JAPAN: THE MEIJI RESTORATION

|
JAPAN: THE MEIJI RESTORATION
|
bet | 24/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
47. JAPAN: THE MEIJI RESTORATION
In this period the great Far Eastern empires of China and Japan were coming in closer contact with both the Catholic-Protestant West and the Orthodox East. Japan responded by adopting a westernization programme which soon shot her into the ranks of the major powers. The key to this almost unique success lay in the fact that Japan did not have westernization imposed upon her by a colonial power (although the Americans did force her to open her land to trade with the West), but was able to absorb it within her own cultural and political framework.
J.M. Roberts writes: "The keys to the continuity and toughness of Japanese society have been the family and the traditional religion. The clan was an enlarged family, and the nation the most enlarged family of all. In patriarchal style, the emperor presided over the national family as did a clan leader over his clan or, even, the small farmer over his family. The focus of family and clan life was participation in the traditional rites, the religion known as Shinto, whose essence was the worship at the proper times of certain local or personal deities."511
In 645, according to the Taika Reform Edict, the emperor, who was from the ruling Yamato elite and claimed to be descended through the first emperor Jinmu from the sun goddess, acquired absolute power and claimed ownership of all land in the kingdom. As W.M. Spellman writes, "he also reaffirmed his status as Shinto high priest, thereby combining supreme religious authority with new-found political primacy on the classic pagan god-king model. In reality, however, the Taika Reform Edict did little to alter the status of powerful and semi-autonomous aristocrats in the countryside, of whom the most important were the Fujiwara."512
"During the Kamakura period (1192-1333) when the Minamoto clan dominated the scene from their military base on the Kanto plain, the Japanese emperor was no more than a symbolic figurehead performing ceremonial and religious functions while banditry and general lawlessness became the norm throughout the islands; even Buddhist monasteries employed armed bands for protection in a strife-torn society. By the eleventh century, private rights had clearly superseded public obligations and localism usurped the prerogatives of central authority. For the next 800 years, Japanese monarchs reigned but did not rule. The fact that outright usurpation of the throne did not occur, however, is testimony to the strength of the royal claim to hereditary priestly leadership within the island kingdom. Indeed unlike the Chinese model, where usurpation was interpreted as the legitimate transfer of the Mandate of Heaven to a more worthy leader, in Japan belief in the divine descent of the emperor [from the sun goddess] and the importance of unbroken succession guaranteed the survival of the monarchy throughout the difficult medieval centuries."513
In the seventeenth century the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) began to centralise power in the country, expelled the European Christian missionaries and restricted trade with the West to Dutch merchants in Nagasaki. "Tokugawa military rule, referred to as the bakafu (tent government), brought about the pacification of the country and laid the groundwork for 250 years of population growth, modest domestic economic expansion, and the introduction of a money economy. Between 1700 and 1850 Japan 'was more peaceful, more equitably fed, and more secure than any other society in the world'. The social values stressed by this military rule included discipline, loyalty, endurance and respect for one's natural superiors. Hideyoshi claimed to be of Fujiwara descent and sought legitimation from the powerless emperor Ogimachi (1516-1593). The imperial court had fallen into its worst condition during the era of civil war, but the Tokugawa were careful to revive the imperial finances and buttress imperial prestige. Although the emperor remained secluded in Kyoto during the centuries of Tokugawa rule, the shogun recognized the ultimate source of his legitimacy in the person of the monarch. By seeking imperial approval for political power won on the battlefield, Hideyoshi reaffirmed the centrality of the emperor to Japan's political order and prepared the way for the restoration of royal power which occurred three centuries later.
"With peace restored throughout the country, the traditional military services of the samurai elite were no longer needed, and the Tokugawa shoguns insisted that all important feudal lords spend a portion of the year in Edo [Tokyo], where they and their families would be under the watchful eye of the rulers. The Japanese did not abandon the belief that the emperor, now living in seclusion in Kyoto, was in theory the supreme political and religious authority, but the Tokugawa family successfully portrayed itself as the vice-regal administrative and military instrument of the god-emperor. No feudal lords were permitted to approach the imperial court or the person of the emperor without the permission of the shogun. By the opening of the nineteenth century, class lines in Japan were beginning to blur as prosperous merchants view with the increasingly idle warrior class for prestige and influence. Social tensions, brought about by fundamental economic change and fuelled by resentment at Tokugawa unwillingness to engage the outside world, prepared the way for a remarkable transformation in the role of the monarch during the second half of the nineteenth century.
"In 1853 the American naval commander Matthew Perry arrived with a powerful fleet near Tokyo and threatened to bombard the city unless the Japanese opened up trade with America. American penetration of the Japanese main islands, begun the following years, was quickly followed by Dutch, Russian and British encroachment. Anti-Tokugawa clan leaders, awakened to the fact of their technological, and especially naval, inferiority and finding the only solution to be in the creation of a strong central government, turned to the traditional monarchy as the rallying point for modernization, an alternative and ancient source of political legitimacy. Between 1858 and 1865 attacks on foreigners escalated. Ironically the emperor Konmei counselled the shogunate to strengthen defences in an effort to maintain Japan's
isolation; at this moment the monarchy took the side of defending the status quo against the corrupting influence of the outside barbarians.
"Against the considerable opposition of the Tokugawa shogun and the emperor, then, economic, military and political modernization became the rallying cry of those samurai elites and urban commercial leaders who were determined not to allow Western domination of the country to proceed unchecked. Turning from the shogunate to the imperial office for support, a new monarchical regime called 'Meiji' or 'Enlightened Rule' was inaugurated after the death of the emperor Komei in January 1867. Leaders of the four most important feudal families turned over their estates to the new 15-year-old emperor Mutsuhito (1852-1912) in a gesture of insurgent nationalism. In a memorial addressed to the emperor, the clan leaders maintained that they were returning to the Son of Heaven what had originally been his 'so that a uniform rule may prevail throughout the empire. Thus the country will be able to rank equally with the other nations of the world.' In July 1869 an imperial decree ordered all other landed elites to make the same submission. In return these aristocrats would become provincial governors under the crown; private political authority in the countryside, the norm for over a millennium, was now defined as usurpation and effectively brought to a close.
"Under Mutushito, the 122nd monarch in a line from Jinmu, calls for the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate intensified. Seeing the scale of the opposition to his family's rule and unwilling to plunge the country into civil war, Tokugawa Yoshinobu abolished the family office - and eight centuries of military government - in November 1867. Establishing a new capital in Tokyo (formerly Edo), the emperor enjoyed enough support from disgruntled samurai warriors, clan leaders and urban commercial interests to defeat the hold-out troops of the now-defunct shogunate. There ensued three decades of unprecedented reform, catapulting feudal Japan into the industrial age. Feudalism was officially abolished in 1871, a national conscript army based on the German model was created, and Western military advisors were recruited in order to assist with the building of a modern navy. State-sponsored and mandatory elementary education was adopted, the Gregorian calendar was introduced, a representative system of local government was created, and a robust commercial and industrial revolution began, the first of its kind in the non-western world. No other non-European nation responded as quickly and as effectively as Japan to the threat of Western imperialism.
"The ideological components of the revolution which occurred in Japan in 1868 centred on two key elements: nationalism and tenno-ism. The historic uniqueness of Japanese civilization was stressed while the monarchy was held up as the embodiment of the nation's highest ideals, its closest bond with earlier times. There was no establishment of direct imperial rule in 1868, but instead the emperor's authority was gradually enhanced as anti-Tokugawa reformers claimed a mandate from the divine ruler. By linking the ancient institution of monarchy with the innovative programme of economic modernization and social change, reformers hoped to make change more palatable in traditionalist circles. Not the least of these
changes involved the new national political institutions. After a series of delegations sent to Europe and the United States during the 1870s and 1880s returned with their suggestions for constitutional reform, in 1889 a new framework of government, reflecting the German imperial model, established a bicameral parliamentary structure with cabinet responsibility for national policy. The lower house or diet, elected on a restricted franchise which excluded 95 per cent of the adult male population, served as an advisory body to the government, but the emperor retained control over the military and named his chief ministers, all of whom served at the pleasure of the monarch. An upper house composed of former nobles and Meiji leaders rounded out the parliamentary system.
"The first article of the new German-style constitution emphasized the centrality of the sacred monarch's role in the new government. Here it was stated plainly that 'The empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of emperors unbroken for ages eternal.' Ito Hirobumi, one of the principal authors of the new constitution, provided a commentary on the document which encapsulates the thinking of the Meiji reformers. The emperor, according to Hirobumi, 'is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; he is pre-eminent above all his subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable. He is indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law no power to hold Him accountable to it.'514
"Unlike his predecessors, the Meiji emperor undertook a new public role designed to link the monarchy with the actions of the state. Reviewing troops, giving audiences to foreign envoys, presiding at various public awards ceremonies, placing his name on a large list of policy decrees, the emperor became the exclusive focus of national loyalty. At court, traditional dress was abandoned in favour of mandatory Western styles, and young Japanese eagerly embraced the idea of modernization in the service of the monarchy.
"It is in this last idea - service to the tenno (lord of heaven) - that the uniqueness of Japan's drive towards modernization must be assessed. The revolution of 1868 was not a middle-class, bourgeois-inspired call for an individualistic and capitalist state along Western lines. Instead the reforming oligarchs who were responsible for the end of the shogunate continued to emphasize the virtues of obedience, loyalty and acquiescence in the service of one's superiors. In an imperial rescript on education issued by the emperor in 1890 - a document to be memorized by generations of schoolchildren down to 1948 - young Japanese were exhorted to 'offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.'
These values, it was hoped would combine to shape a nationalist ideology unique in its association with the institution of monarchy."515
The absence in Meiji Japan of a loyal but independent religious institution laid the foundations of the tragedy of 1945. As the historian Ienaga Saburo writes: "The vast majority of the people were educated from youth into a frame of mind in which they could not criticise state policies independently and had to follow them, mistaken though they were. Education since 1868 carries heavy responsibility for bringing on that tragedy."516511
Nevertheless, the Japanese monarchy was not of the typically pagan, despotic kind. As Dominic Lieven writes: "Japanese tradition was totally opposed to the Emperor actually attempting to act as the chief executive officer of his government. For centuries the Emperor's role had been purely ceremonial and priestly, actual power being exercised by the Shogun. In the last decades of the Tokugawa era even the Shogun did not rule personally, his powers being used by subordinates in his name. Although in theory the Meiji restoration returned power to the monarchy's hands, it was never the intention of the restoration's key statesmen that the monarch should literally run his own government like a Russian or German emperor. On the contrary, the monarchy's role was to provide legitimacy for the Meiji era's reformist oligarchy and to act as a symbol around which the Japanese nation could rally. As in Europe, however, one key reason for the oligarchy's determination to locate sovereignty in the Emperor was their opposition to accepting the only alternative principle, namely the sovereignty of the people exercised through elected institutions.
"In a way that was not true even in Prussia, let alone Russia, court and government were always sharply separated in Meiji Japan. The court was the world of priestly rites and Confucian moral virtues, never of actual political rule. Though in theory the Emperor chose prime ministers, in fact they were selected by the genro, in other words the tiny group of elder statesmen who constituted a sort of supreme privy council and presented the monarch with a candidate whom he never rejected. Recommendations on policy were submitted to the crown in the unanimous name of the government. The Emperor was never asked to adjudicate personally between conflicting choices or groups, still less to devise his own policies and find minister to support them. The traditions of the imperial house meant that the monarchs did not revolt against this passive role. The Emperor Meiji, for instance, is said to have rebuffed efforts to draw him more directly into government by commenting that 'when one views [our] long history one sees that it is a mistake for those next to the throne to conduct politics'. In any case since no modern Japanese emperor, Meiji included, had ever possessed real political power there was never any question of the need to surrender it into the oligarchy's hands. When the Emperor Hirohito contemplated intervening personally to tilt the balance against military extremists in 1937 he was warned by the sole remaining genro, Prince Saioniji, that the monarchy must not endanger itself by active political engagement. Only in the apocalyptic circumstances of 1945 did the monarch decisively enter the political arena and even then this happened because the government was split down the middle on the issue of peace or war and requested his intervention."517
This strange position of the Japanese emperor meant that ordinary Japanese could sincerely venerate, even worship him, while despising the idea of one-man-rule. Thus "during the Second World War the Japanese Communist Nosaka Sanzo told a Chinese Communist party conference that 'the Japanese people may hold the Emperor... in religious awe, but they do not worship the system of despotic rule. We must abolish the Emperor system immediately and establish a democratic system... However, we must be very careful in defining our attitude to... his [the Emperor's] semi-religious influence... Many soldiers captured by the [Communist] Eighth Route Army said they could agree with the [Communist] ideology, but if they sought to destroy the emperor, they would be opposed. This can be seen as a general pattern of thought held by the majority of the Japanese people."518
"Modernizing the Japanese economy required strong governmental initiatives and harsh fiscal policies. There had been for a time a grave danger of opposition and disorder. Centuries before, the imperial power had gone into eclipse, unable to control over-mighty subjects; its restored authority faced new dangers in a new age. Not all conservatives could be reconciled to the new model Japan. Discontented ronin or retainers - rootless and masterless samurai, the traditional fighting class - had been one source of trouble. Another was peasant misery; in the first decade of the Meiji era there had been scores of agrarian revolts, but reform had created unconditional private ownership in land and many tenant farmers were to benefit from it. There had also been a last feudal rebellion, but the energies of the discontented samurai were gradually siphoned off into the service of the new state; building their interests into it, though, only intensified an assertive nationalism in certain key sectors of the national life. It was soon expressed not only in continuing resentment of western powers but also in support of imperial ambitions directed towards the nearby Asian mainland..."519
48. GERMANY ON THE PATH TO WAR
If Germany had the world's largest socialist party, it was far from being a leftist country in general. A powerful reaction to certain aspects of democracy was building up. After the first flush of pride in the victory over France in 1870, a general feeling of dissatisfaction set in in Germany. Many were unhappy at the triumph of Prussia and its regimented, despotic spirit. Engels had welcomed Bismarck's success in reducing German "particularism", but "the main disadvantage," he said, "and it is a very big one, is the inevitable swamping of Germany by the Prussian spirit". The liberals were unhappy that Germany was not a fully parliamentary state, but was still largely controlled by the king, the army and the Prussian aristocracy. Antisemites like Paul de Lagarde, on the other hand, were unhappy that Germany was becoming too liberal, and that the new unified German state was the "little" one, excluding Austria - whose inclusion, he believed, justified a great war. The Catholics were unhappy with Bismarck's Kulturkampf legislation for obligatory civil marriage and the prohibition of the Jesuit order, resistance to which caused most Prussian bishops and thousands of priests to be thrown into prison. Over all this was a vaguer feeling that something was rotten in the house of Germany with its "hard-boiled Realpolitik and oppressive piety, ostentatious theatrical poses, self-righteous nationalism combined with internal discord, and finally materialism, overwhelmed by the successes of the natural sciences, but yet prepared suddenly to change into cheap mysticism".520
These problems became more acute when William II came to the throne in 1888. He had a difficult birth which gave him a withered arm; and he developed a hatred for his English mother and all things English.521 Unbalanced, aggressive, mendacious, provocative and inconsistent to the point of illness (Tsar Nicholas II said he was "raving mad"), William had much to do with dividing Europe into two armed camps and souring the relations between Germany and England, on the one hand, and between Germany and Russia, on the other. 522
William's first major error was to dismiss Bismarck and allow the "reinsurance" treaty with Russia to lapse, thereby introducing a dangerous note of insecurity into German foreign policy. "The monarch," writes W.H. Spellman, was moving Germany "into an aggressive and expansionist posture. In language reminiscent of eighteenth-century divine-right absolutism, he informed the Provincial Diet of Brandenburg in 1891, 'that I regard my whole position and my task as having been imposed on me from heaven, and that I am called to the service of a Higher Being, to Whom I shall have to give a reckoning later.' To Bismarck's successor William confided in 1892 that he was not interested in personal popularity (although his actions belied this), 'for, as the guiding principles of my actions, I have only the dictates of my duty and the responsibility of my clear conscience towards God'. In 1900 William told the future George V of England that as Kaiser he alone 'was master of German policy and my country must follow me wherever I go'. In the judgement of one recent observer the emperor personified the dynastic culture of later eighteenth-century Europe: 'He was a monarch by Divine Right yet always the parvenu; a medieval knight in shining armour and yet the inspiration behind that marvel of modern technology, the battle fleet; a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary yet also - for a time at least - the Socialist Emperor who supported basic accident and retirement insurance for the industrial worker.’”523
Under William, Germans began to dream of world power. Thus “in 1894, radical nationalists set up the Pan-German League. The ambition of the bourgeois nationalist project, and its irritation with the restraint of government policy, was summed up by the rising German sociologist and economist Max Weber. ‘We must realize,’ he announced in his famous Freiburg Lecture of 1895, ‘that the unification of Germany was a youthful prank which the nation played in its dotage, and should have avoided on account of its cost, if it was to have been the completion rather than the starting point of a bid for German global power.’”524
It was in rivalry with Britain that German militarism particularly manifested itself. Hatred of Britain was a defining quality of the German officer class, and through it of most of the civilian population. And yet it was not at all obvious why Britain and Germany should be such implacable opponents. The two countries had never fought against each other: Britain’s traditional rival was France, more recently Russia; and Germany feared above all the powerful nations to the west and east of her – the same France and Russia – who by this time had formed a military alliance. It was in fact more logical, from a geopolitical point of view, for the two Protestant nations of Britain and Germany, linked as they were by race, by religion and even by dynasty (Queen Victoria was the Kaiser’s grandmother, and Edward VII – his uncle), to unite against the two other powers.
Nor were their interests in other respects that divergent. True, there were commercial rivalries – but not so fierce as to be likely to lead to war. True, Britain had a vast colonial empire overseas, whereas Germany had almost nothing. But Bismarck had set the general direction of German expansion: not overseas, but overland. While Britain would built her power on her maritime strength and overseas empire, Germany would build up her army on land and satisfy her Lebensraum by looking to the east – an enterprise that Britain, with her morbid antipathy to Russia, was unlikely to oppose.
However, Divine Providence so disposed events as to lead Britain away from her natural ally and closer to her former rivals. The first such event was the Boer War of 1899-1902 in South Africa, which Britain won, but at great cost, both morally and financially. The Germans were, of course, rooting for their cousins, the Boers; and they noted, as did the rest of the world, how the British had fought for purely avaricious ends (the acquisition of the diamond mines), and with considerable cruelty to the losers, whose lands were destroyed and whose women and children were herded into concentration camps – the first of their kind in history. The Russians were no less critical of the British campaign than the Germans; and the general furore led the British gradually to abandon their policy of “splendid isolation” and seek allies on the continent – including states such as France and Russia, which had been their traditional enemies.
The second event was a joint naval action of British and German naval forces against Venezuela in 1902. The aim was to punish the Venezuelans for reneging on their debts; but the methods used, against an almost defenceless people, caused revulsion – and it was the actions of the German vessels that seemed especially repellent. Thus in New York the Evening Post sneered: “As a method of maintaining German prestige the attack upon a mud fort and a collection of naked fishermen must be regarded as a failure.” Chancellor Bernhardt von Bülow claimed that “no American or British admiral would have done otherwise.” But the damage to German prestige was done; and resentment against the Anglo-Saxons was aroused. And so, as Anthony Delano writes, “after the Venezuela adventure, the Kaiser was later to say, relations between Britain and Germany were never the same.”525
A third factor was the Navy arms race. In 1898, the Navy League had been founded by the arms manufacturer Krupp with a view to catching up with Britain on the seas. “Within a decade,” writes Richard Evans, “it was dwarfing the other nationalist groups, with a membership totalling well over 300,000 if affiliated organizations were counted as well. By contrast, the other nationalist pressure-groups were seldom able to exceed a membership of around 50,000, and the Pan-Germans seemed to be permanently stuck below the 20,000 mark.”526
However, the nationalists, and particularly the Pan-Germans, were to be the force of the future. Building on the militarism described above, they created an ideology that was to re-emerge after the defeat of the First World War in the form of Nazism. The result was a vast increase in military expenditure – 43% of the Reich budget in 1909.527
In 1906, at a Great Power conference in Algeciras over whether France should retain control over Morocco, Germany suffered a major diplomatic defeat as Britain and Russia backed France against Germany. The Anglo-French Entente was now stronger than ever; the “encirclement” by France and Russia that German diplomats feared appeared closer to reality; and, to cap it all, the British launched the Dreadnought, a huge new kind of warship that, as Miranda Carter writes, “threatened to make obsolete everything that had come before.”
“After Algeciras,” she continues, “the German government seemed to be pulled in two directions: on the one hand, there were those who accepted that sabre-rattling hadn’t worked, and that something needed to be done to defuse the tensions the conference had produced; and on the other, there was a feeling that Germany hadn’t played hard enough, that the government had pusillanimously shied away from the logical consequence of its policy – war with France. [Most senior ministers] were in the first camp; many of the German officer class were in the second. After fifteen years under the command of General Alfred von Schlieffen, the senior army staff constituted of a small Junker elite obsessed with its own privileges and superiority, fearing and fending off dilution by the middle classes, utterly opposed to socialism which it regarded as degenerate, saturated in the ideas of the nationalist historian Treitschke – who saw Europe as a Hobbesian battlefield where might was everything and the Slav the enemy – actively welcoming war as a force that would cleanse Germany inside out. Wilhelm had just replaced the retiring Schlieffen – the appointment was entirely in his gift – with Helmuth von Moltke, who was the nephew of the elder Moltke who had delivered the Prussian victories of the 1860s. Within the army Moltke was regarded as a controversial choice: not quite tough enough, and a little too arty – he played the cello, liked to paint and read Goethe. In other respects he was absolutely a product of the solipsistic world of the German General Staff; different only in that he didn’t welcome the European war that he thought was inevitable.”528
Germany was becoming more and more isolated internationally – and the fault was almost entirely hers, as her highly aggressive, provocative yet inconsistent and ill-thought-out policies alarmed her neighbours and drew them closer together.
In 1907 Britain and Russia, fearing German expansion and the beginnings of its colonial empire, in spite of many misgivings on both sides signed a convention delineating their respective “spheres of influence” in the Far East. This was a very limited agreement; but it greatly reduced the sources of tension between two countries. And now the Russians sought a stronger, military alliance with their traditional enemy, Britain, in order to defend themselves against their new enemy, Germany, thereby creating, in effect, a defensive Triple Alliance of Russia, France and Britain against Germany and Austria.
This is not to say that the Tsar, always a peacemaker, was open to suggestions from the Germans. In July, 1905 he had met the Kaiser in secret at Björkö in the Gulf of Finland, and signed a treaty with him. However, when his advisers saw it, they persuaded him to make changes to it and therefore in effect abandon it on the not unreasonable grounds that, although the treaty was a defensive one, it would be bound to look different to the French – and the alliance with France was too important to endanger.
In 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia with its large Serbian population. The shock in Serbia and Russia was immense, and Tsar Nicholas asked the Germans to mediate in the dispute. The Germans refused in a particularly blunt and offensive manner that stirred up a huge wave of anti-German feeling in the two Slavic countries. Although the Russians were too weak, so soon after the Russo-Japanese war and the 1905 revolution, to take decisive action at this point, their humiliation strengthened their determination not to allow the Austrians to get away with it next time. And so this event, more than any other, made eventual war between the Germanic and Slavic nations not simply possible but probable.
The Germans wanted war above all because, while the growth in their own power was impressive, Russia's was till more impressive. For "between 1908 and 1913 [Russia's] industrial production increased by 50 per cent, an expansion that was largely fuelled by defence-related output. Russia's army was already the biggest in Europe. By 1917 it would be three times the size of Germany's."529
And so the chief of the German general staff, von Moltke, was in favour of a preventive war against Russia, while his opposite number in Austria, on hearing of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, wrote that they must now fight Serbia (and probably Russia), "since an old monarchy and a glorious army must not perish without glory".530
The next international incident took place in July, 1911. “Germany sent a gunboat, the Panther, to the port of Agadir, in Morocco, where the French had recently and illegally sent troops claiming they were needed to quell a local rebellion. By the terms of the Algeciras conference, Germany was entitled to compensation if the French changed the nature of their presence in Morocco. With the Panther… positioned threateningly on the coast, the Germany Foreign Office demanded the French hand over the whole of the French Congo, adding that if they did not respond positively Germany might be forced to extreme measures.”531
The British saw this as a threat to their naval supremacy, and reacted strongly. Eventually, the Germans backed down and were given only a small part of Congolese jungle in compensation. But the blow to their pride, and to the reputation of the Kaiser, was considerable. “Senior German army officers sighed that the All Highest [the Kaiser] was so pusillanimous about taking supreme measures – Moltke had privately hoped for a ‘reckoning with the English’. The German colonial minister resigned…”532
“British attitudes to Russia had shifted. By 1912 the country had become fascinated by its would-be ally. In January 1912 The Times published a ‘Russian number’, and a group of liberal MPs visited Russia, a trip which Sir Charles Hardinge described as ‘the pilgrimage of love’. Russian literature was everywhere – not just Tolstoy but Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev had all been recently translated into English. Beef Stroganov had insinuated itself on to fashionable British menus. The Ballets Russes had brought a fantasy of Russian exoticism, wildness and modernity to London; [King] George went to see them on the eve of his coronation in 1911. But cultural fascination was not matched by political sympathy…”533
The reason for this lack of political, as opposed to cultural sympathy was twofold: first, the increasing democratization of British society, as witnessed by the huge struggle for Lords reform, and secondly, the wildly inaccurate reporting of Russian affairs by the Jewish press inside Russia and their western followers. In particular, the myth that the Jews were being foully and unjustly persecuted in Russia, was firmly believed throughout the West. The vast wave of anti-Russian pogroms, with thousands of Jewish political murders (the most damaging was the shooting of Prime Minister Stolypin by the Jew Bogrov in the presence of the Tsar in 1911) was simply not reported.
All this would bear evil fruit in the future. For a while the Anglo-Russian alliance continued in existence, but in 1917 the English embassy in St. Petersburg would prove to be the nest of the February revolution. And this in spite of the fact that the English ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, was “wonderfully devoted” to the tsar, declaring that “His Majesty had such a wonderful charm of manner that when he received me in audience he almost made me feel that it was as a friend, and not the Emperor, with whom I was talking. There was, if I may say so without presumption, what amounted to a feeling of mutual sympathy between us.”534
But cultural fascination and personal sympathies were swept away by the most powerful and enduring force in world politics – ideological differences, the fundamental collision between True Christianity and the democratic-socialist revolution.
However, for the time being common interests drew the rival empires together. The Russians sought a stronger, military alliance with their traditional enemy in order to defend themselves against their new enemy. And the British were not unwilling; for, as Prime Minister Herbert Asquith said, after Bosnia, “incredible as it might seem, the Government could form no theory of German policy which fitted all the known facts, except that they wanted war…”535
Germany was by now completely isolated diplomatically; she could look only to Turkey, traumatized by the Balkan Wars, as a potential ally. Moreover, her sabre-rattling and armaments build-up had only encouraged the Entente to respond in kind. “In 1913, Britain, France and Russia spent in total more than twice as much on armaments as Germany…”536
In the years leading up to the First World War German public opinion became increasingly hysterical and belligerent in relation to the powers that supposedly "encircled" them, especially Britain and Russia.
"In 1913," writes J.M. Roberts, "the Kaiser confided to the Austrian chief of staff that he was no longer against a great war (by which he meant one between several powers) in principle. One of his ministers even felt able to talk to members of parliament of the 'coming world War'. In an atmosphere of excited patriotism (it was the centenary of the so-called 'War of Liberation' with Napoleonic France) a special army bill was introduced that year into the Reichstag. The Russian modernization and rearmament programme (to be completed by 1917) had certainly alarmed the German soldiers. But by itself this can hardly explain the psychological deterioration in Germany that had brought about so dangerous a transformation of German policy as the acceptance of the inevitability of conflict with Russia - and therefore with France - if Germany's due weight in Europe was to be assured.
"Many Germans felt that 'encirclement' frustrated the exercise of German power, and should be broken, if only for reasons of prestige, and that such a step must involve a confrontation - though not necessarily war - with Great Britain. But this was not all that was happening in Germany in the decade before 1914. There had been a major inflammation of nationalist (and conservative) thinking and agitation in those years. It showed in the growth of societies and pressure-groups with different aims - safeguarding of the social hierarchy, anti-Semitism, patriotic support for armaments - but all contributing to a xenophobic and authoritarian atmosphere. Some Germans thought positively of possible territorial and material gains in the east and brooded on a supposed historic mission of Teuton to dominate over Slav. Some were troubled by the colonial questions that had been so contentious and prickly before 1900 (yet colonies had proved disappointing and colonial rivalry played virtually no part in the final approach to war). Germany was dangerously ready psychologically for conflict, even if, when war came at last, it was to find its detonator in the South Slav lands…"537
When the war came, Germany had to fight three major enemies: France, Russia and Britain. But the development of German thought in the pre-war period meant that there was really only one enemy: England.
As Golo Mann writes, “the Allies had only one enemy, Germany (the fact that Austria had actually started the affair was quickly forgotten). The question which the Germans were soon asking themselves was who was their chief enemy. Hardly France; only for the older generation who remembered 1870. Russia? That was the view of the German left, of all those whose thinking was inspired by the tradition of 1848, who saw despotic Russia as the enemy of a progressive, democratic ‘greater’ Germany. Or Britain? That was soon the most widely and ardently held belief. The belief of the pan-Germans, of the navy, of the patriotic professors, of the right in general, and then, under the impression of the blockade, probably also the mass of the people. The war, which the Germans had imagined as a continental war in the style of Moltke, was transformed by Britain into a world war; it deprived the German victories on land of their importance by isolating them. Britain brought into play the full strength of its national character, the whole force of its world-wide organizations and connections, of its dominions overseas; it was the bridge to America, and the channel through which all essential war material reached Germany’s enemies in an uninterrupted stream. France and Russia had both been defeated more than once in modern times and had adapted themselves to defeat; Britain never. That was its glory, and its efforts were correspondingly great. Seen from that angle Britain was the fiercest of Germany’s enemies. As Germany had nothing that Britain could want and as even the pan-Germans did not intend to make conquests at Britain’s expense, it followed that the struggle between Britain and Germany was one of life and death. It was not a question of this or that possession but of survival. As the Germans saw it Britain envied Germany its new splendour, its industry, its trade, its power in Europe and over Europe; there were pre-war quotations from the British press to prove the point. Quietly, busily Britain had spun the poisonous web of the coalition; with unctuous words Lügen-Grey (liar Grey [the British Foreign Secretary]) had drawn it tight at the opportune moment.
“[As the German song put it:] “What do we care about Russians and Frenchies; we repay shot with shot and blow with blow. We fight with bronze and with steel, and some day we shall make peace. But you we shall hate with lasting hatred and we shall not relent; hatred on the seas and hatred on land, hatred of the mind and hatred of the hand, hatred of the hammer and hatred of the crowns, strangling hatred of seventy millions. United in love and united in hatred they have only one enemy: ENGLAND.”538
*
But how did such a civilized nation reach such a paroxysm of hatred, which played such a major role in the destruction of the old world?
Archimandrite Cyril (Govorun) provides us with part of the answer: “One of the most vivid commanders of the German empire and its co-founder was Field-Marshal Helmut von Moltke (1800-1891). Once he expressed himself as follows: ‘Eternal peace is a dream, and not the most beautiful of dreams. War is part of the Divine world-order. In it we find the development of the best human virtues: courage, self-abnegation, faithfulness to duty and the readiness to offer one’s own life in sacrifice. Without war the world would descend into the abyss of materialism.’ This expresses the quintessence of the development of one of the directions of German idealism and German theology, which turned out to be very much in demand in the circle of German actors to which von Moltke belonged. Two basic postulates of this direction were, first, that war has its justification and is even necessary, if it is undertaken for the sake of lofty goals. And secondly, the most lofty goal is the struggle against the errors of the neighbouring peoples in their insufficient ‘spirituality’ – faithfulness to the Spirit (der Geist).
“For Germany, such a nation was first of all France, which had been infected, in the opinion of the Germans, by the virus of republicanism – ‘democratism’. The victory of Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 became for her a sign of election – of God’s having predestined her to be ‘God’s hammer’ in history, placing her in the centre of ‘the history of the salvation’ of the European peoples. This victory allowed Germany to accomplish, in the expression of the German history Martin Greschat, ‘a quantum jump’ from the soulless ‘national industry of war’ (that was how Count Mirabeau put it about Prussia in the 18th century) to a messianic state. In this state the life of each citizen and his rights were subject to a higher goal, and the state was the incarnation of this goal and the fullest manifestation of what Hegel had called Zeitgeist.
“In the self-consciousness of this state it was surrounded by enemies who could not understand it or accept its lofty mission because of its corruption, and for that reason the given state had to count only on its army and fleet. At the slightest opportunity this state considered that it had the right to violate international agreements, insofar as it had a higher goal and higher authorization – God.
“The Churches of Germany in every way supported this ‘self-consciousness’ of the German people. By 1914 what Karl Hammer called ‘the German theology of war’ (Deutsche Kriegstheologie) had been formed. In the opinion of the investigator John Moses, the majority of German theologians before 1914 supported the military messianism, including such authorities as Albrecht Richl and Adolf von Harnak. Several generations of theologians, beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher, who thought that in the war with Napoleon God had been on the side of Prussia, developed the thought that the German nation was chosen by God (Ausgewähltheit). From Schleiermacher’s idea that God was with the Germans at the loftiest moments of their history, the theologians passed to the conviction that the German state was itself a Divine institution.
“Patriotism as an unconditional justification of the state became practically a religious postulate. In 1902 the Kiel theologian Otto Baumgarten published a sermon that immediately became exceptionally popular: Jesu Patriotismus. In it he tried to prove that the religious duty of every person should become higher than his individual interests and that he should be ready to give everything for the homeland. His colleagues in every way supported the Weltpolitik – the colonial and imperialist strivings – of Kaiser Wilhelm and the growth, for the sake of this, of the military and naval might of Germany. Some, for example Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919), tried to unite the ideas of German nationalism and socialism. Naumann supposed that Germany’s struggle to acquire a leading position in the world in the conditions of imperial competition had to have its value and justirication, die Ethisierung der Machtkämpfe.
“One other authoritative theologian of the time, Ferdinand Kattenbusch (1851-1935), in his pamphlet Das sittliche Recht des Kreiges (The Moral Right to go to War), suggest, for the sake of justifying German imperialism, an idiosyncratic interpretation of the words of Christ on love for one’s neighbour. In his words, individual people living in this world cannot fully carry out the commandment on love. Nevertheless, to the degree accessible to each the spirit of love for one’s neighbour could be realized by the Christian in his desire to correct his neighbour. And this it was possible to do through compulsion. If it was necessary to correct one’s neighbours in large numbers, then one could and should apply military force. Military force applied for the sake of correcting the infirmities and sins of one’s neighbour, according to Kattenbusch, is the fulfilment of Christ’s commandment on love. Kattenbusch believed that nations each have their soul. In some nations their soul is infected by vice, and so they need military intervention for the sake of their own correction. But the German soul was the purest and most radiant of all the European souls and for that reason had the right to judge who needed correction, including through military chastisement.
“As Klaus Fondung concludes in his very interesting study, Deutsche Apokalypse 1914: ‘At the centre of the ‘German Apocalypse’ of the 1914 vintage lay a conception of war as the tribunal of the world мира (Weltgericht) – a tribunal at which God judged Germany’s enemies. How God judged we know from the following sequence of events. The world paid too high a price for the path to ‘the tribunal over Germany’s enemies’ until the ‘Nuremburg tribunal’…”539
|
| |