/
Western Civilization: A Concise History –
Volume 3
Original Author: Dr. Christopher Brooks
Last Modified: February 2020
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Open Educational Resource released under the Creative Commons
License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International)
Licensed by Portland Community College
1
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Napoleon 16
Chapter 2: The Industrial Revolution 28
Chapter 3: Political Ideologies and Movements 43
Chapter 4: The Politics of the Nineteenth Century 66
Chapter 5: Culture, Science, and Pseudo-Science 91
Chapter 6: Imperialism 115
Chapter 7: World War I 135
Chapter 8: The Early Twentieth Century 154
Chapter 9: Fascism 173
Chapter 10: World War II 192
Chapter 11: The Holocaust 210
Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War 222
Chapter 13: Postwar Conflict 240
Chapter 14: Postwar Society 258
Chapter 15: Toward the Present 276
2
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Idea of Western Civilization
Introduction
What is Western Civilization? Furthermore, who or what is part of it? Like all ideas,
the concept of Western Civilization itself has a history, one that coalesced in college textbooks
and curriculums for the first time in the United States in the 1920s. In many ways, the very idea
of Western Civilization is a loaded one, opposing one form or branch of civilization from others
as if they were distinct, even unrelated. Thus, before examining the events of Western
Civilizations history, it is important to unpack the history of the concept itself.
Where is the West?
The obvious question is west of what? Likewise, where is the east? Terms used in
present-day geopolitics regularly make reference to an east and west, as in Far East, and
Middle East, as well as in Western ideas or attitudes. The obvious answer is that the West
has something to do with Europe. If the area including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel –
Palestine, and Egypt is somewhere called the Middle or Near East, doesn’t that imply that it
is just to the east of something else?
In fact, we get the original term from Greece. Greece is the center-point, east of the
Balkan Peninsula was east, west of the Balkans was west, and the Greeks were at the center of
their self-understood world. Likewise, the sea that both separated and united the Greeks and
their neighbors, including the Egyptians and the Persians, is still called the Mediterranean,
which means sea in the middle of the earth (albeit in Latin, not Greek – we get the word from a
later “Western” civilization, the Romans). The ancient civilizations clustered around the
Mediterranean treated it as the center of the world itself, their major trade route to one another
and a major source of their food as well.
To the Greeks, there were two kinds of people: Greeks and barbarians (the Greek word
is barbaros). Supposedly, the word barbarian came from Greeks mocking the sound of
non-Greek languages: bar-bar-bar-bar. The Greeks traded with all of their neighbors and
knew perfectly well that the Persians and the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, among others,
were not their inferiors in learning, art, or political organization, but the fact remains that they
3
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
were not Greek, either. Thus, one of the core themes of Western Civilization is that right from
its inception, of the east being east of Greece and the west being west of Greece, and of the
world being divided between Greeks and barbarians, there was an idea of who is central and
superior, and who is out on the edges and inferior (or at least not part of the best version of
culture).
In a sense, then, the Greeks invented the idea of west and east, but they did not extend
the idea to anyone but themselves, certainly including the barbarians who inhabited the rest of
Europe. In other words, the Greeks did not have a concept of Western Civilization, just Greek
vs. barbarian. Likewise, the Greeks did not invent civilization itself; they inherited things like
agriculture and writing from their neighbors. Neither was there ever a united Greek empire:
there was a great Greek civilization when Alexander the Great conquered what he thought was
most of the world, stretching from Greece itself through Egypt, the Middle East, as far as
western India, but it collapsed into feuding kingdoms after he died. Thus, while later cultures
came to look to the Greeks as their intellectual and cultural ancestors, the Greeks themselves
did not set out to found Western Civilization itself.
Mesopotamia
While many traditional Western Civilization textbooks start with Greece, this one does
not. That is because civilization is not Greek in its origins. The most ancient human civilizations
arose in the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from present-day Israel – Palestine through
southern Turkey and into Iraq. Closely related, and lying within the Fertile Crescent, is the
region of Mesopotamia, which is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in
present-day Iraq. In these areas, people invented the most crucial technology necessary for the
development of civilization: agriculture. The Mesopotamians also invented other things that are
central to civilization, including:
Cities: note that in English, the very word civilization is closely related to the word
civic, meaning having to do with cities as in “civic government” or “civic duty.” Cities
were essential to sophisticated human groups because they allowed specialization: you
could have some people concentrate all of their time and energy on tasks like art,
building, religious worship, or warfare, not just on farming.
Bureaucracy: while it seems like a prosaic subject, bureaucracy was and remains the
most effective way to organize large groups of people. Civilizations that developed large
4
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
and efficient bureaucracies grew larger and lasted longer than those that neglected
bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is, essentially, the substitution of rules in place of individual
human decisions. That process, while often frustrating to individuals caught up in it,
does have the effect of creating a more efficient set of processes than can be achieved
through arbitrary decision-making. Historically, bureaucracy was one of the most
important “technologies” that early civilizations developed.
Large-scale warfare: even before large cities existed, the first towns were built with
fortifications to stave off attackers. It is very likely that the first kings were war leaders
allied with priests.
Mathematics: without math, there cannot be advanced engineering, and without
engineering, there cannot be irrigation, walls, or large buildings. The ancient
Mesopotamians were the first people in the world to develop advanced mathematics in
large part because they were also the most sophisticated engineers of the ancient world.
Astronomy: just as math is necessary for engineering, astronomy is necessary for a
sophisticated calendar. The ancient Mesopotamians began the process of
systematically recording the changing positions of the stars and other heavenly bodies
because they needed to be able to track when to plant crops, when to harvest, and when
religious rituals had to be carried out. Among other things, the Mesopotamians were the
first to discover the 365 (and a quarter) days of the year and set those days into a fixed
calendar.
Empires: an empire is a political unit comprising many different peoples, whether
people is defined linguistically, religiously, or ethnically. The Mesopotamians were the
first to conquer and rule over many different cities and peoples at once.
The Mesopotamians also created systems of writing, of organized religion, and of
literature, all of which would go on to have an enormous influence on world history, and in turn,
Western Civilization. Thus, in considering Western Civilization, it would be misleading to start
with the Greeks and skip places like Mesopotamia, because those areas were the heartland of
civilization in the whole western part of Eurasia.
Greece and Rome
Even if we do not start with the Greeks, we do need to acknowledge their importance.
Alexander the Great was one of the most famous and important military leaders in history, a
5
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
man who started conquering the world when he was eighteen years old. When he died his
empire fell apart, in part because he did not say which of his generals was to take over after his
death. Nevertheless, the empires he left behind were united in important ways, using Greek as
one of their languages, employing Greek architecture in their buildings, putting on plays in the
Greek style, and of course, trading with one another. This period in history was called the
Hellenistic Age. The people who were part of that age were European, Middle Eastern, and
North African, people who worshiped both Greeks gods and the gods of their own regions,
spoke all kinds of different languages, and lived as part of a hybrid culture. Hellenistic
civilization demonstrates the fact that Western Civilization has always been a blend of different
peoples, not a single encompassing group or language or religion.
Perhaps the most important empire in the ancient history of Western Civilization was
ancient Rome. Over the course of roughly five centuries, the Romans expanded from the city of
Rome in the middle of the Italian peninsula to rule an empire that stretched from Britain to Spain
and from North Africa to Persia (present-day Iran). Through both incredible engineering, the
hard work of Roman citizens and Roman subjects, and the massive use of slave labor, they built
remarkable buildings and created infrastructure like roads and aqueducts that survive to the
present day.
The Romans are the ones who give us the idea of Western Civilization being something
ongoing something that had started in the past and continued into the future. In the case of
the Romans, they (sometimes grudgingly) acknowledged Greece as a cultural model; Roman
architecture used Greek shapes and forms, the Roman gods were really just the Greek gods
given new names (Zeus became Jupiter, Hades became Pluto, etc.), and educated Romans
spoke and read Greek so that they could read the works of the great Greek poets, playwrights,
and philosophers. Thus, the Romans deliberately adopted an older set of ideas and considered
themselves part of an ongoing civilization that blended Greek and Roman values. Like the
Greeks before them, they also divided civilization itself in a stark binary: there was
Greco-Roman culture on the one hand and barbarism on the other, although they made a
reluctant exception for Persia at times.
The Romans were largely successful at assimilating the people they conquered. They
united their provinces with the Latin language, which is the ancestor of all of the major
languages spoken in Southern Europe today (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), Roman
Law, which is the ancestor of most forms of law still in use today in Europe, and the Roman form
of government. Along with those factors, the Romans brought Greek and Roman science,
learning, and literature. In many ways, the Romans believed that they were bringing civilization
6
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
itself everywhere they went, and because they made the connection between Greek civilization
and their own, they played a significant role in inventing the idea of Western Civilization as
something that was ongoing.
That noted, the Romans did not use the term Western Civilization and as their empire
expanded, even the connection between Roman identity and Italy itself weakened. During the
period that the empire was at its height the bulk of the population and wealth was in the east,
concentrated in Egypt, Anatolia (the region corresponding to the present-day nation of Turkey)
and the Levant. This shift to the east culminated in the move of the capital of the empire from
the city of Rome to the Greek town of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople by the empire who
ordered the move: Constantine. Thus, while the Greco-Roman legacy was certainly a major
factor in the development of the idea of Western Civilization much later, Roman was certainly
not the same thing as western at the time.
The Middle Ages and Christianity
Another factor in the development of the idea of Western Civilization came about after
Rome ceased to exist as a united empire, during the era known as the Middle Ages. The
Middle Ages were the period between the fall of Rome, which happened around 476 CE, and
the Renaissance, which started around 1300 CE. During the Middle Ages, another concept of
what lay at the heart of Western Civilization arose, especially among Europeans. It was not just
the connection to Roman and Greek accomplishments, but instead, to religion. The Roman
Empire had started to become Christian in the early fourth century CE when the emperor
Constantine converted to Christianity. Many Europeans in the Middle Ages came to believe
that, despite the fact that they spoke different languages and had different rulers, they were
united as part of Christendom: the kingdom of Christ and of Christians.
Christianity obviously played a hugely important role in the history of Western
Civilization. It inspired amazing art and music. It was at the heart of scholarship and learning
for centuries. It also justified the aggressive expansion of European kingdoms. Europeans truly
believed that members of other religions were infidels (meaning “those who are unfaithful,”
those who worshipped the correct God, but in the wrong way, including Jews and Muslims, but
also Christians who deviated from official orthodoxy) or pagans (those who worshipped false
gods) who should either convert or be exterminated. For instance, despite the fact that Muslims
and Jews worshiped the same God and shared much of the same sacred literature, medieval
Europeans had absolutely no qualms about invading Muslim lands and committing horrific
7
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
atrocities in the name of their religion. Likewise, medieval anti-Semitism (prejudice and hatred
directed against Jews) eventually drove many Jews from Europe itself to take shelter in the
kingdoms and empires of the Middle East and North Africa. Historically it was much safer and
more comfortable for Jews in places like the predominantly Muslim Ottoman Empire than it was
in most of Christian Europe.
A major irony of the idea that Western Civilization is somehow inherently Christian is that
Islam is unquestionably just as Western. Islams point of origin, the Arabian Peninsula, is
geographically very close to that of both Judaism and Christianity. Its holy writings are also
closely aligned to Jewish and Christian values and thought. Perhaps most importantly, Islamic
kingdoms and empires were part of the networks of trade, scholarship, and exchange that linked
together the entire greater Mediterranean region. Thus, despite the fervor of European
crusaders, it would be profoundly misleading to separate Islamic states and cultures from the
rest of Western Civilization.
The Renaissance and European Expansion
Perhaps the most crucial development in the idea of Western Civilization in the
pre-modern period was the Renaissance. The idea of the Middle Ages was invented by
thinkers during the Renaissance, which started around 1300 CE. The great thinkers and artists
of the Renaissance claimed to be moving away from the ignorance and darkness of the Middle
Ages which they also described as the dark ages – and returning to the greatness of the
Romans and Greeks. People like Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Christine de Pizan, and
Petrarch proudly connected their work to the work of the Romans and Greeks, claiming that
there was an unbroken chain of ideas, virtues, and accomplishments stretching all the way back
thousands of years to people like Alexander the Great, Plato, and Socrates.
During the Renaissance, educated people in Europe roughly two thousand years after
the life of the Greek philosopher Plato based their own philosophies and outlooks on Plato’s
philosophy, as well as that of other Greek thinkers. The beauty of Renaissance art is directly
connected to its inspiration in Roman and Greek art. The scientific discoveries of the
Renaissance were inspired by the same spirit of inquiry that Greek scientists and Roman
engineers had cultivated. Perhaps most importantly, Renaissance thinkers proudly linked
together their own era to that of the Greeks and Romans, thus strengthening the concept of
Western Civilization as an ongoing enterprise.
8
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In the process of reviving the ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Renaissance thinkers
created a new program of education: humanist education. Celebrating the inherent goodness
and potentialities of humankind, humanistic education saw in the study of classical literature a
source of inspiration for not just knowledge, but of morality and virtue. Combining the practical
study of languages, history, mathematics, and rhetoric (among other subjects) with the
cultivation of an ethical code the humanistics traced back to the Greeks, humanistic education
ultimately created a curriculum meant to create well-rounded, virtuous individuals. That
program of education remained intact into the twentieth century, with the study of the classics
remaining a hallmark of elite education until it began to be displaced by the more specialized
disciplinary studies of the modern university system that was born near the end of the
nineteenth century.
It was not Renaissance ideas, however, that had the greatest impact on the globe at the
time. Instead, it was European soldiers, colonists, and most consequentially, diseases. The
first people from the Eastern Hemisphere since prehistory to travel to the Western Hemisphere
(and remain – an earlier Viking colony did not survive) were European explorers who, entirely by
accident, discovered the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century CE. It bears emphasis
that the discovery of the Americas is a misnomer: millions of people already lived there, as
their ancestors had for thousands of years, but geography had left them ill-prepared for the
arrival of the newcomers. With the European colonists came an onslaught of epidemics to
which the Native peoples of the Americas had no resistance, and within a few generations the
immense majority – perhaps as many as 90% – of Native Americans perished as a result. The
subsequent conquest of the Americas by Europeans and their descendents was thus made
vastly easier. Europeans suddenly had access to an astonishing wealth of land and natural
resources, wealth that they extracted in large part by enslaving millions of Native Americans and
Africans.
Thanks largely to the European conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of its
resources and its people, Europe went from a region of little economic and military power and
importance to one of the most formidable in the following centuries. Following the Spanish and
Portuguese conquest of Central and South America, the other major European states embarked
on their own imperialistic ventures in the following centuries. Trade empires emerged over the
course of the seventeenth century, first and foremost those of the Dutch and English, which
established the precedent that profit and territorial control were mutually reinforcing priorities for
European states. Driven by that conjoined motive, European states established huge, and
9
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
growing, global empires. By 1800, roughly 35% of the surface of the world was controlled by
Europeans or their descendants.
The Modern Era
Most of the world, however, was off limits to large-scale European expansion. Not only
were there prosperous and sophisticated kingdoms in many regions of Africa, but (in an ironic
reversal of the impact of European diseases on Americans) African diseases ensured that
would-be European explorers and conquerors were unable to penetrate beyond the coasts of
most of sub-Saharan African entirely. Meanwhile, the enormous and sophisticated empires and
kingdoms of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia (i.e. India) largely regarded
Europeans as incidental trading partners of relatively little importance. The Middle East was
dominated by two powerful and western empires of its own: Persia and the Ottoman Empire.
The explosion of European power, one that coincided with the fruition of the idea that
Western Civilization was both distinct from and better than other branches of civilization, came
as a result of a development in technology: the Industrial Revolution. Starting in Great Britain in
the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans learned how to exploit fossil fuels in the form of
coal to harness hitherto unimaginable amounts of energy. That energy underwrote a vast and
dramatic expansion of European technology, wealth, and military power, this time built on the
backs not of outright slaves, but of workers paid subsistence wages.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution underwrote and
enabled the transformation of Europe from regional powerhouse to global hegemon. By the
early twentieth century, Europe and the American nations founded by the descendents of
Europeans controlled roughly 85% of the globe. Europeans either forced foreign states to
concede to their economic demands and political influence, as in China and the Ottoman
Empire, or simply conquered and controlled regions directly, as in South Asia (i.e. India) and
Africa. None of this would have been possible without the technological and energetic
revolution wrought by industrialism.
To Europeans and North Americans, however, the reason that they had come to enjoy
such wealth and power was not because of a (temporary) monopoly of industrial technology.
Instead, it was the inevitable result of their inherent biological and cultural superiority. The idea
that the human species was divided into biologically distinct races was not entirely invented in
the nineteenth century, but it became the predominant outlook and acquired all the trappings of
a science over the course of the 1800s. By the year 1900, almost any person of European
10
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
descent would have claimed to be part of a distinct, superior race whose global dominance
was simply part of their collective birthright.
That conceit arrived at its zenith in the first half of the twentieth century. The European
powers themselves fell upon one another in the First World War in the name of expanding, or at
least preserving, their share of global dominance. Soon after, the new (related) ideologies of
fascism and Nazism put racial superiority at the very center of their worldviews. The Second
World War was the direct result of those ideologies, when racial warfare was unleashed for the
first time not just on members of races Europeans had already classified as inferior, but on
European ethnicities that fascists and Nazis now considered inferior races in their own right,
most obviously the Jews. The bloodbath that followed resulted in approximately 55 million
deaths, including the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and at least 25 million citizens of
the Soviet Union, another racial enemy from the perspective of the Nazis.
Western Civilization Is Born
It was against the backdrop of this descent into what Europeans and Americans
frequently called barbarism – the old antithesis of the true civilization that started with the
Greeks – that the history of Western Civilization first came into being as a textbook topic and,
soon, a mainstay of college curriculums. Prominent scholars in the United States, especially
historians, came to believe that the best way to defend the elements of civilization with which
they most strongly identified, including certain concepts of rationality and political equality, was
to describe all of human existence as an ascent from primitive savagery into enlightenment, an
ascent that may not have strictly speaking started in Europe, but which enjoyed its greatest
success there. The early proponents of the Western Civ concept spoke and wrote explicitly of
European civilization as an unbroken ladder of ideas, technologies, and cultural achievements
that led to the present. Along the way, of course, they included the United States as both a
product of those European achievements and, in the twentieth century, as one of the staunchest
defenders of that legacy.
That first generation of historians of Western Civilization succeeded in crafting what was
to be the core of history curriculums for most of the twentieth century in American colleges and
universities, not to mention high schools. The narrative in the introduction in this book follows
its basic contours, without all of the qualifying remarks: it starts with Greece, goes through
Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then on to the growth in European power leading up
to the recent past. The traditional story made a hard and fast distinction between Western
11
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Civilization as the site of progress, and the rest of the world (usually referred to as the Orient,
simply meaning east, all the way up until textbooks started changing their terms in the 1980s)
which invariably lagged behind. Outside of the West, went the narrative, there was despotism,
stagnation, and corruption, so it was almost inevitable that the West would eventually achieve
global dominance.
This was, in hindsight, a somewhat surprising conclusion given when the narrative was
invented. The Wests self-understanding as the most civilized culture had imploded with the
world wars, but the inventors of Western Civilization as a concept were determined to not only
rescue its legacy from that implosion, but to celebrate it as the only major historical legacy of
relevance to the present. In doing so, they reinforced many of the intellectual dividing lines
created centuries earlier: there was true civilization opposed by barbarians, there was an
ongoing and unbroken legacy of achievement and progress, and most importantly, only people
who were born in or descended from people born in Europe had played a significant historical
role. The entire history of most of humankind was not just irrelevant to the narrative of
European or American history, it was irrelevant to the history of the modern world for everyone.
In other words, even Africans and Asians, to say nothing of the people of the Pacific or Native
Americans, could have little of relevance to learn from their own history that was not somehow
obsolete in the modern era. And yet, this astonishing conclusion was born from a culture that
unleashed the most horrific destruction (self-destruction) ever witnessed by the human species.
The Approach of This Book (with Caveats)
This textbook follows the contours of the basic Western Civilization narrative described
above in terms of chronology and, to an extent, geography because it was written to be
compatible with most Western Civilization courses as they exist today. It deliberately breaks,
however, from the triumphalist narrative that describes Western Civilization as the most
successful, rational, and enlightened form of civilization in human history. It casts a wider
geographical view than traditional Western Civilization textbooks, focusing in many cases on the
critical historical role of the Middle East, not just Europe. It also abandons the pretense that the
history of Western Civilization was generally progressive, with the conditions of life and
understanding of the natural world of most people improving over time (as a matter of fact, they
did not).
The purpose of this approach is not to disparage the genuine breakthroughs,
accomplishments, and forms of progress that did originate in the West. Technologies as
12
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
diverse and important as the steam engine and antibiotics originated in the West. Major
intellectual and ideological movements calling for religious toleration, equality before the law,
and feminism all came into being in the West. For better and for worse, the West was also the
point of origin of true globalization (starting with the European contact with the Americas, as
noted above). It would be as misleading to dismiss the history of Western Civilization as
unimportant as it is to claim that only the history of Western Civilization is important.
Thus, this textbook attempts to present a balanced account of major events that
occurred in the West over approximately the last 10,000 years. Balance is in the eye of the
reader, however, so the account will not be satisfactory to many. The purpose of this
introduction is to make explicit the background and the framework that informed the writing of
the book, and the author chooses to release it as an Open Education Resource in the
knowledge that many others will have the opportunity to modify it as they see fit.
Finally, a note on the kind of history this textbook covers is in order. For the sake of
clarity and manageability, historians distinguish between different areas of historical study:
political, intellectual, military, cultural, artistic, social, and so on. Historians have made
enormous strides in the last sixty years in addressing various areas that were traditionally
neglected, most importantly in considering the histories of the people who were not in power,
including the common people of various epochs, of women for almost all of history, and of
slaves and servants. The old adage that history is written by the winners is simply untrue –
history has left behind mountains of evidence about the lives of those who had access to less
personal autonomy than did social elites. Those elites did much to author some of the most
familiar historical narratives, but those traditional narratives have been under sustained critique
for several decades.
This textbook tries to address at least some of those histories, but here it will be found
wanting by many. Given the vast breadth of history covered in its chapters, the bulk of the
consideration is on high level political history, charting a chronological framework of major
states, political events, and political changes. There are two reasons for that approach. First,
the history of politics lends itself to a history of events linked together by causality: first
something happened, and then something else happened because of it. In turn, there is a
fundamental coherence and simplicity to textbook narratives of political history (one that
infuriates many professional historians, who are trained to identify and study complexity).
Political history can thus serve as an accessible starting place for newcomers to the study of
history, providing a relatively easy-to-follow chronological framework.
13
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The other, related, reason for the political framing of this textbook is that history has long
since declined as a subject central to education from the elementary through high school levels
in many parts of the United States. It is no longer possible to assume that anyone who has
completed high school already has some idea of major (measured by their impact at the time
and since) events of the past. This textbook attempts to use political history as, again, a starting
point in considering events, people, movements, and ideas that changed the world at the time
and continue to exert an influence in the present.
To be clear, not all of what follows has to do with politics in so many words.
Considerable attention is also given to intellectual, economic, and to an extent, religious history.
Social and cultural history are covered in less detail, both for reasons of space and the simple
fact that the author was trained as an intellectual historian interested in political theory. These,
hopefully, are areas that will be addressed in future revisions.
Original Version: March 2019
Notes on the Second Edition
The Second Edition of this textbook attempts to redress some of the missing pieces
noted in the conclusion of the introduction above. First, greater emphasis is placed on the
history of the Middle East, especially in the period after the collapse of the political authority of
the Abbasid Caliphate in the ninth century CE. The textbook now addresses the histories of
Persia (Iran) and the Ottoman Empire in considerable detail, emphasizing both their own
political, religious, and economic developments and their respective relationships with other
cultures. Second, much greater focus is given to the history of gender roles and to womens
history.
From the perspective of the author, the new material on the Middle East integrates
naturally with the narrative because it remains focused mostly on political history. The material
on gender and womens history is sometimes a more awkward fit in that women were almost
entirely excluded from traditional high-level political histories precisely because so few women
were ever in positions of political authority until the recent past. The shift in focus to include
more womens history necessarily entails greater emphasis not just on gender roles, but on the
social history of everyday life, stepping away at times from the political history framework of the
volumes as a whole. The result is a broader and more robust historical account than that of the
earlier edition, although the overarching narrative is still driven by political developments.
14
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Finally, a note on grammatical conventions: in keeping with most American English
approaches, the writing errs on the side of capitalizing proper nouns. For example, terms like
the Church when referring to the Catholic Church in its institutional presence, specific regions
like Western Europe, and historical eras like the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment are all
capitalized. When possible, the names of individuals are kept as close to their authentic
spelling and/or pronunciation as possible, hence Chinggis Khan instead of Genghis Khan,
Wilhelm I instead of William I, and Nikolai I instead of Nicholas I. Some exceptions have
been made to avoid confusion where there is a prevailing English version, as in Joseph Stalin
instead of the more accurate Iosif Stalin. Diacritical marks are kept when possible in original
spellings, as in the term Fhrer when discussing Adolf Hitler. Herculean efforts have been
made to reduce the number of semicolons in the text, to little avail.
Dr. Christopher Brooks
Faculty Member in History, Portland Community College
Second Edition: February 2020
15
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 1: Napoleon
Considering that he would go on to become one of the most significant French rulers of
all time, there is considerable irony in the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte was not born in France
itself, but on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean. A generation earlier, Corsica had been
won by France as a prize in one of its many wars, and Napoleon was thus born a French
citizen. His family was not rich, but did have a legitimate noble title that was recognized by the
French state, meaning Napoleon was eligible to join the ranks of noble-held monopolies like the
officer corps of the French army. Thus, as a young man, his parents sent him to France to train
as an artillery officer. There, he endured harassment and hazing from the sons of “real” French
nobles, who belittled his Corsican accent and treated him as a foreign interloper. Already
pugnacious and incredibly stubborn, the hazing contributed to his determination to someday
arrive at a position of unchallenged authority. Thanks to his relentless drive, considerable
intellectual gifts, and more than a little luck, he would eventually achieve just that.
Napoleon was a great contrast. On the one hand, he was a man of the French
Revolution. He had achieved fame only because of the opportunities the revolutionary armies
provided; as a member of a minor Corsican noble family, he would never have risen to
prominence in the pre-revolutionary era. Likewise, with his armies he exported the Revolution
to the rest of Europe, undermining the power of the traditional nobility and instituting a law code
based on the principle of legal equality. Decades later, as a prisoner in a miserable British
island-prison in the South Atlantic, Napoleon would claim in his memoirs that everything he had
done was in the name of France and the Revolution.
On the other hand, Napoleon was a megalomaniac who indulged his every political whim
and single-mindedly pursued personal power. He appointed his family members to run
newly-invented puppet states in Europe after he had conquered them. He ignored the beliefs
and sentiments of the people he conquered and, arguably, of the French themselves, who
remained loyal because of his victories and the stability and order he had returned to France
after the tumult of the 1790s. He micro-managed the enormous empire he had created with his
armies and trusted no one besides his older brother and the handful of generals who had
proved themselves over years of campaigning for him. Thus, while he may have truly believed
in the revolutionary principles of reason and efficiency, and cared little for outdated traditions,
there was not a trace of the revolutions democratic impulse present in his personality or in the
imperial state that he created.
16
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Rise of Napoleon’s Empire
Napoleon had entered the army after training as an artillery officer before the revolution.
He rose to prominence against the backdrop of crisis and war that affected the French Republic
in the 1790s. As of 1795, political power had shifted again in the revolutionary government, this
time to a five-man committee called the Directorate. The war against the foreign coalition,
which had now grown to include Russia and the Ottoman Empire, ground on endlessly even as
the economic situation in France itself kept getting worse.
Napoleon first came to the attention of the revolutionary government when he put down
a royalist insurrection in Paris in 1795. He went on in 1796 and 1797 to lead French armies to
major victories in Northern Italy against the Austrians. He also led an attack on Ottoman
Turkish forces in Egypt in 1797, where he was initially victorious, only to have the French fleet
sunk behind him by the British (he was later recalled to France, leaving behind most of his army
in the process). Even in defeat, however, Napoleon proved brilliant at crafting a legend of his
exploits, quickly becoming the most famous of Frances revolutionary generals thanks in large
part to a propaganda campaign he helped finance.
In 1799, Napoleon was hand-picked to join a new three-man conspiracy that succeeded
in seizing power in a coup detat; the new government was called the Consulate, its members
“consuls” after the most powerful politicians in the ancient Roman Republic. Soon, it became
apparent that Napoleon was dominating the other two members completely, and in 1802 he was
declared (by his compliant government) Consul for Life, assuming total power. In 1804, as his
forces pushed well beyond the French borders, he crowned himself (the first ever) emperor of
France. He thought of himself as the spiritual heir to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar,
declaring that, a member of the best race of the Caesars, he was a founder of empires.
17
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Napoleon on his imperial throne. He was not one for subtlety.
Even as he was cementing his hold on political power, Napoleon was leading the French
armies to victory against the foreign coalition. He continued the existing focus on total war that
had begun with the leve en masse, but he enhanced it further by paying for the wars (and new
troops) with loot from his successful conquests. He ended up controlling a million soldiers by
1812, the largest armed force ever seen. From 1799 to 1802, he defeated Austrian and British
forces and secured a peace treaty from both powers, one that lasted long enough for him to
organize a new grand strategy to conquer not only all of continental Europe, but (he hoped),
Britain as well. That treaty held until late 1805, when a new coalition of Britain, Austria, and
Russia formed to oppose him.
His one major defeat during this early period was when he lost the ability to threaten
Britain itself: in October of 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, a British fleet destroyed a larger
French and allied Spanish one. The British victory was so decisive that Napoleon was forced to
abandon his hope of invading Britain and had to try to indirectly weaken it instead. Even the
fact that the planned invasion never came to pass did not slow his momentum, however, since
18
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
the enormous army of seasoned troops he assembled for it was available to carry out conquests
of states closer to home in Central Europe.
Thus, despite the setback at Trafalgar, the years of 1805 and 1806 saw stunning
victories for Napoleon. In a series of major battles in 1805, Napoleon defeated first Austria and
then Russia. The Austrians were forced to sign a treaty and Vienna itself was occupied by
French forces for a short while, while the Russian Tsar Alexander I worked on raising a new
army. The last major continental power, Prussia, went to war in 1806, but its army was no
match for Napoleon, who defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Jena and then occupied Berlin.
Fully 96% of the over 170,000 soldiers in the Prussian army were lost, the vast majority (about
140,000) taken prisoner by the French. In 1806, following his victories over the Austrians and
Prussians, Napoleon formally dissolved the (almost exactly 1,000-years-old) Holy Roman
Empire, replacing much of its territory with a newly-invented puppet state he called the
Confederation of the Rhine.
After another (less successful) battle with the Russians, Napoleon negotiated an alliance
with Tsar Alexander in 1807. He now controlled Europe from France to Poland, though the
powerful British navy continued to dominate the seas. His empire stretched from Belgium and
Holland in the north to Rome in the south, covering nearly half a million square miles and
boasting a population of 44 million. In some places Napoleon simply expanded French borders
and ruled directly, while in others he set up puppet states that ultimately answered to him (he
generally appointed his family members as the puppet rulers). Despite setbacks discussed
below, Napoleons forces continued to dominate continental Europe through 1813; attempts by
the Prussians and, to a lesser extent, Austrians to regain the initiative always failed thanks to
French military dominance.
19
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Napoleons empire at its height. The regions in dark green were governed directly by
Napoleons imperial government, while the regions in light green were puppet states that
answered to France.
Military Strategy
Napoleon liked to think that he was a genius in everything. Where he was actually a
genius was in his powers of memory, his tireless focus, and his mastery of military logistics: the
movement of troops and supplies in war. He memorized things like the movement speed of his
armies, the amount of and type of supplies needed by his forces, the rate at which they would
lose men to injury, desertion, and disease, and how much ammunition they needed to have on
hand. He was so skilled at map-reading that he could coordinate multiple army corps to march
separately, miles apart, and then converge at a key moment to catch his enemies by surprise.
He was indifferent to luxury and worked relentlessly, often sleeping only four or five hours a
night, and his intellectual gifts (astonishing powers of memory foremost among them) were such
that he was capable of effectively micro-managing his entire empire through written directives to
underlings.
Unlike past revolutionary leaders, Napoleon faced no dissent from within his government
or his forces, especially the army. Simply put, Napoleon was always able to rely on the loyalty
of his troops. He took his first step toward independent authority in the spring of 1796, when he
20
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
announced that his army would be paid in silver rather than the paper money issued by the
French Republic that had lost almost all of its value. Napoleon led his men personally in most of
the most important battles, and because he lived like a soldier like them, most of his men came
to adore him. His victories kept morale high both among his troops and among the French
populace, as did the constant stream of pro-Napoleonic propaganda that he promoted through
imperial censorship.
Napoleons military record matched his ambition: he fought sixty battles in the two
decades he was in power, winning all but eight (the ones he lost were mostly toward the end of
his reign). His victories were not just because of his own command of battlefield tactics, but
because of the changes introduced by the French Revolution earlier. The elimination of noble
privilege enabled the French government to impose conscription and to increase the size and
flexibility of its armies. It also turned the officer corps into a true meritocracy: now, a capable
soldier could rise to command regardless of his social background. Mass conscription allowed
the French to develop permanent divisions and corps, each combining infantry, cavalry, artillery,
and support services. On campaign these large units of ten to twenty thousand men usually
moved on separate roads, each responsible for extracting supplies from its own area, but
capable of mutual support. This kind of organization multiplied Napoleon’s operational choices,
facilitating the strategies of dispersal and concentration that bewildered his opponents.
In some ways, however, his strengths came with related weaknesses. In hindsight, it
seems clear that his greatest problem was that he could never stop: he always seemed to need
one more victory. While supremely arrogant, he was also self-aware and savvy enough to
recognize that his rule depended on continued conquests. For the first several years of his rule,
Napoleon appeared to his subjects as a reformer and a leader who, while protecting France’s
borders, had ended the war with the other European powers and imposed peace settlements
with the Austrians and the British which were favorable to France. By 1805, however, it was
clear to just about everyone that he intended to create a huge empire far beyond the original
borders of France.
Civil Life
Napoleon was not just a brilliant general, he was also a serious politician with a keen
mind for how the government had to be reformed for greater efficiency. He addressed the
chronic problem of inflation by improving tax collection and public auditing, creating the Bank of
France in 1800, and substituting silver and gold for the almost worthless paper notes. He
21
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
introduced a new Civil Code of 1804 (as usual, named after himself as the Code Napoleon),
which preserved the legal egalitarian principles of 1789.
Despite the rapacity of the initial invasions, French domination brought certain beneficial
reforms to the puppet states created by France, all of them products of the French Revolutions
innovations a decade earlier: single customs areas, unified systems of weights and measures,
written constitutions, equality before the law, the abolition of archaic noble privileges,
secularization of church property, the abolition of serfdom, and religious toleration. At least for
the early years of the Napoleonic empire, many conquered peoples – most obviously
commoners – experienced French conquest as (at least in part) a liberation.
In education, his most noteworthy invention was the lyce, a secondary school for the
training of an elite of leaders and administrators, with a secular curriculum and scholarships for
the sons of officers and civil servants and the most gifted pupils of ordinary secondary schools.
A Concordat (agreement) with the Pope in 1801 restored the position of the Catholic Church in
France, though it did not return Church property, nor did it abandon the principle of toleration for
religious minorities. The key revolutionary principle that Napoleon imposed was efficiency – he
wanted a well-managed, efficient empire because he recognized that efficiency translated to
power. Even his own support for religious freedom was born out of that impulse: he did not care
what religion his subjects professed so long as they worked diligently for the good of the state.
Napoleon was no freedom-lover, however. He imposed strict censorship of the press
and had little time for democracy. He also took after the leading politicians in the revolutionary
period by explicitly excluding women from the political community – his 1804 law code made
women the legal subjects of their fathers and then their husbands, stating that a husband owed
his wife protection and a wife owed her husband obedience. In other words, under the Code
Napoleon, women had the same legal status as children. From all of his subjects, men and
women alike, Napoleon expected the same thing demanded of women in family life: obedience.
The Fall of Napoleon’s Empire
Unable to invade Britain after the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon tried to economically
strangle Britain with a European boycott of British goods, creating what he hoped would be a
self-sustaining internal European economy: the Continental System. By late 1807 all
continental European nations, except Denmark, Sweden, and Portugal, had closed their ports to
British commerce. But far from buckling under the strain of the Continental System, Britain was
getting richer, seizing the remains of the French Empire in the Caribbean and smuggling cheap
22
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
but high-quality manufactured goods into Europe. Napoleon’s own quartermasters (i.e. the
officers who purchased supplies) bought the French army’s uniforms from the British!
Napoleon demanded that Denmark and Portugal comply with his Continental System.
Britain countered by bombarding Copenhagen and seizing the Danish fleet, an example that
encouraged the Portuguese to defy Napoleon and to protect their profitable commerce with
Britain. Napoleon responded with an invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 (initially an ally of
the Spanish monarchy, Napoleon summarily booted the king from his throne and installed his
own brother Joseph as the new monarch), which in turn sparked an insurrection in deeply
conservative Spain. The British sent a small but effective expeditionary force under the Duke of
Wellington to support the insurrection, and Napoleon found himself tied down in a guerrilla war –
the term guerrilla, meaning little war, was invented by the Spanish during the conflict.
Napoleon’s forces ended up trapped in this new kind of war, one without major battles or
a clear enemy army. The financial costs of the invasion and occupation were enormous, and
over the next seven years almost 200,000 French soldiers lost their lives in Spain. Even as
Napoleon envisioned the further expansion of his empire, most of his best soldiers were stuck in
Spain. Napoleon came to refer to the occupation as his “Spanish ulcer,” a wound in his empire
that would not stop bleeding.
Francisco Goyas The Third of May, commemorating the massacre of Spanish villagers by
French troops.
23
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The problem for the French forces was that they had consistently defeated enemies who
opposed them in large open battles, but that kind of battle was in short supply in Spain. Instead,
the guerrillas mastered the art of what is now called “asymmetrical warfare,” in which a weaker
but determined force defeats a stronger one by whittling them down over time. The French
controlled the cities and most of the towns, but even a few feet beyond the outskirts of a French
camp they could fall victim to a sudden ambush. French soldiers were picked off piecemeal as
the years went on despite the fact that the Spanish did not field an army against them. In turn,
the French massacred villagers suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas, but all the
massacres did was turn more Spanish peasants against them. Napoleon poured hundreds of
thousands of men into Spain in a vain attempt to turn the tide and pacify it; instead, he found his
best troops caught in a war that refused to play by his rules.
Meanwhile, while the Spanish ulcer continued to fester, Napoleon faced other setbacks
of his own design. In 1810, he divorced his wife Josephine (who had not produced a male heir)
and married the princess of the Habsburg dynasty, Marie-Louise. This prompted suspicion,
muted protest, and military desertion since it appeared to be an open betrayal of anti-monarchist
revolutionary principles: instead of defying the kings of Europe, he was trying to create his own
royal line by marrying into one! In the same year, Napoleon annexed the Papal States in central
Italy, prompting Pope Pius VII to excommunicate him. Predictably, this alienated many of his
Catholic subjects.
Russia, Elba, and Waterloo
Meanwhile, the one continental European power that was completely outside of his
control was Russia. Despite the obvious problem of staging a full-scale invasion – Russia was
far from France, it was absolutely enormous, and it remained militarily powerful – Napoleon
concluded that it had come time to expand his empire’s borders even further. In this, he not
only saw Russia as the last remaining major power on the continent that opposed him, but he
hoped to regain lost inertia and popularity. His ultimate goal was to conquer not just Russia, but
the European part (i.e. Greece and the Balkans) of the Ottoman Empire. He hoped to
eventually control Constantinople and the Black Sea, thereby re-creating most of the ancient
Roman Empire, this time under French rule. To do so, he gathered an enormous army, 600,000
strong, and in the summer of 1812 it marched for Russia.
Napoleon faced problems even before the army left, however. Most of his best troops
were fighting in Spain, and more than half of the “Grand Army” created to invade Russia was
recruited from non-French territories, mostly in Italy and Germany. Likewise, many of the
24
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
recruits were just that: new recruits with insufficient training and no military background. He
chased the Russian army east, fighting two actual battles (the second of which, the Battle of
Borodino in August of 1812, was extremely bloody), but never pinning the Russians down or
receiving the anticipated negotiations from the Tsar for surrender. When the French arrived in
Moscow in September, they found it abandoned and largely burned by the retreating Russians,
who refused to engage in the “final battle” Napoleon always sought. As the first snowflakes
started falling, the French held out for another month, but by October Napoleon was forced to
concede that he had to turn back as supplies began running low.
The French retreat was a horrendous debacle. The Russians attacked weak points in
the French line and ambushed them at river crossings, disease swept through the ranks of the
malnourished French troops, and the weather got steadily worse. Tens of thousands starved
outright, desertion was ubiquitous, and of the 600,000 who had set out for Russia, only 40,000
returned to France. In contrast to regular battles, in which most lost soldiers could be
accounted for as either captured by the enemy or wounded, but not dead, at least 400,000 men
lost their lives in the Russian campaign. In the aftermath of this colossal defeat, the anti-French
coalition of Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Russia reformed.
Napoleons retreat.
25
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Amazingly, Napoleon succeeded in raising still more armies, and France fought on for
two more years. Increasingly, however, the French were losing, the coalition armies now trained
and equipped along French lines and anticipating French strategy. In April of 1814, as coalition
forces closed in, Napoleon finally abdicated. He even attempted suicide, drinking the poison he
had carried for years in case of capture, but the poison was mostly inert from its age and it
merely sickened him (after his recovery, his self-confidence quickly returned). Fearing that his
execution would make him a martyr to the French, the coalitions leadership opted to exile him
instead, and he was sent to a manor on the small Mediterranean island of Elba, near his native
Corsica.
He stayed less than a year. In March of 1815, bored and restless, Napoleon escaped
and returned to France. The anti-Napoleonic coalition had restored the Bourbons to the throne
in the person of the unpopular Louis XVIII, younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, and
when a French force sent to capture Napoleon instead defected to him, the coalition realized
that they had not really won. Napoleon managed to scrape together one more army, but was
finally defeated by a coalition force of British and Prussian soldiers in June of 1815 at the Battle
of Waterloo. Napoleon was imprisoned on the cold, miserable island of Saint Helena in the
South Atlantic, where he finally died in 1821 after composing his memoirs.
The Aftermath
What were the effects of Napoleons reign? First, despite the manifest abuses of
occupied territories, the Napoleonic army still brought with it significant reform. It brought a
taste for a more egalitarian social system with it, a law code based on rationality instead of
tradition, and a major weakening of the nobility. It also directly inspired a growing sense of
nationalism, especially since the Napoleonic Empire was so clearly French despite its
pretensions to universalism. Napoleon’s tendency to loot occupied territories to enrich the
French led many of his subjects to recognize the hypocrisy of his “egalitarian” empire, and in the
absence of their old kings they began to think of themselves as Germans and Italians and
Spaniards rather than just subjects to a king.
The myth of Napoleon was significant as well he became the great romantic hero,
despite his own decidedly unromantic personality, thought of as a modern Julius Caesar or
Alexander the Great (just as he had hoped). He gave France its greatest hour of dominance in
European history, and for more than fifty years the rest of Europe lived in fear of another French
invasion. This was the context that the kingdoms that had allied against him were left with in
1815. At a series of meetings known as the Congress of Vienna, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and
26
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Austria gathered together in the Austrian capital of Vienna to try to rebuild the European order.
What they could not do, however, was undo everything that Napoleons legacy completely, and
so European (and soon, world) historys course was changed by a single unique man from
Corsica.
Image Citations (Creative Commons):
Napoleon on his Throne – Public Domain
Napoleonic Empire – Trajan 117
Third of May – Public Domain
Napoleon’s Retreat – Public Domain
27
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 2: The Industrial Revolution
Big Changes
One of the most vexing questions for historians is how to identify the causes of
nineteenth-century European dominance: how does one explain the simple fact that Europe
controlled a staggering amount of territory all around the globe by 1900? The old Eurocentric
viewpoint was that there was something unique about European culture that gave it a
competitive edge in the world. The even older version, popular among Europeans themselves
in the late nineteenth century, was openly racist and chauvinistic: it claimed that European
civilization was the bearer of critical thought itself, of technological know-how, of piercing insight
and practical sense. All other civilizations were, in this model, regarded as either hopelessly
backward or stuck in a previous stage of cultural or even biological evolution.
That explanation was, obviously, not just self-serving but inaccurate. Nineteenth-century
Europeans rarely lived up to their own inflated view of themselves, and more to the point, their
dominance was extremely short-lived. Europe had a technological lead on most other world
regions for less than a century. The Industrial Revolution began in England in about 1750, took
almost a century to spread to other parts of western Europe (a process that began in earnest
around 1830), and reached maturity by the 1850s and 1860s. In turn, European industrial power
was overwhelming in comparison to the rest of the world, except the United States starting in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, from about 1860 – 1914. After that, Europes
competitive edge began a steady decline, one that coincided with the collapse of its global
empires after World War II.
A more satisfying explanation for the explosion of European power than one that claims
that Europeans had some kind of inherent cultural advantage has to do with energy. For about
a century, Europe and, eventually, the United States, had almost exclusive access to what
amounted to unlimited energy in the form of fossil fuels. The iconic battles toward the end of the
century between rifle-wielding European soldiers and the people they conquered in Africa and
parts of Asia were not just about the rifles; they were about the factories that made those rifles,
the calories that fed the soldiers, the steamships that transported them there, the telegraph lines
that conveyed orders for thousands of miles away, the medicines that kept them healthy, and so
28
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
on, all of which represented an epochal shift from the economic and technological reality of the
people trying to resist European imperialism. All of those inventions could be produced in
gigantic quantities thanks to the use of coal and, later, oil power.
While many historians have taken issue with the term revolution in describing what was
much more of a slow evolution at the time, there is no question that the changes industrial
technology brought about really were revolutionary. Few things have mattered as much as the
Industrial Revolution, because it fundamentally transformed almost everything about how
human beings live, perhaps most strikingly including humankinds relationship with nature.
Whole landscapes can be transformed, cities constructed, species exterminated, and the entire
natural ecosystem fundamentally changed in a relatively short amount of time.
Likewise, the Industrial Revolution was really a linking together of distinct revolutions
technology started it, but the effects of those technological changes were economic and
social. All of society was eventually transformed, leading to the phrase industrial society, one
in which everything is in large part based on the availability of a huge amount of cheap energy
and an equally huge number of mass-produced commodities (including people, insofar as
workers can be replaced). To sum up, the Industrial Revolution was as momentous in human
history as was the agricultural revolution that began civilization back in about 10,000 BCE.
Even if it was a revolution that took over a century to come to fruition, from a long-term
world-historical perspective, it still qualifies as revolutionary.
Geography of the Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution occurred first in Great Britain, and that simple fact goes a long
way toward explaining why Britain became the single most powerful European country of the
nineteenth century. Britain was well positioned to serve as the cradle of industrialism. One of
the background causes of the Industrial Revolution was the combination of rapidly increasing
populations and more efficient agriculture providing more calories to feed that population. Even
fairly rudimentary improvements in sanitation in the first half of the eighteenth century resulted in
lower infant mortality rates and lower disease rates in general. The Little Ice Age of the early
modern period ended in the eighteenth century as well, increasing crop yields. Despite the fact
that more commercially-oriented agriculture, something that was well underway in Britain by the
middle of the eighteenth century, was often experienced as a disaster by peasants and farmers,
the fact is that it did increase the total caloric output of crops at the same time. In short,
agriculture definitively left the subsistence model behind and became a commercial enterprise in
29
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Britain by 1800. Thus, there was a surplus population (to quote Ebenezer Scrooge of A
Christmas Carol, speaking of the urban poor) of peasants who were available to work in the first
generations of factories.
English workers arriving for their shift in 1900. Note the young boy on the right, employed by
the factory in lieu of being in school.
In addition, Britain has abundant coal deposits concentrated in northern England. In a
very lucky coincidence for British industry, northern England in the eighteenth century was the
heart of the existing British textile industry, which became the key commercial force in the early
period of industrialization. The northern English coal deposits are part of an underground band
of coal that reaches across to Belgium, eastern France, and western Germany. This stretch of
land would become the industrial heartland of Europe – one can draw a line down a map of
Western Europe from England stretching across the English Channel toward the Alps and trace
most of the industrial centers of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Britain had coal, and the English and Scottish had long known that you could burn it and
produce heat. For many centuries, however, it was an unpopular fuel source. Coal produces a
noxious, toxic smoke, along with heaps of black ash. It has to be mined, and coal mines in
northwestern Europe tended to rapidly fill with water as they dipped below the water table,
requiring cumbersome pumping systems. In turn, conditions in those mines were extremely
dangerous and difficult. Thus, coal was only used in small amounts in England until well into
the Renaissance period.
30
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
What changed was, simply, Britain ran out of forests. Thanks to the need for firewood
and charcoal for heat, as well as timber for building (especially shipbuilding; Britain’s navy
consumed a vast quantity of wood in construction and repairs), Britain was forced to import
huge quantities of wood from abroad by the end of the seventeenth century. As firewood
became prohibitively expensive, British people increasingly turned to coal. Already by the
seventeenth century, former prejudices against coal as dirty and distasteful had given way to the
necessity of its use as a fuel source for heat. As the Industrial Revolution began in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, thanks to a series of key inventions, the vast energy capacity of
coal was unleashed for the first time. By 1815, annual British coal production yielded energy
equivalent to what could be garnered from burning a hypothetical forest equal in area to all of
England, Scotland, and Wales.
There were a series of technological breakthroughs that powered the expansion of the
Industrial Revolution, all of them originating in Britain. Most importantly, a Scottish engineer
named James Watt developed an efficient steam engine in 1763, which was subsequently
manufactured in 1775 (Watt was not the inventor of the concept, but his design was vastly more
effective than earlier versions). Steam engines were originally used to pump water out of
mines, but soon it was discovered that they could be used to substitute for water-power itself at
mills, with Watt developing a rotary (spinning) mechanism tied to the engine. In turn, this
enabled the conversion of thermal energy unleashed by burning a fossil fuel like coal into kinetic
energy (the energy of movement). With a steam engine, coal did not just provide heat, it
provided power. Watt, in turn, personally invented the term horsepower in order to explain to
potential customers what his machine could do. Almost anything that moved could now be tied
to coal power instead of muscle power, and thus began the vast and dramatic shift toward the
modern worlds dependence on fossil fuels.
The first and most important industry to benefit from coal power besides mining itself
was the northern English textile industry, which harnessed steam power to drive new machines
that processed the cotton and transformed it into finished cloth. Building on various other
machine breakthroughs, an inventor named Edmund Cartwright developed the power loom in
1787, the first large-scale textile machine that could process an enormous amount of cotton
fiber. By the end of the 1800s, a single mule (a spinning invention linked to steam power in
1803) could produce thread 200 to 300 times as fast as could be done by hand. By 1850 Britain
was producing 200 times as much cotton cloth than it had in 1780.
31
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Power looms in 1835. Female labor was preferred by factory-owners because women could be
paid less than men for doing the same work.
In turn, textiles were the basis of the Industrial Revolution for straightforward practical
reasons: raw material was available from the American south thanks to slave labor, and there
was an endless market for textiles all across Europe. British cloth processed by the new
machines was of very high quality and, because of the vast quantity that British mills could
produce, it was far cheaper than textiles produced by hand. Thus, British cloth rapidly cornered
the market everywhere in Europe, generating tremendous profits for British industrialists. The
impact on Britains economy was enormous, as was its textile industrys growing dominance
over its European rivals. France initially tried to keep British fabric out of its own markets, but in
1786 the two kingdoms negotiated the Eden Treaty, which allowed the importation of British
manufactured goods. The result was a tidal wave of British cloth in French markets, which
forced French manufacturers to implement industrial technology in their own workshops.
In its first century, the areas in Europe that benefited the most from the Industrial
Revolution were the ones closest to coal. Besides access to coal, the other major factors
driving industrial expansion in Britain were political and cultural. The reason that Britain was far
and away the leading industrial power is that its parliament was full of believers in the principles
of free trade, which meant that commercial enterprises were not hampered by archaic
restrictions or cultural prejudices. Britain was also the richest society in Europe in terms of
32
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
available capital: money was available through reliable, trustworthy banking institutions. Thus,
investors could build up a factory after securing loans with fair interest rates and they knew that
they had a legal system that favored their enterprise. Finally, taxes were not arbitrary or
extremely high (as they were in most parts of Spain and Italy, for example).
The other major reason that Britain enjoyed such an early and long-lasting lead in
industrialization is that British elites, especially the powerful gentry class of landowners, were
not hostile to commercial enterprise. In many kingdoms on the continent, members of the
nobility were banned from actively practicing commerce until the period of the French
Revolution. Even after the Napoleonic wars, when noble titles could no longer be lost by
engaging in commerce, banking, or factory ownership, there remained deep skepticism and
arrogance among continental nobles about the new industries. In short, nobles often looked
down on those who made their wealth not from land, but from factories. This attitude helped to
slow the advent of industrialism for decades.
The only continental region to industrialize in earnest before the 1840s was the southern
swath of the Netherlands, which became the newly-created nation of Belgium in 1830 after a
revolution. That region, immediately a close ally of Great Britain, had usable waterways, coal
deposits, and a skilled artisanal workforce. By the 1830s the newly-minted country was rapidly
industrializing. Belgiums neighbor to the southwest, France, was comparatively slow to follow
despite its large population and considerable overall wealth, however. The traditional elites who
dominated the restored monarchy were deeply skeptical of British-style commercial and
industrial innovations. Despite Napoleons having established the first national bank in 1800,
the banking system as a whole was rudimentary and capital was restricted. In turn, the
transportation of goods across France itself was prohibitively expensive due to the lack of
navigable waterways and the existence of numerous tolls.
There were also important cultural factors that impeded industrial expansion in France.
Whereas Britains large population of landless rural laborers and poor peasants had little option
but to seek factory work, most French peasants were independent farmers who had no interest
in going to cities to work in miserable conditions. Second, French industry had always
concentrated on high-quality luxury goods, and French artisans fiercely resisted the spread of
lower-quality and lower-skilled work and goods. Industrialization was thus limited to the
northeastern part of the country, which had coal deposits, until the second half of the century.
In the German lands, it was not until the establishment of the Zollverein, a customs
union, in 1834 that trade could flow freely enough to encourage industrial growth in earnest.
Following its creation, railroads spread across the various kingdoms of northern Germany.
33
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Western Germany had extensive coal deposits, and by 1850 German industry was growing
rapidly, especially in the Ruhr valley near the border with France.
Meanwhile, outside of Western Europe, there was practically no large-scale industry. It
took until the late nineteenth century for the Industrial Revolution to “arrive” in places like
northern Italy and the cities of western Russia, with some countries like Spain missing out
entirely until the twentieth century.
While the UK enjoyed the early lead in industrial manufacturing, its share of global output had
dropped by 1900. The United States became the major industrial power of the world in the first
two decades of the twentieth century.
Transportation and Communication
The Industrial Revolution began with mining and textiles, but its effects were probably
most dramatic in transportation. The first experimental railroad was put in use in 1820, and the
first passenger railroad followed in 1830, traveling between the industrial cities of Manchester
and Liverpool in northern England. By the middle of the century some trains could go 50 MPH,
far faster than any human had ever gone before (except when falling from a great height).
About 6,500 miles of rail was built in Britain between 1830 and 1850, just 20 years, and railroad
expansion soon followed suit on the continent. The construction of railroads became a massive
34
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
industry unto itself, fueling both profitable investment and the occasional disastrous financial
collapse.
Above and beyond their economic impact, railroads had a myriad of social and cultural
effects. The British developed the system of time zones, based on Greenwich (part of London)
Mean Time as the default, because the railroads had to be coordinated to time departures and
arrivals. This was the first time when a whole country, and soon a whole continent, had to have
a precise shared sense of timing.
Likewise, the telegraph was invented in 1830 and used initially to warn train stations
when multiple trains were on the track. Telegraphs allowed almost instant communication over
huge distances – they sent a series of electrical impulses over a wire as “long” and “short”
signals. The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, invented a code based off of those
signals that could be translated into letters and, as a result, be used to send messages. Morse
Code thus enabled the first modern mass communications device. This was the first time when
a message could travel faster than a messenger on horseback, vastly increasing the speed by
which information could be shared and disseminated.
Simultaneously, steamships were transforming long-distance commerce. The first sailed
in 1816, going about twice as fast as the fastest sailing ship could. This had obvious
repercussions for trade, because it became cheaper to transport basic goods via steamship
than it was to use locally-produced ones; this had huge impacts on agriculture and forestry,
among other industries. Soon, it became economically viable to ship grain from the United
States or Russia across oceans to reach European markets. The first transatlantic crossing
was a race between two steamships going from England to New York in 1838; soon, sailing
vessels became what they are today: archaic novelties.
Two other advances in transportation are often overlooked when considering
industrialization: paved roads and canals. A Scottish engineer invented a way to cheaply pave
roads in the 1830s, and in the 1850s an overland, pan-European postal service was established
that relied on post roads with stations for changing horses. Thus, well before the invention of
cars, road networks were being built in parallel to railroads. Likewise, even though canals had
been around since ancient times, there was a major canal-building boom in the second half of
the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century. Canals linked Manchester to coal
fields, the Erie Canal was built in the US to link the Great Lakes to the eastern seaboard, and
even Russia built a canal between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
35
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The net effect of these innovations was that travel was vastly cheaper, simpler, and
faster than it had ever been in human history. In essence, every place on earth was closer
together than ever before.
Social Effects
The most noteworthy transformation that occurred in quotidian life due to the Industrial
Revolution was urbanization, which absolutely exploded in the nineteenth century. Manchester,
in northern England, is the quintessential example of an industrial city. It was close to major
coal deposits, it had a large textile industry, it was linked to the sea via canal as of 1761, and it
had an army of artisans and laborers because of its historic role as a site of wool production. In
1750 it had a population of 20,000, by 1775 it was 40,000, by 1831 it was 250,000, and by 1850
it was 400,000 – a 200% increase in a century.
View of Manchester in 1840. While the painting is in the Romantic style, with the nature scene
in the foreground, the masses of factory smokestacks are visible in the distance.
The living conditions, however, were abysmal. Whole families were crammed into
one-room cellars, hovels, and cheap apartments. Pollution produced by the new factories
streamed unfiltered into the air and water. Soot and filth covered every surface – early
evolutionary biologists noted that certain moths that had a mutation that made them soot-brown
survived and multiplied while their normal lightly-colored cousins died off. To deal with the
36
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
pollution, factory owners simply started building taller smokestacks, which spread the pollution
farther. Waste from mining (which was often toxic) was simply left in slag heaps, through
which rainwater ran and from which toxic runoff reached water supplies. A coal miner who
entered the mines as a teenager would almost certainly be dead by middle age, (40 at the
oldest) since his or her lungs were ridden with toxic coal dust.
Landlords in the cities took advantage of the influx of laborers and their families by
building cheap tenements in which several families often lived in a single room. There was no
running water and sanitation was utterly inadequate. Food was expensive, in part because of
an 1815 act in the British Parliament called the Corn Laws that banned the importation of grain
and kept prices up (the wealthy, land-owning gentry class had pushed the law through
parliament). Given the incredible squalor, epidemics were frequent. In turn, wages were paid at
a near-subsistence level until after (roughly) 1850. Whenever there was a market downturn,
sometimes lasting for years (e.g. 1839 1842), workers were summarily fired to cut costs, and
some starved as a result.
The English poet William Blake famously referred to the factories as satanic mills.
Likewise, the English novelist Charles Dickens used the grim reality of cities like Manchester as
inspiration and setting for his novels like Hard Times and Oliver Twist. Since real wages did not
increase among working people until fairly late in the century, the actual living conditions of the
majority of the population generally worsened in industrial regions until the second half of the
century. In Britain, laws were passed to protect horses before they were passed to protect
children working in mines and factories.
The major cause of this misery was simple: the ruthless pursuit of profit by factory
owners and manufacturers. The aim of the early factory owners and managers was to simplify
the stages of the manufacturing process so that they could be executed by cheap, unskilled
labor. Many skilled workers or artisans experienced the factory system as a disaster, bringing in
its wake subjection to harsh work discipline, the degradation of craft skills, long hours, cheap
wages, and the abuse of young women and children (who worked under the same conditions as
did adult men).
While they had little reason to consider it, the industrial workers of northern England
lived in a state of misery that was tied to another that was even worse across the Atlantic: the
slave-based cotton economy of the American south which provided the raw material. Despite
the British ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807, the existing population of
African-American slaves was sustained by natural reproduction and remained locked in a
position of complete legal subservience, enforced with brutal violence. In a startling parallel, the
37
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
efficiency of cotton production increased to keep pace with textile manufacturing in Britain
despite the absence of major new technologies besides the invention of the cotton gin in 1794.
That increase was due to the application of ever-increasing degrees of brutality, as slaves were
forced to pick and process cotton at unprecedented speed, spurred on by raw violence at the
hands of overseers.
Back in Europe, one unforeseen effect of the Industrial Revolution, tied to the misery of
working conditions, was the creation of social classes. Until the modern era class was usually
something one was born into; it was a legally-recognized and enforced estate. With
industrialization, the enormous numbers of dirt-poor industrial workers began to recognize that
their social identity was defined by their poverty and their working conditions, just as rich
industrialists and tenement-owning slumlords recognized that they were united by their wealth
and their common interest in controlling the workers. The non-noble rich and middle class came
to distinguish themselves both from the working class and the old nobility by taking pride in their
morality, sobriety, work ethic, and cleanliness. They often regarded the workers as little better
than animals, but some also regarded the old nobles as corrupt, immoral, and increasingly
archaic.
The middle classes that arose out of industrialization were the ranks of engineers,
foremen, accountants, and bureaucrats that were in great demand for building, overseeing, and
running new industrial and commercial operations. Some were genuine self-made men who
worked their way up, but most came from families with at least some wealth to begin with. The
most vulnerable group were the so-called petty bourgeoisie, shop-owners and old-style
artisans, whose economic life was precarious and who lived in constant fear of losing everything
and being forced to join the working class.
From this context, socialism, the political belief that government should be deeply
invested in the welfare of the common people, emerged. Well before mass socialist parties
existed, there were struggles and even massacres over working conditions; one notorious event
was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 in which hundreds of protesting workers in Manchester
were gunned down by middle-class volunteer cavalry. Another famous group, the Luddites,
destroyed factory equipment in a vain attempt to turn back the clock on industrialization and go
back to hand-work by artisans.
Appalled more by the sexual impropriety of young girls and women being around male
workers in mines and factories than by the working conditions per se, the British parliament did
pass some laws mandating legal protections. The Factory Act of 1833 limited child labor in
cotton mills, the Miners Act of 1842 banned the employment of girls and women (and boys
38
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
under 10) underground, and in 1847 a Ten Hour Law limited the workday for women and
children. These were exceptional laws; further legal protections for workers took decades and
constant struggle by the emerging socialist groups and parties to achieve.
Image of a girl hauling a tub of coal up a narrow mine shaft. The image originates with the
British parliaments investigation of working conditions in mines.
Gender
The Industrial Revolution had very different effects on gender roles depending on social
class. Women in the working class, as noted above, labored alongside or even in lieu of men in
factories, in mines, and in mills, almost always doing the same or similar work for lower wages
(laws banning wage differentials based solely on sex were not put in place the late nineteenth
century at the earliest, and they were rarely enforced even then). Women industrial workers
were still expected to carry out domestic labor as well, tending to children, cooking, and
cleaning, a nearly impossible combination of demands that made life for women in the industrial
cities even harder than it was for men.
The hardest workers of all, however, were probably the legions of domestic servants that
toiled in the houses of others. A maid of all work in a middle-class household could expect to
rise before dawn to light the homes hearth and cookfire, cook and clean throughout the day, run
errands if necessary, and finally collapse after up to seventeen hours of nearly nonstop work.
Domestic service was the single largest employment sector in nineteenth-century Britain, yet
economic thinkers (even communists like the great theorist Karl Marx) routinely ignored
servants – they were both taken for granted and effectively invisible, replaceable when injured or
sick, and paid so little that they were only a minor item in a household budget. As late as 1940,
more than half of European women who earned an income were domestic servants of one kind
or another.
39
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
These maids were necessary because of the growth of the middle classes and a
concomitant shift in gender roles. A badge of honor for the middle classes was that the woman
of the house did not have to work for wages, nor was she to perform hard work around the
house if possible. Thus, a servant was believed to be essential. Idleness was still thought of
as dangerous and sinful, however, so middle-class women were increasingly involved with
raising their own children, maintaining the social relationships that demonstrated membership in
the polite classes, and involving themselves in charity. A cult of sentimentality grew
throughout the nineteenth century associated with family life, with middle-class women leading
the way in placing greater emphasis on loving bonds between family members. That cultural
shift was a byproduct of two factors brought about by industrialism: the wealth that allowed
middle-class women to outsource the drudgery of domestic duties to a poor servant girl, and
medical and sanitary advances that saw more children survive infancy.
Men, meanwhile, often struggled to maintain their own sense of masculine worth in the
face of the changes brought about by industrial society. For the working classes, it was almost
impossible for a family to survive on one mans wages, so while men stubbornly insisted on their
leadership of the family unit, they were codependent on their wives (and, all too often, their
children) to work as well. Artisanal skills were slowly but surely rendered obsolete, and as
noted above it took until the second half of the nineteenth century for socialist movements to
grow large and strong enough to effect meaningful improvements in the daily lives of most
working people. Thus, all too often working class men turned to alcohol as their consolation; it
is no coincidence the the first-wave feminist movement (described in a subsequent chapter) was
closely tied to the temperance movement that sought legal bans on alcohol. Simply put, too
many women saw their male family members plummet into alcoholism, leading to even greater
financial struggles and horrific scenes of domestic violence.
Cultural Effects
The Industrial Revolution was responsible for enormous changes in how people lived
their everyday lives, not just how they made a living or how the things they used were made.
Many of those changes were due to the spread of the transportation and communication
technologies noted above. The speed of railway travel made everything “closer” together, and
in doing so it started a long, slow process of tying together distant regions. People could travel
to the capital cities of their kingdom or, later, their “nations,” and the intense localism of the past
started to fade. For the first time, members of the middle classes could travel just for fun –
40
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
middle-class vacations were an innovation made possible by the railroad, and the first
beneficiaries were the English middle class, who “went on holiday” to the seashore whenever
they could.
Simultaneously, new, more advanced printing presses and cheaper paper made
newspapers and magazines available to a mass reading public. That encouraged the spread of
not just information and news, but of shared written languages. People had to be able to read
the “default” language of their nation, which encouraged the rise of certain specific vernaculars
at the expense of the numerous dialects of the past. For example, “French” was originally just
the language spoken in the area around the city of Paris, just as “Spanish” was just the dialect
spoken around Madrid. Rulers had long fought, unsuccessfully, to impose their language as the
daily vernacular in the regions over which they ruled, but most people continued to speak
regional dialects that often had little in common with the language of their monarch. With the
centers of newspaper production often being in or near capital cities, usually written in the
official language of state, more and more people at least acquired a decent working knowledge
of those languages over time.
Those capital cities grew enormously, especially in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Industry, finance, government itself, and railroads all converged on capitals. Former
suburbs were simply swallowed up as the cities grew, and there was often a sense among
cultural elites that the only places that mattered were the capitals: London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna,
St. Petersburg, etc. One peculiar phenomenon arising from the importance of capital cities was
that political revolutions often began as revolutions of a single city – if a crowd could take over
the streets of Paris, for example, they might well send the king running for the proverbial hills
and declare themselves to be a new government (which happened in 1830 and 1848). In some
cases, the rest of the nation would read about the revolution in their newspapers or via
telegraph after the revolution had already succeeded.
While all of the cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution are too numerous to detail
here, one other effect should be noted: the availability of food. With cheap and fast railway and
steamship transport, not only could food travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from where
it was grown or farmed or caught to where it was consumed, but the daily diet itself underwent
profound changes. Tea grown in India became cheap enough for even working people to drink it
daily; the same was true of South American coffee on the continent. Fruit appeared in markets
halfway across the world from where it was grown, and the long term effect was a more varied
(although not always more nutritious) diet. Whole countries sometimes became economic
41
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
appendages of a European empire, producing a single product: for a time, New Zealand (which
became a British colony in 1840) was essentially the British Empires sheep ranch.
The great symbol of changes in the history of food brought on by the Industrial
Revolution is that quintessential English invention: fish and chips. Caught in the Atlantic or
Pacific, packed on steamships, and transported to Britain, the more desirable parts of fish were
sold at prices the upper and middle classes could afford. The other bits – tails, fins and all –
were fried up with chunks of potato, heavily salted, and wrapped in the now-cheap newspaper.
The result was the world’s first greasy, cheap, and wildly popular fast food.
Image Citations (Creative Commons):
Workers Arriving – Public Domain
Power Looms – Public Domain
Output Graph – TwoOneTwo
Manchester – Public Domain
Coal Mine – Public Domain
42
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 3: Political Ideologies and
Movements
After the Revolution
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars profoundly shook Europe. The French
Revolution was seen by the European great powers as both threatening and, as it progressed
and radicalized, morally repulsive, but at least it had largely stayed confined to France. From the
perspective of elites, Napoleon’s conquests were even worse because everywhere the French
armies went the traditional order of society was overturned. France may have been the greatest
economic beneficiary, but Napoleon’s Italian, German, and Polish subjects (among others) also
had their first taste of a society in which one’s status was not defined by birth. The kings and
nobles of Europe had good cause to fear that the way of life they presided over, a social order
that had lasted for roughly 1,000 years, was disintegrating in the course of a generation.
Thus, after Napoleon’s defeat, there had to be a reckoning. Only the most stubborn
monarch or noble thought it possible to completely undo the Revolution and its effects, but there
was a shared desire among the traditional elites to re-establish stability and order based on the
political system that had worked in the past. They knew that there would have to be some
concessions to a generation of people who had lived with equality under the law, but they
worked to reinforce traditional political structures while only granting limited compromises.
Conservatism
That being noted, how did elites understand their own role in society? How did they
justify the power of kings and nobles over the majority of the population? This was not just
about wealth, after all, since there were many non-noble merchants who were as rich, or richer,
than many nobles. Nor was it viable for most nobles to claim that their rights were logically
derived from their mastery of warfare, since only a small percentage of noblemen served in
royal armies (and those that did were not necessarily very good officers!). Instead, European
elites at the time explained their own social role in terms of peace, tradition, and stability. Their
43
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
ideology came to be called conservatism: the idea that what had worked for centuries was
inherently better at keeping the peace both within and between kingdoms than were the forces
unleashed by the French Revolution.
Conservatism held that the old traditions of rule were the best and most desirable
principles of government, having proven themselves relatively stable and successful over the
course of 1,000 years of European history. It was totally opposed to the idea of universal legal
equality, let alone of suffrage (i.e. voting rights), and it basically amounted to an attempt to
maintain a legal political hierarchy to go along with the existing social and economic hierarchy of
European society.
The fundamental argument of conservatism was that the French Revolution and
Napoleon had already proved that too much change and innovation in politics was inherently
destructive. According to conservatives, the French Revolution had started out, in its moderate
phase, by arguing for the primacy of the common people, but it quickly and inevitably spun out
of control. During the Terror, the king and queen were beheaded, French society was riven with
bloody conflict, tens of thousands were guillotined, and the revolutionary government launched
a blasphemous crusade against the church. Napoleon’s takeover – itself a symptom of the
anarchy unleashed by the Revolution – led to almost twenty years of war and turmoil across the
map of Europe. These events proved to conservatives that while careful reform might be
acceptable, rapid change was not.
Images like the above (from the French Revolution) were used by conservatives to illustrate the
violence and bloodshed they claimed were an intrinsic part of revolutionary change.
44
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Many conservatives believed that human nature is basically bad, evil, and depraved.
The clearest statement of this idea in the early nineteenth century came from Joseph de
Maistre, a conservative French nobleman. De Maistre argued that human beings are not
enlightened, not least because (as a staunch Catholic), he believed that all human souls are
tainted by original sin. Left unchecked, humans with too much freedom would always indulge in
depravity. Only the allied forces of a strong monarchy, a strong nobility, and a strong church
could hold that inherent evil in check. It is worth noting that De Maistre wrote outside of France
itself during the revolutionary period, first in the small Italian kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (he
was a noble in both France and Piedmont) and then in Russia. His message resonated strongly
with the arch-conservative Russian Tsar Alexander I in particular.
A more pragmatic conservative take was exemplified by a British lord, Edmund Burke.
He argued that, given the complexity and fragility of the social fabric, only the force of tradition
could prevent political chaos. As the French Revolution had demonstrated, gradual reforms had
the effect of unleashing a tidal wave of pent-up anger and, more to the point, foolish decisions
by people who had no experience of making political decisions. In his famous pamphlet
Reflections On The Revolution in France, he wrote “It is said that twenty-four millions ought to
prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of
arithmetic.” To Burke, the common people were a mob of uneducated, inexperienced would-be
political decision-makers and had no business trying to influence politics. Instead, it was far
wiser to keep things in the basic form that had survived for centuries, with minor
accommodations as needed.
Burke was an eminently practical, pragmatic political critic. De Maistres ideas may have
looked back to the social and political thought of past centuries, but Burke was a very grounded
and realistic thinker. He simply believed that the masses were the last people one wanted
running a government, because they were an uneducated, uncultivated, uncivilized rabble.
Meanwhile, the European nobility had been raised for centuries to rule and had developed both
cultural traditions and systems of education and training to form leaders. It was a given that not
all of them were very good at it, but according to Burke there was simply no comparison
between the class of nobles and the class of the mob to let the latter rule was to invite
disaster. And, of course, conservatives had all of their suspicions confirmed during the Terror,
when the whole social order of France was turned upside down in the name of a perfect society
(Burke himself was particularly aggrieved by the execution of the French Queen Marie
Antoinette, whom he saw as a perfectly innocent victim).
45
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Early nineteenth-century conservatism at its best was a coherent critique of the violence,
warfare, and instability that had accompanied the Revolution and Napoleonic wars. In practice,
however, conservatism all too often degenerated into the stubborn defense of corrupt,
incompetent, or oppressive regimes. In turn, despite the practical impossibility of doing so in
most cases, there were real attempts on the part of many conservative regimes after the defeat
of Napoleon to completely turn back the clock, to try to sweep the reforms of the revolutionary
era under the collective rug.
One additional conservative figure who lived a generation later than Burke and De
Maistre deserves particular attention: the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882).
By the time Gobineau was an adult, the earlier versions of conservatism seemed increasingly
outdated, especially De Maistres theological claims regarding original sin. Gobineau chose
instead to adopt the language of the prevailing form of intellectual authority of the later
nineteenth century: science. From 1853 to 1855 he published a series of volumes collectively
entitled Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. The Essay claimed that the European
nobility had once been an unsullied pure example of a superior race rightfully ruling over social
inferiors who were born of lesser racial stock. Over time, however, the nobility had foolishly
mixed with those inferiors, diluting the precious racial characteristics that had sustained noble
rule. Likewise, by conquering the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia, Europeans as a whole
undermined their purity and hence their superiority to non-Europeans.
The Essays power to persuade was in large part because Gobineau claimed that his
arguments were scientific. In debates with his friend and patron Alexis de Tocqueville, one of
the major intellectual voices of liberalism, Gobineau asserted that he was merely describing
reality by pointing out that some people were racially superior to others. Needless to say,
Gobineaus claims were nonsense in terms of actual scientific reality, but by using the language
of science Gobineaus grandiose celebration of racial hierarchy served to support the authority
and wealth of those already in power behind a facade of a neutral analysis.
Gobineaus work was enormously influential over time. It would inspire the Social
Darwinist movement that arose later in the nineteenth century that claimed that the lower
classes were biologically inferior to the upper classes. It would be eagerly taken up by
anti-Semites who claimed that Jews were a race with inherent, destructive characteristics. In
the twentieth century it would directly inspire Nazi ideology as well: Hitler himself cited Gobineau
in his own musings on racial hierarchy. Thus, Gobineau represents a transition in
nineteenth-century conservatism, away from the theological and tradition-bound justifications for
46
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
social hierarchy of a De Maistre or Burke and towards pseudo-scientific claims about the
supposed biological superiority of some people over others.
Ideologies
Following Napoleons final defeat in 1815, conservatives faced the daunting task of not
just creating a new political order but in holding in check the political ideologies unleashed
during the revolutionary era: liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. Enlightenment thinkers had
first proposed the ideas of social and legal equality that came to fruition in the American and
French Revolutions. Likewise, the course of those revolutions along with the work of thinkers,
writers, and artists helped create a new concept of national identity that was poised to take
European politics by storm. Finally, the political, social, and economic chaos of the turn of the
nineteenth century (very much including the Industrial Revolution) created the context out of
which socialism emerged.
An “ideology” is a set of beliefs, often having to do with politics. What is the purpose of
government? Who decides the laws? What is just and unjust? How should economics
function? What should be the role of religion in governance? What is the legal and social
status of men and women? All of these kinds of questions have been answered differently from
culture to culture since the earliest civilizations. In the nineteenth century in Europe, a handful
of ideologies came to predominate: conservatism, nationalism, liberalism, and socialism. In
turn, briefly put, three of those ideologies had one thing in common: they opposed the fourth.
For the first half of the nineteenth century, socialists, nationalists, and liberals all agreed that the
conservative order had to be disrupted or even dismantled entirely, although they disagreed on
how that should be accomplished and, more importantly, what should replace it.
Romanticism
Even before the era of the French Revolution, the seeds of nationalism were planted in
the hearts and minds of many Europeans as an aspect of the Romantic movement.
Romanticism was not a political movement it was a movement of the arts. It emerged in the
late eighteenth century and came of age in the nineteenth. Its central tenet was the idea that
there were great, sometimes terrible, and literally awesome forces in the universe that
exceeded humankinds rational ability to understand. Instead, all that a human being could do
47
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
was attempt to pay tribute to those forces nature, the spirit or soul, the spirit of a people or
culture, or even death through art.
The central themes of romantic art were, first, a profound reverence for nature. To
romantics, nature was a vast, overwhelming presence, against which humankind’s activities
were ultimately insignificant. At the same time, romantics celebrated the organic connection
between humanity and nature. They very often identified peasants as being the people who
were “closest” to nature. In turn, it was the job of the artist (whether a writer, painter, or
musician) to somehow gesture at the profound truths of nature and the human spirit. A “true”
artist was someone who possessed the real spark of creative genius, something that could not
be predicted or duplicated through training or education. The point of art was to let that genius
emanate from the work of art, and the result should be a profound emotional experience for the
viewer or listener.
Quite by accident, Romanticism helped plant the seeds of nationalism, thanks to its ties
to the folk movement. The central idea of the folk movement was that the essential truths of
national character had survived among the common people despite the harmful influence of
so-called civilization. Those folk traditions, from folk songs to fairytales to the remnants of
pre-Christian pagan practices, were the true expression of a national spirit that had,
supposedly, laid dormant for centuries. By the early eighteenth century, educated elites
attracted to Romanticism set out to gather those traditions and preserve them in service to an
imagined national identity.
The iconic examples of this phenomenon were the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm,
who were both expert philologists and avid collectors of German folk tales. The Brothers Grimm
collected dozens of folk (fairy) tales and published them in the first definitive collection in
German. Many of those tales, from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella, are best known in American
culture thanks to their adaptation as animated films by Walt Disney in the twentieth century, but
they were famous already by the mid-nineteenth. The Brothers Grimm also undertook an
enormous project to compile a comprehensive German dictionary, not only containing every
German word but detailed etymologies (they did not live to see its completion; the third volume
E Forsche was published shortly before Jacobs death).
The Grimm brothers were the quintessential Romantic nationalists. Many Romantics
like them believed that nations had spirits, which were invested with the core identity of their
people. The point of the Grimm brothers’ work was reaching back into the remote past to
grasp the “essence” of what it meant to be “German.” At the time, there was no country called
Germany, and yet romantic nationalists like the Grimms believed that there was a kind of
48
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
German soul that lived in old folk songs, the German language, and German traditions. They
worked to preserve those things before they were further “corrupted” by the modern world.
In many cases, romantic nationalists did something that historians later called “inventing
traditions.” One iconic example is the Scottish kilt. Scots had worn kilts since the sixteenth
century, but there was no such thing as a specific color and pattern of plaid (a “tartan”) for each
family or clan. The British government ultimately assigned tartans to a new class of soldier
recruited from Scotland: the Highland Regiments, with the wider identification of tartan and clan
only emerging in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. The point was instilling a
nationalist pride in a specific group of military recruits, not celebrating an authentic Scottish
tradition. Likewise, in some cases folk tales and stories were simply made up in the name of
nationalism. The great epic story of Finland, the Kalevala, was written by a Finnish intellectual
in 1827; it was based on actual Finnish legends, but it had never existed as one long story
before.
British soldiers of the Highland Regiments in government-issued kilts in 1744.
The point is not, however, to emphasize the falseness of the folk movement or invented
traditions, but to consider why people were so intent on discovering (and, if necessary,
inventing) them. Romanticism was, among other things, the search for stable points of identity
in a changing world. Likewise, folk traditions – even those that were at least in part invented or
adapted – became a way for early nationalists to identify with the culture they now connotated
with the nation. It is no coincidence that the vogue for kilts in Scotland, ones now identified with
clan identity, emerged for the first time in the 1820s rather than earlier.
49
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Nationalism
Romantic nationalism was an integral part of actual nationalist political movements,
movements that emerged in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Those
movements would ultimately succeed in seeing their goals realized almost without exception,
although that process took over a century in some cases (as in Poland and Ireland). Central to
nationalist movements was the concept that the state should correspond to the identity of a
people, although who or what defines the identity of the people proved a vexing issue on
many occasions.
The discussion of nationalism starts with the French Revolution, because more than any
other event, it provided the model for all subsequent nationalisms. The French revolutionaries
declared from the outset that they represented the whole “nation,” not just a certain part of it.
They erased the legal privileges of some (the nobles) over others, they made religion
subservient to a secular government, and when threatened by the conservative powers of
Europe, they called the whole “nation” to arms. The revolutionary armies sang a national
anthem, the Marseillaise, whose lyrics are as warlike as the American equivalent. Central to
French national identity in the revolutionary period was fighting for la patrie, the fatherland, in
place of the old allegiance to king and church.
The irony of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, however, was that the
countries invaded by the French eventually adopted their own nationalist beliefs. The invaded
countries turned the democratic French principle of self-determination into a sacred right to
defend their own national identities, shaped by their own particular histories, against the
universalist pretensions of the French. That was reflected in the Spanish revolt that began in
1808, the revival of Austria and Prussia and their struggles of “liberation” against Napoleon,
Russia’s leadership of the anti-Napoleonic coalition that followed, and fierce British pride in their
defiance to French military pretensions.
Nationalisms Across Europe
As the Napoleonic wars drew to a close for the first time in 1814, the great powers of
Europe convened a gathering of monarchs and diplomats known as the Congress of Vienna,
discussed in detail in the next chapter, to deal with the aftermath. That meeting lasted months,
thanks in part to Napoleons inconvenient return from Elba and last stand at Waterloo, but in
1815 it concluded, having rewarded the victorious kingdoms with territorial gains and restored
50
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
conservative monarchs to the thrones of states like Spain and France itself. Nothing could have
mattered less to the diplomatic representatives present at the Congress of Vienna than the
national identity of the people who lived in the territories that were carved up and distributed
like pieces of cake to the victors – the inhabitants of northeastern Italy were now subjects of the
Austrian king, the entirety of Poland was divided between Russia and Prussia, and Great Britain
remained secure not only in its growing global empire, but in its possession of the entirety of
Ireland.
Thus, many of Europe’s peoples found themselves without states of their own or in
states squeezed between the dominant powers of the time. Among the notable examples are
the Italians and the Poles. Italy had suffered from the domination of one great power or another
since the Renaissance; after 1815 it was the Austrians who were in control of much of northern
Italy. Poland had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the eighteenth
century, simply vanishing from the map in the process. Germany, of course, was not united;
Prussia and Austria vied with each other for dominance of the German lands, but both were
fundamentally conservative powers uninterested in German unification until later in the
century.
What had changed, however, was that the language of nationalism and the idea of
national identity had come into its own by the late Napoleonic period. For example, German
nationalism was powerful and popular after the Napoleonic wars; in 1817, just two years after
the end of the Congress of Vienna, German nationalists gathered in Wartburg where Martin
Luther had first translated the Bible into German, waving the black, red, and gold tricolor flag
that would (over a century later) become the official flag of the German nation. Two years later,
a nationalist poet murdered a conservative one, and the Austrian Empire passed laws that
severely limited freedom of speech, specifically to contain and restrict the spread of nationalism.
Despite this effort, and the Austrian secret police, nationalism continued to spread, culminating
in a large and self-consciously nationalistic movement seeking German unity.
The 1830s were a pivotal decade in the spread of nationalism. The Italian nationalist
leader Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1831, calling for a springtime of peoples in
which the people of each nation of Europe would topple conservative monarchs and assert
their sovereignty and independence. That movement would quickly spread beyond Italy:
“young” became the rallying word and idea of nationalism. In addition to Young Italy, there was
a Young Germany and a Young Ireland, among others – the idea was that all people should and
would eventually inhabit nations, and that this new “youthful” manner of politics would lead to
peace and prosperity for everyone. The old, outdated borders abandoned, everyone would live
51
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
where they were supposed to: in nations governed by their own people. Nationalists argued
that war itself could be rendered obsolete. After all, if each people lived in their nation, what
would be the point of territorial conflict? To the nationalists at the time, the emergence of
nations was synonymous with a more perfect future for all.
Central to the very concept of nationalism in this early, optimistic phase was the identity
of the people, a term with powerful political resonance in just about every European language:
das Volk, le peuple, il popolo, etc. In every case, “the people” was thought to be something
more important than just “those people who happen to live here.” Instead, the people were
those tied to the soil, with roots reaching back centuries, and who deserve their own
government. This was a profoundly romantic idea because it spoke to an essentially emotional
sense of national identity – a sense of camaraderie and solidarity with individuals with whom a
given person might not actually share much in common.
When scrutinized, the real identity of a given people became more difficult to discern.
For example, were the Germans people who speak German, or who lived in Central Europe, or
who were Lutheran, or Catholic, or who think that their ancestors were from the same area in
which they themselves were born? If united in a German nation, who would lead it – were the
Prussians or the Austrians more authentically German? What of those Germans who lived in
places like Bohemia (i.e. the Czech lands) and Poland, with their own growing sense of national
identity? The nationalist movements of the first half of the nineteenth century did not need to
concern themselves overmuch with these conundrums because their goals of liberation and
unification were not yet achievable. When national revolutions of various kinds did occur,
however, they proved difficult to overcome.
Liberalism
Nationalisms supporters tended to be members of the middle classes, including
everyone from artisans to the new professional class associated with commerce and industry in
the nineteenth century. Many of the same people supported another doctrine that had been
spread by the Napoleonic wars: liberalism. The ideas of liberalism were based on the
Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality, and progress from the eighteenth century, but as
a movement liberalism came of age in the post-Napoleonic period; the word itself was in regular
use by 1830.
Nineteenth-century liberals were usually educated men and women, including the elites
of industry, trade, and the professions as well as the middle classes. They shared the
52
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
conviction that freedom in all its formsfreedom from the despotic rule of kings, from the
obsolete privilege of nobles, from economic interference and religious intolerance, from
occupational restrictions and limitations of speech and assemblycould only improve the
quality of society and the well-being of its members.
In something of a contrast to the abstract nature of national identity among nationalists,
liberalism had straightforward beliefs, all of them reflecting not just abstract theories but the
concrete examples of the liberal American and French Revolutions of the prior century.
Perhaps liberalisms most fundamental belief was that there should be equality before the law,
in stark contrast to the old feudal (almost a slur to liberals) order of legally-defined social
estates. From that starting point of equality, the very purpose of law to liberals was to protect
the rights of each and every citizen rather than enshrine the privileges of a minority.
Whereas rights had meant the traditional privileges enjoyed by a given social group or
estate in the past, from the kings exclusive right to hunt game in his forests to the peasants
right to access the common lands, rights now came to mean a fundamental and universal
privilege that was concomitant with citizenship itself. Liberals argued that freedom of speech, of
a press free from censorship, and of religious expression were rights that should be enjoyed
by all. Likewise, most liberals favored the abolition of archaic economic interference from the
state, including legal monopolies on trade (e.g. in shipping between colonies) and the
monopolies enjoyed by those craft guilds that remained – the right to engage in market
exchange unhindered by outdated laws was part of the liberal paradigm as well.
Just as had the French revolutionaries in the early phase of the revolution, most liberals
early nineteenth-century liberals looked to constitutional monarchy as the most reasonable and
stable form of government. Constitutions should be written to guarantee the fundamental rights
of the citizenry and to define, and restrict the power of the king (thus staving off the threat of
tyranny). Liberals also believed in the desirability of an elected parliament, albeit one with a
restricted electorate: almost universally, liberals at the time thought that voting should be
restricted to those who owned significant amounts of property, thereby (they thought)
guaranteeing social stability.
Unlike nationalists, liberals saw at least some of their goals realized in post-Napoleonic
Europe. While its Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, there was now an elected
parliament, religious tolerance, and relaxed censorship. Britain remained the most liberal
power in Europe, having long stood as the model of constitutional monarchy. A liberal
monarchy emerged as a result of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, and by the 1840s limited
liberal reforms had been introduced in many of the smaller German states as well. Thus,
53
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
despite the opposition of conservatives, much of Europe slowly and haltingly liberalized in the
period between 1815 and 1848.
Socialism
The third and last of the new political ideologies and movements of the early nineteenth
century was socialism. Socialism was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related
factors: first, the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French
Revolution, and second, the growth of industrial capitalism. It sought to address both the
economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the living conditions of
workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern society.
The term itself is French. It was created in 1834 to contrast with individualism, a favorite
term among liberals but one that early socialists saw as a symptom of moral decay. Right from
its inception, socialism was contrasted with individualism and egoism, of the selfish and
self-centered pursuit of wealth and power. Socialism proposed a new and better moral order,
one in which the members of a society would care not only for themselves, but for one another.
For the first decades of its existence socialism was less a movement with economic foundations
than with ethical ones. It had economic arguments to make, of course, but those arguments
were based on moral or ethical claims.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word socialism came to be used more
widely to describe several different movements than had hitherto been considered in isolation
from one another. Their common factor was the idea that material goods should be held in
common and that producers should keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better,
happier, more healthy community and, perhaps, nation. The abiding concern of early socialists
was to address what they saw as the moral and social disintegration of European civilization in
the modern era, as well as to repair the rifts and ameliorate the suffering of workers in the midst
of early industrial capitalism.
There was a major shift in socialism that occurred over the course of the century: until
1848, socialism consisted of a movements that shared a concern with the plight of working
people and the regrowth of organic social bonds. This kind of socialism was fundamentally
optimistic early socialists thought that almost everyone in European society would eventually
become a socialist once they realized its potential. Following the later work of Friedrich Engels,
one of the major socialist thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century, this kind of
socialism is often referred to as “utopian socialism.” In turn, after 1848, socialism was
54
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
increasingly militant because socialists realized that a major restructuring of society could not
happen peacefully, given the strength of both conservative and liberal opposition. The most
important militant socialism was Marxism, named after its creator Karl Marx.
Three early socialist movements stand out as exemplary of so-called “utopian”
socialism: the Saint-Simonians, the Owenites, and the Fourierists. Each was named after its
respective founder and visionary. The binding theme of these three early socialist thinkers was
not only radical proposals for the reorganization of work, but the idea that economic competition
was a moral problem, that competition itself is in no way natural and instead implies social
disorder. The Saint-Simonians called egoism, the selfish pursuit of individual wealth, the
deepest wound of modern society.
In that, they found a surprisingly sympathetic audience among some aristocratic
conservatives who were also afraid of social disorder and were nostalgic for the idea of a
reciprocal set of obligations that had existed in pre-revolutionary Europe between the common
people and the nobility. In turn, the early socialists believed that there was nothing inherent in
their ideas threatening to the rich many socialists expected that the privileged classes would
recognize the validity of their ideas and that socialism would be a way to bridge the class divide,
not widen it.
The Saint-Simonians, named after their founder Henri de Saint-Simon, were mostly
highly educated young elites in France, many from privileged backgrounds, and many also
graduates of the cole Polytechnique, the most elite technical school in France founded by
Napoleon. Their ideology, based on Saint-Simon’s writings, envisaged a society in which
industrialism was harnessed to make a kind of heaven on earth, with the fruits of technology
going to feed, clothe, and house, potentially, everyone. They were, in a word, the first
“technocrats,” people who believe that technology can solve any problem. The Saint-Simonians
did not inspire a popular movement, but individual members of the movement went on to
achieve influential roles in the French industry, and helped lay the intellectual foundations of
such ventures as the creation of the Suez Canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
The Owenites were initially the employees of Robert Owen, a British factory owner. He
built a community for his workers in New Lanark, Scotland that provided health care, education,
pensions, communal stores, and housing. He believed that productivity was tied to happiness,
and his initial experiments met with success, with the New Lanark textile mill realizing consistent
profits. He and his followers created a number of cooperative, communalist utopian
communities (many in the United States), but those tended to fail in fairly short order. Instead,
the lasting influence of Owenism was in workers organization, with the Owenites helping to
55
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
organize a number of influential early trade unions, culminating in the London Working Men’s
Association in 1836.
The Fourierists were part of a very peculiar movement, because their founder Charles
Fourier was a very peculiar man. Fourier, who may have been at least partially insane, believed
that he had unlocked a “science of the passions.” According to Fourier, the reason that most
people detested what they did to survive was that they were not doing the right kind of work.
There were 810 specific kinds of personalities in the world, each of which was naturally inclined
toward a certain kind of work. Thus, if 1,620 people (one man and one woman of each type)
were to come together in a community, and each did the kind of work they “should” do, perfect
happiness became possible. For example, according to Fourier, murderers were just people
who should have been butchers, and children should be trash collectors, because they loved to
play in the dirt. These planned communities would be called “Phalanxes,” after the fighting
formations of ancient Greece.
Illustration of a Fouriest phalanx. The heading simply reads The Future.
Fourier was far more radical than most other self-understood socialists. For one, he
advocated complete gender equality and even sexual liberation – he was very hostile to
monogamy, which he believed to be unnatural. Regarding marriage as an outdated custom, he
imagined that in his phalanxes children would be raised in common rather than lorded over by
their parents. Above and beyond forward-thinking ideas about gender, some of his concepts
were a bit more puzzling. Among other things, he claimed that planets mated and gave birth to
baby planets, and that once all of humanity lived in phalanxes the oceans would turn into
lemonade.
Practically speaking, the importance of the fourierists is that many phalanxes were
actually founded, including several in the United States. While the more oddball ideas were
conveniently set aside, they were still among the first real experiments in planned, communal
56
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
living. Likewise, many important early feminists began their intellectual careers as Fourierists.
For instance, Flora Tristan was a French socialist and feminist who emerged from Fourierism to
do important early work on tying the idea of social progress to female equality.
In general, the broad Utopian socialism of the 1840s was quite widespread leading up
to 1848, it was peaceful in orientation, it was democratic, it believed in the right to work, and its
followers hoped that the higher orders might join it. These early movements also tended to
cross over with liberal and nationalist movements, sharing a vision of more just and equitable
laws and a more humane social order in contrast to the repression all three movements
identified with conservatism. Few socialists in this period believed that violence would be
necessary in transforming society.
Considered in detail in the next chapter, there was an enormous revolutionary explosion
all over Europe in 1848. From Paris to Vienna to Prague, Europeans rose up and, temporarily
as it turned out, overthrew their monarchs. In the end, however, the revolutions collapsed. The
awkward coalitions of socialists and other rebels that had spearheaded them soon fell to
infighting, and kings (and in France, a new emperor) eventually reasserted control. Socialists
made important realizations following 1848. Democracy did not lead inevitably to social and
political progress, as majorities typically voted for established community leaders (often priests
or nobles). Class collaboration was not a possibility, as the wealthier bourgeoisie and the
nobility recognized in socialism their shared enemy. Peaceful change might not be possible,
given the forces of order’s willingness to employ violence to achieve their ends. Russia, for
instance, invaded Hungary to ensure the continued rule of (Russias ally at the time) Habsburg
Austria. After 1848 socialism was increasingly militant, focused on the necessity of
confrontational tactics, even outright violence, to achieve a better society. Two post-Utopian
and rival forms of socialist theory matured in this period: state socialism and anarchist socialism.
The first, state socialism, is represented by the French thinker and agitator Louis Blanc.
Blanc believed that social reform had to come from above. It was, he argued, unrealistic to
imagine that groups could somehow spontaneously organize themselves into self-sustaining,
harmonious units. He believed that universal manhood suffrage should and would lead to a
government capable of implementing necessary economic changes, primarily by guaranteeing
work for all citizens. He actually saw this happen in the French revolution of 1848, when he
briefly served in the revolutionary government. There, he pushed through the creation of
National Workshops for workers, which provided paid work for the urban poor.
In stark contrast was anarchist socialism. A semantic point: anarchism means the
rejection of the state, not the rejection of all forms of social organization or even hierarchy (i.e. it
57
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
is perfectly consistent for there to be an organized anarchist movement, even one with leaders).
In the case of nineteenth-century anarchist socialism, there were two major thinkers: the French
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin.
Proudhon was the author of a book entitled What Is Property? in which he answered
unequivocally that property is theft. The very idea of ownership was vacuous and false to
Proudhon, a conceit that ensured that the wealthy maintained their hold on political and legal
power. Unlike his rival Louis Blanc, Proudhon was skeptical of the state’s ability to effect
meaningful reform, and after the failure of the French revolution of 1848 he came to believe that
all state power was inherently oppressive. Instead of a state, Proudhon advocated local
cooperatives of workers in a kind of economic federalism in which cooperatives would
exchange goods and services between one another, and each cooperative would reward work
with the fruits of that work. Simply put, workers themselves would keep all profit. He believed
that the workers would have to emancipate themselves through some kind of revolution, but he
was not an advocate of violence.
The other prominent anarchist socialist was Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary,
sometimes friend, and sometimes rival of Proudhon. Briefly, Bakunin believed in the necessity
of an apocalyptic, violent revolution to wipe the slate clean for a new society of free collectives.
He loathed the state and detested the traditional family structure, seeing it as a useless
holdover from the past. Bakunin thought that if his contemporary society was destroyed, the
social instincts inherent to humanity would flower and people would naturally build a better
society. He was also the great champion of the outcasts, the bandits, and the urban poor. He
was deeply skeptical about both the industrial working class, who he noted all wished could be
middle class, and of western Europe, which was shot-through with individualism, egoism, and
the obsession with wealth. He ended up organizing large anarchist movements in Europe’s
periphery, especially in Italy and Spain. By about 1870 both countries had large anarchist
movements.
In the end, the most influential socialist was a German: Karl Marx. Marx was born in
1818 in the Rhineland, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Lutheranism (out of
necessity – Marxs father was a lawyer in conservative, staunchly Lutheran Prussia). He was a
passionate and brilliant student of philosophy who came to believe that philosophy was only
important if it led to practical change he wrote philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
58
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The best-known portrait of Marx, dating from 1875.
A journalist as a young man, Marx became an avowed socialist by the 1840s and
penned (along with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels) the nineteenth centurys most
famous and influential socialist work, The Communist Manifesto. Exiled to Great Britain in the
aftermath of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Marx devoted himself to a detailed analysis
of the endogenous tendencies of capitalist economics, ultimately producing three enormous
volumes entitled, simply, Capital. The first was published in 1867, with the other two edited from
notes and published by Engels after Marxs death. It is worthwhile to consider Marxs theories in
detail because of their profound influence: by the middle of the twentieth century, fully a third of
the world was governed by communist states that were at least nominally Marxist in their
political and economic policies.
All of history, according to Marx, is the history of class struggle. From ancient pharaohs
to feudal kings and their nobles, classes of the rich and powerful had always abused and
exploited classes of the poor and weak. The world had moved on into a new phase following
the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, however, one that (to Marx) simplified that
59
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
ongoing struggle from many competing classes to just two: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie were the rising middle classes, the owners of factories and businesses, the
bankers, and all of those with direct control over industrial production. The proletariat was the
industrial working class.
Before this, the classes of workers in the pre-modern era generally had direct access to
their livelihood: a small parcel of land, access to the common lands, the tools of their trade in
the case of artisans. They had, in Marxs language, some kind of protected access to “the
means of production,” which could mean anything from some land, a plow, and an ox to a
workshop stocked with a carpenter’s tools. In the modern era, however, those rights and those
tools were systematically taken away. The common lands were closed off and replaced with
commercial farms. Artisans were rendered obsolete by the growth of industry. Peasants were
pushed off the land or owned plots so small their children had to look for work in the cities. The
net effect was, generally, that the class of workers who had “nothing to sell but their labor,” the
proletariat, grew.
At the same time, the people who did own property, “the bourgeoisie,” were under
pressure themselves. In the climate of the new capitalism, of unregulated markets and cutthroat
competition, it was terribly easy to fall behind and go out of business. Thus, former members of
the bourgeoisie lost out and became proletarians themselves. The net effect was that the
proletariat grew and every other conceivable class (including peasants, the owners of small
shops, etc.) shrank.
Meanwhile, industry produced more and more products. Every year saw improvements
in efficiency and economy in production, arriving at a terrific glut of products available for
purchase. Eventually, there was simply too much out there and not enough people who could
afford to buy it, as one of the things about the proletariat, one of their forms of “alienation,” was
their inability to buy the very things they made. This resulted in a “crisis of overproduction” and a
massive economic collapse. This would be unthinkable in a pre-modern economy, where the
essential problem a society faced was the scarcity of goods. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution,
however, products need consumers more than consumers need products.
In the midst of one of these collapses, Marx wrote, the members of the proletariat could
realize their common interests in seizing the unprecedented wealth that industrialism had made
possible and using it for the common good. Instead of a handful of super-rich expropriators,
everyone could share in material comfort and freedom from scarcity, something that had never
been possible before. That vision of revolution was very powerful to the young Marx, who wrote
that, given the inherent tendencies of capitalism, revolution was inevitable.
60
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In turn, revolutions did happen, most spectacularly in 1848, which Marx initially greeted
with elation only to watch in horror as the revolutionary momentum ebbed and conservatives
regained the initiative. Subsequently, as he devoted himself to the analysis of capitalisms
inherent characteristics rather than revolutionary propaganda, Marx became more circumspect.
With staggering erudition, he tried to make sense of an economic system that somehow
repeatedly destroyed itself and yet regrew stronger, faster, and more violent with every business
cycle.
In historical hindsight, Marx was really writing about what would happen if capitalism was
allowed to run completely rampant, as it did in the first century of the Industrial Revolution. The
hellish mills, the starving workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all
part of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Everything that could contain those factors,
primarily in the form of concessions to workers and state intervention in the economy, had not
happened on a large scale when Marx was writing – trade unions themselves were outlawed in
most states until the middle of the century. In turn, none of the factors that might mitigate
capitalisms destructive tendencies were financially beneficial to any individual capitalist, so
Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in states controlled by
moneyed interests.
To Marx, revolution seemed not only possible but probable in the 1840s, when he was
first writing about philosophy and economics. After the revolutions of 1848 failed, however, he
shifted his attention away from revolution and towards the inner workings of capitalism itself. In
fact, he rarely wrote about revolution at all after 1850; his great work Capital is instead a vast
and incredibly detailed study of how Englands capitalist economy worked and what it did to the
people within it.
To boil it down to a very simple level, Marx never described in adequate detail when the
material conditions for a socialist revolution were possible. Across the vast breadth of his books
and correspondence, Marx (and his collaborator Friedrich Engels) argued that each nation
would have to reach a critical threshold in which industrialism was mature, the proletariat was
large and self-aware, and the bourgeoisie was using increasingly harsh political tactics to try to
keep the proletariat in check. There would have to be, and according to Marxism there always
would be, a major economic crisis caused by overproduction.
At that point, somehow, the proletariat could rise up and take over. In some of his
writings, Marx indicated that the proletariat would revolt spontaneously, without guidance from
anyone else. Sometimes, such as in the second section of his early work The Communist
Manifesto, Marx alluded to the existence of a political party, the communists, who would work to
61
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
help coordinate and aid the proletariat in the revolutionary process. The bottom line is,
however, that Marx was very good at critiquing the internal laws of the free market in capitalism,
and in pointing out many of its problems, but he had no tactical guide to revolutionary politics.
And, finally, toward the end of his life, Marx himself was increasingly worried that socialists,
including self-styled Marxists, would try to stage a revolution too early and it would fail or result
in disaster.
In sum, Marx did not leave a clear picture of what socialists were supposed to do,
politically, nor did he describe how a socialist state would work if a revolution was successful.
This only mattered historically because socialist revolutions were successful, and those nations
had to try to figure out how to govern in a socialistic way.
Social Classes
How much did European society resemble the sociological description provided by
Marx? At first sight, nineteenth-century Europe seems more similar to how it was in earlier
centuries than it does radically new most people were still farmers, every country but Britain
was still mostly rural, and the Industrial Revolution took decades to spread beyond its British
heartland. That being said, European society was undergoing significant changes, and Marx
was right in identifying the new professional middle class, the bourgeoisie, as the agents of
much of that change.
The term “bourgeoisie” is French for “business class.” The term originally meant, simply,
“townspeople,” but over time it acquired the connotation of someone who made money from
commerce, banking, or administration but did not have a noble title. The bourgeoisie made up
between 15% and 20% of the population of central and western Europe by the early 1800s.
The male members of the bourgeoisie were factory owners, clerks, commercial and state
bureaucrats, journalists, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else who fell into that ambiguous class
of businessmen. They were increasingly proud of their identity as self-made men, men
whose financial success was based on intelligence, education, and competence instead of
noble privilege and inheritance. Many regarded the old order as an archaic throwback,
something that was both limiting their own ability to make money and societys possibilities of
further progress. At the same time, they were defined by the fact that they did not work with
their hands to make a living; they were neither farmers, nor artisans, nor industrial workers.
The growth of the bourgeoisie arose from the explosion of urbanization that took place
due to both industrialism and the breakdown of the old social order that started with the French
62
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Revolution. Cities, some of which grew almost 1000% in the course of the century,
concentrated groups of educated professionals. It was the middle class that reaped the benefits
of a growing, and increasingly complex, economy centered in the cities.
While the bourgeoisie was proud of its self-understood sobriety and work ethic, in
contrast to the foppery and frivolity of the nobility, successful members of the middle class often
eagerly bought as much land as they could, both in emulation of the nobles and because the
right to vote in most of western Europe was tied for decades to land-ownership. In turn, nobles
were wary of the middle class, especially because so many bourgeois were attracted to
potentially disruptive ideologies like liberalism and, increasingly, nationalism, but over the
course of the century the two classes tended to mix based on wealth. Old families of nobles
may have despised the nouveau riche, but they still married them if they needed the money.
The bourgeoisie had certain visible things that defined them as a class, literal status
symbols. They did not perform manual labor of any kind, and insisted on the highest standards
of cleanliness and tidiness in their appearance and their homes. In turn, all but the most
marginal bourgeois families employed at least one full-time servant (recruited from the working
class and always paid a pittance) to maintain those standards of hygiene. If possible, bourgeois
women did no paid work at all, serving instead as keepers of the home and the maintainers of
the rituals of visiting and hosting that maintained their social network. Finally, the bourgeoisie
socialized in private places: private clubs, the new department stores that opened in for the first
time in the mid-nineteenth century, and the foyers of private homes. The working classes met in
taverns (public houses or just pubs in Britain), while bourgeois men and women stayed
safely inside.
63
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Clothing among the bourgeoisie came to resemble a specific uniform of respectability in the
nineteenth century – the top hat in particular was an iconic mark of class identity by the middle of
the century.
In addition, the members of the bourgeoisie were supposed to live by certain codes of
behavior. In contrast to the sexual libertinage of the old nobility, bourgeois men and women
were expected to avoid extra-marital affairs (although, practically speaking, bourgeois men
regularly took advantage of prostitutes). A bourgeois man was to live up to high standards of
honesty and business ethics. What these concepts shared was the fear of shame the
literature of the time describing this social class is filled with references to the failure of a
bourgeois to live up to these standards and being exposed to vast public humiliation.
What about the nobility? The legal structures that sustained their identity slowly but
surely weakened over the course of the nineteenth century. Even more threatening than the
loss of legal monopolies over land-owning, the officer corps of the army, and political status was
the enormous shift in the generation of wealth away from land to commerce and industry.
Relatively few noblemen had been involved in the early Industrial Revolution, thanks in large
part to their traditional disdain for commerce, but by the middle of the century it was apparent
that industry, banking, and commerce were eclipsing land-ownership as the major sources of
64
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
wealth. Likewise, the one thing that the bourgeoisie and the working class had in common was
a belief in the desirability of voting rights; by the end of the century universal manhood suffrage
was on the horizon (or had already come to pass, as it did in France in 1871) in almost every
country in Europe.
Thus, the long-term pattern of the nobility was that it came to culturally resemble the
bourgeoisie. While stubbornly clinging to its titles and its claims to authority, the nobility
grudgingly entered into the economic fields of the bourgeoisie and adopted the bourgeoisies
social habits as well. The lines between the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie and the bulk of
the nobility were very blurry by the end of the century, as bourgeois money funded old noble
houses that still had access to the social prestige of a title.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Heads on Pikes – Public Domain
Highland Soldiers – Public Domain
Marx – Public Domain
Top Hats – Public Domain
65
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 4: The Politics of the Nineteenth
Century
The nineteenth century is, among many other things, a study in contrasts. On the one
hand, it witnessed spectacular political, economic, and social changes that saw the birth of new
nations and the demise of old kingdoms. On the other, even its newborn nations often looked
back to the most traditional form of political sovereignty: dynastic identity. One of the great
historians of the period, Eric Hobsbawm, noted in his The Age of Empire that Europe had never
seen so many states ruled by emperors as it did at the turn of the twentieth century: the
Empress of the British Empire, the Kaiser of the German Reich, the Kaiser of the Austrian
Reich, and the Tsar of the Russian Empire were not just contemporaries, they were all related
by dynastic marriages. And yet, each emperor ruled over a profoundly different empire than
had his or her predecessors, ones in which (even in Russia by 1905) at least some men voted
to elect representatives with real political power.
At its simplest, nineteenth-century European politics can be seen as a series of struggles
and compromises between different political ideologies and their corresponding movements.
From 1815 until 1848, those struggles normally pitted conservatives against liberals and
nationalists. A series of revolutions shook much of Europe in 1848, but in their aftermath
conservative monarchs regained control almost everywhere. After 1848, conservatism itself
slowly adopted liberal and nationalistic traits, culminating in the conservative-led national
unifications of Italy and Germany. Of the new political movements considered in the last
chapter, only socialism failed to achieve its stated goals at least somewhere in Europe, instead
becoming an increasingly militant movement opposed not just to conservatives, but its
occasional former allies: liberals and nationalists.
The backdrop of these struggles was a wholly uncharacteristic state of peace that held
for most of the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the great powers of Europe
deliberately crafted a new political arrangement whose purpose was, in part, to maintain peace
between them. That peace was broken occasionally starting in 1853, but the subsequent wars
were shorter, less bloody, and less frequent than those of any previous century. Historians have
often noted that the nineteenth century technically ended in 1900, but in terms of its prevailing
66
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
political, social, and cultural patterns, it really ended in 1914, with the advent of the horrendous
bloodshed and destruction of World War I.
The Congress of Vienna
This period of peace began as a product of the post-Napoleonic order. When Napoleon
was first defeated in 1814, representatives from the victorious states gathered in the Austrian
capital of Vienna to establish what was to be done in the aftermath of his conquests.
Napoleons escape from Elba and inconvenient attempt to re-establish his empire forced the
representatives to suspend their meetings while British and Prussian armies finally ended his
reign for good. The conference, known later as the Congress of Vienna, was then re-convened,
finally concluding in 1815. While various states in Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, sent
representatives, the Congress was dominated by the five great powers: the Austrian Empire,
Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and (by the end) France itself.
By its conclusion, the Congress of Vienna had redrawn the map of Europe with the goal
of preventing France from threatening the balance of power again. But unlike the conference
that ended the First World War a century later, the Congress of Vienna did not impose a huge
penalty on the aggressor. Once it had been agreed to place Louis XVIII, the younger brother of
the executed Louis XVI, on the throne of France, the powers that had defeated Napoleon had
the good sense to see that it would be illogical to punish the French (not least because the
French might opt to have yet another revolution in response). Much of the credit was due to a
wily diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Prigord, himself a former official under Napoleon,
who convinced the other representatives to include France as an equal partner rather than an
enemy to be punished. Instead, the victors deprived the French of their conquests and imposed
a modest indemnity, but they did not dismember the country. They did, however, redraw the map
of Europe.
The powers that defeated Napoleon had a few specific goals at the conference. They
sought to create a lasting conservative order in France itself. They hoped to restrain French
ambition and stave off the threat of another revolution. They sought to reward themselves with
territory taken from weaker states like Poland and the formerly independent territories of
northern Italy. And, finally, they devoted themselves to the suppression of future revolutionary
movements. The political order that emerged in 1815 became known as the Congress System
(also known as the Concert of Europe): a conservative international political network maintained
by the five great powers.
67
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Congress System was devoted to peace, stability, and order. While Great Britain
was content with any political arrangement that prevented a disruption like the Napoleonic wars
from occurring again, the more conservative states were not: led by the Russian Tsar Alexander
I, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and France (the latter under its new Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII)
joined in a Holy Alliance that promised to put down revolutions wherever they might occur.
Now, war was to be waged in the name of dynastic sovereignty and the conservative political
order, not territorial ambition. In other words, the next time France invaded Spain and Russia
invaded Hungary, they did so in the name of restoring foreign conservative monarchs to their
rightful position of power, not in order to enrich themselves.
Revolts and Revolutions
As it turns out, they did not have long to wait to put the military commitment of the Holy
Alliance into action. The first liberal revolt against a conservative monarch occurred in the
immediate aftermath of the Congress of Vienna in what had traditionally been one of the most
conservative states of Europe: Spain.
During the Napoleonic period, Spanish liberal intellectuals had been stuck in an
awkward position. Their country was ruled by a foreign power, France, one that taxed it and
extracted resources for its wars, but it was also one that represented the best hope of liberal
reform. The French Revolution was the symbol, for liberals all over Europe, of progress, even if
they had misgivings about the Terror. When the Spanish resistance sprung up against the
French under Napoleon, it was an alliance of conservative priests and peasants, along with
conservative nobles, who spearheaded it. Most Spanish liberals did end up supporting the
resistance, but they still hoped that the post-Napoleonic order would see liberal reforms to the
Spanish monarchy.
Toward the end of the Napoleonic period, the Spanish representative assembly, the
cortes, approved a liberal constitution. Once he was back in power, however, the restored
Spanish King Ferdinand VII refused to recognize the constitution, and he also refused to
summon the cortes. With the approval of the other conservative monarchies of Europe,
Ferdinand essentially moved to turn back the clock in Spain to the pre-revolutionary period.
Ferdinand was able to force Spain back toward the old order, but he proved unable to
squelch independence movements in Spains American colonies. In 1816 an anti-Spanish
uprising in Argentina began and soon spread to the other colonies. By 1824 all of Central and
South America was independent. In the midst of the failure of Spanish military expeditions to
68
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
stop the revolutions, in 1820 an alliance of liberal politicians and military officers staged a coup
against Ferdinand and began remaking Spain as a liberal state.
The Arch-Conservative Spanish King Ferdinand VII
The Spanish liberal coup of 1820 was the first major test of the Holy Alliances
commitment to prevent revolution anywhere in Europe. True to form, the continental members
of the alliance supported a French army of 200,000 in invading Spain and restoring Ferdinand to
the throne. The liberals were persecuted and hounded, and Spain was essentially ruled by an
arch-conservative order for the next few decades. Incidentally, it was in this context that the
American president James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine, which forbid European powers
from interfering in the politics of the Americas. Monroe was afraid that the Holy Alliance would
try to extend its intervention to the now-former Spanish colonies and he thus issued a
proclamation that any attempt by a European power to intervene in the western hemisphere
would be considered a threat to US peace and safety.
The next liberal revolt occurred in the most conservative political context in Europe at the
time: that of Russia. Late in the Napoleonic wars, some Russian officers in the Tsarist army
underwent a pair of related revelations. First, they came to admire the bravery and loyalty of
their soldiers, all of whom were drawn from the ranks of the serfs. In turn, they experienced the
69
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
west firsthand as Russian armies fought Napoleons forces and then during the occupation of
France. There, the sheer backwardness of Russia stood in contrast to the dynamism and
vitality they discovered in French society (especially in Paris itself). The officers came to see
serfdom as both fundamentally immoral and as totally incompatible with any hope of progress
for Russia. Thus, as Russian armies returned home after the Congress of Vienna, a conspiracy
of liberal officers emerged, intent on creating a liberal political order for the Russian state once
the aging, fanatically religious, and arch-conservative Tsar Alexander I died.
Ten years later (in 1825) he did die, and the result was the Decembrist uprising.
During the years that followed Napoleons defeat, the conspiracy of army officers put plans in
motion to force the government to accept liberal reforms, especially a constitution guaranteeing
basic rights and freeing the serfs. When the new Tsar, Nikolai I, was crowned in December of
1825, the officers staged a rebellion in the square in front of the royal palace in St. Petersburg,
hoping that the army as a whole would side with them and force the Tsar to accept reforms.
Instead, after a tense day of waiting, troops loyal to the Tsar opened fire and crushed the
uprising.
The Decembrist uprising, depicted at the moment troops loyal to the tsar opened fire.
70
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Decembrist uprising was the one and only attempt at implementing liberal reform in
Russia in the nineteenth century; it would take until 1905 for the next revolution to come to pass.
Nikolai I was the ultimate reactionary, personally overseeing the police investigation of the
Decembrist conspiracy and creating Europes first secret police force, The Third Section. He
would go on to a long rule (r. 1825 – 1855) guided by the principles he defined for the Russian
state: autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality. In the decades that followed, the slightest sign of
dissent from a Russian subject was grounds for imprisonment or exile to a Siberian
prison-village, and the political and social changes that swept across the rest of Europe were
thus held at bay. Tsarist power remained intact, but Russian society (and the Russian
economy) stagnated.
Even as the Decembrist uprising failed, another revolt was being fought in the heartland
of Western Civilization itself: Greece. The Balkans, including not only Greece but territories
like Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia, had been part of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of
years. There, the predominantly Christian subjects of the Ottomans enjoyed official religious
toleration, but chafed at the tax burden and, increasingly by the late eighteenth century,
resented the foreign rule of the Turks. This resentment coalesced around the new political
ideology of nationalism by the early nineteenth century – just as Germans resented the
conservative Austrian regime and Poles detested the Russian and Prussian states that had
divided up Polish territory, Greeks (as well as Serbs, Croatians, and the other peoples of the
Balkans) increasingly saw themselves as autonomous peoples artificially ruled by a foreign
power.
In 1821, a Greek prince named Alexander Ypsilantis organized a revolt centered on the
demand for a Greek state. A series of uprisings occurred in Greece and on various islands in
the Aegean Sea. Despite the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a nominal ally of the members
of the Holy Alliance and an official part of the Congress System, and despite the fact that the
Greek uprising was precisely the kind of thing that the Holy Alliance had been organized to
prevent, Europeans soon flocked to support the rebellion. European scholars wrote
impassioned articles about how Greece, as the birthplace of European culture, needed to be
liberated from the oriental tyranny of the Turks.
After reports of a Turkish massacre of Greeks were publicized in Europe, the Holy
Alliance demanded that Turkey grant Greek independence. The Ottomans refused, so in 1827
a combined fleet of Britain, France, and Russia sunk an Ottoman fleet. Fighting continued
between the rebels and the Ottomans for a few years, with support going to the rebels from the
71
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
European powers (and Russia actually declaring war in 1829), and in 1833 the Ottomans finally
relented and granted independence to Greece.
Thus, in this case, the cultural bias pitting European Christians against (perceived)
non-European Muslims proved stronger than the pragmatic, conservative concern with
suppressing revolutions among the European powers. Following the Greek uprising, the
Ottoman Empire entered a period of marked decline in power, its territories attracting the
unwanted attention of the European states. Europeans soon referred to the Ottoman Empire as
the sick man of Europe, and squabbling over Ottoman territory became an increasing source
of tension between the European great powers by the middle of the century.
While the Greek uprising was raging in the eastern Mediterranean, revolution was
brewing once again in France. King Charles X, the arch-conservative and nearly delusional
king of France from 1824 1830, was one of the most unpopular monarchs in Europe. Under
his watch the small group of rich politicians allowed to sit in the French Chamber of Deputies
passed a law making religious sacrilege punishable by death (no one was ever actually
executed), and he re-instituted harsh censorship even as French society had become
increasingly literate and liberal. In July of 1830, angered at the growing strength of liberalism,
Charles disenfranchised most of those who had been able to vote at all and further clamped
down on the freedom of the press.
The result was a kind of accidental revolution in which angry crowds took to the streets
and the king lost his nerve and fled. Just as they had in the first French Revolution, the army
sided with the crowd of protesters, not with the king. Charles X fled to exile in England, the last
ever Bourbon monarch to have held the throne of France, and his cousin Louis-Philippe of the
Orlans branch of the royal line became the king. The citizen king as he was called expanded
the electorate, reinstituted freedom of the press, and abandoned the kind of medieval court
etiquette favored by Charles X.
The irony of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe is that it demonstrated some of the
limitations of liberalism at the time. The electorate was very small, comprised of the wealthy
(both noble and bourgeois). The government essentially ran like a company devoted to making
the rich and connected richer and better connected, while leaving the majority of the population
without access to political power. Workers were banned from forming unions and even
relatively prosperous bourgeois were not rich enough to vote. Louis-Philippe himself became
increasingly unpopular as the years went on (satirical cartoons at the time often depicted him as
an obese, spoiled pear). The July Monarchy only lasted fourteen years, toppled during the
revolutions of 1848.
72
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Meanwhile, in Great Britain, it seemed possible that a revolution might come to pass as
well. Britain as of 1815 was comparatively liberal already, having been a constitutional
monarchy since 1689, but there was still plenty for British liberals to attack. There was a limited
representative government in the parliament, and the electorate mostly represented the
landowning gentry class. Furthermore, the electoral districts were either totally out of sync with
the British population or were, in fact, complete nonsense. Voting districts had not been revised
to reflect changes in population since the eighteenth century, and thus, the north was sorely
underrepresented. Also, there were rotten boroughs, electoral districts with no one in them
which were controlled remotely by a lord. One was a pasture. Another, called Dunwich, was
literally underwater; due to changes in sea walls, it had been inundated for centuries. It still sent
a representative to parliament, however, namely the descendant of the lords who had controlled
it before it was submerged.
A series of reforms in Britain, however, staved off a revolution along continental lines.
First, in 1828 and 1829, separate bills made it legal for Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants
to hold office. Then, the Great Reform Bill of 1832 expanded the electorate to encompass most
of the urban middle class and eliminated the rotten boroughs entirely; it only passed the
arch-conservative House of Lords because the lords were terrified that the disgruntled middle
class would join with workers in an actual revolution. The newly liberalized parliament that
followed swiftly voted to end slavery in British territories (1833), passed the controversial Poor
Laws that created public workhouses (1834) for the unemployed, and eliminated corrupt and
archaic city governments and replaced them with elected councils. A decade later, the hated
Corn Laws were finally repealed after a protracted political struggle (1846). Thus, the pattern in
British politics in the nineteenth century was a slow, steady liberalization, even as Britain
clinched its position as the most powerful single state in Europe by the middle of the century.
The Revolutions of 1848
The new political ideologies that had emerged from the backdrop of the French
Revolution and Napoleonic period coalesced in 1848. That year, all across Europe, there were
a series of revolutions that combined the liberal, socialist, and nationalist movements in a
temporary alliance against the conservative order. Starting in France, but quickly spreading to
Prussia, Austria, the smaller German kingdoms, and regions like Italy and Hungary, coalitions
rose up and, temporarily, succeeded in either running their monarchs out of their capital cities
73
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
(as in Paris) or forcing their monarchs to agree to constitutions and rationalized legal systems
(as in Prussia and Austria).
In February of 1848 in France, the unpopular king Louis-Philippe unwisely tried to crack
down on gatherings of would-be reformers. A revolutionary crowd gathered and, after panicked
soldiers fired and killed forty protesters, began to build barricades and prepare to fight back.
The king promptly fled the city. A diverse group of liberals and socialists formed a provisional
government, declared France to be a new republic, and began to draw up plans for a general
election for representatives to a new government. There would be no property restrictions on
voting – although women remained disenfranchised, as they did everywhere else – and never
again would a monarch hold the throne of France simply because of his or her dynastic birth.
Meanwhile, in Austria, crowds took to the streets of Vienna after learning of the
revolution in Paris (telegraphs now carried information across Europe in hours; thus, this was
the first time revolutions were tied together via “social media”). Peasants marched into the
capital demanding the end of feudalism. Workers demanded better wages and conditions.
Liberals demanded a constitution. In non-German areas like the Czech lands and Hungary,
after learning of the news in Vienna, nationalists rose up in the regional capitals of Prague and
Budapest demanding their own independent nations. For a time it looked like the
Austro-Hungarian Empire itself was on the verge of collapse.
Europe in 1848. Note the red marks on the map – those denote major revolutionary outbreaks.
74
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In Prussia and the other German kingdoms, a series of revolutions saw a gathering of
hundreds of would-be politicians in the city of Frankfurt. The first popularly elected national
assembly in German history gathered to draw up a constitution based on the principle of
German unity and a liberalized legal order. Not only Prussians, but representatives of the
various other kingdoms of Germany came together and began the business of creating a unified
state. The representatives, however, had to debate some thorny issues. Should the German
liberals support free enterprise or a guaranteed “right to work,” as demanded by German
socialists? Should they support the independence of Poland at the expense of the German
minority there? Should they favor Bohemian independence at the expense of the German
minority in the Czech lands? There were about 800 delegates gathered, elected from all over
the German states, operating without the official sanction of any of the kings and princes of their
homelands, and they all wanted the chance to speak.
In turn, the major debate that broke out among the delegates was about the form of
German nationalism that should be adopted: should Germany be a smaller German state
defined by German-speakers and excluding Austria, or a greater German state including
Austria and all of its various other ethnicities and languages? It took months for the former
position to win out in debate, and the final conclusion was that any state could join Germany, but
only if it left behind non-German territories (like Hungary). It should be noted, however, that
the delegates agreed that Polish and Czech nationalism had to be crushed because of German
racial superiority, an early anticipation of the Germanic ethnocentrism that would eventually
give rise to Nazism almost a century later.
This flowering of revolutionary upheaval, however, proved shockingly short-lived. The
coalitions of artisans, students, and educated liberals who had spearheaded the uprisings were
good at arguing with one another about the finer points of national identity, but not at
establishing meaningful links to the bulk of the population who did not live in or near the capital
cities. The Frankfurt Congress was the quintessential expression of that form of dysfunction:
impassioned, educated men, most of them lawyers, with few direct links to the majority of the
German population, despite the growing popularity of German nationalism. The problem for the
revolutionaries across Europe was that only in France did the king stay out of power
permanently. In the German kingdoms, Italy, and Austria, monarchs and their officials worked
behind the scenes to re-establish control of their armies and to shore up their own support while
hastily-created assemblies were trying to draw up liberal constitutions.
75
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Likewise, revolutionary coalitions soon discovered that their constituent elements did not
necessarily agree on the major political issues that had to be addressed in creating a new
government. The first sign of this dissent was in France: the socialists in the new French
parliament (called the National Assembly, just as it was in the first French republic half a century
earlier) created new “National Workshops” in Paris that offered good wages to anyone in need
of work. Soon, however, the alliance between liberals and socialists broke down over
resentment at the costs of running the workshops and the Assembly shut them down. The
workers of Paris rose up in protest and a series of bloody street battles called the June Days
broke out in which thousands of Parisian workers were killed or imprisoned. Conservative
peasants were sent by railroad from the countryside under orders from the Assembly and in just
a few days, the great socialist experiment was crushed.
In the aftermath of the June Days, the government of the Second Republic was torn
between liberals, socialists, and conservatives (the latter of whom wanted to restore the French
monarchy). In the midst of the chaos, Napoleon Bonapartes nephew, Louis Napoleon,
successfully ran for president of the Republic, winning in large part because of the simple power
of his name. Posing as a unifying force above the fray of petty politics, he was genuinely
popular across class and regional lines throughout France. In 1852 he staged a coup and
declared himself Emperor of France, just as his uncle had decades earlier. And, also like the
first Napoleon, he had his power ratified by bypassing the Assembly entirely and calling for a
plebiscite (vote of the entire male population) in support of his title, which he won by a landslide.
He took the title of Napoleon III (Napoleon II, the first Napoleon’s son, had died years earlier).
Thus, in a few short years the second experiment in democratic politics in France ended just as
the first one had: a popular dictator named Napoleon took over.
In both Austria and Prussia (as well as the smaller German kingdoms) conservative
forces turned the tide as the revolutionary coalitions wasted time debating the minutiae of the
new political order. Forces loyal to the Austrian emperor, aided by a full-scale Russian invasion
of Hungary in the name of Holy Alliance principles, restored Habsburg rule across the entirety of
the empire by the autumn of 1849. In the meantime, by the time the representatives had finally
drafted a constitution for a united Germany under Prussian rule, the Prussian king Wilhelm IV
had verified the loyalty of the army. When he was presented with the constitution, he simply
refused to accept it (he called the offered position a crown from the gutter), and one by one the
kings of the smaller German states reasserted their control across the German lands.
Ultimately, all of the revolutions failed in their immediate goals of creating liberal
republics, to say nothing of socialist dreams of state-sponsored workshops for the unemployed.
76
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
One prominent historian, much later, noted that 1848 was the year that European history
(specifically, German history, although the comment was often applied to the whole
revolutionary enterprise) reached its turning point and failed to turn. That is not entirely true,
however. Even though conservative regimes ultimately retained power, the very definition of
conservatism and the methods conservatives used were altered by the revolutions.
First, some limited constitutional and parliamentary reforms did occur in many kingdoms.
Even though (again, relying on Russian support) the Austrian Empire had been restored by
conservative forces, the new constitution of 1849 did institute a parliament, and elected
representative bodies became the norm across Europe by the latter decades of the century.
Electorates were almost always limited to property-owners, and nowhere did those electorates
include women until the twentieth century, but they still represented a major shift toward a key
element of liberal politics. Likewise, the very fact that conservative monarchies accepted the
need for written constitutions, and the final end of the old feudal obligations of peasants in areas
where those still existed, were marked steps toward liberalism.
Second, just as significantly, the power of nationalism was obvious to everyone in the
aftermath of 1848, conservative monarchs included. Only Russian invasion had prevented
Hungary from achieving its independence, and Italian uprisings against Austria had been
contained only with great difficulty. Subsequently, conservatives themselves began to adopt
some of the trappings of nationalism in the name of retaining their own power – as considered
below, the most noteworthy success stories of nineteenth-century nationalism, those of Italy and
Germany, were led by conservative politicians, not by utopian insurgents.
National Unifications
The most spectacular successes of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century
were in Italy and Germany, two areas with ancient regional identities but a total lack of political
unity. Italy had last been united during the period of the Roman Empire, whereas Germany had
never been truly united. Each term – Italy and Germany – referred to a region and a language,
not a kingdom or nation, places where people spoke similar lingual dialects and had some kind
of a shared history, but were divided between various kingdoms, cities, and empires.
This very lack of unity was, however, a source of inspiration for the nationalists of the
first half of the nineteenth century. One of the great nationalist thinkers was an Italian,
Giuseppe Mazzini, whose Young Italy movement inspired comparable movements all over
Europe in the 1830s. Mazzini was the quintessential romantic nationalist, someone who
77
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
believed that nations would organically emerge to replace the tyranny of the old feudal order of
conservative monarchs. Young Italy was just one of a number of Young Europes (e.g. Young
Germany, Young Ireland) that shared this essentially optimistic, even utopian, outlook. In turn,
many Germans dreamed of a united Germany that might escape the oppressive influence of
censorship and oppression. Those kind of radical nationalists had their day in the Revolutions
of 1848, but then saw their hopes dashed when the conservative kings of Prussia and Austria
rallied their military forces and re-took power.
That being noted, in the aftermath of 1848, even kings came to accept that the popular
desire for nations was too strong to resist forever, and at least in Prussia, the idea that a
conservative monarch might use nationalism to enhance his power came to the fore. Instead
of allowing a popular uprising that might permanently replace them, conservative monarchs
began maneuvering to co-opt the very idea of nationalism. This was not a great, sinister master
plan, but instead a series of pragmatic political calculations, usually led by high-ranking royal
officials rather than the kings themselves. Through a combination of deliberate political
manipulation and sheer chance, the first nation to unite under conservative leadership was Italy.
Italy had been dominated by foreign powers since about 1500, when Spain and France
jostled for control and extinguished the independence of most of the Italian city-states of the
Renaissance during the Italian Wars. Later, it was Austria that came to dominate in the north,
adding Italian regions and cities to the Austrian Empire. The south was an essentially feudal
kingdom, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, dominated by lesser branches of first the Habsburg
and then the Bourbon royal lines. In the middle was the Papal States, ruled directly by the pope
and still controlling Rome as of the 1850s (after a short-lived republic in 1848 was dismantled by
the French under Napoleon III). Despite the popularity of the concept of nationalism among the
members of the small northern-Italian middle class, it had relatively little mass support (and less
than 3% of the population was literate in the standard Italian language, the dialect spoken in
the region of Tuscany).
The core of Italian unification was the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, a small kingdom
consisting of a large island in the Mediterranean and a chunk of land wedged between France,
Spain, and the Austrian-dominated northern Italian states. Its king, Vittorio Emanuele II, was
from the old royal house of Savoy, and the kingdom retained independence following the
Napoleonic period because it served as a useful buffer state between the French and Austrian
spheres of influence. Vittorio Emanuele enjoyed interfering in foreign policy and took pride in
his military prowess, but he was too lazy to become involved in domestic affairs, which he left to
78
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
his ministers. In turn, the most intelligent and important of his ministers was Count Camillo di
Cavour (1810-1861), the true architect of Italian unification.
Vittorio Emmanuele II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Even by the standards of the time, he favored an
impressive mustache.
Cavour was determined to increase Piedmont-Sardinias power, and he used Italian
nationalism to do it. He did not have any sentimental attachment to the concept of Italy.
Instead, he wanted to make Piedmont-Sardinia the center of a larger, more powerful kingdom.
As of the 1850s, a war (the Crimean War, described below) had torn apart the system of
alliances that had been so crucial in maintaining the balance of power after the Congress of
Vienna, and Cavour knew that he could play one great power off against the other to Piedmonts
benefit. His plan was to use the rivalry between France and Austria to his advantage, by having
France support some kind of Italian independence from Austria in order to weaken the
Habsburgs. Cavour successfully bargained with Napoleon III, the new emperor of France as of
1852, and in 1859, with French military support, Piedmont-Sardinia pushed the Austrians out of
79
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
northern Italy and gained political ascendancy in the name of a new Italian nation. Cavour
gave France the city of Nice in return for continued support in holding the Austrians in check.
Out of nowhere, another figure entered the story: Giuseppe Garibaldi, an unexpected
political leader who brought southern Italy into the equation. Garibaldi was an adventurer, a
romantic nationalist, and a revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life as a mercenary
battling in independence campaigns and wars, mostly in South America. He rushed back to
Italy during the Revolutions of 1848 only to see his hopes of both a united Italy and freedom
from foreign control dashed thanks to the machinations of the Austrians, the French, and the
papacy.
Following Piedmont-Sardinias success in pushing Austria back in the north, however,
Garibaldi returned. In May 1860, Garibaldi, with a tiny force of 1,000 red-shirted volunteers
(mostly townsmen from the north, including numerous under-employed professional men and
students hoping to avoid their examinations) packed aboard two leaky steamships, set out to
invade Sicily. Very rapidly, Garibaldi captured Palermo, the chief city of Sicily. He succeeded
because he won the support of the Sicilian peasants by suspending taxes and promising to
divide up the large estates and distribute the land. The landowners of Sicily, even those who
were most reactionary, were forced to see that the only hope of law and order lay in protection
by this radical dictator and his revolution. Their gradual and reluctant transference of allegiance
to the insurrection was a decisive event and helped to make possible the next phase of
Garibaldi’s astonishing conquest.
On August 18 Garibaldi crossed to mainland Italy, entering Naples. He planned an
invasion of the Papal States, but Cavour convinced Napoleon III that it was necessary to block
the further progress of Garibaldi’s adventurers and assured him that the position of the papacy
itself (under French protection) would not be affected. Cavour threw the bulk of the
Piedmontese army into the Papal States, annexing them and heading off Garibaldi. When he
arrived, Garibaldi ceded his conquests to Vittorio Emanuele, and Italy thus grew to encompass
both Sicily and the south. Thus, in about six months, the northern conquests of
Piedmont-Sardinia were united with Garibaldis bizarre conquest of the south.
Cavours schemes for a Piedmontese-led united Italy had not included the south, which
like most northern Italians he held in contempt. Thus, in a real sense southern Italy emerged as
the unfortunate loser of the wars of unification, even more so than did Austria. Taxes had to be
increased, because the war of 1859 had to be paid for, and the new Italian state needed a larger
army and navy. There was also the fact that the extension of low tariffs from Piedmont to
economically backward regions often completely extinguished the few local industries that
80
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
existed. Nor did the new state have funds to alleviate distress or to undertake public works and
infrastructure projects in the south. The rural poor became more totally dependent than ever on
the local landowning class in their adjustment to the new scheme of things. Some refused to
adjust and became “brigands” who rose up against the new political order almost immediately.
The restoration of order in the south required a major military operation, the so-called Bandit
Wars, which over three years that cost more lives than had the wars of the unification itself. In
the aftermath of the wars, the south was treated almost like a colony rather than a full-fledged
part of the Italian nation, and politics in the south revolved around the growing relationship
between the official Italian government and (as of the 1880s) organized crime.
At the time of Cavour’s death in 1861 the new state had a population of twenty-two
million but an electorate of only half a million, limited to property-owners. Politics in the new
Italian state (a constitutional monarchy in which the king still had considerable power) was about
patronage: getting jobs for one’s cronies and shifting the burden of taxation onto those who
could least afford to pay it. In many respects, unification had amounted to the occupation of the
rest of the country by the north. It would be many years before the new state would begin to
serve the needs and interests of the majority of its citizens.
Germany
In Prussia, it was an official similar to Cavour, but far more memorable, chancellor Otto
Von Bismarck, who was personally responsible for unifying Germany for the first time. Bismarck
was ruthless, practical, and completely amoral in his service to the Prussian king. He was the
inventor of Realpolitik: a political philosophy that insisted on being completely pragmatic and
realistic, rather than pursuing empty goals like “glory” or pulling punches in the name of moral
rectitude. He was such a pragmatist that he ended up introducing social reforms to blunt the
growth of socialism, even though he was an arch-conservative (and thus detested the very idea
of reform). He was from an old Prussian noble family, a Junker, and he had no time for
romantic nationalist drivel, yet he directly brought about German unification. He once said that
the great questions of the time are not determined by speeches and majority decisions that
was the error of 1848 but by iron and blood.
After 1815, Germany was nothing more than the German Confederation, a free trade
zone containing a number of independent kingdoms. German nationalism, however, was very
strong, and in 1848 it culminated in the roughly year-long standoff between the elected group of
self-understood German nationalist politicians in Frankfurt and the kings of Prussia and Austria
(and those of the smaller German kingdoms). Despite the fact that the revolution failed to
81
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
create a Germany in 1848, it was now clear that a German state probably would come into
being at some point; the question remained, however, of whether it would be a greater
Germany under Austrian leadership or a smaller Germany under Prussia.
During the eighteenth century Prussia had risen from being a fairly poor backwater in the
north, lacking natural resources and remote from the centers of intellectual and cultural life
farther south, to being one of the great kingdoms of Europe. That was thanks largely to its royal
house, the Hohenzollerns, who relied on a combination of ruthless administrative efficiency and
a relentless focus on building up Prussias military. Whereas the other royal houses sought to
live in the style of the glorious French kings, the Hohenzollerns lived like reasonably well-off
nobles, pouring state revenues into the army and insisting on brutal discipline. By the middle of
the eighteenth century, Prussia was an established Great Power, part of the coalition that had
defeated Napoleon, a military equal with Austria, and was poised to exert an even greater role
in Central Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire in 1789. While many of the smallest states of the region vanished
during the Napoleonic period, Germany remained nothing more than an idea in the early
nineteenth century.
82
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Otto Von Bismarck was an inheritor of these Prussian traditions, a Prussian conservative
who served in various diplomatic posts in the Prussian kingdom before being promoted to
chancellor by the Prussian King Wilhelm I. Bismarck did not have a master plan to unify
Germany. His goal was always to maintain or, preferably, increase Prussias power (in that
sense, he was a lot like Cavour in Piedmont-Sardinia). He became highly skilled at
manipulating nationalist passions to inflame popular support for Prussian wars, but he was,
personally, deeply skeptical about a national spirit animating the need for unification.
Bismarck achieved German unification through war. He egged Austria on in a conflict
over control of a region in northwestern Germany, recently seized from Denmark, and
succeeded in getting the Austrians to declare war on Prussia. Prussias modernized and
well-trained army smashed the Austrians in a few months in 1866. Significantly, however,
Bismarck convinced the Prussian king not to order a march on Vienna and the occupation of
Austria itself; the goal for Bismarck had been to knock Austria out of contention as the possible
governing power of Germany, not to try to conquer and control it. Conquest of Austria, he
thought, would just lead to more headaches for Prussia since the Austrians would resent the
Prussian takeover. This decision – not to conquer Austria when Prussia could have – was a
perfect example of Realpolitik: a bloodless, realistic, coldly calculating approach to achieving
greater political power without succumbing to some kind of ill-considered quest for glory.
After defeating Austria, Bismarck essentially tricked France into going to war. Bismarck
had toyed with Napoleon III, ignoring French demands for territory if it came to war between
Austria and Prussia. In the aftermath of the war itself, the Spanish throne suddenly became
available because of a coup, and Bismarck sponsored a Prussian candidate related to the
former Spanish ruling line, none other than the Bourbons of France. Even though Napoleon III
was not a Bourbon, this was a direct attack on Frances sphere of influence. Napoleon III was
infuriated – Bismarck even humiliated Napoleon by leaking a memo to the press in which
Napoleons machinations for territory before the Austro-Prussian War were revealed. Feeling
both threatened and belittled, Napoleon insisted that France declare war on Prussia.
The ensuing Franco-Prussian War was short and sweet for Prussia; it started in late
1870 and was over by early 1871. Napoleon III foolishly led the French army into battle
personally (sick with the flu and without an ounce of his famous uncles tactical expertise) and
was subsequently captured in the field. French forces were poorly led and could not stand up to
Prussian training and tactics, and every important engagement was won by the Prussians as a
result. In one fell swoop, the myth of French military supremacy, a legacy from the first
83
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Napoleon, was destroyed, and Europeans were confronted with the fact that a new military
power had asserted its strength in its stead.
In the aftermath of the Prussian victory, a new German empire was declared at
Versailles, with Wilhelm I taking the title of Kaiser (emperor) of the German Reich (empire). The
various smaller German kingdoms renounced their independence and pledged themselves to
the newborn state in the process. France lost two important eastern regions, Alsace and
Lorraine, and had to pay a considerable war indemnity, inspiring an enormous amount of
resentment among the French (and leading to a desire for revanche revenge). The German
Empire became a constitutional monarchy in which all men over 25 could vote for
representatives in the Reichstag, the parliament, but an unelected federal council held
considerable power and the emperor held more. Thus, even though Germany was a
constitutional monarchy, it was hardly the liberal vision of a democratic state.
In one of the more bizarre historical episodes of the time, the city of Paris refused to
concede defeat and fought on against the Prussians for a short while before the Prussians
simply fell back and handed off the issue to the hastily-declared Third Republic of France
(Napoleon III went into exile). Paris declared itself an independent city-state organized along
socialist lines, the Paris Commune, and for a few months (from March through late May) the
French army besieged the communards in the capital. In the end, a French army stormed the
city and approximately 20,000 communards were executed.
While Italian unification had redrawn the map of Europe and disturbed the balance of
power at least somewhat, German unification utterly destroyed it. Germany was not just
Prussia, it was Prussia and most of the rest of what once had been the Holy Roman Empire. It
had a large population, a rapidly industrializing, wealthy economy, and proven military might.
The period after German unification, from 1871 until the start of World War I in 1914, was one in
which the European great powers jockeyed for position, built up their respective military
strength, and scrambled to seize territory overseas before their rivals did. Long gone were the
days of the Congress System and a balance of power based on the desire for peace.
84
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Germany after unification. Note that the color-coded regions were the states of the German
Empire: they retained considerable autonomy despite now being part of a single unified nation.
Russia
In many ways, the histories of Great Britain and Russia were always exceptional in the
context of nineteenth-century European politics. Neither underwent revolutionary upheavals,
and neither had much difficulty suppressing nationalist movements from within their respective
empires. And yet, the two countries were in many ways polar opposites: Britain was an
advanced industrial economy with a liberal constitution and a monarchy whose real political
power declined over time, while Russia was an overwhelmingly agricultural – even feudal –
economy with a powerful, autocratic head of state: the Tsar. The modernizing trends that
changed much of the rest of Europe over the course of the century had the least impact on
Russia of any of the major states.
Tsar Alexander I, who ruled from 1801 1825, was present at the Congress of Vienna.
He was intensely conservative and had a powerful attraction to Orthodox Christian mysticism.
85
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In turn, he sincerely believed that he had a mission from God to maintain the sacred order of
monarchy, nobility, and clergy. In this, he was influenced by timing: he became Tsar shortly after
Napoleon seized power in France. To Alexander, the French Revolution was not just a bad idea
or a threat to his personal power, it was an unholy abomination, a perversion of the proper order
of society as it had been ordained from on high. Ultimately, it was the Russians who defeated
Napoleon’s armies in 1812, thanks largely to the winter and their brilliant tactical decision to
camp out and wait for the French to run out of supplies. Alexander sat in a position of great
power at the Congress of Vienna because of the strength of his armies and the prestige he had
earned chasing the French forces back to France and aiding in their defeat in 1814 and 1815.
In 1815, Russia, along with Austria and Prussia (and, technically, the restored French
monarchy), formed the Holy Alliance that vowed to crush attempts to overthrow the social and
political order with force. For Austria, this was a pragmatic gesture because the Habsburgs had
the most to lose in the face of nationalism. For Prussia, it was a way to cement their great
power status and to be treated as an equal by the other members of the anti-Napoleonic
coalition. For Russia and for Alexander, however, it was nothing less than a true holy mission
that had to happen regardless of any practical benefits. Russia did indeed intervene to crush
rebellions over the course of the next few decades, most importantly in 1848 when it decimated
the Hungarian Revolution and returned Hungary to the Austrians.
Alexander I died in 1825 and his death promptly set off the Decembrist Uprising (noted
above). Not only was the uprising crushed, but Alexander’s younger brother and heir Nikolai I
took a personal hand in interrogating its organizers. Nikolai was much less of a mystic than his
brother had been, but he was equally trenchant in his opposition to any loosening of the
Russian social order. He went on to rule for decades (r. 1825 – 1855), and during that time he
did everything in his power to champion the conservative cause. As noted earlier, not only was
he a staunch supporter of the Holy Alliance, but he formed the world’s first modern secret police
force, The Third Section. Nikolai declared his three principles of government in 1832:
autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality, the last of the three in service to the idea of Russian
supremacy over its enormous empire (and the other ethnic groups present in it).
Not only were the Tsars of the nineteenth century arch-conservatives, the vast majority
of the Russian population had no interest in political change. They were among the poorest,
least educated, and most oppressed in Europe: the Russian serfs. The Russian Orthodox
Church was closely tied to the government and preached total obedience to the authority of the
Tsar. For that tiny sliver of educated society that could read and had access to foreign books,
even to discuss politics at all, let alone advocate reform of any kind, was a punishable crime,
86
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
with thousands exiled to Siberia for the crime of having made an off-hand remark about politics
or owning a book describing a political concept originating in the west.
Tsar Nikolai I, architect of nineteenth-century Russian autocracy.
These people, almost all of whom were nobles, formed the Russian intelligentsia: a
small class of educated and very self-consciously cultured people who were at the forefront of
Russian literature and artistic creation. They were the ones who began modern Russian
literature itself in this period, producing great Russian novelists like Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and
Chekhov. The themes of their art dealt with both the thorny political issues of their time and a
kind of ongoing spiritual quest to understand the Russian soul, something that was usually
identified with both nature and the mystical qualities of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The problem with being a member of the intelligentsia in Russia, however, was that
reading or discussing anything to do with politics was itself sufficient cause for arrest and exile
to Siberia. Many of the great novelists spent at least part of their lives in Siberia as a result;
even Dostoevsky, who ended up being a deeply conservative thinker who was hostile to radical,
or even disruptive, politics, spent part of his life in exile. To be an intellectual was almost the
equivalent of being a criminal in the eyes of the state. It was a short step for intellectuals to
simply act like criminals. It was in large part thanks to the police apparatus that matured under
Nikolai Is rule that this phenomenon occurred.
87
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
That being noted, a momentous event occurred late in Nikolais reign unrelated to Tsarist
autocracy per se: the destruction of the Congress System created at the Congress of Vienna,
thanks to the Crimean War. From 1854 – 1856, France and Britain fought a war against Russia
in the Crimea, a peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea. The war was fought over
great power politics: Russia tried to take advantage of the political decline of the Ottoman
Empire to assert total control in the region of the Black Sea, and both France and Britain
recognized those machinations as a threat to the balance of power. The Austrian government
unwisely stayed neutral during the ensuing war, which ruptured the alliance between it and
Russia (after all, Russia had just put down the Hungarian uprising on Austrias behalf during the
Revolutions of 1848).
The Crimean War, while not long by the standards of the Napoleonic period, was
nevertheless a major conflict. 600,000 men died in the war, the majority from disease thanks to
the abysmal conditions at the front. Russia ultimately lost, and the end result was that the
Congress System was finally undone. From that point on, the great powers of Europe were in
open competition with one another, fearing and resenting each other more so than they feared
revolutionary forces from within – one manifestation of this newfound rivalry was the wars that
saw the birth of Italy and Germany, described above.
Nikolai finally died in 1855, and his son Alexander II took the throne (in the midst of the
war). In 1861, following Russias defeat, Alexander made the momentous decision to
emancipate the serfs, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States
freed the African-American slaves. It was thought by many Russian elites that one of the
reasons Russia had lost the war was its backwardness, a backwardness that Alexander and
many others believed could not be mitigated with serfdom weighing down the possibility of
progress. The emancipation, however, had surprisingly little immediate impact on Russian
society, because the serfs legally owed the government the money that had been distributed to
buy their freedom from the nobility. Thus, for generations, serfs were still tied to the same land,
laboring both to survive and to pay off the debt incurred with their freedom.
The emancipation of the serfs was the single most significant reform spearheaded by a
Russian Tsar of the nineteenth century. It is thus ironic that Alexander II was the only Tsar
assassinated by a radical terrorist group. The group that killed him, The People’s Will, believed
that the assassination of a Tsar would result in an enormous uprising of the newly-liberated
peasants (i.e. the former serfs). In this, they were inspired by the anarchist socialism of the
exiled Mikhail Bakunin, whose vision of an apocalyptic revolutionary transformation spoke
directly to the social and political conditions of his native Russia.
88
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Before the assassination, young members of the intelligentsia formed a social movement
known as the Narodniks. The Narodniks advocated going back to the people, living among
and trying to educate the former serfs, which they did during the spring of 1874. The Narodniks
believed that the serfs would form the nucleus of a revolutionary class that would rise up and
dismantle Tsarist autocracy if properly educated. Instead, the serfs were deeply suspicious of
the urban, educated Narodniks, and in many cases the serfs actually turned the Narodniks in to
the local authorities. It was disappointed Narodniks that formed the Peoples Will, and in March
of 1881 they succeeded in killing Alexander II.
While The Peoples Will had hoped that their assassination of Alexander II would result
in a spontaneous uprising of the peasants against Tsarist despotism, nothing of the sort
occurred. Instead, another reactionary Tsar, Alexander III, came to the throne and ruthlessly
hunted down the terrorist groups. What had changed by the 1880s, however, was that there
were terrorist groups, not just intellectuals guilty of discussing politics, and the one thing that
practically every intellectual in Russian society (terrorist or not) believed was that meaningful
change would require a significant, even radical, restructuring of Russian society. To many
intellectuals and terrorists, there was no room for weak-kneed reformism; it was revolution or
nothing. This is the context into which Vladimir Lenin and the other future Bolsheviks, the
leaders of the Russian Communist Party who seized power in 1917, were born. Lenin was a
brilliant intellectual who synthesized the writings of Marx with the tradition of Russian radical
terrorism, producing a potent combination of theoretical and practical political concepts that
were realized in 1917.
Thus, by the late nineteenth century Russia had changed the least among the great
powers of Europe. Whereas the other states, from Austria to the new Germany to France, had
all adopted at least some form of representative government, Russia remained staunchly
autocratic and monarchical. The Russian economy was overwhelmingly agricultural and rural,
with industrialization only arriving at the very end of the century in and around some of the large
cities of western Russia. Russia was, in a sense, stuck in a historical impasse. That impasse
would only end with outright revolution, first in 1905 and again in 1917.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Ferdinand VII – Public Domain
Decembrist Uprising – Public Domain
Victor Emmanuel II – Public Domain
Holy Roman Empire – Public Domain
89
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Germany 1871 – kgberger
Nikolai I – Public Domain
90
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 5: Culture, Science, and
Pseudo-Science
Victorian Culture
Along with the enormous economic and political changes that occurred in Europe over
the course of the nineteenth century came equally momentous shifts in culture and learning.
The cultural era of this period is known as Victorianism, the culture of the dominant
bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century. That culture was named after the
British Queen Victoria, who presided over the zenith of British power and the height of British
imperialism. Victorias astonishingly long reign, from 1837 to 1901, coincided with the triumph of
bourgeois norms of behavior among self-understood elites.
Queen Victoria, the symbolic matriarch of Western culture in the nineteenth century.
91
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Victorianism was the culture of top hats, of dresses that covered every inch of the female
body, of rigid gender norms, and of an almost pathological fear of sexuality. Its defining
characteristic was the desire for security, especially security from the influence of the lower
classes. Class divisions were made visible in the clothing and manners of individuals, with each
class outfitted in distinct uniforms this was a time when ones hat indicated ones income and
class membership. It was a time in which the bourgeoisie, increasingly mixed with the old
nobility, came to assert a self-confident vision of a single European culture that, they thought,
should dominate the world. Social elites insisted that scientific progress, economic growth, and
their own increasing political power were all results of the superiority of European civilization, a
civilization that had reached its pinnacle thanks to their own ingenuity. Particularly by the latter
decades of the century, they characterized that superiority in racial terms.
According to the great Victorian psychologist Sigmund Freud, Victorianism was
fundamentally about the repression of natural instincts. There were always threats present in
the lives of social elites at the time: the threat of sexual impropriety, the threat of financial failure,
the threat of immoral behavior being discovered in public, threats which were all tied to shame.
There was clearly a Christian precedent for Victorian obsessions, and Victorianism was certainly
tied to Christian piety. What had changed, however, is that the impulse to tie morality to a code
of shame was secularized in the Victorian era to apply to everything, especially in economics.
Simply put, there was a moral connection between virtue and economic success. The wealthy
came to regard their social and economic status as proof of their strong ethical character, not
just luck, connections, or hard work. Thus, Victorian culture included a belief in the existence of
good and evil in the moral character of individuals, traits that science, they thought, should be
able to identify just as it was now able to identify bacteria.
In turn, the Victorian bourgeoisie accused the working class of inherent weakness and
turpitude. In the minds of the bourgeoisie, as the labor movements and socialist parties grew,
the demands of the working class for shortened working days spoke not to their exhaustion and
exploitation, but to their laziness and lack of work ethic. The Victorian bourgeoisie were the
champions of the notion that everyone got what they deserved and that science itself would
eventually ratify the social order. What the Victorian elite feared more than anything was that
the working class would somehow overwhelm them, through a communist revolution or by
simply “breeding” out of control. They tended to fear a concomitant national decline, sometimes
even imagining that Western Civilization itself had reached its pinnacle and was doomed to
degenerate.
92
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
There were some remarkable contrasts between the ideology of Victorian life and its
lived reality. Even though much of the fear of social degeneration was exaggerated, it is also
true that alcoholism became much more common (both because alcohol was cheaper and
because urbanization lent itself to casual drinking), and drug use spread. Cocaine was
regarded as a medicinal pick-me-up, and respectable diners sometimes finished meals with
strawberries dipped in ether. Many novels written around the turn of the twentieth century
critiqued the hypocrisy of social elites and their pretensions to rectitude. Two classics of horror
writing, Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, are both about the monsters that lurked within
bourgeois society. Both were written about Victorian elites who were actually terrible beasts,
just under the surface of their respectable exteriors.
Nowhere was the Victorian obsession with defining and restricting people into
carefully-defined categories stronger than in gender roles. Male writers, theorists, and even
scientists claimed that men and women were opposites: rational, forceful, naturally courageous
men were contrasted with irrational, but gentle and demure, women. Men of all social classes
dressed increasingly alike, in sensible, comfortable trousers, jackets, and hats (albeit with
different hats for different classes). Women wore wildly impractical dresses with sometimes
ludicrously tight corsets underneath, the better to serve their social function as ornaments to
beautify the household. The stifling restrictions on women and their infantilization by men were
major factors behind the rise of the feminist movement in the second half of the century,
described below.
Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Discoveries and Theories
Science made incredible advances in the Victorian era. Some of the most important
breakthroughs had to do with medicine and biology. Those genuine advances, however, were
accompanied by the growth of scholarship that claimed to be truly scientific, but that violated the
tenets of the scientific method, employed sloppy methods, were based on false premises, or
were otherwise simply factually inaccurate. Those fields constitute branches of pseudo-,
meaning false, science.
Disease had always been the greatest threat to humankind before the nineteenth
century – of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, it was Pestilence that traditionally delivered
the most bodies to Death. In turn, the link between filth and disease had always been
understood, but the rapid urbanization of the nineteenth century lent new urgency to the
problem. This led to important advances in municipal planning, like modern sewer systems –
Londons was built in 1848 after a terrible epidemic of cholera. Thus, before the mechanisms of
93
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
contagion were understood, at least some means to combat it were nevertheless implemented
in some European cities. Likewise, the first practical applications of chemistry to medicine
occurred with the invention of anesthesia in the 1840s, allowing the possibility of surgery without
horrendous agony for the first time in history.
By far the most important advance in medicine, however, was in bacteriology, first
pioneered by the French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895). Starting with practical
experiments on the process of fermentation in 1854, Pasteur built on his ideas and proved that
disease was caused by microscopic organisms. Pasteurs subsequent accomplishments are
Newtonian in their scope: he definitively proved that the spontaneous generation of life was
impossible and that microbes were responsible for putrefaction. He developed the aptly named
technique of pasteurization to make foodstuffs safe (originally in service to the French wine
industry), and he went on to develop effective vaccines against diseases like anthrax that
affected both humans and animals. In the course of just a few decades, Pasteur overturned the
entire understanding of health itself. Other scientists followed his lead, and by the end of the
century, deaths in Europe by infectious disease dropped by a full sixty percent, primarily through
improvements in hygiene (antibiotics would not be developed until the end of the 1920s).
Pasteur, with some of his early experimental subjects.
94
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
These advances were met with understandable excitement. At the same time, however,
they fed into a newfound obsession with cleanliness. All of a sudden, people understood that
they lived in a dirty world full of invisible enemies – germs. Good hygiene became both a matter
of survival and a badge of class identity for the bourgeoisie, and the inherent dirtiness of manual
labor was further cause for bourgeois contempt for the working classes. For those who could
afford the servants to do the work, homes and businesses were regularly scrubbed with caustic
soaps, but there was little to be done in the squalor of working-class tenements and urban
slums.
Comparable scientific breakthroughs occurred in the fields of natural history and biology.
For centuries, naturalists (the term for what would later be known as biologists) had been
puzzled by the fact that the fossils of marine animals could be found on mountaintops.
Likewise, fossils embedded in rock were a conundrum that the biblical story of creation could
not explain. By the early nineteenth century, some scientists argued that these phenomena
could only occur through stratification of rock, a process that would take millions, not thousands,
of years. The most famous geologist at the time was the British naturalist Charles Lyell, whose
Principles of Geology went through eleven editions it was so popular among the reading public.
Archeological discoveries in the middle of the century linked human civilization to very long time
frames as well, with the discovery of ancient tools and the remains of settlements pushing the
existence of human civilization back thousands of years from earlier concepts (all of which had
been based on a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible).
In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his Origin of the Species. In it,
Darwin argued that lifeforms “evolve” over time thanks to random changes in their physical and
mental structure. Some of these traits are beneficial and increase the likelihood that the
individuals with them will survive and propagate, while others are not and tend to disappear as
their carriers die off. Darwin based his arguments on both the fossil record and what he had
discovered as the naturalist aboard a British research vessel, the HMS Beagle, that toured the
coasts of South America and visited the Galapagos Islands off its west coast. There, Darwin
had encountered numerous species that were uniquely adapted to live only in specific, limited
areas. On returning to Britain, he concluded that only changes over time within species
themselves could account for his discoveries.
Darwins arguments shocked most of his contemporaries. His theory directly
contradicted the biblical account of the natural world, in which Gods creation is fundamentally
static. In addition, Darwins account argued that nature itself was a profoundly hostile place to
all living things; even as nature sustains species, it constantly tests individuals and kills off the
95
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
weak. Evolutionary adaptations are random, not systematic, and are as likely to result in
dangerous (for individuals) weaknesses as newfound sources of strength. There was no plan
embedded in evolution, only random adaptation.
Nevertheless, Darwins theory was the first to systematically explain the existence of
fossils and biological adaptation based on hard evidence. As early as 1870 three-quarters of
British scientists believed evolutionary theory to be accurate, even before the mechanism by
which evolution occurred, genetics, was understood. In 1871, in his Descent of Man, Darwin
explicitly tied human evolution to his earlier model and argued that humans are descended from
other hominids – the great apes. Despite popular backlash prompted by both religious
conviction and the simple distaste of being related to apes, Darwinian theory went on to become
one of the founding discoveries of modern biological science.
Caricatures of Darwin as a monkey appeared almost as soon as the Descent of Man was
published.
The mechanism of how evolution occurred, was not known during Darwins lifetime, at
least to very many people. Unknown to anyone at the time, during the 1850s and 1860s an
Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel carried out a series of experiments with pea plants in his
monasterys garden and, in the process, discovered the basic principles of genetics. Mendel
first presented his work in 1865, but it was entirely forgotten. It was rediscovered by a number
96
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
of scholars simultaneously in 1900, and in the process, was linked to Darwins evolutionary
concepts. With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, the mechanisms by which evolution occurs
were revealed: it is in gene mutation that new traits emerge, and genes that favor the survival of
offspring tend to dominate those that harm it.
Social Science and Pseudo-Science
Many Europeans regarded Darwinian theory as proof of progress: nature itself ensured
that the human species would improve over time. Very quickly, however, evolutionary theory
was taken over as a justification for both rigid class distinctions and racism. A large number of
people, starting with elite male theorists, came to believe that Darwinism implied that a parallel
kind of evolutionary process was at work in human society. In this view, success and power is
the result of superior breeding, not just luck and education. The rich fundamentally deserve to
be rich, and the poor (encumbered by their poor biological traits) deserve to be poor. This set of
concepts came to be known as Social Darwinism. Drawing on the work of Arthur de Gobineau,
the great nineteenth-century proponent of racial hierarchy described in a previous chapter, the
British writer and engineer Herbert Spencer emerged as the most significant proponent of Social
Darwinism. He summarized his outlook with the phrase the survival of the fittest, a phrase
often misattributed to Darwin himself. Spencer was a fierce proponent of free market
economics and also contributed to the process of defining human races in biological terms,
rather than cultural or historical ones.
In turn, the new movement led an explosion of pseudo-scientific apologetics for notions
of racial hierarchy. Usually, Social Darwinists claimed that it was not just that non-white races
were inherently inferior, it was that they had reached a certain stage of evolution but stopped,
while the white race had continued to evolve. Illustrations of the evolutionary process in
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century encyclopedias and dictionaries were replete with an
evolutionary chain from small creatures through monkeys and apes and then on to non-white
human races, culminating with the supposedly fully evolved European race.
97
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
A typical pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy. (In fact, all human races have skulls of identical
dimensions and shapes, not to mention identical intellectual and moral capacities.)
In addition to non-white races, Social Darwinists targeted elements of their own societies
for vilification, often lumping together various identities and behaviors as unfit. For Social
Darwinists, the “unfit” included alcoholics, those who were promiscuous, unwed mothers,
criminals, the developmentally disabled, and those with congenital disabilities. Social
Darwinism’s prevailing theory was that charity or artificial checks on the exploitation of workers
like trade unions would lead to the survival of the unfit, which would in turn cause the human
species to decline. Likewise, charity, aid, and rehabilitation were misplaced, since they would
supposedly lead to the survival of the unfit and thereby drag down the health of society overall.
Thus, the best policy was to allow the “unfit” to die off if possible, and to try to impose limits on
their breeding if not. Social Darwinism soon led to the field of eugenics, which advocated
programs to sterilize the “unfit.”
Ironically, even as Social Darwinism provided a pseudo-scientific foundation for racist
and sexist cultural assumptions, these notions of race and culture also fed into the fear of
degeneration mentioned above. In the midst of the squalor of working-class life, or in terms of
98
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
the increasing rates of drug use and alcoholism, many people came to fear that certain
destructive traits were not only flourishing in Europe, but were being passed on. There was
thus a great fear that the masses of the weak and unintelligent could and would spread their
weakness through high birth-rates, while the smart and capable were simply overwhelmed.
Not all of the theories to explain behavior were so morally and scientifically questionable,
however. In the late nineteenth century, a Frenchman (Emile Durkheim) and a German (Max
Weber) independently began the academic discipline that would become sociology: the
systematic study of how people behave in complex societies. Durkheim treated Christianity like
just another set of rituals and beliefs whose real purpose was the regulation of behavior, while
Weber provided an enormous number of insights about the operation of governments, religious
traditions, and educational institutions. Another German, Leopold von Ranke, created the first
truly systematic forms of historical research, in turn creating the academic discipline of history
itself.
Sociology and academic history were part of a larger innovation in human learning: the
social sciences. These were disciplines that tried to deduce facts about human behavior that
were equally valid to natural sciences various insights about the operations of the natural world.
The dream of the social sciences was to arrive at rules of behavior, politics, and historical
development that were as certain and unshakable as biology or geology. Unfortunately, as
academic disciplines proliferated and scholars proposed theories to explain politics, social
organization, and economics it was often difficult to distinguish between sound theories based
on empirical evidence and pseudo-scientific or pseudo-scholarly theories (like those
surrounding racial hierarchy) based instead on ideology and sloppy methodology.
Mass Culture
The Victorian era saw the emergence of the first modern, industrialized, “mass”
societies. One of the characteristics of industrial societies, above and beyond industrial
technology and the use of fossil fuels themselves, is the fact that culture itself becomes mass
produced. Written material went from the form of books, which had been expensive and treated
with great care in the early centuries of printing, to mass-market periodicals, newspapers, and
cheap print. People went from inhabitants of villages and regions that were fiercely proud of
their identities to inhabitants of larger and larger, and hence more anonymous and alienating,
cities. Material goods, mass-produced, became much cheaper over the course of the
nineteenth century thanks to industrialization, and in the process they could be used up and
99
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
thrown away with a much more casual attitude by more and more people. Two examples of this
phenomenon were the spread of literacy and the rise of consumerism.
The nineteenth century was the century of mass literacy. In France, male literacy was
just below 50% as of the French Revolution, but it was almost 80% in 1870 and almost 100%
just thirty years later. Female literacy was close behind. This had everything to do with the
spread of printing in vernacular languages, as well as mass education. In France, mass secular
free education happened in 1882 under the prime minister of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry.
Free, public primary school did more to bind together the French in a shared national culture
than anything before or since, as every child in France was taught in standard French and
studied the same subjects.
Paper became vastly cheaper as well. Paper had long been made from rags, which
were shredded, compressed together, and reconstituted. The resulting paper was durable but
expensive. In the late nineteenth century printers began to make paper out of wood pulp, which
dropped it to about a quarter of the former price. As of 1880, the linotype machine was
invented, which also made printing much cheaper and more simple than it had been. Thus, it
became vastly cheaper and easier to publish newspapers by the late nineteenth century.
There was also a positive change in the buying power of the average person. From
1850 to 1900, the average French person saw their real purchasing power increase by 165%.
Comparable increases occurred in the other dynamic, commercial, and industrial economies of
western Europe (and, eventually, the United States). This increase in the ability of average
people to afford commodities above and beyond those they needed to survive was ultimately
based on the energy unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. Even with the struggles over the
quality of life of working people, by the late nineteenth century goods were simply so cheap to
produce that the average person actually did enjoy a better quality of life and could buy things
like consumables and periodicals.
One result of the cheapening of print and the rise in buying power was yellow
journalism, sensationalized accounts of political events that stretched the truth to sell copies. In
France, the first major paper of this type was called Le Petit Journal, an extremely inexpensive
and sensationalistic paper which avoided political commentary in favor of banal, mainstream
expressions of popular opinion. Rival papers soon sprang up, but what they had in common
was that they did not try to change or influence opinion so much as they reinforced it – each
political persuasion was now served by at least one newspaper that preached to the choir,
reinforcing pre-existing ideological outlooks rather than confronting them with inconvenient
facts.
100
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Overall, the kind of journalism that exploded in the late nineteenth century lent itself to
the cultivation of scandals. Important events and trends were tied to the sensationalizing
journalism of the day. For instance, a naval arms race between Britain and Germany that was
one of the causes of World War I had much to do with the press of both countries playing up the
threat of being outpaced by their national rival. The Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Jewish
army officer was falsely accused of treason, spun to the point that some people were predicting
civil war thanks largely to the massive amount of press on both sides of the scandal (the
Dreyfus Affair is considered in detail below). Likewise, imperialism, the practice of invading
other parts of the world to establish and expand global empires, received much of its popular
support from articles praising the civilizing mission involved in occupying a couple of thousand
square miles in Africa that the reader had never heard of before.
In short, the politics of the latter part of the nineteenth century were embedded in
journalism. As almost all of the states of Europe moved toward male suffrage, leaders were
often shocked by the fact that they had to cultivate public opinion in order to pass the laws they
supported. Journals became the mouthpieces of political positions, which both broadened the
public sphere to an unprecedented extent and, in a way, sometimes cheapened political
opinions to the level of banal slogans.
Another seismic shift occurred in the sphere of acquisition. In the early modern era,
luxury goods were basically reserved for the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie. There simply
was not enough social wealth for the vast majority of Europeans to buy many things they did not
need. The average peasant or shopkeeper, even fairly prosperous ones, owned only a few sets
of clothes, which were repaired rather than replaced over time. More to the point, most people
did not think of money as something to save in good years in which the average person
somehow had extra money, he or she would simply spend it on more food or, especially for
men, alcohol, because it was impossible to anticipate having a surplus again in the future.
Perhaps the iconic example of a shift in patterns of acquisition and consumerism was
the advent of department stores. Department stores represented the shift into recognizably
modern patterns of buying, in which people shopped not just for necessities, but for small
luxuries. The former patterns of consumption had been of small, family-run shops and traveling
peddlers, a system in which bargaining was common and there was next to no advertising to
speak of. With department stores, prices were fixed and a wide variety of goods of different
genres were on display together. Advertising became ubiquitous and branded products could
be found across the length and breadth of a given country – just as print and primary education
inculcated national identity, so did the fact that consumer goods were increasingly standardized.
101
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The first area to be affected by these shifts was textiles, both in terms of clothing and
housewares like sheets and curtains. Manufacturing and semi-skilled labor dramatically
decreased the price of textiles, and department stores carried large selections that many people
could afford. People below the level of the rich came not only to own many different items of
clothing, but they voluntarily replaced clothing due to shifts in fashion, not just because it was
worn out.
The first real department store was the Bon March in Paris. It was built in the 1840s
but underwent a series of expansions until it occupied an entire city block. By 1906 it had 4,500
employees. During the 1880s it had 10,000 clients a day, up to 70,000 a day during its
February white sales in which it sold linens for reduced prices. The 1860s were the birth of the
seaside holiday, which the Bon March helped invent by selling a whole range of holiday goods.
By the 1870s there were mail-order catalogs and tourists considered a visit to the Bon March
to be on the same level as one to the Arc de Triomphe built by Napoleon to commemorate his
victories.
The Bon March – the temple of consumerism.
Ultimately, the Victorian Era saw the birth of modern consumerism, in which economies
became dependent on the consumption of non-essential goods by ordinary people. The mass
society inaugurated by the industrial revolution came of age in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, a century after it had begun in the coal mines and textile mills of Northern
England. That society, with its bourgeois standards, its triumphant self-confidence, and its
deep-seated scientific social and racial attitudes, was in the process of taking over much of the
world at precisely the same time.
102
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Culture Struggles
As demonstrated by the conservative appropriation of nationalism in the cases of Italy
and Germany, the stakes of political and cultural identity had changed significantly over the
course of the nineteenth century. Within the nations of Europe – and for the first time in history it
was appropriate to speak of nations instead of just states – major struggles erupted centering
on national identity. After all, liberal and nationalistic legal frameworks had triumphed almost
everywhere in Europe by turn of the twentieth century, but in significant ways the
enfranchisement of each nations citizens was still limited. Most obviously, nowhere did women
have the right to vote, and womens legal rights in general were severely curtailed everywhere.
Likewise, while voting rights existed for some male citizens in most nations by 1900 (generally,
universal manhood suffrage came about only in the aftermath of World War I), conflicts
remained concerning citizenship itself.
These struggles over national identity and legal rights occurred across Europe. The
term culture struggle itself comes from Germany. Following German unification, Otto von
Bismarck led an officially-declared culture struggle a Kulturkampf against Roman
Catholicism, and later, against socialism. The term lends itself, however, to a number of
conflicts that occurred in Europe (and America) around the turn of the century, most significantly
those having to do with feminism and with the legal and cultural status of European Jews.
The Kulturkampf was in part a product of Germanys unique form of government. The
political structure of the newly-united nation of Germany set it apart from the far more liberal
regimes in Britain and France. While there was an elected parliament, the Reichstag, it did not
exercise the same degree of political power as did the British parliament or the French Chamber
of Deputies and Senate. The German chancellor and the cabinet answered not to the
Reichstag but to the Kaiser (the emperor), and while the regional governments had
considerable control locally, the federal structure was highly authoritarian. In turn, there was a
comparatively weak liberal movement in Germany because most German liberals saw the
unification of Germany as a triumph and held Bismarck in high regard, despite his
arch-conservative character. Likewise, most liberals detested socialism, especially as the
German socialist party, the SPD, emerged in the 1870s as one of the most powerful political
parties.
103
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Bismarck represented the old Lutheran Prussian nobility, the Junkers, and he not only
loathed socialism but also Catholicism. He (along with many other northern Germans) regarded
Catholicism as alien to German culture and an existential threat to German unity. Since the
Reformation of the sixteenth century, the majority of northern Germans had been Lutherans,
and many were very hostile to the Catholic church. Still, 35% of Germans were Catholic, mostly
in the south, and the Catholic Center Party emerged in 1870 to represent their interests. The
same year the Catholic church issued the doctrine of papal infallibility – the claim that the Pope
literally could not be wrong in manners of faith and doctrine – and Bismarck feared that a future
pope might someday order German Catholics not to obey the state.
Thus, in 1873 he began an official state campaign against Catholics. Priests in
Germany had to endure indoctrination from the state in order to be openly ordained, and the
state would henceforth only recognize civil marriages. More laws followed, including the right of
the state to expel priests who refused to abide by anti-Catholic measures. A young German
Catholic tried to assassinate Bismarck in 1874, which only made him more intent on carrying
forward with his campaign.
Soon, however, Bismarck realized that the state might need the alliance of the Catholic
Center Party against the socialists, as the SPD continued to grow. Thus, he relaxed the
anti-Catholic measures (although Catholics were still kept out of important state offices, as were
Jews) and instead focused on measures against the SPD. Two assassination attempts against
the Kaiser, despite being carried out by men who had nothing to do with socialism, gave
Bismarck the pretext, and the Reichstag immediately passed laws that amounted to a ban on
the SPD itself.
The SPD itself represented a major shift in the identity of socialism following the
Revolutions of 1848. Whereas early socialists rarely organized into formal political parties – not
least because most states in Europe before 1848 were not democracies of any kind – socialists
in the post-1848 era became increasingly militant and organized. In September of 1864, a
congress of socialists from across Europe and the United States gathered in London and
founded the International Workingmens Association – the First International – in order to better
coordinate their efforts. Within the nations of Europe, socialist parties soon acquired mass
followings among the industrial working class, with the SPD joined by sister parties in France,
Britain (where it was known as the Labour Party), Italy, and elsewhere.
The SPD was founded in 1875 out of various other socialist unions and parties that
united in a single socialist movement. Bismarck was utterly opposed to socialism, and after
mostly abandoning the anti-Catholic focus of the Kulturkampf, he pushed laws through the
104
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Reichstag in 1878 that banned the SPD and trade unions entirely. Ironically, however, individual
socialists could still run for office and campaign for socialism. Bismarcks response was
typically pragmatic: he supported social legislation, including pensions for workers, in a bid to
keep the socialists from attracting new members and growing even more militant. Thus, in an
ironic historical paradox, some of the first welfare state provisions in the world were passed by
a conservative government to weaken socialism.
The SPD was legalized again in 1890 (following the new Kaisers firing of Bismarck
himself) and it issued a new manifesto for its goals. Like many of the other European socialist
parties at the time, its ideological stance was explicitly Marxist. The partys leaders asserted
that Marx had been right in all of his major analyses, that capitalism would inevitably collapse,
and that the partys primary goal was thus to prepare the working class to rise up and take over
in the midst of the coming crisis. Its secondary goals, the in the meantime activities, were
focused on securing universal manhood suffrage and trying to shore up the quality of life of
workers. This amounted to an uncomfortable hybrid of a revolutionary waiting game and a very
routine pursuit of legislative benefits for workers.
This tension culminated in a fierce debate between two of the leaders of the SPD in the
late 1890s: Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Kautsky, the party leader who had written most
of its theoretical manifestos, continued to insist that the real function of the party was to reject
parliamentary alliances and to agitate for revolution. Bernstein, however, claimed that history
had already proven that what the party should be doing was to improve the lives of workers in
the present, not wait for a revolution that may or may not ever happen in the future. Bernstein
was still a socialist, but he wanted the SPD to build socialism gradually; he called his theory
revisionism. Ironically, the SPD rejected Bernstein’s revisionism, but what the party actually
did was indeed revisionist: fighting for legal protection of workers, wages, and conditions of
labor.
Comparable cases of historical irony marked many of the other socialist parties (Britains
Labour Party was a noteworthy exception in that it never adopted Marxism). On the one hand,
there were increasingly democratic parliaments and mass parties, and at least in some cases
the beginning of social welfare laws. On the other hand, rather than the state socialist doctrines
of Louis Blanc, the revolutionary, scientific socialism of Marxism became the official ideology of
the majority of these parties. This practical split between socialism as social welfare and
socialism as the revolutionary rejection of capitalism was to have serious consequences for the
next hundred years of world history.
105
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
First-Wave Feminism
Even as socialist parties were growing in size and strength, another political and cultural
conflict raged: the emergence of feminism. A helpful definition of feminism from the historians
Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinssers A History of Their Own asserts that feminism consists of
the claim that women are fully human, not secondary or inferior to men, that women have been
oppressed throughout history, and that women must recognize their solidarity with other women
in order to end that oppression and create a more just and equitable society. Those claims go
back centuries; perhaps the first distinctly feminist thinker in Western society was the
Renaissance courtier Christine de Pizan (noted in the previous volume of this textbook), and
later feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft expicitly linked the feminist demand for equality to the
revolutionary promise of the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. It
was not until the late nineteenth century, however, that a robust feminist movement emerged to
champion womens rights.
In the context of the Victorian era, most Europeans believed in the doctrine of gender
relations known as separate spheres. In separate spheres, it was argued that men and
women each had useful and necessary roles to play in society, but those roles were distinct
from one another. The classic model of this concept was that the mans job was to represent
the family unit in public and make decisions that affected the family, while the womans job was
to maintain order in the home and raise the children, albeit under the veto power of her
husband. The Code Napoleon, in Article 231, proclaimed that the husband owed his wife
protection, and the wife owed her husband obedience. Until the late nineteenth century, most
legal systems officially classified women with children and the criminally insane in having no
legal identity.
As of 1850, women across Europe could not vote, could not initiate divorce (in those
countries in which divorce was even possible), could not control custody of children, could not
pursue higher education, could not open bank accounts in their own name, could not maintain
ownership of inherited property after marriage, could not initiate lawsuits or serve as legal
witnesses, and could not maintain control of their own wages if working and married.
Everywhere, domestic violence against women (and children) was ubiquitous – it was taken for
granted the the man of the house had the right to enforce his will with violence if he found it
necessary, and the very concept of marital rape was nonexistent as well. In sum, despite the
claim by male socialists that the working class were the wretched of the earth, there is no
106
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
question that male workers enjoyed vastly more legal rights than did women of any social class
at the time.
What had changed since the dawn of the nineteenth century, however, was the growth of
liberalism. It was a short, logical step from making the claim that all men are equal to all
people are equal, and indeed some women (like Wollstonecraft) had very vocally emphasized
just that point in the early liberal movement in the era of the French Revolution. By the late
nineteenth century, liberal legal codes were present in some form in most of Europe, and after
World War I all men won the vote in Britain, France, and Germany (along with most of the
smaller countries in Central and Western Europe). Thus, early feminists argued that their
enfranchisement was simply the obvious, logical conclusion of the political evolution of their
century.
Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century feminism is referred to by historians as
first-wave feminism (there have been three waves so far). Its defining characteristic was the
battle against legally-mandated discrimination against women in terms of property laws, control
over children within the family, and the right to vote. Of all of the culture struggles and legal
battles of the period, however, first-wave feminism faced the greatest opposition from those in
power: men. Biologists routinely claimed that women were simply physiologically less intelligent
than men. Women who, against the odds, had risen to positions of note were constantly
attacked and belittled; one example is the inaugural address of a new female scientist at the
University of Athens in the early 1900s, whose speech was interrupted by male students
shouting back to the kitchen! Queen Victoria herself once said that the demand for equal
rights for women was a mad, wicked follyforgetting every sense of womanly feelings and
propriety.
In response, first-wave feminists argued that women were only inferior because of their
inferior education. If they were educated at the same level and to the same standards as men,
they would be able to exercise their reason at the same level as well, and would hence deserve
to be treated as full equals by the law. As early as the French Revolution, some women had
demanded equal rights for women as a logical outgrowth of the new, more just society under
construction in the Revolution. The most famous revolutionary feminist of French Revolution,
Olympe de Gouges, was executed for daring to argue that things like “equality” and “liberty”
obviously implied that men and women should be equals. A century later, her vision remained
unfulfilled.
One of first-wave feminisms major goals was womens suffrage: the right of women to
vote. In 1867 in Britain the National Society for Womens Suffrage was founded. Comparable
107
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
movements spread across the continent over the next three decades. The word feminist itself
came about in 1890, after a French Suffrage activist, Hubertine Auclert, described herself as
such (Auclert made a name for herself in part because she refused to pay taxes, arguing that
since she was not represented politically, she had no obligation to contribute to the state). Only
in Finland and Norway, however, did women gain the vote before World War I. In some cases, it
took shockingly long for women to get the vote: France only granted it in 1944 as a concession
to the allies who liberated the country from the Nazis, and it took Switzerland until 1971(!).
The struggle for the vote was closely aligned to other feminist campaigns. In fact, it
would be misleading to claim that first-wave feminism was primarily focused on suffrage, since
suffrage itself was seen by feminists as only one component of what was needed to realize
womens equality. An iconic example is the attitude of early feminists to marriage: for middle
class women, marriage was a necessity, not a choice. Working class women worked in terrible
conditions just to survive, while the truly desperate were often driven to prostitution not because
of a lack of morality on their part but because of brutal economic and legal conditions for
unmarried poor women. In turn, middle class women suffered the consequences when their
husbands, succumbing to the temptation of prostitution, brought sexually transmitted diseases
into the middle class home. Women, feminists argued, needed economic independence, the
ability to support themselves before marriage without loss of status or respectability, and the
right to retain the property and earnings they brought to and accumulated during marriage.
Voting rights and the right to initiate divorce were thus weapons of self defense according to
first wave feminists.
After decades of campaigns by feminists, divorce became a possibility in countries like
Britain and France in the late nineteenth century, but it remained difficult and expensive to
secure. For a woman to initiate divorce, she had to somehow have the means to hire a lawyer
and navigate labyrinthine divorce laws; as a result, only the well-off could do so. In other
countries, like Russia, divorce remained illegal. Much more common than legal separation was
the practice of men simply abandoning their wives and families when they tired of them; this
made the institutions of middle-class family life open to mockery by socialists, who, as did Marx
and Engels, pointed out that marriage was nothing but a property contract that men could
choose to abandon at will (the socialist attitude toward feminism, incidentally, was that gender
divisions were byproducts of capitalism: once capitalism was eliminated, gender inequality
would supposedly vanish as well).
Even as the feminist movement in Britain became focused on voting rights, feminists
waged other battles as well. In the 1870s and 1880s, British feminists led by Josephine Butler
108
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
attacked the Contagious Diseases Act, which subjected prostitutes to mandatory gynecological
inspections (but did not require the male clients of prostitutes to be examined), and drew the
radical conclusion that prostitution was simply the most obvious example of a condition that
applied to practically all women. In marriage, after all, women exchanged sexual access to their
bodies in return for their material existence. Butlers campaign weathered years of failure and
scorn before finally triumphing: the Contagious Diseases Act was repealed and the age of
consent for girls was raised from twelve(!) to sixteen.
The demand for the vote, however, was stymied by the fact that male politicians across
the political spectrum refused to champion the issue, albeit for different reasons. On the
political right, the traditional view that women had no place in politics prevailed. On the left,
however, both liberal and socialist politicians were largely in support of womens suffrage…in
theory. In practice, however, leftist politicians (falling prey to yet more sexist stereotypes) feared
that women would vote for traditional conservatives because women naturally longed for the
comfort and protection of tradition. Thus, even nominally sympathetic male politicians
repeatedly betrayed promises to push the issue forward in law.
While most feminists persisted in peaceful demands for reform, others were galvanized
by these political betrayals and turned to militancy. In Britain, the best known militant feminists
were the Pankhursts: the mother Emmeline (1858 1928) and daughters Christabel and Sylvia,
who formed a radical group known as the Suffragettes in 1903. Much of the original
membership came from the ranks of Lancashire textile workers before the group moved its
headquarters to London in 1906. The Pankhursts soon severed their links with the Labour Party
and working class activists and began a campaign of direct action under the motto “deeds, not
words”. By 1908 they had moved from heckling to stone-throwing and other forms of protest,
including destroying paintings in museums and, on one occasion, attacking male politicians with
horsewhips on a golf course. In the meantime, both militant and non-militant feminists did
succeed in making womens suffrage a mainstream political issue: as many as 500,000 women
and pro-feminist men gathered at one London rally in 1908.
Militant activists who staged public demonstrations were on several occasions treated
brutally by police, and those who were arrested were subjected to coercive feeding when they
went on hunger strikes. That brutality led to more widespread public support for the
Suffragettes, but there were still no legal changes forthcoming; even the British Liberal Party
that had, on various occasions, claimed to support womens suffrage always ended up putting it
on the back-burner in parliament. In the most spectacular and tragic act of protest, a Suffragette
named Emily Davison threw herself under the horse owned by the British king George V during
109
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
the Derby (the hugely popular national horse race) of 1913 and was killed – in the aftermath it
was discovered that she had stuffed her dress with pamphlets demanding the vote for women.
Suffragettes who went on hunger strikes were often brutally force-fed while jailed; here, their
jailors are described as a modern inquisition.
Somewhat ironically, given the importance of the suffrage movement, feminists secured
other legal rights before they did the right to vote in the period before World War I. By and
large, women secured the right to enter universities by the early twentieth century and the first
female academics secured teaching positions soon after – the first woman to hold a university
post in France was the famous Marie Curie, whose work was instrumental in understanding
radiation. Women secured the right to initiate divorce in some countries even earlier, along with
the right to control their own wages and property and to fight for the custody of children. In
short, thanks to feminist agitation, women had secured a legal identity and meaningful legal
rights in at least some of the countries of Europe, and the United States, by the onset of World
War I in 1914, but as mentioned above, only in two Scandinavian countries could they yet vote.
110
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Modern Anti-Semitism
The great irony of feminism – or, rather, the need for feminism – was that women were
not a minority but nevertheless faced prejudice, violence, and legal restrictions. European
Jews, on the other hand, were a minority everywhere they lived. Furthermore, because of their
long, difficult, and often violent history facing persecution from the Christian majority, Jews faced
a particularly virulent and deep-seated form of hatred from their non-Jewish neighbors. That
hatred, referred to as anti-Semitism (also spelled antisemitism), took on new characteristics in
the modern era that, if anything, made it even more dangerous
Jews had been part of European society since the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages,
Jews were frequently persecuted, expelled, or even massacred by the Christian majority around
them. Jews were accused of responsibility for the death of Christ, were blamed for plagues and
famines, and were even thought to practice black magic. Jews were unable to own land, to
marry Christians, or to practice trades besides sharecropping, peddling goods, and lending
money (since Christians were banned from lending money at interest until the late Middle Ages,
the stereotypes of Jewish greed originated with the fact that money-lending was one of the only
trades Jews could perform). Starting with the late period of the Enlightenment, however, some
Jews were grudgingly “emancipated” legally, being allowed to move to Christian cities, own
land, and practice professions they had been banned from in the past.
That legal emancipation was complete almost everywhere in Europe by the end of the
nineteenth century, although the most conservative states like Russia still maintained
anti-Semitic restrictions. Anti-Jewish hatred, however, did not vanish. Instead, in the modern
era, Jews were vilified for representing everything that was wrong with modernity itself. Jews
were blamed for urbanization, for the death of traditional industries, for the evils of modern
capitalism, but also for the threat of modern socialism, for being anti-union and for being
pro-union, for both assimilating to the point that regular Germans and Frenchmen and Czechs
could no longer tell who was Jewish, and for failing to assimilate to the point that they were
really the same as everyone else. To modern anti-Semites, Jews were the scapegoat for all of
the problems of the modern world itself.
At the same time, modern anti-Semitism was bound up with modern racial theories,
including Darwinian evolutionary theory, its perverse offspring Social Darwinism, and the
Eugenics movement which sought to purify the racial gene pool of Europe (and America). Many
theorists came to believe that Jews were not just a group of people who traced their ancestry
111
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
back to the ancient kingdom of Judah, but were in fact a race, a group defined first and
foremost by their blood, their genes, and by supposedly inexorable and inherent characteristics
and traits.
Between vilification for the ills of modernity and the newfound obsession with race that
swept across European and American societies in the late nineteenth century, there was ample
fuel for the rise of anti-Semitic politics. The term anti-Semitism itself was invented and
popularized by German and Austrian politicians in the late nineteenth century an Anti-Semitic
League emerged in Germany in the 1870s under the leadership of a politician named Wilhelm
Marr. Marr claimed that Jews had without striking a blow become the socio-political dictator
of Germany. In fact, Jews were about 1% of the German population and, while
well-represented in business and academia, they had negligible political influence. Following
Marrs efforts, other parties emerged over the course of the 1880s.
Parties whose major platform was anti-Semitism itself, however, faded from prominence
in the 1890s. The largest single victory won by anti-Semitic political parties in the German
Empire was in 1893, consisting of only 2.9% of the vote. Subsequently, however, mainstream
right-wing parties adopted anti-Semitism as part of their platform. Thus, even though parties
that defined themselves solely by anti-Semitism diminished, anti-republican, militaristic, and
strongly Christian-identified parties on the political right in France, Austria, and Germany soon
started using anti-Semitic language as part of their overall rhetoric.
Along with the new, racist, version of anti-Semitism, the modern conspiracy theory of
global Jewish influence was a distinctly modern phenomenon. A Prussian pulp novelist named
Hermann Goedsche published a novel in 1868 that included a completely fictional meeting of a
shadowy conspiracy of Rabbis who vowed to seize global power in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries through Jewish control of world banking. That Rabbi’s Speech was soon
republished in various languages as if it had actually happened. Better known was the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document claiming to be the minutes from a meeting of
international Jewish leaders that copied whole sections Goedsche’s Speech and combined
them with various equally spurious accounts of Jewish political machinations. The Protocols
were first published in 1903 by the Russian secret police as justification for continued
anti-Semitic restrictions in the Russian Empire, and they subsequently became important after
World War I when they were used as proof that the Jews had caused the war in order to
disrupt the international political order.
112
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
An American copy of the Protocols published in 1934.
Another iconic moment in the history of anti-Semitism occurred in France in the 1890s,
when a French Jewish military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was framed for espionage, stripped
of his rank, and imprisoned. An enormous public debate broke out in French society over
Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence which revolved around his identity as a French Jew.
Anti-Dreyfusards argued that no Jew could truly be a Frenchman and that Dreyfus, as a Jew,
was inherently predisposed to lie and cheat, while Dreyfusards argued that anyone could be a
true, legitimate French citizen, Jews included.
In the end, the Dreyfus Affair culminated in Dreyfuss exoneration and release, but not
before anti-Semitism was elevated to one of the defining characteristics of anti-liberal,
authoritarian right-wing politics in France. Some educated European Jews concluded that the
pursuit of not just legal equality, but cultural acceptance was doomed given the strength and
virulence of anti-Semitism in European culture, and they started a new political movement to
establish a Jewish homeland in the historical region of ancient Israel. That movement, Zionism,
saw a slow but growing migration of European Jews settling in the Levant, at the time still part of
the Ottoman Empire. Decades later, it culminated in the emergence of the modern state of
Israel in 1948.
113
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Conclusion
The growth of science, the pernicious development of pseudo-science, and the culture
struggles that raged in European society all occurred simultaneously, lending to an overall
sense of disruption and uncertainty as the twentieth century dawned. Lives were transformed
for the better by consumerism and medical advances, but many Europeans still found the sheer
velocity of change overwhelming and threatening. At least some of the virulence of the culture
struggles of the era was due to this sense of fear and displacement, fears that spilled over to the
growing rivalries between nations. In turn, the world itself provided the stage on which those
rivalries played out as European nations set themselves the task of conquering and controlling
vast new empires overseas.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Queen Victoria – Public Domain
Pasteur – Public Domain
Darwin – Public Domain
Racial Hierarchy – Public Domain
Bon March – Creative Commons License
Force Feeding – Public Domain
Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Public Domain
114
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 6: Imperialism
Imperialism in the context of modern history refers to global empire-building by modern
states – to distinguish it from the earlier expansion of European states (e.g. the Spanish empire
in the Americas), it is sometimes referred to as neo-imperialism. Specifically, imperialism
refers to the enormous growth of European empires in the nineteenth century, culminating in the
period before World War I in which European powers controlled over 80% of the surface of the
globe. The aftershocks of this period of imperialism are still felt in the present, with national
borders and international conflicts alike tied to patterns put in place by the imperialist powers
over a century ago.
Modern imperialism was a product of factors that had no direct parallel in earlier
centuries. For a brief period, Europe (joined by the United States at the end of the century)
enjoyed a monopoly on industrial production and technology. The scientific advances described
in the last chapter lent themselves directly to European power as well, most obviously in that
modern medicine enabled European soldiers and administrators to survive in regions like
Sub-Saharan Africa that had been deathtraps for them in the past because of the prevalence of
tropical diseases. In addition, ideological developments like the emergence of Social Darwinism
and the obsession with race inspired Europeans to consider their conquests as morally justified,
even necessary. It was, in short, a perfect storm of technology and ideology that enabled and
justified Europes global feeding frenzy.
While Europeans tended to justify their conquests by citing a civilizing mission that
would bring the guiding lights of Christianity and Western Civilization to supposedly benighted
regions, one other factor was at work that provided a much more tangible excuse for conquest:
the rivalry between European states. With the Congress System a dead letter in the aftermath
of the Crimean War, and with the wars of the Italian and German unifications demonstrating the
stakes of intra-European conflict, all of the major European powers jockeyed for position on the
world stage during the second half of the century. Perhaps the most iconic example was the
personal obsession of the King of Belgium, Leopold II, with the creation of a Belgian colony in
Africa, which he thought would elevate Belgiums status in Europe (and from which he could
derive enormous profits). In the end, his personal fiefdom – the Congo Free State – would
become the most horrendous demonstration of the mismatch between the high-minded
civilizing mission and the reality of carnage and exploitation.
115
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Technology
Technology made the new imperialism possible. It vastly increased the speed of
communication, it armed European soldiers with advanced weapons that overwhelmed
resistance, and it protected Europeans from tropical diseases. Simply put, technology explains
how European dominance grew from about 35% of the globe to over 80% over the course of the
nineteenth century. In hindsight, European technological dominance was nothing more or less
than a historical accident, the circumstantial development of tools and techniques that originated
with the Industrial Revolution. At the time, however, most Europeans and Americans
considered their technology as proof of their racial and cultural superiority.
For example, for the first time cities in Europe acquired the means to communicate
almost instantaneously (via telegraph) with their colonies. Before telegraphs, it could take up to
two years for a message and reply to travel between England and India, but after telegraph lines
were constructed over the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a message
and reply could make the circuit in just two days. This, of course, vastly increased the efficiency
of governing in the context of global empires.
Europeans were not just able to communicate with territories thousands of miles away
thanks to technology – they could survive there as well. Africa had never been colonized by
Europeans before the nineteenth century, except for relatively small territories along the coasts.
The continent was largely impenetrable to Europeans thanks to its geography: there were few
harbors for ships, the interior of the continent had no rivers that were navigable by sail, and
most importantly, there were numerous lethal diseases (especially a particularly virulent form of
malaria) to which Europeans had little resistance. Until the second half of the century, Africa
was sometimes referred to as the “white man’s graveyard,” since Europeans who travelled there
to trade or try to conquer territory often died within a year.
That started changing even before the development of bacteriology. In 1841, British
expeditions discovered that daily doses of quinine, a medicine derived from a South American
plant, served as an effective preventative measure against the contraction of malaria. Thus,
since malaria had been the most dangerous tropical disease, Europeans were able to survive in
the interior of Africa at much higher rates following the quinine breakthrough. Once Pasteur’s
discoveries in bacteriology did occur, it became viable for large numbers of European soldiers
and officials to take up permanent residence in the tropical regions of Africa and Asia.
116
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Advances in medicine were joined by those in transportation. The steamboat, with its
power to travel both with and against the flow of rivers, enabled Europeans to push into the
interior of Africa (and many parts of Asia as well). Steamboats were soon armed with small
cannons, giving rise to the term gunboat. In turn, when Europeans began steaming into
harbors from Hong Kong to the Congo and demanding territory and trading privileges, the term
“gunboat diplomacy” was invented, the quintessential example of which was in the unwilling
concession to western contact and trade on the part of Japan, considered below.
A typical small and, in this case, unarmed steamship on the Congo River in Central Africa.
Steamers as they were called varied greatly in size and armaments.
In addition, major advances in weapons technology resulted in an overwhelming
advantage in the ability of Europeans to inflict violence in the regions they invaded. In the
1860s, the first breech-loading rifles were developed, first seeing widespread use in the
Austro-Prussian War of 1866 in which Prussian infantry utterly overwhelmed Austrian soldiers
armed with older muskets. Breech-loaders were incredibly accurate and quick to reload
compared to earlier muzzle-loading firearms. A European soldier armed with a modern rifle
could fire accurately up to almost half a mile away in any weather, while the inhabitants of Africa
and Asia were armed either with older firearms or hand weapons. Likewise, the first machine
117
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
gun, the Maxim Gun, was invented in the 1880s. For a few decades, Europeans (and
Americans) had a monopoly on this technology, and for that relatively brief period the advantage
was decisive in numerous conquests. Smug British soldiers invented a saying that summarized
that superiority: whatever happens, we have got, the Maxim Gun, and they have not
A British soldier with a maxim gun in South Africa.
The Second Industrial Revolution
Technology thus enabled imperialism. It also created a motive for imperialism, because
of a phenomenon referred to by historians as the Second Industrial Revolution. The Second
Industrial Revolution consisted of the development and spread of a new generation of
technological innovation: modern steel, invented in 1856, electrical generators in 1870 (leading
to electrical appliances and home wiring by 1900 in wealthy homes), and both bicycles and
automobiles by the 1890s. The American inventor Alexander Graham Bell invented the
telephone in 1876, and thousands of phones, carrying millions of calls annually, were in
operation already by the early 1880s. These advances created a huge demand for the raw
materials rubber, mineral ores, cotton that were components of the new technologies.
In the initial phases of the Industrial Revolution, the raw materials necessary for
production had been in Europe itself: coal deposits and iron ore. The other raw material, cotton,
118
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
that played a key role in the Industrial Revolution was available via slave labor in the American
south and from weaker states like Egypt (which seized virtual independence from the Ottoman
Empire in 1833). The raw material of the Second Industrial Revolution, however, was mostly
located outside of the older areas under European control, which meant that European business
interests pressured their respective governments to seize as much territory overseas as
possible. For example, when oil fields were discovered in Persia in 1908, European interest in
Middle Eastern imperialism reached a fever pitch, with European powers cultivating contacts
among Arab nationalist groups and undermining the waning unity of the Ottoman Empire.
Mines and plantations were crucial to this phase of imperialism in Africa and Asia, as
they had been to the early European exploitation of the Americas. Mining in particular offered
the prospect of huge profits. There were Canadian nickel deposits for steel alloys, Chilean
nitrates, Australian copper and gold, and Malaysian tin, just to name a few mineral resources
coveted by Europeans (of course, in the case of Canada, the people being colonized were
Indigenous Canadians, and the colonists were themselves of European descent). Thus, while
the motives behind imperialism were often strongly ideological, they were also tied to
straightforward economic interests, and many of the strongest proponents of imperialism had
ties to industry.
While the United States was not one of the major imperial powers per se (although it did
seize control of the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and exercised considerable power in Central
America), it played a major role in imperialism nonetheless. The US eclipsed Europe as the
major manufacturing power and the major source of exports in a shockingly short period – from
about 1870 into the early 1900s – driving Europeans to sometimes-hysterical levels of fear of
being rendered economically obsolete. The response of European politicians and businessmen
alike was to focus on territorial acquisition overseas to counterbalance the vast natural
resources of the US, which had achieved its dominance thanks to the enormity and richness of
American territory (seized by force from Native Americans). Thus, even though the US did not
join in the Scramble for Africa or assert direct control of East Asian territories, fear of American
economic strength was a major factor driving European imperialism forward.
119
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
American resource production and industrial output vastly outpaced European
production over time; already by the 1870s astute European observers correctly anticipated the
rapid acceleration of American production.
The British Empire
The best known phrase associated with the British Empire from the middle of the
nineteenth century until the early twentieth was that “the sun never set” over its dominions.
That was, quite literally, true. Roughly 25% of the surface of the globe was directly or indirectly
controlled by the British in the aftermath of World War I (1918). Enormous bureaucracies of
“natives” worked under white British officials everywhere from the South Pacific to North Africa.
The ultimate expression of British imperialism was in India, where just under 100,000 British
officials governed a population of some 300,000,000 Indians.
Until 1857, India was governed by the British East India Company (the EIC), the
state-sponsored monopoly established in the seventeenth century to profit from overseas trade
and which controlled a monopoly on Indian imports and exports. Through a long, slow creep of
territorial expansion and one-sided treaties with Indian princes, the EIC governed almost all of
the Indian subcontinent by 1840. India produced huge quantities of precious commodities,
including cotton, spices, and narcotics. In fact, the EIC was the single largest drug cartel in
world history, with the explicit approval of the British government. Most of those narcotics
consisted of opium exported to China.
120
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
By the 1830s, 40% of the total value of Indian exports took the form of opium, which led
to the outbreak of the first major war between a European power, namely Britain, and the
Chinese Empire. In 1840, Chinese officials tried to stop the ongoing shipments of opium from
India and open war broke out between the EIC, supported by the British navy, and China. A
single British gunboat, the Nemesis, arrived after inconclusive fighting had gone on for five
months. In short order, the Nemesis began an ongoing rout of the Chinese forces. The
Chinese navy and imperial fortresses were nearly helpless before gunboats with cannons, and
steamships were able to penetrate Chinese rivers and the Chinese Grand Canal, often towing
sailing vessels with full cannon batteries behind them.
A British commemoration of victory in the Opium War. The Nemesis is in the background on the
right.
In the end, the Royal Navy forced the Chinese state to re-open their ports to the Indian
opium trade, and the British obtained Hong Kong in the bargain as part of the British Empire
itself. In the aftermath of the Opium War, other European states secured the legal right to carry
on trade in China, administer their own taxes and laws in designated port cities, and support
121
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Christian missionary work. The authority of the ruling Chinese dynasty, the Qing, was seriously
undermined in the process. (A second Opium War occurred in the late 1850s, with the British
joined by the French against China – this war, too, resulted in European victory.)
Trouble for the British was brewing in India, however. In 1857, Indian soldiers in the
employ of the EIC, known as sepoys, were issued new rifles whose bullet cartridges were,
according to rumors that circulated among the sepoys, lubricated with both pig fat and cow fat.
Since part of loading the gun was biting the cartridge open, this would entail coming into direct
contact with the fat, which was totally forbidden in Islam and Hinduism (note that there is no
evidence that the cartridges actually were greased with the fat of either animal – the rumors
were enough). Simultaneously, European Christian missionaries were at work trying to convert
both Muslims and Hindus to Christianity, sometimes very aggressively. This culminated in an
explosion of anti-Christian and anti-British violence that temporarily plunged India into a civil
war. The British responded to the uprising, which they dubbed The Mutiny by massacring
whole villages, while sepoy rebels targeted any and all British they could find, including the
families of British officials. Eventually, troops from Britain and loyal Sepoy forces routed the
rebels and restored order.
A British depiction of the Sepoy Rebellion, attributing the uprising to greed rather than its actual
causes. Note also the use of racial caricatures in depicting the sepoys.
122
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
After this Sepoy Rebellion (a term that has long since replaced The Mutiny among
historians), the East India Company was disbanded by the British parliament and India placed
under direct rule from London. India was henceforth referred to as the “British Raj,” meaning
British Rulership, and Queen Victoria became Empress of India in addition to Queen of Great
Britain. She promised her Indian subjects that anyone could take the civil service examinations
that entitled men to positions of authority in the Indian government, and elite Indians quickly
enrolled their sons in British boarding schools. The first Indian to pass the exam (in 1863) was
Satyendranath Tagore, but white officials consistently refused to take orders from an Indian
(even if that Indian happened to be more intelligent and competent than they were). The result
was that elite Indians all too often hit a “glass ceiling” in the Raj, able to rise to positions of
importance but not real leadership. In turn, resentful elite Indians became the first Indian
nationalists, organizing what later became the Indian independence movement.
Africa
While India was the most important, and lucrative, part of the British Empire, it was the
conquest of Africa by the European powers that stands as the highpoint of the new imperialism
as a whole. Africa represents about a quarter of the land area of the entire world, and as of the
1880s it had about one-fifth of the worlds population. There were over 700 distinct societies
and peoples across Africa, but Europeans knew so little about the African interior that maps
generally displayed huge blank spots until well into the 1880s. Likewise, as of 1850 Europeans
only controlled small territories on the coasts, many of them little more than trading posts. The
most substantial European holdings consisted of Algeria, seized by France in the 1830s, and
South Africa, split between British control and two territories held by the descendents of the first
Dutch settlers, the Boers. The rest of the continent was almost completely free of European
dominance (although the Portuguese did maintain sparsely populated colonies in two areas).
That changed in the last few decades of the nineteenth century because of the
technological changes discussed above. The results were dramatic: in 1876, roughly 10% of
Africa was under European control. By 1900, just over twenty years later, the figure was
roughly 90%. All of the factors discussed above, of the search for profits, of raw materials, of
the ongoing power struggle between the great powers, and of the “civilizing mission,” reached
their collective zenith in Africa. The sheer speed of the conquest is summed up in the phrase
123
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
used ever since to describe it: the Scramble for Africa. Even the word imperialism itself went
from a neologism to an everyday term over the course of the 1880s.
In 1884, Otto Von Bismarck organized the Berlin Conference in order to determine what
was to be done with a huge territory in central Africa called the Congo, already falling under the
domination of Belgium at the time. At the Congress, the representatives of the European states,
joined by the United States and the Ottoman Empire, divided up Africa into spheres of influence
and conquest. No Africans were present at the meeting. Instead, the Europeans agreed on
trade between their respective territories and stipulated which (European) country was to get
which piece of Africa. The impetus behind the seizure of Africa had much more to do with
international tension than practical economics there were certainly profits to be had in Africa,
but they were mostly theoretical at this point since no European knew for sure what those
resources were or where they were to be found (again, fear of American economic power was a
major factor – Europeans thought it necessary to seize more territory, regardless of what was
actually in that territory). Thus, in a collective land grab, European states emerged from the
Conference intent on taking over an entire continent.
The Berlin Conference was the opening salvo of the Scramble for Africa itself, the
explosion of European land-grabs in the African continent. In some territories, notably French
North Africa and parts of British West Africa, while colonial administrations were both racist and
enormously secure in their own cultural dominance, they usually did embark on building at least
some modern infrastructure and establishing educational institutions open to the natives
(although, as in the Raj, Europeans jealously guarded their own authority everywhere). In
others, however, colonization was equivalent to genocide.
Among the worst cases was that of Belgium. King Leopold II created a colony in the
Congo in 1876 under the guise of exploration and philanthropy, claiming that his purpose was to
protect the people of the region from the ravages of the slave trade. His acquisition was larger
than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined; it was eighty times larger than
Belgium itself. The Berlin Conferences official purpose was authorizing Leopolds
already-existing control of the Congo, and at the Conference the European powers declared the
territory to be the Congo Free State, essentially a royal fiefdom ruled, and owned, by Leopold
directly, not by the government of Belgium.
Leopold’s real purpose was personal enrichment for himself and a handful of cronies,
and his methods of coercing African labor were atrocious: raids, floggings, hostages, destruction
of villages and fields, and murder and mutilation. (This is the setting of Joseph Conrad’s brilliant
and disturbing novel, Heart of Darkness.) Belgian agents would enter a village and take women
124
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
and children hostage, ordering men to go into the jungle and harvest a certain amount of rubber.
If they failed to reach the rubber quota in time, or sometimes even if they did, the agents would
hack off the arms of children, rape or murder the women, or sometimes simply murder everyone
in the village outright. No attempt was made to develop the country in any way that did not bear
directly on the business of extracting ivory and rubber. In a period of 25 years, the population of
the region was cut in half. It took until 1908 for public outcry (after decades of dangerous and
incredibly brave work by a few journalists who discovered what was happening) to prompt the
Belgian Parliament to strip Leopold of the colony it then took over direct administration.
A few of the millions of victims of Belgian imperialism in the Congo.
125
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
One comparable example was the treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples of
Southwest Africa by the German army over the course of 1904 – 1905. When the Herero
resisted German takeover, they were systematically rounded up and left in concentration camps
to starve, with survivors stalked across the desert by the German army, the Germans poisoning
or sealing wells and water holes as they went. When the Nama rose up shortly afterwards, they
too were exterminated. In the end, over two-thirds of the Herero and Nama were murdered.
This was the first, but not the last, genocide carried out by German soldiers in the twentieth
century.
Effects
Almost without exception, the economics of imperialism can be described as plunder
economies. This entailed three tendencies. First, colonial regimes expropriated the land from
the people who lived there. This was accomplished through force, backed by pseudo-legal
means: unless a given person, or group, had a legal title in the western sense to the land they
lived on, they were liable to have it seized. Likewise, traditional rights to hunt, gather material,
and migrate with herds were lost. Second, colonial regimes expropriated raw materials like
rubber, generally shipped back to Europe to be turned into finished products. Third, colonial
regimes exploited native labor. This was sometimes in the form of outright slavery like the
Congo, the Portuguese African colonies, and forced labor in French and German colonies. In
other cases, it consisted of “semi-slavery” as on the island of Java where the Dutch imposed
quotas of coffee and spices on villages. In other areas, like most of the territories controlled by
Britain, it was in the form of subsistence-level wages paid to workers.
In addition to the forms of labor exploitation, European powers imposed borders where
none had existed, both splitting up existing kingdoms, tribes, and cultures and lumping different
ones together arbitrarily. Sometimes European powers favored certain local groups over others
in order to better maintain control, such as the British policy of using the Tutsi tribe (tribe in this
case being something of a misnomer – class is more accurate) to govern what would later
become Rwanda over the majority Hutus. Thus, the effects of imperialism lasted long after
former colonies achieved their independence in the twentieth century, since almost all of them
were left with the borders originally created by the imperialists, often along with starker ethnic
divisions than would have existed otherwise.
126
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In a somewhat ironic twist, only certain specific forms and areas of exploitation ever
turned a profit for Europeans, especially for European governments. Numerous private
merchant companies founded to exploit colonial areas went bankrupt. The entire French
colonial edifice never produced significant profits one French politician quipped that the only
French industry to benefit from imperialism was catering for banquets in Paris, since French
colonial interests hosted so many conferences. Since governments generally stepped in to
declare protectorates and colonies after merchant interests went under, the cost of maintaining
empire grew along with the territorial claims themselves. Thus, while economic motives were
always present, much of the impetus behind imperialism boiled down to jockeying for position
on the world stage between the increasingly hostile great powers of Europe.
The Decline of the Ottoman Empire
While it is not always considered as part of the history of European imperialism, not least
because the core of its empire was never conquered by European powers, it is still appropriate
to examine the decline of the Ottoman Empire alongside more conventional expressions of
European empire-building. Simply put, while the Ottoman Empire suffered from its fair share of
internal problems, European imperialism played the single most significant role in undermining
its sovereignty and coherence until it finally collapsed in World War I.
By the late nineteenth century Europeans casually referred to the Ottoman Empire as
the sick man of Europe and debated the eastern question, namely how Ottoman territory
should be divided between the great powers of Europe. That attitude was a microcosm of the
attitude of Europeans toward most of the world at the time: foreign territories were prizes for the
taking, the identities of the people who lived there and the states that ruled them of little
consequence thanks to the (short-lived, as it turned out) superiority of European arms and
technology. The great irony in the case of the Ottomans, however, was that the empire had
been both a European great power in its own right and had once dominated its European rivals
in war. How did it become so sick over time?
Some of the reasons for Ottoman decline were external, most obviously the growth in
European power. The Ottomans were never able to make headway against European powers
in the Indian Ocean, and as European states build their global trade empires the Ottoman
economy remained largely landlocked. Likewise, the European Scientific Revolution of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no analog in Ottoman lands; it took until 1727 for a
state-approved printing house printing secular works and there were no significant technological
breakthroughs originating in the later Ottoman Empire.
127
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The state that proved the greatest threat to Ottoman power was Russia. Russia went
from a backwards, politically fractured region to a powerful and increasingly centralized state
under its Tsar Peter the Great (whose reign is described in the previous volume of this
textbook). Peter launched the first major Russo-Ottoman war and, while he did not achieve all
of his military objectives, he did demonstrate the growing strength of the Russian military by
seizing Ottoman territory. In 1744 the empress Catherine the Greats army crushed Ottoman
forces and captured the Crimean Peninsula, securing the Russian dream of warm water (i.e. it
did not freeze during the winter) ports for its navy. Catherine also forced the Ottomans to agree
to the building of an Orthodox cathedral in Constantinople and the protection of Orthodox
Christians in Ottoman lands – this was a massive intrusion into Ottoman sovereignty over its
own subjects.
Other issues that undermined Ottoman strength were internal. Notably, the Janissaries
(who had once been elite slave-soldiers who had bested European forces during the height of
Ottoman power) that had played such a key role in Ottoman victories under sultans like Selim I
and Suleiman the Magnificent were nothing more than parasites living off the largess of the
state by the mid-eighteenth century, concentrating their time on enrichment through commerce
rather than military training. In 1793 a reforming sultan, Selim III, created a New Force of
soldiers trained in European tactics and , but it took until 1826 for the
Janissaries to be eliminated completely (they were slaughtered by members of the New Force
under the next sultan, Mahmud II).
Meanwhile, the Ottoman economy was largely in the hands of Europeans by the turn of
the nineteenth century. Capitulation Agreements that had begun as concessions to religious
minorities had been extended to European merchants over the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. By the late eighteenth century, both Europeans and their local (i.e. Ottoman) agents
were basically above the law in Ottoman territories and they also enjoyed freedom from most
forms of taxation. The state was helpless to reimpose control over its own economy or to
restrain European greed because of the superiority of European military power, and European
trading companies reaped huge profits in the process.
The nineteenth century was thus an era of crisis for the empire. In 1805 the Ottoman
governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, seized power and governed Egypt as an indepedent state
despite being (on paper) an official working for the Ottoman government. In 1839 Resid Pasha,
a high-ranking official serving the sultan Abd al-Macid, instituted a broad reform movement, the
Tanzimat, that introduced sweeping changes to Ottoman governance and law, culminating in a
liberal constitution and the first meeting of an Ottoman parliament in 1876. The same year,
128
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
however, the reactionary Sultan Abdulhamit II (r. 1876 – 1909) came to power and soon did
everything he could to roll back the reforms. Abdulhamit heavily emphasized the empires
Muslim identity, inviting conservative Sunni clerics from across the Islamic world to settle in the
empire and playing up the Christian vs. Muslim aspect of European aggression. In the process,
he moved the empire away from its traditional identity as religiously diverse and tolerant.
Part of Abdulhamits emphasis on Muslim identity was due to a simple demographic fact,
however: much of the non-Muslim territories of the empire seized their independence either
before or during his reign. The Greek Revolution that began in 1821 garnered the support of
European powers and ultimately succeeded in seizing Greek independence. Serbia became
completely independent in 1867, Bulgaria in 1878, and Bosnia passed into Austrian hands in
1908. Simply put, the Christian-dominated Balkans that had been part of the Ottoman Empire
for centuries slipped away thanks to the strength of modern nationalism and the military support
they received from sympathetic European powers.
Meanwhile, while Abdulhamit hoped in vain that doubling down on his own role as sultan
and caliph would somehow see the empire through its period of weakness, other Ottoman elites
reached very different conclusions. High-ranking officers in the Ottoman military educated in the
(European-style) War College established during the Tanzimat formed a conspiratorial society
known as the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) in 1889. Disgusted by what they
regarded as the hopelessly archaic approach of Abdulhamit, they launched a successful coup
detat in 1909 and set out to remake the empire as a modern, secular, and distinctly Turkish
(rather than diverse) state. World War I, however, began in 1914 and ultimately dealt the
empire its death blow as European powers both attacked the empire directly and encouraged
uprisings among its ethnic and religious minorities.
When the dust settled, one of the leaders of the CUP, Mustafa Kemal, led a Turkish army
to expel European forces from the geographic core of the former empire, namely Anatolia, and
form a new nation in its place. Soon known as Atatrk (Father of the Turks), Kemal pushed
through a constitution that explicitly rejected the states Muslim identity, adhering instead to the
secularism of European and American countries. It also, however, represented a nation of
ethnic Turks, with minority groups either expelled or slaughtered outright. The most horrific
violence of the Turkish revolution was directed at the Armenian minority, with over a million
Armenians forced on death marches into deserts or murdered outright. While the state of
Turkey refuses to acknowledge it to this day, historians have long recognized that the Armenian
massacres amounted to a full-scale genocide.
129
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
To sum up, the Ottoman Empire was beset by external pressures in the form of growing
European military might and European intrusion into its economy. It also suffered from internal
issues, most notably the corruption of the Janissaries and the intransigence of reactionaries like
Abdulhamit. Its reform movements culminated in the CUP revolution of 1909, but world war tore
the empire apart before those reforms had time to take effect. And, while Turkey entered the
world stage as a modern nation, it was a modern nation with the blood of over a million people
on the hands of its leaders. In that sense, Turkey was like European imperialism in reverse:
Western European states left a trail of bodies as they built empires around the globe while
Turkeys genocidal crime came about during imperial collapse.
Qajar Persia
Along with the Ottoman Empire, the other major Middle Eastern power had long been
Persia (Iran), a country whose ancient history stretched back to the Achaemenid dynasty begun
by the legendary Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE. By the modern period, however, Persia was in
many ways a shadow of its glorious past. A ruling dynasty known as the Qajars seized power in
1779 but struggled to maintain control over the various tribal groups that had long competed for
power and influence. Likewise, the Qajar shahs (kings) were unable to resist the encroachment
of European powers as the latter expanded their influence in Central Asia. Like the Ottoman
Empire, Persia was not formally colonized by a European power, but Europeans were still able
to dictate international politics in the region.
For most of the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia were the two European powers
that most often competed against one another for power in Persia, with the Qajar shahs
repeatedly trying and failing to play the European rivals off against each other in the name of
Persian independence. Russia seized control of the Caucasus region from Persia
(permanently, as it turned out) in 1813, and subsequently imposed capitulation agreements on
Persia that were a direct parallel of those that so hobbled the Ottomans to the west. In the
following decades succession disputes within the Qajar line were resolved by Russia and Britain
choosing which heir should hold the Qajar throne, an obvious violation of Persian sovereignty.
Persia was spared actual invasion largely because of what a British diplomat referred to as the
great game: the battle for influence in the region in the name of preserving the British hold on
India on the one hand versus the expansion of Russian power on the other. Neither European
power would allow the other to actually take over in Persia as a result.
130
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
One effect of European domination in Persia was the growth of Iranian nationalism. The
central government proved utterly incapable (and mostly uninterested) in economic
development, with the fruits of industry technology arriving at a glacial pace across the country.
Instead of trying to expand the countrys infrastructure directly, the Qajar state handed off
concessions to European banks, companies, and private individuals to build railroads, issue
bank notes, and in one notorious case, monopolize the production and sale of tobacco. Public
outcry often forced the cancellation of the concessions, but foreign meddling in the Persian
economy remained a constant regardless. Reformers, some of them religious leaders from the
Shia ulama (Muslim clergy), others members of the commercial classes familiar with European
ideas, demanded a more effective government capable of protecting national sovereignty.
Mass protests finally forced the issue in 1905. The ruler Muzaffar al-Din Shah signed a
Fundamental Law on his deathbed that created a parliamentary regime, and in 1907 his
successor Muhammad Ali Shah signed a supplement to the law that introduced civil equality
and recognition that national sovereignty is derived from the people. The period of reform was
short-lived, however, with a near civil war followed by the dismissal of the parliament in 1911.
The dynasty limped toward its end in the years that followed, losing practically all authority over
the country until a Russian-trained military officer, Riza Khan, seized power in a coup in 1925.
In sum, the Qajar dynasty coincided with a dismal period in Persian history in which
European powers called the shots both politically and economically. Reform movements did
emerge around the turn of the twentieth century, but modernization did not begin in earnest until
after the Qajar period finally came to an end. The dynasty that began with Riza Khan, known as
the Pahlavis, sought to radically reform the very nature of governance and society in Iran,
inspired by the one meaningful achievement of the attempt at reform in the late Qajar period:
the idea that Iran was a nation that should assert its national identity on the world stage.
The Counter-Examples Ethiopia and Japan
Even the (in historical hindsight, quite temporary) European and American monopoly on
advanced technology did not always translate into successful conquest, as demonstrated in the
cases of both Ethiopia and Japan. As the Scramble for Africa began in earnest in the 1870s,
the recently-united nation of Italy sought to shore up its status as a European power by
establishing its own colonies. Italian politicians targeted East Africa, specifically Eritrea and
Ethiopia. In 1889, the Italians signed a treaty with the Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, but the
treaty contained different wording in Italian and Amharic (the major language of Ethiopia): the
131
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Italian version stipulated that Ethiopia would become an Italian colony, while the Amharic
version simply opened diplomatic ties with Europe through Italy. Once he learned of the
deception, Menelik II repudiated the treaty, simultaneously directing the resources of his
government to the acquisition of modern weapons and European mercenary captains willing to
train his army.
Open war broke out in the early 1890s between Italy and Ethiopia, culminating in a battle
at Adwa in 1896. There, the well-trained and well-equipped Ethiopians decisively defeated the
Italian army. The Italians were forced to formally recognize Ethiopian independence, and soon
other European powers followed suit (as an aside, it is interesting to note that Russia was
already favorably inclined toward Ethiopia, and a small contingent of Russian volunteers
actually fought against the Italians at the Battle of Adwa). Thus, a non-European power could
and did defeat European invaders thanks to Menelik IIs quick thinking. Nowhere else in Africa
did a local ruler so successfully organize to repulse the invaders, but if circumstances had been
different, they certainly could have done so.
In Asia, something comparable occurred, but at an even larger scale. In 1853, in the
quintessential example of gunboat diplomacy, an American naval admiral, Matthew Perry,
forced Japan to sign a treaty opening it to contact with the west through very thinly-veiled
threats. As western powers opened diplomacy and then trade with the Japanese shogunate, a
period of chaos gripped Japan as the centuries-old political order fell apart. In 1868, a new
government, remembered as the Meiji Restoration, embarked on a course of rapid
westernization after dismantling the old feudal privileges of the samurai class. Japanese
officials and merchants were sent abroad to learn about foreign technology and practices, and
European and American advisers were brought in to guide the construction of factories and train
a new, modernized army and navy. The Japanese state was organized along highly
authoritarian lines, with the symbolic importance of the emperor maintained, but practical power
held by the cabinet and the heads of the military.
Westernization in this case not only meant economic, industrial, and military
modernization, it also meant reaping the rewards of that modernization, one of which was an
empire. Just as European states had industrialized and then turned to foreign conquest, the
new leadership of Japan looked to the weaker states of their region as natural territories to be
incorporated. The Japanese thus undertook a series of invasions, most importantly in Korea
and the northern Chinese territory of Manchuria, and began the process of building an empire
on par with that of the European great powers.
132
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Japanese expansion, however, threatened Russian interests, ultimately leading to war in
1904. To the shock and horror of much of the western world, Japan handily defeated Russia by
1905, forcing Russia to recognize Japanese control of Manchuria, along with various disputed
islands in the Pacific. Whereas Ethiopia had defended its own territory and sovereignty, Japan
was now playing by the same rules and besting European powers at their own game: seizing
foreign territory through force of arms.
Japanese depiction of an assault on Russian forces. Note the European-style uniforms worn by
the Japanese soldiers.
Conclusion
It is easy to focus on the technologies behind the new imperialism, to marvel at its
speed, and to consider the vast breadth of European empires while overlooking what lay behind
it all: violence. The cases of the Congo and the genocide of the Herero and Nama are rightly
remembered, and studied by historians, as iconic expressions of imperialistic violence, but they
were only two of the more extreme and shocking examples of the ubiquitous violence that
established and maintained all of the imperial conquests of the time. The scale of that violence
on a global scale vastly exceeded any of the relatively petty squabbles that had constituted
133
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
European warfare itself up to that point – the only European war that approaches the level of
bloodshed caused by imperialism was probably the 30 Years War of the seventeenth century,
but imperialisms death toll was still far higher. Until 1914, Europeans exported that violence
hundreds or thousands of miles away as they occupied whole continents. In 1914, however, it
came home to roost in the First World War.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Steamer on the Congo – Public Domain
Maxim Gun – Public Domain
Opium War – Public Domain
Sepoy Rebellion – Public Domain
Mutilated Children in the Congo – Public Domain
Russo-Japanese War – Public Domain
134
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 7: World War I
Those who survived it called World War I “The Great War” and “The War to End All
Wars.” While they were, sadly, wrong about the latter, they were right that no war had ever
been like it. It was the world’s first mechanized, “impersonal” war in which machines proved to
be much stronger than human beings. It devastated enormous swaths of territory and it left the
economies of the Western World either crippled or teetering. To make matters worse, the war
utterly failed to resolve the issues that had caused it. The war began because of the
culmination of nationalist rivalries, fears, and hatreds. It failed to resolve any of those rivalries,
and furthermore it was such a traumatic experience for most Europeans that certain otherwise
normal people were attracted to the messianic, violent rhetoric of fascism and Nazism.
Background to the War
The single most significant background factor to the war was the rivalry that existed
between Europes great powers by the beginning of the twentieth century. The term great
power meant something specific in this period of history: the great powers were those able to
command large armies, to maintain significant economies and industrial bases, and to conquer
and hold global empires. Their respective leaders, and many of their regular citizens, were
fundamentally suspicious of one another, and the biggest worry of their political leadership was
that one country would come to dominate the others. Long gone was the notion of the balance
of power as a guarantor of peace. Now, the balance of power was a fragile thing, with each of
the great powers seeking to supplant its rivals in the name of security and prosperity. As a
result, there was an ongoing, elaborate diplomatic dance as each power tried to shore up
alliances, seize territory around the globe, and outpace the others.
While no great power deliberately sought war out, all were willing to risk war in 1914.
That was at least in part because no politician had an accurate idea of what a new war would
actually be like. The only wars that had occurred in Europe between the great powers since the
Napoleonic period were the Crimean War of the 1850s and the wars that resulted in the
formation of Italy and Germany in the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. While the Crimean War
was quite bloody, it was limited to the Crimean region itself and it did not involve all of the great
135
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
powers. Likewise, the wars of national unification were relatively short and did not involve a
great deal of bloodshed (by the standards of both earlier and later wars). In other words, it had
been over forty years since the great powers had any experience of a war on European soil,
and as they learned all too soon, much had changed with the nature of warfare in the meantime.
In the summer of 1914, each of the great powers reached the conclusion that war was
inevitable, and that trying to stay out of the immanent conflict would lead to national decline.
Germany was surrounded by potential enemies in France and Russia. France had cultivated a
desire for revenge against Germany ever since the Franco-Prussian War. Russia feared
German power and resented Austria for threatening the interests of Slavs in the Balkans. Great
Britain alone had no vested interest in war, but it was unable to stay out of the conflict once it
began.
Once the war began, the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and Britain faced the Central Powers
of Germany and Austria. Italy was initially allied with the Central Powers but abandoned them
once the war began, switching sides to join the Entente in 1915.
136
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In turn, the thing that inflamed jingoism and resentment among the great powers had
been imperialism. The British were determined to maintain their enormous empire at any cost,
and the Germans now posed a threat to the empire since Germany had lavished attention on a
naval arms race since the 1880s. There was constant bickering on the world stage between the
great powers over their colonies, especially since those colonies butted up against each other in
Africa and Asia. Violence in the colonies, however, was almost always directed at the native
peoples in those colonies, and there the balance of power was squarely on the side of
Europeans. Thus, even European soldiers overseas had no experience of facing foes armed
with comparable weapons.
The nature of nationalism had changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth
century as well. Not only had conservative elites appropriated nationalism to shore up their own
power (as in Italy and Germany), but nationalistic patriotism came to be identified with rivalry
and resentment among many citizens of various political persuasions. To be a good
Englishman was to resent and fear the growth of Germany. Many Germans came to despise
the Russians, in part thanks to the growth of anti-Slavic racism. The lesser powers of Europe,
like Italy, resented their own status and wanted to somehow seize enough power to join the
ranks of the great powers. Nationalism by 1914 was nothing like the optimistic, utopian
movements of the nineteenth century; it was hostile, fearful, and aggressive.
Likewise, public opinion mattered in a way it had never mattered earlier for the simple
fact that every one of the great powers had at least a limited electorate and parliaments with at
least some real power to make law. Even Russia, after a semi-successful revolution in 1905,
saw the creation of an elected parliament, the Duma, and an open press. The fact that all of the
powers had representative governments mattered, because public opinion helped fan the
flames of conflict. Newspapers in this era tended to deliberately inflame jingoistic passions
rather than encourage rational calculation. A very recognizably modern kind of connection was
made in the press between patriotic loyalty and a willingness to fight, kill, and die for ones
country. Since all of the great powers were now significantly (or somewhat, in the case of
Russia) democratic, the opinions of the average citizen mattered in a way they never had
before. Journalism whipped up those opinions and passions by stoking hatred, fear, and
resentment, which led to a more widespread willingness to go to war.
Thanks to the nationalistic rivalry described above, the great powers sought to shore up
their security and power through alliances. Those alliances were firmly in place by 1914, each of
which obligated military action if any one power should be attacked. Each great power needed
the support of its allies, and was thus willing to intercede even if its own interests were not
137
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
directly threatened. That willingness to go to war for the sake of alliance meant that even a
relatively minor event might spark the outbreak of total war. That is precisely what happened.
In 1914, two major sets of alliances set the stage for the war. German politicians,
fearing the possibility of a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously, concluded
an alliance with the Austrian Empire in 1879, only a little over a decade after the
Prusso-Austrian War. In turn, France and Russia created a strong alliance in 1893 in large part
to contain the ambitions of Germany, whose territory lay between them. Great Britain was
generally more friendly to France than Germany, but had not entered into a formal alliance with
any other power. It was, however, the traditional ally and protector of Belgium, which British
politicians considered a kind of toehold on the continent. Finally, Russia grew increasingly close
to the new nation of Serbia, populated as it was by a Slavic people who were part of the Eastern
Orthodox branch of Christianity. The relationships between Great Britain and Russia with
Belgium and Serbia, respectively, would not have mattered but for the alliance obligations that
tied the great powers together.
Those alliances were now poised to mobilize armies of unprecedented size. All of the
great powers now fielded forces of a million men or more. Coordinating that many troops
required detailed advanced planning and a permanent staff of high-ranking officers, normally
referred to as the “general staff” of a given army. In the past, political leaders had often either
led troops themselves or at least had significant influence in planning and tactics. By the early
twentieth century, however, war plans and tactics were entirely in the hands of the general staff
of each nation, meaning political leaders would be obliged to choose from a limited set of
“pre-packaged” options given to them by their generals.
Thus, when the war started, what took all of the leaders of the great powers – from the
Kaiser in Germany to the Tsar in Russia – by surprise was the ultimatums they received from
their own generals. According to the members of each nations general staff, it was all or
nothing: either commit all forces to a swift and decisive victory, or suffer certain defeat. There
could be no small incremental build ups or tentative skirmishes; this was about a total
commitment to a massive war. An old adage has it that generals fight the last war, basing their
tactics on what worked in previous conflicts, and in 1914 the last war most generals looked to
was the Franco-Prussian War, which Prussia had won through swift, decisive action and
overwhelming force.
138
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Start of the War
The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in 1914. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Habsburg throne, a respected Austrian
politician who also happened to be friends with the German Kaiser. Ironically, he was also the
politician in the Austrian state with the most direct control of the Austrian military, and he tended
to favor peaceful diplomacy over the potential outbreak of war it is possible that he would have
been a prominent voice for peace if he had survived. Instead, he was assassinated not by
Austria’s rivals Russia or France, but by a young Serbian nationalist.
Serbia was a new nation. It had fought its way to independence from the Ottoman
Empire in 1878, and its political leaders envisioned a role for Serbia like that Piedmont had
played in Italy: one small kingdom that came to conquer and unite a nation. In this case, the
Serbs hoped to conquer and unite the Balkans in one Serbian-dominated country. Austria,
however, stood in the path of Serbian ambition since Austria controlled neighboring Bosnia (in
which many Serbs lived as a significant minority of the population). Thus, the last thing Austrian
politicians wanted was an anti-Austrian movement launched by the ambitious Serbs.
In 1903, a military coup in Serbia killed the king and installed a fiercely nationalistic
leadership. Serbian nationalists were proud of their Slavic heritage, and Russia became a
powerful ally in large part because of the Slavic connection between Russians and Serbs (i.e.
they spoke related languages and the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches were part of the
same branch of Christianity). Russia also supported Serbia because of Russian rivalry with
Austria. Serbian nationalists believed that, with Russian support, it would be possible to create
an international crisis in Austrian-controlled Bosnia and ultimately seize Bosnia itself. The
Serbs did not believe that Austria would risk a full-scale war with Russia in order to hold on to
Bosnia.
Among the organizers of the coup that had murdered the king and queen were a group
of Serbian officers who created a terrorist group, The Black Hand. In 1914, The Black Hand
trained a group of (ethnically Serbian) college students in Bosnia to assassinate an Austrian
politician when the opportunity presented itself. That happened in June of 1914, when Franz
Ferdinand and his wife came to visit the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. In a fantastically bungled
assassination, Franz Ferdinand survived a series of attacks, with some of his would-be killers
getting cold feet and running off, others injuring bystanders but missing the Archduke, and
139
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
others losing track of where the Archduke’s motorcade was. Finally, quite by accident, the
Archduke’s driver became lost and stuck in traffic outside of a cafe in which one of the
assassins was eating a sandwich. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, seized the opportunity to
stride outside and shoot the Archduke and his wife to death.
The leaders of the Black Hand, the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand and sparking the beginning of World War I.
Serbia’s assumption that Austria would not risk war proved to be completely wrong. The
Austrian government demanded that Serbia allow Austrian agents to carry out a full-scale
investigation of the assassination; Serbian honor would never allow such a thing. Austrian
troops started massing near the Serbian border, and the great powers of Europe started calling
up their troops. Germany, believing that its own military and industrial resources were such that
it would be the victor in a war against France and Russia, promised to stand by Austria
regardless of what happened. Russia warned that Austrian intervention in Serbia would cause
war. France assured Russia of its loyalty. Only Britain was as-yet unaccounted for.
No one was completely certain that a war would actually happen (the German Kaiser,
Wilhelm II, left for his summer vacation as planned right in the middle of the crisis, believing no
140
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
war would occur), but if it did, each of the great powers was confident that they would be
victorious in the end. A desperate diplomatic scramble ensued as diplomats, parliaments, and
heads of state tried at the last minute to preserve the peace, but in the end it was too late: on
July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia, activating the pre-existing system of alliances, and by
August 4 all of the great powers were involved.
Thanks to the fact that Germany invaded through Belgium, Great Britain declared war on
Germany and its allies. In addition to Germany and the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire
soon joined their alliance, known as the Central Powers. Opposing them was the Triple Entente
of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Smaller states like Italy and Portugal later joined the Triple
Entente, as did, eventually, the United States.
The Early War
There was a mixture of apprehension and, in many cases, enthusiasm about the onset
of war among civilians and soldiers alike. Many felt that the war would resolve nationalistic
rivalries once and for all, and almost no one anticipated a lengthy war. Wilhelm II anticipated a
jolly little war and it was widely thought in France and Germany that the war would be over by
Christmas. 30,000 young men and women marched in Berlin before war was even declared,
singing patriotic songs and gathering at the feet of statues of German and Prussian heroes.
Everywhere, thousands of young men enlisted in the military of their own volition. There were
some anti-war protests in July, mostly organized by the socialist parties in the name of socialist
internationalism, but once the war was actually declared those protests abruptly stopped.
The most symptomatic moment of the defeat of socialism by nationalism as rival
ideologies was the fact that 100% of the socialist parties of Europe supported their respective
countries in the war, despite hard and fast promises before the war that, as socialists, they were
committed to peace. Whereas pre-war socialists had argued vociferously that the working class
of each country was a single, united class regardless of national differences, that internationalist
rhetoric largely vanished once the war began. Wanting to be seen as patriots (whether French,
German, or British), the major socialist parties voted to authorize the war and supported the sale
of war bonds. In turn, the radical left of the socialist parties soon broke off and formed new
parties that continued to oppose the war; these new parties were typically called communists
whereas the old ones remained socialists.
War, for many people, represented a cathartic release. War did not represent real
bloodshed and horror for the young men signing up they had never fought in real wars, except
141
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
for the veterans of colonial wars against much less well-armed natives in the colonies. War
was an ideal of bravery and honor that many young men in Europe in 1914 longed for as a way
to prove themselves, to prove their loyalty, and to purge their boredom and uncertainty about
the future. A whole generation had absorbed tales of glory on the battlefield, of the Napoleonic
Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the conquests overseas. Depending on
their nationality, they were either ashamed and angry or fiercely proud of their countrys
performance in past wars. As a result, many saw a new war as a chance to settle accounts, to
prove once and for all that they were citizens a great power, and to shame their opponents into
conceding defeat. France would at last get even for the Franco-Prussian War. Germany would
at least prove it was the most powerful nation in Europe. Russia would prove that it was a
powerful modern nationand so on.
The war itself began with the German invasion of France through Belgium. German
tactics centered on the Schlieffen Plan, named after its author, Field Marshal Alfred von
Schlieffen, who had devised it in the first years of the twentieth century. The Schlieffen Plan
called for a rapid advance into France to knock the French forces out of the war within six
weeks. Subsequently, German troops would be whisked back east via railroads in time to
engage Russia, as it was believed that it would take the Russians at least that long to mobilize
their armies. It not only called for rapid mobilization, but it required the German military to
defeat the French military at an even more rapid pace had the Prussian forces forty years earlier
in the Franco-Prussian War.
The Schlieffen Plan, in theory. In reality, while it met with initial success, French and British
troops succeeded in counter-attacking and pushing back the German advance.
142
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The first taste of the horror of the war to come was the German invasion of Belgium.
Belgium was a neutral country leading up to the war, and German planners had expected
Belgium to surrender swiftly as German troops advanced rapidly toward France. Instead,
Belgian soldiers fiercely resisted the German invasion. In turn, German troops deliberately
massacred civilians, destroyed towns, and raped Belgian women. Thousands of Belgian
refugees fled to Britain, where they were (to the credit of the British government and civilians)
welcomed and housed. The bloodshed shocked the sensibilities of the French and British
reading public and emphasized the fact that the war might go very differently than many had
first imagined. Britain swiftly declared war on Germany.
While the first few weeks of the German invasion seemed to match the ambitions of the
Schlieffen Plan, they soon ground to a halt. A fierce French counter-attack stopped the
Germans in Belgium and Northeastern France in late September. Simultaneously, the
Russians surprised everyone by mobilizing their forces much more quickly than expected,
attacking both Germany and Austria in the east in late August. In the autumn of 1914 the scale
of battles grew to exceed anything Europe had witnessed since the Napoleonic Wars (which
they soon dwarfed). To their shock and horror, soldiers on all sides encountered for the first
time the sheer destructive power of modern weaponry. To shield themselves from the clouds of
bullets belched out by machine guns, desperate soldiers dove into the craters created by
artillery shells. In the process, trench warfare was invented.
The weapons that had been developed in the decades leading up to the war, from
enormous new battleships known as dreadnoughts to high-explosive artillery shells and
machine guns, had all seemed to the nations of Europe like strengths. The early months of the
war revealed that they were indeed strong, in a sense, being far more lethal than anything
created before. Unfortunately, human bodies were pitifully weak by comparison, and as the
death toll mounted, the human (and financial) costs associated with modern warfare shattered
the image of national strength that politicians and generals continued to cling to. Those
generals in particular stuck to their favored, and outdated, tactics, sending cavalry in bright
uniforms to their deaths in hopeless charges, ordering offensives that were doomed to fail, and
calling up every soldier available on reserve.
That Christmas, in a well-remembered symbolic moment, a brief and unauthorized truce
held on the Western Front between Entente and German forces long enough for French and
German soldiers to climb out of their respective trenches and meet in the no mans land
between the lines, with a German barber offering shaves and haircuts to all comers. By then,
143
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
both sides were well aware that the conceit that the war would be over by Christmas had been
a ridiculous fantasy. Never again in the war would a moment of voluntary peace re-emerge;
while they did not know it for certain at the time, the soldiers faced four more years of carnage
to come.
The Evolution of the War
On the Western Front of the war, it was the trenches that defined almost everything in
the lives of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. An English officer and poet later wrote that
when all is said and done, this war was a matter of holes and ditches. While they began as
improvised, hastily-dug ditches, the trenches involved into vast networks of fortified rifts that
stretched from the English Channel in the north to the Swiss Alps in the south. Behind the
trenches lay the artillery batteries, capable of hurling enormous shells for miles, and farther back
still lay the command posts of the high-ranking officers who fruitlessly conceived of new
variations on a constant theme: hopeless charges against the impregnable enemy position.
The tactical problem facing both sides was due to the new technologies of war: whereas
in past wars the offensive strategy was often superior to the defensive strategy, things were
entirely reversed in World War I. Because of trenches, machine guns, mines, and modern rifles,
it was far more effective to entrench oneself and defend a position than it was to charge and try
to take the enemys position. It was nearly impossible to break through and gain territory or
advantage; the British phrase for an attack was going over the top, which involved thousands
of men climbing out of their trenches and charging across the no mans land that separated
them from the enemy. While they were charging, the enemy would simply open fire with
impunity from their trenches, and without exception not a single offensive captured a significant
amount of territory between 1915 and early 1917. As a single example, one British attack in
1915 temporarily gained 1,000 yards at the cost of 13,000 lives.
In turn, and in stark contrast to the early dreams of glory to be won on the battlefield,
soldiers discovered that their own competence, even heroism, had been rendered irrelevant by
the new technology of warfare. Because warfare was so heavily mechanized, the old ideal of
brave, chivalric combat between equals was largely obsolete. Men regularly killed other men
they never laid eyes on, and death often seemed completely arbitrary – in many cases, survival
came down to sheer, dumb luck. No amount of skill or bravery mattered if an artillery shell hit
the trench where a soldier happened to be standing. Likewise, if ordered to go over the top, all
one could hope for was to survive long enough to be able to retreat.
144
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Thus, the experience of war in the trenches for the next three years was a state of
ongoing misery: men stood in mud, sometimes over a foot deep, in the cold and rain, as shells
whistled overhead and occasionally blew them up. They lived in abject terror of the prospect of
having to attack the enemy line, knowing that they would all almost certainly be slaughtered.
Thousands of new recruits showed up on the lines every month, many of whom would be dead
in the first attack. In 1915, in a vain attempt to break the stalemate, both sides started using
poison gas, which was completely horrific, burning the lungs, eyes, and skin of combatants.
The survivors of poison gas attacks were considered to be the unlucky ones. By 1917, both
sides had been locked in place for three years, and the soldiers of both sides were known to
remark that only the dead would ever escape the trenches in the end.
Soldiers in a trench in 1915.
Individual battles in World War I sometimes claimed more lives than had entire wars in
past centuries. The Battle of Verdun, an enormous German offensive that sought to break the
stalemate in 1916, resulted in 540,000 casualties among the French and 430,000 among the
Germans. It achieved nothing besides the carnage, with neither side winning significant
territorial concessions. The most astonishing death count of the war was at the Battle of the
145
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Somme, a disastrous British offensive in 1916 in which 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded
on the first day alone there were more British soldiers killed and wounded in the first three
days of the battle of the Somme than there were Americans killed in World War I, The Korean
War, and the Vietnam War combined. Ultimately, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 420,000
British casualties (meaning either dead, missing, or wounded to the point of being unable to
fight), 200,000 French casualties, and 650,000 German casualties. One British poet noted
afterwards that the war had won the battle, not countries or people.
In this context of ongoing carnage, even the most stubborn commanders were forced to
recognize that their dreams of a spectacular breakthrough were probably unachievable.
Instead, by 1916 many of the wars top strategists concluded that the only way to win was to
outspend the enemy, churning out more munitions and supplies, drafting more men, committing
more civilians to the war effort at home, and sacrificing more soldiers than could the other side.
At its worst, commanders adopted an utterly ruthless perspective regarding their own casualties:
tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths were signs of progress in the war effort,
because they implied that the other side must be running out of soldiers, too. This was a war of
attrition on a new level, one that both soldiers and lower-ranking officers alike recognized was
designed to kill them in the name of a possible eventual victory.
The Eastern Front and the Ottoman Empire
Things were different in the east, however. In contrast to the essentially static nature of
trench warfare on the Western Front, the Russian, German, and Austrian armies in the east
were highly mobile, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles in an attempt to outflank their
enemies. The Russian army fought effectively in the early years of the war, especially against
Austrian forces, which it consistently defeated. While Russian soldiers were also the match of
Germans, however, Russia was hampered by its inadequate industrial base and by its lack of
rail lines and cars. The Germans were able to outmaneuver the Russians, often surrounding
Russian armies one by one and defeating them. A brilliant Russian general oversaw a major
offensive in 1916 that crippled Austrian forces, but did not force Austria out of the war. In the
aftermath, a lack of support and coordination from the other Russian generals ultimately
checked the offensive.
By late 1916 the war had grown increasingly desperate for Russia. The Tsars
government was teetering and morale was low. The home front was in dire straits, with serious
food shortages, and there were inadequate munitions (especially for artillery) making it to the
front. Thus, the German armies steadily pushed into Russian territory. A furious defense by the
146
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Russian forces checked the German advance in the winter of 1916 – 1917, but the war was
deeply unpopular on the home front and increasing numbers of soldiers deserted rather than
face the Germans. It was in this context of imminent defeat that a popular revolution overthrew
the Tsarist state – that revolution is described in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, long considered the sick man of Europe by European
politicians, proved a far more resilient enemy than expected. As described in the chapter on
Imperialism, in 1909 a coup of army officers and political leaders known as the Committee of
Union and Progress, but more often remembered as the Young Turks, seized control of the
Ottoman state and embarked on a rapid program of western-style reform (including a growing
obsession with Turkish racial identity at the expense of the Empires other ethnicities). With
war clouds gathering over Europe in 1914, the Young Turks threw in their lot with Germany, the
one European power that had never menaced Ottoman territories and which promised
significant territorial gains in the event of a German – Turkish victory.
In 1915 British forces staged a full-scale invasion of Ottoman territory which rapidly
turned into an outright disaster. In a poorly-planned assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula near
Constantinople, hundreds of thousands of British Imperial troops (including tens of thousands of
Australians and New Zealanders recruited to fight for their empire from half a world away)
were gunned down by Turkish machine guns. In the months that followed, British forces failed
to make headway against the Ottomans, with the Ottoman leadership rightly judging that the
very survival of the Ottoman state was at stake in the war.
An Australian propaganda poster calling for volunteers.
147
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In 1916, however, British forces focused their strategy on capturing the eastern stretch of
the Ottoman Empire: Mesopotamia, the site of the earliest civilization in human history (which
became the country of Iraq in 1939). The British made steady progress moving west from
Mesopotamia while also supporting an Arab nationalist insurgency against the Ottomans from
within the Ottoman borders. By 1917 Ottoman forces were in disarray and the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire looked all but certain.
Even as British and French politicians began plans to divide up the Ottoman territory into
protectorates (dubbed mandates after the war) under their control, however, the Young Turk
leader Mustafa Kemal launched a major military campaign to preserve not Ottoman but Turkish
independence, with the other ethnicities that had lived under Ottoman rule either pushed aside
or destroyed. In one of the greatest crimes of the war, Turkish forces drove hundreds of
thousands of Armenians from their homes across deserts to die of abuse, exhaustion, hunger,
and thirst when they were not slaughtered outright. To this day, the Turkish government (while
admitting that many Armenians died) denies what historians have long since recognized: the
Armenians were victims of a deliberate campaign of genocide, with over one million killed.
Women in the War (and Afterwards)
World War I transformed, at least during the war itself, gender roles. The total
commitment to the war on the part of the belligerent nations left numerous professional
positions vacant as men were dispatched to fight. Women responded by taking on jobs that
they had been barred from in the past, as doctors, mid-level officials and executives in private
enterprise, and in wartime production in factories. Suffrage movements temporarily suspended
their agitation for the vote in favor of using their existing organizations to support the war effort
in the name of patriotism. Thousands of women joined the war effort directly as nurses, in many
cases serving near or even in the trenches on the Western Front. The famous scientist Marie
Curie (the first women to win a Nobel Prize – she won a second a few years later) drove an
ambulance near the front lines during the war.
In many cases, the labor shortage led to breakthroughs for women that simply could not
be reversed at the wars end. Having established the precedent that a woman could work
perfectly well at a mans job (as a competent streetcar conductor, for example) certain fields
remained at least partially open to women after the war concluded in 1918. Other changes
were cultural in nature rather than social. For example, the cumbersome, uncomfortable
angle-length dresses of the pre-war period vanished (along with corsets, the very model of
148
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
impracticality and discomfort), replaced by sensible, comfortable dresses and skirts. Women
cut their hair short in bobs for the first time both for fashion and because short hair was more
practical while working full-time for the war effort. The war, in short, required gender roles to
change primarily for economic reasons, but women embraced those changes as forms of
liberation, not just side-effects of their new jobs.
While it was not always a straightforward case of cause-and-effect, there is no doubt that
womens participation in the war effort did have a direct link to voting rights after the war. One
by one, most European countries and the United States granted the vote to at least some
women in the years that followed the war. One striking example is Belgium, where only women
who were widowed, had lost sons, or had themselves been held captive during the war were
granted the vote initially. Some countries stubbornly resisted this trend – France rejected
womens suffrage entirely until after the period of Nazi occupation in World War II – but there can
be no doubt that, overall, the cause of womens suffrage was aided immensely by the patriotic
service of women during WWI.
The Late War
World War I was fought primarily in Europe, along the Western Front that stretched from
the English Channel south along the French border to the Alps, and on the Eastern Front across
Poland, Galicia (the region encompassing part of Hungary and the Ukraine) and Russia. It was
a world war, however, for two reasons. First, hundreds of thousands of troops from around the
world fought in it, the most numerous of which were citizens of the British Empire drawn from as
far away as India and New Zealand. Second, military engagements occurred in the Ottoman
territories of the Middle East, in Africa between European colonial armies, and in Asia (albeit at
a much smaller scale). Japan even supported the Entente war effort by taking a
German-controlled Chinese port, Tsingtao.
The other major power involved in the war, the United States, was a latecomer to the
fighting. The United States was dominated by “isolationist” sentiment until late in the war. Most
Americans believed that the war was a European affair that should not involve American troops.
America, however, was an ally of Britain and provided both military and civilian supplies to the
British, along with large amounts of low-interest loans to keep the British economy afloat. In
1917, as the war dragged on and the German military leadership under the Field Marshal Paul
Von Hindenburg recognized that the nation could not sustain the war much longer, the German
generals decided to use their new submarines, the U-Boats, to attack any vessel suspected of
149
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
carrying military supplies to the British or French. When ships carrying American civilians were
sunk in 1917, American public sentiment finally shifted and the US declared war on Germany in
April of 1917.
The importance of the entrance of the United States in the war was not the superiority of
American troops or technology – American soldiers were as horrified as anyone when they first
encountered modern, mechanized warfare. Instead, the key factor was that the US had a
gigantic industrial capacity, dwarfing all of the great powers of Europe put together, and millions
of fresh troops that could be called up or drafted. Germany, meanwhile, had been totally
committed to the war for almost three years, and its supplies (of money, fuel, munitions, food,
and people) were running very thin. Most German civilians still believed that Germany was
winning, but as the carnage continued on the Western Front, the German general staff knew
that they had to achieve a strategic breakthrough.
By 1918, it was clear to the German command that they were at risk of losing, despite
the military resources freed up when the Bolshevik Revolution ended Russias commitment to
the war. The Germans had been able to fight the French and British to a standstill on the
Western Front, but when the US entered on the side of the British and French, it became
impossible to sustain the war in the long run. The only hope appeared to be one last desperate
offensive that might bring the French and British to the negotiating table. Thus, German forces
staged a major campaign in the spring of 1918 that succeeded in breaking through the western
lines and coming within about 40 miles of Paris, but by then German troops had outpaced their
supply lines, lost cover, and were now up against the combined reserves of the French, British,
and Americans. Another attempted offensive in July failed, and the Entente (and American)
powers began to push the German forces back.
Back in Germany, criticism of the Kaiser appeared for the first time in the mainstream
press, and hundreds of thousands of workers protested the worsening economic conditions. In
late September, the head of the German General Staff, Ludendorff, advised the Kaiser to sue
for peace. A month later, the Reichstag passed laws making the governments ministers
responsible to it instead of the Kaiser. Protest movements spread across Germany and the
rapidly-collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire, as nationalist movements declared independence
in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans.
On November 11 of 1918, a voluntary commission of German politicians led by the
German Socialist Party (SPD) formally sued for peace. The Kaiser, blaming socialists and Jews
for “stabbing Germany in the back,” snuck away in a train to Holland, where he abdicated. The
top generals of the German General Staff, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, themselves the authors
150
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
of the myth of the stab in the back, did their best to popularize the idea that Germany would
have won if not for sabotage perpetrated by a sinister conspiracy of foreign agents,
communists, and (as with practically every shadowy conspiracy theory of the twentieth century)
Jews. In fact, if the commision of German politicians had not sued for peace when they did,
French, British, and American troops would have simply invaded Germany and even more
people would have died.
The Aftermath
The aftermath of the war was horrendous. Over twenty million people, both soldiers and
civilians, were dead. For Russia and France, of the twenty million men mobilized during the
war, over 76% were casualties (either dead, wounded, or missing). A whole generation of
young men was almost wiped out, which had lasting demographic consequences for both
countries. For Germany, the figure was 65%, including 1.8 million dead. The British saw a
casualty rate of only 39%, but that figure still represented the death of almost a million men,
with far more wounded or missing. Even the smaller nations like Italy, which had fought
fruitlessly to seize territory from Austria, lost over 450,000 men. A huge swath of Northeastern
France and parts of Belgium were reduced to lifeless fields of mud and debris.
Politically, the war spelled the end of three of the most venerable, and historically
powerful, empires of the early modern period: the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire of
Austria, and the Ottoman Empire of the Middle East. The Austrian Empire was replaced by new
independent nations, with Austria itself reduced to a rump state: the remnant of its former
imperial glory. France and Great Britain busily divided up control of former Ottoman territories in
new mandates, often creating new nations (such as Iraq) without the slightest concern for the
identities of the people who actually lived there, but Turkey itself achieved independence thanks
to the ferocious campaign led by Mustafa Kemal, or Atatrk, meaning father of the Turks. As
noted above, revolution in Russia led to the collapse of the Tsarist state and, after a bloody civil
war, the emergence of the worlds first communist nation: the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. While Germany had not been a major imperial power, it also lost its overseas
territories in the aftermath of the war.
The American president Woodrow Wilson, hoping to prevent future wars on the scale of
World War I and, as importantly, to present an appealing anti-communist vision for a peaceful
global order, helped to organize a new international body: the League of Nations. The idea
behind the League was that it would work against reckless international aggression and war,
coordinate diplomatic and economic relationships, and protect the right of self-determination of
151
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
peoples around the world. Instead, the League was quickly revealed to be weak and
ineffectual, consistently failing to act when nations launched wars of invasion (starting the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in northern China, in 1931), handing out territories in Africa
and the Middle East to European imperialists instead of to the people who actually lived there,
and failing to attract the membership of the very country whose leader had proposed it in the
first place: the United States. Instead of inspiring confidence and hope, the League appeared to
many as the symbol of international dysfunction.
For surviving soldiers everywhere, the psychological damage from years of carnage and
desperation left wounds as crippling as those inflicted by poison gas and artillery strikes. From
the euphoria many felt at the start of the war, the survivors were left psychologically shattered.
The British term for soldiers who survived but were unable to function in society was shell
shock, a vague diagnosis for what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Whereas
P.T.S.D. is now understood as a grave psychological issue that requires medical and therapeutic
intervention, it was considered a form of hysteria at the time, a deeply gendered diagnosis that
compared traumatized soldiers to hysterical middle class women suffering from depression.
While the numbers of shell shock cases were so great that they could not be ignored by the
medical community at the time, the focus of treatment revolved around trying to force former
soldiers to somehow tough their way back to normal behavior (something that is now
recognized to be impossible). Some progress was made in treating shell shock cases by
applying the talking cure, an early form of therapy related to the practices of the great early
psychologist Sigmund Freud, but most of the medical community held to the assumption that
trauma was just a sign of weakness.
Likewise, there was no sympathy in European (or American) culture for psychological
problems. To be unable to function because of trauma was to be weak or insane, with all of
the social and cultural stigma those terms invoke. Any soldier diagnosed with a psychological
issue, as opposed to a physical one, was automatically disqualified from receiving a disability
pension as well. Thus, many of the veterans of World War I were both pitied and looked down
on for not being able to re-adjust to civilian life, in circumstances in which the soldiers were
suffering massive psychological trauma. The result was a profound sense of betrayal and
disillusionment among veterans.
This was the context in which Europeans dubbed the conflict “The War to End All Wars.”
It was inconceivable to most that it could happen again; the costs had simply been too great to
bear. The European nations were left indebted and depopulated, the maps of Europe and the
Middle East were redrawn as new nations emerged from old empires, and there was a profound
152
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
uncertainty about what the future held. Most hoped that, at the very least, the bloodshed was
over and that the process of rebuilding might begin. Some, however, saw the wars conclusion
as deeply unsatisfying and, in a sense, incomplete: there were still scores to be settled. It was
from that sense of dissatisfaction and a longing for continued violence that the most destructive
political philosophy of the twentieth century emerged: fascism.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Black Hand – Creative Commons License
Schlieffen Plan – Public Domain
Alliances – Creative Commons License
Soldiers in Trench – Public Domain
Australian Propaganda – Public Domain
153
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 8: The Early Twentieth Century
Russian Revolutions
The last Tsar of Russia was Nikolai II (1868 – 1918). At the start of his reign in 1894, at
the death of his father Alexander III, Nikolai was among the most powerful monarchs in Europe.
Russia may have been technologically and socially backwards compared to the rest of Europe,
but it commanded an enormous empire and boasted a powerful military. Alone among the
monarchs of the great powers, the Tsars had successfully resisted most of the forces of
modernity that had fundamentally changed the political structure of the rest of Europe. Nikolai
ruled in much the same manner as had his father, grandfather, and great grandfather before
him, holding nearly complete authority over day-to-day politics and the Russian Church.
Family resemblance: cousins Tsar Nikolai II (on the left) and King George V of Britain (on the
right).
154
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
It was, however, during his reign that modernity finally caught up with Russia. The
Russian state was able to control the press and punish dissent into the first years of the
twentieth century, but then events outside of its immediate control undermined its ability to
exercise complete control over Russian society. The immediate cause of the downfall of
Nikolai’s royal line, and the entire traditional order of Russian society, was war: The Russo –
Japanese War of 1904 – 1905 and, ten years later, World War I.
Japan shocked the world when it handily defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
To many Russians, the Tsar was to blame for the defeat in both allowing Russia to remain so far
behind the rest of the industrialized world economically, and because he himself had proved an
indecisive leader during the war. Following the Russian defeat, 100,000 workers tried to
present a petition to the Tsar asking for better wages, better prices on food, and the end of
official censorship. Troops fired on the crowds, which were unarmed, sparking a nationwide
wave of strikes. For months, the nation was rocked by open rebellions in navy bases and cities,
and radical terrorist groups managed to seize certain neighborhoods of the major metropolises
of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Nikolai finally agreed to allow a representative assembly, the
Duma, to meet, and after months of fighting the army managed to regain control.
The aftermath of this (semi-)revolution saw the Tsar still in power and various
newly-constituted political parties elected to the Duma. Very soon, however, it was clear that
the Duma was not going to serve as a counter-balance to Tsarist power. The Tsar retained
control of foreign policy and military affairs. In addition, the parties in the Duma had no
experience of actually governing, and quickly fell to infighting and petty squabbles, leaving most
actual decision making where it always had been: with the Tsar himself and his circle of
aristocratic advisors. Still, some things did change thanks to the revolution: unions were
legalized and the Tsar was not able to completely dismiss the Duma. Most importantly, the state
could no longer censor the press effectively. As a result, there was an explosion of anger as
various forms of anti-governmental press spread across the country.
One of Nikolai’s many concerns was that his only male heir, Prince Alexei, was a
hemophiliac (i.e. his blood did not clot properly when he was injured, meaning any minor scrape
or cut was potentially lethal). Nikolai’s wife, Tsarina Alexandra, called upon the services of a
wandering, illiterate monk and faith healer named Grigorii Rasputin. Rasputin, definitely one of
the most peculiar characters in modern history, was somehow able (perhaps through a kind of
hypnotism) to stop Alexei’s bleeding, and the Tsarina thus believed that he had been sent by
God to protect the royal family. Rasputin moved in with the Tsar’s family and quickly became a
powerful influence, despite being the son of Siberian peasants, and despite the fact that part of
155
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
his philosophy was that one was closest to God after engaging in sexual orgies and other forms
of debauchery.
Grigori Rasputin in 1916, shortly before his death.
When World War I began in 1914, the already fragile political balance within the Russian
state teetered on the verge of collapse. In the autumn of 1915, as Russian fortunes in the war
started to worsen, Nikolai departed for the front to personally command the Russian army. In
1916 a desperate conspiracy of Russian nobles, convinced that Rasputin was the cause of
Russia’s problems, managed to assassinate him. By then, however, the German armies were
steadily pressing towards Russian territory, and tens of thousands of Russian troops were
deserting to return to their home villages. As the social and political situation began to approach
outright anarchy, one group of Russian communists steeped in the tradition of radical terrorism
stood ready to take action: the Bolsheviks.
The form of radical politics that had taken root in Russia in the late nineteenth century
revolved around apocalyptic revolutionary socialism. Mikhail Bakunin was the exemplary figure
in this regard – Bakunin believed that the only way to create a perfect socialist future was to
utterly destroy the existing political and social order, after which “natural” human tendencies of
peace and altruism would manifest and create a better society for all. By the late nineteenth
156
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
century, this homegrown Russian version of socialist theory was joined with Marxism, as various
Russian radical thinkers tried to determine how a Marxist revolution might occur in a society like
theirs that was still largely feudal.
The problem with Marxist theory faced by Russian Marxists was that, according to Marx,
a revolution could only happen in an advanced industrial society. The proletariat would
recognize that it had “nothing to lose but its chains” and overthrow the bourgeois order. In
Russia, however, industrialization was limited to some of the major cities of western Russia, and
most of the population were still poor peasants in small villages. This did not look like a
promising setting for a revolution of the industrial working class.
The key figure who saw a way out of this theoretical impasse was Vladimir Lenin. Lenin
was an ardent revolutionary and a major political thinker. He created the concept of the
“vanguard party”: a dedicated group of revolutionaries who would lead both workers and
peasants in a massive uprising. Left to their own devices, he argued, workers alone would
always settle for slight improvements in their lives and working conditions (he called this “trade
union consciousness”) rather than recognizing the need for a full-scale revolutionary change.
The vanguard party, however, could both instruct workers and lead them in the creation of a
new society. Led by the party, not only could a communist revolution succeed in a backwards
state like Russia, but it could skip a stage of (the Marxist version of) history, jumping directly
from feudalism to socialism and bypassing industrial capitalism.
In Lenins mind, the obvious choice of a vanguard party was his own Russian communist
party, the Bolsheviks. By 1917, the Bolsheviks were a highly organized militant group of
revolutionaries with contacts in the army, navy, and working classes of the major cities. When
political chaos descended on the country as the possibility of full-scale defeat to Germany
loomed, the Bolsheviks had their chance to seize power.
On International Womens Day in February of 1917 (using the Eastern Orthodox
calendar still in use at the time – it was March in the west), women workers in St. Petersburg
demonstrated against the Tsar’s government to protest the price of food, which had skyrocketed
due to the war. Within days the demands had grown to ending the war entirely and even calling
for the ouster of the Tsar himself, and a general strike was called. Comparable demonstrations
broke out in the other major cities in short order. The key moment, as had happened in
revolutions since 1789, was when the army refused to put down the uprisings and instead joined
them. The Duma demanded that the Tsar step aside and hand over control of the military. By
early March, just a few weeks after it had begun, the Tsar abdicated, realizing that he had lost
the support of almost the entire population.
157
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In the aftermath of this event, power was split. The Duma appointed a provisional
government than enacted important legal reforms but did not have the power to relieve the
Russian army at the front or to provide food to the hungry protesters. Likewise, the Duma itself
represented the interests and beliefs of the educated middle classes, still only a tiny portion of
the Russian population as a whole. The members of the Duma hoped to create a democratic
republic like those of France, Britain, or the United States, but they had no road map to bring it
about. Likewise, the Duma had no way to enforce the new laws it passed, nor could they
compel Russian peasants to fight on against the Germans. Most critically, the members of the
Duma refused to sue for peace with Germany, believing that Russia still had to honor its
commitment to the war despite the carnage being inflicted on Russian soldiers at the front.
Soon, in the industrial centers and in many of the army and naval bases, councils of
workers and soldiers (called soviets) sprang up and declared that they had the real right to
political power. There was a standoff between the provisional government, which had no police
force to enforce its will, and the soviets, which could control their own areas but did not have the
ability to bring the majority of the population (who wanted, in Lenins words, peace, land, and
bread) over to their side. Many fled the cities for the countryside, peasants seized land from
landowners, and soldiers deserted in droves; by 1917 fully 75% of the soldiers sent to the front
against Germany deserted.
Thus, as of the late summer of 1917, there was a power vacuum created by the war and
by the incompetence of the Duma. No group had power over the country as a whole, and so
the Bolsheviks had their opportunity. In October the Bolsheviks took control of the most
powerful soviet, that of Petrograd (former St. Petersburg). Next, the Bolsheviks seized control
of the Duma, expelled the members of other political parties, and then stated their intention to
pursue the goals that no other major party had been willing to: unconditional peace with
Germany and land to the peasants with no compensation for landowners. In early 1918, after
consolidating their control in Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk with Germany, granting Germany huge territorial concessions in return for peace
(Germany would lose those new territories when it lost the war itself later that year).
Almost immediately, a counter-revolution erupted and civil war broke out. The
Bolsheviks proved effective at rallying troops to their cause and leading those troops in war.
Their Red Army engaged the White counter-revolutionaries all over western Russia and the
Ukraine. For their part, the Whites were an ungainly coalition of former Tsarists, the liberals who
had been alienated by the Bolshevik takeover of the Duma, members of ethnic minorities who
wanted political independence, an anarchist peasant army in the Ukraine, and troops sent by
158
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
foreign powers (including the United States), terrified of the prospect of a communist revolution
in a nation as large and potentially powerful as Russia. Despite the fact that very few Russians
were active supporters of communist ideology, the Red Army still proved both coherent and
effective under Bolshevik leadership.
Lenin making a speech in 1920 in support of the Red Army during the civil war.
The ensuing war was brutal, ultimately killing close to ten million people (most were
civilians who were massacred or starved), and lasting for four years. In the end, however, the
Bolsheviks prevailed in Russia itself, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Some Eastern European
countries, including Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, did gain their independence thanks to
the war, but everywhere else in the former Russian Empire the Bolsheviks succeeded in
creating a new communist empire in its place: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
159
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Early Twentieth-Century Cultural Change
The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent creation of the USSR represents perhaps
the most striking political event of its time, but it occurred during a period of profound political,
cultural, and intellectual instability across Europe and much of the world. The first few decades
of the twentieth century revolved around World War I in many ways, but even before the war
began Western society was riven with cultural and political conflict. It was an incredibly
tumultuous time, one in which Western Civilization struggled to define itself in the face of
scientific progress and social change that seemed to be speeding forward ever faster.
Part of this phenomenon was the fact that the old order of monarchy and nobility was
finally, definitively destroyed, a casualty of World War I. Never again would kings and emperors
and noblemen share power over European countries. At the same time, the great political
project of the nineteenth century, republican democracy, seemed profoundly disappointing to
many Europeans, who had watched it degenerate into partisan squabbles that were helpless to
prevent the Great War and its terrible aftermath. In that aftermath there was a terrific flowering
of cultural and intellectual production even as the continent struggled to recover economically. It
is tempting to see these years, especially the interwar period between 1918 and 1939, as
nothing more than the staging ground for World War II, but a more accurate picture reveals
them as being much more than just a prequel.
Modernism
Modernism in the arts refers to a specific period starting around 1900 and coming into its
own in the 1920s. It expressed a set of common attitudes and assumptions that centered on a
rejection of established authority. It was a movement of skepticism directed toward the
post-Victorian middle class, an overhaul of the entire legacy of comfort, security, paranoia,
rigidity, and hierarchy. It rejected the premise of melodrama, namely clear moral messages in
art and literature that were meant to edify and instruct. Socially, it was a reaction against the
complacency of the bourgeoisie, of their willingness to start wars over empire and notions of
nationalism.
160
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Modernist art and literature sometimes openly attacked the moral values of mainstream
society, but sometimes experimented with form itself and simply ignored moral issues. This was
the era of lart pour lart (“art for art’s sake), of creation disinterred from social or intellectual
duty. Artists broke with the idea that art should represent something noble and beautiful, and
instead many indulged in wild experiments and deliberately created disturbing pieces meant to
provoke their audience. Sometimes, modernists were distinctly modern in glorifying
industrialism and technology, while other times they were modern in that they were
experimenting with entirely novel approaches to creation.
One of the quintessential modernist movements was Futurism. Starting in Italy before
World War I, Futurism was a movement of poets, playwrights, and painters who celebrated
speed, technology, violence, and chaos. Their stated goal was to destroy the remnants of past
art and replace it with the art of the future, an art that reflected the modern, industrial world.
Futurism sought something new and better than what the Victorian bourgeoisie had come up
with: something heroic.
In 1909, F.T. Marinetti, the movement’s founder, wrote the Futurist Manifesto. In it, he
thundered that the Futurists wanted to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and
rashness, and that poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown. The
Manifesto went on to proclaim, ominously, that we want to glorify war – the only cure for the
world and that the Futurists were dedicated to demolishing museums and libraries and sought
to fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. The Manifesto, in
short, was a profound expression of dissatisfaction with the mainstream culture of Europe
leading up to World War I, and its proponents were proud partisans of violence, elitism, and
misogyny.
Futurist art itself was often bizarre and provocative – one Futurist play consisted of a
curtain opening to an empty stage, the sound of a gunshot and a scream offstage, and the
closing of the curtain. Futurist paintings often depicted vast clouds of dark smoke with abstract
images of trains and radio towers, or sometimes just jumbles of color. While their politics were
as murky as some of their art early on, after World War I most of the Futurists embraced
fascism, seeing in fascism a political movement that reflected their desire for a politics that was
new, virile, and contemptuous of democracy.
The Futurists were just one branch of modernism in the In visual arts. Other schools
existed across Europe, including Vorticism in England, Expressionism in Austria, and Cubism in
France. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), the major cubist painter and sculptor, was one of the
quintessential modernist painters in that he portrayed objects, people, even the works of past
161
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
masters, but he did so from several different perspectives at once. The English Vorticists,
meanwhile, attempted to capture the impression of motion in static paintings, not least by
depicting literal explosions in their art.
Among the creators of the most striking, sometimes beautiful, but other times grotesque
images associated with modernism were the Austrian expressionists. The major point of
expressionism was to put the artist’s inner life on display through abstract, often disturbing
images. The governing concept was not to depict things “as they are,” but instead to reflect the
disturbing realities of the artist’s mind and spirit. The greatest Austrian expressionist was
Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918), who created beautiful but haunting and often highly eroticized
portraits, the most famous of which became one of the quintessential dorm room decorations of
collegiate America – The Kiss.
Klimts The Kiss from 1908.
In 1901, the University of Vienna commissioned Klimt to create paintings to celebrate the
three great branches of traditional academic scholarship: philosophy, medicine, and law. In
each case, Klimt created frightening images in which the nominal subject matter was somehow
162
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
present, but was overshadowed by the grotesque depiction of either how it was being carried
out or how it failed to adequately address its subject. Philosophy, for instance, depicts a column
of naked, wretched figures clinging to one another over a starry abyss, with a sinister,
translucent face visible in the backdrop. The paintings were all beautiful and skillfully rendered,
but also dark and disturbing (the originals were destroyed by the Nazis during their occupation
of Austria – Modernism was considered degenerate art by the Nazi party).
Klimts Philosophy, from 1907.
One of Klimt’s students was Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), who subverted Klimt’s themes
(which, although very dark, were also beautiful) and openly celebrated the ugly and threatening.
His self-portraits in particular were meant to portray his own perversity and depression; he
normally painted himself in the nude looking emaciated, threatening, and grim. Whereas Klimt
sought to capture at least some positive or pleasurable aspects of the human spirit and the mind
that existed at the unconscious level, Schieles work almost brutally portrayed the ugliness
embedded in his own psyche.
163
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Modernism was not confined to literature and the visual arts, however. Some
composers and musicians in the first decades of the twentieth century sought to shatter musical
traditions, defying the expectations of their listeners by altering the very scales, notes, and
tempos that western audiences were used to hearing. Some of the resulting pieces eventually
became classics in their own right, while others tended to become part of the history of music
more so than music very many people actually listened to.
One of the most noteworthy modernist composers was Igor Stravinsky (1882 1971). A
Russian composer, Stravinsky’s was best known for his Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring was
a ballet depicting the fertility rites of the ancient Scythians, the nomadic people native to
southern Russia in the ancient past. Staged by classical ballet dancers, the Rite of Spring
completely scandalized its early audiences; at its first performance in Paris, members of the
audience hissed at the dancers, and pelted the orchestra with debris, while the press described
it as pornographic and barbaric. The dancers lurched about on stage, sometimes in an overtly
sexual manner, and the music changed its tempo and abandoned its central theme. Within a
few years, however (and following a change in its wild choreography), the Rite became part of
ballets canon of great pieces.
In contrast, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) invented a form of
orchestral music that remains more of an important influence to avant-garde musicians and
composers than something actively listened to by mainstream audiences. Schoenbergs major
innovations consisted of experiments with atonality – music without a central, binding key – and a
newly-invented twelve-tone scale of his own creation. Schoenberg was among the first to defy
the entire tradition of western music in his experiments. Ever since the Renaissance, western
musicians had worked in basically the same set of scales. As a result, listeners were trained
from birth to expect certain sounds and certain rhythms in music. Schoenberg deliberately
subverted those expectations, inserting dissonance and unexpected notes in many of his works.
Similar in some ways to the innovations in the visual arts and music, modernist literature
created out a new approach to poetry and prose. Authors like Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust,
Franz Kafka, and James Joyce (whose places of origins spanned from Dublin to Prague)
created a new form of literature in which the nominal plot of a story was less important than the
protagonists inner life and experience of his or her surroundings and interactions. Joyces
(incredible difficult to read) novel Ulysses described a single unremarkable day in the life of a
man in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the vast range of thoughts, emotions, and reactions that
passed through the mans consciousness rather than on the events of the day itself. Proust and
Woolf also wrote works focused on the inner life rather than the outside event, and Woolf was
164
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
also a seminal feminist writer. Kafkas work brilliantly, and tragically, satirized the experience of
being lost in the modern world, hemmed in by impersonal bureaucracies and disconnected from
other people – his most famous story, Metamorphosis, describes the experience of a young man
who awakens one day to discover that he has become a gigantic insect, but whose immediate
concern is that he will be unable to make it in to his job.
Ultimately, artistic modernism in the arts, music, and literature questioned the
(post-)Victorian obsession with traditional morality, hierarchy, and control. The inner life was not
straightforward it was a complicated mess of conflicting values, urges, and drives, and
traditional morality was often a smokescreen over a system of repression and violence. Certain
modernist artists attacked the system, while others exposed its vacuity, its emptiness or
shallowness, against the darker, more complex reality they thought lay underneath.
Freud
While not an artist himself, the great thinker of modernism was, in many ways, Sigmund
Freud (1856 – 1939). Freud was one of the founders of the medical and scientific discipline of
psychology. He was the forefather of the concept of modern therapy itself and his theories,
while now largely rejected by psychologists in terms of their empirical accuracy, nevertheless
continue to exert tremendous influence. In historical hindsight, Freuds importance derives from
his work as a philosopher of the mind more so than as a scientist per se, although it was
precisely his drive for his work to be respected as a true science that inspired his research and
writing.
Freud was born in Moravia (todays Czech Republic) in 1856, and his family eventually
moved to Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire of which Moravia was part. Freud was
Jewish, and his family underwent a generational transformation that was very common among
Central European Jews in the latter part of the nineteenth century, following legal emancipation
from anti-Semitic laws: his grandparents were unassimilated and poor, his parents were able to
create a successful business in a major city, and Freud himself became a highly-educated
professional (he received his medical degree in 1881). Many of Freud’s theories were
influenced by his own experience as a brilliant scholar who happened to be Jewish, living in a
society rife with anti-Semitism – he sought to understand the inner psychological drives that led
people to engage in irrational behavior.
165
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The best-known portrait of Freud, dating from 1921.
Freud’s greatest accomplishment was diagnosing the essential irrationality of the human
mind. Influenced by modernist philosophers, by great writers like Shakespeare, and by Darwin’s
work on evolution, Freud came to believe that the mind itself “evolved” from childhood into
adulthood in a fundamentally hostile psychic environment. The mind was forced to conform to
social pressure from outside while being enslaved to its own unconscious desires (the “drives”)
that sought unlimited power and pleasure. Freud wanted to be the “Darwin of the mind,” the
inventor of a true science of psychology that could explain and, he hoped, cure psychological
disorders.
Freud became well known because of his work with hysterical patients. The word
hysteria is related to the Greek hystera, meaning womb. Essentially, “hysteria” consisted of
physical symptoms of panic, pain, and paralysis in women who had no detectable physical
problems. Hysteria was a term invented to blame the female anatomy for physical symptoms,
in the absence of other discernible causes. Freud, however, believed that hysteria was the
166
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
result not of some unknown physical problem among women, but instead a physical result of
psychological trauma – in almost all cases, that of what we would now describe as sexual
abuse.
Freud built on the work of an earlier psychologist and employed the “talking cure” with
his hysterical patients, naming his version of the talking cure “psychoanalysis.” The talking cure
was the process by which the therapist and the patient recounted memories, dreams, and
events, searching for a buried, suppressed idea that is causing physical symptoms. As Freud’s
theories developed, he identified a series of common causes tied to childhood traumas that
seemed remarkably consistent. He extrapolated those into scientific truths, most of which had
to do with the development of sexual identity. This culminated in his 1905 Three Essays in the
Theory of Sexuality.
The Freudian talking cure was verbal, inferential, and in a way speculative, since it was
about the conversation between the therapist and the patient, working toward causes of mental
disorder. The analyst played an active role, above and beyond the medical diagnosis of
disorder. Freud believed that the human mind was almost always arrested in its progress
toward mental health from childhood to adulthood. It was possible to be healthy, to be mostly
unencumbered by mental disorders, but it was also very difficult to arrive at that position. In
turn, he hoped that his theories would create “the possibility of happiness.”
Ultimately, Freuds most important theories had to do with the nature of the unconscious
mind. According to Freud, the thoughts and feelings we experience and can control are just the
tip of the proverbial iceberg. Most thoughts and feelings are buried in the unconscious. Within
the unconscious are stored repressed memories that trigger responses, verbal slips, and
dreams, symptoms of their existence. It is always terribly difficult to reconcile one’s desires and
the requirements of socialization (of living in a society with its own rules and laws) and that
leads inevitably to inner conflict. Thus, people form defense systems that may protect their
emotions in the short term, but return later in life to cause unhappiness and alienation.
According to Freud, there are three basic areas or states that exist simultaneously in the
human mind. First, part of the unconscious is the Id: the seat of the drives for pleasure (sexual
lust, power, security, food, alcohol and other drugs, etc.) and for what might be considered
“obsession” – the seemingly irrational desires that have nothing to do with pleasure per se
(pyromania, kleptomania, or seemingly self-destructive political activity). Freud called the drive
for pleasure “eros,” the Pleasure Principle, and the obsessive and self-destructive drive
“thanatos,” the Death Drive.
167
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Next, Freud identified another area of the unconscious as the Superego: the social
pressure to conform, the confrontation with outside authority, and the overwhelming sense of
shame and inadequacy that can, and usually does, result from facing all of the pressures of
living in human society. In the context of his own, deeply Victorian bourgeois society, Freud
identified the Superegos demands as having to do primarily with the suppression of the desires
that arose from the Id.
Finally, the only aspect of the human psyche the mind is directly aware of is the Ego:
the embattled conscious mind, forced to reconcile the drives of the Id and Superego with the
“reality principle,” the knowledge that to give in to one’s urges completely would be to risk injury
or death. In Freud’s theory, the reason most people have so many psychological problems is
that the Ego is perpetually beset by these powerful forces it is not consciously aware of. The Id
bombards the Ego with an endless hunger for indulgence, while the Superego demands social
conformity.
In short, Freud described the mind itself as defying control: despite the illusion of free will
and autonomy, no one is capable of complete self-control. Freudian theory suggested that the
life of the mind was complicated and opaque, not rational and straightforward. The great dream
of the optimistic theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been that proper
education and rational politics could create a perfect society. Freud, however, cautioned that no
one is completely rational, and that politics could easily follow the path of the Death Drive and
plunge whole nations, even whole civilizations, into self-destruction. He lived to see at least part
of his worst fears come to pass at the end of the life as he fled from the Nazi takeover of Austria
in 1938.
One other major theme present in Freuds theories had to do with sexuality, which he
believed to be of central importance to psychology. His theories largely revolved around sexual
instincts and their repression, and he invented various specific concepts like the Oedipus
complex, the idea that young boys sexually desire their mothers and fear the authority of their
fathers, and penis envy, the claim that girls are psychologically wounded by not having male
genitalia, that he claimed were fundamental to the human psyche. For all his insight, and all his
clinical work with women patients, however, Freud remained convinced that women were in a
sense less evolved than men and were biologically destined for a secondary role. He also
admitted that he could not really figure out womens motivations; he famously asserted that the
question that psychology could not answer was what does a woman want? In the end, the
irony of Freuds take on gender and sexuality is that it simply reproduced age-old sexual
stereotypes and double standards, however important his other theories were in exploring the
168
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
unconscious. Despite the genuine changes occurring to gender in the society around him,
Freud remained embedded in the assumption that a male and female physiology dictated
separate and unequal destinies for men and women.
Gender Roles
Those destinies, however, were slowly changing. As noted in the discussion of World
War I in the previous chapter, gender roles had been transformed both economically and
culturally during (and because of) the war. Some of those changes were durable. The range of
jobs available to women was certainly larger than it had been before the war. Women continued
to wear more comfortable and practical clothing after the war than before it, the restrictive
ankle-length dress replaced by the looser, calf-length dress or skirt. Some women continued to
cut their hair short, and of course womens suffrage was finally realized (albeit with various
restrictions) in most European countries and the United States over the course of the 1920s.
No sooner had the war ended, however, that men generally did everything in their power
to reverse many of the changes to gender roles it had caused. Through a combination of legal
restrictions and quasi-legal practices, women were forced from traditional male jobs, prevented
from enrolling in universities and medical schools, and paid significantly less than men for the
same work. Fascist parties (described in a following chapter) were explicitly devoted to
enforcing traditional gender roles, and when some countries were overtaken by fascist rule
women were often forced out of the workplace. Everywhere, most men (and many women)
continued to insist that women were inherently biologically inferior to men and that it was the
natural role of men to serve as head of the household and head of the nation-state in equal
measure.
The exemplar of both the greater freedom enjoyed by women and male resentment of
that freedom was the New Woman. A stock figure in the media of the time, the New Woman
was independent, working at her own job full time and living by herself, and able to enjoy a
social life that included drinking, dancing, and even the possibility of casual sex. The famous
flappers of the 1920s, young women in the latest fashion who danced to cutting-edge
American jazz and wore scandalously short, knee-length dresses, were the ultimate expression
of the New Woman. While the image of the New Woman was greatly exaggerated, both in
advertising and by male misogynists, there was at least a kernel of truth to the archetype. Far
more women were independent by the 1920s than in the past, fashions really had changed, and
thanks to halting advances in contraception, casual sexual relationships were easier to have
169
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
without fear of pregnancy. It would take at least another half-century, however, for laws against
sexual discrimination to come into being in most countries, and of course the struggle for
cultural equality remains unfulfilled to this day.
The American actor Alice Joyce in 1926 in an extravagant flapper dress. Film stars of the day
were the most visible examples of the New Woman most people encountered outside of
advertising.
The Great Depression
Modernism in the arts and modernist theory came of age before, during, and after World
War I; some of the most interesting writing and art of the modernist movement occurred during
the 1920s. The political order of Europe (Russia, as usual, was an exception) and the United
States during the 1920s was beset by struggle and conflict, but while the economies of the west
struggled to recover from World War I, there was at least some economic growth. That growth
came crashing to a halt in 1929 with the advent of the Great Depression.
170
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Great Depression has the dubious distinction of being the worst economic disaster
in the modern era. It constituted an almost total failure of governments, businesses, and banks
to anticipate or prevent economic disaster or to effectively deal with it. The Depression explains
in large part the appeal of extremist politics like Nazism, in that the average person was
profoundly frightened by what had happened to their world; instead of progress resulting in
better standards of living, all of a sudden the hard-won gains of the recent past were completely
ruined.
The background to the Depression was the financial mess left by World War I. The
victorious alliance of Britain and France imposed massive reparations on Germany – 132 billion
gold marks. In addition, the former members of the Triple Entente themselves owed enormous
sums to the United States for the loans they had received during the war, amounting to
approximately $10 billion. Over the course of the 1920s, as the German economy struggled to
recover (at one point the value of German currency collapsed completely in the process), the
US government oversaw enormous loans to Germany. In the end, a triangle of debt and
repayment locked together the economies of the United States and Europe: US loans
underwrote German reparation payments to Britain and France, with Britain and France then
trying to pay off their debts to the US. None of the debts were anywhere near settled by the end
of the 1920s, not least because more loans were still flooding into the market.
The Depression started in the United States with a massive stock market crash on
October 24, 1929. The ill-conceived cycle of debt described above had worked well enough for
most of the 1920s while the American economy was stable and American banks were willing to
underwrite new loans. When the stock market crashed, however, American banks demanded
repayment of the European loans, from Germany and its former enemies alike. The capital to
repay those loans simply did not exist. Businesses shut down, governments defaulted on the
American loans, and unemployment soared. In one year, Germanys industrial output dropped
by almost 50% and millions were out of work. In turn, inspired by liberal economic theories,
governments embraced policies of austerity, cutting back the already limited social programs
that existed, balancing state budgets, and slashing spending. The result was that even less
capital was available in the private sector. In the United States and Western Europe, the
Depression would drag on for a decade (1929 – 1939), at which point World War II
overshadowed economic hardship as the great crisis of the century.
171
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Summing Up
What do Modernist art, Freudian psychology, shifts in gender, and the Great Depression
have in common besides chronological coincidence? They were all, in different ways,
symptoms of disruption and (often) a profound sense of unease that pervaded Western culture
after World War I. European civilization was powerful and self-confident before the war, master
of over 80% of the globe, and at the forefront of science and technology. That civilization
emerged from four years of bloodshed economically shattered, politically disunited, and in many
ways skeptical of the possibility of further progress. It was in this uncertain context that the
most destructive political philosophy in modern history emerged: fascism, and its even more
horrific offshoot, Nazism.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Nikolai II and George V – Public Domain
Rasputin – Public Domain
Lenin Speech – Public Domain
Klimt The Kiss – Public Domain
Klimt Philosophy – Public Domain
Freud – Public Domain
Alice Joyce – Public Domain
172
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 9: Fascism
Disappointment
In many ways, World War I was what truly ended the nineteenth century. It undermined
the faith in progress that had grown, despite all of its setbacks, throughout the nineteenth
century among many, perhaps most, Europeans. The major political movements of the
nineteenth century seemed to have succeeded: everywhere in Europe nations replaced empires
(nationalism). Europe controlled more of the world in 1920 than it ever had or ever would again
(imperialism). In the aftermath of the war, almost every government in Europe, even Germany,
was a republican democracy based on the rule of law (liberalism). Even socialists had cause to
celebrate: there was a nominally Marxist state in Russia and socialist parties were powerful and
militant all across Europe. The old order of monarchs and nobles was rendered all but obsolete,
with noble titles holding on as nothing more than archaic holdovers from the past in nearly every
country. In addition, of course, technology continued to advance apace.
Despite the success of all of those movements, however, with all of the hopes and
aspirations of their supporters over the last century, Europe had degenerated into a horrendous
and costly war. The war had not purified and invigorated the great powers; they were all left
reeling, weakened, and at a loss for how to prevent a future war. Science had advanced, but its
most noteworthy accomplishment was the production of more effective weapons. The global
empires remained, but the seeds of their dissolution were already present.
The results were bitterness and reprisals. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the war
imposed harsh penalties on Germany, returning Alsace and Lorraine to France and imposing a
massive indemnity on the defeated country. The Treaty also required Germany to accept the
“war guilt clause,” in which it assumed full responsibility for the war having started in the first
place. Simultaneously, the Austrian Empire collapsed, with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the
new Balkan nation of Yugoslavia all becoming independent countries and Austria a short-lived
republic. Almost no one would have believed that another “Great War” would occur in twenty
years.
In other words, World War I did not resolve any of the problems or international tensions
that had started it. Instead, it made them worse because it proved how powerful and
173
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
devastating modern weapons were, and it also demonstrated that no single power was likely to
be able to assert its dominance. France and Britain went out of their way in blaming Germany
for the conflict, while in Germany itself, those on the right believed in the conspiracy theory in
which communists and Jews had conspired to sabotage the German war effort – this was later
called the “Stab in the Back” myth. Thus, many Germans felt they had been wronged twice:
they had not really lost the war, yet they were forced to pay outrageous indemnities to the
victors.
It was in this context of anger and disappointment that fascism and its racially-obsessed
offshoot Nazism arose. World War I provided the trauma, the bloodshed, and the skepticism
toward liberalism and socialism that underwrote the rise of fascism. Fascism was a modern
conservatism, a conservatism that clung to its mania for order and hierarchy, but which did not
seek a return to the days of feudalism and monarchy. It was a populist movement, a movement
of the people by the people, but instead of petty democratic bickering, it glorified the (imagined)
nation, a nation united by a movement and an ethos.
Fascism
Fascism centered on the glorification of the state, the rejection of liberal individualism,
and an incredible emphasis on hierarchy and authority. Fascist movements sprung up right as
the war ended. The term fascism was invented by the Italian Fascist Party itself, based on the
term fascii: a bundle of sticks with an axe embedded in the middle. Symbolically, the sticks are
weak individually but strong as a group, and the axe represented the power over life and death.
In ancient Rome, the bodyguards of the Roman consuls carried fascii as a badge of authority
over war, peace, law, and death, and that symbolism appealed to the Italian Fascists.
By the early 1920s, there were fascist movements in many European countries, all of
them agitating for some kind of right-wing revolution against democracy and socialism. One
place of particular note in the early history of fascism was France. There, a right-wing
monarchist group called Actione Franaise had existed since the Dreyfus Affair, but it
transformed itself into a French fascist group despite still clinging to monarchist and traditional
Catholic ideologies. When Germany defeated France in World War II, the Nazis found a large
contingent of right-wing Frenchmen who were all too happy to create a home-grown French
fascist state (a fact that many in France tried their best to forget after the war). Likewise, when
the Nazis seized power in various places in Eastern Europe, they often found it expedient to
simply work with or appoint the already-existing local fascist groups to power.
174
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Fascism was a twentieth-century phenomenon, but its ideological roots were firmly
planted in the nineteenth century. Mostly obviously, fascism was an extreme form of
nationalism. The nation was not just the home of a people in fascism, it was everything. The
nation became a mythic entity that had existed since the ancient past, and fascists claimed that
the cultural traits and patterns of the nation defined who a person was and how they regarded
the world.
The confusing jumble of what defined a nation in the first place often took on explicitly
racial, and racist, terms among fascist groups. Now, Germans were not just people who spoke
German in Central Europe; they were the German (or Aryan, the term itself nothing more than
a pseudo-scholarly jumble of linguistic history and racist nonsense) race. French fascists
talked about the bloodlines of the ancient Gauls that supposedly survived despite the pollution
of the Roman invasions in the ancient past. Likewise, Mussolini and the Italian Fascists claimed
that the Italians were the direct descendants of the most glorious tradition of the ancient
Roman Empire and were destined to create a new, even greater empire. The pseudo-sciences
of race had arisen in the late nineteenth century as perverse offshoots of genuine advances in
biology and the natural sciences. Fascism was, among other things, a cultural movement that
found in scientific racism a profoundly compatible doctrine: the scientific proof in the
rightness of the racial nations rise to power.
At first sight, one surprising aspect of fascism was that many fascists were former
communists Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian Fascist Party, had been a prominent
member of the Italian Communist Party before World War I. What fascism and communism had
in common was a rejection of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. They both sought
transcendent political and social orders that went beyond mere parliamentary compromise.
The major difference between them was that fascists discovered in World War I that most
people were not willing to die for their social class, but they were willing to die for their nation.
Fascism was, in part, a kind of collective movement that substituted nationalism for the class
war. All classes would be united in the nation, fascists believed, for the greater glory of the race
and movement.
Italian Fascism
As noted above, the very term fascist is a product of the first fascist group to seize
control of a powerful country: the Italian Fascist Party. Italian Fascism was an invention of
Italian army veterans. Most important among them was Benito Mussolini, a combat veteran
who had welcomed the war as a cleansing, invigorating opportunity for Italy to grow into a more
175
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
powerful nation. He was deeply disappointed by its lackluster aftermath. Italy, having joined
with England and France against Germany and Austria in hopes of seizing territory from the
Austrians, was given very little land after the war. Thus, to Mussolini and many other Italians,
the war had been especially pointless.
The Fascists, who started out with a mere 100 members in the northern Italian city of
Milan, grew rapidly because of the incredible social turmoil in Italy in 1919 and 1920. Italy had a
powerful communist movement, one that was inspired by and linked to the Soviet Unions recent
birth and the success of the communist revolution in Russia. After the war, a huge strike wave
struck Italy and many poor Italians in the countryside seized land from the semi-feudal landlords
who still dominated rural society. There was genuine concern among traditional conservatives,
the Church, business leaders, and the middle classes that Italy would undergo a communist
revolution just as had occurred in Russia – at the time Russia was still in the midst of its civil war
between the “Red” Bolsheviks and the anti-communist coalition known as the Whites. By 1920
the Reds were clearly winning.
The Fascists organized themselves into paramilitary units of thugs known as the
Blackshirts (for their party-issued uniforms) and engaged in open street fighting against
communists, breaking up strikes, attacking communist leaders, destroying communist
newspaper offices, and intimidating voters from communist-leaning neighborhoods and
communities. They were often tacitly aided by the police, who rounded up communists but
ignored Fascist lawbreaking as long as it was directed against the communists. Likewise,
business leaders started funding the Fascists as a kind of guarantee against further gains by
communists. Fascist politicians ran for office in the Italian parliament while their gangs of thugs
terrorized the opposition.
In 1922, the weak-willed King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele III, appointed Mussolini Prime
Minister, seeing in Mussolini a bulwark against the threat of communism (and caving in to the
growing strength of the Fascist Party). Fascists from all over Italy converged in a famous
March on Rome, a highly staged piece of political theater meant to demonstrate Fascist unity
and strength. Mussolini then set out to destroy Italian democracy from within. From 1922 to
1926 Mussolini and the Fascists manipulated the Italian parliament, intimidated political
opponents or actually had them murdered, and succeeded finally in eliminating party politics
and a free press. The Fascist party became the only legal party in Italy and the police
apparatus expanded dramatically. Mussolini’s official title was Il Duce: “The Leader,” and his
authority over every political decision was absolute. The Fascist motto was believe, obey,
176
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
fight, a distant parody of the French liberal motto (from the French Revolution) liberty, equality,
fraternity.
Mussolini (in the center) and Fascist Blackshirts during the March on Rome in 1922.
Mussolini immediately understood the importance of appearances. The 1920s was the
early age of mass media, especially radio, and an intrinsic part of fascism was public spectacle.
Mussolini staged enormous public exhibitions and rallies and he carefully controlled how he was
portrayed in the media the press was forbidden to mention his age or his birthday, to give the
illusion that he never aged. He was always on the move, usually in a race car, and usually
accompanied by models, actresses, and socialites years his junior. He spoke about his own
“animal magnetism” and often walked around without a shirt on as a kind of (would be)
herculean archetype.
Officially, Italian Fascism promised to end the class conflict that lay at the heart of
socialist ideology by favoring what it called corporatism over mere capitalism. Corporatism
was supposed to be a unified decision-making system in which workers and business owners
would serve on joint committees to control work. In fact, the owners derived all of the benefits;
trade unions were banned and the plight of workers degenerated without representation.
177
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
What Italian Fascism did do for the Italian people was essentially ideological and, in a
sense, emotional: it directed youth movements and recreational clubs and sought the
involvement of all Italians. It glorified the idea of the Italian people and in turn many actual
Italians did come to feel great national pride, even if they were working in difficult conditions in a
stagnant economy. In turn, Fascist propaganda tried to inculcate Italian pride and Fascist
identity among Italian citizens, while Fascist-led police forces targeted would-be dissidents,
sentencing thousands to prison terms or internal exile in closed prison villages (not unlike some
of the Russian gulags that would exemplify a different but related totalitarian system to the
east).
While Mussolini was often praised in the foreign press, including in American
newspapers and magazines, for accomplishments like making (a few) Italian trains run on time,
in the long term the Fascist government proved to be inefficient and often outright ineffectual.
Mussolini himself, convinced of his own genius, made arbitrary and often foolish decisions,
especially when it came to building up and training the Italian military. The circle of Fascist
leaders around him were largely corrupt sycophants who lied to Mussolini about Italy’s strength
and prosperity to keep him happy. When World War II began in 1939, the Italian forces were
revealed to be poorly trained, equipped, and led.
The Weimar Republic
One place in Europe during the interwar period stands out as a microcosm of the
political and cultural struggles occurring elsewhere: Weimar Germany. Named after the resort
town in which its constitution was written in early 1919, the Weimar Republic represented a
triumphant culmination of liberalism. Its constitution guaranteed universal suffrage for men and
women, fundamental human rights, and the complete rejection of the remnants of monarchism.
Unfortunately, the government of the new republic was deeply unpopular among many groups,
including right-wing army veterans like a young Adolf Hitler.
One great lie that poisoned the political climate of the Weimar Republic was, as
mentioned above, the stab-in-the-back myth. Toward the end of World War I, Germany was
losing. Its own General Staff informed the Kaiser of this fact; with American troops and
munitions flooding in, it was simply a matter of time before the Allies were able to march in force
on Germany. As defeat loomed, however, the military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorff,
along with the Kaiser himself, concocted the idea that Germany could have kept fighting, and
won, but instead public commitment to the war wavered because of agitators on the home front
178
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
and saboteurs who crippled military supply lines. Usually, according to the conspiracy theory,
those responsible were some combination of Jews and communists (and, of course, Jewish
communists). This was an outright lie, but it was a convenient lie that the political right in
Germany could cling to, blaming Jewish saboteurs and Bolshevik agents for Germanys loss.
The Versailles Treaty had also required Germany to disarm – the German army went
from millions of men to a mere 100,000 soldiers. It was forbidden from building heavy military
equipment or having a fleet of more than a handful of warships. Given the social prestige and
power associated with the German military before the war, this was an enormous blow to
German pride. While the nations of Europe pledged to pursue peaceful resolutions to their
problems in the future, many Germans were still left with a sense of vulnerability, particularly as
the Bolsheviks cemented their control by the end of the 1920s in Russia.
Neither did the Weimar government itself inspire much confidence. Its parliament, the
Reichstag, was trapped in an almost perpetual state of political deadlock. Its constitution
stipulated that voting was proportional, with the popular vote translated into a corresponding
number of seats for the various political parties. Unfortunately, given the vast range of political
allegiances present in German society, there were fully thirty-two different parties, representing
not just elements of the left – right political spectrum, but regional and religious identities as well.
The most powerful parties were those of the far left, the communists, and the far right, initially
monarchists and conservative Catholics, with the Nazis rising to prominence at the end of the
1920s. Thus, it was nearly impossible for the Reichstag to govern, with the various parties
undermining one anothers goals and coalition governments crumbling as swiftly as they
formed.
179
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Diagram of electoral results over the course of the Weimar Republic. Note the lack of a
governing party, as well as the rise of the Nazis (the NSDAP, marked in dark maroon at the top
of the diagram) to prominence in the last years of the Republic.
Simultaneously, the Weimar Republic faced ongoing economic issues, which fed into the
resentment of most Germans toward the terms of the Versailles Treaty and its reparation
payments (set to 132 billion gold marks annually, although that amount was renegotiated and
lowered over the course of the decade). The actual economic impact of those payments is still
debated by historians; what is not debated is that Germans regarded them as utterly unjust,
since they felt that all of the countries of Europe were responsible for World War I, not just
Germany. Especially in moments of economic crisis, many otherwise ordinary Germans
looked to political extremists for possible solutions; to cite the most important example, the
electoral fortunes of the Nazi party rose and fell in an inverse relationship to the health of the
German economy.
The economy of Germany underwent a severe crisis less than five years after the end of
the war. In 1923, unable to make its payments, the Weimar government requested new
negotiations. The French responded by seizing the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley. In order to pay
striking workers, the government simply printed more money, thereby undermining its value.
This, in turn, led to hyperinflation: the German Mark simply collapsed as a currency, with one
American dollar being worth nearly 10,000,000,000 marks by the end of the year. Workers were
paid in wheelbarrows full of cash at the start of their lunch break so they had time to buy a few
groceries before inflation forced shopkeepers to raise prices by the afternoon.
180
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Million-mark notes used as scratch paper during hyperinflation.
In the course of a year, Germans who had spent their lives carefully building up savings
saw those savings rendered worthless. This inspired anger and resentment among common
people who might otherwise not be attracted to extremist solutions. The situation stabilized in
1924 after emergency negotiations overseen by American banks resulted in a new stabilized
currency, but for many people in Germany their experience of democracy thus far had been
disastrous. It was in this context of economic instability and political dysfunction that an
extreme right-wing fringe group from the southern German state of Bavaria, the National
Socialist German Workers Party, began to attract attention.
The Nazis
Any discussion of the Nazis must start with Adolf Hitler. It is impossible to overstate
Hitler’s importance to Nazism: his own private obsessions became state policy and were used
as the justification for war and genocide. His unquestionable powers of public speaking and
political maneuvering transformed the Nazis from a small fringe group to a major political party,
and while he was largely ineffective as a practical decision-maker, he remained central to the
image of strength, vitality, and power that the Nazis associated with their state. Hitler was also
one of the three “greatest” murderers of the twentieth century, along with Josef Stalin of the
Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung of China. His obsession with a racialized, murderous vision of
181
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
German power translated directly into both the Holocaust of the European Jews and World War
II itself.
Nothing about Hitlers biography would seem to suggest his rise to power, however.
Hitler was born in Austria in 1889, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He dreamed of
being an artist as a young man, but was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in the Austrian
capital of Vienna many of his works survive, depicting boring, uninspired, and moderately
well-executed Austrian landscapes. Listless and lazy, but convinced from adolescence of his
own greatness, Hitler invented the idea that the rejection was due not to his own lack of talent,
but because of a shadowy conspiracy that sought to undermine his rise to prominence.
For several years before the outbreak of World War I, Hitler lived in Vienna in
flophouses, cheap hotels for homeless men, and there he discovered right-wing politics and
cultivated a growing hatred for Austrias ethnic and linguistic diversity. Hitler spent his days
drifting around Vienna, absorbing the rampant anti-Semitism of Austrian society and developing
his own theories about Jews and other foreign influences. Likewise, he read popular works of
racist pseudo-scholarship that glorified a fabricated version of German history. It was in Vienna
that he discovered his own talent for public speaking, as well. The first groups he held
enraptured by his improvised speeches about German greatness and the Jewish (and Slavic)
peril were his fellow flophouse residents.
Hitler regarded the fact that Germany and Austria were separate countries as a terrible
historical error. He hated the weak Austrian government and fled to Germany rather than serve
his required military service in Austria. Much to his delight, World War I broke out when he was
already in Germany; he enthusiastically volunteered for the German army and served at the
western front, surviving both a poison gas attack and shrapnel from an exploding shell. Unlike
most veterans of the war, Hitler experienced combat and service in the trenches as exhilarating
and fulfilling, and he was completely without compassion – he would later shock his own
generals during World War II by his callousness in spending German lives to achieve symbolic
military objectives.
182
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Hitler, on the far right, and some of his fellow soldiers in his infantry regiment early in WWI. He
trimmed his moustache to its (in)famous length during the war in order to be able to securely
wear a gas mask.
After the war, he was sent by the army to the southern German city of Munich, which
was full of angry, disenchanted army veterans like himself. His assignment was to investigate a
small right-wing group, the German Workers Party. His investigation immediately transformed
into enthusiasm, finding like-minded conservatives who loathed the Weimar Republic and
blamed socialism and something they called international Jewry for the defeat of Germany in
the war. He swiftly rose in the ranks of the Nazis, becoming the Fhrer (“Leader”) of the party in
1921 thanks to his outstanding command of oratory and his ability to browbeat would-be political
opponents – he unceremoniously ejected the partys founder in the process. Under Hitlers
leadership, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi is
derived from the German word for national), and it adopted the swastika, long a favorite of
racist pseudo-historians looking for the ancient roots of the fabricated Aryan race, as its
symbol.
What made Nazi ideology distinct from that of their Italian Fascist counterparts was its
emphasis on biology. The Nazis believed that races were biological entities, that there was
something inherent in the blood of each “race” that had a direct impact on its ability to create or
183
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
destroy something as vague as true culture. According to Nazi ideology, only the so-called
Aryan race, Germans especially but also including related white northern Europeans like the
Danes, the Norwegians, and the English, had ever created culture or been responsible for
scientific progress. Other races, including some non-European groups like the Persians and the
Japanese, were considered culture-preserving races who could at least enjoy the benefits of
true civilization. At the bottom end of this invented hierarchy were culture-destroying races,
most importantly Jews but also including Slavs, like Russians and Poles. In the great scheme
for the Nazi new world order, Jews would be somehow pushed aside entirely and the Slavs
would be enslaved as manual labor for “Aryans.”
Hitler himself invented this crude scheme of racial potential, codifying it in his
autobiography Mein Kampf (see below). He was obsessed with the idea that the German race
teetered on the brink of extinction, tricked into accepting un-German concepts like democracy or
communism and foolishly interbreeding with lesser races. Behind all of this was, according to
him, the Jews. Hitler claimed that the Jews were responsible for every disaster in German
history; the loss of World War I was just the latest in a long string of catastrophes for which the
Jews were responsible. The Jews had invented communism, capitalism, pacifism, liberalism,
democracy…anything and everything that supposedly weakened Germany from Hitlers
perspective.
In 1921, under Hitlers leadership, the Nazis organized a paramilitary wing called the
Stormtroopers (SA in their German acronym). In 1923, inspired by the Italian Fascists’ success
in seizing power in Italy, Hitler led his fellow Nazis in an attempt to seize the regional
government of the German region of Bavaria, of which Munich is the capital. This would-be
revolution is remembered as the Beer-Hall Putsch. It failed, but Hitler used his ensuing trial as
a national stage, as the proceedings were widely reported on by the German press. The court
officials, who sympathized with his politics, gave him and his followers ludicrously short
sentences in minimum security prisons, a sentence Hitler spent dictating his autobiography,
Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), to the Nazi party’s secretary, Rudolf Hess.
184
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Nazi leadership on trial – note the degree to which the photo looks like a publicity stunt
rather than a criminal proceeding. Hitler is joined by Erich Ludendorff, in the center, one of the
top German commanders during WWI. Ludendorff flirted with Nazism early on, but abandoned
the party after the Beer Hall Putsch.
When he was released in nine months (including time served and recognition of his good
behavior), Hitler was a minor national celebrity on the right. The Nazis were still a fringe group,
but they were now a fringe group that people had heard of. Nazi Stormtroopers harassed leftist
groups and engaged in brawls with communist militants. The party created youth organizations,
workers and farmers wings, and womens groups. They held rallies constantly, creating early
versions of interest groups to gauge the issues that attracted the largest popular audience.
Even so, they did not have mass support in the 1920s – they only won 2.6% of the national vote
in 1928.
The Great Depression, however, threw the Weimar government and German society into
such turmoil that extremists like the Nazis suddenly gained considerable mass appeal.
Promising the complete repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the build-up of the German military,
an end to economic problems, and a restoration of German pride and power, the Nazis steadily
grew in popularity: an electoral breakthrough in 1930 saw them win 18% of the seats in the
Reichstag. In 1932 they won 37% of the national vote, the most they ever won in a free, legal
election.
185
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
That being noted, the Nazis never came close to winning an actual majority in the
Reichstag. They were essentially a strong, combative far-right minority party. Thanks to the
advent of the Depression, more ordinary Germans than before were attracted to their
message, but that message did not seem at the time to be greatly different than the messages
of other right-wing parties. That said, the Nazis were masters of fine-tuning their messages for
the electorate; most of their propaganda had to do with German pride, unity, and the need for
social and economic order and prosperity, not the hatred of Jews or the need to launch attacks
on other European nations. They offered themselves as a solution to the inefficiency of the
Weimar Republic, not as a potential bloodbath.
In fact, 1932 represented both the high point and what could have been the beginning of
the decline of the Nazis as a party. The presidential election that year saw Hitler lose to
Hindenburg, who had served as president since 1925, despite his own contempt for democracy.
The Nazis lost millions of votes in the subsequent Reichstag election, and Hitler even briefly
considered suicide. Unfortunately, in January of 1933, Hindenburg was convinced by members
of his cabinet led by a conservative Catholic politician, Franz von Papen, to use Hitler and the
Nazis as tools to help dismantle the Weimar state and replace it with a more authoritarian
political order. Thus, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, the second-most powerful political
position in the state.
Hitler seized the opportunity to launch a full-scale takeover of the German government.
The Reichstag building was set on fire by an unknown arsonist in February, and Hitler blamed
the communists, pushing through an emergency measure (the Reichstag Fire Decree) that
suspended civil rights. That allowed the state to destroy the German Communist Party,
imprisoning 20,000 of its members in newly-built concentration camps. Through voter fraud and
massive intimidation by the Nazi Stormtroopers, new elections saw the Nazis win 49% in the
next election. Soon, with the aid of other conservative parties, the Nazis pushed through the
Enabling Act, which empowered Hitler and the presidential cabinet to pass laws by decree. In
July, the Nazis outlawed all parties except themselves. By the summer of 1933, the Nazis
controlled the state itself, with Hindenburg (impressed by Hitlers decisiveness) willingly signing
off on their measures.
The Nazi government that followed was a mess of overlapping bureaucracies with no
clear areas of control, just influence. The Weimar constitution was never officially repudiated,
but the letter of laws became far less important than their interpretation according to the spirit
of Nazism. In lieu of a rational political order, there was a kind of governing principle that one
Nazi party member described as working towards the Fhrer: trying to determine the spirit of
186
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Nazism and abiding by it rather than following specific rules or laws. The only unshakable core
principle was the personal supremacy of the Fhrer, who was supposed to embody Nazism
itself.
Nazism was not just a governing philosophy, however. Hitler was obsessed with winning
over ordinary Germans to the partys outlook, and to that end the state both bombarded the
population with propaganda and sought to alleviate the dismal economic situation of the early
1930s. The Nazi state poured money into a debt-based recovery from the Depression (the
economics of the recovery were totally unsustainable, but the Nazi leadership gambled that war
would come before the inevitable economic collapse). Employment recovered somewhat as the
state funded huge public works and, after he publicly broke with the terms of the Versailles
Treaty in 1935, rearmament. Even though there were still food and consumable shortages,
many Germans felt that things were better than they had been. The Nazis refused to continue
war reparations and soon the rapidly-rebuilding military was staging enormous public rallies.
Ultimately, the Nazi party controlled Germany from 1933 until Germany surrendered to
the Allies in World War II in 1945 – that period is remembered as that of the Third Reich, the
Nazis own term for what Hitler promised would be a 1,000 years of German dominance.
During that time, the Nazis sponsored a full-scale attempt to recreate German culture and
society to correspond with their vision of a racialized, warlike, and purified German nation.
They claimed to have launched a national revolution in the name of unifying all Germans in
one Volksgemeinschaft: peoples community.
The Nazis targeted almost every conceivable social group with a specific propaganda
campaign and encouraged (or required) German citizens to join a specific Nazi league: workers
were encouraged to work hard for the good of the state, women were encouraged to produce as
many healthy children as possible (and to stay out of the workplace), boys were enrolled in a
paramilitary scouting organization, the Hitler Youth, and girls in the League of German Girls,
trained as future mothers and domestics. All vocations and genders were united in the
glorification of the military and, of course, of the Fhrer himself (Heil Hitler was the official
greeting used by millions of German citizens, whether or not they ever joined the Nazi party
itself). The purpose of the campaigns was to win the loyalty of the population to the regime and
to Hitler personally, and nearly the entire population at least paid lip service to the new norms.
187
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Hitler Youth and League of German Girls members at a rally in 1933.
The dark side of both the propaganda and the legal framework of the Third Reich was
the suspension of civil rights and the concomitant campaigns against the so-called enemies of
the German people. The Nazis vilified Jews, as well as other groups like people with disabilities
and the Romani (better known as Gypsies, although the term itself is something of an ethnic
slur). Starting in 1933, the state began a campaign of involuntary sterilizations of disabled and
mixed-race peoples. Jewish businesses were targeted for vandalism and Jewish people were
attacked. In 1935 the Nazis passed the so-called Nuremberg Laws which outlawed Jews from
working in various professions, stripped Jews of citizenship, and made sex between Jews and
non-Jews a serious crime.
Even as Germans were encouraged to identify with the Nazi state, and joining the Nazi
Party itself soon became an excellent way to advance one’s career, the Nazis also held out the
threat of imprisonment or death for those who dared defy them. The first concentration camp
was opened within weeks of Hitler’s appointment of chancellor in 1933, and a vast web of police
forces soon monitored the German population. The most important organization in Nazi
Germany was the SS (Schutzstaffel, meaning protection squadron”), an enormous force of
188
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
dedicated Nazis with almost unlimited police powers. The SS had the right to hold anyone
indefinitely, without trial, in “protective custody” in a concentration camp, and the Nazi secret
police, the Gestapo, were merely one part of the SS. This combination of incentives (e.g.
propaganda, programs, incentives) and threats (e.g. the SS, concentration camps) helps explain
why there was no significant resistance to the Nazi regime from within Germany.
The Spanish Civil War
The first real war launched by fascist forces was not in Italy or Germany, however, but in
Spain. The greatest of the European powers in the sixteenth century, Spain had long since
sunk into obscurity, commercial weakness, and backwardness. Its society in 1920 was very
much like it had been a century earlier: most of the country was populated by poor rural farmers
and laborers, and an alliance of the army, Catholic church, and old noble families still controlled
the government in Madrid. The king, Alfonso XIII, still held real power, despite his own personal
ineptitude. In many ways, Spain was the last place in Europe that clung to the old order of the
nineteenth century.
Socialists and liberals were increasingly militant by the early 1920s, and Catalan and
Basque nationalists likewise agitated for independence from Spain. From 1923 to 1930, a
general named Primo de Rivera acted as a virtual dictator (with the support of the king) trying to
drag Spain into the twentieth century by building dams, roads, and sewers. He weakened what
representation there was in the state by making government ministers independent of the
parliament (the Cortes) and he even managed to lose support in the army by interfering in the
promotion of officers.
In 1931, the king abdicated after an anti-monarchist majority took the Cortes. The result
was a republic, whose parliament was dominated by liberals and moderate socialists. The
parliament pushed through laws that formally separated church and state (for the first time in
Spanish history) and redistributed land to the poor, seized from the enormous estates of the
richest nobles. Peasants in the countryside went further, attacking churches, convents, and the
estates of the nobility. Meanwhile, Spanish communists sought a Russian-style communist
revolution and, even further to the left, a substantial anarchist coalition aimed at the complete
abolition of government. Thus, the left-center coalition was increasingly beleaguered, as the far
left gravitated away and the nobility and clergy joined with the army in an anti-parliamentarian
right. Two years of anarchy resulted, from 1933 1935.
189
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In 1935, as the forces of the right rallied around a general named Francisco Franco, the
socialists, liberals, anarchists, and communists formed a Popular Front to fight it. More chaos
ensued, with Francos forces growing in power and the Popular Front suffering from infighting
(i.e. the anarchists, communists, liberals, and nationalist minorities did not work well together).
Francos traditional conservative forces joined with Spanish fascists, the Falange, soon openly
supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In 1936, Francos forces seized several key
regions in Spain.
Francisco Franco
The war began in earnest in that year. It was hugely bloody; probably about 600,000
people died, of which 200,000 were loyalists (the blanket term for the pro-republican, or at
least anti-monarchical, forces) summarily executed after being captured by the nationalists
under Franco. Meanwhile, the loyalists carried out atrocities of their own, targeting especially
members of the church. One of the iconic moments in the war was the arrival of over 20,000
foreign volunteers on the side of the loyalists, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the
United States. Both the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the English writer George
Orwell fought in defense of the republic.
While, officially, there was an international non-interventionist agreement among the
governments of Europe and the US with regards to Spain, Germany and Italy blatantly violated
it and provided both troops and equipment to the nationalist forces. The most effective support
provided by Italy or Germany came from the German air force, the Luftwaffe, which used Spain
as a training ground with real targets. The loyalists had no means to fight against planes, so
they suffered consistent defeats and setbacks from German bombing raids. Overall, the
Spanish Civil War allowed Italy and Germany to “try out” their new armies before committing to
a larger war in Europe (Italy, however, did launch a brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1934 as well).
190
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The nationalists triumphed in early 1939, having cut off the pockets of loyalists off from
one another. They were recognized as the legitimate government of Spain internationally, and
despite their promises to the contrary, they immediately began carrying out reprisals against the
now-defeated loyalists. Franco adopted the title of Caudillo, or leader, in the same manner as
Mussolini and Hitler. Where Spain differed from the other fascist powers was that Franco was
well aware of its relative weakness and deliberately avoided an expansionist foreign policy;
Hitler once spent a fruitless day trying to convince him to join the war once World War II was
underway.
Francos regime, which united the old nobles, the army, and the Catholic church,
controlled the country until Francos death in 1975. Just as Spain was one of the last countries
still tied to the old political order of kings and nobles after World War I, it was among the last
fascistic countries long after Hitlers Germany and Mussolinis Italy had fallen.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
March on Rome – Public Domain
Weimar Electoral Results – Pass3456
Hyperinflation – Creative Commons License
Hitler in WWI – Creative Commons License
Beer Hall Putsch – Creative Commons License
Hitler Youth and League of German Girls – Creative Commons License
Franco – Creative Commons License
191
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 10: World War II
World War II was the defining disaster of the twentieth century for millions of people
across the globe. It was the culmination of the vision of total war the world had first
encountered in World War I, but it was generalized to vast stretches of the planet, not just parts
of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The promise of technology was realized in its most
perverse form as the energy of advanced industrialism was unleashed in weapons of mass
slaughter. World War II was also the setting for the Holocaust, the first and only incidence of
industrialized mass murder in world history.
The war resulted in approximately 55 – 60 million deaths, of which 25 – 27 million were
Soviets and 6 million were the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. While nationalist rivalries and
international tensions certainly led to the war in some ways, as they had in World War I, the
primary cause of WWII was unquestionably Adolf Hitler’s personal obsession with creating a
vastly expanded German empire. Europe had, in some ways, stumbled into World War I. World
War II was instead a war of aggression launched by a single belligerent, Germany, supported by
its allies. (Note: Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies are referred to as “The Axis” in World
War II. Britain, the US, the USSR, and their allies are referred to as “The Allies” in World War
II.)
Leading up to War
The years leading up to the start of World War II (which began in September of 1939)
saw a series of bold moves by Nazi leadership. Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi
government steadily broke with the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. While the (pre-Nazi)
German state had already suspended reparation payments, once the Nazis were in control they
simply refused to negotiate the possibility of the payments ever resuming. By 1934, in secret,
Germany began the process of re-arming, and then in 1935 it openly moved toward building a
military that would dwarf even its World War I equivalent.
By 1938, Hitler felt that Germany was prepared enough that it could sustain a limited
war; by 1939 he felt confident that the German war machine was ready for a full-scale effort to
seize the space he imagined for the new Reich. In a sense, this period consisted of Hitler
192
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
“playing chicken” with the rest of Europe: he would launch a dangerous and provocative
initiative, then see if the rest of Europe (meaning primarily France and Britain) would respond
with the threat of force or instead back down. The political leadership of those nations did back
down, repeatedly, until the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 finally proved to the world
beyond a doubt that Hitler could not be stopped without war.
This is the period remembered as appeasement. The term refers to the policy adopted
by the French and British governments in giving Hitler what he wanted in hopes that he would
not do it again. Pieces of foreign territory, political unions with closely related German
territories, and the growth of German military power were seen by desperate British and French
politicians as things that Germans might have legitimate grievances about, and thus they played
along with the idea that Germany, and more to the point Hitler, might be appeased once those
issues were addressed.
It was a popular critique long after the war to vilify the French and British leadership for
being willing to concede so much to Hitler when a strong militarized response might have cut
the rug out from under the Nazi war machine before it was ready for its full-scale assault.
Arguably, one should not be too quick to write off appeasement. World War I had been so awful
that it was very difficult for most Europeans, even most Germans, to believe that Hitler could
actually want to plunge Europe back into another world war. It is certain that the French and
British wanted to avoid full-scale war at any cost; their civilian populations were totally opposed
to war and, especially in France, their governments were unstable and unpopular as it was.
Thus, British and French political leaders did not think of their concessions to Hitler as caving in:
they thought of them as preserving peace.
In March of 1938, Germany annexed Austria, an event known as the Anschluss.
Despite the German pseudo-invasion being poorly organized, most Austrians welcomed the
German tanks that rolled into Austrian cities, and there was practically no resistance. Germans
were at first apprehensive that this blatant violation of both the Versailles Treaty and the
sovereignty of another nation would result in war, but instead it became a public relations boost
for Hitler and the Nazis when there was no foreign response. In one fell swoop, Nazi laws and
policies (most notably the entire edifice of anti-Semitic legislation) were imported to Austria, and
there was a looting spree as Catholic Austrians attacked their Jewish countrymen.
In September of 1938, the threat of German intervention in the Sudetenland, a region of
northwestern Czechoslovakia with a significant German minority, prompted an international
crisis. The British and French governments hastily convened a conference in Munich to stave
off war, and there, instead of defending Czech sovereignty (which the Czechs were demanding),
193
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
the French and British agreed that Germany should annex the Sudetenland to protect its
German population. Then, in early 1939, German troops simply occupied the rest of
Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands were divided between Germany and a newly-created
protectorate, while Slovakia became a puppet state under an anti-Semitic Catholic priest, Jozef
Tiso.
Hitler greeting the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the Munich Peace Conference
that agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland.
Even as Germany was expanding its territories against a backdrop of international
vacillation, it was forming political alliances. In May of 1939 Italy and Germany pledged alliance
with one another, more or less a formality given their long-standing fascist kinship. More
importantly, in August of 1939 Germany and the USSR signed a mutual non-aggression pact.
This pact was absolutely crucial for the Nazis, as they could not envisage a successful war
against Western and Northern Europe unless the major eastern threat, the USSR, was
neutralized. Whereas Hitler had absolutely no intention of honoring the pact in the long term,
the Soviet Premier Josef Stalin did, believing both that Germany was not strong enough to
194
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
threaten Soviet territory and that the future war (which he accepted as inevitable) would be a
squabble among the capitalist nations that did not involve his own resolutely communist state.
To sweeten the deal for the Soviets, the pact secretly included provisions to divide Poland
between Germany and the USSR in the immediate future.
The Early War
It finally came to war in September of 1939. The Nazis claimed that Poles had been
abusing and mistreating ethnic Germans in Poland, and Nazi propagandists fabricated a
number of supposed atrocities that had been perpetrated against Germans. Using this excuse,
the German army invaded in September. France and Britain finally had to face the hard truth
that there was no appeasing Hitler, and they declared war on Germany. As part of the pre-war
agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east as German forces
invaded from the west, with the Soviets occupying eastern Poland in the name of both territorial
expansion for its own sake and to provide a buffer from Germany and the west.
The most important lesson German strategists had learned from World War I was how to
overcome trench warfare. After years of stalemate, Germany had managed to break through
the French and British lines on the western front right at the end of the war, before they were
pushed back by the flood of American troops. Military technology advanced rapidly between the
wars, equipping each of the major nations with fast-moving, heavily armored tanks and heavy
bombers supported by fighter planes. It would be possible to strike much more quickly and
much harder than had the ragged lines of charging soldiers going over the top twenty years
earlier.
Likewise, as American intervention had proved in World War I, all of the combatants in
the Second World War recognized the key role of industrial production itself. The winner in war
would be not only the side that struck first and hardest, but the side that could continue to churn
out weapons and equipment at the highest rates for the longest time. In that sense, industrial
capacity was as important as fighting ability. German strategists had learned all of these
lessons, and the German army – the Wehrmacht – struck with overwhelming force, backed by an
industrial base designed to support a lengthy war.
When Germany finally attacked Poland in September of 1939, the Wehrmacht
unleashed (what the Allies called) Blitzkrieg, lightning war, which consisted of fast-moving
armored divisions supported by overwhelming air support. Behind those armored divisions the
main body of German infantry neutralized remaining resistance and, typically, succeeded in
195
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
taking thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of prisoners of war. Blitzkrieg had
originally been conceived by a French officer, Charles de Gaulle, in a military tactical plan
regarding mobile warfare. It was rejected by the French General Staff but was acquired by the
Germans and implemented by the Wehrmacht. (The irony is that De Gaulle would go on to
become the leader of the anti-Nazi Free French forces in the war after France itself
surrendered).
The first stage of the war resulted in complete German victory. The Polish army put up a
valiant defense but was swiftly crushed. Over 1,300 planes attacked Poland at once in the early
stage of the invasion, and Poland capitulated in October, with its government fleeing to exile in
London. While the smaller nations in the region warily watched their own borders, most global
attention shifted to the border with France, the obvious next stage in the plans for German
conquest.
While France had declared war on Germany immediately in September of 1939, it did
not actually attack. French plans for a future war with Germany had revolved around defense,
meaning awaiting a German attack, since the end of World War I. After WWI, the French built a
huge series of bunkers and fortresses along the French – German border known as the Maginot
Line. There, from September of 1939 until May of 1940, the French military essentially waited
for Germany to invade – this was a period the French came to refer to as the “drle de guerre,
or joke war (the British called it the phony war, the Germans Sitzkrieg or sitting war). The
assumption had been that Germany would be held back by the heavy fortifications and could be
pushed back, and the French army simply did not have any plans, or intentions, to attack
Germany in the meantime.
Instead, the Germans had the (in hindsight, not entirely surprising) idea to go around the
Maginot Line. In April, German forces invaded and swiftly defeated Denmark and Norway,
despite a valiant resistance by the Norwegians. Then, on the 10th of May, they attacked the
Netherlands, Belgium, and France, sending the bulk of their forces through a forest on the
French – Belgian border that the French had, wrongly, thought was impassable to an army. The
Germans proved far more effective than the French or British at using tanks and artillery, and
they immediately began driving the French and British forces back. The Maginot Line,
meanwhile, went unused, with the German invasion simply bypassing it completely with the
Belgian invasion.
196
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
German forces invaded France through southern Belgium, bypassing the Maginot Lines strong
fortifications entirely.
An infamous incident occurred in late May, when over 300,000 British and French
soldiers retreating from the Germans were pinned down on the coast of the English Channel
near the French town of Dunkirk. There, a flotilla of navy and fishing vessels managed to
evacuate them back to England while the British Royal Air Force held off the opposing German
Luftwaffe (air force). This retreat was counted as a success by the standards of the Allies at the
time, although the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reminded his countrymen that
successful retreats were not how wars were won.
The defeat of France and its allied British Expeditionary Force is, in hindsight, all the
more disappointing in that the combined Allied forces were more numerous than their German
enemies and could have, conceivably, put up a stiff fight. Instead, the French sent their armored
forces toward Holland while the Germans smashed into France itself, the British and French
proved inept at working together, and Allied morale collapsed completely. The French in
particular did not realize the potential of tank warfare: they treated tanks more as mobile artillery
197
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
platforms than as weapons in their own right, and they had no armored divisions, just tanks
interspersed with infantry divisions.
In the end, France surrendered to Germany on June 22. Germany occupied the central
and northern parts of France but allowed a group of right-wing French politicians and generals
to create a Nazi-allied puppet state in the south. That state became known as the Vichy
Regime, named after the spa town of Vichy that served as its capital. There, the Vichy
government rapidly set up a distinctly French fascist state, complete with concentration camps,
anti-Semitic laws, and a state of war with Britain.
Thus, as of June of 1940, no major powers remained to oppose Germany but Britain (the
United States, while far more favorable to Britain than Germany, remained neutral). Hitler had
initially hoped that the British would agree to surrender the continent and negotiate while he
consolidated his victory (and turned against the USSR). Instead, Britain refused to back down
and handed over power to an emergency government headed by the new prime minister,
Winston Churchill. Starting in July of 1940, the Luftwaffe began a campaign to utterly destroy
the Royal Air Force (RAF) of Britain and to terrify the British into surrendering. German plans
revolved around a naval invasion of the British Isles across the English Channel, but German
strategists conceded that they would have to cripple the RAF for the invasion to be possible.
The resulting months of combat in the skies came to be known as The Battle of Britain. It was
the greatest series of air battles ever fought, lasting from July through September of 1940, with
thousands of planes battling in the skies every day and night.
The British were quite well prepared. They had the newly-created technology of radar,
which allowed them to anticipate German attacks. In addition to the RAF, the British had
numerous batteries of anti-aircraft guns that inflicted significant losses on the Luftwaffe. Many
British pilots survived crashes and were rescued, whereas German pilots who were shot down
either died or were captured. Most importantly, British factories churned out twice as many new
planes as did German ones over the course of the war. Thus, the RAF was able to counter
German attacks with new, effective fighters and increasingly seasoned pilots. By the end of
September, much to Hitlers fury, Germany had to abandon the immediate goal of invading
Britain.
Meanwhile, the United States stayed out of the war isolationism was still a very
popular stance among many Americans. In part because of the heroism of the British defense,
however, the American Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in March of 1941 which
authorized unlimited support for Britain, mostly taking the form of food and military supplies
provided on credit, short of war. Britain relied both on American supplies and complete
198
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
governmental control of its own economy to survive in the coming years. With German
blockades preventing the importation of anywhere near the pre-war amounts of food, every
aspect of the British economy (especially agriculture and other forms of food production) was
directed by emergency wartime ministries to keep the British population from starving.
The specific decision by Hitler and the Nazi leadership that resulted in the United States
joining the Allies was the alliance between Germany and Japan. In September of 1941,
Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. The Pact stipulated that any of the three
powers would declare war on a neutral country that declared war on one of the others.
Practically speaking, Germany hoped that the Pact would make American politicians think twice
about joining Britain in the war effort. In hindsight, it backfired against Germany, since the
Japanese attack on the United States led Germany to honor its agreement and declare war on
the US as well: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and Germany
was obliged to declare war on the US (Hitler was urged not to by his advisors, but gleefully
claimed that Japan had never lost a war and now victory was assured for the Axis).
The sinking of the battleship USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the meantime, a series of events shifted the focus of the war to North Africa, Greece,
and the Balkans. Mussolini had ordered in the Italian army to invade British territories in Africa
(most importantly Egypt) and to attack Yugoslavia and Greece in 1940. The Italians were
199
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
largely ineffective, however, and all their attack did was inspire a spirited British
counter-offensive and a strong anti-Italian resistance movement in the Balkans. The Germans,
however, needed supplies from the Balkans and southeastern Europe, including both foodstuffs
and natural resources like oil. It would be literally unable to continue the war if the Allies
managed to take over these regions.
Thus, Germany sent forces to the Balkans and Africa to support their Italian allies. By
the spring of 1941 the Germans held all of southeastern Europe and had pushed the British
back in Africa yet more important victories for the Nazis but also a delay in their plans.
Another setback was that Hitlers attempt to get the Spanish to join the war fell flat, when the
Spanish dictator Franco indicated that Spain was simply too poor and weak, especially after its
civil war, to join the Axis, despite the obvious political affinity between fascist Spain and Nazi
Germany (Hitler said that he would rather have teeth extracted than endure another meeting like
the one he suffered through with Franco).
The War in the East
Despite those setbacks, to many, World War II seemed like it was over within a year:
Germany controlled Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, and Belgium, all within
nine months of the initial attack on Poland. As noted above, its forces were soon making
headway in the Balkans and North Africa as well. Hitler had first conceived of the war against
the USSR as something to be accomplished after defeating the rest of Europe, and thus the
planned invasion of Britain was to be the final step before the Soviet invasion. The fact that
Britain was not only holding out, but holding on, however, led to a change in German plans: the
Soviet invasion would have to occur before Britain was defeated.
In the overall context of the war, by far the largest and most important target for
Germany was the Soviet Union. The non-aggression pact signed just before the beginning of
the war between the USSR and Germany had given the Nazis the time to concentrate on
subduing the rest of Europe. By the spring of 1941, Hitler felt confident that an all-out attack on
the USSR was certain to succeed, now that German military resources could be concentrated
mostly in the east. He was spurred on by the fact that, according to his own racial ideology, the
Slavs of Eastern Europe (most obviously the Russians) were so inferior to the “Aryan” Germans
that they would be unable to mount an effective resistance. Thus, Hitler anticipated the
conquest of the Soviet Union taking about ten weeks.
For his part, Stalin did not think Hitler would be foolish enough to try to invade Soviet
Union, especially before Germany had truly won in the west. In 1939, Stalin reported to his
200
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
advisers that The war will be fought between two groups of capitalist stateswe have nothing
against it if they batter and weaken each other. It would be no bad thing if Germany were to
knock the richest capitalist countries (particularly England) off their feet. Furthermore, every
European school child learned about Napoleons disastrous attempted invasion of Russia in
1812, and thus the sheer size of Soviet territory seemed like a logical impediment to invasion (in
fact, the German invasion was deliberately timed to coincide with the 129th anniversary of
Napoleons invasion – in the minds of the Nazis, where the French had failed, Germany would
succeed). Stalin dismissed intelligence reports of the massive military buildup that preceded the
invasion, remaining convinced that, at the very least, Germany would not attack while Britain
remained unconquered.
While we now know that he was completely wrong about Hitlers intentions, Stalin had
good reason for not thinking that Germany would dare attack – the USSR had one-sixth of the
land surface of the earth, with a population of about 170,000,000. Its standing army as of 1941
was 5.5 million strong, with 12 million in reserve. It also had a vast superiority in quantity (albeit
not quality) of equipment at the start of the war. Indeed, by the end of the war, the Soviets had
mobilized 30.6 million soldiers (of whom 800,000 were women: the USSR was the only nation to
rely on women in front-line combat roles, at which they equaled their male countrymen in
effectiveness). Given that vast strength, Stalin was astonished when the Germans attacked,
reportedly spending hours in a daze before ordering an armed response.
On June 22 of 1941, Germany invaded the USSR with over 3 million troops. This
invasion was codenamed Operation Barbarossa, after a medieval German king who warred with
the Slavs. The first few months were a horrendous disaster for the Soviets. The Soviet air force
was utterly destroyed, as were most of its armored divisions. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet
soldiers were taken prisoner. Stalin had spent the late 1930s “purging” various groups within
the Soviet state and the army, and his purges had already killed almost all of the experienced
commanders, leaving inexperienced and sometimes inept replacements in their wake. In many
areas, the locals actually welcomed the Germans as a better controlling force than the
Bolsheviks had been, putting up no resistance at all. Even though Hitler himself was frustrated
to discover than his ten-week estimate of conquest was inaccurate, the first months of the
invasion still amounted to an astonishing success for German forces.
Despite its early success, however, the German advance halted by winter. The initial
welcome German soldiers received vanished when it was revealed that the German army and
the Nazi SS were at least as bad as had been the communists, pressing people into work
gangs, murdering resisters, and most importantly, shipping everything that could possibly be
201
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
useful for the German war effort back to Germany, including both equipment and foodstuffs.
Thus, groups of partisans (i.e. insurgents) mounted successful resistance movements that
cost the Germans men and resources. Likewise, German forces had advanced so quickly that
they were often bogged down in transit, with German supply lines stretched to the breaking
point. Thus, just as had happened during Napoleon’s retreat over a hundred years earlier,
guerrilla fighters were able to strand and kill the foreign invaders.
The German advance between June and December 1941 opened a front stretching from the
Baltic to the Black Sea, representing a terrible loss of territory and life to the Soviets.
Just as it had thwarted Napoleon as well, the Russian winter played a key role in
freezing the German invasion in its tracks. Mud initially slowed the German advance in autumn,
then the bitter cold of winter set in. The Germans were not equipped for winter conditions,
having set out in their summer uniforms. Despite the Wehrmachts mechanization, German
forces still used horses extensively for the transportation of supplies, with many of the horses
dying from the cold. Even machines could not stand up to the conditions; it got so cold that
202
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
engines broke down and tanks and armored cars were rendered immobile. Thus, the German
army, while still huge and powerful, was largely frozen in place in the winter of 1941 – 1942.
Incredibly, the Soviets were able to use this breathing room to literally dismantle their
factories and transport them to the east, outside of the range of the German bombers. Whole
factories, particularly in the Ukraine, were stripped of motors, turbines, and any other useful
equipment that could be moved, and sent hundreds of miles away from the front lines. There,
they were rebuilt and put back to work. By 1943, a year and a half after the initial invasion, the
Soviets were producing more military hardware than were the Germans. Likewise, despite the
relative success of the German invasion, Germany lost over 1.4 million men as casualties in the
first year.
The Home Front
World War II was unprecedented in its effects on civilian populations. Many prior wars of
the modern era had largely spared civilians, with most casualties limited to the men who fought
or logistically supported the fighting. The range of bombers in World War II, however, ensured
that civilians were at risk even when they lived hundreds of miles from the front lines. From the
Battle of Britain onward, while military targets were given priority, civilian targets were also
deliberately sought out by German bombers, and when the war began to turn against Germany
the Allies eagerly returned the favor by raining bombs on German cities. What Nazi strategists
called the War of Annihilation launched by Germany against the Soviet Union was specifically
aimed at destroying the Soviet population, not just its government, as is so horribly illustrated by
the death tolls: some 25 million Soviets died, including approximately 17 million civilians.
Likewise, the Holocaust of the European Jews (described in detail in the next chapter) murdered
some 6 million Jewish civilians deliberately and systematically.
Thus, the experience of the war by civilians in the countries in or near the fighting often
revolved around terror and hardship. Everyone, including those spared by the bombings or
foreign occupation, had to contend with shortages of food and supplies that grew worse over
time. As an example, British civilians experienced rationing immediately at the outbreak of war
that grew ever more stringent as the war went on: the weekly 8 oz. (about two sticks) ration of
butter per person at the start of the war was down to 2 oz. (about half a stick) by 1945.
Rationing ensured that only civilian populations in actual war zones were likely to face outright
famine, but hunger was widespread everywhere. British farmers were considered so important
203
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
to the war effort that they were excluded from conscription and were hailed as heroes in
government propaganda.
In a familiar pattern from World War I, women played an enormous role on the home
front during World War II. Millions of women worked in war production in all of the Allies
countries, with women almost completely replacing men in Soviet agriculture by the wars end.
Both Britain and the USSR conscripted women to work in various ways and war industries were
completely dependent on womens labor for most of the war. Propaganda hailed womens
participation in the war as a patriotic necessity, with iconic characters like the American Rosie
the Riveter created to inspire women to contribute as much as possible to the war effort.
Despite this acknowledgment, women were still paid as little as half of mens wages for the
same work almost everywhere (Winston Churchill even personally defeated an effort led by
women teachers, and supported by parliament, for equal pay).
Rosie the Riveter.
In comparison to World War I, there was a major difference in how the Second World
War was perceived by most civilians on the homefront: it was an existential battle for
democracy and freedom for most Americans, but for most of the European nations it was a
war for survival itself. One of the major factors that contributed to the loyalty of German
204
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
civilians to the Nazi regime until the bitter end was the simple, pragmatic understanding that if
Germany lost it would be at the mercy of the Soviet Union, a country that the German military
had set out to utterly obliterate. For the Soviets, of course, only a fanatical resistance to
German aggression could save their nation and their lives. Even in countries that Germany
had not set out to destroy, most civilians dreaded the prospect of a German victory as being
nearly equivalent. Everywhere in occupied countries civilians desperately sought out scraps
of information that might indicate that the war was finally turning against the Third Reich.
For its part, Nazi Germany persisted in the war effort by relying on a simple, ancient
institution: slavery. Prisoners in concentration camps (Jews and non-Jews alike) were all, by
definition, slaves of the regime, put to work in factories, quarries, forests, and workshops and
paid in meager rations. Millions of civilians from occupied countries were either conscripted
to work on behalf of Germany in their own countries or were captured and sent into the Reich
as slaves, with some 8 million slaves toiling within the German borders by the end of 1944.
Even when German factories were crippled by Allied bombs the war machine held together
thanks to its massive reliance on slavery. In short, it was not mere slave labor (a phrase
that weakens the horror of the institution) that powered the Third Reich, it was slavery
enforced through lethal violence.
The Turn of the Tide
Despite the power of Britain, the US, and the USSR, the Axis war effort continued with
amazing success well into 1942. A German army under the general Erwin Rommel (“the Desert
Fox”) in North Africa pushed to within a few hundred miles of the Suez Canal in Egypt,
threatening to cut the Allies off from much of their oil supply. Once the winter of 1941 – 1942
was over, the Germans continued to advance into Soviet territory, endangering the rebuilt
factories and Soviet oil fields in the Caucuses. Japan, meanwhile, took advantage of the
success of the Pearl Harbor attack and occupied dozens of islands across the Pacific. A series
of Allied victories in 1942 and 1943, however, turned the tide of the war.
Two major naval engagements in the Pacific spelled disaster for Japan. In May of 1942,
at the Battle of the Coral Sea, American forces defeated a Japanese invasion force targeting
Australia and drove the Japanese fleet back. In June of 1942, at the Battle of Midway,
American forces sank four Japanese aircraft carriers. The importance of Midway was not the
loss itself, which was less severe than the losses the American navy had already sustained.
Instead, it was the fact that the Americans had the industrial capacity to rebuild, whereas there
205
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
was no way that Japan could do so. From that point on, American forces slowly but steadily
“island hopped” across the Pacific, driving Japanese forces from the islands they had occupied.
In Egypt, meanwhile, British forces managed to decisively defeat and push back the
Germans in October of 1942. An American army soon landed to help them, and the Allies
forced the Germans to retreat by November. By July of 1943, the Allies were poised to bring the
fight to Italy itself. Vichy French territories in North Africa had fallen after an ineffectual
resistance earlier, in November 1942, which led Hitler to order the complete occupation of
France the same month; the fascist puppet state of the Vichy Regime thus only lasted from
June of 1940 to November of 1942.
The real turn of the tide occurred in the Soviet Union, however. In late 1942, a huge
German army was dispatched against the city of Stalingrad near the Black Sea. For months,
Russian and Ukrainian civilians and soldiers alike fought the Germans in brutal street battles,
with the people of Stalingrad often engaging German tanks armed only with grenades,
handguns, and Molotov cocktails. The Germans were held at bay until the main Soviet army
was assembled. By November, the Germans were being beaten, and the German general in
charge directly disobeyed Hitler and surrendered in February of 1943. Here, the Germans were
not in their element urban warfare was not the same as Blitzkrieg, and the fanatical resistance
of the Soviets (who paid with over 1.1 million casualties) stopped them.
Later that year an enormous Soviet army led by 9,000 tanks defeated a German army
near the city of Kursk, 500 miles south of Moscow. Kursk is often considered to be the real
turning point in the Soviet war, since the Germans were consistently on the retreat after it. The
importance of Kursk was the fact that the Germans were beaten at their own game they
were able to employ Blitzkrieg tactics, but the Russians now had anti-tank military hardware and
tactics that rendered it much less effective.
As an aside to the narrative of the war, it is worthwhile to consider the role of the Soviet
Union in World War II. In its aftermath, Americans often looked on World War II as “the good
war,” the war that was fought for the right reasons against countries whose leadership were truly
villainous. There is a lot of truth to that idea – American troops fought as bravely as any, and US
involvement was crucial in the ultimate victory of the Allies. It is important, however, to
recognize that it was really the USSR that broke the back of the Nazi war machine. At the cost
of at least 25,000,000 lives (some estimates are as high as thirty million), the Soviets first
stopped, then pushed back, then ultimately destroyed the large majority of German military
forces. By way of comparison between the war in the west and the war in the east, the Battle of
Alamein in Egypt that turned the tide against German forces there involved about 300,000
206
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
troops, while Stalingrad saw over 2 million troops and hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilian
combatants. Most German forces were always committed to the eastern front after the invasion
of the USSR in June of 1941, and without the incredible sacrifice of the Soviet people, the US
and Britain would have been forced to take on the full strength not just of Germany and Italy, but
of the various German puppet states and allies (e.g. Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) within the
Axis.
Back in the west, with Italian forces in shambles and the Fascist government in disarray,
the Italian king dismissed Mussolini in July of 1943. The new Italian government quickly made
peace with the Allies, prompting a swift invasion of northern Italy by Germany as the Allies
seized the south. For over a year, the Allies pushed north against the German forces occupying
central and northern Italy. The fighting was brutal, but Allied forces made steady headway in
driving German forces back toward the Reich itself.
By 1944, Germany was clearly on the defensive. British and American forces pushed
north through Italy as the Soviets closed from the east. On June 6, 1944, known as D-Day,
British, American, and Canadian forces launched a surprise invasion across the English
Channel with hundreds of thousands of troops (over 150,000 on the first day alone). After
securing the coastline, the Allies steadily pushed against the Germans, suffering serious
casualties in the process as the Germans refused to give up ground without brutal fighting. By
April of 1945, the Allies were within striking distance of Berlin. The western Allies agreed to let
the Soviets carry out the actual invasion of Berlin, a conquest that took eleven days of hard
fighting. On May 7, Germany surrendered, a week after Hitler had committed suicide in his
bunker, and the following day was V-E Day Victory in Europe.
Meanwhile, the fighting in the Pacific continued for months. By March of 1945, American
planes could bomb Japan itself, and civilian as well as military targets were destroyed, often
with incendiary bombs. One attack destroyed 40% of Tokyo in three hours; the death toll was
immense. Nevertheless, Japanese forces resisted every inch taken by the Americans. It took
about two months for American forces to take the island of Okinawa, resulting in about 100,000
Japanese and 65,000 American casualties. The prospect of the invasion of Japan itself was
therefore extremely daunting. It seemed clear that America would ultimately prevail, but at a
horrendous loss of life. This ultimately led to the deployment of the most terrible weapons ever
invented by the human species: nuclear arms.
The Manhattan Project, a secret military operation housed in a former boarding school in
Los Alamos, New Mexico, succeeded in creating and then detonating an atomic bomb on July
16. President Truman of the US warned Japan that it faced prompt and utter destruction if it
207
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
did not surrender; when it did not, he authorized the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6)
and Nagasaki (August 8). Hundreds of thousands, the large majority civilians, died either in the
initial blasts or from radiation poisoning in the months that followed. At the behest of the
Japanese emperor, negotiations began a few days later, with Japanese representatives signing
an unconditional surrender on September 2.
A photograph of the infamous mushroom cloud following the atomic blast that destroyed
Hiroshima.
The Aftermath
The death toll of the war was unprecedented, and most of the dead were civilians.
Millions more were left homeless and displaced, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. As a
whole, Europe was in shambles, with whole cities destroyed, and even the victorious Allied
nations were economically crippled. In addition, much to the world’s growing horror, the true
costs of Nazi rule were revealed in the closing months of the war and in the months to follow, as
the details of what became known as the Holocaust were discovered. Simultaneously, the world
was forced to grapple with the fact that human beings now had the ability to extinguish all life on
earth through atomic weapons. These two traumas – the Holocaust and The Bomb – forced
“Western Civilization” as a whole to rethink its own identity in the aftermath.
208
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Chamberlain and Hitler – Creative Commons License
Maginot Line – Creative Commons License
Pearl Harbor – Public Domain
Eastern Front Map – Gdr
Rosie the Riveter – U.S. National Archives, Flickr Commons
Mushroom Cloud – Public Domain
209
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 11: The Holocaust
The term genocide was adopted in the immediate aftermath of World War II out of the
need to designate, to name, the most horrendous crime perpetrated by the Nazi regime: the
systematic, state-run murder of the European Jews. The word itself means murder of a
people, and while the act of genocide was not invented in the twentieth century – forms of
genocide have occurred since the ancient world – never before had a government carried out a
genocide that was as far-reaching, as bureaucratically-managed, or as focused as the
Holocaust. While much of the Holocaust took the form of blood-soaked massacres, akin to the
slaughter of the Armenians by the inchoate state of Turkey in the early 1920s or the various
mass killings of Native Americans in the long, bloody colonization of the Americas by
Europeans, the Holocaust was also distinct from other genocides in that much of it was
industrialized: run on timetables, with the killing occurring in gas chambers built by Nazi agents
or private firms contracted to do the work. In short, the Holocaust was a distinctly and
horrifyingly modern genocide.
World War II would just be the story of a horrendously costly war if not for the
Holocaust. The term itself refers to early Jewish rituals of sacrifice by fire, in which offerings
were made to God and burned in the ancient Temple of Solomon (long since destroyed by the
Romans) in Jerusalem. Today, the term is mostly used in the United States; the rest of the
world largely uses the term Shoah, which means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. Its core definition is
simple: the ideologically-motivated, brutal murder of approximately 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazi
regime, representing two-thirds of Europes Jewish population at the time, and one-third of the
entire global Jewish population. Thus, in addition to its modern character, the Holocaust stands
out among the history of genocides for its shocking success from the perspective of the Nazi
leadership: they set out to kill every Jew, theoretically in the entire world, and were horrifyingly
successful at doing so in a very short time period.
In addition to the murder of the Jews, millions more were killed by the Nazis in the name
of their ideology. While estimates vary, at least 250,000 Romani (Gypsies) were murdered. At
least 6,000 male homosexuals were murdered. Many thousands of ideological enemies, from
Jehovahs Witnesses to various kinds of political leftists, were murdered as well. In addition,
while not normally considered part of the Holocaust per se, almost 20,000,000 civilians in the
Slavic nations – Poles and Russians especially – were murdered by the Nazis in large part
210
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
because of Nazi racial ideology. Slavs too were racial inferiors and subhumans according to
the Nazi racial hierarchy, and thus civilian populations in the Slavic countries were either killed
outright or subjected to treatment tantamount to murder. Thus, while the Holocaust is, and must
be, defined primarily as the genocide of the European Jews by the Nazis, it is still appropriate to
consider the other victims of Nazi ideology as an aspect of Nazi mass murder as a whole.
Before the Holocaust
The Nazis implemented anti-Jewish racial laws, known as the Nuremberg Laws, in 1935.
Those laws defined full Jews as having three or four practicing Jews as grandparents, and
those with two or one as being distinct categories of mixed (Mischlinge) Jews, the latter of
whom received some exemptions from anti-Semitic laws. Jews were deprived of their
citizenship and banned from various professions. For the next four years leading up to the war,
the goal of the Nazi government was to force Jews to emigrate from the Reich, while extracting
as much wealth from them as possible. The state imposed a Reich Flight Tax, meant to fleece
fleeing Jews of as much of their wealth as possible, and in 1938, the Nazis forced all Jews to
register their property, which was then expropriated in a campaign dubbed Aryanization.
In November of 1938 the Nazis initiated a nationwide pogrom known as the Night of
Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) in which some 90 Jews were killed and 177 synagogues burned to
the ground, after which 20,000 Jewish men were arrested for disrupting the peace and
incarcerated in prison camps – this represented the first mass roundup of Jews simply for being
Jewish. Hermann Gring, at the time the second most powerful Nazi leader after Hitler, then
demanded one billion Marks from the German Jewish population for the damage caused by the
riots. After Kristallnacht, many of the remaining German Jews desperately sought asylum
outside of Germany, but were all too often rebuffed by countries which, in the midst of the Great
Depression, allowed in only a trickle of immigrants each year (Jewish or otherwise).
Approximately half of the 500,000 German Jews did manage to flee before the war despite the
incredible difficulty of doing so at the time.
211
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The aftermath of Kristallnacht in Munich: the gutted remains of the Ohel-Jakob Synagogue.
Simultaneously, high-ranking Nazi officials in the SS were exploring permanent options
for ridding the Reich of Jews. Serious thought and research went into plans to create Jewish
reservations in Poland as well as a plan to ship all of the Jews in German-held territory to the
African island of Madagascar. Even after large-scale murder campaigns in Eastern Europe
began in 1941, many Nazis were still looking for some way to transport and dump the Jews of
Europe somewhere far from Germany. The stated goal of these schemes was to render the
entire face of Europe, and possibly the world, Judenrein: “Jew-Free.” In the end, the final
solution to the Jewish question – the Nazis euphemism for the Holocaust – was decided to
consist not of deportation, but of systematic murder, but that decision does not appear to have
been reached until 1941.
The irony of considering the case of German (and, as of 1938, Austrian) Jews in detail is
that the large majority of the victims of the Holocaust were not from Germany. The bulk of the
Jewish population of Europe was in the east, concentrated in Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine.
Poland alone had a Jewish population of approximately 3,000,000, 10% of the population of
Poland as a whole. Unlike the Jews of Central and Western Europe, most of the Jews of
Eastern Europe were largely unassimilated, living in separate communities, speaking Yiddish as
their vernacular language instead of Polish or Russian, and often facing harsh anti-Semitism
212
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
from their non-Jewish neighbors (which was somewhat muted in the nominally unprejudiced
Soviet Union). Thus, the Jews of the east had almost nowhere to run and few who would help
them once the German war machine arrived.
When the war began, even Polish Jews were not systematically murdered right away:
they were beaten, humiliated, and sometimes murdered outright, but there was not yet a
campaign of focused, organized murder against them. Instead, the initial task of Nazi murder
squads was the elimination of the Polish leadership class, which came to mean intellectuals,
politicians, communists, and Catholic priests. At least 50,000 Polish social, political, and
intellectual elites were murdered by SS death squads or regular German soldiers in a campaign
codenamed Operation Tannenberg.
On encountering the enormous numbers of Jews in Poland, the Nazis opted to drive
them into hastily-constructed ghettos in towns and cities. Ghettos were neighborhoods of a
town or city that were usually fenced-off, surrounded with barbed wire, and then filled with the
Jews of the surrounding areas. The ghettos were built almost immediately, from late 1939 to
early 1940, and ended up housing millions of people in areas that were meant to hold perhaps a
few hundred thousand at most. The largest were in the large Polish cities of Warsaw and Lodz;
the Warsaw Ghetto alone housed over 400,000 Jews at its height in late 1941. Conditions were
atrocious: the official food ration paid to Jewish workers who worked as slave laborers for the
Nazi war effort consisted of about 600 – 800 calories a day (an adult should consume about
2,000 a day to remain healthy). Potato peels were as precious as diamonds to ghetto
inhabitants. The ghettos alone ended up costing the lives of approximately 500,000 people
from starvation and disease.
Corpses being transported from the Warsaw Ghetto.
213
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Holocaust Begins
The Holocaust itself began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
As German armies advanced into Soviet territory, they were followed by four teams of
Einsatzgruppen – mobile killing squads – charged with killing Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled.
The Einsatzgruppen’s technique for murdering their victims consisted of marching Jews into the
woods or fields and systematically shooting them. The victims would be forced to dig mass
graves or ditches, to strip, and to watch as their entire community was slaughtered. Mothers
would be forced to strip, then undress their children, watch their children be murdered, and then
join them in the mass graves. The Einsatzgruppen and the local helpers they recruited were
responsible for approximately 1 million deaths over the course of the war. The Einsatzgruppen
were aided by regular Wehrmacht (German army) units and by battalions of the Order Police, a
hybrid of police force and national guard mobilized for the war effort. In other words, many
regular soldiers, not just Nazi party members, were responsible for killing innocent men,
women, and children, often for days at a time and at point-blank range. This aspect of the
Holocaust is today referred to as the Holocaust by bullets, one that was largely overlooked by
historians for many decades after the war.
Members of the Einsatzgruppen about to murder the Jewish woman and child, with Jewish men
digging their own graves to the right.
214
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
There were various logistical problems with this technique, however. It was hard to
generalize it in urban areas already under Nazi control. Many members of the Einsatzgruppen
suffered from mental breakdowns from murdering innocent people day after day. There were
never very many Einsatzgruppen to begin with: four teams with about 6,000 soldiers assigned to
them in total. Out of necessity, they made heavy use of auxiliary troops to do much of the actual
shooting, recruited from Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, or Estonian POW camps. These
auxiliaries were called Hiwis, an abbreviation of Hilfswilligen (helpers), by the Nazis. Soon,
both members of the SSs army, the Waffen SS, as well as regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht
were assigned to Jewish Actions, the euphemism for organized massacres.
At some point between the late summer and fall of 1941, the top Nazi leadership
decided to abandon earlier experiments with forced deportations and to search instead for more
efficient methods of murder. Almost immediately after the implementation of the
Einsatzgruppen, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered experiments with better means
of mass murder, which resulted in Nazi technicians devising gas vans that killed their victims
through carbon monoxide poisoning. By late fall of 1941, killing facilities were being built in the
concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz, both of which had been built as slave labor
camps in 1940. There, the first experiments with the infamous pesticide Zyklon B were carried
out on Russian POWs.
The Peak Killing Period
Based on the experiments with gas vans and temporary gas chambers at Auschwitz, SS
leaders concluded that stationary killing centers would be the most efficient and (for the killers)
psychologically viable form of mass murder. Thus, as of early 1942, the Nazis embarked on the
most notorious project of the Holocaust: the creation of the extermination camps. Extermination
camps were not the same thing as concentration camps. Concentration camps were prison
camps, some of which created during the first weeks of Nazi rule in 1933. There were literally
tens of thousands of concentration camps of various kinds scattered across the entire breadth
of German-controlled territory. Extermination camps, however, were designed for one purpose:
to kill people. There were only six of them in total, and most were very small – often about a
quarter of a square mile in size. All were located in occupied Poland, near rail lines and hidden
in forests away from major population centers. They were not meant to house prisoners for
slave labor; new arrivals to an extermination camp were typically dead within two hours. They
were, in short, “death factories,” production facilities of murder that ran on industrial timetables.
215
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The height of the Holocaust was thus shockingly short. It lasted from early 1942, when
the extermination facilities were put into operation, until the late summer of 1943, a period of just
over a year that saw 50% of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust itself murdered. The major
reason for that incredible speed is that the ghettos of Poland were emptied into the
extermination camps. The extermination camp Treblinka alone killed at least 800,000 people,
most of whom were sent from the enormous ghetto of Warsaw. The millions of Jews who had
been in Poland and the Russian territories of the west were murdered at a stunning, completely
unprecedented rate.
The most infamous of the camps is unquestionably Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a great
exception among the extermination camps in that it did house Jewish prisoners who were not
immediately killed. Instead, about 80% of new arrivals to Auschwitz were sent immediately to
their deaths in the gas chambers, while the other 20% were temporarily enslaved. More is
known about of a death camp from Auschwitz because a relatively large
number of its victims survived the war, although “relative” in this case still means “far less than
1%.” Likewise, the infamous tattoos issued to prisoners were only performed at Auschwitz;
there was no point in tattooing victims who were to be killed within hours, after all.
Within Auschwitz, not just Jews but regular criminals, enemies of the Nazi regime,
Romani, and various other groups were housed in grossly overcrowded barracks. These
prisoners were treated differently by German and auxiliary guards based on who they were and
where they were from, and they were actively encouraged to treat each other differently based
on those distinctions as well. Non-Jewish German criminals were given important positions as
kapos, team leaders, who oversaw Jewish slaves in the construction of new buildings in the
vast, sprawling Auschwitz camp complex (it was over 20 kilometers across, including numerous
sub-camps) or working in factories designed to support the German war effort. Of the
approximately 200,000 Jews who were spared immediate murder on arrival, the large majority
were either worked to death or murdered in the gas chambers after becoming too weak to work.
216
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Three of the survivors of Buchenwald concentration camp, likely transferred from Auschwitz in
the death marches that began in January 1945.
The five death camps besides Auschwitz operated from early 1942 until the fall or winter
of 1943 (one, Madjanek, was operational until the summer of 1944). They were used primarily
to murder the Jews of Poland and their total death toll was close to 2 million victims. In turn,
they were never meant to be permanent: there were no large-scale slave labor facilities and
only a handful of Jews were kept alive on arrival to work as slaves for the guards and to burn
the bodies of their fellow victims after they were gassed (the survival rate from the three major
camps besides Auschwitz was one one-thousandth of 1%, or .0001 to 1, representing the 150
people who survived and the 1.5 million who did not). Slave revolts occurred at two camps in
August and October of 1943, which explains the fact that anyone survived these camps, but by
then the camps had already succeeded: almost the entire Polish Jewish population was dead,
starved in the ghettos or gassed in the camps. Afterwards, the SS destroyed the remains of the
camps to hide the evidence of what had happened there.
217
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Auschwitz, however, had been built to be permanent. Its gas chambers were large and
made of concrete and steel (unlike the wood sheds used to murder in the other extermination
camps). It was intended to be the final destination for every Jew captured by the Nazis in the
years to come, and thus most Jews from the western European countries occupied by Germany
were sent to die in Auschwitz. The Nazis continued to prioritize the “final solution” even as the
war turned against them, shipping hundreds of thousands to Auschwitz as the Allies steadily
pressed against them in the east and south.
One of the most bizarre and chilling episodes of the Holocaust was the Nazi takeover of
Hungary in mid-1944. There, in what had been a staunch German ally, over 700,000 Jews had
survived the war, protected in the sense that the Hungarian government had resisted the
demands of the Germans to turn over its Jews for murder. When the Germans learned that the
Hungarians were negotiating with the Soviets to switch allegiances, now that the German defeat
was all but assured by early 1944, they supported a coup by Hungarian fascists under the
direction of the Nazi state. That summer, at an astonishing rate, SS specialists overseeing
Hungarian fascist police deported over 500,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The vast
majority were killed on arrival; in the Fall of 1944 Auschwitz was operated at its maximum
capacity of killing up to 12,000 people a day. It bears emphasizing that the Holocaust was
regarded by the top Nazi leadership as being a priority that was at least as high as actually
fighting the war. Even after the war was evidently lost, tremendous efforts were made to kill
every Jew then in German hands.
In early 1945, as the Soviet army closed from the east and the western Allies from the
west, the Nazis initiated a series of death marches from the camps in Poland. Jewish prisoners
that had survived up to that point, against incredible odds, were forced to march up to twenty
miles through the Polish winter, then loaded into cattle cars and shipped into Germany. The
western Allies – mostly Britain and the US – discovered the first evidence of the Holocaust when
they liberated these German camps, discovering tens of thousands of corpses and thousands of
horribly malnourished survivors. Likewise, the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz itself,
discovering the gas chambers and the smattering of survivors who had been left behind when
the Germans fled. Ultimately, the Holocaust ended because the war ended. The Nazis had
been intent on “winning the Holocaust” even after it was self-evident that they could not win the
war.
218
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Aftermath
The liberation of the camps was horrifying to the Allied soldiers who discovered them in
the closing months of the war. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander of the
forces that had carried out the D-Day invasion, ordered that British and American troops alike
document what they discovered – the huge mounds of corpses, the open graves, the emaciated
survivors, and the gas chambers – lest those horrors be dismissed as propaganda at some
point in the future. Likewise, Soviet forces preserved the evidence discovered in the eastern
camps, including Auschwitz itself. As the war in Europe finally ended, Allied troops and agents
immediately embarked on an enormous effort to locate, catalog, and preserve the
documentation having to do with the Holocaust in German army, state, and SS offices as they
prepared the groundwork for war crimes trials.
Bodies at the Gusen Concentration Camp being transported for burial by German civilians
pressed into the work by Allied soldiers, in an attempt to force the Germans to confront the
results of their actions.
219
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The scope of the Holocaust shocked even battle-hardened troops who were already
aware of German depredations against civilians. At the the Nuremberg Trials, organized to
legally prosecute the Nazi leadership, Nazi leaders were charged with Crimes Against
Humanity, a completely new category of crime designed by the victorious Allies to try to deal
with the enormity of what they still called Nazi atrocities. Thanks to SS documentation, the
Allies correctly calculated that the death toll of Jews murdered by the Third Reich amounted to
roughly six million individuals, and the basic mechanisms of deportation, slavery, and gassing
were also clear.
Even though Allied authorities were able to piece together the basic characteristics of
the Holocaust, various aspects remained obscure for decades. Most survivors were deeply
hesitant to talk about what they had been through, and even in the newly-founded Jewish state
of Israel, most of the focus was on the symbolically-important acts of resistance like a famous
uprising of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, rather than on the millions who were killed.
For decades, most survivors tried to make new lives, often thousands of miles from their former
homes, and most non-Jews were completely ignorant of the breadth, scope, and organized
nature of the genocide.
The first systematic study of the Holocaust was carried out by an American Jewish
historian, Raul Hilberg, who published his The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961,
containing the first highly detailed study of the number of victims, the methods used by the
Nazis, and the breadth of the genocide itself. While it took years to mature, the field of
Holocaust scholarship began in earnest with Hilbergs work, eventually burgeoning into a major
subfield of history, political science, and sociology. Today, while the scholarship is always
turning up new facts and presenting new interpretations, the essential narrative of the Holocaust
is well established, based on mountains of hard evidence and meticulous research.
The event that brought the Holocaust to world attention was not scholarship, however,
but the capture of the Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 by agents of the
Israeli secret service, the Mossad. Eichmann was taken to Jerusalem and tried for his work in
overseeing the logistics of the Holocaust. His major job during the war had been to make sure
the trains carrying victims ran on time and efficiently delivered them to their deaths. Eichmann
was the quintessential desktop murderer, a man who (apparently) never personally harmed
anyone, but was still responsible for the deaths of millions through his actions. The trial was
highly publicized and it began the process of transforming the Holocaust from being only a dark
memory of its survivors, largely unknown or overlooked by historians and the general public, to
being perhaps the most infamous event of the twentieth century.
220
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In the 1970s and 1980s, a series of films and television programs brought the history of
the Holocaust to audiences around the western world, and survivors of the Holocaust began
speaking publicly about their experiences in large numbers. Part of the impetus behind the
organizations of survivors was the emergence of Holocaust Denial in the 1970s: the hateful,
disingenuous, and utterly false claim that the Holocaust never happened (Eichmann himself was
irritated when asked by early deniers in Argentina to corroborate their claims – he was
perversely proud of his role in running an efficient system of mass murder).
Holocaust memorialization had existed in Israel since the 1940s, but it became much
more widespread by the 1980s. One of the most significant memorials to the victims of the
Holocaust is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, conceived of by a
commission brought together by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and ultimately dedicated by
President Bill Clinton in 1993. Certainly, by the 1990s, the Holocaust was an integral part of
history taught in schools and universities almost everywhere; while it is possible not to know
many of the details, even people with only a cursory understanding of modern history are
usually aware that the Nazis carried out the genocide of the Jews of Europe during World War
II.
Conclusion
The Holocaust was one of the great traumas associated with World War II. It forced the
Western World to confront the fact that a highly advanced, “civilized” nation at the heart of
Europe – Germany – had been responsible not just for a initiating a horrendously bloody war, but
for carrying out the systematic murder of millions of completely innocent people. The conceit
that “Western Civilization” was the most just and desirable matrix of law, politics, and culture
was permanently undermined in the process. Since the ancient Greeks, the proud distinction
between civilization and barbarism had been upheld in the minds of the social and political elites
of the West, and yet it was some of those very elites who perpetrated the ultimate act of
barbarism in the twentieth century.
Image Citations:
Kristallnacht – German Federal Archives
Warsaw Ghetto – Public Domain
Einsatzgruppen – Public Domain
Buchenwald Survivors – Public Domain
Bodies at Gusen – Public Domain
221
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 12: The Soviet Union and the Cold War
At the height of Soviet power in the late 1960s, one-third of the worlds population lived
in communist countries. The great communist powers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) and the Peoples Republic of China loomed over a vast swath of Eurasia, while smaller
countries occasionally erupted in revolution. Non-aligned countries like India were often as
sympathetic to the Soviet Bloc (i.e. countries allied with or under the control of the USSR) as
they were to the United States and the other major capitalist countries. Even in the capitalist
countries of the West, intellectuals, students, and workers often sympathized with communism
as well, despite the apparent mismatch between the Utopian promise of Marxism and the reality
of a police state in the USSR.
This global split between communist and capitalist was only possible because of the vast
might of the USSR. The threat of world war terrified every sane person on the planet, but
beyond that, the threat of conventional military intervention by the Soviets was almost as
threatening. The USSR controlled the governments of every Eastern European country, with
the strange exception of Yugoslavia, and it had considerable influence almost everywhere in the
globe. Its factories churned out military hardware at an enormous rate, even as its scientists
proved themselves the equal of anything the west could produce and its athletes often defeated
all challengers at the Olympics every four years.
Behind the faade of strength and power, however, the USSR was one of the strangest
historical paradoxes of all time. It was a country whose official political ideology,
Marxism-Leninism, proclaimed an end to class warfare and the stated goal of achieving true
communism, a workers state in which everyone enjoyed the fruits of science and industrialism
and no one was left behind. In reality, the nation was in a perpetual state of economic
stagnation, with its citizens enjoying dramatically lower standards of living than their
contemporaries in the west and workers toiling harder and for fewer benefits than did many in
the west. Marxism-Leninism was officially hostile to imperialism, and yet the USSR controlled
the governments of most of its allied nations after World War II. Of all forms of government,
communism was supposed to be the most genuinely democratic, responding to the will of the
people instead of false representatives bought with the money of the rich, and yet
decision-making rested in the hands of high-level member of the communist party, the so-called
222
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
apparatchiks, or arch-bureaucrats. Finally, Marxism-Leninism was officially a political program
of peace, yet nothing received so much attention or priority in the USSR as did military power.
Stalinism
The Bolshevik party rose to power against the backdrop of the anarchy surrounding
Russias disastrous military position in the latter part of World War I. Once the Bolsheviks were
firmly in power by 1922, they embarked on a fascinating and almost unprecedented series of
political and social experiments. After all, no country in the history of the planet to that point had
undergone a successful communist revolution, so there was no precedent for how a socialist
society was supposed to be organized. Facing a terrible economic crisis from the years of war,
the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin launched the New Economic Policy, which allowed limited
market exchange of goods and foodstuffs, even as the state supported a renaissance in the arts
and literature. For a few years, not only did standards of living rise, but there was a flowering of
innovative creative energy as artists and intellectuals explored what it might mean to live in the
country of the future.
Lenin had driven the revolution forward, and he oversaw the social and economic
experiments that followed the war. He died in 1924, however, inaugurating a struggle within the
Bolshevik leadership to succeed him. In 1927, Joseph Stalin politically defeated his enemies
(most importantly the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Zinoviev, two of Lenins closest allies
before his death) and consolidated total control of the state. Officially, Stalin was the Premier
of the communist party – the first – overseeing its central decision-making committee, the
Politburo. Unofficially, Stalins control of the top level of the party translated into pure autocracy,
not hugely dissimilar in nature to the power of the Tsar before the revolution.
Before his rise to power, Stalins position in the Russian Communist Party had been
relatively innocuous; he was its secretary, a position of little direct power but enormous potential
influence. In order to achieve an appointment to a given position within the party, other
members of the party had to go through Stalin. He shrewdly used this fact to cement political
relationships and influence, so that by Lenins death he was well-positioned to make a power
grab himself. Lenin suffered a series of strokes in the early 1920s, giving Stalin the opportunity
to build up his power base without opposition, even though Lenin himself was worried about
Stalins dictatorial tendencies.
Stalin is a much more enigmatic figure than Hitler, to whom he is often compared thanks
to their respective legacies of mass murder. Stalin did not write manifestos about his beliefs,
223
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
nor did he leave behind many documents or letters that might help historians reconstruct his
motivations. Biographers have had to rely on the accounts of people who knew Stalin rather
than having access to troves of personal records. He also changed his mind frequently and did
not stick to consistent patterns of behavior or decision-making, making it difficult to pin down his
essential beliefs or goals. His only overarching personality trait was tremendous paranoia: he
almost always felt himself surrounded by potential traitors and enemies. He once informed his
underlings that every communist is a possible hidden enemy. And because it is not easy to
recognize the enemy, the goal is achieved even if only five percent of those killed are truly
enemies.
Stalin
Stalins paranoia was reflected in his ruthless policies. Starting at the end of the 1920s,
Stalin forced through massive change to the Soviet economy and society while periodically
killing off anyone he could imagine being a threat or enemy. Communism was supposed to
spread around the world after an initial revolutionary outburst, but instead it was stuck in one
place, socialism in one country, in Stalins words, which he believed necessitated a massive
industrial buildup. The only thing that benefited from Stalins oversight was the military, which
224
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
grew dramatically and, for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, achieved a level of parity
with the west.
Of his many destructive policies, Stalin is perhaps best remembered for the purges.
“Purging” consisted of rounding up and executing members of the communist party, the army, or
even the police forces themselves. Normally, Stalin’s agents would use torture to force the
hapless victims to confess to outlandish charges like conspiring with Germany or (later) the
United States to bring down the Soviet Union from within. His secret police force, the NKVD (its
Russian acronym – it was later changed to KGB) often following direct orders from Stalin
himself, eliminated uncounted thousands more. Thus, even at the highest levels of power in the
USSR, no one was safe from Stalin’s paranoia.
Stalin relied on the NKVD to carry out the purges, targeting better-off peasants known as
kulaks, then the Old Bolsheviks (who had taken part in the revolution itself), army officers,
middle-ranking communist party members, and finally, tens of thousands of regular citizens
caught in the grotesque machinery of accusation and punishment that plagued the country in
the second half of the 1930s. Every purge was designed to, at least in part, purge the past
purgers, blaming them for excesses that had killed innocent people – this of course simply led
to the murder of more innocents. So many people disappeared that most Soviets came to
believe that the NKVD was everywhere, that everyone was an informer, and that everything was
bugged. In addition to outright murder, thousands more were imprisoned in labor camps known
as gulags, almost all of which were located in the frigid northern regions of Siberia. The total
number of victims is estimated conservatively at 700,000, which does not count the hundreds of
thousands deported to the gulags.
While emblematic of Stalins tyranny, the purges did not result in nearly as many deaths
as did his other policies. Beginning in 1928, Stalin ordered a definitive break with the limited
market exchange of the New Economic Policy, announcing a Great Turn towards
industrialization, state-controlled economics, and agricultural reorganization. Starting in 1929,
the Soviet state imposed the collectivization of agriculture, forcing millions of peasants to
abandon their farms and villages and move to gigantic new collective farms. Collectivization
required peasants to meet state-imposed quotas, which were immediately set at unachievable
levels. In the winter of 1932 1933 in particular, peasants across the USSR (and especially in
the Ukraine) starved to death probably around 3 million people died of starvation, and the
collectivization process resulted in another 6 – 10 million deaths including those who were
executed for resisting. Thus, the total deaths were probably over 10 million. Despite falling
abysmally short of its production goals, where collectivization succeeded was in destroying the
225
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
age-old bonds between the peasants and the land. In the future, Soviet peasants would be a
resentful and inefficient class of farm workers rather than peasants rooted in the land who
identified with traditional values.
Acknowledging the vast gap between the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity and that of
the west, Stalin also introduced the Five-Year Plans, in which sky-high production quotas were
set for heavy industry. While those quotas were never actually met and thousands died in the
frenzy of industrial buildup, the Five-Year Plans (three of which took place before World War II
began) were successful as a whole in achieving near parity with the western powers in terms of
industrial capacity. One of the only aspects of communist ideology that was reflected in reality
in the USSR was that industrial workers, while obliged to toil in conditions far from a workers
paradise, were at least spared the worst depredations of the purges and did not face outright
starvation.
Soviet propaganda consistently mythologized the supposed fervor of industrial workers. The
text reads 2+2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5.
Stalins overriding goals were twofold: secure allies abroad against the growing power of
Germany (and, to an extent, Japan), and drag the USSR into the industrial age. Despite the
turmoil of his murderous campaigns, he succeeded on both counts. While remaining deeply
hostile to the western powers, the Soviet state under Stalin did end the Soviet Unions pariah
226
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
status, receiving official diplomatic recognition from the US and France in 1933. The Five-Year
Plans were part of the USSRs new command economy, one in which every conceivable
commodity was produced based on quotas imposed within the vast party bureaucracy in
Moscow. That approach to economic planning was disastrous in the long run, but in the short
run it did succeed in industrializing the USSR. On the eve of World War II, the USSR had
become the third-largest industrial power in the world after the United States and Germany, and
was counted among the major political powers of not just Europe, but the world.
World War II and its Aftermath
Thus, at a terrible human cost, Stalins policies did transform the USSR into a
semblance of a modern state by the eve of World War II – just in time as it turned out. During
the war the USSR bore the brunt of German military power. More than 25 million Soviets died
on the eastern front, soldiers and civilians alike, and it was through the incredible sacrifice of the
Soviet people that the German army was finally broken and driven back. In the aftermath of
World War II, Stalins power was unshakable. During the war, he had played the role of the
powerful, protective “uncle” of the Soviet people, and after victory was achieved he enjoyed a
period of genuine popularity, especially as returning Soviet soldiers were given good positions in
the bureaucracy.
During the war, the one thing that tied Britain, the US, and the USSR together in alliance
was their shared enemy, Germany, not shared perspectives on a desirable postwar outcome
besides German defeat. The war required them to work together, however, and that included
making compromises that would in some cases haunt the postwar period. In 1943, after the tide
of the war had shifted against Germany but well before the end was in sight, the “Big Three”
leaders of Britain, the US, and the USSR met in Tehran to discuss the war and what would be
done afterwards. There, Stalin insisted that the territory seized from Poland by the USSR in
1939 would remain in Soviet hands: Poland would thus shrink enormously. Roosevelt and
Churchill, well aware of the critical role then being played by Soviet troops, were not in a
position to insist otherwise.
227
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The Tehran Conference in 1943 represented the first in-person meeting of the Big Three.
From left: Josef Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill.
In 1944, a team of politicians and economists from several Allied nations met in New
Hampshire and devised the basis of the postwar economic order, the Bretton Woods
Agreement. That agreement fixed the dollar as the monetary reserve of the western world,
created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize the international
economy, and fixed currency exchange rates. This plan initially included the Soviets, who would
thus be eligible for financial support in addressing the devastation wrought by Germany (as
noted below, however, the USSR pulled out in 1948, thereby driving home an economic as well
as political divide between east and west).
In January of 1945, when the end was finally in sight and Soviet forces already occupied
most of Eastern Europe, Stalin stipulated that the postwar governments in Eastern Europe
would need to be friendly to the Soviet Union, an ambiguous term whose practical meaning
suggested dominance by communist parties. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on the condition
that Stalin promised to support free elections, something Stalin never intended to allow. The
leaders also agreed to divide Germany into different zones until such time as they could
determine how to allow the Germans, purged of Nazism they hoped, to have self-government
again.
228
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In part, Britain and the US gave in to Soviet demands because of the incredible sacrifice
of the Soviet people in the war; 90% of the casualties on the Allied side up to 1944 were Soviets
(mostly Russians, but including millions of Ukrainians and Central Asians as well). Until 1945,
Roosevelt assumed the United States would need Soviet help in bringing about the final defeat
of Japan as well. Each side tried to avoid antagonizing the other, especially while the war
continued, even though they privately recognized that there were incompatible visions of
postwar European reorganization at stake.
Despite those incompatible ideas, many political leaders (and regular citizens) across
the globe hoped that the postwar order would be fundamentally different than its prewar analog.
Fundamental to that vision was the creation of an official international body whose purpose was
the prevention of armed conflict and the pursuit of peaceful and productive policies around the
world: the United Nations, the second attempt at an international coordinating organization after
the pitiful failure of the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s. The UN was founded in
1945 as a body of arbitration and, when necessary, enforcement of internationally-agreed upon
policies, seeing its first major role in the Nuremberg Trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. Its
Security Council was authorized to deploy military force when necessary, but its very reason to
be was to prevent war from being used as a tool of political aggrandizement. The Soviet Union
joined the western powers as a founding member of the UN, and there were at least some
hopes that it would oversee a just and equitable postwar political order.
The Cold War
Despite the foundation of the UN, and the fact that both the US and USSR were
permanent members of the Security Council, the divide between them undermined the
possibility of global unity. Instead, by the late 1940s, the world was increasingly split into the
two rival camps of the Cold War. The term itself refers to the decades-long rivalry between the
two postwar superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. This was a conflict that,
fortunately for the human species, never became a “hot” war. Both sides had enormous nuclear
arsenals by the 1960s that would have ensured that a “hot” war would almost certainly see truly
unprecedented destruction, up to and including the actual possibility of the extinction of the
human species (the American government invented a memorable phrase for this known as
M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction). Instead, both nations had enough of a collective
self-preservation instinct that the conflict worked itself out in the form of technological and
229
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
scientific rivalry, an enormous and ongoing arms race, and “proxy wars” fought elsewhere that
did not directly draw both sides into a larger conflict.
The open declaration of the Cold War, as it were, consisted of doctrines and plans. In
1947 the US issued the Truman Doctrine, which pledged to help people resist communism
wherever it appeared the rhetoric of the doctrine was about the defense of free people who
were threatened by foreign agents, but as became very clear over the next few decades, it was
more important that people were not communists than they were free from dictatorships. The
Truman Doctrine was born out of the idea of containment, of keeping communism limited to
the countries in which communist takeovers had already occurred. The immediate impetus for
the doctrine was a conflict raging in Greece after WWII, in which the communist resistance
movement that had fought the Nazis during the war sought to overthrow the right-wing, royalist
government of Greece in the aftermath. Importantly, while both the British and then the US
supported the Greek government, the USSR did not lend any aid to the communist rebels,
rightly fearing that doing so could lead to a much larger war. Furious at what he regarded as
another instance of western capitalist imperialism, however, Stalin pulled the USSR out of the
Bretton Woods economic agreement in early 1948.
The Truman Doctrine was closely tied to the fear of what American policy-makers called
the Domino Theory: if one nation fell to communism, it was feared, communism would
spread to the surrounding countries. Thus, preventing a communist takeover anywhere, even in
a comparatively small and militarily insignificant country, was essential from the perspective of
American foreign policy during the entire period of the Cold War. That theory was central to
American policy from the 1950s through the 1980s, deciding the course of politics, conflicts, and
wars from Latin America to Southeast Asia.
Along with the Truman Doctrine, the United States introduced the Marshall Plan in 1948,
named for the American secretary of state at the time. The Marshall Plan consisted of
enormous American loans to European countries trying to rebuild from the war. European
states also founded a intra-European economic body called the Organization of European
Economic Cooperation that any country accepting loans was obliged to join. Stalin regarded the
OEEC as a puppet of the US, so he banned all countries under Soviet influence from joining,
and hence from accepting loans. Simultaneously, the Soviets were busy extracting wealth and
materials from their new puppets in Eastern Europe to help recover from their own war losses.
The legacy of the Marshall Plan, the OEEC, and Soviet policy was to create a stark economic
division: while Western Europe rapidly recovered from the war, the East remained poor and
comparatively backwards.
230
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Already by 1946, in the words of Winston Churchill, the iron curtain had truly fallen
across Eastern Europe. Everywhere, local communist parties at first ruled along with other
parties, following free elections. Then, with the aid of Soviet advisers, communists from
Poland to Romania pushed other parties out through terror tactics and legal bans on
non-communist political organizations. Soon, each of the Eastern European states was officially
pledged to cooperate with the USSR. Practically speaking, this meant that every Eastern
European country was controlled by a communist party that took its orders directly from Moscow
– there was no independent political decision-making allowed.
The major exception was Yugoslavia. Ironically, the one state that had already been
taken over by a genuine communist revolution was the one that was not a puppet of the USSR.
During the war, an effective anti-German resistance was led by Yugoslav communists, and in
the aftermath they succeeded in seizing power over the entire country. Tito, the communist
leader of Yugoslavia, had great misgivings about the Soviet takeover of the rest of Eastern
Europe, and he and Stalin angrily broke with one another after the war. Thus, Yugoslavia was a
communist country, but not one controlled by the USSR.
In turn, it was Stalin’s anger that Yugoslavia was outside of his grasp that inspired the
Soviets to carry out a series of purges against the communist leadership of the Eastern
European countries now under Soviet domination. Soviet agents sought Titoists who were
supposedly undermining the strength of commitment to communism. Between 1948 and 1953
more communists were killed by other communists than had died at the hands of the Nazis
during the war (i.e. in terms of direct Nazi persecution of communists, not including casualties of
World War II itself). Communist leaders were put on show trials, both in their own countries and
sometimes after being hauled off to Moscow, where they were first tortured into confessing
various made-up crimes (collaborating with western powers to overthrow communism was a
popular one), then executed. It is worth noting that this period, especially the first few years of
the 1950s, saw anti-Semitism become a staple of show trials and purges as well, as latent
anti-Semitic sentiments came to the surface and Jewish communist leaders suffered a
disproportionate number of arrests and executions, often accused of being Zionists secretly in
league with the west.
Simultaneously, the world was dividing into the two camps of the Cold War. The zones
of occupation of Germany controlled by the US, France, and Britain became the new nation of
the Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany, while the Soviet-controlled zone
became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Nine western European countries
joined the US in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, whose stated purpose
231
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
was the defense of each of the member states from invasion understood to be the invasion of
Western Europe by the USSR. The USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August of 1949,
thereby establishing the stakes of the conflict: the total destruction of human life. And, finally, by
1955 the Soviets had formalized their own military system with the Warsaw Pact, which bound
together the Soviet Bloc in a web of military alliances comparable to NATO.
In hindsight, it is somewhat surprising that the USSR was not more aggressive in the
early years of the Cold War, making no overt attempts to sponsor communist takeovers outside
of Eastern Europe. The one direct confrontation between the two camps took place between
May of 1948 and June of 1949, when the Soviets blockaded West Berlin. The city of Berlin was
in East Germany, but its western zones remained in the hands of the US, Britain, and France,
the phenomenon a strange relic of the immediate aftermath of the war. As Cold War tensions
mounted, Stalin ordered the blockade of all supplies going to the western zones. The US led a
massive ongoing airlift of food and supplies for nearly a year while both sides studiously avoided
armed confrontation. In the end, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, and West Berlin became
a unique pocket of the western camp in the midst of communist East Germany.
A US Air Force transport plane dropping candy (part of a morale-boosting campaign) to children
during the Berlin Airlift.
It is worth considering the fact that Europe had been, scant years earlier, the most
powerful region on Earth, ruling the majority of the surface of the globe. Now, it was either
under the heel of one superpower or dominated by the other, unable to make large-scale
international political decisions without implicating itself in the larger conflict. The rivalries that
232
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
had divided the former great powers in the past seemed insignificant compared to the threat of
a single overwhelming war initiated by foreign powers that could result in the end of history.
The USSR During the Cold War
Stalin died in 1954, leaving behind a country that was still comparatively poor, but
enormously powerful. In addition, Stalin left a legacy of death and imprisonment that touched
nearly every family in the USSR, with millions still trapped in the gulags of Siberia. After a
power struggle between the top members of the communist party, Stalins successor emerged:
Nikita Khrushchev, a former coal miner and engineer who rose in the ranks of the party to
become its leader. Khrushchev was a true believer in the Soviet system, genuinely believing
that the USSR would overtake the west economically and that its citizens would in turn
eventually enjoy much better standards of living than those experienced in the west.
Khrushchev broke with Stalinism soon after securing power. In 1956, he gave a speech
to the leaders of the communist party later dubbed the secret speech – it was not broadcast to
the general public, but Khrushchev allowed it to leak to the state-controlled press. In it,
Khrushchev blamed Stalin for bringing about a cult of personality that was at variance with true
communist principles, and for excesses, a thinly veiled acknowledgement of the Siberian
prison camps and summary executions. Shortly after the speech, Khrushchev had four million
prisoners released from the gulags as a practical gesture demonstrating his sincerity. This
period is called The Thaw in Soviet history. For a brief period, there was another flowering of
literary and artistic experimentation comparable to that of the early 1920s. The ubiquitous
censorship was relaxed, with a few accurate accounts of the gulags making it into mainstream
publication. In turn, among many, there were genuine hopes for larger political reforms of the
system.
This hope of a new beginning was not limited to the Soviet Union itself. In October of
1956, a reformist faction of the Hungarian communist party inspired a mass uprising calling for
not just a reformed, more humanistic communism, but the expulsion of Soviet forces and
advisers completely. That led to a full-scale invasion by the Soviet army that killed several
thousand protesters in violent clashes (primarily in the capital city of Budapest), followed by the
arrests of over half a million people in the aftermath. It was clear that Khrushchev might not
want to follow directly in Stalins footsteps, but he had no intention of allowing genuine
independence in the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe.
233
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Angered both by the events in Hungary and by the growth of outright dissent with the
Soviet system in the USSR itself, Khrushchev reasserted control. A few noteworthy works of art
that hinted at dissent were allowed to trickle out (until Khrushchev was ousted by hardliners in
1964, at any rate), but larger-scale change was out of the question. The state instead
concentrated on wildly ambitious – sometimes astonishingly impractical – economic projects.
Soviet engineers and planners drained whole river systems to irrigate fields, Soviet factories
churned out thousands of tons of products and materials no one wanted, and whole regions
were polluted to the point of becoming nearly uninhabitable. Over time, cynicism replaced terror
as the default outlook of Soviet citizens. It was no longer as dangerous to be alive as it had
been under Stalin, but people recognized that the system was not “really” about the pursuit of
communism. Instead, for most, the only hope of achieving a decent standard of living and
relative personal stability was forming the right connections within the enormous party
bureaucracy. The USSR went from a murderous police state under Stalin to a bloated, corrupt
police state under Khrushchev and the leaders who followed him.
It was also under Khrushchev that the Cold War reached its most frenzied pitch.
Khrushchev himself was an explosive personality who sincerely believed in the possibility of the
USSR winning the Cold War by outstripping the western world economically and winning over
the nations of the Third World to communism politically. To that end, he continued the Stalinist
focus on building up heavy industry and, especially, military hardware, but he also devoted huge
energies toward science and engineering.
During Khrushchevs tenure as premier the space race joined the arms race as a major
centerpiece of Cold War policy. Despite the limited practical consequences of some aspects of
the space race, it was symbolically important to both sides it was a very visible demonstration
of scientific superiority, and the first superpower to reach a given breakthrough in the space race
had thus won a major symbolic victory in the eyes of the world. In addition, since the space
race was based on the mastery of rocket technology, the military implications were obvious. In
1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth, an event which was
perceived as a major Soviet triumph in the Cold War. Khrushchev claimed that the USSR had
also developed missiles that could strike targets on the other side of the world, and thus the
west feared that the Soviets could as easily detonate a nuclear weapon in the US as in Europe.
234
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
A commemorative Soviet postage stamp depicting Sputniks orbit.
The resulting fear and resentment between the two sides saw even greater emphasis on
both the space race and the buildup of nuclear arms going into the 1960s. The American
President John F Kennedy was a hard-line anti-communist, a cold warrior, and he believed it
was important to stand up to the Soviets symbolically and, if necessary, militarily. In 1959,
Cuban revolutionaries overthrew the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (who had been an
American ally), and fearing American intervention, eventually aligned themselves with the
USSR. Thus, as Kennedy took office in 1960, he faced not only the growing technological and
military power of the USSR itself, but what he regarded as a Soviet puppet on the very doorstep
of US territory.
In 1962, the US Central Intelligence Agency staged an unsuccessful attempt to
overthrow the Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, an event known as the Bay of Pigs
Invasion. In the aftermath, Castro and Khrushchev agreed to install missile batteries in Cuba
235
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
both as a deterrent against a potential invasion by the US in the future and to redress the
superiority of American missile deployments. Khrushchev was eager to establish a military
presence in the western hemisphere, especially since the US had already installed missile
batteries in its allied nations of Italy and Turkey within striking distance of the USSR. American
spy planes, however, detected the construction of the missile site in Cuba and the shipments of
missiles en route to Cuba, leading to the point in history when the human race stood closest to
complete extinction: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
When the US government learned of the Soviet missiles, there was serious
consideration of launching a full-scale assault on Cuba, something that could have led directly
to nuclear war. Many American military leaders believed at the time in the possibility of a
limited nuclear war in which missile sites would be destroyed quickly enough to prevent the
Soviets from launching counter-strikes. Instead, however, Kennedy and Khrushchev carefully
engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, both of them realizing the stakes of the conflict and,
thankfully for world history, not wanting to destroy the world in the name of national pride. The
American and Soviet navies faced off in the Atlantic while frenzied diplomacy sought an end to
the crisis. After thirteen panicked days, both sides agreed to withdraw their missiles, but not
before an incident in which a Soviet submarine very nearly launched nuclear torpedoes at an
American ship. A single Soviet officer – Vasili Arkhipov – called off the strike that could have led
directly to nuclear war.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR agreed to create a
hotline to ensure rapid communication in the event of future crises. The United States
dropped the very idea of limited nuclear war from its tactical repertoire and instead recognized
that any nuclear strike was the equivalent of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction). While the
arms race between the superpowers continued, spiking again during the 1980s, both sides did
enter into various treaties that limited the pace of nuclear arms production as well.
In 1964, having lost the confidence of key members of the Politburo, Khrushchev was
forced out of office. He was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a lifelong communist bureaucrat.
Brezhnev would hold power until 1982, overseeing a long period of what is usually
characterized as stagnation by historians: the Soviet system, including its nominal adherence to
Marxism-Leninism, would remain in place, but even elites abandoned the idea that real
communism was achievable. Instead, life in the USSR was about trying to find a place in the
system, rather than pursuing the more far-reaching goals of communist theory. The state and
the economy – deeply wedded in any case – were rife with corruption and nepotism, and a
deep-seated, bitter cynicism became the outlook of most Soviet citizens toward their
236
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
government and their lot in life. Arguably, this pattern had already emerged under Khrushchev,
but it truly came of age under Brezhnev.
During Brezhnevs tenure as the Soviet premier, another eastern bloc nation tried
unsuccessfully to break away from Soviet domination: Czechoslovakia. In the Spring of 1968,
the Czech communist leader Alexander Dubcek (who had fought against the Nazis in the war
and had been a staunch ally and trusted underling of the Soviets up to that point) received
permission from Moscow to experiment with limited reforms. He called for socialism with a
human face, meaning a kind of communist government that allowed freedom of speech, a
liberalized outlook on human expression, and a diversified economy that could address sectors
besides heavy industry. Dubcek relaxed censorship and allowed workers to organize into
Soviets (councils) as they had in the early years of communist revolution in Russia. These
reforms were eagerly embraced by the Czechs and Slovaks.
Predictably, the reforms proved too radical for Moscow. Brezhnev sent in the Soviet
military, and all of the other Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania) also sent in troops. This
reaction was regarded around the world as especially crude and disproportionate, given that the
Czechs and Slovaks did not rise up in any kind of violent way (as the Hungarians had done, at
least briefly, twelve years earlier). Instead, the message was clear: no meaningful reform would
be possible in the East unless the leadership in Moscow somehow underwent a fundamental
change of outlook. That change did eventually come, but not until the 1980s under Mikhail
Gorbachev.
Conclusion: What Went Wrong with the USSR
In historical hindsight, the paradox of a “communist” country that so profoundly failed to
realize its stated goals of freedom, equality, and justice, has led many people (not just
historians) to speculate about what was inherently flawed with the Soviet system. There are
many theories, three of which are considered below.
One idea is that the Soviet state was trapped in impossible circumstances. It was
largely cut off from the aid of the rest of the world until after World War II, and the Bolsheviks
inherited control of a backwards, economically-underdeveloped nation. They did their best,
however brutal their methods, to catch up with the nations of the west and to create at least the
possibility of a better life for future Soviet citizens. This thesis is supported by the success of
the Red Army: if Stalin had not industrialized Russia and the Ukraine by force, the theory goes,
the results of World War II would have been even more awful.
237
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Another take is that communism is somehow contrary to human nature and thus
doomed to failure, no matter what the circumstances or context. Here, scholars note the
incredible prevalence of corruption at every level of Soviet society: the huge black market and
the nepotism and infighting present in everything from getting a job to getting an apartment in
one of the major cities. Greed proved an implacable foe to communist social organization, with
the party apparatchiks reaping the benefits of their positions – better food, better housing,
vacations – that were never available to rank-and-file citizens.
A more subtle and sympathetic interpretation is that some kind of communism might be
possible (social democracies have thrived in Europe for decades, after all), but the Soviet
system went mad with trying to control everything. The Soviet economy was the ultimate
expression of the idea of a command economy, with every product produced according to
arcane quotas set by huge bureaucracies within the Soviet state, and every industry was
beholden to equally unrealistic quotas. The most elementary laws of supply and demand in
economics were ignored in favor of irrational, and indeed arbitrary, systems of production. The
results were chronic shortages of goods and services people actually needed (or wanted) and
equally vast surpluses of useless, shoddy junk, from ill-fitting shoes to unreliable machinery. To
cite a single example (noted by the historian Tony Judt), party leaders in the Soviet republic of
Kyrgyzstan told farmers to buy up grain supplies from stores in order to meet their yearly
quotas; those quotas were utterly impossible to meet through actual farming.
All of these ideas have something to them. It should also be considered that there had
never been anything like a democratic or liberal society in Russia. There was no tradition of
what the British called the loyal opposition of political parties who may disagree on particulars
but who are still accepted as legitimate expressions of the will and opinion of parts of the
citizenry. There were no checks and balances to hold back corruption either, and by the
Brezhnev era political connections were far more important than was any kind of heartfelt
devotion to Marxist theory. Thus, the kinds of decisions made by the Soviet leadership were
inspired by a pure, ruthless will to see results against a backdrop of staggering inefficiency and
corruption.
In the end, perhaps the biggest problem with the Soviet system was the fact that it was
more important to fit into the system than to speak the truth. The essential threat of violence
and imprisonment during the Stalinist period cast a long shadow on the rest of Soviet history.
Conformity, ideological dogmatism, and indifference to any notion of fairness were all
synonymous with success in Soviet society. Before long, competence and honesty were
threats to too many people already in power to be allowed to exist – as an example, famous
238
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Russian scientists lived under house arrest for decades because they could not be disposed of,
but neither could they be allowed to state their views openly.
It also bears consideration that not everything about Soviet society was, actually, a
failure. After the Thaw in the early 1950s, almost no one was executed for simply disagreeing
with the state, and prison terms were much shorter. Standards of living were mediocre, but
medical care, housing, and food was either free or cheap because of state subsidies. The kind
of leveling-out associated with communist theory did happen, in a sense, because most
people lived at a similar standard of living, the perks allowed to senior members of the
communist party notwithstanding. In the end, the Soviet Union represented one of the most
profound, albeit often blood-soaked and inhumane, political experiments in world history.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Stalin – Public Domain
Five Year Plan Propaganda – Public Domain
Big Three – Public Domain
Supply Plane – Public Domain
Sputnik Stamp – Public Domain
239
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 13: Postwar Conflict
One of the definitive transformations in global politics after World War II was the shift in
the locus of power from Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union. It was American aid
or Soviet power that guided the reconstruction of Europe after the war, and both superpowers
proved themselves more than capable of making policy decisions for the countries within their
respective spheres of influence. The Soviets directly controlled Eastern Europe and had an
enormous amount of influence in the other communist countries, while the United States
exercised considerable influence on the member nations of NATO.
Thus, many Europeans struggled to make sense of their own identity, with the height of
European power still being a living memory. One issue of tremendous importance to most
Europeans was the status of their colonies, most of which were still intact in the immediate
postwar period. Many Europeans felt that, with all their flaws, colonies still somehow proved the
relevance and importance of the mother countries as an example, the former British prime
minister Winston Churchill was dismayed by the prospect of Indian independence from the
British commonwealth even when most Britons accepted it as inevitable. Many in France and
Britain in particular thought that their colonies could somehow keep them on the same level as
the superpowers in terms of global power and, in a sense, relevance.
There were a host of problems with imperialism by 1945, however, that were all too
evident. Colonial troops had played vital roles in the war, with millions of Africans and Asians
serving in the allied armies (well over two million troops from India alone served as part of the
British military). Colonial troops fought in the name of defending democracy from fascism and
tyranny, yet back in their home countries they did not have access to democratic rights. Many
independence movements, such as Indias, refused to aid in the war effort as a result. Once the
war was over, troops returned home to societies that were still governed not only as political
dependencies, but were divided starkly along racial lines. The contrast between the ostensible
goals of the war and the obvious injustice in the colonies could not have been more evident.
Simultaneously, the Cold War became the overarching framework of conflict around the
world, sometimes playing a primary role in domestic conflicts in countries hundreds or even
thousands of miles from either of the superpowers themselves. At its worst, the Cold War led to
proxy wars between American-led or at least American-supplied anti-communists and
communist insurgents inspired by, and occasionally supported by the Soviet Union or
240
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
communist (as of 1949) China. There was thus a complex matrix of conflict around the world
that combined independence struggles within colonies on the one hand and proxy conflicts and
wars between factions caught in the web of the Cold War on the other. Sometimes,
independence movements like those of India and Ghana managed to avoid being ensnared in
the Cold War. Other times, however, countries like Vietnam became battlegrounds on which the
conflict between capitalism and communism erupted in enormous bloodshed.
The newly-founded United Nations generally failed to prevent the outbreak of war
despite its nominal goal of arbitrating peaceful solutions for international problems. It was
hamstrung by the fact that the two superpowers were among those with permanent seats on the
UN Security Council, the body that was charged with authorizing the use of force when
necessary. Likewise, the two camps of the Cold War generally remained loyal to their
respective superpower leaders, ensuring that there could be no unified decision making when it
came to Cold War conflicts.
In addition, while some independence movements that avoided becoming embroiled in
the Cold War were able to secure national independence peacefully, others did not. In many
cases, European imperial powers reacted violently to their colonial subjects demands for
independent governance, leading both the bloodshed and grotesque violations of human rights.
Here, again, the United Nations was generally unable to prevent violence, although it did at
times at least provide an ethical framework by which the actions of the imperialist powers might
be judged historically.
Major Cold War Conflicts
Fortunately for the human species, the Cold War never turned into a hot war between
the two superpowers, despite close calls like that of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It did, however,
lead to wars around the world that were part of the Cold War setting but also involved conflicts
between colonizers and the colonized. In other words, many conflicts in the postwar era
represented a combination of battles for independence from European empires and proxy wars
between the two camps of the Cold War.
The first such war was in Korea. Korea had been occupied by Japan since 1910, one of
the first countries to be conquered during Japans bid to create an East Asian and Pacific
empire that culminated in the Pacific theater of World War II. After the defeat of Japan, Korea
was occupied by Soviet troops in the north and US troops in the south. In the midst of the
confusion in the immediate postwar era, the two superpowers ignored Korean demands for
241
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
independence and instead divided the country in two. In 1950, North Korean troops supported
with Soviet arms and allied Chinese troops invaded the south in the name of reuniting the
country under communist rule. This was a case in which both the Soviets and the Chinese
directly supported an invasion in the name of spreading communism, something that would
become far less common in subsequent conflicts. A United Nations force consisting mostly of
American soldiers, sailors, and pilots fought alongside South Korean troops against the North
Korean and Chinese forces.
Refugees fleeing south after the invasion by North Korean forces.
Meanwhile, in 1945 Vietnamese insurgents declared Vietnam’s independence from
France, and French forces (such as they were following the German occupation) hastily invaded
in an attempt to hold on to the French colony of Indochina. When the Korean War exploded a
few years later, the United States intervened to support France, convinced by the events in
Korea that communism was spreading like a virus across Asia. As American involvement grew,
orders for munitions and equipment from the US to Japan revitalized the Japanese economy
and, ironically given the carnage of the Pacific theater of World War II, began to forge a strong
political alliance between the two former enemies.
After three years of bloody fighting, including the invasion of a full-scale Chinese army in
support of the northern forces, the Korean War ended in a stalemate. A demilitarized zone was
established between North and South Korea in 1953, and both sides agreed to a cease fire.
Technically, however, the war has never officially ended – both sides have simply remained in a
tense state of truce since 1953. The war itself tore apart the country, with three million
242
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
casualties (including 140,000 American casualties), and a stark ideological and economic divide
between north and south that only grew stronger in the ensuing decades. As South Korea
evolved to become a modern, technologically advanced and politically democratic society, the
north devolved into a nominally communist tyranny in which poverty and even outright famine
were tragic realities of life.
The Korean War energized the American obsession with preventing the spread of
communism. President Truman of the US insisted, against the bitter protests of the British and
French, that West Germany be allowed to rearm in order to help bolster the anti-Soviet alliance.
As French forces suffered growing defeats in Indochina, the US ramped up its commitment in
order to prevent another Asian nation from becoming a communist state. The American theory
of the domino effect of the spread of communism from country to country seemed entirely
plausible at the time, and across the American political spectrum there was a strong consensus
that communism could only be held in check by the application of military force.
That obsession led directly to the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American
War). The Vietnam War is among the most infamous in modern American history (for
Americans) because America lost it. In turn, American commitment to the war only makes if it is
placed in its historical context, that of a Cold War conflict that appeared to American
policymakers as a test of resolve in the face of the spread of communism. The conflict was, in
fact, as much about colonialism and imperialism as it was communism: the essential motivation
of the North Vietnamese forces was the desire to seize genuine independence from foreign
powers. The war itself was an outgrowth of the conflict between the Vietnamese and their
French colonial masters, one that eventually dragged in the United States.
The war really began with the end of World War II. During the war, the Japanese
seized Vietnam from the French, but with the Japanese defeat the French tried to reassert
control, putting a puppet emperor on the throne and moving their forces back into the country.
Vietnamese independence leaders, principally the former Parisian college student (and former
dishwasher – he worked at restaurants in Paris while a student) Ho Chi Minh, led the communist
North Vietnamese forces (the Viet Minh) in a vicious guerrilla war against the beleaguered
French. In a prescient moment with a French official, Ho Chi Minh once prophesied that you
will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours and you will end up by wearing yourselves
out. The Soviet Union and China both provided weapons and aid to the North Vietnamese,
while the US anticipated its own (later) invasion by supporting the South.
243
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Ho Chi Minh in 1946.
The French period of the conflict reached its culminating point in 1954 when the French
were soundly defeated at Dien Bien Phu, a French fortress that was overwhelmed by the Viet
Minh. The French retreated, leaving Vietnam torn between the communists in the north and a
corrupt but anti-communist force in the south supported by the United States. Refusing to allow
the national elections that had been planned for 1956, the US instead propped up an unpopular
president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who claimed authority over the entire country. An insurgency,
labeled the Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) by the Diem government, supported by the
north erupted in 1958, leading the US to provision hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and,
soon, an increasing number of military advisers to the south.
In 1964, pressured by both Soviet and Chinese advisers and with the US stepping up
pressure on the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh leadership launched a full-scale invasion in the name
of Vietnamese unification. American involvement skyrocketed as the South Vietnamese proved
unable to contain the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong insurgents. Over time, thousands of
American military advisers, mostly made up of what would become known as special forces,
were joined by hundreds of thousands of American troops. In 1964, citing a fabricated attack on
an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, President Lyndon Johnson called for a full-scale armed
244
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
response, which opened the floodgates for a true commitment to the war (technically, war was
never declared, however, with the entire conflict constituting a police action from the American
policy perspective).
Ultimately, Ho Chi Minh was proven right in his predictions about the war. American and
South Vietnamese forces were fought to a standstill by the Viet Minh and Viet Cong, with neither
side winning a definitive victory. All the while, however, the war was becoming more and more
unpopular in America itself and in its allied countries. As the years went by, journalists
catalogued much of the horrific carnage unleashed by American forces, with jungles leveled by
chemical agents and napalm and, notoriously, civilians massacred. The United States resorted
to a lottery system tied to conscription – the draft – in 1969, which led to tens of thousands of
American soldiers sent against their will to fight in jungles thousands of miles from home.
Despite the vast military commitment, US and South Korean forces started to lose ground by
1970.
The entire youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s was deeply embedded in the
anti-war stance caused by the mendacious press campaigns about the war carried on by the US
government, by atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians, and by the deep unpopularity
of the draft. In 1973, with American approval for the war hovering at 30%, President Richard
Nixon oversaw the withdrawal of American troops and the end of support for the South
Vietnamese. The Viet Minh finally seized the capital of Saigon and ended the war in 1975. The
human cost was immense: over a million Vietnamese died, along with some 60,000 American
troops.
245
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
A Pulitzer-Prize winning photo from 1972 depicting the aftermath of a napalm attack on a South
Vietnamese village suspected of harboring Viet Cong forces. The girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, is
naked after stripping off her burning clothes. She survived and ultimately became a peace
activist as an adult. Images like the above helped to inspire fervent anti-war sentiments in the
United States and Europe.
In historical hindsight, one of the striking aspects of the Vietnam War was the relative
restraint of the Soviet Union. The USSR provided both military supplies and financial aid to
North Vietnamese forces, but it fell far short of any kind of sustained intervention along the
American model in the south. Likewise, the Peoples Republic of China supported the Viet
Minh, but it did so in direct competition with the USSR (following a historic break between the
two countries in 1956). Nevertheless, whereas the US regarded Vietnam as a crucial bulwark
against the spread of communism, and subsequently engaged in a full-scale war as a result, the
USSR remained circumspect, focusing on maintaining power and control in the eastern bloc and
avoiding direct military commitment in Vietnam.
That being noted, not all Cold War conflicts were so lopsided in terms of superpower
involvement. As described in the last chapter, Cuba was caught at the center of the single most
dangerous nuclear standoff in history in part because the USSR was willing to confront
American interests directly. Something comparable occurred across the world in Egypt even
earlier, representing another case of an independence movement that became embedded in
Cold War politics. There, unlike in Vietnam, both superpowers played a major role in
246
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
determining the future of a nation emerging from imperial control, although (fortunately) neither
committed itself to a war in doing so.
Egypt had been part of the British empire since 1882 when it was seized during the
Scramble for Africa. It achieved a degree of independence after World War I, but remained
squarely under British control in terms of its foreign policy. Likewise, the Suez Canal – the
crucially important link between the Mediterranean and Red Sea completed in 1869 – was under
the direct control of a Canal Company dominated by the British and French. In 1952 the
Egyptian general Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the British-supported regime and asserted
complete Egyptian independence. The United States initially sought to bring him into the
American camp by offering funds for a massive new dam on the Nile, but then Nasser made an
arms deal with (communist) Czechoslovakia. The funds were denied, and Nasser announced
that he would instead seize the Suez Canal (which flowed directly through Egyptian territory) to
pay for the dam instead.
Thus, in the summer of 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Henceforth, all of the
traffic going through the vitally important canal would be regulated by Egypt directly. Stung by
the nationalization, Britain and France plotted to reassert control. The British and French were
joined by Israeli politicians who saw Nassers bold move as a direct threat to Israeli security
(sharing as they did an important border). A few months of frenzied behind-the-scenes
diplomacy and planning ensued, and in October Israeli, British, and French forces invaded
Egypt.
Despite being a legacy of imperialism, the Suez Crisis swiftly became a Cold War
conflict as well. Concerned both at the imperial posturing of Britain and France and at the
prospect of the invasion sparking Soviet involvement, US President Dwight Eisenhower
forcefully demanded that the Israelis, French, and British withdraw, threatening economic
boycotts (all while attempting to reduce the volatility with the Soviets). Days later Khrushchev
threatened nuclear strikes if the French, Israeli, and British forces did not pull back. Cowed, the
Israeli, French, and British forces retreated. The Suez Crisis demonstrated that the US
dominated the policy decisions of its allies almost as completely as did the Soviets theirs. The
US might not run its allied governments as puppet states, but it could directly shape their foreign
policy.
In the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Egypt’s control of the canal was assured. While
generally closer to the USSR than the US in its foreign policy, it also tried to initiate a genuine
“third way” between the two superpowers, and Egyptian leaders called for Arab nationalism and
unity in the Middle East as a way to stay independent of the Cold War. Despite that intention,
247
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
however, the Suez Crisis saw both superpowers take a more active interest in maintaining
client, or at least friendly, states in the region, regardless of the ideological commitments of
those states. This led to the strange spectacle of the United States, nominal champion of
democracy, forming a close alliance with the autocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia and other
states resolutely uncommitted to representative government or even basic human rights.
Independence Movements and Decolonization
Despite the enormous pressure exerted by the superpowers, some independence
movements did manage to avoid becoming a proxy conflict within the Cold War. For the most
part, the simplest way in which an independence movement might avoid superpower
involvement was to steer clear of communist rhetoric or nationalized industries. From Asia to
Latin America, independence movements and rebel groups that adopted communist ideology
were targeted by the US, whereas those that avoided it rarely drew the ire of either superpower.
The exceptions were countries like Iran that tried to nationalize domestic industries – the US
sponsored a coup to overthrow the prime minister Mohammed Mosadeq in 1953 for trying to
assert Iranian ownership of its own oil fields, replacing him with a corrupt king, Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was beholden to American interests. Still, in general it was
possible for a country to fight for its independence and still stay in the good graces of the USSR
(as with Egypt) without openly embracing communism, whereas it was impossible for a country
to embrace socialism and stay out of the crosshairs of the US thanks to the Truman Doctrine,
which committed the United States to armed intervention in the case of a communist-backed
uprising.
Thus, while there were only a handful of true proxy wars over the course of the Cold
War, there were dozens of successful movements of independence. As quickly as European
empires had grown in the second half of the nineteenth century, they collapsed in the decades
following World War II in a phenomenon known as decolonization. In the inverse of the
Scramble for Africa, nearly the entire continent of Africa remained colonized by European
powers as of World War II but nearly all of it was independent by the end of the 1960s.
Likewise, European possessions in Asia all but vanished in the postwar era.
Given the rapidity with which the empires collapsed it is tempting to imagine that the
European states simply acknowledged the moral bankruptcy of imperialism after World War II
and peacefully relinquished their possessions. Instead, however, decolonization was often as
bloody and inhumane as had been the establishment of empire in the first place. In some
248
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
cases, such as Dutch control of Indonesia and French sovereignty in Indochina, European
powers clung desperately to colonies in the name of retaining their geopolitical relevance. In
others, such as the British in Kenya and the French in Algeria, large numbers of white settlers
refused to be abandoned by the European metropole, leading to sometimes staggering levels
of violence. That being noted, there were also major (soon to be former) colonies that achieved
independence without the need for violent insurrection against their imperial masters. (Note:
given the very large number of countries that achieved independence during the period of
decolonization, this chapter concentrates on some of the particularly consequential cases in
terms of their geopolitical impact at the time and since).
The case of India is iconic in that regard. Long the “jewel in the crown of the British
empire,” India was both an economic powerhouse and a massive symbol of British prestige. By
World War II, however, the Indian National Congress had agitated for independence for almost
sixty years. An astonishing 2.5 million Indian troops served the British Empire during World War
II despite the growth in nationalist sentiment, but returned after victory in Europe was achieved
to find a social and political system still designed to keep Indians from positions of importance in
the Indian administration. Peaceful protests before the war grew in intensity during it, and in the
aftermath (in part because of the financial devastation of the war), a critical mass of British
politicians finally conceded that India would have to be granted independence in the near future.
The British state established the date of independence as July 18, 1947.
The British government, however, made it clear that the actual logistics of independence
and of organizing a new government were to be left to the Indians. A conflict exploded between
the Indian Muslim League and the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, with the former demanding
an independent Muslim state. The British came to support the idea and finally the Congress
Party conceded to it despite the vociferous resistance of the independence leader Mahatma
Gandhi. When independence became a reality, India was divided between a non-contiguous
Muslim state, Pakistan, and a majority-Hindu state, India.
This event is referred to as “The Partition. Millions of Muslims were driven from India
and millions of Hindus and Sikhs were driven from Pakistan, leading to countless acts of
violence during the expulsion of both Muslims and Hindus from what had been their homes.
Hundreds of thousands, and possibly more than a million people died, and the states of
Pakistan and India remain at loggerheads to the present. Gandhi himself, who bitterly opposed
the Partition, was murdered by a Hindu extremist in 1948.
249
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Refugees during the Partition.
Religious (and ethnic) divides within former colonies were not unique to India. Many
countries that sought independence were products of imperialism in the first place – the
national borders of states like Iraq, Ghana, and Rwanda had been arbitrarily created by the
imperial powers decades earlier with complete disregard for the religious and ethnic differences
of the people who lived within the borders. In the Iraqi example, both Sunni and Shia Muslims,
Christian Arabs (the Assyrians, many of whom claim a direct line of descent from ancient
Assyria), different Arab ethnicities, and Kurds all lived side-by-side. Its very existence was due
to a hairbrained scheme by Winston Churchill, foreign secretary of the British governments after
World War I, to lump together different oil-producing regions in one convenient state under
British domination. Iraqs ethnic and religious diversity did not guarantee violent conflict, of
course, but when circumstances arose that inspired conflict, violence could, and often did,
result.
The current ongoing crisis of Israel Palestine is both a result of arbitrary borders drawn
up by former imperial powers as well as a unique case of a nationalist movement achieving its
goals for a ethnic-religious homeland. The British had held the mandate (political
governorship) of the territory of Palestine before WWII, having seized it after the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire. Thousands of European Jews had been immigrating to Palestine since
250
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
around the turn of the century, fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe and hoping to create a Jewish
state as part of the Zionist movement founded during the Dreyfus Affair in France.
During World War I, the British had both promised to support the creation of a Jewish
homeland in Palestine while also assuring various Arab leaders that Britain would aid them in
creating independent states in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empires expected demise. Even
the official British declaration that offered support for a Jewish homeland the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 specifically included language that promised the Arabs of Palestine (both
Muslim and Christian) support in ensuring their own civil and religious rights. In other words,
the dominant European power in the area at the time, and the one that was to directly rule it
from 1920 1947, tried to appease both sides with vague assurances.
After World War I, however, the British established control over a large swath of territory
that included the future state of Israel, frustrating Arab hopes for their own independence.
Countries like Iraq, Transjordan, and the Nadj (forerunner to todays Saudi Arabia) were simply
invented by British politicians, often with compliant Arab leaders dropped onto newly-invented
thrones in the process. Meanwhile, between 1918 and 1939, the Jewish population of Palestine
went from roughly 60,000 to 650,000 as Jews attracted to Zionism moved to the area. The
entire period was replete with riots and growing hostility between the Arab and Jewish
populations, with the British trying (and generally failing) to keep the peace. As war loomed in
1939 the British even tried to restrict Jewish immigration to avoid alienating the regions Arab
majority.
After World War II, the British proved unable and unwilling to try to manage the volatile
region, turning the territory over to the newly-created United Nations in April of 1947. The UNs
plan to divide the territory into two states one for Arabs and one for Jews was rejected by all
of the countries in the region, and Israels creation as a formal state in May of 1948 saw nine
months of war between the Jews of the newly-created state of Israel and a coalition of the
surrounding Arab states: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, along with small numbers of
volunteers from other Arab countries. Israel consistently fielded larger, better-trained and
better-equipped armies in the ensuing war, as the Arab states were in their infancy as well, and
Jewish settlers in Palestine had spent years organizing their own militias. When the dust
settled, there were nearly a million Palestinian refugees and a state that promised to be the
center of conflict in the region for decades to come.
Since the creation of Israel, there have been three more full-scale regional wars: the
1956 Suez War (noted above in the discussion of Egypt), which had no lasting consequences
besides adding fuel to future conflicts, the Six-Day War of 1967, that resulted in great territorial
251
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
gains for Israel, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 that undid some of those gains. In addition to
the actual wars, there have been ongoing explosions of violence between Palestinians and
Israelis that continue to the present.
Africa
While the cases of India and Israel were, and are, of tremendous geopolitical
significance, the most striking case of decolonization at the time was the wave of independence
movements across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Africa had been the main target of the
European imperialism of the late nineteenth century. The Scramble for Africa was both
astonishingly quick (lasting from the 1880s until about 1900) and amazingly complete, with all of
Africa but Liberia and Ethiopia taken over by one European state or another. In the postwar era,
almost every African country secured independence just as quickly; the whole edifice of
European empire in Africa collapsed as rapidly as it had arisen a bit over a half century earlier.
In turn, in some places this process was peaceful, but in many it was extremely violent.
In West Africa, the former colony of the Gold Coast became well known for its
charismatic independence leader Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah not only successfully led Ghana
to independence in 1957 after a peaceful independence movement and negotiations with the
British, but founded a movement called Pan-Africanism in which, he hoped, the nations of Africa
might join together in a United States of Africa that would achieve parity with the other great
powers of the world to the betterment of Africans everywhere. His vision was of a united African
league, possibly even a single nation, whose collective power, wealth, and influence would
ensure that outside powers would never again dominate Africans. While that vision did not
come to pass, the concept of pan-Africanism was still vitally important as an inspiration for other
African independence movements at the time.
In Kenya, in contrast, hundreds of thousands of white colonists were not interested in
independence from Britain. By 1952, a complex web of nationalist rebels, impoverished
villagers and farmers, and counter-insurgent fighters plunged the country into a civil war. The
British and native white Kenyans reacted to the uprising by creating concentration camps,
imprisoning rebels and slowly starving them to death in the hills. The rebels, disparagingly
referred to as Mau Maus (meaning something like “hill savages”), in turn, attacked white
civilians, in many cases murdering them outright. Finally, after 11 years of war, Kenya was
granted its independence and elected a former insurgent leader as its first president. Ironically,
while British forces were in a dominant position militarily, the British state was financially
over-extended. Thus, Britain granted Kenyan independence in 1963.
252
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
While most former colonies adopted official policies of racial equality, and for the first
time since the Scramble black Africans achieved political power almost everywhere, there was
one striking exception: South Africa. South Africa had always been an unusual British colony.
21% of the South African population was white, divided between the descendents of British
settlers and the older Dutch colony of Afrikaners who had been conquered and then
incorporated by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. The Afrikaners in particular
were virulently racist and intransigent, unwilling to share power with the black majority. As early
as 1950 white South Africans (British and Afrikaner alike) emphatically insisted on the
continuation of a policy known as Apartheid: the legal separation of whites and blacks and the
complete subordination of the latter to the former.
South Africa became independent from Britain in 1961, but Apartheid remained as the
backbone of the South African legal system, systematically repressing and oppressing the
majority black population. Even as overtly racist laws were repealed elsewhere – not least in the
United States as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s – Apartheid remained
resolutely intact. That system would remain in place until 1991, when the system finally
collapsed and the long-imprisoned anti-Apartheid activist leader Nelson Mandela was released,
soon becoming South Africas first black president.
British colonies were not alone in struggling to achieve independence, nor in the legacy
of racial division that remained from the period of colonization. One of the most violent
struggles for independence of the period of decolonization in Africa occurred in the French
territory of Algeria. The struggles surrounding Algerian independence, which began in 1952,
were among the bloodiest wars of decolonization. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians died,
along with tens of thousands of French and pieds-noires (“black feet,” the pejorative term
invented by the French for the white residents of Algeria). The heart of the conflict had to do
with a concept of French identity: particularly on the political right, many French citizens felt that
Frances remaining colonies were vital to its status as an important geopolitical power.
Likewise, many in France were ashamed of the French defeat and occupation in World War II
and refused to simply give up Frances empire without a struggle. This sentiment was felt
particularly acutely by the French officer corps, with many French officers having only ever been
on the losing side of wars (World War II and Indochina). They were thus determined to hold on
to Algeria at all costs.
On the other hand, many French citizens realized all too well that the values the Fourth
French Republic supposedly stood for liberty, equality, and fraternity – were precisely what had
been denied the native people of Algeria since it was first conquered by France during the
253
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
restored monarchy under the Bourbons in the early nineteenth century. In fact, native
Algerians were divided legally along racial and religious lines: Muslim Arab and Berber
Algerians were denied access to political power and usually worked in lower-paying jobs, while
white, Catholic Algerians (descendents of both French and Italian settlers) were fully
enfranchised French citizens. In 1954, a National Liberation Front (FLN) composed of Arab and
Berber Algerians demanded independence from France and launched a campaign of attacks on
both French officials and, soon, pieds-noires civilians.
The French response was brutal. French troops, many fresh from the defeat in
Indochina, responded to the National Liberation Front with complete disregard for human rights,
the legal conduct of soldiers in relation to civilians, or concern for the guilt or innocence of those
suspected of supporting the rebellion. Infamously, the army resorted almost immediately to a
systematic campaign of torture against captured rebels and those suspected of having
information that could aid the French. Algerian civilians were often caught in the middle of the
fighting, with the French army targeting the civilian populace when it saw fit. While the torture
campaign was kept out of the press, rumors of its prevalence soon spread to continental
France, inspiring an enormous debate as to the necessity and value of holding on to Algeria.
The war grew in Algeria even as France itself was increasingly torn apart by the conflict.
French soldiers next to the bodies of Algerian insurgents.
254
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Within a few years, as the anti-war protest campaign grew in France itself, many soldiers
both in Algeria and in other parts of France and French territories grew disgusted with what they
regarded as the weak-kneed vacillation on the part of republican politicians. Those soldiers
created ultra-rightist terrorist groups, launching attacks on prominent intellectuals who spoke out
against the war (the most prominent French philosopher at the time, Jean-Paul Sartre, had his
apartment in Paris destroyed in a bomb attack). Troops launched an attempted coup in Algeria
in 1958 and briefly succeeded in seizing control of the French-held island of Corsica as well.
It was in this context of near-civil war, with the government of the Fourth Republic
paralyzed and the prospect of a new right-wing military dictatorship all too real, that the leader of
the Free French forces in World War II, Charles de Gaulle, volunteered to rescue France from
its predicament, with the support of the army. He placated the army temporarily, but when it
became clear he intended to pull France out of Algeria, a paramilitary terrorist group twice tried
to assassinate him. De Gaulle narrowly survived the assassination attempts and forced through
a new constitution that vested considerable new powers in the office of the president. De
Gaulle opened negotiations with the FLN in 1960, leading to the ratification of Algerian
independence in 1962 by a large majority of French voters. Despite being an ardent believer in
the French need for greatness, De Gaulle was perceptive enough to know that the battle for
Algeria was lost before it had begun.
In the aftermath of the Algerian War, millions of white Algerians moved to France, many
of them feeling betrayed and embittered. They became the core of a new French political
far-right, openly racist and opposed to immigration from France’s former colonies. Many
members of that resurgent right wing coalesced in the first openly fascistic party in France since
the end of World War II: the Front National. Racist, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with a notion of
French identity embedded in the culture of the Vichy Regime (i.e. the French fascist puppet
state under Nazi occupation), the National Front remains a powerful force in French politics to
this day.
The Non-Aligned Movement and Immigration
In the context of the Cold War, many struggles over decolonization were tied closely to
the attitudes and involvement of the US and USSR. Vietnam provides perhaps the most iconic
example. What was really a struggle for independence became a global conflict because of
the socialist ideology espoused by the Viet Minh nationalists. Many leaders of
formerly-colonized countries, however, rejected the idea that they had to choose sides in the
255
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Cold War and instead sought a truly independent course. The dream of many political elites in
countries in the process of emerging from colonial domination was that former colonies around
the world, but especially those in Africa and Asia, might create a new superpower through their
alliance. The result was the birth of the Nonaligned Movement.
The beginning of the Nonaligned Movement was the Bandung Conference of 1955. In
the Indonesian city of Bandung, leaders from countries in Africa, Asia, and South America met
to discuss the possibility of forming a coalition that might push back against superpower
dominance. This was the high point of the Pan-Africanism championed by Kwame Nkrumah
described above, and in turn non-aligned countries earnestly hoped that their collective strength
could compensate for their individual weakness vis–vis the superpowers. A French journalist
at the conference created the term third world to describe the bloc of nations: neither the first
world of the US and western Europe, nor the second world of the USSR and its satellites, but
the allied bloc of former colonies.
While the somewhat utopian goal of a truly united third world proved as elusive as a
United States of Africa, the real, meaningful effect of the conference (and the continued
meetings of the nonaligned movement) was at the United Nations. The Nonaligned Movement
ended up with over 100 member nations, wielding considerable power in the General Assembly
of the UN and successfully directing policies and aid money to poorer nations. During the
crucial decades of decolonization itself, the Nonaligned Movement also served as inspiration for
millions around the world who sought not only independence for its own sake, but in the name
of creating a more peaceful and prosperous world for all.
The irony of decolonization is that even as former European colonies were achieving
formal political independence, millions of former colonized peoples were flocking to Europe for
work. A postwar economic boom in Europe (described in the next chapter) created a huge
market for labor, especially in fields of unskilled labor. Thus, Africans, Caribbeans, Asians, and
people from the Middle East from former colonies all came in droves to work at jobs Europeans
did not want, because those jobs still paid more than even skilled work did in the former
colonies.
Initially, most immigrant laborers were single men, guest workers in the parlance of the
time, who were expected to work for a time, send money home, then return to their places of
origin. By the mid-1960s, however, families followed, demographically transforming the formerly
almost all-white Europe into a genuinely multi-ethnic society. For the first time, many European
societies grew ethnically and racially diverse, and within a few decades, a whole generation of
non-white people were native-born citizens of European countries.
256
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The result was an ongoing struggle over national and cultural identity. Particularly in
places like Britain, France, and postwar West Germany, the official stance of governments and
most people alike was that European culture was colorblind, and that anyone who culturally
assimilated could be a productive part of society. The problem was that it was far easier to
maintain that attitude before many people not born in Europe made their homes there; as soon
as significant minority populations became residents of European countries, there was an
explosion of anti-immigrant racism among whites. In addition, in cases like France, former
colonists who had fled to the metropole were often hardened racists who openly called for
exclusionary practices and laws. Europeans were forced to grapple with the idea of cultural and
racial diversity in a way that was entirely new to them (in contrast to countries like the United
States, which has always been highly racially diverse following the European invasions of the
early modern period).
One group of British Marxist scholars, many of whom were immigrants or the children of
immigrants, described this phenomenon as the empire strikes back: having seized most of the
worlds territory by force, Europeans were now left with a legacy of racial and cultural diversity
that many of them did not want. In turn, the universalist aspirations of Western Civilization
were challenged as never before.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Korean Refugees – Public Domain
Ho Chi Minh – Public Domain
Napalm Attack – Fair Use, Nick Ut / Associated Press
Partition – Public Domain
Algerian War Soldiers – Public Domain
257
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 14: Postwar Society
Once the Cold War began in 1947, Europe was just one of the stages on which it was
played out around the world. Cold War divisions were perhaps stronger in Europe than
anywhere else, however, because the European subcontinent was geographically divided along
the lines of the Cold War: in the west the prevailing political and economic pattern was a
combination of democracy and a regulated market capitalism, while in the east it was of
Soviet-dominated communist rule and command economies. The contrast was all the more
striking in that both sides of the Cold War divide began in similar circumstances – devastated by
World War II – yet within a decade the west was in the midst of an unprecedented economic
boom while the east remained in relative economic stagnation.
Social Democracy
In the aftermath of the war, the most important and noticeable political change in the
west was the nearly universal triumph of democratic forms of government. Whereas the
democratic experiments of the interwar period had all too often ended in the disaster of fascism,
stable democratic governments emerged in the postwar era that are still present today, albeit in
modified forms in some cases like that of France. All of the governments of Western Europe
except Spain and Portugal granted the right to vote to all adult citizens after the war. And, for
the first time, this included women almost everywhere. (Although one bizarre holdout was
Switzerland, where women did not get the vote until 1971.)
There was a concomitant embrace of a specific form of democratic politics and market
economics: social democracy, the commitment on the part of government to ensure not just
the legal rights of its citizens, but a base minimum standard of living and access to employment
opportunities as well. Social democracy was born of the experience of the war. The people of
Europe had simply fought too hard in World War II to return to the conditions of the Great
Depression or the bitter class struggles of the prewar period. Thus, one of the plans anticipated
by wartime governments in the west was recompense for the people who had endured and
suffered through the war – this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the postwar
258
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
compromise between governments and elites on the one hand and working people on the
other.
It was within the commitment to social democracy that the modern welfare state came
into being. The principle behind the welfare state is that it is impossible to be happy and
productive without certain basic needs being met. Among the most important of those needs
are adequate healthcare and education, both priorities that the governments of postwar Western
Europe embraced. By the end of the 1950s, 37% of the income of Western European families
was indirect, subsidies paid to them by their governments in the form of housing subsidies,
food subsidies, health care, and education. European governments devoted four times more
income to social services in 1957 than they had in 1930.
The results of state investment in citizen welfare were striking. By the end of the 1960s,
most Western European states provided free high-quality medical care, free education from
primary school through university, and various subsidies and pensions. In part because of the
strength of postwar leftist (both communist and socialist) parties, trade unions won considerable
rights as well, with workers entitled to pensions, time off, and regulated working conditions.
Thus, as the economies of the Western European states expanded after the end of the war,
their citizens enjoyed standards of living higher than any generation before them, in large part
because wealth was distributed much more evenly than it had ever been.
The welfare state was paid for by progressive taxation schemes and a very large
reduction in military spending; one of the benefits of western Europes alliance with the US, and
European commitment to the UN, was that it was politically feasible to greatly reduce the size of
each countrys military, with the understanding that it was the US that would lead the way in
keeping the threat of a Soviet invasion in check. For instance, even as military spending
skyrocketed for the US and the Soviet Union, it dropped to less than 10% of the GDP of the UK
by the early 1960s and steadily declined from there in the following years. Likewise, with the
long-term trend of decolonization, there was no longer a need for large imperial armies to
control colonies. Instead, control shifted to a model of economic relationships between the
former colonial masters and their former colonial possessions.
Also in stark contrast to the political situation of the interwar years was the power of the
political center. Simply put, the far right had been completely compromised by the disastrous
triumph of fascism. Just about all major far-right parties had either been fascistic themselves or
allied with fascism before the war, and in the wars aftermath far-right politicians were forced into
political silence by the shameful debacle that had resulted in their prewar success. Fascistic
259
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
parties did not re-emerge in earnest until the 1960s, and even then they remained fringe groups
until the 1990s.
In turn, the far left, namely communists, were inextricably tied to the Soviet Union. This
was a blessing for communist parties in the immediate aftermath of the war, but became a
burden when the injustices of Soviet society became increasingly well known in the west. The
problem for western communists was that communist parties were forced to publicly support the
policies of the Soviet Union. In the immediate postwar period that was not a problem, since the
USSR was widely admired for having defeated the Nazis on the eastern front at tremendous
cost to its people. In the postwar period, however, the USSR quickly came to represent nothing
more than the threat of tyranny to most people in the west, especially as it came to dominate the
countries of the eastern bloc. The existence of Soviet gulags became increasingly well known,
although the details were often unclear, and thus western communist parties struggled to appeal
to anyone beyond their base in the working class. Around 30% of the electorate in France and
Italy voted communist in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that percentage shrank steadily
in the following decades.
Thus, with the right compromised by fascism and the left by communism, the parties in
power were variations on the center-left and center-right, usually parties that fell under the
categories of Socialists (or, in Britain, Labour) and Christian Democrats. In turn, at least for
the thirty years following the war, neither side deviated significantly from support for social
democracy and the welfare state. The ideological divisions between these two major party
categories had to do with social and cultural issues, of support or opposition to womens issues
and feminism, of the stance toward decolonization, of the proper content of the state-run
universities, and so on, rather than the desirability of the welfare state.
The socialists in this case were only socialistic in their firm commitment to fair
treatment of workers. In some cases, socialist parties held onto the traditional Marxist rhetoric
of revolution as late as the early 1970s, but it was increasingly obvious to observers that
revolution was not in fact a practical goal that the parties were pursuing. Instead, socialists
tended to champion a more diffuse, and prosaic, set of goals: workers rights and protections,
support for the independence of former colonies, and eventually, sympathy and support for
cultural issues surrounding feminism and sexuality.
In turn, Christian Democracy was an amalgam of social conservatism with a
now-anachronistic willingness to provide welfare state provisions. Christian Democrats (or, in
the case of Britain, the Conservative Tory Party) tended to oppose the dissolution of empire, at
least until decolonization was in full swing by the 1960s. While willing to support the welfare
260
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
state in general, Christian Democrats were staunchly opposed to the more far-reaching
demands of labor unions. Against the cultural tumult of the 1960s, Christian Democrats also
emphasized what they identified as traditional cultural and social values. Arguably, the most
important political innovation associated with Christian Democracy was that the European
political right wing accepted liberal democracy as a legitimate political system for the first time.
There were no further mainstream political parties or movements that attempted to create
authoritarian forms of government; fascism and the war had simply been too traumatic.
The Postwar Boom and Cultural Change
With the governments of Western Europe sharing these fundamental characteristics,
they sought to ease trade across their borders, forming federalist bodies meant to make
economic cooperation easier. In 1957, the governments of central continental Europe came
together and founded the European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the Common
Market. They created a free trade zone and coordinated economic policies in such a manner
that trade between them increased fivefold in the years that followed. Britain opted not to join,
and tellingly its growth rates lagged significantly.
Regardless, Britain joined the other western European countries in achieving
unprecedented affluence by the mid-1950s. While the memory of immediate postwar rationing
and penury was still fresh, fueled by coordinated government action and Marshall Plan loans the
Western European countries were able to vault to higher and higher levels of wealth and
productivity less than a decade after the end of the war. Real Wages grew in England by 80%
from 1950 to 1970, French industrial output doubled between 1938 and 1959, and West
Germanys exports grew by 600% in one decade: the 1950s. The years between 1945 and
1975 were described by a French economist as the trente glorieuses: the thirty glorious years.
It was a time in which regular working people experienced an enormous, ongoing growth in their
buying power and standard of living.
With the welfare state in place, many people were willing to spend on non-essentials,
buying on credit and indulging in the host of new consumer items like cars, appliances, and
fashion. In short, the postwar boom represented the birth of the modern consumer society in
Europe, the parallel of that of the United States at the same time. Increasingly, only the very
poor were not able to buy consumer goods that they did not need for survival. Most people
were able to buy clothes that followed fashion trends, middle-class families could afford creature
261
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
comforts like electric appliances and televisions, and increasingly working families could even
afford a car, something that would have been unheard of before World War II.
Part of this phenomenon was the baby boom. While not as extreme in Europe as in the
US, the generation of children born in the first ten years after WWII was very large, pushing
Europes population from 264 million in 1940 to 320 million by the early 1970s.. A child born in
1946 was a teenager by the early 1960s, in turn fueling the massive explosion of popular music
that resulted in the most iconic musical expression of youth culture: rock n roll. The boomers
were eager consumers as well, fueling the demand for fashion, music, and leisure activities.
Meanwhile, the sciences saw breakthroughs of comparable importance to those of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Scientists identified the basic structure of DNA in 1953.
Terrible diseases were treated with vaccines for the first time, including measles and polio.
Organ transplants became a reality in the 1950s. Thus, life itself could be extended in ways
hitherto unimaginable. Along with the growth of consumer society, postwar Europeans and
Americans alike had cause to believe in the possibility of indefinite, ongoing progress and
improvement.
One stark contrast between American and European culture at this time was the
dramatic differences in church attendance. American religious culture was not significantly
impacted by consumerism, while consumerism (in a way) replaced religiosity in Europe. The
postwar period saw church attendance decline across the board in Europe, hovering around 5%
by the 1970s. In an effort to combat this decline, Pope John XXIII called a council in 1958 that
stretched on for five years. Known as Vatican II, this council revolutionized Catholic practices
in an effort to modernize the church and appeal to more people. One of the noteworthy
changes that came out of Vatican II was that the Mass was conducted in vernacular languages
instead of in Latin – over four centuries after that practice had first emerged during the
Protestant Reformation.
Philosophy and Art
Ironically, some of the major intellectual movements of the postwar period focused not
on the promise of a better future, but on the premise that life was and probably would remain
alienating and unjust. Despite the real, tangible improvements in the quality of life for most
people in Western Europe between 1945 – 1975, there was a marked insecurity and pessimism
that was reflected in postwar art and philosophy. Major factors behind this pessimism were the
devastation of the war itself, the threat of nuclear war between the superpowers, and the
declining power of Europe on the world stage. New cultural struggles emerged against the
262
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
backdrop not of economic uncertainty and conventional warfare, but of economic prosperity and
the threat of nuclear war.
The postwar era began in the shadow of the war and the fascist nightmare that had
preceded it; the British writer George Orwell noted that since about 1930, the world had given
no reason for optimism whatsoever. Nothing in sight except a welter of lies, cruelty, hatred, and
ignorance. Some of the most important changes in art and philosophy in the postwar era
emerged from the moral exhaustion that was the result of the war, something that lingered over
Europe for years and grew with the discovery of the extent of the Holocaust. There was also
the simple fact that the world itself could not survive another world war; once the Cold War
began in earnest in the late 1940s, the world was just a few decisions away from devastation, if
not outright destruction.
The quintessential postwar philosophy was existentialism. The great figures of
existentialism were the French writers and philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
and Albert Camus. Sartre and Beauvoir had played minor roles in the French Resistance
against the Nazis during the war, while Camus had played a more significant role in that he
wrote and edited a clandestine anti-Nazi paper, Combat. Sartre and Beauvoir were products of
the most elite schools and universities in France, while Camus was an Algerian-born French
citizen who took pride in his provincial background. Even before the war, Sartre was famous
for his philosophical work and for his novel Nausea, which depicted a “hero” who tried
unsuccessfully to find meaning in life after realizing that his actions were all ultimately pointless.
263
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Lifelong companions and fellow philosophers Beauvoir and Sartre.
While existentialism is a flowery word, its essential arguments are straightforward. First,
there is no inherent meaning to life. Humans just exist: they are born, they do things while alive,
then they die. During life, however, people are forced to constantly make choices – Sartre wrote
that humans “are condemned to be free.” Most people find this process of always having to
make choices frightening and difficult, so they pretend that something greater and more
important provides the essential answers: religion, political ideologies, the pursuit of wealth, and
so on. Sartre and Beauvoir called this “bad faith,” the pretense that individual decisions are
dictated by an imaginary higher power or higher calling.
There was no salvation in existentialism, but there was at least the possibility of
embracing the human condition, of accepting the heroic act of choosing ones actions and
projects in life without hope of heaven, immortality, or even being remembered after death. The
existentialists called living in this manner “authenticity” – a kind of courageous defiance of the
despair of being alive without a higher purpose or meaning. Increasingly, the major existential
philosophers argued that authenticity could also be found as part of a shared project with
others, but only if that project did not succumb to ideological or religious dogmatism.
A large part of the impetus behind not just the actual theories of the existentialists, but its
popular reception, was the widespread desire for a better, more authentic social existence
264
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
after the carnage of the war. Appropriately, existentialism had its heyday from 1945 until about
1960. It enjoyed mainstream press coverage and even inspired self-styled existentialists in
popular culture who imitated their intellectual heroes by frequenting cafes and jazz clubs on the
Left Bank of the Seine River in Paris. While the existentialists themselves continued to write,
debate, and involve themselves in politics (most became Marxist intellectuals and supporters of
third-world uprisings against colonialism), existential philosophy eventually went out of fashion
in favor of various kinds of theory that were eventually loosely grouped together as
“postmodernism.”
The idea of postmodernism is complex; it is a term that has been used to describe many
different things and it often lacks a core definition or even basic coherence. That noted, the
basis of postmodernism is the rejection of big stories, or meta-narratives, about life, history,
and society. Whereas in the past intellectuals tried to define the meaning of history, or
Western Civilization, or of mankind, postmodern thinkers exposed all of the ways in which
those meanings had been constructed, usually in order to support the desires of the people
doing the storytelling. In other words, to claim that history led inevitably to greater freedom or
plenty or happiness had almost always been an excuse for domination and some kind of
conquest.
For instance, during the highpoint of European imperialism, high-minded notions of the
civilizing mission, the culmination of the liberal and nationalist political aspirations of the
nineteenth century, and the emergence of truly modern science all coincided with the
blood-soaked plundering of overseas territories. The postmodern historical critique of
imperialism was more than just an attack on Western hypocrisy, however, instead arguing that
the very notion of history moving forward to a better future was obviously incorrect. History,
from the postmodern perspective, has no overarching narrative – things simply change, with
those changes generally revolving around the deployment of social and economic power.
Perhaps the most famous and important postmodern philosopher was the Frenchman
Michel Foucault. Foucaults work analyzed the history of culture in the West, covering
everything from the concept of insanity to state power, and from crime to sexuality,
demonstrating the ways that ideas about society and culture had always been shaped to serve
power. Foucaults most evocative analyses had to do with how the definition of crime and the
practices of punishment had changed in the modern world to justify a huge surveillance
apparatus, one set to monitor all behavior. In this model, criminality was an invention of the
social and political system itself that justified the systems police apparatus.
265
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Postmodernism came under fire at the time, and since, for sometimes going so far as to
question the very possibility of meaning in any context. Theorists like Roland Barthes and
Jacques Derrida (both, again, French) argued that authorial intent in writing was meaningless,
because the text became entirely separate from the author at the moment of being written
down. Likewise, both worked to demonstrate that texts themselves were nothing more or less
than elaborate word games, with any implied meaning simply an illusion in the mind of a
reader. At its most extreme, postmodernism went a step beyond existentialism: not only was life
inherently meaningless, but even a persons intentions and actions (the only source of meaning
from the existential perspective) amounted to nothing.
That being noted, much of postmodern theory was not itself pessimistic or dour. Instead,
there was often a joyful, irreverent play of ideas and words at work in postmodern thought, even
if it was largely indecipherable outside of the halls of academia. That joyful irreverence
translated directly into postmodern art, which often both satirized and embraced the breakdown
between mainstream culture and self-understood avant-gardes. Especially during the
Modernist period in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, artists and
writers had often staged their work in opposition to the mainstream culture and beliefs of their
societies, but artists in the postmodern era could play with the stuff of the mainstream without
rejecting or breaking from it.
In turn, the iconic example of postmodern art was pop art. The most famous pop artist
was the New York-based Andy Warhol. Pop art consisted of taking images from popular culture
– in Warhol’s case, everything from portraits of Marilyn Monroe to the Campbell’s Soup can – and
making it into “fine art.” In fact, much of pop art consisted of blurring the line between
commercial advertising and fine art; Warhol transformed advertising images into massive
silk-screened posters, satirizing consumer society while at the same time celebrating it.
266
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Warhols Campbells Soup, 1968
The Youth Movement and Cultural Revolution
What existentialism and postmodernism had in common was that, in very different ways,
they critiqued many aspects of western culture, from the progressive narrative of history to
traditional religious beliefs. There is some irony in that forms of philosophy that were often
radical in their orientation flourished in the midst of the growing affluence of postwar consumer
society: discontentment with popular values and a demand for greater social freedom grew
along with, even in spite of, the expansion of economic opportunity for many people. Part of the
explanation for the fertile reception of radical thought – very much including Marxism, which
remained highly influential – was a straightforward generational clash between the members of
the generation that had survived World War II and that generations children: the baby boomers.
Much more significant in terms of its cultural and social impact than postwar philosophy
was the global youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The baby boom generation came of
age in the 1960s, with unprecedented numbers of young people reaching adolescence right at
the height of postwar prosperity. Enormous numbers of young people from middle-class or
267
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
even working-class backgrounds became the first in their families to ever attend universities,
and the contentious political climate of the Cold War and decolonization contributed to an
explosion of discontent that reached its height in the late 1960s.
There were essentially two distinct, but closely related, manifestations of the youth
movement of the 1960s: a largely apolitical counterculture of so-called hippies (a term of
disparagement invented by the mainstream press; the contemporary analog is hipsters), and
an active protest movement against various forms of perceived injustice. Of course, many
young people were active in both aspects, listening to folk music or rock n roll, experimenting
with the various drugs that became increasingly common and available, but also joining in the
anti-war movement, the second-wave feminist movement, or other forms of protest.
The album cover from The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967. An iconic
expression of the youth culture of the day, the individuals pictured behind the band members
include everyone from their fellow musical pioneer Bob Dylan to the godfather of the beat
generation, William S. Burroughs, to the Beatles younger selves (on the left).
Western society faced an unprecedented problem as of the 1960s: there were more
highly-educated young people than ever before. As late as the middle of the twentieth century,
the purpose of higher education was essentially to reinforce class divisions: a small elite
attended university and were therefore credentialed representatives of their class interests. In
the relative social mobility brought about by the postwar economic boom, however, far more
268
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
young people from non-elite backgrounds completed secondary schools and enrolled in
universities. In turn, it was often college students who formed the core of the politicized youth
movement of the time: taught to think critically, globally aware, and well informed, many
students subjected the values of their own society to a withering critique.
There was much to critique. The Cold War, thanks to nuclear weapons, threatened the
human species with annihilation. The wars associated both with it and with the decolonization
process provided an ongoing litany of human rights violations and bloodshed. The
American-led alliance in the Cold War claimed to represent the side of freedom and prosperity,
but it seemed to many young people in the West that American policy abroad was as unjust and
violent as was Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. On the domestic front, many young people also
chafed at what they regarded as outdated rules, laws, and traditions, especially those having to
do with sexuality.
A key factor in the youth movement was the American war in Vietnam. Despite Soviet
control of the Eastern Bloc, the American government was a much more visible oppressor than
was the Soviet Union to the more radical members of the youth movement. American atrocities
in Vietnam were perceived as visible proof of the inherently oppressive nature of capitalism and
imperialism, especially because the Viet Minh was such a relatively weak force in comparison to
the American military juggernaut. Vietnam thus served as a symbolic rallying point for the youth
movement the world over, not just in the United States itself.
The focus of the youth movement, and a radical philosophical movement called the New
Left associated with it, was on the life of individuals in the midst of prosperity. Leftist thinkers
came to reject both the obvious injustices of Soviet-style communism as well as the injustices of
their own capitalist societies. The key term for many New Left theorists, as well as rank-and-file
members of the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, was liberation sexual, social, and
cultural. Liberation was meant to break down social mores as much as effect political change.
For example, the idea that it was perfectly acceptable to live with a romantic partner before
marriage went from being a marginalized, bohemian concept to one that enjoyed widespread
acceptance.
Likewise, elements of the youth movement and the New Left came to champion aspects
of social justice that had often been neglected by earlier radical thinkers. In the United States,
many members of the youth movement (black and white alike) campaigned for the end of both
racist laws and the inherent racism of American culture in general. A new feminist movement
(considered in more detail below) emerged to champion not just womens rights before the law,
but the idea that the objectification and oppression of women was unjust, destructive, and
269
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
unacceptable in supposedly democratic societies. In addition, for the first time, a movement
emerged championing the idea that homosexuality was a legitimate sexual identity, not a mental
illness or a perverse threat to the social order.
The youth movement reached its zenith in May of 1968. From Europe to Mexico,
enormous uprisings led mostly by college students temporarily paralyzed universities,
infrastructure, and even whole countries. What was to become the most iconic uprising against
authority by the European youth movement began in a grungy suburb of Paris called Nanterre.
There, the newly-opened and poorly-designed university faced student protests over a policy
forbidding male students to visit female dormitories. When a student leader was arrested,
sympathetic students in Paris occupied the oldest university in France: the Sorbonne. Soon, the
entire Latin Quarter of Paris was taken over by thousands of student radicals (many of whom
flocked from outside of Paris to join the protest), wallpapering buildings with posters calling for
revolution and engaging in street battles with riot police. Workers in French industry instituted a
general strike in solidarity with the students, occupying their factories and in some cases
kidnapping their supervisors and managers. Students traveled to meet with workers and offer
support. At its height, French infrastructure itself was largely paralyzed.
Leftist workers outside of their occupied factory during the Events of May.
The student movement had extremely radical, and sometimes very unrealistic, goals for
itself, including everything from student-run universities to a Marxist revolution of students and
workers. The French public sympathized with the students at first, especially since it was well
known that French schools and universities were highly authoritarian and often unfair, but as the
strikes and occupations dragged on, public opinion drifting away from the uprisings. The
movement ebbed by late June, with workers accepting significant concessions from business
270
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
owners in return for calling off the strike. The students finally agreed to leave the occupied
universities. In the aftermath, however, major changes did come to French universities and high
schools; this was the beginning of the (relative) democratization of education itself, with
students having the right to meet with professors, to question grading policies, and to demand
quality education in general. Likewise, and not just in France, the more stultifying rules and
policies associated with gender and sexuality within schools and universities were slowly
relaxed over time.
The Events of May (as they became known in France) were the emblematic high point
of the European youth movement itself, at least in its most radical manifestation. The thirty
glorious years of the postwar economic boom ended in the early 1970s, and the optimism of
the youth movement tended to ebb along with it. Likewise, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975,
while understandably welcomed by the youth movement, did rob the movement of its most
significant cause: opposition to the war.
That being noted, the youth movements legacy was profound. While no country in the
Western world witnessed a genuine political revolution along the lines imagined by radicals at
the time, there is no question that Western culture as a whole became much more accepting of
personal freedoms, especially regarding sexuality, and less puritanical and rigid in general.
Likewise, the youth movements focus on social justice would acquire momentum in the
following decades, leading to the flourishing of second-wave feminism, anti-racist movements,
and a broad (though far from universal) acceptance of multiculturalism and blended cultures.
Second-Wave Feminism
One movement of particular importance to emerge from the protest culture of the late
1960s was second-wave feminism (the first was that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries). In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, one of the seminal existentialist philosophers
mentioned above, wrote an enormous (over 1,000 pages long) book about the status of women
in Western societies. Titled The Second Sex, the book argued that throughout the entire history
of Western Civilization, women had been the social and cultural “other, always the secondary
and exceptional variety of person compared to the default: men. In other words, when men
wrote about “human history” they were actually writing about the history of men, with women
lurking somewhere in the background, having babies and providing domestic labor (in English,
consider phrases like since the dawn of mankind or mans relationship with nature – the
implication is that men are the species). Likewise, historically, every state, empire, and nation in
271
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
history had been controlled by men, and women were legal and political non-entities until the
twentieth century.
Thus, as described by Beauvoir, it was not just that men dominated, patronized, and
often violently abused women, it was that to be a woman was to be the exception to every kind
of political theory, philosophy, and history ever conceived of. Women were, in a sense, not
really part of history. Beauvoir critiqued that non-status in Second Sex, writing from an
existential perspective in which everyone’s freedom and choice was at the heart of human
existence. While she did not set out to start a political movement per se – her political
involvement in the 1950s and early 1960s was focused on decolonization and a kinship with
Marxism – The Second Sex would go on to be the founding document of the second wave of
feminism later in the decade.
From the end of World War II until the late 1960s, there were only small feminist
movements in most western countries. While women had won the vote after the war (with some
exceptions such as Switzerland), and most of the other legal goals of first-wave feminism had
been achieved as well, the postwar social order still operated under the assumption that women
were to focus on domestic roles. Women were taught as girls that the world of politics and paid
work was for men, and that only in motherhood and marriage could a women find fulfillment. In
the process, women as a social category were largely cut off from the sense of political
solidarity that had sustained first-wave feminism a generation earlier.
The problem for women in the postwar period, however, was widespread dissatisfaction
and unhappiness with the social role into which they were forced, along with both overtly sexist
laws and oppressive cultural codes. To cite a few examples, it was perfectly legal (and
commonplace) for men to discriminate in hiring and workplace practices based on a womans
appearance – flight attendants (stewardesses in the parlance of the time) were routinely fired
at age 30 for being too old to maintain the standards of attractiveness enforced by airlines.
Pregnancy was also grounds for termination, and unmarried women were generally paid fair
less than men since it was assumed they would eventually marry and quit their jobs. White
women in the United States made 60% of the earnings of men doing the same work, with black
women earning a mere 42%. Rape charges were routinely dismissed if a victim had asked for
it by being alone at night or being inappropriately dressed, and there was no legal concept of
marital rape. Domestic violence remained commonplace, and husbands were generally only
held accountable by the law if the violence seemed excessive from the perspective of police and
judges. In short, while the first-wave feminist movement had succeeded in winning key legal
272
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
battles, a vast web of sexist laws and cultural codes ensured that women were held in precisely
the secondary position identified by Beauvoir.
In response, starting in the mid-1960s, the second-wave feminist movement came into
existence to combat precisely these forms of both legal and cultural oppression and
discrimination. Most of the women who joined the new movement were inspired by the broader
anti-establishment counter culture described above, but they arrived at feminism in part
because most male rebels were just as sexist and repressive as the conservative politicians
they detested (e.g. women at gatherings of self-proclaimed revolutionaries were expected to do
the dishes and clean up after the men). Beauvoir herself joined the French Women’s Liberation
Movement, joining many women who were one-third of her age at that point. Likewise, in the
United States, second-wave feminism was often referred to as the “Women’s Lib” movement,
with comparable movements emerging across the Western world.
Members of the (American) Womens Liberation Movement marching in 1970.
Everywhere that second-wave feminism emerged as a movement, its goals were the
creation of laws that expressly forbid sexual discrimination in the workplace and schools and a
broader cultural shift that saw women treated as true social equals of men. This latter focus on
equitable culture distinguished it from first-wave feminism, which while certainly cognizant of
sexist cultural norms, had focused on overcoming the most serious legal restrictions on women
rather than cultural shifts. For second-wave feminists, the movement was not simply about
women having access to the same forms of employment and equal wages as men (although
those were obviously very important goals), but about attacking the sexual objectification and
273
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
sexual double standards to which women were held. For instance, why were promiscuous
women the subject of shaming and mockery, while promiscuous men were celebrated for their
virility? The essential injustice of sexual double standards was a key issue that second-wave
feminists raised.
The demand for sexual liberation was part of the Youth Movement in general, and
members of the counterculture fought against the idea that sexuality was inherently sinful and
dirty (an attitude that had only come of age in earnest in the nineteenth century, incidentally).
Second-wave feminists took the demand for liberation a step further and advocated for reliable,
legal contraception and legalized abortion. Both were illegal almost everywhere in the western
world through the 1950s, and even in countries like Britain and the Netherlands where
contraception was legally available, it was difficult to come by and associated with promiscuity.
Aided by major advances in related fields of medicine – the birth control pill was approved for
contraceptive use in the United States in 1960, for example – second-wave feminists fought a
successful campaign for the legalization of contraceptives and abortion by the end of the 1970s,
although abortion rights remain a highly charged political issue in countries like the US.
While the battle for sexual equality is obviously far from over, second-wave feminism did
achieve many important goals. Legally, many countries adopted laws banning discrimination
based on gender itself, as well as age and appearance. Laws pertaining to both sexual assault
and domestic violence were often strengthened and more stringently enforced. Culturally,
sexual double-standards, the objectification of women, and prescribed female social roles were
all called into question. As with racism, the numerous forms of sexism embedded in Western
culture all too frequently weathered these feminist assaults, but arguably they did weaken as
compared to the past.
Conclusion
It cannot be overstated how much cultural change occurred in the decades following
World War II. Perhaps the most important changes had to do with the extension of liberal
democratic ideas to their logical conclusion: everyone in a democracy was supposed to have
equal rights, to be treated with essential dignity, and to possess the right to protest the
conditions of their education, employment, or even their simple existence (in the case of women
facing misogyny and harassment, for example). The legacy of the cultural revolution that began
with the youth movement of the 1960s remains strong to the present day.
274
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Beauvoir and Sartre – Public Domain
Warhol Campbell’s Soup – Fair Use
Sgt. Pepper’s – Fair Use
Workers May 1968 – Creative Commons, BeenAroundAWhile
Women’s Liberation – Public Domain
275
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Chapter 15: Toward the Present
In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Like the proverbial sorcerers apprentice who
unleashed an enchantment he cannot control, the (last, as it turned out) Soviet premier Mikhail
Gorbachev had begun a series of reforms in 1986 that ultimately resulted in the dismantling of
the Soviet state. In 1989, the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc crumbled as it became
clear that the USSR would not intervene militarily to prop them up as it had in the past.
Nationalist independence movements exploded across the USSR and, finally, the entire system
fell apart to be replaced by sovereign nations. In 1991, Russia itself reemerged as a distinct
country in the process rather than just the most powerful part of a larger union.
In 1992, following the Soviet collapse, the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama
published a book entitled The End of History and the Last Man. Put briefly, The End of Historys
central argument is that humanity was entering into a new stage in which the essential political
and economic questions of the past had been resolved. Henceforth, market capitalism and
liberal democracy would be conjoined in a symbiotic relationship. Human rights would be
guaranteed by the political system that also provided the legal framework for a prosperous
capitalist economy. All of the alternatives had already been tried and failed, after all, from the
old order of monarchy and nobility to modern fascism and, as of 1991, Soviet communism.
Thus, former dictatorships would (if they had not already) join the fold of American-style
democracy and capitalism soon enough.
As it turned out, Fukuyamas predictions were true for some of the former members of
the Eastern Bloc: East and West Germany were reunited, and the countries of Eastern Europe
in general, from Romania to newly-independent and separate Slovakia and the Czech Republic,
elected democratic governments and sought to join the capitalist western economies. So, too,
did Russia initially, although almost immediately its economy foundered in the face of the shock
therapy led by western advisors: the rapid imposition of a market economy and the dismantling
of the social safety net that had been the one meaningful benefit of the former Soviet system for
ordinary citizens.
In the long run, however, countries all over the globe in the post-Soviet era were as likely
to embrace an economic and political system unanticipated by Fukuyama in 1992: authoritarian
capitalism. To the surprise of many at the time, there is nothing about market economics that
requires a democratic government. So long as an authoritarian state was willing to oversee the
legal framework, and occasional economic interventions, necessary for capitalism to function, a
276
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
capitalist economy could thrive despite the absence of civil and political rights. This pattern was
(and remains) true even of those states that remain nominally communist, the Peoples
Republic of China most importantly. Likewise, starting with the election of Vladimir Putin in
2000, Russia would soon adopt the model of authoritarian capitalism, with a single political party
controlling the state and exercising enormous influence, if not outright control, of the press.
Meanwhile, in the countries of Central and Western Europe in which battles over economics and
politics had finally been resolved in favor of the democracy/capitalism hybrid in the postwar era,
social and cultural problems developed by the 1970s that remain largely unresolved in the
present.
The End of the Postwar Compromise
Contemporary Europe struggles with the legacies of the postwar era. The incredible
economic boom of the postwar decades came to a screeching halt in the early 1970s, when
OPEC, the international consortium of oil-producing nations, instituted an embargo of oil in
protest of western support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Gas prices skyrocketed,
and the incredible economic growth of the postwar era simply stopped, never to regain the
momentum it had from 1945 – 1973. Those critical decades of the baby boom and economic
boom had left their mark in several ways, however, resulting in social democracy, large
immigrant populations, and high standards of living. Contemporary European politics have
grappled with each of those factors in turn.
Politically and socially, one of the most difficult legacies of the postwar years has been
immigration. While racism was always a factor in Europe, during the boom years immigrants
were generally regarded as at the very least useful for European countries and their
economies. They did the jobs that Europeans did not want and formed a vital part of the
economy of Western Europe as a whole. When the economic boom ended, however, they were
rapidly castigated for their supposed laziness, penchant for criminality, and failure to assimilate
in a word, they were the scapegoats for everything going wrong with economics and social
issues in the post-boom era. Thus, the far right in Europe was reborn, a generation after the
defeat of fascism, in the form of harshly anti-immigrant political parties, often with a smattering
of fascistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric mixed in (Frances National Front was the first, and remains
a powerful force in French politics).
The new European far right called for extremely limited quotas for immigration, laws
banning the expression of non-Christian religious traditions (most importantly, those associated
277
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
with Islam), and a broader cultural shift rejecting the tolerance and cosmopolitanism of
mainstream European culture after the war. They also attacked non-white citizens of European
countries, citizens born in Europe to immigrant parents. In other words, citizens of immigrant
ancestry were legally the same as any other citizen, but the far right capitalized on a latent racist
definition of British or French or Swiss or German, as white. This racially-based definition and
understanding of European identity was simply factually wrong by the 1960s and 1970s: there
were hundreds of thousands of Europeans of color who had been born and raised in the
countries to which their parents or grandparents had immigrated, but it remained the basis of
the appeal of far right politics to millions of white Europeans.
While the far right has gained strength in many European countries over time, of greater
overall impact was the changed identity of mainstream center-right conservatism. This form of
conservatism is often called “neoconservatism” to differentiate it from the earlier form of postwar
center-right politics. By far the most important change within neo-conservatism was that the
center-right belatedly came to reject the welfare state. The compromise between left and right
that had seen a broad endorsement of nationalized industry, free health care and education,
subsidies for housing, and strong unions definitively collapsed starting in the mid-1970s.
Neoconservatives blamed the welfare state and unions for exacerbating the economic crisis of
the 1970s, arguing that the state was always inefficient and bloated compared to private
industry, and they promised to do away with unneeded and counterproductive regulation in favor
of unchecked market exchange.
The iconic neo-conservative politician was the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
who held office from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher acquired the nickname “the Iron Lady” for her
blunt manner of speaking and her refusal to compromise. While prime minister, Thatcher
privatized a number of industries in Britain, most importantly the railways. She took a hard line
with unions, shutting down northern English coal mines rather than giving in to the demands of
the coal miners’ union (the English mining industry simply shut down as a result – it has never
recovered). She slashed government subsidies for various industries, resulting in an explosion
of unemployment in manufacturing areas.
278
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Margaret Thatcher in 1977.
The sectors of the British economy that benefited from Thatcherite policies were
financial in nature: banks in particular thrived as regulations were dropped and banks were
legally allowed to pursue vast profits through financial speculation. Britain began its transition
toward what it is in the present: the dynamic, wealthy financial and commercial center that is
London surrounded by an economically stagnant and often politically resentful nation. Thatcher
herself was a polarizing figure in British society – while she was reviled by her opponents,
millions of Britons adored her for her British pride, her hard-nosed refusal to compromise, and
her unapologetic, Social Darwinist contempt for the poor – she once advised the English that
they ought to glory in inequality because it was symptomatic of the strong and smart
succeeding.
The British economy began to recover as a whole in the early 1980s, but the major
reason that Thatcher stayed in power was her success in selling an image of strength and
trenchant opposition to British unions, which had reached the height of their influence in the
mid-1970s. A brief war over the (strategically and economically unimportant) Falkland Islands in
the Pacific between Argentina and Britain in 1982 also buoyed her popularity with patriotic
citizens. Finally, the British Labour party was in disarray, split between its still genuinely socialist
left wing and a new more moderate reform movement that wanted to abandon socialist rhetoric
in favor of straightforward liberalism. Thus, Thatcher remained in power until 1990, when her
279
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
own party decided she was no longer palatable to the electorate and replaced her with a
somewhat forgettable English politician named John Major.
Outside of Britain, the essential characteristics of Western European politics were in
place by the 1980s that remain to this day. Center-right parties from Italy to Germany and from
France to Britain correspond to the Thatcherite neo-conservative model, embracing the free
market and trying to limit the extent of the welfare state (although none of these parties
advocate getting rid of the welfare state entirely; generations of Europeans, including people
who vote for center right parties, expect free health care, education, and social benefits). Most
center-right parties outside of Britain have been less willing to truly gut the welfare state than
was Thatcher and her conservatives, but the general focus on the market remains their defining
characteristic overall.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the major change within left-wing parties was
the final and definitive abandonment of Marxist ideology. Again, Britain provides the iconic
example: the triumph within the Labour Party of a centrist faction that created “New Labour,” a
political philosophy that supports the welfare state but also accepts the position that the free
market is the essential motor of economic growth. The iconic figure of New Labour was the
prime minister Tony Blair, who held office from 1997 – 2007. Even in countries whose major
leftist parties had the word “socialist” in their titles – France’s Socialist Party, for example – the
whole notion of revolution was gone by the 1990s. Instead, the center-left parties came to be
the custodians of the welfare state while belatedly joining the center-right in favoring market
economics in the private sector.
Broadly speaking, the defining argument between mainstream leftist and mainstream
rightist parties leading up to the present is about how much free market deregulation to
embrace. Many Europeans have become attracted to the far-right parties mentioned above as
much because the two sides of mainstream politics are almost indistinguishable; to many
Europeans, the far-right seems like the only “real” alternative. In turn, with revolution off the
agenda, the far left in Europe is represented now by the Green parties. Green parties (the
strongest of which is Germany’s) are very strong supporters of environmental legislation and are
the most hostile to free market deregulation of any political faction, but they remain limited in
their electoral impact.
280
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Eastern Europe
While the politics and economics of Western Europe underwent a number of changes in
the decades following World War II, they nevertheless represent an essential continuity (i.e.
market economies, welfare states, democratic politics) in many ways right up to the present.
The opposite is true of Eastern Europe: while the postwar order of command economy
communism and single-party, authoritarian rule held true almost through the 1980s, that entire
system imploded in the end, with lasting consequences for the region and for the world.
As of the 1970s, the economic stagnation of the east was far worse than that of the
west. Real growth rates were lost in a haze of fudged statistics, and technology had failed to
keep up with western standards. By the 1980s the only profitable industries in Russia were oil
and vodka, and then oil prices began a decade-long decline. Politically, Eastern European
governments were so corrupt that it was basically pointless to distinguish between normal
“politics” and “corruption” – every political decision was governed by personal networks of
corrupt politicians who traded political favors and controlled access to creature comforts (like the
coveted dachas – vacation cottages – in the USSR). The USSRs politburo, the apex of political
power in which decisions of real consequence were made, was staffed by aging apparatchiks
who had spent their entire lives working within this system.
Then, the old men of the order simply started dying off. Brezhnev died in 1982, then the
next two leaders of the Soviet communist party died one after the other in 1984 and 1985.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985, was a full generation younger, and he brought with
him a profoundly different outlook on the best path forward for the USSR and its allies. Unlike
the men of the older generation, Gorbachev was convinced that the status quo was increasingly
untenable – the Soviet economy staggered along with meager or no growth, the entire
educational system was predicated on propaganda masquerading as fact, and the state could
barely keep up its spending on the arms race with the United States (especially after the
American president Ronald Reagan came to office in 1980 and poured resources into the
American military).
Gorbachev was convinced that the only way for the Soviet system to survive was
through real, meaningful reforms – the kinds flirted with by Khrushchev in the 1950s but swiftly
abandoned. To that end, Gorbachev introduced two reformist state policies: Glasnost and
Perestroika. Glasnost means openness or transparency in information. It represented the
relaxation of censorship within the Soviet system, one that was most dramatically demonstrated
281
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
in 1986 when Gorbachev allowed an accurate appraisal in the press of a horrific nuclear
accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. The idea behind Glasnost was to allow frank and
honest discussion, to end the ban on truth, in an effort to win back the hearts and minds of
Soviet people to their own government and social system.
Simultaneously, Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, meaning restructuring. This
program was meant to reform the economy, mostly by modernizing industry and allowing limited
market exchange. The two policies – openness and restructuring – were meant to work in
tandem to improve the economy and create a dynamic, truthful political and social system.
What Gorbachev had not anticipated, however, was that once Soviet citizens realized that they
could publish views critical of the state, an explosion of pent-up anger and resentment swept
across Soviet society. From merely reforming the structures of Soviet society, Glasnost in
particular led to open calls to move away from Marxism-Leninism as the states official doctrine,
for truly free and democratic elections, and for the national minorities to be able to assert their
independence.
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
282
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Meanwhile, the Soviet economy continued to spiral downwards. Soviet finances were in
such disarray by the second half of the 1980s that Gorbachev simply ended the arms race with
the United States, conceding the USSR could not match the US’s gigantic arsenal. Starting
cautiously in 1988, he also announced to the governments of Eastern Europe that they would
be “allowed to go their own way” without Soviet interference. Never again would columns of
tanks respond to protests against communism. This development caused considerable dismay
to hard-line Communist leaders in countries like East Germany, where the threat of Soviet
intervention had always been the bulwark against the threat of reform. When Gorbachev made
good on his promises and protest movements against the communist states started to grow, it
was the beginning of the end for the entire Soviet Bloc.
The result was a landslide of change across Eastern Europe. Over the course of 1989,
one country after another held free elections and communists were expelled from governments.
Rapidly, new constitutions were drawn up. The Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989 and
Germany was reunified less than a year later. Likewise, the USSR itself fell apart by 1991, torn
apart by nationalist movements within its borders as Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians,
Kazakhs, and other national minorities of the USSR demanded their independence from
Russian dominance. An attempted counter-revolution led by Soviet hardliners failed in the face
of mass protest in Moscow, and the first free elections since the February Revolution of 1917
were held in Russia.
Since the collapse of the USSR, some Eastern European countries (e.g. the Czech
Republic, Poland) have enjoyed at least some success in modernizing their economies and
keeping political corruption at bay. In Russia itself, the 1990s were an unmitigated economic
and social disaster as the entire country tried to lurch into a market economy without the
slightest bit of planning or oversight. Western consultants, generally associated with
international banking firms, convinced Russian politicians in the infancy of its new democracy to
institute shock therapy, dismantling social programs and government services. While foreign
loans accompanied these steps, new industries did not suddenly materialize to fill the enormous
gaps in the Russian economy that had been played by state agencies. Unemployment
skyrocketed and the distinctions between legitimate business and illegal or extra-legal trade all
but vanished.
The result was an economy that was often synonymous with the black market, gigantic
and powerful organized crime syndicates, and the rise of a small number of “oligarchs” to
stratospheric levels of wealth and power. One shocking statistic is that fewer than forty
individuals controlled about 25% of the Russian economy by the late 1990s. Just as networks
283
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
of contacts among the Soviet apparatchiks had once been the means of securing a job or
accessing state resources, it now became imperative for regular Russian citizens to make
connections with either the oligarch-controlled companies or organized crime organizations.
Stability only began to return because of a new political strongman. Vladimir Putin, a
former agent of the Soviet secret police force (the KGB), was elected president of Russia in
2000. Since that time, Putin has proved a brilliant political strategist, playing on anti-western
resentment and Russian nationalism to buoy popular support for his regime, run by his political
party, United Russia. While opposition political parties are not illegal, and indeed consistently
try to make headway in elections, United Russia has been in firm control of the entire Russian
political apparatus since shortly after Putins election. Opposition figures are regularly harassed
or imprisoned, and many opposition figures have also been murdered (although the state itself
maintains a plausible deniability in cases of outright assassination). Some of the most
egregious excesses of the oligarchs of the 1990s were also reined in, while some oligarchs
were instead incorporated into the United Russia power structure.
Unlike many of the authoritarian rulers of Russia in the past, Putin was (and remains)
hugely popular among Russians. Media control has played a large part in that popularity, of
course, but much of Putins popularity is also tied to the wealth that flooded into Russia after
2000 as oil prices rose. While most of that wealth went to enrich the existing Russian elites
(along with some of Putins personal friends, who made fortunes in businesses tied to the state),
it also served as a source of pride for many Russians who saw little direct benefit. Further
boosts to his popularity came from Russias invasion of the small republic of Georgia in 2008
and, especially, its invasion and subsequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from the
Ukraine in 2014. While the latter prompted western sanctions and protests, it was successful in
supporting Putins power in Russia itself.
The European Union
At the start of the postwar boom, most of the nations of western Europe entered into
various international groups that sought to improve economic relations and trade between the
member nations. Those culminated in the creation of the European Community (EC) in 1967,
essentially an economic alliance and trade zone between most of the nations of non-communist
Europe. Despite various setbacks, not the least the enmity between French and British
politicians that achieved almost comic levels at times, the EC steadily added new members into
the 1980s. Its leadership also began to discuss the possibility of moving toward an even more
284
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
inclusive model for Europe, one in which not just trade but currency, law, and policy might be
more closely aligned between countries. That vision of a united Europe was originally
conceived in large part in hopes of creating a power-bloc to rival the two superpowers of the
Cold War, but it also encompassed a moral vision of an advanced, rational economic and
political system, in contrast to the conflicts that had so often characterized Europe in the past.
The EC officially became the European Union in 1993, and various member nations of
the former EC voted (sometimes barely) to join in the following years. Over time, passport
controls at borders between the member states of the EU were eliminated entirely. The
member nations agreed to policies meant to ensure civil rights throughout the Union, as well as
economic stipulations (e.g. limitations on national debt) meant to foster overall prosperity. Most
spectacularly, at the start of 2002, the Euro became the official currency of the entire EU except
for Great Britain, which clung tenaciously to the venerable British Pound.
The period between 2002 and 2008 was one of relative success for the architects of the
EU. The economies of Eastern European countries in particular accelerated, along with a few
unexpected western countries like Ireland (called the Celtic Tiger at the time for its success in
bringing in outside investment by slashing corporate tax rates). Loans from wealthier members
to poorer ones, the latter generally clustered along the Mediterranean, meant that none of the
countries of the Eurozone lagged too far behind. While the end of passport controls at borders
worried some, there was no general immigration crisis to speak of.
The European Union in 2016. As of early 2020, Britain is no longer a member.
285
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Unfortunately, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, the EU has been fraught with
economic problems. The major issue is that the member nations cannot control their own
economies past a certain point they cannot devalue currency to deal with inflation, they are
nominally prevented from allowing their own national debts to exceed a certain level of their
Gross Domestic Product (3%, at least in theory), and so on. The result is that it is terrifically
difficult for countries with weaker economies such as Spain, Italy, or Greece, to maintain or
restore economic stability. Instead, Germany ended up serving as the EUs banker and also its
inadvertent political overlord, issuing loan after loan to other EU states while dictating economic
and even political policy to them. This led to the surprising success of far-left political parties
like Greeces Syriza, which rose to power by promising to buck German demands for austerity
and by threatening to leave the Eurozone altogether (it later backpedaled, however).
In the most shocking development to undermine the coherence and stability of the EU as
a whole, Great Britain narrowly voted to leave the Union entirely in 2016. In what analysts
largely interpreted as a protest vote against not just the EU itself, but of complacent British
politicians whose interests seemed squarely focused on Londons welfare over that of the rest of
the country, a slim majority of Britons voted to end their countrys membership in the Union.
Years of bitter political struggle ensued, but the country finally left in early 2020. The political
and economic consequences remain unclear: the British economy has been deeply enmeshed
with that of the EU nations since the end of World War II, and it is simply unknown what effect
its Brexit will have in the long run.
The Middle East
The Middle East has been one of the most conflicted regions in the world in the last
century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. In the recent past, much
of that instability has revolved around three interrelated factors: the Middle Easts role in global
politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the vast oil reserves of the region. In turn, the
United States played an outsize role in shaping the regions politics and conflicts.
During the Cold War the Middle East was constantly implicated in American policies
directed to curtail the (often imaginary) threat of Soviet expansion. The US government tended
to support political regimes that could serve as reliable clients regardless of the political
orientation of the regime in question or that regimes relationship with its neighbors. First and
foremost, the US drew close to Israel because of Israels antipathy to the Soviet Union and its
own powerful military. Israels crushing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War demonstrated to
286
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
American politicians that it was a powerhouse worth cultivating, and in the decades that
followed the governing assumption of American – Israeli relations was that Israel was the most
reliable powerful partner supporting American interests. Part of that sympathy was also born
out of respect for the fact that Israels government is democratic and that it has a thriving civil
society.
Simultaneously, however, the US supported Arab and Persian regimes that were
anything but democratic. The Iranian regime under the Pahlavi dynasty was restored to power
through an American-sponsored coup in 1953, with the democratically-elected prime minister
Muhammad Mosaddegh expelled from office. The Iranian Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi ruled
Iran as a loyal American client for the next 26 years while suppressing dissent through a brutal
secret police force. The Iranian regime purchased enormous quantities of American arms (50%
of American arms sales were to Iran in the mid-1970s) and kept the oil flowing to the global
market. Iranian society was highly educated and its economy thrived, but its government was
an oppressive autocracy.
Likewise, the equally autocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia emerged as the third pillar in
the USs Middle Eastern clientage system. Despite its religious policy being based on
Wahhabism, the most puritanical and rigid interpretation of Islam in the Sunni world, Saudi
Arabia was welcomed by American policitians as another useful foothold in the region that
happened to produce a vast quantity of oil. Clearly, opposition to Soviet communism and
access to oil proved far more important from a US policy perspective than did the lack of
representative government or civil rights among its clients.
This status quo was torn apart in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution. What began as a
coalition of intellectuals, students, workers, and clerics opposed to the oppressive regime of the
Shah was overtaken by the most fanatical branch of the Iranian Shia clergy under the
leadership of the Ayatollah (eye of God) Ruhollah Khomeini. When the dust settled from the
revolution, the Ayatollah had become the official head of state and Iran had become a hybrid
democratic-theological nation: the Islamic Republic of Iran. The new government featured an
elected parliament and equality before the law (significantly, women enjoy full political rights in
Iran, unlike in some other Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia), but the Ayatollah had final
say in directing politics, intervening when he felt that Shia principles were threatened.
Deep-seated resentment among Iranians toward the US for the latters long support of the
Shahs regime became official policy in the new state, and in turn the US was swift to vilify the
new regime.
287
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
The 1980s and 1990s saw a botched Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an ongoing military
debacle for the Sovet Union in Afghanistan, and a full-scale war between the new Islamic
Republic of Iran and its neighbor, Iraq. Ruled by a secular nationalist faction, the Baath Party,
since 1968, Iraq represented yet another form of autocracy in the region. Saddam Hussein, The
military leader at the head of the Baath Party, launched the Iran-Iraq War as a straightforward
territorial grab. The United States supported both sides during the war at different points
despite its avowed opposition to the Iranian regime. In the end, the war sputtered to a bloody
stalemate in 1988 after over a million people had lost their lives.
Just two years later, Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait and the United
States (fearing the threat to oil supplies and now regarding Husseins regime as dangerously
unpredictable) led a coalition of United Nations forces to expel it. The subsequent Gulf War was
an easy victory for the US and its allies, even as the USSR spiralled toward its messy demise
as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. The early 1990s thus saw the United States in a
position of unparalleled power and influence in the Middle East, with every country either its
client and ally (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel) or hostile but impotent to threaten US interests (e.g.
Iran, Iraq). American elites subscribed to what President George Bush described as the New
World Order: America would henceforth be the worlds policeman, overseeing a global market
economy and holding rogue states in check with the vast strength of American military power.
Instead, the world was shocked when fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, not agents of a
nation, hijacked and crashed airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and
into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the American military) on September 11, 2001. Fueled
by hatred toward the US for its ongoing support of Israel against the Palestinian demand for
sovereignty and for the decades of US meddling in Middle Eastern politics, the terrorist group Al
Qaeda succeeded in the most audacious and destructive terrorist attacks in modern history.
President George W. Bush (son of the first President Bush) vowed a global War on Terror that
has, almost two decades later, no apparent end in sight. The American military swiftly invaded
Afghanistan, ruled by an extremist Sunni Muslim faction known as the Taliban, for sheltering Al
Qaeda. American forces easily toppled the Taliban but failed to destroy it or Al Qaeda.
In a fateful decision with continuing reverberations in the present, the W. Bush
presidency used the War on Terror as an excuse to settle unfinished business in Iraq as well.
Despite the complete lack of ties between Husseins regime and Al Qaeda, and despite the
absence of the weapons of mass destruction used as the official excuse for war, the US
launched a full scale invasion in 2002 to topple Hussein. That much was easily accomplished,
as once again the Iraqi military proved completely unable to hold back American forces. Within
288
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
months, however, Iraq devolved into a state of murderous anarchy as former leaders of the
Baath Party (thrown out of office by American forces), local Islamic clerics, and members of
different tribal or ethnic groups led rival insurgencies against both the occupying American
military and their own Iraqi rivals. The Iraq War thus became a costly military occupation rather
than an easy regime change, and in the following years the internecine violence and American
attempts to suppress Iraqi insurgents led to well over a million deaths (estimates are notoriously
difficult to verify, but the death toll might actually be over two million). A 2018 US Army analysis
of the war glumly concluded that the closest thing to a winner to emerge from the Iraq War was,
ironically, Iran, which used the anarchic aftermath of the invasion to exert tremendous influence
in the region.
Toward the Present
While Europe has suffered from economic and, to a lesser extent, political instability
since the 1980s, that instability pales in comparison to the instability of other world regions. In
particular, the Middle East entered into a period of outright bloodshed and chaos as the
twenty-first century began. In turn, the shock waves of Middle Eastern conflict have
reverberated around the globe, inspiring the growth of international terrorist groups on the one
hand and racist and Islamophobic political parties on the other.
To cite just the most important examples, the US invasion of Iraq in 2002 inadvertently
prompted a massive increase in recruitment for anti-western terrorist organizations (many of
which drew from disaffected EU citizens of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry). The
Arab Spring of 2010 led to a brief moment of hope that new democracies might take the place of
military dictatorships in countries like Libya, Egypt, and Syria, only to see authoritarian regimes
or parties reassert control. Syria in particular spiraled into a horrendously bloody civil war in
2010, prompting millions of Syrian civilians to flee the country. Turkey, one of the most
venerable democracies in the region since its foundation as a modern state in the aftermath of
World War I, has seen its president Recep Tayyip Erdoan steadily assert greater authority over
the press and the judiciary. The two other regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, carry on a
proxy war in Yemen and fund rival paramilitary (often considered terrorist) groups across the
region. Israel, meanwhile, continues to face both regional hostility and internal threats from
desperate Palestinian insurgents, responding by tightening its control over the nominally
autonomous Palestinian regions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
289
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
In Europe, fleeing Middle Eastern (and to a lesser extent, African) refugees seeking the
infinitely greater stability and opportunity available to them abroad have brought about a
resurgence of far-right and, in many cases, openly neo-fascist politics. While fascistic parties
like Frances National Front have existed since the 1960s, they remained basically marginal and
demonized for most of their history. Since 2010, far right parties have grown steadily in
importance, seeing their share of each countrys electorate increase as worries about the impact
of immigration drives voters to embrace nativist, crypto-racist political messages. Even some
citizens who do not harbor openly racist views have come to be attracted to the new right, since
mainstream political parties often seem to represent only the interests of out-of-touch social
elites (again, Brexit serves as the starkest demonstration of voter resentment translating into a
shocking political result).
While interpretations of events since the start of the twenty-first century will necessarily
vary, what seems clear is that both the postwar consensus between center-left and center-right
politics is all but a dead letter. Likewise, fascism can no longer be considered a terrible
historical error that is, fortunately, now dead and gone; it has lurched back onto the world stage.
A widespread sense of anger, disillusionment, and resentment haunts politics not just in Europe,
but in much of the world.
That being noted, there are also indications that the center still holds. In France, the
National Fronts presidential candidate in 2017, Marine Le Pen, was decisively defeated by the
resolutely centrist Emmanuel Macron. Contemporary far-right parties have yet to enjoy the kind
of electoral breakthrough that set the stage for (to cite one obvious example) the Nazi seizure of
power in 1933. Even those countries that have proved most willing to use military force in the
name of their ideological and economic agendas, namely Russia and the United States, have
not launched further wars on the scale of the disastrous American invasion of Iraq in 2002.
Predicting the future is a fools errand, and one that historians in particular are generally
loathe to engage in. That said, if nothing else, history provides both examples and
counterexamples of things that have happened in the past that can, and should, serve as
warnings for the present. As this text has demonstrated, much of history has been governed by
greed, indifference to human suffering, and the lust for power. It can be hoped that studying the
consequences of those factors and the actions inspired by them might prove to be an antidote
to their appeal, and hopefully to their purported legitimacy as political motivations.
Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):
Margaret Thatcher – Public Domain
290
/
Western Civilization: A Concise History
Mikhail Gorbachev – Creative Commons, RIA Novosti
EU Map – Creative Commons, CrazyPhunk
291

---

Are you busy and do not have time to handle your assignment? Are you scared that your paper will not make the grade? Do you have responsibilities that may hinder you from turning in your assignment on time? Are you tired and can barely handle your assignment? Are your grades inconsistent?

Whichever your reason is, it is valid! You can get from our service at affordable rates. We have a team of professional academic writers who can handle all your assignments.

• Plagiarism free papers
• Timely delivery
• Any deadline
• Skilled, Experienced Native English Writers
• Subject-relevant academic writer
• Adherence to paper instructions
• Ability to tackle bulk assignments
• Reasonable prices
• 24/7 Customer Support
• Get superb grades consistently

Online Academic Help With Different Subjects

Literature

Students barely have time to read. We got you! Have your literature essay or book review written without having the hassle of reading the book. You can get your literature paper custom-written for you by our literature specialists.

Finance

Do you struggle with finance? No need to torture yourself if finance is not your cup of tea. You can order your finance paper from our academic writing service and get 100% original work from competent finance experts.

Computer science

Computer science is a tough subject. Fortunately, our computer science experts are up to the match. No need to stress and have sleepless nights. Our academic writers will tackle all your computer science assignments and deliver them on time. Let us handle all your python, java, ruby, JavaScript, php , C+ assignments!

Psychology

While psychology may be an interesting subject, you may lack sufficient time to handle your assignments. Dont despair; by using our academic writing service, you can be assured of perfect grades. Moreover, your grades will be consistent.

Engineering

Engineering is quite a demanding subject. Students face a lot of pressure and barely have enough time to do what they love to do. Our academic writing service got you covered! Our engineering specialists follow the paper instructions and ensure timely delivery of the paper.

Nursing

In the nursing course, you may have difficulties with literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, critical essays, and other assignments. Our nursing assignment writers will offer you professional nursing paper help at low prices.

Sociology

Truth be told, sociology papers can be quite exhausting. Our academic writing service relieves you of fatigue, pressure, and stress. You can relax and have peace of mind as our academic writers handle your sociology assignment.

Business

We take pride in having some of the best business writers in the industry. Our business writers have a lot of experience in the field. They are reliable, and you can be assured of a high-grade paper. They are able to handle business papers of any subject, length, deadline, and difficulty!

Statistics

We boast of having some of the most experienced statistics experts in the industry. Our statistics experts have diverse skills, expertise, and knowledge to handle any kind of assignment. They have access to all kinds of software to get your assignment done.

Law

Writing a law essay may prove to be an insurmountable obstacle, especially when you need to know the peculiarities of the legislative framework. Take advantage of our top-notch law specialists and get superb grades and 100% satisfaction.

What discipline/subjects do you deal in?

We have highlighted some of the most popular subjects we handle above. Those are just a tip of the iceberg. We deal in all academic disciplines since our writers are as diverse. They have been drawn from across all disciplines, and orders are assigned to those writers believed to be the best in the field. In a nutshell, there is no task we cannot handle; all you need to do is place your order with us. As long as your instructions are clear, just trust we shall deliver irrespective of the discipline.

Are your enough to handle my paper?

Our essay writers are graduates with bachelor’s, masters, Ph.D., and doctorate degrees in various subjects. The minimum requirement to be an essay writer with our essay writing service is to have a college degree. All our academic writers have a minimum of two years of academic writing. We have a stringent recruitment process to ensure that we get only the most competent essay writers in the industry. We also ensure that the writers are handsomely compensated for their value. The majority of our writers are native English speakers. As such, the fluency of language and grammar is impeccable.

What if I dont like the paper?

There is a very low likelihood that you wont like the paper.

Reasons being:

• When assigning your order, we match the papers discipline with the writers field/specialization. Since all our writers are graduates, we match the papers subject with the field the writer studied. For instance, if its a nursing paper, only a nursing graduate and writer will handle it. Furthermore, all our writers have academic writing experience and top-notch research skills.
• We have a quality assurance that reviews the paper before it gets to you. As such, we ensure that you get a paper that meets the required standard and will most definitely make the grade.

In the event that you dont like your paper:

• The writer will revise the paper up to your pleasing. You have unlimited revisions. You simply need to highlight what specifically you dont like about the paper, and the writer will make the amendments. The paper will be revised until you are satisfied. Revisions are free of charge
• We will have a different writer write the paper from scratch.
• Last resort, if the above does not work, we will refund your money.

Will the professor find out I didnt write the paper myself?

Not at all. All papers are written from scratch. There is no way your tutor or instructor will realize that you did not write the paper yourself. In fact, we recommend using our assignment help services for consistent results.

What if the paper is plagiarized?

We check all papers for plagiarism before we submit them. We use powerful plagiarism checking software such as , , and . We also upload the plagiarism report so that you can review it. We understand that plagiarism is academic suicide. We would not take the risk of submitting plagiarized work and jeopardize your academic journey. Furthermore, we do not sell or use prewritten papers, and each paper is written from scratch.

When will I get my paper?

You determine when you get the paper by setting the deadline when . All papers are delivered within the deadline. We are well aware that we operate in a time-sensitive industry. As such, we have laid out strategies to ensure that the client receives the paper on time and they never miss the deadline. We understand that papers that are submitted late have some points deducted. We do not want you to miss any points due to late submission. We work on beating deadlines by huge margins in order to ensure that you have ample time to review the paper before you submit it.

Will anyone find out that I used your services?

We have a and confidentiality policy that guides our work. We NEVER share any customer information with third parties. Noone will ever know that you used our assignment help services. Its only between you and us. We are bound by our policies to protect the customers identity and information. All your information, such as your names, phone number, email, order information, and so on, are protected. We have robust security systems that ensure that your data is protected. Hacking our systems is close to impossible, and it has never happened.

How our Assignment Help Service Works

You fill all the paper instructions in the order form. Make sure you include all the helpful materials so that our academic writers can deliver the perfect paper. It will also help to eliminate unnecessary revisions.

2. Pay for the order

Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. The paper subject is matched with the writers area of specialization.

3. Track the progress

You communicate with the writer and know about the progress of the paper. The client can ask the writer for drafts of the paper. The client can upload extra material and include additional instructions from the lecturer. Receive a paper.

4. Download the paper

The paper is sent to your email and uploaded to your personal account. You also get a plagiarism report attached to your paper.

GET A PERFECT SCORE!!!

---

---

Get Professional Assignment Help Cheaply

Are you busy and do not have time to handle your assignment? Are you scared that your paper will not make the grade? Do you have responsibilities that may hinder you from turning in your assignment on time? Are you tired and can barely handle your assignment? Are your grades inconsistent?

Whichever your reason is, it is valid! You can get professional academic help from our service at affordable rates. We have a team of professional academic writers who can handle all your assignments.

Why Choose Our Academic Writing Service?

• Plagiarism free papers
• Timely delivery
• Any deadline
• Skilled, Experienced Native English Writers
• Subject-relevant academic writer
• Adherence to paper instructions
• Ability to tackle bulk assignments
• Reasonable prices
• 24/7 Customer Support
• Get superb grades consistently

 

Online Academic Help With Different Subjects

Literature

Students barely have time to read. We got you! Have your literature essay or book review written without having the hassle of reading the book. You can get your literature paper custom-written for you by our literature specialists.

Finance

Do you struggle with finance? No need to torture yourself if finance is not your cup of tea. You can order your finance paper from our academic writing service and get 100% original work from competent finance experts.

Computer science

Computer science is a tough subject. Fortunately, our computer science experts are up to the match. No need to stress and have sleepless nights. Our academic writers will tackle all your computer science assignments and deliver them on time. Let us handle all your python, java, ruby, JavaScript, php , C+ assignments!

Psychology

While psychology may be an interesting subject, you may lack sufficient time to handle your assignments. Don’t despair; by using our academic writing service, you can be assured of perfect grades. Moreover, your grades will be consistent.

Engineering

Engineering is quite a demanding subject. Students face a lot of pressure and barely have enough time to do what they love to do. Our academic writing service got you covered! Our engineering specialists follow the paper instructions and ensure timely delivery of the paper.

Nursing

In the nursing course, you may have difficulties with literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, critical essays, and other assignments. Our nursing assignment writers will offer you professional nursing paper help at low prices.

Sociology

Truth be told, sociology papers can be quite exhausting. Our academic writing service relieves you of fatigue, pressure, and stress. You can relax and have peace of mind as our academic writers handle your sociology assignment.

Business

We take pride in having some of the best business writers in the industry. Our business writers have a lot of experience in the field. They are reliable, and you can be assured of a high-grade paper. They are able to handle business papers of any subject, length, deadline, and difficulty!

Statistics

We boast of having some of the most experienced statistics experts in the industry. Our statistics experts have diverse skills, expertise, and knowledge to handle any kind of assignment. They have access to all kinds of software to get your assignment done.

Law

Writing a law essay may prove to be an insurmountable obstacle, especially when you need to know the peculiarities of the legislative framework. Take advantage of our top-notch law specialists and get superb grades and 100% satisfaction.

What discipline/subjects do you deal in?

We have highlighted some of the most popular subjects we handle above. Those are just a tip of the iceberg. We deal in all academic disciplines since our writers are as diverse. They have been drawn from across all disciplines, and orders are assigned to those writers believed to be the best in the field. In a nutshell, there is no task we cannot handle; all you need to do is place your order with us. As long as your instructions are clear, just trust we shall deliver irrespective of the discipline.

Are your writers competent enough to handle my paper?

Our essay writers are graduates with bachelor's, masters, Ph.D., and doctorate degrees in various subjects. The minimum requirement to be an essay writer with our essay writing service is to have a college degree. All our academic writers have a minimum of two years of academic writing. We have a stringent recruitment process to ensure that we get only the most competent essay writers in the industry. We also ensure that the writers are handsomely compensated for their value. The majority of our writers are native English speakers. As such, the fluency of language and grammar is impeccable.

What if I don’t like the paper?

There is a very low likelihood that you won’t like the paper.

Reasons being:

• When assigning your order, we match the paper’s discipline with the writer’s field/specialization. Since all our writers are graduates, we match the paper’s subject with the field the writer studied. For instance, if it’s a nursing paper, only a nursing graduate and writer will handle it. Furthermore, all our writers have academic writing experience and top-notch research skills.
• We have a quality assurance that reviews the paper before it gets to you. As such, we ensure that you get a paper that meets the required standard and will most definitely make the grade.

In the event that you don’t like your paper:

• The writer will revise the paper up to your pleasing. You have unlimited revisions. You simply need to highlight what specifically you don’t like about the paper, and the writer will make the amendments. The paper will be revised until you are satisfied. Revisions are free of charge
• We will have a different writer write the paper from scratch.
• Last resort, if the above does not work, we will refund your money.

Will the professor find out I didn’t write the paper myself?

Not at all. All papers are written from scratch. There is no way your tutor or instructor will realize that you did not write the paper yourself. In fact, we recommend using our assignment help services for consistent results.

What if the paper is plagiarized?

We check all papers for plagiarism before we submit them. We use powerful plagiarism checking software such as SafeAssign, LopesWrite, and Turnitin. We also upload the plagiarism report so that you can review it. We understand that plagiarism is academic suicide. We would not take the risk of submitting plagiarized work and jeopardize your academic journey. Furthermore, we do not sell or use prewritten papers, and each paper is written from scratch.

When will I get my paper?

You determine when you get the paper by setting the deadline when placing the order. All papers are delivered within the deadline. We are well aware that we operate in a time-sensitive industry. As such, we have laid out strategies to ensure that the client receives the paper on time and they never miss the deadline. We understand that papers that are submitted late have some points deducted. We do not want you to miss any points due to late submission. We work on beating deadlines by huge margins in order to ensure that you have ample time to review the paper before you submit it.

Will anyone find out that I used your services?

We have a privacy and confidentiality policy that guides our work. We NEVER share any customer information with third parties. Noone will ever know that you used our assignment help services. It’s only between you and us. We are bound by our policies to protect the customer’s identity and information. All your information, such as your names, phone number, email, order information, and so on, are protected. We have robust security systems that ensure that your data is protected. Hacking our systems is close to impossible, and it has never happened.

How our Assignment  Help Service Works

1.      Place an order

You fill all the paper instructions in the order form. Make sure you include all the helpful materials so that our academic writers can deliver the perfect paper. It will also help to eliminate unnecessary revisions.

2.      Pay for the order

Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. The paper subject is matched with the writer’s area of specialization.

3.      Track the progress

You communicate with the writer and know about the progress of the paper. The client can ask the writer for drafts of the paper. The client can upload extra material and include additional instructions from the lecturer. Receive a paper.

4.      Download the paper

The paper is sent to your email and uploaded to your personal account. You also get a plagiarism report attached to your paper.

PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET A PERFECT SCORE!!!

---