Postwar Eurasia II: Politics is war by other means
Renate Kasuba [1], The Creation of Modern Germany (Berlin: Allgemeine, 2007)
… Although physically devastated from the war, the North German Confederation experienced less social dislocation than most of the other major powers. Part of the reason was high morale; Germany had come out of the war an unmistakable victor, its economic hegemony stretched across Central Europe, and give or take Alsace-Lorraine, the dream of German unification had finally been achieved. Another part was, paradoxically, the very extent of German losses; the high number of casualties meant that there was a labor shortage even with wartime contracts ending, and the destruction suffered by front-line districts meant that there were jobs to be had rebuilding. Many of the state governments, with the notable exception of Prussia, assisted veterans in finding jobs and adjusting to civilian life, meaning that the problems caused by unemployed soldiers in countries like Spain, Hungary and Japan were largely absent in Germany.
But all was far from smooth. The war, and the postwar labor shortage, brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the German states, including demobilized African and Indian troops, ethnic German refugees from war-torn Hungary, and labor migrants from Poland, Bulgaria, the Slovak lands and Hungary itself. These immigrants were heavily concentrated in the industrial regions – in some cities amounting to as much as ten percent of the population – and the influx caused acute housing shortages and resentment among some of the prewar residents. In a few cases, immigrants were subjected to violent attacks from which they defended themselves, threatening to spark riots.
The class structure of German society was also shaken by the war. Losses among the aristocracy, which provided most of the prewar officers, resulted in many middle-class and even working-class soldiers being promoted to officer rank; as well, the sheer number of men mobilized during the war required officers to be drawn from outside the traditional elites. These men, many of them trade unionists or intellectuals, returned home determined to challenge the anti-union measures and censorship enacted during the war, which the government showed no sign of moving to repeal. The labor shortages worked in their favor, empowering workers against the industrialists and compelling the latter to deal even with illicit unions rather than provoking boycotts by attempting to shut them down. And the workers’ struggle extended to the political system, challenging antiquated institutions such as the Prussian three-class system and the powerful aristocratic houses that existed in many state legislatures.
The fate of the southern German states was also a point of contention. It was a foregone conclusion that they would join a united Germany – all of them acceded to the North German Confederation either before the war ended or within days of the armistice – but their form of government remained in question. Württemberg’s transition was seamless, and indeed was not really a transition – the king simply submitted to North German authority and kept his throne – but the other two southern German states were republics under the effective control of radical pan-Germanists and army officers, and their long-term stability was uncertain.
In Baden, this problem was resolved fairly easily. Although the former Grand Duke had supported the Franco-Austrian alliance during the war, he had not otherwise blotted his copybook, and his liberal rule was well remembered. Shortly after the armistice, he abdicated in favor of his son, rendering moot the controversy over whether an opponent of pan-Germanism should be allowed to resume the throne. His son was acceptable to all but the most radical of the junta, and promised to respect the liberal reforms of the republican constitution (including universal male suffrage and reduction of the Herrenhaus to a largely symbolic role), so after a short debate, the republican council restored the monarchy and dissolved itself so that the new Grand Duke could call an election.
In Bavaria, however, the Wittelsbachs had stained their record beyond hope of redemption due to their violent prewar suppression of pan-Germanism and the royal army’s excesses during the war. There could be no question of restoring the king; in fact, in a referendum called by the republican government to strengthen its hand, less than 30 percent of the voters favored continuing the monarchy. In negotiations with Wilhelm II and the princes of the Confederation, the junta agreed to call an election and hand over power to a civilian legislature and president, but would not compromise on either republican rule or the reforms proclaimed by the postwar government. At the election, held in November 1897, the Social Democratic Party of Bavaria won the presidency and 45 percent of parliamentary seats, and for the first time in any German state, the Social Democrats were not only a member of the government but its senior partner.
All this played out amid the background of Wilhelm’s quest to create a German Empire, in which he would become the equal of other major European monarchs; indeed, the idea that not only Queen Victoria and Napoleon V but Rudolph of Austria still outranked him was a source of never-ending irritation. This quest proved far more difficult than Wilhelm had anticipated. He was personally popular, and his audacity during the war was widely admired, but neither the public nor his fellow princes was inclined to accept him as an autocratic ruler. Rather than being offered the throne by acclamation, as he had expected, Wilhelm confronted a Reichstag that insisted on political reforms and a coalition of princes (including the Bavarian president) who demanded concessions to state autonomy and restrictions on the would-be emperor’s power to make war. The federal election of February 1898, in which the Social Democrats and liberal parties made extensive gains, only sharpened the battle lines.
It was not until late 1899 – more than two years after the armistice – that Wilhelm was finally able to win approval for his imperial ambitions, and in doing so, he was forced to make concessions that he would never have even considered had he not wanted the title of Emperor so badly. The imperial constitution would include responsible government, a Reichstag apportioned strictly according to population rather than favoring conservative rural areas, and protection of free speech and collective bargaining. It would also include, at the insistence of the princes, a strong Reichsrat, guarantees of state autonomy and strict separation of the imperial and Prussian governments: among other things, the Chancellor would not be permitted to hold any Prussian office.
Possibly the greatest concession of all was that the imperial throne would be elective as in Holy Roman times, with the succession determined by the princes as represented in the Reichsrat. Wilhelm was guaranteed a victory in the first election – in fact, it was agreed that no other candidates would be nominated – but it was made clear that the throne was the gift of the states and that Wilhelm’s son was by no means entitled to succeed. Wilhelm grudgingly agreed to this provision, anticipating that Prussia would always be able to bribe the other princes into compliance and that no other royal house would ever be able to gain enough support to oust the Hohenzollerns – an assumption which, unlike his belief that he would be acclaimed Emperor, would prove largely correct.
On November 11, 1899, the new imperial constitution was approved by large majorities in the Reichstag and the Bundesrat (which under the new regime would continue as the Reichsrat). The constitution was to take effect on January 1, 1900, at which time Wilhelm would be crowned in Berlin as German Emperor…
Terence Mills, From Victoria to Edward: The British Empire at the Close of the Century (London: Ploughman, 1970)
… In his address to Parliament on 23 June 1897, Prime Minister Cranbrook proclaimed that the Great War had been a victory for the entire empire. “From Britain and Ireland, from Canada to Australasia, from the ancient cities of India to the African savanna, the Queen’s subjects worked together and the Queen’s soldiers fought together. We of Britain could not have stood without the valiant men of our dominions and colonies, nor could they have fought as they did without our guiding hand.” And as if to punctuate his remarks, the Honours List for July included more than a hundred Indian and African officers and industrialists as well as many from the dominions, all receiving knighthoods and a few even obtaining peerages. The Maharajahs of Baroda and Travancore, whose industrial output had been invaluable to the war effort, became British earls, and the Ooni of Ife was honoured with a viscountcy, making them the first from the colonies to sit in the House of Lords.
In fact, the picture of harmony painted by Lord Cranbrook was at best half true. The British public did feel great pride in the empire’s shared struggle and considerable goodwill toward its peoples; a parade of Indian regiments through London in August was met by more than a million spectators cheering themselves hoarse, and the newspapers were lavish in the colonial troops’ praise. But in the background, Britain faced the same industrial unrest and class conflicts as France or the Ottoman Empire, and overlaid on this conflict were the persistent questions of Irish and Indian autonomy and of the dominions’ role in steering the empire’s course.
The election of February 1898 – the first after the war – returned Cranbrook’s Conservatives to office, but as a minority government with a greatly reduced number of seats. The new government remained opposed to both labour activism and home rule, but sought, in both Britain and Ireland, to defuse unrest with paternalistic welfare measures. In Britain, Cranbrook proposed Bismarckian social insurance programs; in Ireland, he set aside funds to purchase large estates and distribute them for free to returning veterans. He also increased the budget for Irish primary education and promised a “rule of equity” under which the civil service would actively recruit and promote Irish candidates.
As he had been during the war, however, Cranbrook was caught between the demands of the British workers and Irish nationalists on the one hand, and the right wing of his own party and the Lords on the other. The returning veterans and trade-unionists demanded universal suffrage, full employment and support for worker control of factories, while the Irish nationalists would settle for nothing short of home rule, and neither were inclined to be mollified by Cranbrook’s proposals. The proposals themselves were opposed by a significant part of the Conservative caucus and, although Cranbrook was able to pass them with the support of the Liberals and some of the minor parties, they stalled in the House of Lords, and Queen Victoria declined to intervene to break the logjam.
The result was that, for much of 1898, the British industrial cities were the scene of strikes and protests, some of which degenerated into clashes with the police. Ireland, with a large population of unemployed veterans and disappointed expectations of postwar concessions, was considerably worse. The streets of Dublin degenerated into a four-cornered brawl between secular nationalists, Catholic nationalists, leftists and unionists, with the three nationalist factions sometimes cooperating against the unionists and the government and sometimes fighting each other. Terrorist acts against government installations and rival organizations, including shooting and bombing, were common, with the bombs escalating in size and sophistication during 1898 and 1899. The police sided more or less openly with the unionists and were accused of terrorist acts themselves; although their involvement was never proven, the allegations diminished what lingering trust the Irish still had in the government, and turned large portions of the cities into effectively lawless zones.
In India, the “partnership raj” that had been declared by the Government of India and the Congress in 1896 came under serious strain. Many members of the colonial administration had viewed the wartime political and economic concessions as temporary, to be curtailed or rolled back entirely once peace came. Also, the Indian government was under pressure from British industrialists to roll back competition from Indian-owned businesses, and from Indian feudal landlords to reverse the partial land reforms that had occurred in Congress-controlled areas. The Congress, of course, had a different view of these matters and did not hesitate to make its position known.
The Viceroy in Calcutta declared that he was still committed to the partnership idea and refused to dismiss the three Congress ministers. However, he also did little to restrain the provincial governors and civil servants who delayed or denied Indian business licenses and put restrictions on opposition meetings and publications, nor did he intervene in the landlords’ judicial attempts to reclaim their estates. The Indian courts, dominated by British judges, largely upheld these administrative actions; in those cases where Indian judges ruled against the administration, their judgments were usually reversed on appeal. The Congress-controlled ministries were able to make inroads and sometimes even secure the dismissal of particularly obstructionist officials, but the delays stifled the postwar retooling of Indian industry and added to the number of unemployed veterans in the slums. And in the countryside, the veterans added to the strength of the Congress-organized peasant self-defense groups and engaged in an undeclared war against other demobilized soldiers hired by the landlords.
Cranbrook’s response to these developments was to throw up his hands. His wartime Indian reform package had been severely diluted by right-wing Tories and the Lords before being enacted, and while he cited the postwar unrest as evidence that stronger reforms should have been made, he was unwilling to risk his political neck again for measures that his party refused to pass. He was indeed of two minds himself about whether the Congress – which he still viewed fundamentally as an organization of troublemakers – really deserved the concessions it had obtained. In the words of the Voice of Labour, Cranbrook fiddled while India burned, although it was more a slow smoldering than a conflagration…
… With the war ended, a peace treaty ratified and the immediate demobilization in hand, the Imperial War Cabinet dissolved in April 1898. Lord Cranbrook was happy enough to see the back of it, the dominions less so. The dominion governments had got a taste of steering the empire’s industrial and economic policy, and while they remained strongly pro-British – especially English Canada and Australasia – they feared a return to industrial policies designed to benefit British trade at their expense. Also, Australasia increasingly wanted a voice in colonial policy; it saw itself as a British cadet in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and there were calls to put some of the Southeast Asian princely states under joint administration. India, as well, viewed itself as a British cadet even while remaining a colony itself; Indians were represented in the Southeast Asian colonial service and their merchants set up shop in the ports of Cochin-China and Annam, which gave Australasia one more reason for wanting a forum to mediate the competing interests.
There seemed little prospect of reviving an imperial cabinet, but the Canadian call for a quadrennial imperial summit met with a better reception, as did discussion of imperial sporting and academic links – the sort of thing that would enhance imperial good feeling with a minimum of political commitment. After some preliminary bargaining, the British and dominion governments and the Government of India agreed in principle to hold the first imperial conference in 1900 and appointed a secretariat to agree on its agenda.
But in the meantime, two events would dramatically reshape British domestic politics. In April 1899, Queen Victoria, her constitution weakened by the stresses of the war, fell ill. At her advanced age, the sickness progressed rapidly, and on the twenty-third of that month, the Queen died, bringing the 57-year-old Prince Albert Edward to the throne as Edward VII. And in the summer of the same year, the Cranbrook government became embroiled in a dual scandal: the Irish police were implicated in the sale of army surplus weapons to unionist gangs, and in Manchester, a panicked militia commander ordered his men to fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing six and wounding more than a hundred. On September 1, the government fell, and a general election was scheduled for November 21…
Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
… With the Great War ended, the Ottoman government found itself in a strange kind of paralysis. The empire was among the winners of the war: it was the unchallenged master of the Caucasus, maintained a foothold in the Crimea, and had growing influence in Bornu, Persia and the vast new Turkestani republic. But it had been a near thing, and the battle had been devastating.
The Ottoman war debt was enormous, and the reparations specified in the Washington treaty not nearly enough to cover it; the fact that most of it was held by Ottoman citizens provided a respite, but not much more than that. The paper lira printed during the war were worth one sixth of a prewar gold lira. The war had also laid bare the divisions between the traditional ruling class and the growing number of industrial workers and urban professionals, between the imperial authorities and Balkan Christian nationalists, and between the heartland and frontier. Large parts of the country had got used to ruling themselves while occupied or besieged, and were reluctant to return to central control; Bulgaria, although pacified, was sullen and bid fair to become a running sore.
And in the midst of these crises, both the Constitutionalist Party and the conservative faction had run out of ideas. The Constitutionalists’ paternalistic liberalism had worked well enough in the 1870s and had facilitated necessary reforms, but it had no answers to the challenges of the late 1890s. The conservatives lacked even that much ideological coherence, and were united mainly by desire to protect their own privileges and return to an idealized past. The radical democrats, already strong in the major cities, expanded to fill the vacuum, as did the socialists, Turkish nationalists, regional autonomists and a new brand of Ottoman nationalists inspired by French futurism.
The government, unsure of its hold on power, hesitated to call an election, seeing what had already happened in Germany, France and Britain. This, in turn, fed the unrest in the cities and towns as an alliance of trade unions, returning veterans and democrats demanded an immediate vote followed by reforms to the political system. By early 1899, much of Anatolia, the Balkans and the Levantine ports were paralyzed by strikes, adding to the burden on the already-strapped economy. In some areas it seemed that rebellion was imminent, and in May, the government finally gave in and called a vote.
The poll was held in early summer, and the establishment parties combined for slightly less than 60 percent of the seats in the lower house, but most of their support came from the rural districts where votes were cast by village headmen. It was clear that in a real election they would have lost decisively. The Democratic Party took 30 percent of the lower house, making a near-sweep of the capital and winning even in outlying cities like Sarajevo and Haifa that had historically voted for the Constitutionalists. A scattering of other opposition parties won 12 percent of the seats, mainly in the cities but with some regional parties also finding support among the independent headmen of the hill tribes. Several of the provincial councils also fell to opposition control, meaning that the establishment parties’ hold on the senate was also put in jeopardy.
Neither the Constitutionalists nor the conservatives were willing to form a coalition with the democrats, but neither could come anywhere near a majority on their own. As had happened with previous hung parliaments, they went to the Sultan to mediate. The Porte cobbled together a unity government of liberals and conservatives – something that caused defections from both parties, but still kept a bare majority of the lower house – and which largely represented the Sultan’s wishes and priorities.
The new grand vizier, 66-year-old Alexander Karatheodori Pasha, was a neutral figure chosen for his experience as a respected cabinet minister and diplomat, but what caused the greatest stir about him was that he was Greek. His government included an Armenian, two loyalist Bulgarians and a Bosnian Serb, and the message was clear: that minorities would have a place in the highest levels of Ottoman government if they gave over their ambitions for independence. At the same time, he took a firm hand in negotiating with Bulgarian leaders for a renewed charter of autonomy. His job was to act as a technocrat, mediate the empire’s political and ethnic differences, and return its finances to a sound footing. He was able to succeed in some measure with the Sultan’s backing, but since the coalition that supported him in parliament could agree on little beyond self-preservation, anything that required legislation was out of the question and budget commitments had to be fought for lira by lira.
With the parliament unable to agree on anything important, local institutions stepped in to fill the gap, aided by the fact that the central government often couldn’t decide what to do with them. The Sarajevo Commune – the elected council that had taken charge of the city while it was under siege – extended its authority across the sanjak and was even able to organize an election; the district governor nominally refused to recognize it, but realized that he couldn’t do anything without its support and rarely challenged its decisions. Similar councils sprang up in several other sanjaks, each with its own mix of parties and method of selection. In the hills of Albania and the Caucasus, more traditional authorities asserted themselves.
Outside the large cities, the ferment was greatest in the Balkans and the large Arab towns. The Arabs in some ways had the worst of both worlds: they weren’t considered a minority, but they were still thought of as backward by many Turks and had been given low priority for development. There were Arabs in the Alexander Karatheodori government, mostly drawn from traditional elites, but they were underrepresented and the Arab ministers were widely thought of as corrupt. The Arabs – influenced in some cases by the ideologies that Jewish immigrants had brought with them to the coastal cities – demanded effective local government and a fair share of imperial spending. Their movement would draw from such diverse sources as Marx, Abacar, Bello, Abay Qunanbaiuli and the Bahá'u'lláh, and would be the first step in the career of the man who would become known as Lev Pasha…
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[1] Renate Marianne Kasuba (b. 1958) is a German politician, academic and popular historian. Her great-grandfather, Adalbert (née Akalemwa) Kasuba (1879-1947), was born in the then-kingdom of Barotseland and fought as a private soldier in the Bavarian front of the Great War, settling in Bremen after the war and becoming a machinist and trade unionist. Her grandfather and father both held elected office, the former as a Social Democrat and the latter as a Social Catholic. Frau Kasuba is a professor of German literature at the University of Bremen and the author of 11 books on German and African history as well as a volume of short stories. She was a member of the Reichstag for Bremen as a Social Democrat from 1987 to 1996, a member of the Reichsrat from 1996 to 2003, and president of the Bremen City Senate from 2003. She married architect Thilo Mahler in 1980 and has three children.
Renate Kasuba [1], The Creation of Modern Germany (Berlin: Allgemeine, 2007)
… Although physically devastated from the war, the North German Confederation experienced less social dislocation than most of the other major powers. Part of the reason was high morale; Germany had come out of the war an unmistakable victor, its economic hegemony stretched across Central Europe, and give or take Alsace-Lorraine, the dream of German unification had finally been achieved. Another part was, paradoxically, the very extent of German losses; the high number of casualties meant that there was a labor shortage even with wartime contracts ending, and the destruction suffered by front-line districts meant that there were jobs to be had rebuilding. Many of the state governments, with the notable exception of Prussia, assisted veterans in finding jobs and adjusting to civilian life, meaning that the problems caused by unemployed soldiers in countries like Spain, Hungary and Japan were largely absent in Germany.
But all was far from smooth. The war, and the postwar labor shortage, brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the German states, including demobilized African and Indian troops, ethnic German refugees from war-torn Hungary, and labor migrants from Poland, Bulgaria, the Slovak lands and Hungary itself. These immigrants were heavily concentrated in the industrial regions – in some cities amounting to as much as ten percent of the population – and the influx caused acute housing shortages and resentment among some of the prewar residents. In a few cases, immigrants were subjected to violent attacks from which they defended themselves, threatening to spark riots.
The class structure of German society was also shaken by the war. Losses among the aristocracy, which provided most of the prewar officers, resulted in many middle-class and even working-class soldiers being promoted to officer rank; as well, the sheer number of men mobilized during the war required officers to be drawn from outside the traditional elites. These men, many of them trade unionists or intellectuals, returned home determined to challenge the anti-union measures and censorship enacted during the war, which the government showed no sign of moving to repeal. The labor shortages worked in their favor, empowering workers against the industrialists and compelling the latter to deal even with illicit unions rather than provoking boycotts by attempting to shut them down. And the workers’ struggle extended to the political system, challenging antiquated institutions such as the Prussian three-class system and the powerful aristocratic houses that existed in many state legislatures.
The fate of the southern German states was also a point of contention. It was a foregone conclusion that they would join a united Germany – all of them acceded to the North German Confederation either before the war ended or within days of the armistice – but their form of government remained in question. Württemberg’s transition was seamless, and indeed was not really a transition – the king simply submitted to North German authority and kept his throne – but the other two southern German states were republics under the effective control of radical pan-Germanists and army officers, and their long-term stability was uncertain.
In Baden, this problem was resolved fairly easily. Although the former Grand Duke had supported the Franco-Austrian alliance during the war, he had not otherwise blotted his copybook, and his liberal rule was well remembered. Shortly after the armistice, he abdicated in favor of his son, rendering moot the controversy over whether an opponent of pan-Germanism should be allowed to resume the throne. His son was acceptable to all but the most radical of the junta, and promised to respect the liberal reforms of the republican constitution (including universal male suffrage and reduction of the Herrenhaus to a largely symbolic role), so after a short debate, the republican council restored the monarchy and dissolved itself so that the new Grand Duke could call an election.
In Bavaria, however, the Wittelsbachs had stained their record beyond hope of redemption due to their violent prewar suppression of pan-Germanism and the royal army’s excesses during the war. There could be no question of restoring the king; in fact, in a referendum called by the republican government to strengthen its hand, less than 30 percent of the voters favored continuing the monarchy. In negotiations with Wilhelm II and the princes of the Confederation, the junta agreed to call an election and hand over power to a civilian legislature and president, but would not compromise on either republican rule or the reforms proclaimed by the postwar government. At the election, held in November 1897, the Social Democratic Party of Bavaria won the presidency and 45 percent of parliamentary seats, and for the first time in any German state, the Social Democrats were not only a member of the government but its senior partner.
All this played out amid the background of Wilhelm’s quest to create a German Empire, in which he would become the equal of other major European monarchs; indeed, the idea that not only Queen Victoria and Napoleon V but Rudolph of Austria still outranked him was a source of never-ending irritation. This quest proved far more difficult than Wilhelm had anticipated. He was personally popular, and his audacity during the war was widely admired, but neither the public nor his fellow princes was inclined to accept him as an autocratic ruler. Rather than being offered the throne by acclamation, as he had expected, Wilhelm confronted a Reichstag that insisted on political reforms and a coalition of princes (including the Bavarian president) who demanded concessions to state autonomy and restrictions on the would-be emperor’s power to make war. The federal election of February 1898, in which the Social Democrats and liberal parties made extensive gains, only sharpened the battle lines.
It was not until late 1899 – more than two years after the armistice – that Wilhelm was finally able to win approval for his imperial ambitions, and in doing so, he was forced to make concessions that he would never have even considered had he not wanted the title of Emperor so badly. The imperial constitution would include responsible government, a Reichstag apportioned strictly according to population rather than favoring conservative rural areas, and protection of free speech and collective bargaining. It would also include, at the insistence of the princes, a strong Reichsrat, guarantees of state autonomy and strict separation of the imperial and Prussian governments: among other things, the Chancellor would not be permitted to hold any Prussian office.
Possibly the greatest concession of all was that the imperial throne would be elective as in Holy Roman times, with the succession determined by the princes as represented in the Reichsrat. Wilhelm was guaranteed a victory in the first election – in fact, it was agreed that no other candidates would be nominated – but it was made clear that the throne was the gift of the states and that Wilhelm’s son was by no means entitled to succeed. Wilhelm grudgingly agreed to this provision, anticipating that Prussia would always be able to bribe the other princes into compliance and that no other royal house would ever be able to gain enough support to oust the Hohenzollerns – an assumption which, unlike his belief that he would be acclaimed Emperor, would prove largely correct.
On November 11, 1899, the new imperial constitution was approved by large majorities in the Reichstag and the Bundesrat (which under the new regime would continue as the Reichsrat). The constitution was to take effect on January 1, 1900, at which time Wilhelm would be crowned in Berlin as German Emperor…
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Terence Mills, From Victoria to Edward: The British Empire at the Close of the Century (London: Ploughman, 1970)
… In his address to Parliament on 23 June 1897, Prime Minister Cranbrook proclaimed that the Great War had been a victory for the entire empire. “From Britain and Ireland, from Canada to Australasia, from the ancient cities of India to the African savanna, the Queen’s subjects worked together and the Queen’s soldiers fought together. We of Britain could not have stood without the valiant men of our dominions and colonies, nor could they have fought as they did without our guiding hand.” And as if to punctuate his remarks, the Honours List for July included more than a hundred Indian and African officers and industrialists as well as many from the dominions, all receiving knighthoods and a few even obtaining peerages. The Maharajahs of Baroda and Travancore, whose industrial output had been invaluable to the war effort, became British earls, and the Ooni of Ife was honoured with a viscountcy, making them the first from the colonies to sit in the House of Lords.
In fact, the picture of harmony painted by Lord Cranbrook was at best half true. The British public did feel great pride in the empire’s shared struggle and considerable goodwill toward its peoples; a parade of Indian regiments through London in August was met by more than a million spectators cheering themselves hoarse, and the newspapers were lavish in the colonial troops’ praise. But in the background, Britain faced the same industrial unrest and class conflicts as France or the Ottoman Empire, and overlaid on this conflict were the persistent questions of Irish and Indian autonomy and of the dominions’ role in steering the empire’s course.
The election of February 1898 – the first after the war – returned Cranbrook’s Conservatives to office, but as a minority government with a greatly reduced number of seats. The new government remained opposed to both labour activism and home rule, but sought, in both Britain and Ireland, to defuse unrest with paternalistic welfare measures. In Britain, Cranbrook proposed Bismarckian social insurance programs; in Ireland, he set aside funds to purchase large estates and distribute them for free to returning veterans. He also increased the budget for Irish primary education and promised a “rule of equity” under which the civil service would actively recruit and promote Irish candidates.
As he had been during the war, however, Cranbrook was caught between the demands of the British workers and Irish nationalists on the one hand, and the right wing of his own party and the Lords on the other. The returning veterans and trade-unionists demanded universal suffrage, full employment and support for worker control of factories, while the Irish nationalists would settle for nothing short of home rule, and neither were inclined to be mollified by Cranbrook’s proposals. The proposals themselves were opposed by a significant part of the Conservative caucus and, although Cranbrook was able to pass them with the support of the Liberals and some of the minor parties, they stalled in the House of Lords, and Queen Victoria declined to intervene to break the logjam.
The result was that, for much of 1898, the British industrial cities were the scene of strikes and protests, some of which degenerated into clashes with the police. Ireland, with a large population of unemployed veterans and disappointed expectations of postwar concessions, was considerably worse. The streets of Dublin degenerated into a four-cornered brawl between secular nationalists, Catholic nationalists, leftists and unionists, with the three nationalist factions sometimes cooperating against the unionists and the government and sometimes fighting each other. Terrorist acts against government installations and rival organizations, including shooting and bombing, were common, with the bombs escalating in size and sophistication during 1898 and 1899. The police sided more or less openly with the unionists and were accused of terrorist acts themselves; although their involvement was never proven, the allegations diminished what lingering trust the Irish still had in the government, and turned large portions of the cities into effectively lawless zones.
In India, the “partnership raj” that had been declared by the Government of India and the Congress in 1896 came under serious strain. Many members of the colonial administration had viewed the wartime political and economic concessions as temporary, to be curtailed or rolled back entirely once peace came. Also, the Indian government was under pressure from British industrialists to roll back competition from Indian-owned businesses, and from Indian feudal landlords to reverse the partial land reforms that had occurred in Congress-controlled areas. The Congress, of course, had a different view of these matters and did not hesitate to make its position known.
The Viceroy in Calcutta declared that he was still committed to the partnership idea and refused to dismiss the three Congress ministers. However, he also did little to restrain the provincial governors and civil servants who delayed or denied Indian business licenses and put restrictions on opposition meetings and publications, nor did he intervene in the landlords’ judicial attempts to reclaim their estates. The Indian courts, dominated by British judges, largely upheld these administrative actions; in those cases where Indian judges ruled against the administration, their judgments were usually reversed on appeal. The Congress-controlled ministries were able to make inroads and sometimes even secure the dismissal of particularly obstructionist officials, but the delays stifled the postwar retooling of Indian industry and added to the number of unemployed veterans in the slums. And in the countryside, the veterans added to the strength of the Congress-organized peasant self-defense groups and engaged in an undeclared war against other demobilized soldiers hired by the landlords.
Cranbrook’s response to these developments was to throw up his hands. His wartime Indian reform package had been severely diluted by right-wing Tories and the Lords before being enacted, and while he cited the postwar unrest as evidence that stronger reforms should have been made, he was unwilling to risk his political neck again for measures that his party refused to pass. He was indeed of two minds himself about whether the Congress – which he still viewed fundamentally as an organization of troublemakers – really deserved the concessions it had obtained. In the words of the Voice of Labour, Cranbrook fiddled while India burned, although it was more a slow smoldering than a conflagration…
… With the war ended, a peace treaty ratified and the immediate demobilization in hand, the Imperial War Cabinet dissolved in April 1898. Lord Cranbrook was happy enough to see the back of it, the dominions less so. The dominion governments had got a taste of steering the empire’s industrial and economic policy, and while they remained strongly pro-British – especially English Canada and Australasia – they feared a return to industrial policies designed to benefit British trade at their expense. Also, Australasia increasingly wanted a voice in colonial policy; it saw itself as a British cadet in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and there were calls to put some of the Southeast Asian princely states under joint administration. India, as well, viewed itself as a British cadet even while remaining a colony itself; Indians were represented in the Southeast Asian colonial service and their merchants set up shop in the ports of Cochin-China and Annam, which gave Australasia one more reason for wanting a forum to mediate the competing interests.
There seemed little prospect of reviving an imperial cabinet, but the Canadian call for a quadrennial imperial summit met with a better reception, as did discussion of imperial sporting and academic links – the sort of thing that would enhance imperial good feeling with a minimum of political commitment. After some preliminary bargaining, the British and dominion governments and the Government of India agreed in principle to hold the first imperial conference in 1900 and appointed a secretariat to agree on its agenda.
But in the meantime, two events would dramatically reshape British domestic politics. In April 1899, Queen Victoria, her constitution weakened by the stresses of the war, fell ill. At her advanced age, the sickness progressed rapidly, and on the twenty-third of that month, the Queen died, bringing the 57-year-old Prince Albert Edward to the throne as Edward VII. And in the summer of the same year, the Cranbrook government became embroiled in a dual scandal: the Irish police were implicated in the sale of army surplus weapons to unionist gangs, and in Manchester, a panicked militia commander ordered his men to fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing six and wounding more than a hundred. On September 1, the government fell, and a general election was scheduled for November 21…
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Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
… With the Great War ended, the Ottoman government found itself in a strange kind of paralysis. The empire was among the winners of the war: it was the unchallenged master of the Caucasus, maintained a foothold in the Crimea, and had growing influence in Bornu, Persia and the vast new Turkestani republic. But it had been a near thing, and the battle had been devastating.
The Ottoman war debt was enormous, and the reparations specified in the Washington treaty not nearly enough to cover it; the fact that most of it was held by Ottoman citizens provided a respite, but not much more than that. The paper lira printed during the war were worth one sixth of a prewar gold lira. The war had also laid bare the divisions between the traditional ruling class and the growing number of industrial workers and urban professionals, between the imperial authorities and Balkan Christian nationalists, and between the heartland and frontier. Large parts of the country had got used to ruling themselves while occupied or besieged, and were reluctant to return to central control; Bulgaria, although pacified, was sullen and bid fair to become a running sore.
And in the midst of these crises, both the Constitutionalist Party and the conservative faction had run out of ideas. The Constitutionalists’ paternalistic liberalism had worked well enough in the 1870s and had facilitated necessary reforms, but it had no answers to the challenges of the late 1890s. The conservatives lacked even that much ideological coherence, and were united mainly by desire to protect their own privileges and return to an idealized past. The radical democrats, already strong in the major cities, expanded to fill the vacuum, as did the socialists, Turkish nationalists, regional autonomists and a new brand of Ottoman nationalists inspired by French futurism.
The government, unsure of its hold on power, hesitated to call an election, seeing what had already happened in Germany, France and Britain. This, in turn, fed the unrest in the cities and towns as an alliance of trade unions, returning veterans and democrats demanded an immediate vote followed by reforms to the political system. By early 1899, much of Anatolia, the Balkans and the Levantine ports were paralyzed by strikes, adding to the burden on the already-strapped economy. In some areas it seemed that rebellion was imminent, and in May, the government finally gave in and called a vote.
The poll was held in early summer, and the establishment parties combined for slightly less than 60 percent of the seats in the lower house, but most of their support came from the rural districts where votes were cast by village headmen. It was clear that in a real election they would have lost decisively. The Democratic Party took 30 percent of the lower house, making a near-sweep of the capital and winning even in outlying cities like Sarajevo and Haifa that had historically voted for the Constitutionalists. A scattering of other opposition parties won 12 percent of the seats, mainly in the cities but with some regional parties also finding support among the independent headmen of the hill tribes. Several of the provincial councils also fell to opposition control, meaning that the establishment parties’ hold on the senate was also put in jeopardy.
Neither the Constitutionalists nor the conservatives were willing to form a coalition with the democrats, but neither could come anywhere near a majority on their own. As had happened with previous hung parliaments, they went to the Sultan to mediate. The Porte cobbled together a unity government of liberals and conservatives – something that caused defections from both parties, but still kept a bare majority of the lower house – and which largely represented the Sultan’s wishes and priorities.
The new grand vizier, 66-year-old Alexander Karatheodori Pasha, was a neutral figure chosen for his experience as a respected cabinet minister and diplomat, but what caused the greatest stir about him was that he was Greek. His government included an Armenian, two loyalist Bulgarians and a Bosnian Serb, and the message was clear: that minorities would have a place in the highest levels of Ottoman government if they gave over their ambitions for independence. At the same time, he took a firm hand in negotiating with Bulgarian leaders for a renewed charter of autonomy. His job was to act as a technocrat, mediate the empire’s political and ethnic differences, and return its finances to a sound footing. He was able to succeed in some measure with the Sultan’s backing, but since the coalition that supported him in parliament could agree on little beyond self-preservation, anything that required legislation was out of the question and budget commitments had to be fought for lira by lira.
With the parliament unable to agree on anything important, local institutions stepped in to fill the gap, aided by the fact that the central government often couldn’t decide what to do with them. The Sarajevo Commune – the elected council that had taken charge of the city while it was under siege – extended its authority across the sanjak and was even able to organize an election; the district governor nominally refused to recognize it, but realized that he couldn’t do anything without its support and rarely challenged its decisions. Similar councils sprang up in several other sanjaks, each with its own mix of parties and method of selection. In the hills of Albania and the Caucasus, more traditional authorities asserted themselves.
Outside the large cities, the ferment was greatest in the Balkans and the large Arab towns. The Arabs in some ways had the worst of both worlds: they weren’t considered a minority, but they were still thought of as backward by many Turks and had been given low priority for development. There were Arabs in the Alexander Karatheodori government, mostly drawn from traditional elites, but they were underrepresented and the Arab ministers were widely thought of as corrupt. The Arabs – influenced in some cases by the ideologies that Jewish immigrants had brought with them to the coastal cities – demanded effective local government and a fair share of imperial spending. Their movement would draw from such diverse sources as Marx, Abacar, Bello, Abay Qunanbaiuli and the Bahá'u'lláh, and would be the first step in the career of the man who would become known as Lev Pasha…
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[1] Renate Marianne Kasuba (b. 1958) is a German politician, academic and popular historian. Her great-grandfather, Adalbert (née Akalemwa) Kasuba (1879-1947), was born in the then-kingdom of Barotseland and fought as a private soldier in the Bavarian front of the Great War, settling in Bremen after the war and becoming a machinist and trade unionist. Her grandfather and father both held elected office, the former as a Social Democrat and the latter as a Social Catholic. Frau Kasuba is a professor of German literature at the University of Bremen and the author of 11 books on German and African history as well as a volume of short stories. She was a member of the Reichstag for Bremen as a Social Democrat from 1987 to 1996, a member of the Reichsrat from 1996 to 2003, and president of the Bremen City Senate from 2003. She married architect Thilo Mahler in 1980 and has three children.
