Conflicting loyalties and the crisis of efficiency: the imperial test of the First World War

Transcription

1 Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg JÖRN LEONHARD Commentary Conflicting loyalties and the crisis of efficiency: the imperial test of the First World War Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Jörn Leonhard (Hrsg.): Comparing empires : encounters and transfers in the long nineteenth century. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011, S

2 Schriftenreihe der FRIAS School of History Edited by Ulrich Herbert and Jörn Leonhard Volume 1

3 Comparing Empires Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century Edited by Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

4 t ) 44,2 4 Mit 19 Abbildungen Umschlagabbildung: The British Library Board (Photo 448/4) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. ISBN it 2011 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Oakville, CT, U.S.A. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Hinweis_zu 52a UrhG: Weder das Werk noch seine Teile dürfen ohne vorherige schriftliche Einwilligung des Verlages öffentlich zugänglich gemacht werden. Dies gilt auch bei einer entsprechenden Nutzung für Lehr- und Unterrichtszwecke. Printed in Germany. Satz: Dörlemann, Lemförde Druck und Bindung: 0 Hubert & Co, Göttingen Redaktion: Agnes Fellner, Jörg Später Redaktionsassistenz: Leonard Bowinkelmann Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Ill WEN

5 Table of Contents Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard: Beyond Rise, Decline and Fall Comparing Multi-Ethnic Empires in the Long Nineteenth Century 9 Exploring and Mobilizing The Challenge of Imperial Space Valeska Huber: Highway of the British Empire? The Suez Canal between Imperial Competition and Local Accommodation 37 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk: Mastering Imperial Space? The Ambivalent Impact of Railway-Building in Tsarist Russia 60 Marsha Siefert: "Chingis-Khan with the Telegraph" Communications in the Russian and Ottoman Empires 78 Murat Özyüksel: Rail and Rule Railway-Building and Railway-Politics in the Ottoman Empire 109 Karl Schlögel: Commentary Mastering Imperial Spaces in the Age of Engineers 137 Mapping and Classifying Surveying Composite States and Multi-Ethnic Populations Ulrike von Hirschhausen: People that Count The Imperial Census in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Europe and India 145 Mehmet Hacisalihoglu: Borders, Maps and Censuses The Politization of Geography and Statistics in the Multi-Ethnic Ottoman Empire 171 Ute Schneider: Commentary Empires and the Tension between Difference and Likeness 211

6 6 Table of Contens Mediating and Representing The Monarchy as an Imperial Instrument Ulrike von Hirschhausen: The Limits of Ornament Representing Monarchy in Great Britain and India in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 219 Daniel Unowsky: Dynastic Symbolism and Popular Patriotism Monarchy and Dynasty in Late Imperial Austria 237 Richard Wortman: The Tsar and the Empire Representation of the Monarchy and Symbolic Integration in Imperial Russia Hakan T. Karateke: From Divine Ruler to Modern Monarch The Ideal of the Ottoman Sultan in the Nineteenth Century 287 Peter Haslinger: Commentary Failing Empires? Strategies and Impacts of Imperial Representation during the Nineteenth Century. 302 Believing and Integrating Religion and Education as Media for Imperial Images Benedikt Stuchtey: One Big Imperial Family? Religion and Missions in the Victorian Age 31'1 Martin Schulze Wessel: Religion, Politics and the Limits of Imperial Integration Comparing the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire 337 Joachim von Puttkamer: Schooling, Religion and the Integration of Empire Education in the Habsburg Monarchy and in Tsarist Russia 359 Azmi Özcan: Imperial Legitimacy and Unity The Tradition of the Caliphate in the Ottoman Empire 373 Fikret Adanir: Commentary Challenging Religion's Supranational Character in a Period of International Competition 385 Ruling and Bargaining Confronting Conflicts within the Empires Jörn Leonhard: Pax Britannica and Imperial Conflict Strategies The Indian Uprising 1857/58 and the South African War in Comparison 393 Alice Freifeld: Conflict and De-escalation The Hungarian People and Imperial Politics from to the Ausgleich of

7 Table of Contens 7 Alexey Miller and Mikhail Dolbilov: "The Damned Polish Question" The Romanov Empire and the Polish Uprisings of and Maurus Reinkowski: The Imperial Idea and Realpolitik Reform Policy and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire 453 Jürgen Osterhammel: Commentary Measuring Imperial `Success' and `Failure' 472 Defending and Fighting The Empires' Experience of the First World War Santanu Das: "Heart and Soul with Britain"? India, Empire and the Great War 479 Martin Zuckert: Imperial War in the Age of Nationalism The Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War 500 Eric Lohr: Politics, Economics and Minorities Core Nationalism in the Russian Empire at War 518 Erik-Jan Zürcher: Demographic Engineering, State-Building and the Army The Ottoman Empire and the First World War 530 Jörn Leonhard: Commentary Conflicting Loyalities and the Crisis of Efficiency: The Imperial Test of the First World War. 545 Acknowledgements 553 List of Authors 555

8 Jörn Leonhard Commentary Conflicting Loyalties and the Crisis of Efficiency: The Imperial Test of the First World War When the American President Woodrow Wilson developed his vision of a new world order in 1917, he insisted on the right of national self-determination, particularly that of small nations: "No nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but... every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along the great and powerful." At the end of the war Wilson identified the causes of the World War in the suppression of many nationalities in continental Europe: "This war had its roots in the disregard of rights -of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life."' Wilson's premise of democratic and national self-determination developed into a counter-model to multi-ethnic empires. The combination of the continental empires' collapse as a result of the First World War and the establishment of new nation-states in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe seemed to justify Wilson's model and fuelled the historiographic narrative of an inevitable end of traditional and autocratic empires on the European continent. According to this interpretation, the First World War proved their anachronistic character, which was made responsible for the suppression of nations without states and the outbreak of conflict in However, and in contrast to this paradigm, the suggestive image of continental empires as prisons of nationalities never reflected the complex reality 1 W. Wilson, ("A Peace worth Preserving, Address to Congress on Essential Terms of Peace, 22 January 1917'; in Americanism: Woodrow Wilson's Speeches on the War, why he made them and what they have done, the President's principal Utterances F in the first Year of War, with Notes, Comments and War Dates, giving them their historical Setting, Significance and Consequences, and with brief Quotations from earlier Speeches and Papers, ed. O. M. Gale (Chicago,1918), 22-28, 27; second quotation: "`Only One Peace Possible, Address to Congress Answering a Peace Offensive, 11th February 1918, containing the `Four Points", in ibid., , 106.

9 546 Commentary before Instead, this image itself was in many ways the result of war experiences and war propaganda. Although the second half of the nineteenth century saw elements of nationalizing empires Russification, Magyarization, Turkification thus copying, at least selectively, the model of the homogenizing nation state, a relative flexibility in dealing with multi-ethnic diversity remained a prime characteristic of all empires under consideration, reflecting their historical structure of composite states. Imperial routine, based on broad experiences in responding to spatial, legal, ethnic and religious diversity, was not completely replaced. Far from idealizing the complex ethnic, religious, social melanges in cities such as Czernowitz, Riga or Thessaloniki, it was not inevitable that such multilayered structures were doomed to violent disintegration. However, they came under pressure with the rise of the national paradigm and its transformation into a collective and suggestive mass phenomenon, which demanded the identity of state and nation. This premise proved a particular challenge in the ethnically mixed regions of central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe, since it questioned the traditional dynastic and religious-confessional bases of imperial sovereignty and legitimacy. Against the background of the model of homogenizing nation-states, alternatives to historical empire structures were widely discussed before 1914, be it the idea of an Imperial Federation in the case of the British Empire, the numerous plans to stabilize the Habsburg Monarchy with its two states and ten historic peoples, or the ideal of an Ottoman nation as the empire's core. The fact that many of these concepts were not put into practice had less to do with secessionist nationalisms only a minority of Czechs and Slays really thought of national independence in 1914, and in 1918 the Austrian Socialist Karl Renner still favoured a Habsburg "state of nationalities, in order to provide an example for mankind's future national order." 2 Instead, the cause lay in the dynamism of the First World War itself: In all societies, political as well as military leaders made use of national arguments in order to win allies or to stabilize the home front. This also included the promise of independent nation states after the war. Thus, the war not only provoked expectations of social and political participation, combining conscription and franchise in the idea of national service, but also national expectations. This explains Tomas Masaryk's campaigns in his London exile and in the United States, it stood behind German support for Ukrainian and Finnish nationalists, the German-Russian competition for Polish support, the British and French promises for Arab and Palestinian independence movements, not least out of British fear of Ottoman anticolonial propaganda in India, thereby appealing to solidarity between all Muslims. The hitherto unknown number of vic- 2 Quoted in M. Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe's Twentieth Century (New York, 1999), 46.

10 Jörn Leonhard 547 tims of this global war was translated into collective political, constitutional, fiscal, social and national expectations. Historically, modern concepts of nation and nation-state were inextricably linked with experiences of war. The long-term process of state building, by which Europe's political map changed dramatically from the early modern period to the First World War, was, at the same time, a history of warfare and its revolutionary impacts. Most of the numerous territorial states of the early modern period did not survive this violent process of restructuring. Between the last third of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century the number decreased from about 500 units around 1500 to about 20 states around State-building by war affected mostly the smaller units, and it accompanied the establishment of new nation states, but before 1914 it left the multi-ethnic empires more or less intact, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire, which found itself under constant external pressure. As a consequence of the First World War, this long-term process was reversed, and the dissolution of continental multi-ethnic empires led to many new nationstates, but not to a more stable international order. War not only accompanied the external processes of state-building. It also represented a possible means of political emancipation and participation and, hence, contributed to internal nation-building. According to the war theories developed since the 1860s and 1870s and widely read in all European capitals prior to 1914, a war fought in the name of the whole nation and fought by the whole nation in arms, provoking hitherto unknown expectations of political and social participation, would directly challenge the traditional empires with their multi-ethnic populations. The intensive interaction between war and nation-building generated the ideal notion of a nation in arms, which was intensively observed in the imperial capitals of London, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Istanbul. It was based on the new ideal of the politically participating citizen as the natural defender of the fatherland. From that point of view, the perceived national character of conflicts provoked connotations of citizenship and political participation; the connection between franchise and conscription was the most obvious example. It was the experience of the First World War with hitherto unknown numbers of victims that challenged these concepts of loyal nations in arms. For the empires the question was even more radical: Would the multi-ethnic empires, with their traditional or newly invented bonds and languages of loyalty, be strong enough to survive a total war? What did the ideal of a `nation in arms' mean for multi-ethnic empires? How did the crisis of integration and loyalty affect the empires' stability during the First World War? The first `total war' meant a fundamental challenge to political rule, social cohesion and national loyalty in all empires. When mass mobilization, militarization of societies and expectations of political participation were com-

11 548 Commentary bined, traditional ideas of national wars changed into distinct war nationalisms that became characteristic for the years between 1914 and With the new quantity of victims, a new quality of mobilization and the reality of a long industrial war, the war became a test of all means of loyalty and provided radicalized criteria of political, social and economic efficiency. It led to new bargaining constellations for new actors. With the crisis of traditional languages of monarchical, dynastic or religious loyalty, the war turned into a plebiscite over imperial legitimacy, further complicated by external pressures from the idealistic counter-model of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points after Against this general background, the four contributions of this concluding section explain the crisis of the various empires' legitimacy not just by a handbook-style combination of war, revolution and imperial collapse between 1917 and Instead they allow us to differentiate a spectrum of responses to the empires' particular war experiences. Santanu Das looks at the different responses to, and effects of, the outbreak of the European war in India. Thus, the perspective is changed from the "colonizing" British to the "colonized" and their perception and experience of the war. The article proves the limits of these traditional and static concepts. Despite the opposition against British colonial rule, the outbreak of war at first provoked a wave of inter-imperial solidarity, not only in the empire's white Dominions, but also in India where the annual Indian Congress was poorly attended. Indian war contributions became vital for Britain's European and global position, and more than a million Indian soldiers and labourers were sent to France, Mesopotamia, East Africa and the Mediterranean. However, in the course of the war the difference between Indian soldiers fighting for the empire and the Indian national movement turning against British imperial rule became ever more obvious. The result was a complex and dual marginalization of Indian soldiers: first by the Indian national movement, and second by the war narrative of the British. For India, the experience of the First World War became ever more closely connected with anticolonial resistance, so that mass conscription and middleclass support for the war did not exclude the nationwide Home Rule agitation and more aggressive demands for self-government. From that perspective, the war continued and radicalized experiences of the South African War: For her European positioning, Britain depended more and more on the war contributions of her empire, but that made it difficult to avoid a changing balance between London and the imperial parts. Imperial war contributions underlined the need for representation or autonomy according to the Dominion-model or independence. In that respect Ireland and India, the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the Amritsar massacre of 1918, both reflected the limits of imperial loyalty.

12 Jörn Leonhard 549 Martin Zuckert looks at the Habsburg Monarchy's experience of the war. Here, prior to 1914, many contemporaries had feared an imminent military collapse of the monarchy in a major European war. Its multi-ethnic army seemed badly prepared to meet the challenges of large-scale war on different fronts. Despite these predictions, the Habsburg Monarchy survived the first tests of the war, and although nationalist propaganda and ethnically motivated distrust contributed to a latent destabilization and erosion, traditional loyalty focusing on the monarch and the army as integrative institutions functioned for quite a long time. The monarchy's military, despite its multiethnic character, was not more affected by mutinies and desertions than other nations in arms, and the image of unreliable Czech deserters had much to do with a retrospective narrative. The war proved that national belonging as an isolated factor was no explanation of imperial disintegration, and it was not a seriously disintegrating factor from the beginning of war. However, in the context of supply crises and military defeats ethnicity became more and more an instrument to mark social conflicts. An erosion of trust developed when social and economic conflicts highlighted the fragile structure of the Habsburg Monarchy, so that fundamental differences and inconsistencies within the monarchy, especially between the two parts of the dual monarchy, became more visible in the course of the First World War: In Cisleithania, on the one hand, symbolic acts of national belonging by Slavic soldiers or civilians were violently suppressed, and the Germans' collective obsession with an apparent inner enemy led to a climate of increasing mistrust. On the other hand, in Hungary identification with the nationally defined state was not only possible but also openly supported. The imperial test of war only began to question the empire's existence when a particular combination of a supply crisis, military defeats and general war-weariness demonstrated, in the eyes of contemporaries, that the monarchy could no longer fulfil its traditional functions. The collapse of economic, social and administrative structures after was also the result of eroding languages of loyalty, as the example of the imperial monarchy demonstrated: The Habsburg emperors may have been successful princes of peace, but they were no warrior kings. Traditional imperial loyalty could be secured in peacetime, but not in a war with radically new experiences of victims, and conflicts over the equal distribution of the unexpected costs of war. Changing the perspective, Eric Lohr concentrates on the development of Russian core nationalism in the wartime Tsarist Empire. War nationalism became closely connected to the changing war economy and the crisis over distributing the costs of war. The argument is that we must not overlook this aggressive form of Russian war nationalism against the background of the periphery's national movements. Russian core nationalism relied on a broad social base of the core population and soon began to question the domestic

13 550 Commentary and international status quo. Contrary to the cosmopolitan model of modernization, with which the Tsarist regime had entered the war in 1914, the state, confronted with Russian core nationalism, soon embraced and encouraged it and began to isolate enemy populations, which were deported and whose private properties were often nationalized. This practice of radical war nationalism with nationalization purges and internal enemy politics marked a very clear contrast to concepts of Russification as they had been employed before Thus, the war generated a new understanding of the imperial state which became less and less regarded as a single entity but rather as a conglomerate of antagonistic and competing nationalities that necessitated, and justified, radical means of exclusion. Against this background more traditional ideas of imperial assimilation were replaced by mobilizing, segregating and punishing distinct national groups. Here an obvious line of continuity between Russian war nationalism and future policies of the Soviet regime became visible. The Ottoman Empire's experience of the First World War pointed to a particular connection between traditions of demographic engineering, military violence and imperial disintegration, as Erik-Jan Zürcher shows in his contribution. Against the background of earlier experiences of foreign interventions, the Young Turk leadership feared that neutrality could lead to yet another intervention and that the empire could, in the end, be carved up by the victors. The war radicalized earlier developments, especially with regard to voluntary and forced migration and expulsion of minorities in the later nineteenth century, serving as means to replace lost provinces, but also to replace the non-muslim bourgeoisie dominating particular sectors of the economy a similar mechanism compared with Russian war time nationalism. Under the pressure of military defeats against the Russian forces, older traditions of forced migrations turned into aggressive demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and extermination by neglect. A radicalization of means in the course of war became obvious: from questioning the loyalty of Armenians and other Christian communities, to disarming Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army and putting them into labour battalions, to pogroms against Christian villages and piecemeal deportations of Armenians in the rear of the front. This was intensified when Armenians seemed to join forces with the advancing Russian army, so that the Young Turk government decided in favour of large-scale deportations of the Armenian population of Anatolia to Syria and northern Mesopotamia. Although forced migrations through deportations had been a traditional Ottoman policy to generate loyalty and stability, both quantity and quality of the deportations of 1915 were without precedent. Yet in contrast to Russia, these violent measures during and after the war were not justified by linguistic or ethnic categories per se, but were mainly based on religious criteria. In the Ottoman experi-

14 Jörn Leonhard 551 ence religion had already become the primary ethnic marker in the previous decades, and the war catalysed a radicalization of this concept of exclusion. Although the Young Turkish elite did not succeed in making the army a truly Ottoman nation in arms, thus copying the example of other European nation-states, through the particular war experiences and the military's role in the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia the army did indeed become a fundamental institutional nucleus of the Turkish Republic as a nation-state. In sum, the First World War as an experience of total warfare on the military and the home fronts put military efficiency, mass loyalty, political mobilization and social coherence to the test. Against this general background the European continent's multi-ethnic empires were faced with particular challenges that could, under specific, but not inevitable constellations, question their very existence. In contrast, the British position in the European war was rather strengthened by imperial war contributions, but it led to a changing balance between the imperial parts and the metropolis. From that perspective the British experienced what had already been obvious during the South African War: the reality of a global war in which Britain became increasingly dependent on the empire, thus reversing the imagined relation between the colonizing centre and colonized peripheries. All contributions highlight a particular dynamism and self-logic of war constellations. This went far beyond any previous anticipation and, hence, challenges the premise of inevitability. One may be rather surprised to see how long the empires, with their complex structures, succeeded under these conditions. Contrary to contemporary expectations the Habsburg multi-ethnic conscript army did not disintegrate, whereas core nationalisms in both Russia and in the Ottoman Empire turned to aggressive measures of identifying scapegoats, of exclusion and demographic engineering. Often the war served as a catalyst, and not a primary cause, for processes that had started earlier, as the radicalization of forced migration in the Ottoman Empire demonstrated. In the context of war, ethnicity was not an isolated factor, causing imperial disintegration especially if the perspective of soldiers' everyday life and the experience of the home front are taken into account, as the examples of the British Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy indicate. On the other hand, dynamic and radicalized core nationalisms, as in the Ottoman and Russian empires, could have a strongly disintegrative effect when they clashed with national movements in the peripheries. The examples prove that the respective and individual combinations of military success and failure, supply crises, warweariness and the erosion of traditional languages of loyalty led to a new and radical process, namely the ethnicization of political, social and economic conflicts within imperial societies. This constellation, which was far from obvious in the summer of 1914, but would become an everyday reality from on, marked the empires' test of efficiency and loyalty in a totalized war.