International History

A Cultural Approach

Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781780936307
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia del XX secolo

International History: A Cultural Approach offers an innovative history of modern international relations that stresses cultural themes. In place of the usual focus on great-power rivalries, diplomatic negotiations, military conflict, and other phenomena in which sovereign nations are the key players, this book focuses on intercultural relations as individuals, races, religions, and non-state actors interact across national boundaries, to provide a fresh perspective on modern international history. Among the themes covered are:
- Nationalism and cosmopolitanism
- Migration
- Cross-cultural encounters
- Consumerism and youth cultures
- Environmental transformations
- Economic and technological globalization Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde's approach offers a deeper understanding of international history, focusing on people and their cultures rather than just state level interactions.

PART ONE

The Rise of the Modern

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life,” Karl Marx wrote in the 1840s. He declared further that “conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people.” While the exact relationship between consciousness and material conditions is still the subject of much debate—did material conditions “create” consciousness or did consciousness “shape” material conditions?—there exists a general consensus that the emergence of a modern consciousness in the nineteenth century was inextricably tied to pursuits in the social and economic spheres. Much of what we identify as this new consciousness was taking shape in the West, in particular Western Europe and North America, where industrialization and expanding trade contributed to enabling more and more people, not just the aristocracy, to experience higher standards of living and partake in cultural pursuits. Among those cultural pursuits were the rise of romantic literature and music, which transcended national boundaries. This same period also saw the rise of nationalist movements all over Europe and the Americas, but this did not prevent the development of cosmopolitanism, the belief that people everywhere—at least in the West—shared certain ideas and aspirations. Among the most influential of such ideas were Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, all of which challenged the sovereign state as the key determinant of people’s identities. More traditional identities, above all religious and ethnic, remained, but they were transformed by significant developments in these communities as technical innovations—in particular, the telegraph and the telephone—narrowed the sense of distance and facilitated communication across borders.

Modernity took root in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, when through geographic exploration and scientific discovery, the world became better known and was experienced increasingly through a secular rather than religious lens. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century had steadily increased the dissemination of religious and secular texts to a broader readership, facilitating the proliferation of new ideas throughout the western world and ultimately the entire globe. The spread of secularized enlightenment ideas also led to the de-centering of the Christian West. The French philosopher Voltaire was among the leading advocates of a more global understanding of knowledge, elevating to prominence the contributions of Arab, Indian, and Chinese thinkers, philosophers, and inventors. Modernity, while primarily associated with the advances of the western world, was built on significant discoveries and ideas outside the western world.

Everywhere in the world, what came to be identified as modern civilization steadily transformed people’s ways of life and thought, often accompanied by a consciousness about the tension between modernity and tradition. This consciousness was a phenomenon one could find among non-western as well as western people. The opening of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to western economic penetration should be seen not only as an instance of imperialism, but also as a key cultural development that shaped the ways of life of all people in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, “Asia,” “Africa,” and “America” were cultural terms before they acquired political meaning. The Ottoman Empire, encompassing southeastern Europe, North Africa, and what would later be called the Middle East, played a major role in international cultural developments during this period. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean. In Asia, among Commodore Perry’s gifts when his squadron returned to Japan in 1854 were two telegraph sets that literally opened the “eyes and ears” of the Japanese still living in their feudal age. The elites of the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire, and Japan, as well as other countries began to embrace modernization with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

The following pages explore the cultural currents and consequences that contributed to the rise of this global network. They include a close examination of how nationalism and internationalism informed each other in a dialectical relationship, the former driving the latter forward and the latter redefining and transforming the former. Cross-cultural encounters expanded by mid-century, creating both greater opportunities for transnational cooperation and new points of friction that increased the potential for conflict as nation-states emerged, expanded, and competed for economic, political, and cultural dominance. Geopolitical watershed moments of the nineteenth century, such as revolutions, wars, and the national unifications of Italy and Germany will be examined within this broader framework of cultural encounters, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between culture and power. The rise of the modern consciousness was at once a process that emerged within the structures of the nation-state and outside of them. It was not just a unidirectional phenomenon emanating from the industrializing West and spreading to the non-western world, but a dynamic process of cultural encounter between communities, regions, and states, albeit often under conditions of unequal power relations. It bound together the nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa in ever tighter webs of connections. The modern consciousness was forged within this framework of economic, political, scientific, and intellectual exchanges.

1

The Dialectics of Nationalism and Internationalism

Over the course of the nineteenth century some influential ideas and perspectives emerged in the West that would seek to codify what was happening in the world. This can best be seen in the development of the conceptions of nationalism and internationalism, as exemplified by new ideas of the modern nation-state on the one hand and by some global visions on the other. These forces of nationalism and internationalism, rather than working in opposite directions, were mutually constitutive. Forged at the Vienna Congress of 1815, both nationalism and internationalism gained strength throughout the nineteenth century.

Historians and the public usually understand international relations at the turn of the nineteenth century as a story of warfare among European states in which France under Napoleon Bonaparte sought to augment his power. At one point, Napoleon tried to conquer Russia, extend French power to the Middle East, and even form an alliance with the young republic of the United States to challenge British supremacy at sea. All such attempts ended in failure. Napoleon was eventually exiled to the island of Elba, off the western coast of Italy, while the victorious coalition led by Britain and Russia met at a conference in Vienna in 1814 to re-establish some sort of order in Europe. Although quite tenuous, the Vienna system of international relations managed to avoid another major war in Europe until 1914.

How do we reconfigure the history of the Napoleonic wars or the Vienna Congress and resulting system of peace within a cultural framework? How did the tumultuous developments in Europe affect cultural pursuits there and elsewhere? Answers must begin by recognizing that until that time Europe was by no means the undisputed cultural center of the world. The Ottoman Empire had, from time to time, claimed to be a major cultural influence in the world, as did the Ming, Qing, and other empires in control of China. In economic production, until the end of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman and Chinese peoples produced more wealth and were more advanced in pottery, rug-making, and other artisanal productions than the rest of the world. There were other cultural centers as well: the Persian Empire, the Mughal (Indian) Empire, the United States, and others. All of them together with Europe and the Middle East constituted global cultures, and the world was a space of cultural complexity and diversity.

The balance began to shift at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the Napoleonic wars. Even as the European countries engaged in devastating warfare, their global economic and cultural influence expanded to an unprecedented degree. Historians have traditionally referred to this transformation as the rise of the West. Prior to 1800 the West—primarily Europe—had been just one of many centers of culture and power in the world. Yet in the nineteenth century it achieved a decisively dominant position, so much so that the label “great powers” was synonymous with Europe and the United States, and “civilization” came to mean the West’s intellectual and artistic achievements. The West’s power and culture reinforced each other to such an extent that, by the turn of the twentieth century it was dominating the rest of the world politically, militarily, economically, and culturally. International relations, which used to entail a complex web of interactions among various regions of the world, had now become virtually synonymous with intra-European affairs.

How did this transformation come about? One reason was technology, namely, that from the last decades of the eighteenth century onward technological innovations in Europe and North America—ranging from the steam engine and steam ships to the telegraph—enabled people to establish connections with one another at greater speed and with greater ease than ever before. Such innovations were in turn products of a scientific revolution that had developed new ways of looking at the universe, separating humans from nature and expanding the exploitation of natural resources for industrial production and international trade. There was, of course, nothing new about global trade, which some scholars trace as far back as the Age of Migration and the silk routes of antiquity, others to the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century. But the new technologies made it possible for merchants, manufacturers, and consumers to connect with one another much more easily. Connections, again, were the key, and as closer and more extensive contacts were established among countries and peoples of the world, those who were energetic, assertive, and even aggressive in such activities steadily grew more influential.

The long wars of Europe did not stifle such overseas activities, and this is another reason why the West on the whole achieved its ascendancy around 1800. Warfare required arms, and antagonists strove to produce more and better weapons of destruction. War and industrialization reinforced one another in that new technologies and manufacturing methods enabled nations to produce greater quantities of weapons while at the same time enhancing the overall economic output of countries. War and imperial expansion in turn propelled further industrialization by opening new markets abroad as well as making it possible to recruit a fresh labor force. The non-western world was equally dynamic, yet without sharing the West’s passion for establishing connections all over the world. As a result, people in those regions were less affected by the rapidly advancing technologies Europeans and North Americans had developed.

All these factors contributed to the emergence and consolidation of nation-states in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The centralization of power in the body of the state was not just a political move, it was rooted in cultural transformations, among them the spirit of nationalism that swept across the European continent. The production of what Benedict Anderson has called “imagined communities,” bound together by a common language, heritage, religious and secular values, was either imposed by ruling authorities over their consolidated territories or grew organically from the bottom up through grassroots movements. Nationalism and its relationship to a newly emerging internationalism take center-stage in the cultural reconceptualization of international history.

Nationalism

Words like “national” and “international” had been in use in Europe since the seventeenth century, when some countries came to define themselves as nations. A nation referred to an entity that had a unified and central government, that ruled a space with fixed geographical boundaries, and whose people identified with this political/territorial entity. Wars were fought in the name of the nation, and theorists wrote discourses on national interest, national power, and national identity. But the ideology of nationalism, or a mentality that defined individuals in terms of their identification with and loyalty to a particular country, developed more slowly. Other centers of identity and loyalty such as the family, the village, the guild, the church, and the royalty, competed with the nation. Nationalism was an idea that transcended these loyalties and bound individuals to their nation as the core of identity that remained with them from birth to death.

That such ideas first developed in the West in the seventeenth century had far-reaching consequences for the subsequent development of world history. European kingdoms and societies might have continued to exist in their traditional ways, loosely tied together within an empire, like the Ottoman or the Qing Empire. Europe, too, had its empires, most prominently the Habsburg Empire, whose domain spanned from Spain to Austria. Some kingdoms, however, refused to remain incorporated into an imperial system and managed to create and preserve separate existences. One of these was Britain, which by the seventeenth century consisted of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Anot...