by Kevin Reilly
The Russian Path . Russian industrialization was both later and less far reaching than in the rest of Europe. It got under way seriously in the 1880s and was concentrated in large industrial complexes in several major cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the absence of a vigorous capitalist class, the state took the initiative with railroads and heavy industry leading the way. More than anywhere else, Russian industrialization took place in an otherwise backward country. Russian serfs won their freedom only in 1861, and the country remained overwhelming rural well into the twentieth century. The democratic ideas of the French Revolution had little impact in Russia, where the tsar retained absolute authority even after he reluctantly allowed a representative assembly to be elected in 1905. The strains of industrial development in an autocratic state exploded in revolution during World War I, leading to the world’s first communist state. That state, the Soviet Union, then undertook a massive program of industrialization in the 1930s, but it completely rejected the capitalist framework within which all other processes of industrialization had developed.
New Identities, New Conflicts
Together, the industrial and political revolutions produced in the West were strikingly different from any in world history. They were enormously more productive and more commercialized. They engaged far more ordinary people in public life than in any of the older agrarian empires. Their military capacity surpassed anything known before. Social values highlighting competition among individuals as the route to a good society reversed traditional moralities that had emphasized community and cooperation. Finally, the worldview of the dominant elites was increasingly secular, seeking to explain the world in scientific rather than religious terms. In particular, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged long-held notions about humankind as a distinct creation of God, while Sigmund Freud suggested that human beings were motivated largely by irrational drives, both sexual and aggressive.
Nowhere has the combined impact of the political and industrial revolutions been more apparent than in the growth of three movements—socialism, nationalism, and fem-inism—that appeared in nineteenth-century Europe and were appropriated in much of the rest of the world in the twentieth.
Socialism
Utopian Socialism . Socialism was a protest against the inequality of capitalist society. It had roots in biblical ideas of a peaceful future when “the lion would lie down with the lamb,” in peasant yearnings for their own land, and in protests against the division of common grazing land into private property. Such early ideas and movements were later seen as nostalgic and naive. In one, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the author imagined an ideal island in the Atlantic where a highly educated society had no private property, held everything in common, and needed neither money nor gold. In the English Civil War of the 1640s, poor peasants and revolutionaries called Lev-elers and Diggers briefly claimed the estates of lords for their own cultivation. During the French Revolution, in the 1790s, a firebrand named Gracchus Babeuf created a revolutionary group called “The Conspiracy of the Equals.” During the first half of the nineteenth century, such ideas spread throughout Europe and North America. Some created utopian communities on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” or based on the idea that work should be an expression of personal passion rather than obligation to an employer. Some of these utopian colonies lasted into the twentieth century, especially in the rural United States.
Marxism . It was Karl Marx (1818-1883) who labeled these early efforts “utopian” in the sense of “unrealistic.” For Marx, the utopian socialists were naive to imagine that they would change society by creating alternative models in the wilderness. They failed to understand that the capitalist class had created a new society, infinitely more productive than rural agricultural society but full of contradictions: between private gain and social wellbeing, its power to transform the world for the better, and its narrow selfishness. The goal of “scientific socialism,” Marx believed, was to understand this process of historical change in order to exploit the contradictions of the capitalist system—to harness its enormous productivity to serve the common good.
Here was an economic system that could produce enough for everyone through the marvels of industrial technology but was absurdly unable to provide to its workers the fruits of their own labor. No wonder capitalism would be swept away in revolutionary upheaval featuring the urban industrial proletariat. Then its vast productive potential would be placed in service to the whole of society in a rationally planned, democratic, and egalitarian community. In such a socialist commonwealth, degrading poverty, conflicting classes, contending nations, and human alienation generally would be but fading memories. From the ashes of capitalism, Marx wrote, there will emerge a socialist society in which “the free development of each [person] is the condition for the free development of all.”24
Socialist Parties . In answer to the question of how this new world would come into being, the followers of Marx, not to mention other socialists, had diverse responses. Some believed that the downtrodden working classes would spontaneously rise up in a popular revolution. In 1848, the Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Friedrich Engels, fed such revolutionary energy with its call to struggle: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” But the middle-class revolution of 1848 did not turn into the working-class revolution that they urged. In Germany, where Marx and Engels were most hopeful, even the middle-class aspirations were brutally repressed. The first revolutionary socialist society was created by the people of Paris in 1871 after France was defeated by the new German Empire. They declared Paris to be an independent commune, governed by the workers and citizens. It lasted only a couple of months.
Nevertheless, by the time of Marx’s death in 1883, there were socialist political parties throughout Europe. They agitated for the rights of workers, to vote, to organize in unions, and to gain political power. Socialist parties splintered and proliferated. Some remained revolutionary, in tune with the “Internationale,” the anthem of the newly global movement:
Arise you prisoners of starvation,
Arise you wretched of the earth;
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better world’s in birth.
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us,
Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall,
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
We have been naught, we shall be all.
Western capitalists and governments countered the appeal of socialism in a number of ways. Capitalist governments recognized the need to integrate the worker classes into the political society. They initiated mass education and encouraged national rather than class identity. In Germany, conservative governments lured away workers with an alternative state socialism of health, old-age, and unemployment insurance, creating the basis of what was to become the welfare state. By 1900, most socialist parties had dropped revolutionary ideology and adopted electoral politics. In France, a socialist party joined a conservative government. Accustomed to political power, the new socialists taught reform rather than violent struggle and evolutionary change rather than revolution. In the same period, Western corporations were able to raise the living standards of their domestic workers as they increased their exploitation of peoples in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Western governments compensated for the depressed domestic markets of the late nineteenth century with a wave of “new imperialism” aimed at gaining cheaper raw materials and more global markets for European and North American corporations.
Nationalism
Western socialist movements were also undermined by the cultivation of appeals to the nation. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 marked a capitulation by workers t
o this new identity. Some socialist leaders called on the workers to refuse participation in a conflict where they would be expected to kill fellow workers from other countries. But national loyalties proved stronger than class solidarity as European workers rallied to their respective flags and enthusiastically set out to slaughter fellow brothers of the Communist International rather than rising up against their capitalist overlords. Where had this compelling sense of national identity come from?
Nationalism as a Modern Idea . The national idea—that the world is divided into separate peoples each with its own distinct culture and deserving political independence—is sometimes regarded as a natural and ancient organization of human society. In fact, however, nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, dating back little more than two centuries in most places, and largely a European innovation. Before that most people regarded themselves as members of small local communities such as clans, villages, or towns. Where they were bound to larger structures, it was as religious believers, such as Christians or Muslims, or as subjects, not citizens, of dynastic states or empires, such as those that governed the Russian, Chinese, or Ottoman empires.
The Origins of Nationalism . The emergence of what we now recognize as national identity occurred as Europe’s modern transformation eroded older identities and loyalties. Science and rationalism weakened traditional religious loyalties. The emergence of separate states (Spain, Prussia, England, and France) undermined dynastic imperial systems in which a sacred monarch ruled over a variety of culturally different peoples. The printing press standardized differing dialects and created a national language. By means of public education and popular media, print spelled out a national identity for a literate public.
Capitalism, industrialization, migration, and urbanization uprooted millions from long-established traditions and so created a need for new forms of community. The French Revolution and its democratic legacy encouraged many people to feel that they had a right to participate in political life, for they were now citizens and no longer subjects. And leaders of that revolution called on these citizens to defend the French nation and its revolutionary achievements against attacks from conservative forces in the rest of Europe.
Creating Nations . This was the brew from which nationalism emerged, first of all in France and England, where the modern transformation was most highly developed. In these countries, vernacular languages largely coincided with political boundaries, making the transition to a national consciousness easier. The political and economic success of these western European nations—especially through the conquests of Napoleon—soon gave the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state a great appeal in central and eastern Europe, where dynastic empires still held sway. There, during the nineteenth century, a distinctly national consciousness dawned for peoples who, unlike the French and the English, had no states of their own. Urban intellectuals—linguists, historians, writers, and students of folklore—took the lead in creating German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian, Greek, Ukrainian, and many other nationalisms. Drawing on local folk cultures and selected aspects of their historical experience, these intellectuals shaped a conception of the nation that appealed to a widening circle of people. This process did not so much reawaken ancient national feelings; rather, it “invented” or “constructed” new political loyalties—the “imagined communities” of the modern era.25
The Power of the National Idea . It soon proved to be a compelling identity. In Germany and Italy, scattered members of these “national communities” were gathered into new unified states, a process largely completed by the early 1870s. Governments increasingly based their authority on a claim to represent the “nation” rather than on divine right. They actively encouraged national loyalties in their schools, public rituals, newspapers, and military forces. Newly conscious “nations,” such as Czechs and Hungarians, sought greater political independence from the ramshackle Austrian Empire; Greeks and Serbs revolted against Turkish rule in the Ottoman Empire; and Poles and Ukrainians grew increasingly conscious of their subordination within the Russian Empire. As European imperialism intruded on Asia and Africa, stirrings of nationalism emerged in late nineteenth-century Egypt, India, China, and Vietnam. In the twentieth century, nationalism was thoroughly “internationalized” as it exploded across the globe, bursting apart any number of empires (Ottoman, British, French, Portuguese, and Soviet), triggering two world wars and the Holocaust, and serving to justify many regional conflicts and civil wars. New national identities may initially have been “imaginary,” but modern political and economic changes forged them into powerful and competitive communities. Those national identities became a central element in the making of the modern world, a source of solidarity and immense sacrifice as well as a stimulus to bitter conflict.
Feminism
Although much smaller in size and impact than nationalism and socialism, the emergence of a feminist movement in nineteenth-century Europe and America represented something even more novel and unprecedented. Conflict between classes and countries was, after all, nothing new in world history. But the patriarchal double standard that allowed men to rule women had existed at least as long and had rarely been challenged. Now in the most advanced industrial societies of the West, such a challenge took shape and became a mass movement by the beginning of the twentieth century. How had it happened?
Roots of Feminism . Many elements of Europe’s modern transformation paved the way for a feminist movement. Enlightenment thinkers challenged many of the received traditions of European society, including that of women’s intrinsic inferiority. The French and American revolutions raised the question of whether women were to be included in pronouncements of equality.
The growth of an industrial society with a much larger middle class, together with growing educational opportunities for girls, created a substantial group of educated women with the leisure to read, write, correspond with one another, and, eventually, organize. Both the slow progress of democracy and the challenge of socialism expressed ideas of equality with implications for women.
Feminist Beginnings . By the 1830s, small groups of educated middle-class women in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, had come to a feminist awareness that completely rejected female subordination and inequality. “I came to the consciousness and to the knowledge that the position of women was absurd,” wrote one German American feminist, “so I soon began to do as much as I could, in words and print, for the . . . betterment of women.”26 Many of them had prior experience in other reform movements, such as socialism, abolitionism, and religious freedom, and they took courage from a wave of short-lived revolutionary upheavals that broke out all over Europe in 1848.
These women established feminist newspapers and journals, founded schools and colleges, held numerous meetings and conventions of like-minded colleagues, and kept in touch with one another across national boundaries as they created the first international women’s movement in world history. In the process, they questioned age-old traditions: some women wore pants, others declined to take their husband’s name, and still others challenged patriarchal religious beliefs and practices. Women contested dominant male attitudes concerning sex, prostitution, rape, and divorce. They organized to gain equal employment opportunities, education, and political rights for women.
The American feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton made the case in an eloquent address to a committee of the U.S. Congress in 1892:
The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to selfsovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must kn
ow something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to match the wind and waves and know when to take in the sail, and to read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman.
Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.27
The Achievements of Feminism . The European feminist movement was temporarily silenced in the repression that followed the revolutionary upheavals in 1848. But it reemerged several decades later with a primary focus on the issue of suffrage and with a growing constituency. Now many ordinary middle-class housewives and working-class mothers joined their better-educated sisters in the movement. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, French feminist groups counted some 100,000 adherents, while the National American Women’s Suffrage Association claimed 2 million members. Although most of these organizations pursued peaceful tactics of persuasion and protest, the British Women’s Social and Political Union was deliberately more aggressive, engaging in civil disobedience and occasional acts of terrorism. One suffragette threw herself in front of the king’s horse during a race in Britain in 1900 and died from her injuries. The violent hostility that such actions aroused revealed the depth of “sexual warfare,” which an overt feminism provoked. In the most highly industrialized countries of the West, the women’s movement had become a mass movement.
