Out of Ashes

A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century

Konrad H. Jarausch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883479
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe

A sweeping history of twentieth-century Europe that examines its unprecedented destruction—and abiding promise A sweeping history of twentieth-century Europe, Out of Ashes tells the story of an era of unparalleled violence and barbarity yet also of humanity, prosperity, and promise.Konrad Jarausch describes how the European nations emerged from the nineteenth century with high hopes for continued material progress and proud of their imperial command over the globe, only to become embroiled in the bloodshed of World War I, which brought an end to their optimism and gave rise to competing democratic, communist, and fascist ideologies. He shows how the 1920s witnessed renewed hope and a flourishing of modernist art and literature, but how the decade ended in economic collapse and gave rise to a second, more devastating world war and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Jarausch further explores how Western Europe surprisingly recovered due to American help and political integration. Finally, he examines how the Cold War pushed the divided continent to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and how the unforeseen triumph of liberal capitalism came to be threatened by Islamic fundamentalism, global economic crisis, and an uncertain future.A gripping narrative, Out of Ashes explores the paradox of the European encounter with modernity in the twentieth century, shedding new light on why it led to cataclysm, inhumanity, and self-destruction, but also social justice, democracy, and peace.

Part I

PROMISE OF PROGRESS, 1900−1929

Chapter 1

GLOBAL DOMINATION

South African diamond mine, 1911. Source: Library of Congress.

Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, marking the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, was the symbolic climax of European imperialism. Suggested by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, the celebration on June 22, 1897, was a splendid “Festival of the British Empire,” attended by eleven prime ministers from the self-governing dominions. Barely visible in the flickering images of a film taken at the time, all of London was decked out with flags, garlands, and curious crowds, held back by soldiers in tall fur hats. Military units from all over the empire paraded on foot or on horseback through the city streets in colorful uniforms, including Canadians in red serge and Indian regiments in native garb. Led by the octogenarian queen in a horse-drawn carriage, the procession stopped in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral for an open-air service. Local celebrations in Britain and the colonies marked the day with speeches and fireworks. The diamond jubilee displayed the military might of the empire and the affection of its many subjects for their aging monarch.¹

Contemporary propagandists and later commentators never tired of touting the benefits of empire for the colonizers as well as the colonized. Writers like H. Rider Haggard penned exciting stories such as the adventures of Allan Quartermain, which were set in Africa and became the model for the Indiana Jones movies. Journalists such as a young Winston Churchill vividly described rousing colonial victories against superior numbers of dervishes without any qualms about the ethics of their slaughter. A century later the jihadist chaos has once again drawn attention to some of the advantages of imperial order when compared to the disruption caused by clashes between religions or nation-states. British historian Niall Ferguson has argued therefore that “the Empire enhanced global welfare” as an early form of “Anglobalization” by spreading liberal capitalism, the English language, parliamentary democracy, and enlightenment in schools and universities. Pointing to the benign impact of empire, he concluded that “the imperial legacy has shaped the modern world so profoundly that we almost take it for granted.”²

Over the century mounting criticism, however, turned imperialism into one of the most hated terms in the political vocabulary. Novelists such as Joseph Conrad portrayed European exploitation and racism in compelling stories like his novella Heart of Darkness. Liberals such as John A. Hobson attacked colonialism for having “its sources in the selfish interests of certain industrial, financial and professional classes, seeking private advantages out of a policy of imperial expansion.” During World War I the revolutionary Vladimir I. Lenin claimed that “the economic quintessence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism” in order to argue that the chain of imperialist exploitation could be broken at its weakest link, his native Russia. Eager to have a theoretical justification for overthrowing European rule, many anticolonial intellectuals embraced this critique of exploitation in their national liberation struggles. Inspired by resentment of America’s Cold War support for Third World dictatorships, much postcolonial scholarship continues to excoriate the nefarious consequences of imperialist racism and white oppression.³

The intensity and longevity of the normative debate about imperialism underlines the centrality of empire in modern European history. For centuries, the quest for resource-rich overseas possessions dominated the politics of western states, while the eastern monarchies similarly sought to acquire adjacent territories. Much of the raw material used by Europe’s industries came from the colonies, while finished products were exported to the captive colonial markets. Many European attitudes reflected a sense of superiority over foreign “natives,” while precious objects of imperial culture graced the drawing rooms of the European elite. As a result of this unequal interaction, empire was omnipresent in the metropolitan countries. At the same time, non-Europeans encountered whites first in the guise of imperial explorers, traders, missionaries, officials, or officers. Their understanding of and feelings about Europeans were therefore profoundly shaped by their experiences with imperial control and economic exploitation.⁴ At the turn of the twentieth century imperialism characterized not only Europe’s domination over the world but also the world’s reaction to Europe.

Both as a cause and as a result, modernization was deeply involved in the imperial project, testifying to the ambivalence of its dynamism. On the one hand, European military superiority over indigenous peoples rested on the technological advances in weapons and organization that modernity offered. The restlessness that propelled exploration, the greed that motivated risk taking, the individualism that encouraged emigration, and the rule of law that made contracts enforceable were fundamentally modern. On the other hand, the imperial imprint on colonized societies was profound, spreading an exploitative form of modernization by force and persuasion around the entire globe. By creating plantations, trading houses, government offices, and military barracks as well as establishing schools, hospitals, and churches imperialists disrupted traditional patterns of life. While imperial possession reinforced the European sense of arrogance and confidence in progress, it imposed a perplexing mixture of oppression and amelioration on the colonized. It is therefore essential to recognize the deeply problematic connection between empire and modernity.⁵

CAUSES OF EXPANSION

European overseas expansion had begun in the fifteenth century with daring Portuguese and Spanish explorers like Vasco da Gama, later joined by Dutch, British, and French seafarers. This initial wave of colonialism was by and large coastal and commercial, driven by private concessions such as the Dutch East India Company. It concentrated on extracting precious metals such as silver, which were getting scarce in Europe, or on collecting spices, tea, and coffee that could not grow there. Much of the trade was also in involuntary labor, reduced to slavery, for plantation agriculture in the Caribbean or the Americas. In more hospitable regions of North America and Australia, where the climate was moderate and there were no diseases like malaria, settlement colonies also developed; these attracted religious dissidents, land-hungry peasants, and criminal outcasts.⁶ This older colonialism established vast transoceanic empires, but with the rise of free trade and the abolition of the slave trade around the first third of the nineteenth century, its energy was largely spent.

From the 1870s on a new imperialism developed, based on the dynamics of European modernization, that built on earlier trends but intensified penetration and control. The term “imperialism” originally criticized Napoleon III’s adventurous policy of building the Suez Canal, but once the shorter shipping route to India had turned into a “life-line of the British empire,” the word assumed a more positive ring. In the ensuing “scramble for Africa” that divided the continent among European powers according to the boundaries laid out in the 1884–85 Congo Conference in Berlin, the new imperialism acquired a different character from the older pattern of colonialism. Though still propelled by scientists, missionaries, and traders, it was quickly taken over by governments and involved claiming entire territories, penetrating the back country beyond the coastlines, and establishing military security as well as bureaucratic control. This more invasive form of domination allowed plantation owners, mining companies, financial investors, and shipping lines to pursue their profits within a framework of European hegemony.⁷

In the 1920s the American political scientist Parker T. Moon tried to define the essence of this “new imperialism” by highlighting its political aspects. He considered it “an extension of political or economic control by one state over another, possessing a different culture or race, supported by a body of ideas, justifying the process.” Instead of focusing on economic exploitation, this classic definition stressed a direct or indirect form of control, a difference in culture and race as well as a rhetoric promoting expansion. A more recent definition paints a more complicated picture: “Empires were characterized by huge size, ethnic diversity, a multitude of composite territories as a result of historic cession or conquest, by specific forms of supranational rule, by shifting boundaries and fluid border-lands and finally by a complex of interactive of relationships between imperial centers and peripheries.” This description has the advantage of encompassing not only the maritime empires like that of Great Britain but also the contiguous land-based empires like those of Russia, Turkey, and Austria-Hungary.⁸

The renewal of European overseas expansion and territorial conquest was propelled by several complementary aspects of modernity. One often-overlooked motive was scientific curiosity in exploring the geography of unknown territories, such as David Livingstone’s attempt to discover the sources of the Nile, and to map their resources so as to exploit them. Engineers were also excited about the challenges of building harbors, bridges, railroads, telegraph lines, or canals in difficult environments in order to tame an unruly nature so that Europeans could penetrate into and profit from their new possessions.⁹ Moreover, a whole new scholarly discipline of ethnology developed in order to study representatives of presumably more primitive cultures, describing their strange customs and collecting their religious or secular artifacts. When these anthropologists brought some of the products and sometimes even peoples of exotic lands back home, they exhibited them in newly founded ethnology museums so that European visitors could marvel at their strange customs—and feel superior to them.¹⁰

Economic interests undoubtedly played a major role as well in propelling adventurers into foreign continents in the hope of making a fortune abroad. With the advent of mass production, industries such as textiles looked for new markets beyond Europe, since the meager wages paid to their own workers kept consumption low. The rise of new technologies such as electricity and automobiles also required raw materials that were not available in the Old Continent such as copper for wiring or rubber for tires. Moreover, the spread of prosperity expanded the available capital of speculators intent on making investments where the return might be double or triple that of the yield at home, even if the ventures were much riskier. These incentives motivated businessmen to establish plantations or mines supervised by whites who ruthlessly exploited native labor in order to turn a profit. To the shopper in the European metropolis, some goods like coffee, tea, bananas, oranges, and chocolate were offered in stores as “colonial wares.”¹¹ Since creating the necessary infrastructure was expensive, most colonies operated at public cost for the sake of private gain.

Somewhat less clear are the social dynamics, connected to the rise of the masses, that lay behind the drive toward empire. One element was the fear of overpopulation that resulted from rapid increases in the last decades of the nineteenth century, dramatized by Hans Grimm’s novel People without Space (1926). However, hopes for bettering one’s life through emigration to the colonies were often disappointed owing to the hardships involved in such a move, so that the expectation of Europe’s governments to clear their domestic slums through imperialism rarely panned out. Another aspect was the fierce propaganda of pressure groups such as the colonial leagues or navy leagues financed by commercial interests such as shipping lines or importers of colonial goods. With posters, pamphlets, and lectures these associations painted a glowing picture of individual opportunity in the empire, ready for the taking.¹² Finally, some European elites also sought to deflect the increasing pressures for social reform and political participation through imperial expansion, thereby making a lowly proletarian feel superior to a foreign prince.

The cultural impetus of the new imperialism was the paradoxical project of a “civilizing mission” or mission civilisatrice, understood as a right and duty to elevate lesser peoples to the European standard. Originally, this motive comprised the missionary aim to bring the blessings of Christianity to heathens so that they might also have a chance for salvation. In its secular guise developed during the Enlightenment, the concept also involved the propagation of a rational way of life, which Europeans regarded as the apex of human development. In his poem titled “The White Man’s Burden,” the British writer Rudyard Kipling provided the classic rationale for this effort by enjoining youths “to serve your captives’ need.” But calling the colonial peoples “half-devil and half-child” betrayed a deep-seated arrogance and racism that contradicted the altruistic spirit of lifting so-called natives “out of bondage” by spreading knowledge, health, and civility. While claiming to disseminate a humanitarian vision of modernity, the civilizing ethos went only so far as to make the colonized function in the imperial system, denying them full equality.¹³

A final cluster of causes of the new imperialism involved the rivalry between the great powers, which incited countries to compete with each other in conquering and exploiting colonies lest they be left behind. A social Darwinist outlook saw international politics as a struggle for survival, forcing governments to match any presumptive gain in power or territory of a neighbor with similar increases of their own. Once an empire had been established, there was also the strategic necessity of geopolitical defense of one’s possessions, demanding coaling stations for naval resupply or the annexation of further lands to improve the military position of a frontier. In 1890 the American admiral Alfred T. Mahan formulated this credo of “sea power” persuasively, arguing that empires like the British rose to dominance due to their superiority on the oceans, thereby propagating a “navalism” that dovetailed well with imperialism. Such views coalesced into a sense of national vitality, which argued in biological metaphors that the future belonged to young and growing as opposed to old and declining nations.¹⁴

The rise of the new imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century therefore resulted from the dynamism of European modernity, which propelled outward expansion. Many of the motives—such as scientific curiosity, capitalist greed, and mass politics—were driving forces of modernization. Also most of the tools of domination—such as steamers, railroads, telegraphs, and machine guns—were new technological inventions that made European countries more powerful, allowing their navies and armies to conquer new territories and bureaucracies to establish administrations to control them. Moreover, the humanitarian vision of “civilizing” the world was a modern European invention, intending to reshape the entire globe in its own “progressive” image. Taken together, these forces made the new imperialism a self-propelling process that proved so unstoppable as to overcome even the reluctance of continental traditionalists like Prince Otto von Bismarck, who had vowed “as long as I am imperial chancellor, we shall not pursue a policy of colonialism.”¹⁵ The result was the scramble that divided Africa and the rest of the not-yet-modernized globe.

PATTERNS OF DOMINATION

In hindsight it still seems baffling that a small number of Europeans managed to seize control over far more numerous peoples and vast territories by making use of the advantages of modernity. Usually the imperialists merely transformed the previous penetration of explorers, traders, or missionaries into political control by intervening in local conflicts. In India several tens of thousands of Englishmen managed to govern an entire subcontinent populated by tens of millions through a mixture of political alliances with powerful local rulers (Raj) and the occasional use of military force against their foes. In German East Africa a few thousand administrators and soldiers succeeded in subjecting ...