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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
9. “Over-The-Top” and “Over There”: Status Contests Among National-Sovereigns
How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom, it will make kings jump like coffee beans on the roaster.
—Hillaire Belloc
If the Monarchy is doomed to perish, let it at least perish decorously.
—Emperor Franz Joseph
A thick mist blurred everything that morning...It was cold and drizzling; suddenly a Boche patrol appeared out of the mist ahead...hands in pockets...smoking cigarettes. Dumbstruck, our men hesitated for a moment. That was when the Boche n.c.o. suggested in a mournful voice, “Sad war, gentlemen! Sad war!” Then they disappeared back into the mist.
—La Saucisse, [French trench-newspaper] June 1916
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed—Rupert Brooke
So much has been written about the origins, conduct, and effects of the First World War that the theorist attempting to approach this event from a fresh perspective may easily be daunted by the scope of the literature and may despair of the prospect of saying anything original or new about the matter whatever. From the beginning of the war, let alone from its end, historians and social scientists of various stripes and schools have continuously debated what appear to constitute the conflict’s pertinent issues and have staked out well-marked claims to explanatory virtuosity regarding its origins.
One comes away from prolonged exposure to this literature impressed by several salient features of this debate that I will take as a pertinent starting point to my discussion of the contribution of national-sovereign identity in explaining the conflict. First, I am impressed by the general agreement among historians regarding the proximate causes of the war. The sequence of events beginning with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo in June of 1914, to the initiation of hostilities by all major European Powers by the second week in August 1914 is well documented, well debated and fairly well agreed upon. Most historians have apparently found agreement concerning why each actor took the decisions they did in this tragic sequence of errors, misperceptions, and miscalculations. Second, I am impressed by the general agreement among many social scientists and historians regarding the “structural causes” 1 of the war. The array of conflicting rational, geopolitical, strategic, and other “realist interests” 2 experienced by the relevant actors has been well developed in the literature. The conflicts among these interests have been explored. Those who regard the war as a result of classic, Great Power rivalry, have found no difficulty in tracing the history of these rivalries or in finding examples of “Great Power interests” which were being threatened in the years leading up to the war. I will discuss these accounts in detail later in this chapter.
Third, I am struck by the general lack of agreement among historians and social scientists who have contributed to this quite substantial literature regarding whether the proximate causes or “structural causes” were more contributing (or determining, dependent upon the epistemological perspective of the analyst) in generating the conflict. Fourth, and more importantly, I am struck by the fact that the debate continues so strongly, even among those investigating these events from the analytic perspective of “realist interests,” regarding whether proximate (microrealist) or structural (macrorealist) 3 causes were more important in generating the conflict. This debate continues, to my reading, in the context of an almost universal, stunned, and awed consensus among most analysts of the period that the effects of the war were so wildly out of proportion to, at the least, both the proximate causes of the war, and the declared war aims. As Kissinger has recently observed: “There was not a single specific Russian demand on Germany or a single German demand on Russia which merited a local war, much less a general one.” War broke out “because nationalistic politics in each country made them afraid to challenge their military establishments.” 4
The gulf between intentions and consequences, between war aims and effects, is so vast that scholars must continue to question whether they have understood the nature of the conflict at all, quite irrespective of the many volumes devoted to the topic that already weigh down the library shelves. The Treaty of Versailles was not concluded until millions lay dead, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled geographically as well as politically, and three major European dynasties—the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov—had vanished. 5 Additionally, in another view, “a world organization of supranational functions was created...[the League of Nations]...[t]he colonial era came to a close...[m]onarchy as an institution of real authority received a death blow while democracy and socialism made giant advances.” 6 Why should a war that many maintain began as just another Great Power struggle for European hegemony have been so physically, mortally, and politically destructive with such socially and institutionally creative consequences? The map of Europe was remade at the war’s termination, a natural enough Aussenpolitik consequence of so momentous a struggle. Yet the principles by which the map was remade, though certainly and obviously influenced by the “realist interests” of the victorious Great Power architects of the peace, were generally predicated on the what was then the relatively novel principle of national self-determination. The post-First World War map of Europe was the most substantial institutionalization of the new, system-legitimating principle of national self-determination achievable at that time, and is a monument to the strength of the new principle.
The close of the war also placed upon the world two institutions whose nature had not previously been encountered. The first of these was Soviet Russia—a gargantuan experiment in Marxist, proletarian socialism. The creation of the Soviet Union constituted the most substantial institutionalization of class identity then achievable. It was a manifestation of class identity of continental proportions that moved quickly to encompass the polyglot peoples of the old Czarist Empire within a theoretically unique form of working class sovereignty—the dictatorship of the proletariat. 7 Why should such an institutional form spring from the war-torn soils that had for so many centuries nurtured so well the reactionary roots of Czarist autocracy? Why this particular manifestation of Innenpolitik, so out of step with the second historically unique institution to be built on the political ground that had been leveled so thoroughly by the war—the first comprehensive, international institution of multilateralism, the League of Nations? Wilson’s League of Nations had been envisioned as a multilateral peacekeeping forum for the resolution of the disputes that would inevitably arise from the world of nationally self-determining, national sovereigns that he had envisioned. How could Lenin’s worker’s state—founded on Marxist notions of class consciousness, for which national divisions were anathema, and for which national consciousness constituted “false-consciousness”—find sustenance in the same climate as a Europe reconstituted in accordance with national-sovereign principles?
I will argue that a large measure of the answer to this and related puzzles lies in the evidence I will present that both national collective identity and class collective identity were stimulated and developed in the years leading up to the war, and brought to a crisis by it. National-identity commitments generally served as a stronger impetus to social action than class-identity commitments in this context. As others have observed, “the socialists marched.” National identity and class identity had, in the domestic political arena, developed simultaneously throughout the long nineteenth century, but had developed differentially within various “national” institutional contexts in Europe. In the terminology of Michael Mann, the state had “crystallized” as both capitalist and nationalist nearly everywhere. Variations in domestic institutional arrangements, however, resulted in variations in the franchises of the citizenry of relevant Great Power actors, with attendant variations in the depth of popular nationalist sentiment among them. Where the political franchise was relatively restricted, the popular internalization of the notion of bourgeois-national political citizenship that was so instrumental in the development of popular nationalism was relatively retarded, as in autocratic Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany proved an important exception to this tendency, for reasons that will be developed later. The significance of these observations is that internal domestic political arrangements (or regime type, if we prefer) constituted an institutional fact 8 that helped to structure popular, competing identity commitments within a “national” context. The legitimating principles of domestic social orders that were institutionalized in regimes, and that most severely limited bourgeois-national political citizenship, were unable to survive the legitimation crisis that accompanied defeat in war 9 and the attendant popular privation. 10 Survival was particularly difficult subsequent to the mass mobilization of these societies 11 for modern “total warfare.”
As will shortly become clear, co-constituted individual and collective identity was not monolithically “national” identity on the eve of the First World War. Class- and national-identity commitments coexisted and competed with one another in different segments of European populaces. Tensions between classes, which we might expect to be socially centrifugal, proved to be socially integral when the fear and hostility induced by increasing economic and social status anxiety in the lower and middle bourgeoisie was transferred to peoples whose “otherness” was defined by their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural attributes rather than by their socioeconomic class.
Nation and Class: The Issue of Middle-Class NAtionalism and the Bourgeois-Nationalist Milieu
In the last chapter I hope to have established my proposition that the competitive imperialist behavior of European (and American and Asian) nation-states in the late nineteenth century constituted a bourgeois-nationalist status competition in the periphery. For quite a long time, emerging European nation-states apparently satiated their appetite to manifest their national collective social identity to the world by transmitting the bourgeois-nationalist culture that encapsulated much of that identity to the periphery. The Social Darwinism that had provided the intellectual figleaf for the cultural aggression and racist condescension that had characterized the new imperialism soon found expression in a wholly European context, however. These expressions were both ethnic (racial) and cultural. When fellow Europeans could be viewed through the eyes of Social Darwinism, European Great Power politics could take on an entirely different dimension, particularly when considering actions taken by other European Powers, such as the German drive for naval parity with Great Britain, that could be interpreted as a challenge to existing power arrangements.
Eric Hobsbawm has recently argued that the period between the close of the Franco-Prussian War and the close of the First World War, saw the transformation of nationalism from the more diffuse, cultural-national affinities (“Mazzini nationalism”) that had served as the impetus for the German and Italian national-state-building projects to a more potent, neotraditional, rightist nationalism. In the period between 1880 and 1914, the principle of national self determination was evolving into a right to sovereign territorial independence for any group laying claim to nationhood. Ethnicity and language had become the criterion for putting forward claims to independent national-statehood, and the period witnessed a sharp move to the right of both nation and flag. 12
Nationalist movements were now to be found in regions where they had not previously been seen. This was to become an enormous, and ultimately insurmountable problem for the polyglot Hapsburg Empire, which had been driven to the exigency of a “dual-monarchy” arrangement with the increasingly rebellious Magyar peoples, who constituted the most significant non-German minority governed increasingly ineffectively from Vienna. Racially virulent, ethno-linguistic nationalisms had developed in this period in response to both social and political changes that were transforming the lives of all European peoples after 1870. Socially, nationalism developed as a reaction to the insecurities and anxieties attending industrialization, urbanization, and mass migration. Politically, these economically and status-anxious peoples were becoming politically active in an era characterized by the “citizen-mobilizing” state, the rise of mass politics (with the creep of democratization), and the increasing nationalization of language attending the rise of administrative vernaculars. 13 The relentless penetration of the state into society, particularly through the exposure of the masses of the citizenry to the institutions of the army, and of public schools, had brought the official (high-culture) 14 vernacular into universal usage.
As the official vernacular became the language of the bourgeoisie, of administration and of the state, and the vehicle for the transmission of secondary education, Hobsbawm argues that the middle strata of society became fragmented in accordance with its proficiency in adopting the official vernacular. This enhanced the insecurity of the lower bourgeoisie, which adopted the official vernacular less proficiently. Xenophobic, neotraditional nationalism became attractive to them, as national identity developed in reaction to liberalism, capitalism, Jews and migrant workers, and other sources of lower-bourgeois economic and social status insecurity. In this view, chauvinism compensated, at the level of individual and class psychology, for the insecurity attending rapid social and economic change, and petty bourgeois downward mobility. 15 According to Hobsbawm: “... identification with the state was essential to the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie and lesser middle classes. If they had no state as yet, national independence would give them the position they felt they deserved...nationalism gave them the social identity that proletarians got from their class movement.” 16
While Hobsbawm provides us with a plausible explanation for the origins of the phenomena of middle-class nationalism in particular, and popular nationalism in general, his account has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. I assert that Europe approached the First World War strongly under the influence of a bourgeois, hypernationalist milieu that permeated society and enhanced its proclivity for a violent confrontation to settle competing nationalist status claims. This environment also exacerbated the scope and destructiveness, thus the ultimate social and political consequences of the war. It is worthwhile to pause briefly and examine the debate regarding the social composition and breadth of the promoters of this nationalist sentiment in order to more fully comprehend the significance of the interplay of overlapping national and class self-identifications during this period. I will attempt to demonstrate later in the chapter how the interplay between these overlapping identity commitments help to illuminate the debate regarding whether macrorealist, Aussenpolitik factors, or microrealist, Innenpolitik issues were more pertinent to explaining the events attending the origins, conduct, and consequences of the First World War.
Mann’s work suggests that virulent national collective identity was by no means uniformly in evidence throughout the middle classes. Yet in criticizing Hobsbawm’s analysis, he appears to support the argument that the lurch toward the right by the middle strata of the European bourgeoisie in this period, and their consistent tendency to ally themselves with capital and the state, is a consequence of what I have earlier referred to as bourgeois timidity. Middle-class conservatism, he argues, may be explained with reference to the middle strata bourgeoisie’s “integration into capitalist investment channels...[and]...desire to distinguish themselves in consumption, culture, and qualifications from workers.” 17 Mann’s verdict on the significance of this class as agents of social change and historical transformation is roughly similar in tone to Greenfeld’s judgment that the French bourgeoisie inherited rather than made the French Revolution as they were “a middling sort of people, smart enough to recognize a good opportunity.” 18 Mann all but dismisses them when he intones that “[i]f the state were merely capitalist, without other significant crystallizations, the middle class might bore the historian.” 19 The analytically significant component of Mann’s argument is his division of the middle strata of the bourgeois into four distinct substrata. Each of these substrata exhibited different levels and behavioral manifestations of national-identity commitments. In Mann’s taxonomy, the middle bourgeoisie may be subdivided into petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, small-business proprietors etc.), corporate careerists, bureaucratic careerists and professionals. 20
There had indeed developed an important domestic alliance—particularly in the multiparty democracies such as Great Britain, France, and the United States—between capital and their middle-bourgeois staffs. This alliance helped to avoid major class upheavals through the extension of political citizenship to these middle strata. Mann observes that the virulently nationalist element of the middle class, that I argue contributed so tragically to the bourgeois-nationalist milieu that enveloped Europe as it approached 1914 came predominantly from the substrata of the state careerist (bureaucrats, state employees, public school teachers) and from the most highly educated elements among the corporate careerists and professionals. 21
Middle-class nationalism was, then, a distinctly “statist nationalism” 22 and drawn from self-identifications of elements of the middle-bourgeois with the national-state. The state careerists drew their bourgeois status, so essential to self-esteem and social respectability in a thoroughly bourgeois society, from their function in service to the bourgeois-national state, and from no other source. The most highly educated segments of the corporate careerist and professional strata, even in relatively authoritarian Germany and Austria, had been thoroughly imbued with the nationalist thought parceled out in the process of acquiring a university education. 23 Neither were university students in the multiparty democracies spared an infusion of nationalist indoctrination in the course of their studies. According to one study, the number of undergraduates in residence at the Oxford examination schools fell from 3,097 at the onset of hostilities in the summer of 1914 to 1,387 by October, as young men (the “lost generation”) left Oxford in waves for the trenches. This resident population had fallen to 369 by 1918. 24 Mann and Howard agree that the more highly educated one was, the more virulently nationalist one was likely to be. 25
Thus nationalism was not everywhere middle-bourgeois. Just as the middle-bourgeoisies were not uniformly virulently nationalist within a domestic setting, there were also important variations among middle-bourgeois nationalisms in various national settings. Mann argues that middle-class nationalism was very hard to find in the United States during this period. 26 Of course, unlike the German case, the American middle-bourgeois strata had no real cause to fear American proletarians. 27 Karl Polanyi’s account of the fictional nature of the functioning of the “hidden hand” of the “self-regulating market” in the context of the American nineteenth century goes a long way toward explaining the absence of this class conflict here. 28 What Polanyi refers to as “free land,” “free labor” and “free money” in America, so long as the frontier remained open and immigration remained unrestricted, had obviated the bourgeois timidity that reminded the status-anxious German and Austrian middle-bourgeois strata to remain loyal, socially conservative servants of capital and of the state. The middle-bourgeoisie could hardly have been said to exist in quasi-feudal, rural, and autocratic Russia, and was more likely to have been populated by semiliterate, kulak 29 rural proprietors than servants or staffs of urban, industrialized capital concerns in any case.
It was in Austria, and particularly in Germany, that the bourgeois status anxiety of the middle-bourgeoisie was adequate for the practice of “social imperialism” policies by the state. Much more than elsewhere, class and national identity “cross-cut” one another. The national-state loyalty of the nationalist segments of the middle-strata bourgeois class was a necessary prop to the maintenance of the bourgeois identity and respectability, with which their functions in service to the national-state alone provided them. Specifically the German regime was able to practice “divide and rule” domestic politics by playing on the bourgeois status anxiety of all of the middle strata. 30 The German government “brought the middle class to the edges of the state in order to keep labor [especially the socialists and social democrats] and ethnic minorities well outside it.” 31
The emerging definition of German citizenship in this period had fully enfranchised some and disenfranchised others. In the Wilhelmine period, the citizenship laws were reformed to deal with the specific problems that the old citizenship law, based upon Prussian law, had created, in an era of rampant ethno-linguistic nationalism. Under the older laws, the Auslandsdeutsche—Germans living abroad, having emigrated to America or the German colonies—automatically lost their citizenship if they did not return to Germany to reside there within ten years of emigrating abroad. This rankled the burgeoning German nationalist pressure groups, particularly the Pan-German League, the German Colonial Society, and the German School Association, which put enormous popular pressure on the relatively insulated monarchic German government for revision of this stipulation. Neither had it been acceptable to German nationalists that under the Prussian-based legal citizenship code that ethnic Germans who had emigrated from Germany to potentially forfeit their German citizenship could be replaced by Volksfremde—foreigners of non-German ethnicity—as citizens. Thus German citizenship law changed in 1913 to predicate German citizenship explicitly on German ethnicity, in order to ensure that Reichesdeutsche (citizens of the Reich) were also Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). 32 In a move that appeared clearly designed to appease specifically nationalist sentiment, the new Wilhelmine citizenship law “made citizenship more accessible to emigrants permanently settled outside, and less accessible to immigrants permanently settled inside, the Reich.” 33
French nationalism had also “migrated to the right” in this period. 34 By the last decade of the nineteenth century the French conception of nationality had in practice if not in theory narrowed from a broader “state-centered and assimilationist” view to a “ethnocultural counteridiom.” 35 In practice this appeared to exclude Jews. France struggled madly with the issue of French nationality for a decade during the Dreyfus Affair. The issue at stake here was whether the French nation could bear the blow to the prestige of the French Army that would attend the revelation that an innocent officer of Jewish extraction had been interred for life on Devil’s Island on the basis of evidence manufactured against him by the French army. 36 This revelation was ultimately professed in turn by the journalist Émile Zola and then by French Army Colonel Georges Picquart, at the cost of significant personal sacrifice at the hands of the French nation in return for their effort. That the issue of Dreyfus’s innocence or guilt so polarized the French nation for so many years, that taking a stand in favor of his innocence was for so many an insult to the Army and thus the nation, indicates that in these years of right-leaning nationalism many minority citizens of France had but a tenuous hold on their citizenship. The issue of Austro-Hungarian citizenship was increasingly problematic as centrifugal nationalist pressures for ethno-linguistic nationalist self-determination mounted inside the Dual Empire. 37 Thousands of lives were lost in nationalist and anti-imperialist struggles against the Hapsburg masters in this period. The Hapsburg monarchy lurched from crisis to crisis in this period in a continuous search for a means by which an ancient, territorial-sovereign dynasty could continue to rule over a vast assortment of peoples and cultures who were increasingly self-aware as particularistic ethno-linguistic nationals. The Empire was progressively becoming too great a dinosaur to survive the full dawn of the national-sovereign era. It was dead even before it was aware of its own demise. It is undeniable that Vienna’s insistence upon desperate reaction against this centrifugal nationalism, to the very end, both hastened that end and served as a proximate cause of the war.
As is well known, the assassin’s bullet that felled the Austrian Arch-Duke in Sarajevo was an instrument of Serbian nationalism. This Serbian nationalism had been alive even at the formation of the Dual Empire between Austria and Hungary in 1867 when the Serbian prince was juridically the vassal of the Turkish Sultan, and Serbia already languished under the rule of the Ottoman Empire that was so soon to precede the Hapsburg Empire into collapse. 38 I have perused few issues in the literature on the proximate causes of the war upon which I have found more agreement than that Austro-Hungarian insistence on punishing Serbia was one of the most critical proximate causes of the war. The court at Vienna had been simply desperate to make an example of Serbia, lest more nationalist uprisings be encouraged in the Empire, and quite irrespective of the highly conciliatory Serb response to the impossibly drafted ultimatum. Thus one of the most spectacular consequences of the continued coexistence of national-collective identity, and territorial-sovereign institutional structures was an event that served as a trigger for a global war. The perceived requirements for the confederal state of territorial-sovereign Hapsburg Austria to punish subject, centrifugally nationalist Serbia provided the spark that would ignite a generational holocaust and ultimately demolish the continental institutional manifestations of the territorial-sovereign form. But before turning to and testing the microrealist and macrorealist accounts, it is important to pause and illustrate how domestic, Innenpolitik, nationalist pressures contributed to, among other things, the policies that became the Aussenpolitik grievances that macrorealist and structural realist theories suggest were the “structural causes” of the war.
Nationalist Pressure Groups and the Pld Regime’s Insecurities: Wilhelm II as Germany’s Napoleon III
The historiography of the First World War, to the extent that it concerns itself with assigning responsibility for the initiation of hostilities, generally recognizes that there was plenty of blame to go around but pays special attention to the issue of German nationalism and what is seen to be a particularly aggressive German foreign policy in the years leading up to the war. The work of Fritz Fischer has been particularly influential in this regard. 39 Among theorists of international relations, Stephen Van Evera’s 1986 game theoretic evaluation of the events leading up to the war concludes by drawing upon the title of Fischer’s most influential work by suggesting that “World War I was a war of illusions, caused by the misperceptions that afflicted contemporary European societies...misperceptions were the taproot of the war.” 40 Many of these “illusions” and “misperceptions” were generated by what must be acknowledged to be the extraordinarily aggressive and consistently threatening German policy and behavior during the reign of Wilhelm II after his dismissal of Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890. 41 The latter event had its origins in Wilhelm’s obvious resentment under Bismarck’s tutelage from the time of his succession to the imperial throne in 1888. 42
The sources of this aggressive foreign policy, according to realist accounts, are to be found alternatively in Germany’s “fear of encirclement” by the other Great Powers in the European system, or strangely conversely, in Germany’s insistence upon challenging British hegemony. In the latter sort of account, Germany is a rising star on the European scene whose rate of economic growth (fungibly translatable into military power) outstrips that of all rivals, including the reigning but declining hegemon, Great Britain. 43 Other important realist accounts treat Germany’s behavior as a more generically directed attempt to alter “the balance of power,” if not to replace the reigning hegemon. 44 These are, of course, all largely structural arguments. Even those which deal with the issue of nationalism as an aggravating factor, such as Morgenthau’s work, pay inadequate attention to the interplay between popular national collective identity and elite decisionmaking procedures. As I will shortly argue, even elites that were still nominally afforded the luxury of a relatively insulated decisionmaking process, in the era of popular nationalism, found that Innenpolitik, popular nationalist pressures oriented them toward policy moves and decisions that could appear bellicose and threatening to other powers, who were generally subject to similar pressures.
One source of this pressure, particularly important in the German context, were the patriotic societies, the Nationale Verbände—voluntary associations that functioned as nationalist pressure groups and actively sought to sway public opinion, through the publication of pamphlets and propaganda, and thus influence the press and national decisionmaking centers to consider their particularistic policy goals.
these associations included the Colonial Society (1882; consolidated 1887), the Pan-German League (1891), the Society of the Eastern Marches (1894), the Navy League (1898), the Imperial League against Social Democracy (1904), and the Army League (1912). By the Eve of the First World War, the patriotic societies could muster impressive membership totals: the Colonial Society (42,000), the Pan-German League (18,000), the Imperial League against Social Democracy (221,000), the Navy League (331,000), and the Army League (90,000). 45
Historical evaluation of the social composition of these nationalist pressure groups, and their effectiveness in impacting Imperial German policy, has yielded interesting debates regarding the assertions of some social historians that Imperial Germany had been able to practice a domestic policy of Sammlungspolitik. This has been argued to have been a form of social imperialism, by which the Prussian, Junker elites had been able to keep the masses in check by identifying domestic proponents of socialism, social democracy, and even milder forms of liberal reformism as Reichsfeinde, or enemies of the Reich. This was ostensibly accomplished by identifying the military with the Crown and state, and with the Vaterland. If Sammlungspolitik was practiced successfully by the German government this would tend to support the view that nationalism was a tool for statesmen that enabled them to accomplish foreign policy objectives determined by rationally calculated status interests. It would not support the contrary position, that policies which reflected the will of the people as a national collectivity were placed on the foreign policy agenda of statesmen anxious to maintain their position and popularity by satisfying that national-sovereign will with their Aussenpolitik policy prescriptions.
Geoff Eley’s work on the social composition of the German right, and on the Navy League, has made the contrary argument. 46 Eley argues that these German Nationale Verbände were “self-mobilized, popular nationalist association[s]” 47 dominated by the petty-bourgeoisie, and quite critical of the government, which would indicate that class conflict was too antipathetic within German society to be fobbed off by a transparent Sammlungspolitik ploy by the government. These associations were in no way subject to elite manipulation in this view, but rather were hotbeds of “radical nationalism.” They were a “constructive ideological assault on the old order, its parliamentary practices and forms of legitimacy.” 48 They became “mobilizers of a new kind of patriotic and political movement, independent of government control.” 49
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| Figure 4: Social Composition of German Army League 1914-18 50 |
Coetzee’s data, however, support quite effectively Michael Mann’s arguments regarding the character of middle-class nationalism in this period. Note that 75 percent of the membership of the League during the war period consisted of members of the bourgeois classes. Of the members in the 24 percent category marked “other” in figure 4, 2.4 percent were landed elites, 0.6 percent were nonacademic intellectuals, 1.9 percent were clergyman, 5 percent were innkeepers, 1.5 percent were doctors, and 3.8 percent were women. Only 1 percent were artisans, only 1.1 percent were workers, 0.3 percent were retired and the occupational status of 7.1 percent was unknown. 51 Thus we can see that we can place 75 percent of the membership within those substrata of the middle-bourgeoisie that Mann suggests were statist nationalists—people who owed their bourgeois status to their functions and positions in the national state, or who were highly educated professional or business people who had been subjected to the virulently nationalist content of a university education. The underrepresentation of “innkeepers” or shopkeepers or artisans indicates that at least the German Army League was not a petty-bourgeois association. Mann argues that similar data provided by Roger Chickering and Geoff Eley—regarding the social composition of the Navy League, the Pan-German League, and the Society of the Eastern Marches—provide results that appear to be quite similar to those that I have derived from Coetzee’s work on the German Army League. 52
The importance of this issue is that it helps us to assess the social composition of the nationalist groups that actively sought to become opinion leaders in Wilhelmine German society. Coetzee argues that “By mobilizing the opinions of German citizens, in particular those of the middle classes, in order to redirect the course of nationalist politics, the Army League activists intended to prove themselves more effective leaders than Germany’s ruling bureaucrats.” 53
Due, if only in part, to the efforts of these Nationale Verbände, one outlet of opinion formation that certainly had an effect on the attitudes and policies of Wilhelm II, was the press. The German press had became increasingly nationalistic, jingoistic, and critical of what it perceived as governmental failure to establish a Weltpolitik which would gain Germany the respect on the world stage that it had earned by its accomplishments since unification. Wilhelm spent an inordinate amount of his time reading through and marginally annotating press clippings. Bismarck would have regarded this as a vain, idle, and quixotic way in which the bearer of the imperial crown of the German Empire should spend his time. But Wilhelm had dismissed Bismarck, and had become convinced that he could best gain insight into the likely policy movements of any nation with which Germany maintained diplomatic relations by reading its press.
Wilhelm was convinced of the power of mass opinion, perhaps by the ruinous impact that a poor opinion of his parents, Friedrich and Victoria, which had been strongly reflected over the years in the German press, had delivered to his own families’ life and happiness. 54 It is interesting to contemplate the significance of Wilhelm’s respect for the power of popular opinion when we consider that he, aside from Nicholas II, might otherwise be thought of as the most insulated decisionmaker to take part in the Great War—if we are to judge the matter by internal institutional arrangements.
Clearly Franz Joseph in Vienna was aware that his decisionmaking must at least take into account internal centrifugal nationalist opinion. Nicholas had demonstrated little more understanding of the domestic difficulties that his autocratic decisionmaking procedures had caused him than had his father, Alexander III, before him. 55 Wilhelm regarded any statement critical of him, his government, or policies in the domestic or international press to be a matter of first importance. His concern for what he perceived to be the bellicose tone of the British press is evident as early as 1903 in his marginal annotation of a newspaper account of a British-Portuguese diplomatic engagement. British King “Edward’s statement at a banquet given by the king of Portugal, ‘Je ne veux pas la guerre...c’est la paix que je désire,’ prompted Wilhelm to write; ‘Mais la Times!’ referring to the influential and Germanophobic British paper.” 56
No less a realist than Henry Kissinger has paused in his writings to note the sensitivity of Wilhelm to mass opinion, particularly as expressed in the press, and especially those expressions of mass opinion that issued forth from the opinion leadership of nationalist pressure groups. Kissinger writes in his recent book that:
the German public was demanding an ever more assertive foreign policy...it was the new industrial managerial and the growing professional classes that provided the nucleus of nationalist agitation....As autocratic as Germany was, its leaders were extremely sensitive to public opinion and heavily influenced by nationalistic pressure groups. These groups saw diplomacy and international relations almost as if they were sporting events, always pushing the government to a harder line, more territorial expansion, more colonies, a stronger army, or a larger navy. 57
Yet as Jervis has already pointed out, 58 none of these “assertive” policies could be viewed without alarm by the government of Great Britain, among other powers. Incremental enhancements in the power of an already powerful Germany, even if designed to enhance German defensive capabilities, or simply to appease the jingoistic mob at home, could be viewed as an offensive threat to the security of Germany’s neighbors. British opinion certainly could not be persuaded that Germany’s crash program to build a powerful blue-water navy was a defensive measure.
The theoretical and empirical ground regarding the “security dilemma” that these policies generated has been well trod upon. I am more than happy to acknowledge Robert Jervis’s important contribution to our understanding of these issues. What interests me here are two propositions. The first is the extent to which the security dilemma, so well described by Jervis, was exacerbated by the hypernationalist milieu in which these policies were formulated and executed. The second is the extent to which these policies, generated as they were, at least in part, by the pressure of the national-sovereign voice of the German people, were formally irrational and executed by a government which recognized them as formally irrational. 59 The latter issue, if it can be demonstrated, is particularly significant for what it says about the radical reduction of the insularity of elite decisionmaking in the nationalist era. To the extent that Wilhelm formulated an aggressive foreign policy, while aware of the risks that he was running, in order to appease the nationalist press and mass nationalist opinion, he emerges as the German version of Napoleon III. 60
It is hardly difficult to argue that the hypernationalist environment in which Wilhelmine foreign policy was formulated was conducive to envisioning any expansion of a potential adversary’s national military or economic power as a potentially mortal threat. The promulgation of faddish Social Darwinism, which had laced the already combustible nationalist ideologies of the day with the even more incendiary proposition of national, cultural, or racial survival, had ensured that this would be the case. The patriotic societies had nearly uniformly preached the inevitability and desirability of war as “an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation finds the highest expression...a biological necessity of the first importance.” 61
In this view, any future war would be a Krieg ums Dasein, a Vernichtungskrieg, 62 a “natural” and “healthy,” almost biological function. Those elements of German society which denigrated this view, especially socialists and pacifists, were condemned by the nationalist pressure groups as “decadent classes who used peace as a ‘weapon of domination’ to protect their interests.” 63 We can express little surprise that to the extent that this crude Social-Darwinist thought was influential in Germany and in European society at large in the early twentieth century, the First World War would consequently constitute a “total war” between mobilized, national-sovereign societies. Industrial society was thoroughly organized and mobilized to provide the masses of armaments and material required to sustain a global conflict between armies numbering in the millions. Even the liberal Third Republic was to introduce a new and intrusive conscription measure in preparation for the coming conflict. 64 Industrial mobilization proceeded in the teeth of quite divisive class conflict providing unprecedented firepower. British artillery delivered 1.7 million shells on German positions in eight days at the opening of the summer 1916 Somme offensive, and 4.2 million shells in the fourteen days preceding the summer 1917 Passchendaele offensive. 65
German opinion, in the years leading up the war, had been particularly nationally charged as the German people had taken justifiable pride in their collective accomplishments since unification. They hoped and expected, and then later demanded, to see these accomplishments acknowledged by the rest of European society, and were thrilled to discern any indication of this recognition in their reading of the fruits of Wilhelmine diplomacy. Wilhelm had been quite responsive to these demands and it is not surprising that German society registered the world’s treatment of Wilhelm as the world’s treatment of Germany.
This proclivity of the German people to live vicariously, as it were, through the Aussenpolitik of Wilhelm and the German nation is both causally significant for the conduct of prewar German foreign policy, and inexplicable without reference to the constitutive linkages between individual and collective identity in my earlier theoretical development. Durkheim’s insights regarding the “organic solidarity of dissimilar individuals” develops demonstrable social agency in this context. 66 It is here that Druckman’s observations, gleaned from his analysis of the literature on in-group biases, regarding the criticality of collective identification of the self with the group for individual self-esteem, become so analytically cogent. 67
As Kohut notes in a passage that resonates perfectly with my assertions regarding collective identity formation and collective societal goals:
In an age of nationalism people define themselves to a greater or lesser degree in terms of the nation to which they belong. Thus a nation’s defeat or victory may be experienced with a sense of personal humiliation or exhilaration by its citizens even though that defeat or victory does not affect them directly. Defining themselves as part of that collective identity called Germany, Germans were emotionally invested in their country’s fortunes and invested in the personal symbol of that collective identity. In an age of nationalism, in other words, Wilhelm II was experienced by his subjects as an extension of themselves. 68
Unlike the hapless Napoleon III, Wilhelm could claim dynastic legitimacy and a legacy of illustrious Hohenzollern forbears stretching back in popular patriotic memory to Friedrich the Great, the conqueror of Austrian Silesia in the early eighteenth century. Kohut’s biographical account of Wilhelm’s relationship with his subjects leaves little doubt, however, that Wilhelm sensed quite correctly that if he wished to reign in the nationalist era—particularly at the dawn of the twentieth century, that “his position and power depended upon popular support.” 69 As German nationalist opinion continued to develop, Wilhelm had increasingly found his personal popularity to be hostage to his capacity to satisfy this opinion. To the extent that this was true, Wilhelm found himself in a very similar position to that which had caused Napoleon III to take such consistently disastrous decisions in the interests of appeasing public and nationalist opinion.
The notion of interest expressed by the national-sovereign, the people of the German Empire, could emerge as significantly different than the notion of interest that we might expect a territorial-sovereign, rational, insulated decisionmaker to pursue. An effective strategy for Wilhelm to practice, in this context, was to pursue policies that allowed him to tap into the emotional energy that the German people had invested in the German nation, and in him as the personal symbol of the nation. Wilhelm thus often practiced Gefühlspolitik, the politics of feeling, rather than Realpolitik, with often disastrous results for German relations with other European powers. This was the case, for example, when Wilhelm had sent a telegram in 1896 to South African President Krüger, to offer congratulations upon a Boer victory over British forces. Publication of the telegram boosted Wilhelm’s stock in Germany, and inflamed British opinion to very ill effect. 70 Kissinger has recently argued that the publication of Wilhelm’s congratulatory note to Krüger “undermined [Wilhelm’s] option for a British alliance for the rest of the century.” 71 But the response to the Krüger telegram in Germany was distinctly pleasurable. The German liberal daily Allgemeine Zeitung, had intoned appreciatively that “Nothing that the government has done for years...has given as complete satisfaction...It is written from the soul of the German people.” 72 However desirous they might have been of returning to a Bismarckian policy of Realpolitik, and however often they might try to steer Wilhelm back to it, the Old Regime statesmen surrounding Wilhelm were aware of the difficulties. As Wilhelm’s Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, had remarked shortly after the publication of the Krüger telegram, and the concomitant uproar, “[t]he threat of war in our times lies...in the internal politics of those countries in which a weak government is confronted by a strong nationalist movement.” 73
Thus it may be argued that nationalist opinion, and Wilhelm’s dependence upon it for the popularity of his personal reign and political regime, increasingly drove an aggressive German foreign policy posture that had begun to appear quite threatening to Germany’s neighbors. Kohut has argued that these dynamics were at work in the Kaiser’s shift to a policy of Weltpolitik, in the German colonial expansion, in the 1897 German occupation of Kiaochow, Wilhelm’s 1899 Samoan treaty, his extreme reaction to the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, and his “conduct in the Moroccan crises 1905 and 1911.” 74 Bethmann-Hollweg indicated that he understood very well how the interplay between German nationalist sentiment at home, and Wilhelm’s reliance upon basking in the glow of that sentiment, caused Wilhelm to pursue policies that were alarming to Europe, without providing a Realpolitik benefit to Germany. Bethmann-Hollweg described Wilhelm’s foreign policy in 1913 in the following, clearly disgusted, terms. “Challenge everybody, put yourself in everybody’s path and actually weaken no one in this fashion. Reason: aimlessness, the need for little prestige successes and solicitude for every current of public [nationalist] opinion.” 75
Wilhelm’s naval policy, oriented toward the development of a blue-water German navy capable of challenging British naval supremacy is the best example of a policy that played to adoring crowds at home in Germany, and caused Britain and others to feel fundamentally threatened by Germany. Regardless of the benefit Germany derived from such a naval buildup, it “was kaiserliche: it embodied monarchical-imperial power.” 76
These observations tend to support those analysts who argue that the Wilhelmine policies of naval expansion and Weltpolitik indicate a policy of social imperialism at the level of Innenpolitik. Kohut acknowledges that “the Kaiser, Bülow, and [Admiral] Tirpitz all hoped that the naval construction and Weltpolitik would have an integrative [domestic] effect.” 77 Yet he goes on to argue persuasively that this policy was more effective in this regard than Wilhelm and his Old Regime colleagues might have hoped.
Within short order, however, the government found itself attacked for being too moderate, too modest, too Anglophile. At that point, rather than attempting to stir up nationalist and imperialist sentiment, the government found itself trying to damp that sentiment down. The attempt to manipulate the public had failed. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the leaders of the Reich found themselves overwhelmed by forces they had called forth and could not control. 78
Social Identities in the Critique of Realist Theories of the Great War
I want to conclude this chapter with some observations that I hope will serve in the way of correctives to some of the more rigid structural realist explanations of the First World War, and with some observations regarding its revolutionary consequences for the subsequent patterns of politics in the international system. Structural realist accounts of the Great War, whether written by historians, sociologists, or political scientists, tend to view the war as quite nearly a pure product of great-power rivalry. Such analysis tends to focus on the primacy of Aussenpolitik and of Realtpolitik. State policies, decisions, and actions follow neatly from the responses of statesmen to changes in the relative position of international actors in these accounts.
It is far from my purpose to argue that there were no structural factors—including those stemming from changes in the relative positions of, for example, Germany and Great Britain—which contributed to the generation of the conflict. Clearly Great Britain was suffering relative economic decline with respect to both Germany and the United States and was suffering relative military decline with respect to unified Germany, particularly after Germany embarked on its aggressive naval program. 79 Certainly the demise of the Ottoman Empire, after a lingering illness, left a vacuum in the Balkans and elsewhere in Southeastern Europe in which Austrian and Russian territorial-geopolitical interests were bound to clash. Certainly German concern over an ambitious Russian modernization program, particularly Russian modernization of its rail system, provided an inducement for Germany to fight Russia sooner rather than later if Berlin were truly committed to the notion of the inevitability of such a conflict. Certainly European alliance formation in this period had polarized the continent militarily, particularly subsequent to the Russo-French Entente Cordiale of 1891, and even more severely after Britain joined the Entente. There can be little doubt that this confronted Germany with the prospect of a two-front war, thrust Germany into closer alignment with Austria-Hungary, and enhanced the security penalties for failing to support an ally in even the most reasonable of demands. These issues, and all the rest of the structural and positional issues that are so well developed in the familiar, structural realist lore regarding the sources of the First World War are, in my view, salient and significant sources of the conflict. I will not quarrel in this respect.
I will, however, quarrel with the attendant accounts of the reasons that these issues were as salient as they were, and with the notion that the conflict was an “unavoidable” consequence of these structural features of the contemporary international system. One of the major reasons these factors were such salient sources of conflict is that the quixotic social identities of particularly Central European elites “tended to reinforce realist behavior among statesmen.” 80 The “Old Regime” component of the social identity of these statesmen induced them to think reflexively in terms of an old regime conception of the pursuit of national interest that was still distinctly territorial. As Mann observes, in the thinking of these Old Regime statesmen—though they were now in the service of increasingly national-sovereign rather than territorial-sovereign regimes—national “status” and “honor” were still bound up with the anachronistically territorial conceptions of nineteenth-century geopolitics. This residual territoriality was reinforced by the retention of the territorially bounded state as an institutional form of collective action, even while the latter was in the process of becoming the nation-state. In the lexicon of Mann, national status and honor (as opposed to dynastic status and honor) were to be defended territorially because “ ‘[w]e’ are defined territorially as the members of a state, not of localities, regions, or transnational collectivities.” 81
These Old Regime statesmen were not themselves nationalist but were “pro-capitalist, monarchist, militarist,” particularly in Central Europe, but “nationalism pressured them without and within.” 82 When the Austro-Serbian crisis came in the summer of 1914, a combination of nationalist pressure and Old Regime misperceptions generated a spiral of posturing that resulted in mobilization. Austria felt it had to punish Serbia or face unending centrifugal nationalist violence and agitation the regime in Vienna could not survive. Germany felt it had to back Austria or lose a valuable ally, and face withering criticism from the nationalists at home. Russia felt it had to at least partially mobilize or face continued bullying from Germany, which in any case preferred to fight Russia prior to further Russian modernization. France could not afford to tarry in mobilizing with the memories of Sedan still fresh in the popular mind. Britain could not tolerate German occupation of Belgium and Belgian ports near the channel, particularly in light of the German naval expansion.
As Mann observed, contra Morgenthau, the war was by no means an “inevitable” consequence of geopolitical shifts in relative position or of balances of power. It is not clear than any party to the conflict regarded the war as a rational means of “reordering the system.” The war was not fought for either material or ideational reasons. 83 Mann argues persuasively that the pressures of popular nationalism, continuously expanded in this period by the aggressive, middle-bourgeois, statist nationalists, created the environment in which statesmen were impelled to go to war for formally irrational reasons. He provides an amusing but helpful illustration.
the nation can be represented as that cartoonist’s delight, the late nineteenth-century anarchist’s bomb, a black, pudding-shaped ball with a protruding fuse. The fuse is composed of the statist nationalists; the combustible material is composed of the full citizens, whose shallow aggressive [nationalist] pressure endures long enough to cause the explosion, which is the enormous power of the military state hurling outward the jagged fragments, coercively disciplined workers and peasants. The fuse needed igniting, however. 84
The fuse was surely ignited in Sarajevo in June of 1914.
One of the most significant aspects of Mann’s quite original development of the sources of the First World War is his observation that the most intense nationalist pressure came from the middle-bourgeois statist-nationalists (those middle-bourgeoisie who owed their bourgeois societal status to their statist functions in society). Much of European society, among the “full citizens,” those fully enfranchised, were “shallow” nationalists. They responded to nationalist messages, identified with nationalist goals, and possessed national collective identity, but were not as fully committed to this identity as the statist nationalists. They were committed, unequally, to “multiple identities” 85 which imbued them with identity commitments that diluted the salience of the social action that stemmed from the more undiluted national identity commitments of the statist-nationalists, and from what Eley calls the radical nationalists.
Carleton Hayes is correct that the First World War “turned out to be a supremely nationalistic war...[and that]...[a]s soon as war was declared, both masses and classes rallied to the support of their respective governments” 86 , and that nationalism was, perhaps, both the “cause and result of World War I.” 87 Yet it is not the case that public enthusiasm for the war was universal or instantaneous. In a recent study of the French reaction to the mobilization of August 1914, it appears that the initial news of the mobilization in the French countryside and provincial towns was met more often with expressions of surprise, consternation, graveness and sadness than with enthusiasm. 88 However, “[b]y the time the soldiers departed [for the front], those who responded negatively to mobilization had become a minority.” 89 A caustic remark by David Lloyd George suggests that the same pattern of response was observed among the mobilizing populace of Great Britain, when he suggested that “ ‘[t]he War had leaped into popularity between Sunday and Monday’ ” 90 as war was declared across Europe.
As Mann suggests, and as we should at this juncture have no difficulty in understanding or explaining, there was very little working-class nationalism or peasant nationalism to be found in Europe at this date precisely because these classes were still largely socially and economically disenfranchised. They had not been accorded the full citizenship that is so important to the generation of national collective identity. They “did not usually identify strongly...with the nation-state...[b]ecause it was not their state.” 91 The bourgeoisie, particularly the state-dependent substrata of the middle-bourgeoisie, had found the institutional form of collective action which permitted them to express their own social agency, and manifest it to the world. “[T]he state was theirs. Because it symbolized their imagined community, they might more easily identify with its ‘greatness,’ ‘honor,’ and geopolitical interests. As the state had become the nation-state, sacred reasons of state might become sacred national interests.” 92
The working and peasant classes were not able to acquire an institutional form of collective actions that could serve as a vehicle for the expression of their particular structure of identities and interests in 1914. These classes might have been quite aware of their class identity and interests at this time, but the social agency that these identity commitments might have expressed or propagated was encumbered by an institutional obstacle. The horizons of working-class social identity were, in 1914, severely circumscribed by the institutional structures of the national-state. The levers by which these institutional structures might be manipulated were already firmly in the hands of the domestic bourgeoisie. This is still the case. Only in Soviet Russia, in 1917, were the working classes to find an institutional form of collective action that was at all capable of serving as a vehicle for the encapsulation of their class-based form of social agency. Even here, the scope of their agency was to be limited by the stubborn failure of the national-statist institutional structures of the rest of capitalist international society to crumble under the persistent pressure of class antagonism. In fact, the capitalist national state was, in Mann’s lexicon, to “crystallize” as even more intensely nationalist in the intervening years between the First World War and the next, but this is a topic for another book.
I conclude this section by signaling broad agreement with Mann’s analysis. European society on the eve of the First World war was infused with national collective identity, and thus quite combustible, but was not uniformly aggressively nationalist due to the persistence of class antagonisms. As Mann argues trenchantly, “[n]ational identity was now deeply rooted in both intensive and extensive social practices, but aggressive nationalism was not.” 93 Aggressive nationalism was to later become much more broadly experienced within European (and non-European society), but was not so broad nor uniform in 1914.
Still, we are left not only with the fact that “the socialists marched,” but also with the fact that once enlisted in the struggle the men who fought in the trenches for four devastating years did go “over the top” into withering fire with unprecedented loss of life. The American doughboys and Canadian denizens of the “dominion” did go “over there” to fight and often to die in a struggle removed from their land and lives by a vast ocean. We must be impressed by how far removed these battles were from the eighteenth-century conflicts that I have described earlier in this work. Long gone from the order of battle were the ranks of noncommissioned officers, equipped with spontoons, and charged with the duty of executing on the spot the foreign mercenary infantryman who might be tempted to break ranks and desert as the battle lines formed. How far had warfare traveled into haze of formal irrationality! In contrast to the attitude of the Whig oligarchy during the Seven Years’ War of the territorial-sovereign era, in the nationalist era, dying for one’s country became not only conceivable, but a duty. How can we hope to understand the motivations that impelled men to propel themselves out of entrenched positions and into a probable violent death? The severe dangers of the early-twentieth-century battlefield were unprecedented and thoroughly horrific. The following passage from a French trench newspaper relates quite graphically the experience of going “over the top.”
At the prescribed hour the officers gave us the usual little pep-talk, with last instructions, and then inquired if we were ready. At our response in the affirmative, there was a moment’s silence and contemplation, and then suddenly the shout “Advance.” We were in the second jumping-off line. Without hesitation officers and men jumped up on to the parapet and ran to the front line to take the place of friends who were already close to the Boche lines. We hardly stopped before we heard the cry again, “Advance!” We scrambled over the next parapet and ran forward after the first wave, shouting whatever came into our heads....The guns were crackling away ahead of us, the machine-guns spitting out their ribbons of death. Tack, tack, tack, tack. We caught up with our friends but—to our horror—we met a barbed wire barrier that was still intact and more than 30 meters deep. And all this time the enemy machine guns went on...while we could see our friends on our left, falling, covering the ground with their blue uniforms, red with blood where they were hit. 94
Audoin-Rouzeau provides us with the root of an explanation for how these dangers and hardship were born, overwhelmingly by men whose class origins might signify that they would not be strongly responsive to nationalist pressures, or strongly motivated by nationalist sentiment. He does so in a fashion that brings to mind Max Weber’s observation 95 that compliance with the injunctions of a legitimate social authority is taken on as a sense of “duty.” No search for motives consistent with our understanding of individual rationality is required, as the individual “values absolutely” those of the legitimate social order with which he is complying. Audoin-Rouzeau describes the feeling of shame that the soldiery suffered upon losing some ground to which they had previously formed attachment as it had been gained at high loss of life. He argues that “[t]o this attachment should be linked the instinctive reflex of defense of ‘one’s own.’ ” 96 Defense of one’s countrymen had become a “moral obligation” in a way it had never been in the past. It is expressed eloquently by one soldier-turned-trench-journalist:
We fought because we could not do otherwise....We were forced to make war and to fight by all the social ties which bind us: by the dependence and the subjection in which the individual exists in relation to the State within modern societies; by the thousand threads which attach him to the soil, to the very atmosphere of his land, and which form the morally binding attitudes more powerful than any physical shackles. 97
Thus the national-sovereign social order had acquired a legitimacy which impelled a conception of a moral duty to defend it in the soldiery. This appears to have been the case even in those elements of the soldiery that had benefited least from a social order which had crystallized, as Mann would have it, as capitalist, statist, militarist, and nationalist all at once. When the guns had finally fallen silent, the experience of national identity had been much more thoroughly infused in the international and domestic social orders of the participants in the war than at the beginning. The legitimating principle of the global social order had changed thoroughly. The last vestiges of the old regime territorial-sovereign order had been swept away, as had the monarchs and institutions of that order. The map of Europe was redrawn to recreate the continent according to a scheme in which nationality and territoriality were co-extensive. The principle of national self-determination would henceforth serve as the basis for the legitimate claim to sovereignty. 98
Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise
The chapter has illustrated the profound consequences of the resolution of competing European class and national-identity commitments in favor of national collective identity. Regime types were depicted as institutional facts which helped to structure competing identity commitments within a national context. The demolition of residual, territorial-sovereign, monarchical institutions at the close of the war is of elementary theoretical significance. Their demise punctuates my assertion that regimes legitimated by principles that most severely limited the bourgeois-national citizenship that has become constitutive of a national-sovereign polity were unable to survive the legitimation crisis that accompanied defeat in war.
The chapter explored competing explanations for the victory of popular and middle-class nationalism without which mass mobilizations of European national economies for total war would not have been possible. As Hobsbawm suggests, xenophobic, neotraditional nationalism emerges as a reaction to liberalism and the socially corrosive artifacts of industrial revolution capitalism. Chauvinistic collective identity emerges as compensation for insecurity and dislocation, fostering self-identification with the national state where available and a compensating stateless imagined community where unavailable. But analysis of Coatzee’s studies of German Nationale Verbände corroborates Michael Mann’s assertion of an uneven distribution of nationalist sentiment with the middle classes. Most vociferous in their nationalist sentiment were the “statist nationalists” whose self-identification with the nation was strengthened by the fact that they drew their self-esteem and bourgeois social respectability from service to the bourgeois national-state. In this sense, the increasingly eudomonic function of the national-state was axiomatic for them.
The chapter has also shown how domestic nationalist grievances and pressures contributed fundamentally to the macrorealist, Aussenpolitik policies, particularly in Germany, that were major proximate causes of the Great War. Domestic nationalist pressures fueled “old regime insecurities,” punctuating the radical reduction of the insularity of elite decisionmaking in the national-sovereign era, and exacerbating the “security dilemma” associated with internal balancing with a hypernationalist milieu. The resultant, bellicose German foreign policies were formally irrational and it appears that they were recognized to be so by Wilhelm and his government even as they put them into execution. In this sense, Wilhelm II emerges as a German variant of Napoleon III, similarly dooming his government and throne as the Hohenzollern dynasty was similarly delegitimated when it proved incapable, through humiliating defeat in war, of providing a serviceable vehicle for the expression of German national identity.
The defeat of the regimes of the dynasties exposed a glaring discontinuity between residual dynastic, territorial-sovereign institutional forms of collective action among elites, and proliferating national-sovereign structures of identities and interests among the peoples. This gap had been papered over by nationalist martial tunes, uniforms, bunting, and military brocade until 1917–1918. But when war exhaustion and defeat had silenced the bands, tattered the uniforms, soiled the bunting, and pulled off the epaulettes, the map of Europe was redrawn in accordance with a more mature manifestation of national-self-determination of peoples. I now move to conclude this book with a more contemporary example of the mismatch between emergent and prevailing social identities and incongruent and defunct institutional forms of collective action.
Endnotes
Note 1: This is the terminology of structural realism. The extent to which political structures may be considered a “cause” of war is, of course, still an issue of contention. Back.
Note 2: This is Michael Mann’s phrase. Mann employs the terms as a shorthand for the standard explanatory repertoire and the tendency of realism and theories of rational choice to focus on the “geopolitical interests” of states, guided by the assumptions that (1) states have rationally determinable geopolitical “interests,” (2) these interests persistently conflict and (3) war is a normal, rational means of securing the ends suggested by these interests. I will occasionally avail myself of Mann’s shorthand for the sake of convenience in this chapter. See Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 743. Back.
Note 3: The parenthetic phrases are also Mann’s lexicon. Back.
Note 4: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 205. Back.
Note 6: Bernadotte E. Schmitt and Harold C. Vedeler, The World in the Crucible: 1914&-;1919 (New York: Harper, 1988), p. xv. Back.
Note 7: Kautsky develops the notion of working-class sovereignty within a proletarian dictatorship in a work completed shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. See Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (with introduction by John Kautsky). Reprint of the 1919 National Labour Press edition (Westport: Greenwood, 1981). See especially chapter 5, pp. 42–58. Back.
Note 8: The reader is again referred to Kratochwil’s treatment of the functioning of institutional facts in Kratochwil, “Regimes, Interpretation and the ‘Science’ of Politics,” pp. 263–84. Back.
Note 9: An example of what William Kornhauser refers to as “discontinuities in authority.” Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, p. 129. Back.
Note 10: Or “discontinuities in society.” Ibid. p. 159. Back.
Note 11: Or “discontinuities in community.” Ibid. p. 143. Back.
Note 12: Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, p. 101. For Hobsbawm’s extended discussion of the rise of ethno-linguistic nationalisms see especially pp. 101–11. Note that another important scholar of nationalism, Elie Kedourie, appears to disagree with this last contention. Kedourie views the emergence of nationalism in terms of a youth movement, and a reaction by youth against the traditionalism of their parents, and argues that it is “a misunderstanding to ask whether nationalism is politics of the right of the left. It is neither. Left and right are concepts which arose in the course of struggle between aristocracy, middle class and working class in European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are unintelligible apart from this particular history.” Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (2nd ed) (London: Hutchinson, 1966). See pp. 89–90. Quote is from p. 89. Back.
Note 13: Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, pp. 109–10. Back.
Note 14: This is Gellner’s lexicon. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 29–38. Back.
Note 15: Ibid. pp. 115–21. Back.
Note 17: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 575. Back.
Note 18: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 186. Back.
Note 19: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 575. Back.
Note 23: See, for example, John Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” Central European History 17 (4) (December 1984): 299–309, and Konrad H. Jarausch, “German Students in the First World War,” Central European History 17 (4) (December 1984): 310–29. Back.
Note 24: See Michael Howard, “Europe on the Eve of the First World War,” in R. J. W. Evans and Martmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds.), The Coming of the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 1–18. Note that Howard attributes this effect to the content of the education, rather than official propaganda. He argues, on p. 15, that the general enthusiasm for the call to arms was due to: “Nationalistically oriented public education; military service which, however unwelcome and tedious, bred a sense of cohesion and national identity; continuing habits of social deference: all this helps explain, at a deeper level than does the strident propaganda of the popular press, why the population of Europe responded so readily to the call when it came.” Back.
Note 25: See Ibid. p. 18, and Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 578. Back.
Note 28: See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). Back.
Note 29: The term “kulak” translates from the Russian as “fist” as was long employed by the Russian peasantry as an imprecation of resentment against the wealthier agricultural proprietors of peasant origins who employed the peasantry at unfavorable wages. The liquidation of kulak power became the goal of the Stalinist collectivization of agriculture in the bid to build “socialism in one country” See Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as a Revolutionary 1879–1929, especially chapter 10. See also Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 139–81. For a general study of “de-kulakization” in the context of the class conflict leading to Russian and Ukrainian agricultural collectivization see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See especially Chapter 6. Back.
Note 30: This appears to be a viable strategy to the present day. U.S. domestic politics has long witnessed political parties to be effectively employing this strategy in electoral politics by creating “wedge issues” to divide the electorate, break up voting blocks, and impede the formation of oppositional coalitions. Back.
Note 31: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 584. Back.
Note 32: Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, pp. 114–19. Back.
Note 35: Ibid. pp. 12–13. Back.
Note 36: A rather brief but excellent and accessible account of the Dreyfuss Affair may be found in Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966). See Chapter 4. Back.
Note 37: An outstanding account of these pressures is provided in Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburgh Empire 1526–1918, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1974. See pages 406–67. Back.
Note 38: See Ian Armour, “The Roots of Sarajevo: Austria-Hungary and Serbia, 1867–81,” History Today 38 (August 1988): 12–19. The piece nicely summarizes the origins of Serb nationalism under the Ottomans. Back.
Note 39: See especially Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967); Fritz Fischer, World Power or Decline: The Controversy Over Germany’s Aims in the First World War (trans. L. L. Farrar, Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber) (New York: Norton, 1974); and Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (trans. Marian Jackson) (New York: Norton, 1975). Back.
Note 40: See Stephen Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed in 1914,” in Kenneth A. Oye (ed.), Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 116. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 41: See Eyck’s particularly poignant account of this event in Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire. Back.
Note 42: For an extraordinary account of the sequential successions of 1887 and 1888 see J. Alden Nichols, The Year of the Three Kaisers: Bismarck and the German Succession, 1887–88 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Back.
Note 43: Three important examples of this sort of account that spring to mind are Robert Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics, A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler’s The War Ledger, and Paul Kennedy’s, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Back.
Note 44: Here the most prominent examples are Hans J. Morgenthau’s, Politics Among Nations, and Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy. Back.
Note 45: Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 4. Back.
Note 46: See Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and Geoff Eley, “Reshaping the Right: Radical Nationalism and the German Navy League, 1898–1908,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 327–54. Back.
Note 47: Coetzee, The German Army League, p. 7. Back.
Note 50: Graphical representation of data taken from Ibid., “Table 6. Rank and File According to Region,” p. 90. Data presented in the figure are rounded to the nearest whole percentile. Back.
Note 52: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, pp. 587–58. The sources cited by Mann are Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), and Eley, Reshaping the German Right. Back.
Note 53: Coetzee, The German Army League, p. 121. Back.
Note 54: See Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See especially chapters 1 and 6. Back.
Note 55: An excellent account of Russian domestic difficulties in this context is Adam B. Ulam, Russia’s Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to the Dissidents (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1981). Back.
Note 56: Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans, p. 130. Edward’s statement is rendered as “I don’t want war. it’s peace that I desire.” Wilhelm scribbles “But the [London] Times!” The translations are mine. Back.
Note 57: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 184. Back.
Note 58: Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30 (2) (1978): 167–214. Back.
Note 59: Mann suggests that the First World War was formally irrational as it could not achieve its stated goals. See Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2: 755–56. Back.
Note 60: I refer the reader back to Chapter 7. Back.
Note 61: Coetzee, The German Army League, p. 52. Here Coetzee is quoting from an article entitled “Krieg und Völkerfrieden” (which I translate as “War and a Peaceable People”) from the German Army League’s journal, Die Wehr. Back.
Note 62: These phrases are rendered as “war of survival” and “fight to the finish” respectively. See Ibid., p. 52. The translations are Coetzee’s. I would note that Vernichtungskrieg could alternatively be rendered “war of extermination.” Back.
Note 63: Ibid. Coetzee cites articles from Dei Wehr entitled “Das Volk und sein Treiber” (1913) and “Wehrmacht und Volskraft” (1912). In English these are rendered as “The People and their Oppressors” and “The Armed Forces and National Vigor.” The translations are mine. Back.
Note 64: See Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France of the Eve of the First World War: The Introduction of Three-Year Conscription 1913–14, Stephen Coll (trans.) (Warwickshire and Dover: Berg, 1984). Back.
Note 65: See, for example, Ian F. W. Beckett, “Total War,” in C. Emsley, A. Marwick and W. Simpson (eds.), War, Peace and Social Change in Twentieth Century Europe (Philadelphia; Open University Press, 1989), pp. 31–32. Back.
Note 66: Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy. Back.
Note 67: Druckman, “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Group Loyalty.” Back.
Note 68: Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans, p. 163. Back.
Note 71: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 184. Back.
Note 72: Ibid. p. 185. Kissinger quotes from the January 5, 1896 issue of Allgemeine Zeitung. Back.
Note 74: Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans, p. 177. Back.
Note 75: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 208. Back.
Note 76: Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans, p. 184. Back.
Note 79: Note that it has been recently argued that both British economic and military decline could have been avoided by the abandonment of British liberal ideology in the area of international trade issues, and by the initiation of appropriate policies to stem these losses. See John Robert Ferris, Men, Money, and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919–1926, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See also Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) For a different view see Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 194–274. Back.
Note 80: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 744. Back.
Note 83: Ibid. pp. 751–52. Back.
Note 85: For a brief discussion of “multiple identities” and overlapping social identities as guides to social action see Smith, National Identity, pp. 3–18. Back.
Note 86: Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion, p. 122. Back.
Note 87: Ibid. This phrase is part of the title of Hayes’ ninth chapter. Back.
Note 88: See Jean-Jacques Becker, “That’s the Death Knell of Our Boys” in Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home Front: 1914–1918 (Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1992), pp. 17–36. Back.
Note 90: Lloyd George is quoted in Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 767. Back.
Note 92: Ibid. p. 786. Emphasis in the original. Back.
Note 94: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War (trans. Helen McPhail) (Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 70. Audoin-Rouzeau quotes here from the trench newspaper L’Echo de tranchées-ville, October 28, 1915. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 95: See the extended quote of Weber in Chapter 2 of this work, under the subheading “Legitimating Principles.” Back.
Note 96: Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914–1918, p. 180. Back.
Note 97: Ibid. p. 181. Audoin-Rouzeau quotes here from the trench newspaper Le Tord-boyau, August 1917. Back.
Note 98: For development of this point see J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, “The State and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations,” International Organization 48 (1) (1994): 199–22. For a masterful account of the Paris Peace Conference and the forging of this legitimating principle in the course of the negotiations see Osiander, The States System of Europe, pp. 248–315. Back.
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