The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  The Majlis had attempted to reform the country’s finances by collecting taxes from wealthy grandees, and they stopped the Shah from borrowing from Russia and Great Britain; they hired a financial expert, W. Morgan Shuster, an American, as Treasurer-General (Americans were seen in a favourable light, unlike the highly distrusted Europeans).27 Shuster, who arrived in Iran in December 1911, had previously organized the customs of Cuba and the Philippines, de facto US colonies, which is why he was occasionally, if wrongly, regarded as an American stooge. Shuster took his job seriously, attempting to collect taxes and stamp out corruption, and operated as if Iran were a truly independent country. He acted as if he owed his loyalty exclusively to his employers, the Majlis, and managed to antagonize the Russians, the British, and even the French (whose priority was the development of an alliance against Germany).28 But the Majlis had no support whatsoever from any European power. Eventually the Russians sent an ultimatum to the Majlis asking them to dismiss Shuster and not to hire foreign subjects without asking Russia and Great Britain.29 At first the Majlis refused and were supported by a popular boycott of British and Russian goods.30 Without a proper army the country was unable to resist and eventually the Majlis were forced to accept the Russian ultimatum. Shuster went back to the United States in January 1912, a bitter man. His mission had lasted only seven months. He wrote in his memoirs of the events, The Strangling of Persia, that the country ‘was the helpless victim of the wretched game of cards which a few Europeans powers, with the skill of centuries of practice, still play with weaker nations’.31

  In Egypt, too, democracy was stirring. Although technically part of the Ottoman Empire, the country was autonomous. Egypt had become, by 1848, among the top ten cotton producers in the world, with France and Britain as her main trading partners, thanks to the state-directed reforms of the great khedive Muhammad Ali (‘founder of modern Egypt’ – a soldier of Albanian birth who conducted his governmental affairs in Turkish). The wealth derived from cotton might have been used as the springboard for a state-directed industrialization – as in Japan.32 Indeed, Muhammad Ali destroyed some of the privileges of the landlords and distributed cultivation rights to the fellahin (the peasants).33 Soon he was the agricultural master of Egypt as well as its chief industrialist, employing in his factories some 40,000 workers.34 But the British–Ottoman Treaty forced free trade on Egypt, destroying its mechanized industry (which, had Egypt been a stronger state, should have been protected). Egypt’s cotton industry was devastated. The Egyptian state was strong at home but weak internationally and ‘no match for British interests and designs’.35 Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha (‘Ismail the Magnificent’) continued the task of modernizing the country, becoming increasingly independent from the Ottoman Empire. He opened the Suez Canal in 1869, and introduced a modern co-educational school system, encouraging the emergence of a native elite and the involvement of Europeans in the economic and cultural life of the country.36 By the 1860s, expressions such as tamaddun (civilization) and taqaddum (progress) had become common among Egyptian intellectuals, particularly with the minority that had a Christian background.37 However, modernizing on the back of huge debts contracted with the British and the French proved too great an obstacle.

  In the years before the First World War, during the heyday of British imperialism, the British consul was the de facto ruler of Egypt. Evelyn Baring (who became Lord Cromer in 1892), consul for twenty years from 1887, had two priorities: the first was to assert British control and the second to convince London politicians that the British (i.e. himself) would be better at ruling Egypt than the Egyptians.38 In 1887 he wrote to Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, that he doubted that there could be:

  a sudden transfer of power in a quasi-civilized State to a class so ignorant and incapable as the pure Egyptians. These latter have for centuries past been a subject race … Neither for the present do they appear to possess any of the qualities which would render it desirable, either in their own interests or in those of the civilized world in general, to raise them to the category of autonomous rulers.39

  Cromer wanted to vet all ministers in the Egyptian ‘government’. Gladstone himself, then Prime Minister, was alarmed by Cromer’s arrogance.40 Soon the khedive gave up any pretence of being able to resist British demands. The old guard of Egyptian politicians was now completely demoralized.41 Cromer did his best to prevent the development of an Egyptian middle class or a cotton industry in Egypt for fear of the ‘serious consequences … [for the] … huge trade in cotton now carried on between England and this country’.42 If asked to choose between the interests of Lancashire cotton and those of Egypt, Cromer, in spite of spending three decades in Egypt, would always choose Lancashire. However, without a strong enough state Egypt could never become the Japan of the Middle East. The major modernizing project it had undertaken in the nineteenth century, the Suez Canal, which halved the distance between England and India, turned out to be a blessing in disguise since it made Egypt of vital importance to Britain and its empire.43

  Thus the Ottoman, Iranian, and Egyptian aspirations towards constitutional rule and democratic reform were part of a global movement which, paradoxically, was often thwarted by the so-called pioneers of democracy. Today we call this the ‘international community’, or the West.

  A central aspect of this new ‘democratic’ era was that some sort of lip service had to be paid to ‘the people’. Even a brutally frank authoritarian discourse would be phrased in populist and popular terms. Thus, in Latin America the oligarchies that had broken with Spain, often led by caudillos such as Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina or Antonio López de Santa Anna in Mexico, or authoritarian politicians such as Diego Portales in Chile, and, later, ‘elected’ dictators such as Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, claimed they had the interests of the people at heart. (Those who fought against these caudillos also used the language of democracy.) The caudillos themselves required an army of loyal followers to whom they would distribute state resources while themselves possessing an economic base in the form of landed estates they had obtained by force or inherited, as was the case with many of the caudillo of the Plata region such as Rosas.44

  The Mexican Revolution of 1910 had goals that were unmistakably ‘modern’: ‘representative democracy’, the subservience of Church to State, the development of secular education, agrarian reform, regulation of employment and the extension of the public sector, especially over resources that might fall under the control of foreign companies.45 The Mexican Revolution was a revolution of the New World, like the North American one. It was not aimed at eliminating an ancien régime as the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and the 1911 revolution in China had been. Its target was a modern dictatorship, that of Porfirio Díaz, a regime which had all the hallmarks of modern liberalism: a strong belief in national unity, secularism, republicanism, and individualism.46 Democracy had been a formal element of this liberal Mexican state. Díaz was almost constantly re-elected between 1876 and 1910, albeit by means of a formidable array of methods, from threats and coercion to bribery and cooptation. Parliament was a rubber stamp. As Henry Lane Wilson, the American ambassador to Mexico, wrote in 1914: ‘Díaz was not a tyrant, but a benevolent autocrat who understood the Mexican people and knew them to be unfitted for self-government.’ 47

  The old Mexican Constitution of 1857, extant during the entire period of the Porfiriate (as Porfirio Díaz’s rule came to be known), did not recognize the indigenous natives as true Mexican citizens; defended private ownership of land, much of which was communally held by the people of the villages; and was anticlerical in a deeply Catholic country.48 Nevertheless, it was also the kind of constitution any European democrat would have recognized: it enshrined human rights, male suffrage, the separation of executive and judiciary powers, federalism, and the separation of Church and State. Of course, in practice, little of this was respected. Whereas in the Ottoman and Tsarist Empires reformers asked for a constituti
on, the revolutionaries in Mexico in 1910 demanded the implementation of the existing constitution in a political conflict between elites, where each used the people as a weapon in the struggle.49

  Yet the people were not absent. The great land reforms that characterized the Mexican experience saw a popular involvement unequalled elsewhere. In Russia, for instance, the emancipation of the serfs had been fundamentally a revolution from above. In Mexico, on the eve of the 1910 revolution, villagers petitioning the authorities for land used all legal (and sometimes illegal) means, searched land titles, marked boundaries, and asked the authorities to mediate disputes over land ownership.50

  Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship was not just an arbitrary one-man rule but was rather a modernizing ‘liberal’ quasi-dictatorship. (True, elections were usually rigged, but Díaz had genuine support.) Porfirian liberals strengthened the executive branch not only to promote economic development and growth, but also to uphold social policies that could protect the poor. Lands were often distributed to poor Indians in an effort to relieve them of their dismal conditions. The turmoil of 1910 to 1913 – the end of the Porfiriate, revolution, the election of Francisco Madero, his assassination in 1913, and the military coup d’état by Victoriano Huerta with the probable complicity of the American ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson – resulted in the long-term rule of the aptly named Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which ruled uninterruptedly for seventy-one years and was re-elected often with extravagantly large majorities.

  By 1917, Mexico had promulgated social and political rights similar to those of the more progressive European states: land reform; male suffrage; some form of welfare; and rights for workers to organize themselves into unions and to go on strike; protection for women and children; the eight-hour day; and a minimum wage. The example was followed by many Latin American countries. Of course, the extent to which such rights were implemented remained an issue.

  The Mexican Revolution was a harbinger of other twentieth-century secularist and nationalist revolutions. Until the advent of the Khomeini Revolution in Iran in 1979, such national revolutions were overwhelmingly secular and often anti-religious, propounding a language which, as in Mexico in 1910, constantly referred to the ‘people’, whom the revolution claimed to have liberated.51 Of course, the people often remained dissatisfied. Revolutionary rhetoric inevitably exalted the possibility of impossible messianic changes.

  The chronic instability of so many Latin American countries was often due to significant differences between rural conservative elites and urban-based liberal ones. The two sides at times entered into an acuerdo entre caballeros (a gentlemen’s agreement) and monopolized power, but when the compromise was broken, instability ensued.52 On both sides rhetoric invoked ‘the people’ but treated them like pawns in a complex political game. Harsh repression of the people was often deployed, as in Chile in 1907 when troops murdered over a thousand defenceless striking miners as well as their wives and children in Iquique (the Santa María School massacre). Yet neither liberals nor conservatives were unduly worried by militant workers. Neither the industrial proletariat nor socialism was a significant force in Latin America.53

  Popular consensus for nation-building, real or presumed, was also invoked elsewhere: in recently unified states such as Germany and Italy; in recently consolidated ones, such as the United States after the Civil War; even in well-established states such as France and Britain; in ‘nations’ that wished to become nations while being part of other, larger states, such as Poland and Ireland; and in old countries in decline such as Portugal and Spain. Such a distinction between old dying nations and ‘true’ living nations had been evoked by Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister, in a famous speech to the Primrose League (a Conservative organization committed to ‘uphold and support God, Queen, and Country’) on 4 May 1898. In it he divided the nations of the world into dying nations (such as Spain, Portugal, China, and Turkey) and living ones such as the United States and Germany and, of course, Great Britain (Salisbury was unsure about France and Italy).54

  Spain was, it is true, compared to most western European countries, economically backward, politically unstable, and troubled by coups and counter-coups. The economic situation was dire. After years of civil strife state finances were in disarray.55 After the republican interlude of 1873–4 the military-led restoration of the Bourbon dynasty turned out to be a conservative ‘liberal’ regime where the conservative Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (six times Prime Minister between 1874 and 1897, when he was murdered by an Italian anarchist) alternated in power with a liberal, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta (eight times Prime Minister between 1870 and 1902). This was the so-called turno pacifico (peaceful turn), a semi-formal arrangement aimed at keeping the army out of politics and sharing the spoils in what was a highly corrupt system with some of the trappings of democracy. Social conditions remained dire: there was chronic under-nourishment and many were plagued by cholera and flu epidemics (1885–90). Tuberculosis was the main cause of death in urban centres; 71 per cent of Spaniards were illiterate.56 In 1898, Spain lost its remaining colonies – Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines – to the United States. Some Europeans, such as the French geographer Maurice Zimmermann, began to worry at the rise of the new American power.57

  The demoralization that pervaded the country after the desastre del ’98 – as the losses of the colonies were called – gave way to a period of intense soul-searching, nationalism, and economic protectionism, even though the economic consequences of the desastre were relatively trivial.58 There was little popular sorrow for these losses – something which puzzled the intelligentsia, particularly those who were so traumatized that they became known as the generación del ’98, whose despair gave rise to a spate of books, from Damían Isern’s Del desastre nacional y sus causas (1899) to Ricardo Macías Picavea’s El problema nacional. Hechos, causas y remedios (1899).59

  In Catalonia, Spain’s most modern (culturally and industrially) region, the disaster of 1898 was regarded as a defeat for Spain not for Catalonia.60 Nation-building in Spain was difficult because the separatist movements prevailed where industry was strong, namely in Catalonia and the Basque country. This was unusual at the time in western Europe since separatism of this kind tended to be in poorer areas, which blamed the richer ones for their plight. And even this poor man’s separatism was a minor affair: in Sicily it did not amount to much; in Corsica nationalism was a spent force; in Scotland and Wales it was, at the time, a matter for eccentrics; Bavaria seemed content to be part of Germany at least until after the First World War. Ireland was quite a different matter and, indeed, Irish nationalism remained a key player in British politics even after the formation of the Irish Free State in southern Ireland in 1922.

  The anti-democratic argument in Spain (but also elsewhere, as we shall see in Chapter 13) was that it would be folly to grant the suffrage to the entire people since they were an inchoate mass whose lack of education and base desires made them easy prey for unscrupulous rabble-rousers. The people had to be educated and then, in the fullness of time, and only gradually, could they be allowed to elect their representatives. They would learn their duties. They would behave responsibly. They would stop blaming their rulers for what happened to them. They would arbitrate between competing elites in a peaceful way. Nevertheless, in 1890 a new electoral law granted suffrage to all Spanish men over the age of twenty-five, regardless of income (and well ahead of Britain, where universal men’s suffrage was granted only in 1918).

  In Russia, too, there was an unmistakable whiff of democracy. By the 1860s even Russian conservatives recognized that some political reforms were due. Some attributed the catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War (1853–6) to the lack of patriotic spirit of conscripted soldiers (mainly peasants) and believed that this, in turn, was due to the lack of involvement of the people in political life. Yuri Samarin, an ardent Slavophile, wrote, ‘We will regain our proper place in the comity of European powe
rs not in Vienna, not in Paris, and not in London but only inside Russia’ by ending ‘the isolation of the government from the people’.61 There were 300,000 landowners in Russia, he explained, who lived in fear of a terrible revolution (and ‘with reason’ he added) and millions of peasants united in the belief that their common enemy was the nobility (though they still worshipped the Tsar).62

  Like many conservatives who wanted ‘to turn to the people’, whom they regarded as a source of wisdom, religion, and tradition, Slavophiles such as Samarin had advocated the abolition of serfdom not out of some commitment to liberalism but in order to ensure that the autocracy would rest on a solid foundation of popular deference, all the better to withstand revolutionary populism. Other Slavophiles had welcomed the emancipation of the serfs too because they thought it would eliminate the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the serfs and their masters.63

  By the turn of the century most Russian newspapers, whether liberal or conservative, supported the idea of equal rights and criticized the excessive privileges of the nobility.64 An important paper such as Peterburgskaia gazeta in 1905 carried interviews with workers protesting against conditions in factories and even articles sympathetic to radical reformers.65 Even more alienated than the peasants (whose thoughts can only be surmised) were members of the young radical intelligentsia – a word borrowed from the German die Intelligentz, but already widely circulating in Russia.66 Their rejection of the existing order had no parallel in the rest of Europe. Many of these young intellectuals were ‘nihilists’ (a word popularized by Turgenev in his famous 1862 novel Fathers and Sons). Some became terrorists, forming groups such as Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), responsible for a spate of assassinations. Many of their victims were obvious targets of hatred, including the Education Minister Nikolai Bogolepov (1901), who had cracked down on students; the Interior Minister Dmitry Sipyagin (1902); his successor Vyacheslav von Plehve (1904), who had persecuted minorities – Armenians, Jews, and Finns – as well as militant workers and who had fervently supported the war against Japan (1904–5); Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Governor General of Moscow and brother of Tsar Alexander III (1905), who had been a repressive hard-liner responsible for the expulsion of some 20,000 Jews from Moscow in 1891; and, finally, the Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1911), who had closed down the First Duma (the legislative assembly), modified electoral rules in a conservative direction, executed terrorists under martial law, and operated in complete disregard of established legislation.