SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY-7
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Within less than a decade, however, England’s sense of “civilized security” was challenged by the “Age of Revolution” in Europe (1789-1848), when, as T.B. Macaulay summed it up, when reasonable demands for changes were consistently denied creating a dangerous polarization of forces that swayed from violent reaction to violent revolution. After the great French wars of 1793-1815 British foreign policy had tried to promote an English model of small self-governing countries that could pose no threat abroad, most especially in the New World where British policy supported the new Latin American republics, but also in Greece and Belgium. But, as Macaulay recalled in a speech in Edinburgh in 1852, the call for an international “European Year of Revolution” in 1848 had produced terrible scenes of violence, with the streets of the main cities running red, whereas, in spite of the “Hard Times” of the decade 1835-45 Great Britain and Ireland was conspicuously free from such violence.
It was in such a Britain very conscious of progressively moving forward that Herbert Spencer could begin to develop his scientific model of a reality that moved forward by “evolution”, coming up with the phrase “the survival of the fittest”, notions that came to be closely associated with the ideas of T.R. Malthus and Charles Darwin. And it was in a new mood of self-confidence in striving to be “the best” that London and its sister cities invited “All the nations” to contribute their finest “works of industry” to the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace itself a triumphant assertion of ‘power from the people’ in an age of the Gospel of Work, the product individualism and collectivism, of volunteerism and local government, of the power potential of the “combination of the weak” working within an English tradition of “commonweal” and community.
And in terms of the high hopes for human progress, to which President Obama referred when addressing ‘young leaders’ on the Saturday morning of his visit to Britain, the ‘High Noon’ moment for that dream has become with T.B. Macaulay and Victorian Britain in the 1850s and early 1860s, when it was hoped that the wider world would learn to emulate the traditions of the Westminster Parliament and the English tradition of constitutional government based on “the Sovereignty of the People”.
What happened, however, was that Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, having spent an period of exile in England during those crucial years up to and including 1848, returned to France, as Voltaire had done over a hundred years before, having seen how he could adapted the English ‘bottom-up’ democratic tradition to the French top-down tradition associated with the “Sun King” who unified France by teaching all of its disparate and disunited parts to define themselves by their mutual connection to his central power, itself a model that could claim inspiration from the glories of Ancient Rome, and its empire in which “all roads led to Rome”, roads built by its legions and used to extend the ‘long arm’ of central authority all the way out to the frontiers of empire and beyond.
So, under Napoleon III, France gave the world a new model of top-down heavily centralised government based on an updated version of Colbert’s schemes for a French Industrial Revolution, with the French railway system conceived as an expression of national unity, not as a sequence of inter-city connections in the Liverpool-Manchester tradition: and like the transport system of Ancient Rome, the national network served the twin military purposes of maintaining the capacity to crush internal rebellion or dissent and also to either defend the existing borders, or extend them.
For, as Macaulay said in 1852, the Year of Revolution had shown that Gibbon and Adam Smith had been wrong, back in that “Civilized Security”, in asserting that the Dark Ages had gone and would never return, for the Barbaric forces were no longer any match for civilization. What 1848 had shown was that the Barbarians were living within Western Civilization and were willing to destroy it and deliberately embrace revolutionary ‘nihilism’, anarchy and mindless savagery once more. So Civilization itself was faced by the challenge of “the survival of the fittest”, as the Egyptology that had become a French obsession after the Napoleonic venture into Egypt in the 1790s was followed by more and more “digs” that revealed new knowledge of forms of life that had become extinct, both species like all the dinosaurs and great Ancient Civilizations.
But, as Louis Napoleon, having been elected for a term as a constitutional President, then refused to step down and declared himself an Emperor, and Bonaparte had done, the new French model showed how anyone who seized power in an existing state could use a British-type of “Industrial Revolution” in order to set up a highly centralized command-based system of economic, social, political, cultural and military after the model of the ‘Panopticon’ designed by Jeremy Bentham for his brother who was charged with building a large prison in Russia.
There is perhaps no better or more dramatic example of the way that the vogue for ‘top down’ “Modernization” spread around the world than the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
Having had some experience of contact with Europe in the early Seventeenth Century Japan had decided to massacre and or exclude “Foreign Devils” for a couple of hundred years under the rule of the Shoguns, the military leaders. But in the 1860s this policy became unsustainable. After a civil war the supreme authority of the Mikado was restored: but a number of officials urged the need for change “In order to restore the fallen fortunes of the Empire and to make the Imperial dignity respected abroad…Let the Court ceremonies, hitherto imitated from the Chinese, be reformed; and let the foreign representatives be bidden to Court in the manner prescribed by the rules current amongst all nations”. It would also be “necessary… to get rid of the narrow-minded ideas which have prevailed hitherto…The most important duty that we have at present is for high and low to unite harmoniously in understanding the condition of the age, in effecting a national reformation, and commencing a great work…By travelling to foreign countries and observing what good there is in them, and by comparing their daily progress, the universality of enlightened government, the sufficiency of military defences and of abundant food for the people, with our present condition, the causes of prosperity and degeneracy may be plainly traced.” (pages 179-80)
And it is hardly surprising that the missions that were sent out to “foreign countries” to “observe what good there is in them” found that the country that was leading the way in “national” progress was the new Germany that came into being in 1871, when Bismarck had manipulated Napoleon III to declare war on the German states, only for the Prussian led German forces to win yet another “lightning fast” victory. In Britain Matthew Arnold had already been writing about the way that Great Britain, having benefitted for centuries from having broken away from “the mainstream” of History was now falling behind as European states like France and Germany had started to modernise with the benefit of superior educational systems producing a superior intellectual elite and practical technocracy, as well as a ‘lumpen proletariat” sent to state schools and taught to “know its place” as Plato’s ‘drones’ in the modern world: and Thomas Carlyle was an even more passionate advocate of all things German, with members of his circle championing the recollection that the Anglo-Saxon race too was Germanic in its roots and had been prepared to invade Britain and exterminate the British by means of “the ring of steel”, as J.R. Green described in his radical “History of the English People” (1874) as the “survival of the fittest” came to justify the extermination of “Barbarians”, who preferred a warrior’s death to the loss of their traditional ways of life.
Voices were raised both in Germany and Britain against what Matthew Arnold called “the Anglo-Saxon contagion”, breaking with the Carlyle group, but it really had to wait for the anti-German reaction during the First World War for Carlyle’s influence to fall totally into disrepute. Up till then, as G.M. Trevelyan wrote in 1918- “Ever since Carlyle’s death his name has been coupled with Darwin’s in argument for every bit of Prussian brutality that any Anglo-Saxon wished to commit under the sun. This was to put a gloss on the text of Darwin; but from Carlyle’s later works chapter and verse for the whole doctrine of force could warrantably be quoted. Some ‘imperialists’ used twenty years ago to quote the sage of Chelsea against all counsels of humanity and common sense.” (page 193)
But as Donald Read wrote in concluding his study of Cobden and Bright in 1967, when Richard Cobden had died in 1865 it was still possible to hope for peaceful internationalism and the spread of democracy, however: “The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death, and which culminated in two global wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude. In an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860s a century ago.” (page 249)
Though the “hopefulness” of the world in 1967 was qualified by the fact that all Life on Earth lived under the shadow of the Nuclear Arms Race, the latest form of Mutually Assured Destruction that much informed opinion by 1900 was beginning to assert made a Great War unthinkable, and, as A.J.P. Taylor was to bring out so clearly in “War By Timetable” his 1969 study of just how the First World War began “the era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism” had involved a massive Capital investment in the capacity of the Modern State to deploy vast and monstrous technologies in order to impose its will on all within its borders and all who threatened those borders, since from the time of Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci one of the main features of the Modern Era was the way that genius was prepared to seek patronage and a sense of Civilized Security under the protective umbrella of a dominant power, something that the Japanese had come to appreciate by 1900, looking to Great Britain for its new naval tradition and its great battleships, and to Germany for its new Army and constitution.
But what was “enlightened government” beyond making sure of “the sufficiency of military defences and of abundant food for the people” and trying to promote “prosperity” and counter “degeneracy”? And the construction of railway systems radiating out from capital cities to the outermost limits of the state could be seen as the very first step in forcing “modernization” on vast continental spaces leading to that American-English verb “to railroad”, meaning “to push forward fast”, frequently with no respect for local and indigenous values, not even a place with such a venerable ancient Civilization as China, where the granting of European coastal concessions led to the construction of railways up the great river valleys deep into the interior, where often Belgian engineers applied Western expertise and ignored Chinese considerations of ‘Feng Shui’, resulting in anti-European riots.
Within less than a decade, however, England’s sense of “civilized security” was challenged by the “Age of Revolution” in Europe (1789-1848), when, as T.B. Macaulay summed it up, when reasonable demands for changes were consistently denied creating a dangerous polarization of forces that swayed from violent reaction to violent revolution. After the great French wars of 1793-1815 British foreign policy had tried to promote an English model of small self-governing countries that could pose no threat abroad, most especially in the New World where British policy supported the new Latin American republics, but also in Greece and Belgium. But, as Macaulay recalled in a speech in Edinburgh in 1852, the call for an international “European Year of Revolution” in 1848 had produced terrible scenes of violence, with the streets of the main cities running red, whereas, in spite of the “Hard Times” of the decade 1835-45 Great Britain and Ireland was conspicuously free from such violence.
It was in such a Britain very conscious of progressively moving forward that Herbert Spencer could begin to develop his scientific model of a reality that moved forward by “evolution”, coming up with the phrase “the survival of the fittest”, notions that came to be closely associated with the ideas of T.R. Malthus and Charles Darwin. And it was in a new mood of self-confidence in striving to be “the best” that London and its sister cities invited “All the nations” to contribute their finest “works of industry” to the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace itself a triumphant assertion of ‘power from the people’ in an age of the Gospel of Work, the product individualism and collectivism, of volunteerism and local government, of the power potential of the “combination of the weak” working within an English tradition of “commonweal” and community.
And in terms of the high hopes for human progress, to which President Obama referred when addressing ‘young leaders’ on the Saturday morning of his visit to Britain, the ‘High Noon’ moment for that dream has become with T.B. Macaulay and Victorian Britain in the 1850s and early 1860s, when it was hoped that the wider world would learn to emulate the traditions of the Westminster Parliament and the English tradition of constitutional government based on “the Sovereignty of the People”.
What happened, however, was that Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, having spent an period of exile in England during those crucial years up to and including 1848, returned to France, as Voltaire had done over a hundred years before, having seen how he could adapted the English ‘bottom-up’ democratic tradition to the French top-down tradition associated with the “Sun King” who unified France by teaching all of its disparate and disunited parts to define themselves by their mutual connection to his central power, itself a model that could claim inspiration from the glories of Ancient Rome, and its empire in which “all roads led to Rome”, roads built by its legions and used to extend the ‘long arm’ of central authority all the way out to the frontiers of empire and beyond.
So, under Napoleon III, France gave the world a new model of top-down heavily centralised government based on an updated version of Colbert’s schemes for a French Industrial Revolution, with the French railway system conceived as an expression of national unity, not as a sequence of inter-city connections in the Liverpool-Manchester tradition: and like the transport system of Ancient Rome, the national network served the twin military purposes of maintaining the capacity to crush internal rebellion or dissent and also to either defend the existing borders, or extend them.
For, as Macaulay said in 1852, the Year of Revolution had shown that Gibbon and Adam Smith had been wrong, back in that “Civilized Security”, in asserting that the Dark Ages had gone and would never return, for the Barbaric forces were no longer any match for civilization. What 1848 had shown was that the Barbarians were living within Western Civilization and were willing to destroy it and deliberately embrace revolutionary ‘nihilism’, anarchy and mindless savagery once more. So Civilization itself was faced by the challenge of “the survival of the fittest”, as the Egyptology that had become a French obsession after the Napoleonic venture into Egypt in the 1790s was followed by more and more “digs” that revealed new knowledge of forms of life that had become extinct, both species like all the dinosaurs and great Ancient Civilizations.
But, as Louis Napoleon, having been elected for a term as a constitutional President, then refused to step down and declared himself an Emperor, and Bonaparte had done, the new French model showed how anyone who seized power in an existing state could use a British-type of “Industrial Revolution” in order to set up a highly centralized command-based system of economic, social, political, cultural and military after the model of the ‘Panopticon’ designed by Jeremy Bentham for his brother who was charged with building a large prison in Russia.
There is perhaps no better or more dramatic example of the way that the vogue for ‘top down’ “Modernization” spread around the world than the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
Having had some experience of contact with Europe in the early Seventeenth Century Japan had decided to massacre and or exclude “Foreign Devils” for a couple of hundred years under the rule of the Shoguns, the military leaders. But in the 1860s this policy became unsustainable. After a civil war the supreme authority of the Mikado was restored: but a number of officials urged the need for change “In order to restore the fallen fortunes of the Empire and to make the Imperial dignity respected abroad…Let the Court ceremonies, hitherto imitated from the Chinese, be reformed; and let the foreign representatives be bidden to Court in the manner prescribed by the rules current amongst all nations”. It would also be “necessary… to get rid of the narrow-minded ideas which have prevailed hitherto…The most important duty that we have at present is for high and low to unite harmoniously in understanding the condition of the age, in effecting a national reformation, and commencing a great work…By travelling to foreign countries and observing what good there is in them, and by comparing their daily progress, the universality of enlightened government, the sufficiency of military defences and of abundant food for the people, with our present condition, the causes of prosperity and degeneracy may be plainly traced.” (pages 179-80)
And it is hardly surprising that the missions that were sent out to “foreign countries” to “observe what good there is in them” found that the country that was leading the way in “national” progress was the new Germany that came into being in 1871, when Bismarck had manipulated Napoleon III to declare war on the German states, only for the Prussian led German forces to win yet another “lightning fast” victory. In Britain Matthew Arnold had already been writing about the way that Great Britain, having benefitted for centuries from having broken away from “the mainstream” of History was now falling behind as European states like France and Germany had started to modernise with the benefit of superior educational systems producing a superior intellectual elite and practical technocracy, as well as a ‘lumpen proletariat” sent to state schools and taught to “know its place” as Plato’s ‘drones’ in the modern world: and Thomas Carlyle was an even more passionate advocate of all things German, with members of his circle championing the recollection that the Anglo-Saxon race too was Germanic in its roots and had been prepared to invade Britain and exterminate the British by means of “the ring of steel”, as J.R. Green described in his radical “History of the English People” (1874) as the “survival of the fittest” came to justify the extermination of “Barbarians”, who preferred a warrior’s death to the loss of their traditional ways of life.
Voices were raised both in Germany and Britain against what Matthew Arnold called “the Anglo-Saxon contagion”, breaking with the Carlyle group, but it really had to wait for the anti-German reaction during the First World War for Carlyle’s influence to fall totally into disrepute. Up till then, as G.M. Trevelyan wrote in 1918- “Ever since Carlyle’s death his name has been coupled with Darwin’s in argument for every bit of Prussian brutality that any Anglo-Saxon wished to commit under the sun. This was to put a gloss on the text of Darwin; but from Carlyle’s later works chapter and verse for the whole doctrine of force could warrantably be quoted. Some ‘imperialists’ used twenty years ago to quote the sage of Chelsea against all counsels of humanity and common sense.” (page 193)
But as Donald Read wrote in concluding his study of Cobden and Bright in 1967, when Richard Cobden had died in 1865 it was still possible to hope for peaceful internationalism and the spread of democracy, however: “The era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism, which began after his death, and which culminated in two global wars, is now seen as a disastrous interlude. In an important sense the world of the 1960s is continuing from the point where Cobden hopefully left the world of the 1860s a century ago.” (page 249)
Though the “hopefulness” of the world in 1967 was qualified by the fact that all Life on Earth lived under the shadow of the Nuclear Arms Race, the latest form of Mutually Assured Destruction that much informed opinion by 1900 was beginning to assert made a Great War unthinkable, and, as A.J.P. Taylor was to bring out so clearly in “War By Timetable” his 1969 study of just how the First World War began “the era of high protection, extreme nationalism and rampant militarism” had involved a massive Capital investment in the capacity of the Modern State to deploy vast and monstrous technologies in order to impose its will on all within its borders and all who threatened those borders, since from the time of Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci one of the main features of the Modern Era was the way that genius was prepared to seek patronage and a sense of Civilized Security under the protective umbrella of a dominant power, something that the Japanese had come to appreciate by 1900, looking to Great Britain for its new naval tradition and its great battleships, and to Germany for its new Army and constitution.
But what was “enlightened government” beyond making sure of “the sufficiency of military defences and of abundant food for the people” and trying to promote “prosperity” and counter “degeneracy”? And the construction of railway systems radiating out from capital cities to the outermost limits of the state could be seen as the very first step in forcing “modernization” on vast continental spaces leading to that American-English verb “to railroad”, meaning “to push forward fast”, frequently with no respect for local and indigenous values, not even a place with such a venerable ancient Civilization as China, where the granting of European coastal concessions led to the construction of railways up the great river valleys deep into the interior, where often Belgian engineers applied Western expertise and ignored Chinese considerations of ‘Feng Shui’, resulting in anti-European riots.
