The Western Tradition - Episode 44 - The Age of Nation States (1989)

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00][Music] a powerful current flowed through europe the current of nationalism and national pride and as european powers expanded their empires their rivalries extended all over the world until war seemed inevitable the age of nations states this time on the western tradition [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now ucla professor eugene weber's continuing journey through the history of western civilization last time we saw how the romantics looked at society with new eyes they saw things that had been there before of course but now that they had taken a good long look they were shocked they were shaken and they wanted to do something about it the industrial revolution the urban explosion the improvement of communication and information had concentrated the reality and the image of suffering and horror and injustice to an unprecedented degree just as the fallout of enlightenment revolution romanticism made people more sensitive more ready to be impressed or depressed by human suffering the wonders of modern industry were matched by the horrors of human industry or perhaps in human industry little children working 16 hours a day and getting so tired that they fell into the machinery and were killed or maimed men women and children dressed in rags living in pits like bears several families to one room with a beaten earth floor covered with mud and manure the problem was mitigated by reforms which gradually improved the lot of the outcast poor by the workers organizing to help themselves by revolution which accelerated the process of reform and by the increased production and resources that brought more surplus and more to go around by the second half of the century the grinding hunger and misery that so depressed earlier observers had been alleviated they hadn't disappeared by any means but they had become less intense hours of labor were being restricted conditions of work were being improved there were medical services old age pension schools subsidies for housing for garden allotments for unemployment all this came in dribs and drabs however often too little and too late in most countries social legislation of real importance was only passed at the end of the 19th century or in the 20th but it had never existed before and if you compare the last 150 years with the rest of history this alone makes it an exceptional period moreover social reform came in part because the upper and the middle classes felt sorry for the lower classes and that was new too you might describe it a social romanticism it sees the people as the last noble savages from whom social regeneration will come and this point of view which combines empathy charity and guilt this point of view is still with us today reforms also came because more people got the vote by 1914 every male had a vote even in countries like austria and italy which had lagged behind the rest universal male suffrage meant that politicians who wanted to be elected had to mine the interests of broader and broader sections of the electorate on the other hand one shouldn't exaggerate electoral pressure because social reforms came before voting rights in places like germany and they were slow to come in places like france which had universal suffrage quite early still the vote was a factor in reform just as it was a negative factor in the case of women who having no votes found it hard to put pressure on politicians whom they needed to grant them the vote by 1914 women went to the polls only in finland and norway although this was about to change as well and it was close to change in england whose women were about to get the vote just before the war and did get it just after the fact that reforms came because there were more resources to go around inspired or confirmed ideas that you might call social utilitarianism organize the economy properly and you solve the social problem organize production and distribution and you eliminate poverty the great figures of this school were the court the cersei more in france and his secretary augusta august who was a mathematician [Music] the doctrines associated with sansimon and kant are known as saint simonianism and positivism positivism because it was supposed to be based on scientific analysis of positive data like mathematics or statistics but what these doctrines are really is religions of progress inspired by the real progress taking place and arguing that gigantic further progress could be accomplished by technocratic management engineers financiers specialists of all kinds because it was closely related to concrete achievements positivism inspired a lot of people including the men who won brazil's independence who put the positivist slogan on the country's flag order and progress positivism also produced some very real successes positivists and saint simonians built some of europe's great railway lines they planned and built the suez canal and the eiffel tower they published the first mass magazines they started the first ad agency but if these contributed to the general prosperity they addressed the workers problems only incidentally and indirectly if the workers wanted to be effective in labor politics and national politics they themselves had to organize or to be organized to help themselves and here we get the tradition of social revolt which begins by trying to integrate the workers into the bourgeois state and which ends by denying that integration is possible by arguing that the classes cannot be reconciled the two nations the poor and the rich cannot be integrated in this view the workers the working class have to conquer power they have to take over the state and use it in their interests just as the bourgeois rested power from the aristocracy in the revolution to use the state in their own interest as karl marx declared only when the working class has conquered only then will liberty and equality reign because then there will be no class left to oppress or be oppressed society can be organized in a rational manner with labor and justice for all resources will flow from everyone according to their capacities to everyone according to their needs marxism however was not going to be very influential until the end of the century but the several doctrines that try to integrate the underprivileged by reform or by revolt prodded the social evolution along made everyone more aware that this was an issue and colored the politics and the atmosphere of the time but there was an even more powerful current flowing through europe and out from europe and that was the current of nationalism of national sentiment national pride fed by the example of 18th century revolutions and by the ideology of romanticism greeks poles romanians czechs and south slavs were ruled by foreign powers and germans and italians were divided into a lot of separate states but as everyone knew men could only be free as citizens of their own nation not a subject of some foreign ruler this attitude is what inspired the latin americans to rise against their spanish and portuguese masters it inspired the greeks to rise against the turks it inspired the belgians to seek independence from holland in fact the international history of the century is the story of people struggling to be free as nations achieving this as the italians did and the germans romanians bulgarians and serbs in the 1860s and 70s or failing like the poles those who failed kept trying and their plotting and their insurrections introduced an undercurrent of instability there was no enduring international stability in 19th century europe because the subject nations pearls czech slovaks romanians south slavs were continually conspiring and rebelling to get what they claimed were their national rights the two great revolutionary explosions of 1830 and 1848 especially were times of national revolution when peoples either revolted for independence or for the right to unite in one common nation state the 19th century was not a terribly war-like age in europe but the wars that were thought were almost all over national issues the unification of italy then of germany then of balkan countries until general war broke out in 1914 precisely because the south slavs wanted the united nation of their own and when the first world war ended the national aspirations of the 19th century were finally answered europe from russia to the atlantic was a europe of nation states but in the 19th century economically the affairs of europe and the rest of the world were run by the advanced countries and to an important extent from places like the bank of england here politically international affairs were in the hands of the great powers a term invented at the time of the peace conference after the napoleonic wars the congress of vienna with britain france russia austria and her habsburg empire and prussia which in 1871 became the german empire then in the 1870s a unified italy joined the group these were the great powers and you will notice that the united states was not one of them partly because it was busy in its corner of the world partly because nobody could imagine a non-european country being a power at all the great powers squabbled but for the most part they ran the world as an informal club in the first half of the century the two major powers were britain and france who combined industrial development and large population in the second half of the century the two major powers were britain and germany for the same reason the original object of the great power club was to prevent anything like the french revolution from ever happening again the french revolution haunted the 19th century as the russian revolution was going to haunt the 20th century and there is no understanding international politics in this period if you don't bear that in mind revolution kept breaking out in the early 1820s in the early 30s and especially in 1848 49 but whenever revolutions got out of hand the other powers intervened to help each other put down a rising and even more important the motives for revolution were being whittled down one big revolutionary demand in germany has in italy had been national unification but that was achieved by 1870 not by revolution but by conservative power politics handled by intelligent statesmen like bismarck men like him and like napoleon iii in france realized that the radicals could be diffused by carrying out the less radical part of their programs higher productivity economic improvements and moderate reforms made this possible the great powers like queen victoria's england were also determined to avoid anything that would weaken them anything that would let revolution through and the first thing they wanted to avoid was any large general war because they thought and rightly that war would advance revolution so the european wars of the 19th century tended to be marginal as in the crimea seen here or in the balkans or else they were bilateral france against austria australians prussia prussia against france on the whole however the century from 1815 to 1914 was the longest period without general warfare in the history of europe since roman days and the reason for this or part of the reason is that the european powers managed to export their competitions and their surface of energy to other parts of the world which is what we call imperials [Music] overseas politics had always been part of a great power politics but in the 19th century they became more so because european politics were world politics europe had gobbled up the world it did so by conquest it did so through trade and investment it did so by settlement sending something between 30 and 50 million europeans into countries that were already extensions of europe as in the americas or were going to become extensions of europe australia new zealand north africa south africa and siberia european colonies like england's australia were in effect autonomous in their politics better off economically than the home countries in europe and more open as well on the whole they offered more opportunities more equality more democracy than the old country at least for the whites this was not the case however in colonies where settlers were in a minority where a few soldiers planters administrators ruled over natives with different colored skins it isn't very clear why they even bother to do so because it is necessary to occupy an area in order to dominate its economy the british control the economy of egypt probably more effectively than they did australia's and they made more money economic control was more economical than colonial conquest and occupation [Music] if the world was nevertheless divided up in this unpractical colonial way it was in part because great powers and small are not always moved solely by rational interest there was a sense of adventure about the colonies the sort of thing you get in tarzan's stories there was a sense of mission bringing christianity or hygiene or decent government to what the turn of the century described with no embarrassment as the lesser breeds without the law we can laugh now about the white man's burden and there was a lot of hypocrisy about it and brutality and stupidity but then again the slave trade in africa which was carried out by africans and arabs was only put down by white officers and missionaries recent converts to anti-slavery and a lot of diseases were treated and a lot of overpopulation problems were inadvertently caused by the intervention of white doctors but the main reason why the great powers got themselves into colonial possessions was because the rivalries of european powers competing for supremacy in europe were spilling over into the rest of the world a great power by definition had overseas possessions and it had a fleet the british had both the french had both so when the germans became a great power after 1870 they had to have colonies to end a fleet despite the trouble and expense these caused them even the italians once they were completely united in 1870 started to think that they would like to look like a great power and so they started to think about colonies in any case european rivalries economic and political extended all over the world and filled the 30 years before 1914 with international crisis arising out of colonial conflicts this is an american cartoon of russia's imperial ambitions none of these crises actually produced world war but their accumulation produced the expectation of a major conflict and made it seem unavoidable sooner or later and it's not surprising that when world war finally came in 1914 it began in what you might describe as the last colonial or the last decolonized area of europe the balkans just as 19th century statesmen had expected war and revolution came together russian colonial expansion on the pacific rim had brought the tsarist empire to war with japan a war which russia lost badly its humiliating defeat destabilized the russian empire and brought revolution there in 1905 this revolution was put down but not before it sparked sympathetic revolutions in russia's even more backward neighbors persia china and most important turkey and its decrepit ottoman empire with turkey in chaos her broken subjects and ex-subjects started to fight the turks and each other this upheaval in the balkans threatened in turn another archaic empire that of austria-hungary the habsburg empire which ruled over a great many southern slavs in what is today yugoslavia so the first world war was going to break out in the darkest balkans because the interests and the fears of three archaic empires met there and clashed with each other and clashed with the revolutionary national ambitions of serbs croats bulgarians and greeks not to mention italians montenegrins and albanians the crisis that began the war arose when the heir to the austrian throne archduke franz ferdinand was murdered by this slav student terrorist in sarajevo the capital of bosnia which was then part of austria's empire it was commonly believed and rightly that serbia an independent slavic nation had a hand in the assassination and so austria backed by her ally germany confronted serbia which was backed by russia which was allied to france and aligned with britain none of these powers really wanted war but everyone was prepared for war and the more prepared as a result of the long series of colonial crisis so the great power network designed to avoid hostilities by mutual deterrence helped to bring it about within weeks of franz ferdinand's murder most of europe was at war a century that started with a war that was finally decided at waterloo in 1815 really ended in another war that was finally decided on flanders fields not far from waterloo in 1980 and the century which opened with an era of revolutions in western europe ended with an era of revolution in eastern europe but that is another story for another program next time we'll go back a step to the end of the 19th century when many of our present attitudes were really shaped until then [Music] you