substance. Yet the second, and much more important, though embodying an unprecedented degree of international organization for the working classes, had become by 1914 a far from revolutionary body, as its acts in that year showed.
The virtual disappearance of violent revolution from European history is a complex story. One element in it may be the long-term—though uneven-rise in material wealth in the half-century that followed i860. Another was the increasing—if by 1914 still far from complete-integration of mass societies, and the more effective government they enjoyed: popular education and rising literacy; at least formal participation in representative systems by larger numbers; the conscious extension of what would now be called ‘welfare’ legislation; better communications; the use of conscription to create national armies — these were some of the many changes silently transforming the relations of government and governed. This transformation was neither even nor uniform in its advance. Germany, with a wider franchise, had a government more firmly under the thumb of traditional privilege than England in 1914. By then Englishmen were entitled to old age pensions, such as Frenchmen were not to receive until after the First World War—and Russians not until after the Second—and, again unlike the French, were used to paying income tax. But the tendency is notable, and is probably one reason why the threat of violent revolution receded. Not all liberals, as the twentieth century began, remained optimistic about the spread of constitutionalism, far less democracy —but by 1914 there was not a major European state—except, of course, the United Kingdom—without a written constitution; most gave some formal protection to the citizen against arbitrary interference, whatever the practical realities of the way it worked. Conscious political reform—sometimes conceded only reluctantly, and occasionally only cosmetic—had led everywhere to a prevailing set of ideas and institutions unthinkable a hundred years earlier.
The revolutionary serpent which had still not been scotched in the egg was nationalism. Social revolution was still a real threat where it coincided with nationalist resentment. Irish national leaders looked with admiration to Magyars who, they believed, had fought the good fight against national oppression from the Hofburg while they were fighting against the same threat from Dublin Castle. But to the Romanian peasant of Transylvania, to the Croat or the Slovene, Magyars looked—and often were—both rapacious landlords and alien tyrants; they hoped independent nationhood would give them what Magyars had got in 1867. Elsewhere, there were still Italians in ‘unredeemed’ Habsburg territory, the British had a national problem in Ireland, and Norway and Sweden parted company (peaceably) in 1905. But it was in the great eastern empires that the real revolutionary potential lay. Poland could be managed, but Russia faced greater difficulty; her Poles and Jews were only two of the scores of non-Russian peoples she ruled. Above all, tension was greatest in Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Europe.
Revolution and the Approach to Disaster
By the end of the century, as neighbours of the decaying Ottoman empire, Austria and Russia were openly concerned about what was to take its place. France and Britain, too, were always acutely sensitive to any prospect of changes anywhere in the empire and, indeed, over its capacity to survive at all. Broadly speaking, the eighteenth-century solution had been the direct extension of Habsburg and Romanov power into former Ottoman lands. In the nineteenth century, that became more difficult to accept, and other solutions were sought. One sometimes welcomed was the emergence of new national states in south-eastern Europe. Thus emerged Serbia during the Napoleonic wars and a Greek national state in 1830; so crystallized Romania after the Crimean war.
In any particular instance the powers were tugged in different directions by different impulses and interests. Russia always found it somewhat tempting to stand up for Christian populations alleged to be oppressed by Turkish misrule —of which much more was heard as the nineteenth century went on. Her rulers also grew increasingly susceptible after 1870 to the blandishments of a supranational ‘Slavophilism’, popular among many Russians, which linked the protection of the Orthodox Christian Churches to that of the Slav peoples (although one of those peoples, the Polish, was embarrassingly Roman Catholic). This encouraged Russian diplomacy to cultivate potential satellites as new states appeared in the Balkans. In its turn, this was likely to favour other elements in Russian policy: ambitions to dominate the lower Danubian lands and to control the Straits of Constantinople—an artery which grew in importance with the sea-borne export trade in grain from Odessa.
The Austrian position was normally more conservative and reactive. No such domestic influences as in Russia urged the Roman Catholic Habsburgs towards interference to protect the Balkan Christian peoples. Vienna was more concerned over its own interests in the Danube valley, the Monarchy’s major outlet for water-borne commerce other than Trieste, and for the maintenance of stability in the Ottoman territories so that other powers would have no excuse to interfere in the region. As the nineteenth century progressed, another concern loomed larger in Austrian calculations. Whether or not Russian power was extended overtly and formally in the Danube valley and the Balkans, would not the Monarchy’s strength be weakened by the appearance there of new Slav nations? They might seek not only to exploit their shared Slavdom so as to reduce the Monarchy’s influence beyond its borders, but perhaps also to attempt to turn its own Slav subjects against it. This prospect increasingly troubled Magyar politicians, aware as they were of the huge Slav population of their half of the Monarchy. And, if the ‘South’ Slavs, as those peoples increasingly came to be called, won concessions, what would then happen with others: the Romanians of Transylvania, the Ruthenes of the Polish Ukraine, the Poles themselves?
Between 1871 and 1914 five new nations emerged into full independence and sovereign status in south-eastern Europe. All were in formerly Ottoman lands, all were poor and largely barbarous, but they were also Christian, talked the language of nationalism, and were governed by what purported to be constitutional regimes. Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria were Slav; Romania and Albania were not. They were the final monuments of over a century of effective diplomacy which, except in 1854, avoided direct conflict between the great European powers in south-east Europe by building up such states at the expense of the subsiding Ottoman empire (of which by 1914 there was very little left north of the Bosphorus). In 1913 some of these states, along with Greece, showed that this solution to the Eastern Question had bought success at the cost of creating new problems: in the second of two Balkan wars — the first, a year earlier, had been with the Turks—they fought one another over the division of the Ottoman spoil.
A Revolutionary War
The exhaustion of diplomatic solutions in the Balkans, the persistence there of problems, such as Macedonia, which could not be solved at the expense of the Ottoman empire, and the bungling of Austro-Russian relations all contributed to the descent into the abyss in 1914. To that extent, it would be fair to call the struggle which began then the Third Balkan War, or another of the Wars of the Ottoman Succession. But with no less appropriateness it could be called the Third German War, for it was fought, as those of 1866 and 1870 had been fought— and as a fourth, still greater, was to be fought in the future — to settle questions about Germany’s weight in Europe. Some, Germans among them, would even have said it was about Germany’s place in the world, but historians have tended to agree that extra-European, and specifically colonial, issues did not play a major part in the outbreak of war. The long resentment of Frenchmen over the loss in 1871 of Alsace and Lorraine, their government’s alliance with Russia and understandings with Britain, and the provision of the British government with a cast-iron legal excuse for entry to war when Germany invaded Belgium were all much more important. Some of Germany’s rulers were haunted by the fear that their moment of effective supremacy might pass if they did not fight then. Germany was a huge mass of demographic, economic, and therefore military power. They felt that, while there was still time, they should demonstrate and exploit that fact, before a modernizing, stronger Russia could throw her full weight into the scale.
The narrative of the war which began in 1914, though fascinating for its own sake and important for the explanation of its nature, cannot be set out here. In that story, in any case, it is easy to lose sight of the revolution—or revolutions — which made the war unique in more than its huge scale and extent. Nothing like it had happened since the struggles of 1792-1815, which were also, like those of 1914-18, referred to long after they were over simply as ‘the Great War’. Much of this revolutionary effect was a matter of the intensification of processes already long under way. The war demonstrated the immense strength of the national state which had become the dominant political institution in Europe since 1789. Military police were not needed to force conscripts aboard the troop trains which took them in millions to the fronts in 1914. Until 1916, the huge British army in France could still rely on volunteers to fill its ranks. Perhaps even more impressive evidence of the power the state could now mobilize was wartime management of economic life. It was carried further than ever before, and though Russia’s starving cities in 1917, and those of Austria and Germany in the following year, presaged the closeness of breakdown and surrender, for years bureaucrats succeeded in warding off famine by the exercise of administrative controls and the exploitation of technical resources on an unprecedented scale. Paradoxically the war made the central direction of the economy advocated by socialists a reality over much of Europe.
War aims developed as the struggle continued and combined with deep-rooted facts and long-evolving trends to make it a revolutionary war. Poland’s hour came at last, as the combatants began to look round for new allies. Their concessions to her were implicitly revolutionary—the Germans had helped to set up an ‘independent’ Polish state as early as 1916 — but revolution had already been unleashed by the British outside Europe in their support for Arab revolt in the Ottoman empire. Promises with revolutionary implications were also made; Italy’s entry to the war in 1915 could be read as the opening of the last war of the Risorgimento because the Allies offered her the ‘unredeemed’ lands in Dalmatia and the Trentino. Most extraordinary of all, France and Britain had secretly conceded the great aim of Tsarist foreign policy for a century and perhaps more—the promise of acquiescence in the Russian occupation of Constantinople after victory.
These were perhaps only indicators of revolution. Two great events in 1917 changed world history. The major precipitating agency in each was the same small group of men. They were not, as revolutionaries had long hoped and conservatives long feared, the self-designated successors of Robespierre, Mazzini, Nechaev, and so many other devoted disturbers of the status quo. The revolutionizing of world affairs in 1917 was the work of the German general staff. By the beginning of that year its soldiers had at last worn out even Russia’s huge strength. Though her armies were then still in the field and still capable of great feats of arms, Russia’s cities were starving, her transport system was wrecked, and her government had lost its moral authority. The regime was mortally wounded. A revolution in February (March in the older calendar) brought it down and installed a republican provisional government. It recognized Poland’s independence and gave autonomy within a Russian state to Finland and Estonia. Unhappily, it did not give Russians what they longed for above all: peace. War-weariness and the tireless exploitation of its political weakness by the Marxist socialists called Bolsheviks, whose leader had been sent back to Russia by the Germans, in the hope that some advantage might come of it, enabled them to thrust aside the provisional government in a coup d’etat in October. Soon, Russia was out of the war and a new state had appeared, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
These events took time to demonstrate their full revolutionary consequences. But some were very quickly apparent. The Bolshevik regime inaugurated a new foreign policy by a dramatic (and ineffective) appeal over the heads of governments to the peoples whom they were supposed to oppress. This symbolized the new regime’s rejection of traditional assumptions of international life and diplomacy. It was a signal sent by a government which wished to show that it was essentially subversive of any other which did not share its ideological position. Soon, gestures of support—acts were later to follow— towards revolutionary movements in other countries confirmed that. A new instability was thus injected into international life.
The other great revolutionary event of 1917 had been the entry to the war of the United States. This too was the work of Germany’s military leaders. The proximate cause was their decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare against the Allies, which meant trying to sink all ships, whether under combatant or neutral flags, approaching Allied ports. The ships were often American, so this assured America’s entry into the war on the Allied side. Soon it was clear that, since Germany was not winning the maritime battle, the Allies were therefore bound to win the land struggle, even after they had lost their Russian ally, since American numbers and industrial strength more than made up the loss. Win they did, and Germany sued for peace in October 1918.
By then, the American entry to the war had transformed the struggle and had implicitly settled much of the character of the peace which was to follow. Other events helped. In the spring of 1918, the full military weight of the United States had still to be deployed in Europe. The French and British faced the last great German onslaught without much support in the field from their new associate. In the crisis, they looked around for new resources. Among them were some which might be brought to bear through revolutionary and subversive means, both by propaganda and diplomacy. The Allies began to recognize and encourage those who spoke for the ‘subject peoples’ of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This fitted, more or less, the rhetorical diplomacy of the American president, whose commitment to a break with the self-interested war aims of the Allies — significantly, the United States government did not accept that it was their ‘ally’, but described itself as an ‘associated power’ — was made evident in assertions that the coming peace was to be based on the principle of self-determining nationality; six of the ‘Fourteen Points’ the President announced as the basis for a peace settlement expressed this.
America’s entry to the war initiated the final evolution of
The wars which had sprung from 1914. They had turned into the greatest revolutionary war in history. The old Europe was gone. On the eve of the armistice which ended fighting in the west, a German republic replaced Bismarck’s Reich. The Polish republic emerged again as an independent state. Long before the peace conference began, two great dynastic empires crumbled away, both in revolution. The Dual Monarchy dissolved into Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, while others of its former lands were now part of a new ‘Yugoslavia’ which also swallowed Serbia and Montenegro. Soon, the new Russian state was desperately fighting a civil war to hold itself together. The peace treaties when they came endorsed and furthered the triumphs of nationalism and the collapse of dynasticism and briefly brought about an unprecedented extension of formal democracy. They also registered the other and still vaster revolutionary change denoted by the American army’s presence in France. The New World had been called in to settle the problems Europe could not herself solve—and, it was to appear in due course, failed in turn to solve them. Symbolically, the majority of the countries whose representatives signed the Treaty of Versailles lay outside Europe. The age of European ascendancy was over.
The Treaty of Versailles was not signed until 1919 and was only one of several which settled the terms of the new order. Some were not signed for years, and 1918 is not, therefore, a good date to break Europe’s political story. Her German problem had not been solved and 1918 was to that extent only a pause in a new Thirty Years’ War. Even as hostilities ended, there were either established, or fighting strongly for existence, nine independent sovereign states which had not been there in 1914—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia (a name not officially adopted until 1929; in the Treaty of Versailles it was referred to as ‘The Serb-Croat-Slovene State’). Like the new Germany, all of them were constitutional in form. Seven of them were republics. Above all they witnessed the triumph of the principle of national sovereignty announced in the French Revolution. It was still double-edged, implying at once a new way of authenticating authority and a huge revolutionary potential, as minorities in the new Europe quickly grasped.
Other facts also registered sweeping change. At Vienna in 1815 the Papacy had been officially represented; there was to be no nuncio signing the Treaty of Versailles, for since 1870, when the Italians occupied Rome, the Papacy had ceased to enjoy its temporal power. Rome had retreated on other fronts too. For all the Papacy’s claims, even states with large Roman Catholic populations had already made concessions to a creeping secularism. European political life since 1789 was influenced by innovation in science, philosophical ideas, social assumptions, and much else which redefined the role of religion. Elites which had once rested on unquestioned foundations dissolved, or abandoned themselves to the opportunities of industrial and commercial society. There were doubts, even about ideas which seemed to triumph; not all nineteenth-century liberals viewed the onset of democratic society with complacency. In 1918 new, illiberal principles were already abroad, and were being solidly entrenched in Russia, a country which was bound one day to be a great state again. Such reflections lead back to the conclusion that the Europe of 1918 had not reached a new resting-place. She was only a little way into the phase of world revolution in which we still live, and which Europe’s global supremacy had launched. The cannonade at the Bastille was in the end to be heard round the world, however astonishing the transformations, compromises, and distortions away from their ideal origins the principles and ideas of Europe were to undergo.
World History
