Civilization: The West and the Rest (38 page)

Marx and Engels were wrong on two scores, then. First, their iron law of wages was a piece of nonsense. Wealth did indeed become highly concentrated under capitalism, and it stayed that way into the second quarter of the twentieth century. But income differentials began to narrow as real wages rose and taxation became less regressive. Capitalists understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels. On the contrary, as the case of the United States was making increasingly clear, there was no bigger potential market
for most capitalist enterprises than their own employees. Far from condemning the masses to ‘immiseration’, the mechanization of textile production created growing employment opportunities for Western workers – albeit at the expense of Indian spinners and weavers – and the decline in the prices of cotton and other goods meant that Western workers could buy more with their weekly wages. The impact is best captured by the exploding differential between Western and non-Western wages and living standards in this period. Even within the West the gap between the industrialized vanguard and the rural laggards widened dramatically. In early seventeenth-century London, an unskilled worker’s real wages (that is, adjusted for the cost of living) were not so different from what his counterpart earned in Milan. From the 1750s until the 1850s, however, Londoners pulled far ahead. At the peak of the great divergence within Europe, London real wages were six times those in Milan. With the industrialization of Northern Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the gap began to close, so that by the eve of the First World War it was closer to a ratio of 3:1. German and Dutch workers also benefited from industrialization, though even in 1913 they still lagged behind their English counterparts.
³⁵
Chinese workers, by contrast, did no such catching up. Where wages were highest, in the big cities of Beijing and Canton, building workers received the equivalent of around 3 grams of silver per day, with no upward movement in the eighteenth century and only a slight improvement in the nineteenth and early twentieth (to around 5–6 grams). There was some improvement for workers in Canton after 1900 but it was minimal; workers in Sichuan stayed dirt poor. London workers meanwhile saw their silver-equivalent wages rise from around 18 grams between 1800 and 1870 to 70 grams between 1900 and 1913. Allowing for the cost of maintaining a family, the standard of living of the average Chinese worker fell throughout the nineteenth century, most steeply during the Taiping Rebellion (see
Chapter 6
). True, subsistence was cheaper in China than in North-western Europe. It should also be remembered that Londoners and Berliners by that time enjoyed a far more variegated diet of bread, dairy products and meat, washed down with copious amounts of alcohol, whereas most East Asians were subsisting on milled rice and small grains. Nevertheless, it seems clear that by the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living
standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.
³⁶

The second mistake Marx and Engels made was to underestimate the adaptive quality of the nineteenth-century state – particularly when it could legitimize itself as a
nation
-state.

In his
Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
, Marx had famously called religion the ‘opium of the masses’. If so, then nationalism was the cocaine of the middle classes. On 17 March 1846 Venice’s Teatro La Fenice was the setting for the premiere of a new opera by the already celebrated Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Technically, Verdi had in fact been born a Frenchman: his name at birth was formally registered as ‘Joseph Fortunin François Verdi’ because the village where he was born was then under Napoleonic rule, having been annexed to France along with the rest of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. Venice, too, had been conquered by the French, but was handed over to Austria in 1814. The unpopularity of the Habsburg military and bureaucracy explains the rowdy enthusiasm with which the predominantly Italian audience responded to the following lines:

Tardo per gli anni, e tremulo,

È il regnator d’Oriente;

Siede un imbelle giovine

Sul trono d’Occidente;

Tutto sarà disperso

Quand’io mi unisca a te …

Avrai tu l’universo
,

Resti l’Italia a me.

(Aged and frail / Is the ruler of the Eastern Empire; / A young imbecile sits on the throne of the Western Empire; / All will be scattered / If you and I unite … /
You can have the universe / But leave Italy to me
.)

Sung to Attila by the Roman envoy Ezio following the sack of Rome, these words were a thinly veiled appeal to nationalist sentiment. They perfectly illustrate what nationalism always had over socialism. It had style.

Nationalism had its manifestos, to be sure. Another Giuseppe – Mazzini – was perhaps the nearest thing to a theoretician that nationalism produced. As he shrewdly observed in 1852, the Revolution
‘has assumed two forms; the question which all have agreed to call social, and the question of nationalities’. The Italian nationalists of the Risorgimento:

struggled … as do Poland, Germany, and Hungary, for country and liberty; for a word inscribed upon a banner, proclaiming to the world that they also live, think, love, and labour for the benefit of all. They speak the same language, they bear about them the impress of consanguinity, they kneel beside the same tombs, they glory in the same tradition; and they demand to associate freely, without obstacles, without foreign domination …
³⁷

For Mazzini it was simple: ‘The map of Europe has to be remade.’ In the future, he argued, it would be neatly reordered as eleven nation-states. This was much easier said than done, however, which was why the preferred modes of nationalism were artistic or gymnastic rather than programmatic. Nationalism worked best in the demotic poetry of writers like the Greek Rigas Feraios (
– ‘It’s better to have an hour as a free man than forty years of slavery and prison’), or in the stirring songs of the German student fraternities (
Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein
– ‘The Guard on the Rhine stands firm and true’), or even on the sports field, where Scotland played England on St Andrew’s Day, 1872, in the world’s first international soccer match (result: 0–0). It was more problematic when political borders, linguistic borders and religious borders failed to coincide, as they did most obviously in the fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea. Between 1830 and 1905 eight new states achieved either independence or unity: Greece (1830), Belgium (1830–39), Romania (1856), Italy (1859–71), Germany (1864–71), Bulgaria (1878), Serbia (1867–78) and Norway (1905). But the American Southerners failed in their bids for statehood, as did the Armenians, the Croats, the Czechs, the Irish, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Slovenes and the Ukrainians. The Hungarians, like the Scots, made do with the role of junior partners in dual monarchies with empires they helped to run. As for such ethno-linguistically distinct peoples as the Roma, Sinti, Kashubes, Sorbs, Wends, Vlachs, Székelys, Carpatho-Rusyns and Ladins, no one seriously thought them capable of political autonomy.

Success or failure in the nation-building game was ultimately about realpolitik. It suited Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour, to turn the rest of Italy into a colonial appendage of Piedmont-Sardinia, just as it suited Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, to preserve the prerogatives of the Prussian monarchy by making it the most powerful institution in a federal German
Reich
. ‘Never did I doubt,’ wrote Bismarck in his
Reminiscences
,

that the key to German politics was to be found in princes and dynasties, not in publicists, whether in parliament and the press, or on the barricades … The Gordian knot of German circumstance … could only be cut by the sword: it came to this, that the King of Prussia, conscious or unconscious, and with him the Prussian army, must be gained for the national cause, whether from the ‘Borussian’ point of view one regarded the hegemony of Prussia or from the national point of view the unification of Germany as the main object: both aims were co-extensive … The dynasties have at all times been stronger than press and parliament … In order that German patriotism should be active and effective, it needs as a rule to hang on the peg of dependence upon a dynasty … It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Württemberger, a Bavarian or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that [the German] is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism.
³⁸

The transformation of the thirty-nine-state German
Bund
, which Austria dominated, into a twenty-five-state
Reich
, which Prussia dominated, was Bismarck’s masterstroke. What happened when Prussia defeated Austria and the other members of the German Confederation in 1866 is better regarded not as a war of unification, but as the North’s victory over the South in a German civil war, for the simple reason that so many German-speakers were excluded from the new Germany. Yet Bismarck’s victory was not complete until he had outmanoeuvred his Liberal opponents at home, first by introducing universal suffrage, which cost them seats in the new imperial diet (the Reichstag), then by splitting them over free trade in 1878. The price was to give the South Germans two powerful blocking positions: the Catholic Centre Party’s pivotal role in the lower house (Reichstag) and the South German states’ combined veto in the upper house (Bundesrat).

Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi
– ‘If
we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change.’ The most famous line in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical novel
The Leopard
(1958) is frequently cited to sum up the covertly conservative character of Italian unification. But the new nation-states were about more than just preserving the cherished privileges of Europe’s beleaguered landowning elites. Entities like Italy or Germany, composites of multiple statelets, offered all their citizens a host of benefits: economies of scale, network externalities, reduced transaction costs and the more efficient provision of key public goods like law and order, infrastructure and health. The new states could make Europe’s big industrial cities, the breeding grounds of both cholera and revolution, finally safe. Slum clearance, boulevards too wide to barricade, bigger churches, leafy parks, sports stadiums and above all more policemen – all these things transformed the capitals of Europe, not least Paris, which Baron Georges Haussmann completely recast for Napoleon III. All the new states had imposing façades; even defeated Austria lost little time in reinventing itself as ‘imperial-royal’ Austria-Hungary, its architectural identity set in stone around Vienna’s Ringstrasse.
³⁹
But behind the façades there was real substance. Schools were built, the better to drum standardized national languages into young heads. Barracks were erected, the better to train the high-school graduates to defend their fatherland. And railways were constructed in places where their profitability looked doubtful, the better to transport the troops to the border, should the need arise. Peasants became Frenchmen – or Germans, or Italians, or Serbs, depending where they happened to be born.

The paradox is that this age of nationalism coincided with a sustained standardization of modes of dress. Military uniforms, to be sure, continued to be nationally distinct so that, in the heat of battle, a
poilu
could be distinguished from a
boche
or a
rosbif
, even in silhouette. Yet the military innovations of the nineteenth century, which greatly improved the accuracy and power of artillery, as well as introducing smokeless gunpowder, necessitated a shift from the bright coats of the eighteenth and nineteenth century to altogether drabber uniforms. The British adopted khaki drill after the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, an example later followed by the Americans and the Japanese. The Russians also chose khaki, but of a greyer shade, in 1908. The
Italians opted for a grey-green; the Germans and Austrians for field grey and pike grey, respectively. As armies grew in size, too, economy dictated simplification. The face of battle grew plain.