In multinational empires building the nation was an obviously difficult task. One ‘nation’ could dominate the others, as Turks did in the Ottoman Empire and Russia in the Tsarist Empire. In the Habsburg Empire the unquestioned domination of Austria had come to an end with its defeat by Germany in 1866. The ‘solution’ to Austrian weakness was the so-called compromise of 1867 that gave birth to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, upgrading, so to speak, Hungary to equal status with Austria, but this left the question of nation-building unresolved and unresolvable.
The Tsarist Empire faced similar problems. According to the only census ever held under the Tsars (it excluded Finland, technically an autonomous Grand Duchy), in 1897, 146 languages and dialects were spoken in the empire; two-thirds of the inhabitants were ‘Russians’ – adding together ‘great’ Russians (55.6 million), ‘little’ Russians (Ukrainians, 22.4 million), and ‘white’ Russians (Belorussians, 5.8 million).38 These spoke varieties of Slavonic, regarded themselves as Slavs, and were Orthodox (at the time Ukrainian Catholics were largely in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). Nationalist stirrings in Ukraine were confined to minority sections of the intelligentsia, as was the case in most countries. A great many landlords were of Polish descent, and many of the peasants had also once been petty nobles of Polish origin. They were deprived of their privileges by the Tsar after the failed uprising of 1830 and became assimilated, adopting the Ukrainian language and Russian Orthodoxy. Jews represented some 10 per cent of the population of Ukraine.39
Even counting all Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians as Russians, almost one-third of the population of the empire remained outside the ‘Russian nation’ and most of them were not Orthodox: Poland and Lithuania were Catholic; Latvia and Estonia (and Finland) were Protestant; in the Caucasus and central Asia there were probably more Muslims than in the Ottoman Empire. Even the Muslims were not a single group: there were the Azerbaijanis (mainly Shia), then there were the Volga and Crimean Tatars, the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Kyrgyzs, etc.; there were Buddhists in Mongolia, Christians in the Caucasus (Georgians, Ossetians, and Armenians) as well as in Bessarabia (now mainly in Moldova).40
Meanwhile, the internationalist socialist movement was busily building the idea of an identity based on class rather than on nation. Did the class antagonism between capitalists and workers stand in the way of nation-building? The workers, like the putative citizens of the nations, needed convincing, inciting, organizing. After all, no one, not even a true proletarian, was a spontaneous socialist. The famous 1871 socialist hymn, the ‘Internationale’, written by Eugène Pottier, urges the damnés de la terre (the wretched of the earth) to stand up (debout, debout), not to accept their fate as an enslaved crowd (foule esclave), not to follow supreme saviours (Ni Dieu, ni César). But by 1914, nation-building had reached a stage such that socialists felt comfortable in the bourgeois capitalist nation that had given them the suffrage and (some) political power and (some) social reforms. So, when war broke out, the socialists, almost everywhere, and above all in well-established nations such as Germany and France, stood alongside the patrie of the so-hated capitalists. The great gap between capital and labour had narrowed in the face of a common external enemy, and an enemy of ‘the nation’.
Nation-building is a cumulative process that depends on a series of relatively minor events: the creation of pan-national institutions, a central bank, a unified system of weights and measures, a single currency, and a new generation educated in the national stories and myths. There was plenty to be proud of in being French in 1900: the ancient history, the Revolution, popular mobilization, a culture that appeared then to dominate the continent, and the feeling of superiority that accompanies all of this. There was also plenty to be proud of in being German: the most powerful country in continental Europe, a world leader in scientific achievements, more universities than Great Britain. It made many think that, after all, it was better to be a German than to be a Bavarian or a Prussian. Besides, with the exception of being Prussian and perhaps Bavarian, other local identities in Germany (being from the Rhineland, Hamburg, or Saxony) had virtually no national connotation, whereas Prussia was so dominant that Prussians accepted becoming Germans the way the English became British.
In nation-building the class division between bourgeois and aristocrats was even easier to bridge than that between workers and capitalists or between ethnic groups and religions. The nobility, as Arno Mayer has pointed out, were more cohesive and self-confident than the bourgeoisie, which ‘never coalesced sufficiently seriously to contest the social, cultural and ideological pre-eminence of the old ruling class’.41
In most European countries there was a conflict between agrarian and industrial elites, but such elites were never monolithic. There never was a landed bloc facing, as in trench warfare, an industrial bloc. Besides, in the nineteenth century, if one had money and power one could join the aristocracy the way one joined a club. Once one was rich one could obtain a title, hence the tremendous expansion of the aristocracy throughout Europe in the ‘bourgeois’ nineteenth century, with bankers in the lead. The aristocracy, over the centuries, had diversified their interests. They had a disproportionate presence in the military, the bureaucracy, the Church, and in parliament. They could not behave as a monolithic class. Those in the bureaucracy often had a bias in favour of strong states. Those in the Church defended clerical privileges. Those in the military were often in favour of industrial growth. And, of course, the landowners upheld the interests of landowners, including those of non-aristocratic landowners. This old landed aristocracy was still around and included the richest people in nineteenth-century Europe, who had not yet been displaced by industrialists and bankers. They were perturbed by the rising tide of capitalist modernity and suspected that they were now on the wrong side of history. But wealth buys time, and though their status was constantly being challenged by the nouveau riche, the positions of power they had accumulated in previous centuries saw them in good stead for a further century.42 The more intelligent among the aristocrats realized that future primacy would reside in economic power rather than social privilege (it is easier at the top to discern the future than when one is labouring down below).
In Prussia, from the second half of the eighteenth century, well before the industrialization process had started, a modern entrepreneurial and speculative spirit manifested itself among large landholders. The urban markets of western Europe increased the demand for grain and this was reflected in rising prices and land values. The possibility of rapid profits led many aristocrats to speculate on land. The agricultural crisis that followed the Napoleonic Wars led some of the more forward-looking aristocrats to adopt scientific methods of agriculture. By 1835 many Prussian landowners had been converted to modern agriculture. Soon advanced systems of drainage were developed, machinery was introduced and, after 1850, chemical fertilizers. These changes in agricultural production had profound consequences for the Prussian aristocracy. They led to a division between those who still viewed landed estates mainly as the source of aristocratic status and those who viewed them as an investment that had to be protected. And as capitalistic agriculture grew the gap separating the aristocracy from the middle classes narrowed.43
Those who owned much land were still rich.44 They might have had less ready cash (their wealth being tied to the land), but they still wielded some power, and still commanded some respect. They too, however, had to adjust to the developing capitalist world. In Britain many members of the landowning classes, then the richest in Europe, retained their prosperity thanks to the financial sector.45 The City of London thus always straddled two worlds, the pre-capitalist world of commerce and banking and the post-industrial world of the future. The City offered a way of getting rich, or remaining rich, while also remaining a gentleman, since one could remain distant from the sordid world of trade and the dirty world of manufacture. Not that there was a serious (i.e. political as opposed to cultural) conflict between industrial capital and ‘gentlemanly’
capital.46 Elsewhere, the political problem within the establishment was in trying to reconcile urban and landed interests. This was true even where there was no authentic aristocracy (as in the United States and Latin America), or where it had been formally destroyed (republican France), or where commerce and/or the professions were in the hands of foreigners and ‘alien’ groups (such as the Jews) – as in parts of Austria-Hungary and Romania.
While the aristocracy increasingly adopted bourgeois lifestyles, the capitalists acquired titles and became noble. Impoverished nobles married the rich and became rich. In Belgium, for instance, the nobility remained politically influential but by the end of the nineteenth century the country was governed by an elite of businessmen.47 Money mattered more than ever before, and so did bourgeois values. What these values might be was not clear then (and is still not clear now). Was it the assumption that the virtuous (bourgeois) man worked whereas, in traditional society, gentlemanly virtues consisted in not having to work?48 Was thrift and prudence a bourgeois virtue, as was so often said? Yet successful capitalists were often those who had the courage to borrow and take a gamble. Some capitalists were virtuous, philanthropic, and ethical; others were power-hungry, avaricious, and greedy. There is no general rule.49 Goethe’s flawed hero, Faust, is at peace with himself not after accumulating vast wealth but when he finally perceives the possible fulfilment of his project for economic and human progress. Some capitalists, like some workers, may be ethical, but capitalism as a system has no necessary ethics, and only one aim, growth (like cancer cells).
Did the vast material inequality that accompanied the growth of capitalism interfere with the building of the nation? Bourgeois society implied two contradictory aspects: that we are all equal with the same chances of being unequal, and, as it inevitably followed, inequality was ‘fair’. The modern bourgeois state was supposed to treat everyone equally without raising the question of real material inequalities; it was supposed to look after the ‘general interest’ as if society was a happy homogeneous whole; it was supposed to dispense justice while letting happiness remain a matter for the individual. We were all equal, all ‘in it together’, all part of the same commonwealth, of the same community, of the same society, of the same nation – all of us, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, the clever and the stupid, the talented and the inept, those raised in squalor and those born in prosperity. All could rally around the idea of nationhood.
While the ideology surrounding the development of capitalism was ‘democratic’, capitalism also increased income inequalities, though France and Britain were more unequal (in terms of income) than the more capitalist United States in the years 1900–1910.50 Do inequalities make nation-building more complex? That is difficult to say, particularly since nation-building is a vague concept and almost impossible to measure. The proposition that inequalities weakened nations had been cogently expressed as early as 1752 by one of the sharpest minds of the Enlightenment, David Hume:
A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich, than it adds to that of the poor.51
Benjamin Disraeli’s famous novel Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) highlighted the problem in a dramatic (and didactic) form. Charles Egremont, a young aristocrat, dons a disguise to investigate the conditions of the working classes. He is dismayed by the factory system.
In an encounter with a working-class radical (the father of the lovely Sybil) he is told that England is divided into two nations:
between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws … THE RICH AND THE POOR.52
This was a common theme in the social novels of the time. Six decades after Sybil, in 1909, the Liberal MP Charles Masterman lamented the coexistence of ‘public penury’ with ‘private ostentation’ – a characterization similar to John Kenneth Galbraith’s ‘private opulence and public squalor’ in The Affluent Society (1958). Masterman noted that the ‘multitude’, the ‘masses’, the ‘crowd’, the ‘80 per cent’ of the population, live in complete separation from the elites (the ‘conquerors’) and the middle classes (the ‘suburbans’):
… it is a people … who never express their own grievances, who rarely become articulate … It is a people which, all unnoticed and without clamour or protest, has passed through the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city.53
For Disraeli and his followers the creation of ‘one nation’ did not mean bridging the gap between rich and poor. It meant integrating the poor into the nation so that they would be content and made to feel they had a stake in it. In his celebrated Crystal Palace speech of 24 June 1872, Disraeli explained that ‘the Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing’. Its goals were not only the preservation of the institutions of the country (law and order, religion, the monarchy, the Empire, etc.) but also ‘the elevation of the condition of the people’. Disraeli gloried in the fact that the Conservatives had been able to reduce working hours ‘without injuring the wealth of the nation’. The Liberals had opposed these reforms, arguing that they would lead to unemployment and impoverishment.54 Social, ‘compassionate’ conservatism was then strong and probably contributed to the phenomenon of the working-class Tory. Some Tories understood this perfectly: Lord John Manners, a supporter of Disraeli, in a letter to him (24 October 1866) about the extension of the Factory Acts, wrote of the need to cultivate ‘the Working Classes’.55
How effective was this ‘compassionate conservatism’ – as we would call it today? Was it anything more than a desire to use working-class discontent against the Liberals? Was it propelled by a vague fear of revolution?56 The subsequent history of the Conservative Party is the history of its transformation into a pro-capitalist party, rendered easier by the fact that, though its parliamentary representation, even in the 1860s, was based mainly on rural constituencies, its basic economic ideas, as with those of the Liberal Party, were embedded in an orthodox political economy built on the principles of individualism and predisposed against government intervention.57
Being worried about the gap between the ‘two nations’ was not just a Tory peculiarity. Gladstone, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his Financial Statement to the House on 16 April 1863, noted that the country had experienced a ‘vast increase in wealth’, indeed an ‘extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth’ due, he surmised, to technological improvements and legislation. But he then added, ominously, ‘The augmentation I have described … is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property’, something he disapproved of, though he added, consolingly, that perhaps this may be of ‘indirect benefit to the labourer’ (later referred to as the ‘trickle-down effect’). Yet he was confident that the average condition of the British labourer had improved remarkably in the last two decades.58 Karl Marx could not fail to mention this speech in Das Kapital while ungraciously calling Gladstone ‘this unctuous minister’.59
Alessandro Garelli, an Italian academic, who remarked on the ‘strange scene’ of wealth and misery constantly growing side by side in the United Kingdom, worried about inequalities in post-unification Italy too, lamenting that the wealth accumulated by the wealthy has produced a terrible new misery among the poor.60 He warned that ‘our workers’ are still full of good intentions, all they want is to improve their conditions of existence; they do not want to abolish wages, they want higher wages.61 In other words they were not socialists – not yet.
Inequalities also perturbed liberals such as J. A.
Hobson, who pointed out that the majority of the working class did not have sufficient resources for a ‘decent human life’, adding that greater equality as a result of stimulating home consumption might ‘make our industries largely independent of the need of finding new markets in parts of the world where we stir national animosities involving incalculable risks …’62
And in 1909, Winston Churchill, then a cabinet minister in a Liberal government, in a speech supporting David Lloyd George’s so-called People’s Budget (5 September 1909), asserted that the ‘unnatural gap between rich and poor’ was ‘the greatest danger to the British Empire’. Such a danger, he explained:
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