AP European History Unit 7
7.1-7.3 Nationalism and Unification
Nationalism in France: Napoleon III
Louis Napoleon was elected as president in France in December 1848. He was elected both because of his share name with his uncle and because middle-class and even peasant landowners feared socialism at the time. They wanted a strong ruler to protect private property and provide stability after the Revolution of 1848.
Louis Napoleon represented a vision of national unity and social progress in France, and he believed that France needed a strong, authoritarian leader who could stimulate the economy, provide jobs, and serve all people, not just special interest groups.
Louis Napoleon had been elected to a four-year term, but he was forced to share power with the National Assembly, which was dominated by conservatives. These conservatives sponsored legislation that limited voting rights and increased the role of the Catholic Church in education.
After the Assembly refused to change the constitution so he could run for a second term, Louis Napoleon conspired with the military and staged a coup d’etat on December 2nd, 1851. He dismissed the legislature and crushed resistance with the army and then, after restoring universal male suffrage, had a vote to legalize his coup. He was elected with 92 percent of the vote to a term of ten years. In a plebiscite the next year, he was made Emperor of France.
Emperor Napoleon III ruled France from 1852 to 1870. During this time, he experienced both successes and failures as a ruler.
His policies led to widespread economic growth in the 1850s, where his government invested in banks and railroad construction. It promoted public works programs, including rebuilding Paris. This improved the economy, with rising wages and declining unemployment.
Louis Napoleon enjoyed widespread support from urban workers and in the 1860s,he granted workers the right to form unions and to strike. He also relaxed press censorship and pursued free trade with Great Britain.
Louis Napoleon restricted the National Assembly and encouraged individuals who had opposed the regime to run as government-backed candidates to widen his base of support. However, by 1869, his opposition make up about 45 percent of the vote, and Louis Napoleon granted France a new constitution.
However, his reforms could not outshine his foreign policy failures, and he was captured by the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War.
Unification of Germany
When Wilhelm I inherited the Prussian throne in 1861, he set out to reestablish Prussia’s power and introduced reforms in the army. He called for expansion of the army through military draft and introduced modernized weapons.
As Germany industrialized, the power of the middle-class Liberal Party grew in Prussia and they were resentful of the conservative influence of the army and the Junker class, both who opposed the reforms of the king. This created a deadlock and a constitutional crisis over military spending, and to solve it, Wilhelm I looked to Otto von Bismarck.
Bismarck was made prime minister in 1862 and came into the position with widespread diplomatic experience. He declared that Wilhelm’s government would rule without parliamentary consent.
Addressing the opposition, Bismarck used the expression "Blood and Iron," or more accurately "Eisen und Blut," to describe how the great moments in history are decided through conflict and warfare. Bismarck's phrase was meant to assert that wars decide the major events of history, and it was delivered as an appeal to the Prussian Parliament to increase defense spending.
Bismarck went on collecting taxes even though the budget had not been approved and he reorganized the army. He then waged three separate wars to unify Germany.
Bismarck was a master of Realpolitik, taking advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves. In 1864, Denmark incorporated Schleswig and Holstein into the Danish kingdom, provoking a joint war with Prussia and Austria, which was short and successful against Denmark.
Afterwards, the joint occupation of this territory created conflict, as Bismarck wanted Prussia to control this territory. Prussia went to war against Austria in 1866 and the Prussians defeated the Austrians, forcing them out of German affairs.
Prussia annexed the states of north Germany and created the Northern German Confederation. While the southern Catholic German states were not included here, Bismarck convinced them into an alliance if there was a war against France.
In 1870, Bismarck manipulated a war against France, easily defeating France in the Franco-Prussian war and taking the French provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.
In 1871, the German Empire was declared with William I as its Kaiser, or emperor.
Unification of Italy
Sardinia’s brilliant statesman Count Camillo Benso di Cavour had limited and realistic national goals, seeking unity only for the states of northern and perhaps central Italy in an expanded kingdom of Sardinia.
In the 1850s Cavour worked to consolidate Sardinia as a liberal constitutional state capable of leading northern Italy; he successfully built support for Sardinia through a program of highways and railroads, civil liberties, and opposition to clerical privilege.
Cavour realized that Sardinia could not drive Austria out of northern Italy without a powerful ally, and so in 1858 he established a secret alliance with Napoleon III against Austria.
When Cavour goaded Austria into attacking Sardinia in 1859, Napoleon III came to Sardinia’s defense and Austria was defeated.
Napoleon III then did an about-face, abandoning Cavour and making a compromise peace with the Austrians in July 1859 that required Austria to give up only Lombardy to Sardinia.
Cavour resigned in a rage, but his plans for Italian unification were salvaged by the skillful maneuvers of his allies in the moderate nationalist movement.
Cavour returned to power in early 1860, gained Napoleon III’s support by ceding Savoy and Nice, achieving his original goal of a northern Italian state when the people of central Italy voted to join a greatly enlarged kingdom of Sardinia under Victor Emmanuel.
Garibaldi, the son of a poor sailor, personified the romantic, revolutionary nationalism and republicanism.
In 1860 Garibaldi’s guerrilla band of a thousand Red Shirts landed in Sicily, capturing the imagination of the peasantry, which revolted against their landlords, and outwitting the royal army to win battles, gain volunteers, and take Palermo.
When Garibaldi and his men crossed to the mainland and prepared to attack Rome, the wily Cavour quickly sent Sardinian forces to occupy most of the Papal States (but not Rome) and to intercept Garibaldi.
Cavour feared Garibaldi’s radicalism and popular appeal, so he immediately organized a plebiscite (direct vote to change the Constitution) in the conquered territories that went unopposed by patriotic Garibaldi, and the people of the south voted to join the kingdom of Sardinia.
When Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel rode together through Naples to cheering crowds, they symbolically sealed the union of north and south, of monarch and nation-state.
The parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emmanuel II was neither radical nor democratic, and although it was politically unified, a growing social and cultural gap separated the progressive, industrializing north from the stagnant, agrarian south.
7.4-7.5 Darwinism and Age of Modernity
The Influence of Darwin
Charles Darwin served as the official naturalists on a five-year scientific cruise to Latin America and the South Pacific starting in 1831, where he collected specimens of animals he encountered. After returning to England, he came to doubt the belief in the divine creation of each species.
His theory of evolution was rather that all life had evolved from a common ancestral origin which resulted in a struggle for survival. He published his work, On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection in 1859.
Darwin was influenced by Malthus, who believed that populations naturally grow more rapidly than the supply of food available to them. Because of this, Darwin believed that chance differences among the individual members of a species would help some survive while others die. The variations that prove useful in the struggle for survival are selected naturally and would gradually be spread to the entire species through reproduction.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) applied Darwin’s theory to human affairs, claiming that the human race was driven forward to ever-greater specialization and progress by a brutal economic struggle that determined the “survival of the fittest.”
This incorrect view of the poor as ill-fated and weak and the prosperous as the chosen strong gained adherents among nationalists and among imperialists, who used Social Darwinist ideas to justify the rule of the “advanced” West over colonial subjects and territories.
The crudest distortions of the incorrect socially constructed theory would be used in the 20th century to manipulate and exploit racial conflict – racist anti-Semitism became popular with the extreme right in European politics.
Social Darwinism
The theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform.
The Modern University and Social Sciences
By the 1880s Europe’s major universities had been modernized and professionalized; education emphasized controlled research projects, and faculty devoted to the newly instituted human or social sciences took their place alongside the hard sciences.
Sociology, the critical analysis of contemporary or historical social groups, emerged as a leading social science.
German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) argued in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1890) that the rise of capitalism in northern Europe was directly linked to Protestant values of hard work, saving, and investing—the foundations for capitalist development; this success was “a sign of God’s approval.”
This argument challenged the basic ideas of Marxism… to Weber these ideas were just as important as economics or class struggle in the rise of capitalism.
French sociologist David Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) earned an international reputation for The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), a study of the psychic and social basis of religion, and Suicide (1897), a pioneering work of quantitative sociology that concluded that growing suicide rates were caused by widespread feelings of ”anomie” – the disappearance of norms and values.
The German Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) argued that industrialization had transformed European civilization from a “community” to a “society,” replacing traditional values with rationalized self-interest and leading to intensified alienation.
In The Crowd (1895), French sociologist Gustav Le Bon (1841–1931) wrote that the alienated masses were prone to gathering in mass crowds, in which individuals lost control of their emotions and actions and could be easily manipulated by a charismatic leader.
The new sociologists acknowledged some benefits of urban industrial society, such as rationalization and modernization, but they bemoaned the loss of community and tradition.
In some ways, the diagnosis of the modern individual as an ”isolated atom” seeking human connection was chillingly prescient: the powerful Communist and Fascist movements after WWI seemed to win popular support by offering people a renewed sense of belonging.
7.6-7.7 New Imperialism
Contextualizing New Imperialism - Causes
Economic motives played an important role in the extension of political empires, especially in the British Empire, which was losing its early economic lead and facing increasing competition in foreign markets.
Each leading European power saw colonies as crucial to national security and military power; for example, safeguarding the Suez Canal played an important role in the British occupation of Egypt.
Many people were convinced that colonies were essential to great nations, an attitude that reflects both the increasing aggressiveness of European nationalism and Social Darwinian theories of brutal competition among races.
Another enormous factor was the industrial world’s unprecedented technological and military superiority, as evidenced by the rapidly firing Maxim machine gun, the use of quinine in controlling malaria, and the steamship and the international telegraph.
Conservative political leaders manipulated colonial issues in order to divert popular attention from the class struggle at home and to create a false sense of unity.
Imperialists developed additional arguments in order to satisfy their consciences and answer their critics. A favorite idea was that Europeans could and should civilize more primitive nonwhite peoples.
Contextualizing New Imperialism - Criticisms
Following the unpopular South African War, radical English economist J. A. Hobson (1858–1940) wrote Imperialism (1902), a forceful attack on the expansion of empire.
Hobson contended that the economic needs of unregulated capitalism motivated the rush to acquire colonies.
Yet, Hobson argued, imperial possessions did not pay off economically for the colonizing country as a whole; only unscrupulous special-interest groups profited, at the expense of both European taxpayers and natives.
Future Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin concluded that imperialism represented the “highest stage” of advanced monopoly capitalism and predicted that its onset signaled the coming decay and collapse of capitalist society.
In The Heart of Darkness (1902), Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) castigated the “pure selfishness” of Europeans in supposedly civilizing Africa.
Critics charged Europeans with applying a degrading double standard and failing to live up to their own noble ideals.
At home, Europeans had won or were winning representative government, individual liberties, and a certain equality of opportunity, but in their empires, Europeans imposed military dictatorships on Africans and Asians, forced them to work involuntarily, and discriminated against them shamelessly.
Imperialsim in Africa
Imperialism in Africa began with the International Congo Association in 1878 by Leopold II of Belgium. He formed a financial syndicate under his personal control and sent Henry M. Stanley to the Congo, where he established trading stations and signed unfair treaties with African chiefs.
After Leopold’s intrusion into the Congo, tensions mounted among European nations as industrialized countries wanted a share of the valuable natural resources in Africa. To keep the peace during this “Scramble for Africa,” Otto von Bismarck arranged the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885.
The conference recognized Leopold’s personal rule over a neutral Congo Free State and agreed to work towards stopping the slave trade in Africa. European powers then pushed into the interior of Africa so that no single power would be able to claim the continent.
The British already possessed the largest empire in the world and had acquired valuable territory including Egypt and South Africa. The completion of the Suez canal in 1869 had made Egypt vitally important to the British because it shortened the route to India. To protect Egypt, Britain also advanced into the Sudan.
France solidified its claims on much of West Africa and acquired large portions of North Africa with vital natural resources such as iron ore and petroleum. By 1882, they were in full control of Algeria and had taken over Tunisia to prevent it falling into Italian hands.
Bismarck had little interest in colonies but pursued an imperial policy to improve Germany’s diplomatic position. Germany had acquired territory in central Africa in 1890, where it established a lucrative mining industry. This location in central Africa also blocked Great Britain’s hopes of creating a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo.
Imperialism in Asia
The Dutch, who in 1815 ruled little more than the island of Java in the East Indies, gradually brought almost all of the three-thousand-mile Malay Archipelago under their political authority.
In the 1880s the French took Indochina, and India, Japan, and China also experienced a profound imperialist impact.
Russia conquered Muslim areas to the south in the Caucasus and in Central Asia and in the 1890s proceeded to nibble greedily on China’s outlying provinces.
The United States’ great conquest was the Philippines, taken from Spain in 1898 through the Spanish-American War.