14. NATIONALISM, IMPERIALISM AND THE "GREAT WAR"

NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM

It is hard today to understand that in the late 1800s and early 1900s imperialism was generally (though there were exceptions) not considered to be some kind of great evil, but was quite the opposite, something able to bring patriotic tears to the eyes of Europeans as they reviewed the blessings brought to the world through their political, economic, cultural or even religious undertakings abroad.  As with all aggressive dominators, their ability to rationalize such aggression with high sounding moral logic was truly amazing.  But keep in mind that it was the age of Darwin and Social Progress.  Darwinism, with its survival of the fittest mentality, made the justification of imperial aggression very natural, even laudable.

Actually imperialism, as practiced in the 1800s and early 1900s, involved simply the transferring away from European and American – or Western – society the naturally aggressive (tribal) tendencies of the West's new, rising and highly ambitious national political actors.  This redirection of competitive instincts abroad would help immensely to keep peace within the West itself, for a while – that is until there were no more unclaimed overseas territories available for these hungry empires to grab up. When that happened, Europe fell into suicidal self-destruction: the Great War or World War One.

No two nations explained the blessings of imperialism exactly the same way.  But that is because each of these dominators understood themselves in unique ways, and therefore moralized their imperialism in unique ways.  In other words, there was no one standard thing called imperialism.  It was simply nationalism written large, nation by nation.

The Portuguese got an early start on (commercial) imperialism in the 1400s, setting out from their Atlantic ports and slowly advancing south down the West African coast, establishing Portuguese trading posts along the way – actually also crossing the Atlantic once the discovery of America occurred and establishing a base point there (Brazil) from which they could then take advantage of the Atlantic currents and sweep back again eastward towards Southern Africa – either way finally reaching the southern tip, the Cape of South Africa.  Once around South Africa, the Portuguese then headed toward India, again establishing trading posts – the most notable and enduring being Goa on India's Western coast – and then heading on around India toward the valuable Spice Islands of Southeast Asia.  From there they would by the mid-1500s even head north to China, establishing another port along the southern Chinese coast at Macao.  They would later lose some of these holdings to the Dutch, but hold on to others, such as Goa and Macao, and their positions in Africa at Angola and Mozambique – well into the 20th century.

The Spanish found their way to the wealth of the Far East blocked by the Portuguese, so at the end of the 1400s they headed west across the Atlantic, and in doing so stumbled into the Americas – and a vast amount of gold they were able to acquire in plundering the Aztec and Inca Empires.  The wealth was so vast that they had to – and were able to – build a huge navy to protect the transfer of that wealth from the pirates that lurked in the Caribbean waters, where their American empire was headquartered.

But their thirst for increasing the number of Catholic souls at a time that Protestantism was driving Catholicism from its religious monopoly in Europe became another key motif of Spanish imperialism.  Huge numbers of Catholic priests were sent to establish missions among the new Indian subjects of the Spanish kings, thus bringing Spanish America emotionally as well as materially into the realm of Spanish feudalism.  This feudal social-cultural legacy became so well-established that even when these colonies broke free from their Spanish (and closely related Portuguese) sovereigns in the early 1800s, the cultural patterns established through this imperialism remained firmly in place.

Indeed, by the late 1800s a romantic revival of Spanish nationalism was taking place in Spain, looking to Spanish America to rebuild the Spanish-Catholic cultural ties that once existed between Spain and America.

But Yankee Americans had other ideas. They wanted to democratize this feudal culture, and thus found themselves intervening frequently in the affairs of their neighbors to the south, under the principle of the Monroe Doctrine.  These interventions (usually by the U.S. marines) helped support U.S. economic interests in Latin America, but had little impact on the political culture of the region, producing instead a lot of anti-Yankee resentment.

While the Portuguese and Spanish were busy setting their overseas empires in place, the Protestant Dutch were busy fending off the very-Catholic Spanish kings trying to force the Dutch provinces back into submission to Catholic Spain.  The effort drained Spanish power considerably,¹ and instead strengthened Dutch power and resolve all the more.  When Spanish power became feeble enough in the early 1600s, the Dutch then headed out on their own to explore the larger world – mostly following the Portuguese imperial route, seizing Portuguese ports along the way: notably South Africa and the Spice Islands (modern Indonesia).  The Dutch also established trading posts in North America at the mouth of the Hudson River and the land behind it, on various islands in the Caribbean, and on the northeastern coast of South America at Suriname.

Like the Portuguese, the Dutch Empire was largely commercial (trading in valuable goods) in nature, which included a vast number of Africans sold into slavery in order to work the highly valuable sugar plantations in the Caribbean and at Suriname.

Early British imperialism followed the pattern of the Portuguese and the Dutch, especially the Dutch with whom the English found themselves in deep commercial competition – with several wars fought in the process.  Like the Dutch, the English were early capitalists, forming joint-stock corporations to amass the amount of investment money needed to pay for very expensive private business operations (meaning, not funded by the monarchy).  A number of companies reached great size, such as the Muscovy Company in 1555, trying unsuccessfully to reach China by way of a Northeast passage across the arctic, or at least across Russia.  And there was the East India Company, though as with all business enterprises, it had its ups and downs.

The British East India Company reached such enormous size that it became almost a government in itself, securing political as well as economic dominance over most of India and parts of China.  After American independence – achieved through a rebellion sparked in part by the British king's attempt to establish an East India Company monopoly in the tea trade with the American colonies – the British Empire and the East India Company became almost one and the same.

The focus of the Company's activities was India, a huge sub-continent over which the Company secured political control through an array of separate agreements with various local Indian lords or rajas. In essence the Indian rajas agreed to place themselves under the Company's protection in order to facilitate the all-important trade of tea, cotton, indigo and salt from India in exchange for the finished textiles of England. Backing up this arrangement was the Company's own private army made up of local Hindu and Muslim mercenaries – or sepoys – commanded locally by some of the rajas, but ultimately by Company officers themselves. It was all quite a noble arrangement for many Indians and Englishmen.

The Company and its army was an aggressive player in the international theater, fighting wars here and there in Asia, such as the one waged against the Chinese Emperor – who tried (unsuccessfully) to stop the Company from selling its highly profitable opium to his Chinese subjects.  In essence the Company was the world's first major drug cartel!

But troubles with its own Indian sepoys developed over the thoughtlessness of some of its English officers, and a huge rebellion resulted (1857-1859) – involving the death of large numbers of English officials and their families serving in India. When the rebellion was finally put down, British Parliament liquidated the Company and took over its affairs directly, creating officially the British Empire – with Victoria now serving as the Empress of India as well Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland (along with many other titles).

These were the glory days of British imperialism.  And the British Empire stood at the very heart of the whole European imperial system as its proudest symbol.

Not to be outdone by the English, the French sought a similar imperial status during the mid-1800s under the new French Emperor, Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III (nephew of the famous Napoleon of the earlier 1800s).  The French were having a hard time emotionally with the fact that French culture had once (during the 1700s and much of the 1800s) been a central part of the culture of Europe's ruling classes, and that its decline in the face of rising linguistic nationalism in Europe was a major blow to French pride.  France's imperial mission therefore seemed to be to compensate for this loss by taking French culture abroad, trying now to plant French culture among the ruling elite in French Indochina of Cochin China (Vietnam), Cambodia and Laos and at various points along the African coast.

Then when in the latter part of the 1800s the Europeans began to take an interest in laying claim to the material wealth (and the souls of the people) in the dark unknown of interior Africa, the French made a huge effort to plant widely the French imperial flag there.  Also Egypt – at least since Napoleon's invasion there in the early 1800s (an unsuccessful effort to block Britain's passage from the Mediterranean to India) – had long held French interest, and the French worked out a deal with the local king to build a canal at Suez, which then stirred British interest in the project.  The British eventually bought out the king's interest in the Suez Canal, making European imperialism in Egypt at the very heart of the world of Islam a matter of cooperation between both the French and the English.

Africa. Also interested in Africa were the recent arrivals on the European national scene, the Germans and the Italians.  The many Italian city-states and regional kingdoms had finally united into a single Italian state in 1860, and much the same was the case for Germany in 1870.  Now fully national as Italy and Germany, both new countries wanted a piece of the imperial action in Africa – because that was about the only part of the earth that had not already been laid claim to by European imperialists.

The Portuguese, of course, were already in Africa (coastal Angola, Mozambique and other small positions along the coast being under Portuguese control since the 1400s and 1500s).  And Spain was interested in the North African land across the Straits of Gibraltar (and British-held Gibraltar itself) in Morocco.  And America had protectorate responsibilities over the tiny country of Liberia, set up as an independent country to receive American Blacks freed from slavery and returned to the African "homeland" earlier in the 1800s.

The decaying Ottoman or Turkish Empire.  Then at the same time there was the matter of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire, a great Islamic domain at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in Southeastern Europe (the huge, multi-ethnic Balkan Peninsula).  The Ottoman Empire had lost considerable energy since its glory days in the 1500s, and like old Christendom, it was falling apart. Thus various newly emerging national groups, principally the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs – once part of the Ottoman empire – were moving to grab chunks of the Ottoman holdings in the Balkan Peninsula in order to establish their own national independence.  Meanwhile the English and French busied themselves attempting to grab the rest of the Ottoman Empire – from Egypt to Syria – with the Russians coming at the Turks along the northern coast of the Black Sea at Crimea and Southeastern Ukraine (with the British actually attempting to help the Turks hold off this Russian expansion).

All this activity – focused on the dying Ottoman "Sick Man of Europe" plus the opening up of Africa – threatened to bring the aggressiveness of European imperialism much too close to home for the comfort of the major European players.

Something needed to be done to head off this growing danger to the peace of Europe itself.

Indeed, since the days of Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there had been a rather high level of diplomatic cooperation among Europe's imperial contenders, sort of a gentlemanly sharing of the spoils of imperialism.  The ruling dynasties understood the importance of being somewhat cooperative in their aggressions.  They had learned some hard lessons from the Napoleonic wars and had devised a system (the Concert of Europe) to bring their mutual tensions under discussion in order to keep those tensions from pushing them to war, and thus having to call on their people once again to come rescue their thrones from their enemies.

And thus it was that they gathered in Berlin in 1878 to come to an agreement as to how they wanted to divide up the dying Ottoman Empire, and assign Ottoman land to the various European participants, notably the Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs.  Everyone was mostly happy with the results – except the Turks, of course, whose nationalist fever began to rise in the face of this assault on their long-standing Empire.

Then in 1884-1885 the Europeans met again in Berlin, this time to get out a map of Africa and assign pieces of the continent to the conference's various European participants.  Everyone was a winner (except the Africans, who were not consulted on the matter).  The Portuguese were simply confirmed in their old African holdings.  The French received major pieces of West Africa (interspersed with English holdings).  The Belgian King Leopold was awarded the rich center-piece of Africa, the Congo, as a personal feudal domain, serving somewhat like Belgium itself as a buffer territory designed to keep any one of the major European powers from establishing a single line of dominance across the continent.  The English were accorded vast pieces of the rest of Africa, most importantly from the Cape Province in the South – taken from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars – north through the Central part of Africa (with Leopold's Congo being the exception), all the way up through the Sudan to Egypt.  The Germans finally got lands in Central Africa to the east (Tanganyika) and the west (Kamerun) of the Belgian Congo.  And the Italians got a section of Somaliland at the vital juncture between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.

Under Bismarck's skillful leadership this business had all been conducted in a fairly rational fashion.  For Bismarck and for Germany this was all part of the German nation's new birth, but also its growing sense of importance within the realm of European political affairs.

¹The disastrous attempt at about the same time (1588) to do the same thing to Protestant England by sending their mighty Spanish Armada (army and navy) against the English also drained Spanish power considerably.