Taking megalomanias seriously

Sickness unto death leads to fear and trembling

The First World War was started by the actions of states, by megalomanias in action. Of course, the war began in the Balkans after Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne. But a single act did not cause war. What mattered was the involvement of the great powers. They had avoided such involvement carefully before, as they were to do so again in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Bloc. Furthermore, involvement involved taking very considerable risks. The Habsburgs knew that their ultimatum might bring war with Russia (and thereby sought the guarantee from Imperial Germany, which will concern us later), whilst the latter feared that war might well bring revolution in its wake. Radical risk-taking by elites was everywhere, as Dominic Lieven has so usefully and powerfully stressed (Lieven, 2002, 2015). Nowhere was this more true than in Ireland, where part of the British elite contemplated mutiny and the possibility of civil war in order to prevent Home Rule.

The background factor to which attention must be given if we wish to understand state behavior is that of the intensity of geopolitical competition. The world that Hobson describes is one in which size seemed to be necessary for power, not least so that secure sources of supply and market access be guaranteed (Lieven, 2002). The dilemma that resulted was simple: size meant states needed to gain positive loyalty from the nations within their midst. The world powers looked on in horror at the fate of the Ottomans, losing a third of their territory before 1914, and the richest part at that, continually subject to western interference and the first great power to suffer from sustained ethnic cleansing. The sickness that seemed to be leading to death created, to make full use of Kierkegaardian notions, fear and trembling amongst the other world states. All felt deeply insecure. The Habsburg monarchy had lost coherence because of the autonomy granted to the Magyars when defeated by Germany, and the best that could be said thereafter was, in Count Taaffe’s words, that its nationalities lived in a state of ‘bearable dissatisfaction’. Britain was but a small island, its share of the world the result of expansion in the power vacuum that followed from the defeat of the world war with Napoleon: it could but lose, especially given the rise of Germany. But Germany itself felt threatened, not just by the implacable hostility of the French but equally by the rise of Russia. But the latter had been badly beaten in 1905, and it felt that it faced an alliance of two German-speaking empires, one of which had the capacity to interfere with the Straits on which its commerce increasingly depended.

The intense geopolitical pressure of this era encouraged states to be unitary on the grounds that this would increase their powers, and so their ability to survive. The powers sought to organize their territories, and if possible to nationalize them so that greater coherence could lend them the military effectiveness that they believed to have been present in Japan’s victory over Russia. Hence it becomes possible to talk of a marriage between imperialism and nationalism, the deep interpenetration of the two forces; this is the world of nationalizing empires (Berger and Miller, 2014). If Russia could destroy burgeoning Ukrainian nationalism, Russian ‘ethnics’ would then make up a majority within Tsarist territory, and at least allow the possibility of nation-building. In the British case closer links to the white Dominions of South Africa, Canada and New Zealand might allow for a larger Britannic nationalism capable of ensuring the preservation of the empire. The Habsburg position was altogether different. There were not enough German-speakers to allow the creation of a linguistically unitary state, even though this remained the dream of some in Vienna. What was clear, however, was that no nationality could be allowed to leave, a view which led to the harsh ultimatum to Serbia in 1914, designed in part to make it clear to Serbs within the empire that exit was impossible.

Considerable care needs to be shown at this point. It is very probably the case that the Serbs within the empire had few nationalist ideas, thereby representing the relative weakness of nationalism that will concern us as this article develops. Princip himself was poorly educated, certainly as much influenced by anarchism as by nationalism. Insofar as that is true, the radicalism of Vienna’s actions in 1914 lacked rational foundations. But in social life what is believed to be real is real in its consequences. The feeling that the empire might disintegrate was strong within the political elite, and it was acted upon. That this is so makes most sense of the claim of Gellner and Wimmer, and of Lieven, that nationalism was undermining imperial rule. Nonetheless, the distinction is important: nationalism was less important than the beliefs held about it by elements within the elite. What mattered, in other words, was less nationalists themselves than the psychic world of elites within the world states that started the war. But a good deal more needs to be said about the genesis of nationalism and the character of empires – with the latter consideration fully justifying concentration on the behavior of megalomanias.

Genealogies of nationalisms

Two background considerations must be borne in mind as we seek to understand nationalisms and empires in more detail. The first is the subject of Eric Weitz’s (2008) brilliant account of the change over the 19th century in the central principle of international relations. The view that peoples should and could be assigned to multinational entities without reference to their desires or their ethnicities came to be replaced with an insistence that a particular population should control its own historic territory. This is the move from the world of the Congress of Vienna to that of the Treaty of Versailles (and of the other treaties that marked the end of the First World War). Perhaps the classic instance of the new principle was that of the creation of Greece. There was very little action by nationalists on the ground (with the initial rising taking place far outside what became Greek territory!), though a good deal from traditional bandits, and the Ottoman state had little difficulty in controlling the situation. But the great powers had romantic notions about Greece, seeing it as the foundation of their own liberties. Such notions led to intervention, to the destruction of the Ottoman navy, and to the creation of a new state so messy and anarchic, so lacking in national capacity, that it rapidly irritated those who had created it in the first place.

Weitz offers no explanation for the move in question, but this can perhaps be found in historical developments in the face of a problem. The idea of nationalism was clearly present by the end of the 18th century, and it was carried across Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. Its sources of support were at times significant, as in the German military reforms overseen by Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Clausewitz, though these did not lead in the end to the destruction of the Prussian ancien regime. In general, however, the idea of nationalism was the preserve of intellectuals. But the idea turned to reality when the great powers faced the problem of rebellions in Ottoman provinces, a problem made more difficult by reluctance to simply give the territories concerned to any of the existing imperial entities for fear that it would disrupt the balance of power. Hence states adopted the language of nationalism for their own purposes. This principle is at the back of the superb treatment of the clash between Ottoman and Russian empires offered by Michael Reynolds:

[The book] treats the Ottoman and Russian empires as state actors rather than as manifestations of proto-nationalist ideologies or holding tanks of nationalist movements and argues that interstate competition, and not nationalism, provides the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the early 20th century. (Reynolds, 2011: 6)

The first point has already been made in passing, but it deserves amplification. It is negative: nationalism from below was far less prominent than is often believed. Experts on the Balkans have pointed to the underdeveloped state of the territory, bereft of much commerce, transportation links and education facilities so as to demonstrate without question that nationalist sentiments were almost totally absent until the end of the 19th century (Malesevic, 2013). Two points follow. Nation-state creation in this area was the result of the actions of the great powers, absolutely not the result of nationalist demands. ⁶ Further, such nationalist activities as there were at the end of the 19th century rested on the actions of intellectuals and state servants. ⁷ The general point at issue is made in a very amusing manner in Judson’s (2006) account of linguistic activists in the borderlands of the Habsburg empire at the end of the 19th century. Such activists were nationalizers, trying to impart nationalist sentiments into those whose borderland status gave them multiple identities. At one census such people might describe themselves as Czech, at another make an entirely different choice! There is a major general point here that is worth highlighting. At the end of the 19th century nationalism was often an elite affair, a drive of leaders to homogenize their territories. Leaders today certainly care about the state of their nations, but one feels and notes the fact that nationalism has changed its character – having most force now as nativism, the preserve of those at the bottom ill-equipped to deal with the intensification of global interchange.

The second point builds on the first, and in an equally amusing manner. Empires on occasion actually created nations! This can be particularly clearly seen in the borderlands between the Ottoman and Tsarist empires (Reynolds, 2011). Both Kurds and Armenians straddled the border, offering opportunities for both sides to cause trouble for the other. In 1912 the leading Russian ethnographer of the Kurds noted that they lacked any clear sense of national identity, going on to explain that this explained the ease with which their risings in the Ottoman empire were put down. Efforts were accordingly made though an ‘Upbringing’ society to teach Kurdish tribes that they were a nation. Something similar can be said about the border between Russia and Austria (Lieven, 2015). The attempt of the former to nationalize its empire depended, as noted, on its ability to prevent the Ukrainians gaining any separate identity, a vital matter additionally given that Ukraine was the breadbasket of the empire; as long as Ukrainians remained ‘little Russians’, Russian ethnicity would dominate in the empire. But suppression on the Russian side was countered in Galicia by full support for Ukrainian identity from Vienna, leading to immense tension in the years before 1914. It is worth highlighting the dangers implicit in both cases. Claims on the same territory led to a dreadful game of mirrors in which fears of a fifth column in an imperial territory encouraged ethnic cleansing, with the realization that this might happen encouraging interference from an external homeland – which thereby seemed to justify the initial fears.

Beyond the creation of nations lie, finally, responses to ‘official nationalisms’, that is, to imperial nationalist ideals, sometimes born in response to nationalist movements but as often the result of autonomous development (Anderson, 1983). One should note to begin with that the Ottomans were by no means as weak as was once believed. It was their attempts to organize their territories in the Balkans that had led to vigorous responses, almost none of which were really nationalist in character, though they were later held to be such. What is more noticeable is that imperial behavior helped politicize nations. It may be that the Poles had a strong sense of national identity already in existence, but this did not apply to the Finns. They had been quiescent when left alone with the privileges they enjoyed inside an imperial duchy, but they were politicized by attempts to linguistically homogenize the empire. A good deal of trouble followed the decision to emphasize autocracy and orthodoxy within the late Tsarist empire: this did not appeal to socialists of course, nor to Catholics, Muslims or Old Believers (many of whom were socialists). Further, the empire could not make up its mind. Just before the war there was an attempt to liberalize in Polish territories, by allowing greater use of Polish, but this was blocked by hardliners insisting that it would lead to general imperial dissolution (Lieven, 2015: 310). Similarly, the Czechs eventually seceded because the future of reform seemed to have ended when Franz Joseph’s successor announced plans to nationalize the empire into a German-speaking arena. Further, the inability of the British state to grant Home Rule for Ireland led a new generation to turn against the empire, most famously in 1916. The vicious way in which the Rising was put down politicized generally, making independence thereafter inevitable.

A final thought can usefully end this section. Did such politicization actually cause war? It most certainly increased the stakes of war once it was under way. But one must set against causal interpretations the success of attempts, at least in some places, to contain nationalism. Count Taaffe was probably right to stress the ‘bearable’ state of the nationalities question in the Habsburg domains, to which point can be added the success, however partial, of the Moravian Compromise – and of the likelihood that this process of reform could be extended to other areas. Insofar as this is true, then nation-state formation did result from the effects of world war – caused at least in part by standard geopolitical reasons.

The character of empire

Empires are a very particular form of state, above all in having to deal with their nationalities. An initial consideration concerns the Habsburgs, the subject of a brilliant recent interpretation (Judson, 2016). The attempt to rationalize and modernize the multinational empire led grievances to be aired in different languages. Still,

nationalist conflict was not an inevitable result of the multilingual quality of Austrian and Hungarian societies but was a product of institutions. The history of Habsburg Austrian may also remind us that political solutions can in fact manage and shape the kinds of ethnic conflicts that often appear to divide societies. (Judson, 2016: 272)

One of the central factors allowing different nations to live under a single roof stressed by Wimmer is the presence of cross-cutting ties within a country (Wimmer, 2016). The presence of civil society links between linguistic groups prevented the politicization of ethnicity. The presence of a shared Swiss national identity despite difference lies behind a political party system that runs across the country. It was exactly this that was missing in the Habsburg empire.

[N]ationalism was a residual political phenomenon. The lower social strata’s access to political decision-making always lagged behind the national communities’ willingness to embrace them, and since the state – parliament and government – denied them the possibility of asserting their social interests and maybe even suppressed their (trans-national) attempts to organize, they had only the national to turn to. National radicalism was also stimulated by the political parties’ lack of genuine influence on the politics of the executive. The court, the nobility, the top bureaucracy had an interest in a weak or paralyzed Reichsrat, and Austrian politics was caught in a vicious cycle: the less political influence, the greater the incitement to prove one’s importance to the voters with spectacular manifestations of national zeal; and the more the Reichsrat was exposed to obstructions and fights, the harder it was to argue for the virtues of a democratic approach. (Bugge, 1994: 336)

But something of still greater importance about imperial rule, missed by both Gellner and Wimmer, needs to be stressed. The national question was not present only among minorities politicized by their states. Over time – to take the case of Imperial Germany – new radical right forces, largely made up of statist actors, pressed through various leagues for a much more activist nationalist policy than the leaders of the state wanted, including pan-German irredentism (Chickering, 1984). Something of a break occurred just before the war, especially given the German failure in Morocco. In 1913 Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor of Germany, speaking in the Bundesrat on a new army bill, declared that ‘one could not assume that the progressive democratization of states means the preservation of peace. On the contrary, the influence of those who agitate for war is becoming ever greater’. The same theme was at work in an essay of his confidant, the brilliant geopolitical theorist Kurt Riezler, published shortly before the war. ‘In our time the threat of war lies in the domestic politics of those countries in which a weak government confronts a strong nationalist movement’ (Chickering, 1984: 289–90). Much revolves around the notion of a strong state. In this connection, it is worth noting that the weakness of the Wilhelmine state lay in much more than the pressures created by particular pressure groups. What mattered was the inability to modernize politically, to integrate both middle and working classes so as to create loyalty to the regime (Chickering, 1984: conclusion).

Similar points can be made about the Russian case, despite obvious differences. Geopolitical insecurity was born when Austria, which had been saved by Russian intervention in 1848, in effect changed sides by refusing to support Russia in the Crimean war. Thereafter Russia faced continual humiliation. Its successes against the Ottomans were curtailed at the Congress of Vienna in 1878, and it suffered a major reverse in 1908 when the Habsburgs annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. These events encouraged pan-Slavist voices in an increasingly active press (as well as in elements of the elite), and this put considerable pressure on the regime not to climb down again. This emphasis on the Balkans was not altogether wise. The traditional policy of expansion to the east made more sense to some of the most intelligent voices in the elite, even though it had become more difficult as the result of defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905. These voices noted that the Balkan states that Russia was protecting in fact had their own interests, some of them contrary to those of their protector. But state actions were at the least constrained by popular pressure, making it difficult for the elite to calculate in pure realist terms.

This leads to a final consideration about the identity of nationalists. Elites have to this point been seen as largely non-nationalist. A very particular example of this is that of Bismarck, more interested in Prussian power than in allowing a Grossdeutsch solution for all German-speakers that would have allowed Vienna to dominate Berlin. Of course leaders of states were always interested in power, and so generally had what might be termed proto-national feelings. To this end they considered all sorts of strategies. Some considered war as a means to build their national solidarity (Sambanis et al., 2015); many promoted nationalism as an alternative to socialism. But elite sentiments were not always so instrumental. The sentiments of Clausewitz seem to me to be wholly nationalist in a modern sense, and the same applies to those of Alexander III. But the discussion must end by remembering that states are not always united at their peak. Two points about Conrad von Hotzendorf, the Chief of the Austrian General Staff, can usefully be made here. An idiosyncratic but not unimportant one concerned his love life. Desperately in love with a married woman, he pushed for war in the belief that military success would lead to a successful petition for divorce. ⁸ More important was his complete rejection (and that of his military peers) of the reform process in the empire that was undermining traditional elite privilege, including that of the armed forces.

These elites understood very well that the transformations of Austro-Hungarian society in the last decades of the 19th century – from the growth of popular politics to the politicization of the bureaucracy – had seriously reduced their power and influence.…[the] elite mood of pessimism in 1914 was one factor that encouraged some members of the General Staff and Diplomatic Corps to risk taking Austria-Hungary to war. Believing that a cataclysm like a war offered them their last opportunity to silence political conflict at home…they embraced it. As the single individual most responsible for war…[Conrad] himself wrote to Joseph Redlich of his caste’s fears, ‘It is very difficult to improve the internal situation of the monarchy peacefully.’ (Judson, 1916: 383–4)

Lacking systems of policy

An absolutely crucial general point still needs to be made. Whatever the extent of nationalist pressures present in 1914, it cannot be claimed that these were the only cause of war. What matters about Vienna’s ultimatum to Serbia is that other powers did not stay out of a Balkan imbroglio that had little immediate meaning for some of them. Perhaps the Central Powers and Russia did act in part to protect their empires or were driven to do so by internal national pressures. But it is much harder to see the Anglo-German rivalry in these terms, and without that rivalry there would not have been a world war. Of course, these states were involved in the balance of power, and so could not completely ignore central European and Balkan affairs. But entirely different factors were involved, and they had dynamics of their own.

Insufficient attention has been given to the British case. From one aspect Britain shows the enormous benefit of cabinet government in internal affairs, of a central place allowing for the working out and setting of priorities. Britain in effect retreated from the east by making a deal with Japan, and it learnt to share power with the United States so as to remove all danger from that quarter. The political elite was well aware of its true interest in the European sphere and did everything to concentrate resources so as to meet the threat from Imperial Germany – including the Committee for Imperial Defence drawing up plans to starve Germany into submission during the course of any war. But the other side of this equation is largely negative. The society, or at least the party in power, was liberal, and it was deeply marked by an aversion to any continental commitment. From this followed the refusal to make it crystal clear to Germany that it would intervene if France were attacked – as was mandated by the Schlieffen Plan. It is very important to know that Bethmann-Hollweg did not realize, despite warnings from the Germany embassy in London, that Britain would in fact react to such an attack – as it did, despite resignations from the Cabinet – and made dreadful decisions in consequence. This element of the British state had of course nothing to do with nationalism, but it was an element involved in the start of the First World War.

This brings us to the German case, whose role in starting the war is far more important. Imperial Germany most certainly lacked cabinet government. Rather, it was a court society, whose character was deeply affected by the personal character of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Hull, 1982). The sheer intelligence of the British elite can be seen in the way in which the problem was captured by Eyre Crowe, a civil servant in the Foreign Office, in his famous memorandum of 1907.

It might be suggested that the great German design is in reality no more than the expression of a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift. A charitable critic might add, by way of explanation, that the well-known qualities of mind and temperament distinguishing for good or for evil the present Ruler of Germany may not improbably be largely responsible for the erratic, domineering, and often frankly aggressive spirit which is recognizable at present in every branch of German public life…and that this spirit has called forth those manifestations of discontent and alarm both at home and abroad with which the world is becoming familiar; that, in fact, Germany does not really know what she is driving at, and that all her excursions and alarums, all her underhand intrigues do not contribute to the steady working out of a well-conceived and relentlessly followed system of policy, because they do not really form part of any such system. (Crowe, 1928: 415)

Conclusion

Nationalism is less a single thing than something with a history, and a history that has sequences within it. The French Revolution did much to create and certainly carried new ideas, and its spread produced reactive nationalism in consequence, above all in Germany. Once the national idea was then in the public domain, the key force that spread it was states, which is not to deny that the idea had great popularity amongst intellectuals. States started to think in terms of single populations possessing their own state, above all in the Balkans. Very often there were no nations in these new states, just as there was little even in Italy after ‘unification’ – the task after the state had been created being famously to create Italians! Still, when the great powers sought to modernize themselves they produced reactions from national minorities that affected their behavior and which certainly raised the stakes in war. But the argument has been that there were two other sorts of nationalists – excluded middle classes and statists and elements of the elite – who mattered just as much: if there is a relationship between nationalism and war it is most present at this point, in the core of megalomanias. But I have added to this an insistence that a very significant cause of the First World War has nothing to do with nationalism, albeit a great deal to do with the character of imperial states – above all in those institutional weaknesses of Imperial Germany that limited rational calculation of national interest. In the interests of completion, and with the opening sentence of this paragraph in mind, it should firmly be noted that the continuing history of nationalism did not wholly rest on state actions; differently put, no claim is being made that only states matter. A brilliant recent account of a central core of the League of Nations has demonstrated the impact that international intellectuals had on furthering the idea of the nation-state in the interwar period (Pedersen, 2015). Of course, much more could be said about later developments of nationalism, in Europe and in the rest of the world.

Two cursory comments can usefully be made about the theorists with whom this essay began. Much can be learnt from the work of Wimmer, but one can now see that in stressing the role of nationalism he often cuts into the middle of the causal chain involved, not seeing that national minorities behaved as the result of their interactions with their metropoles. Gellner is in fact more sophisticated, or became so at the end of his life:

It had all begun with the Empire trying to increase its own efficiency and effectiveness by centralizing and streamlining its bureaucracy. At first this provoked a hostile reaction from the old, initially quite non-ethnic regionalisms and the nobility that manned them. But it also helped engender the new, non-regional, but ethnic nationalism: by making bureaucracy more important and pervasive, it underscored the importance of culture and language. Full effective citizenship now belonged to those who could deal with the bureaucracy in an idiom it respected, and who were masters of that idiom. (Gellner, 1998: 31)

Two points about our own world can be made in conclusion. First, the advanced world has lived through a wonderful period of peace for 70 years. The nuclear revolution has changed much. So too is the fact that the nationalities question has been ‘solved’ by ethnic cleansing taking place. Perhaps as important is the need to ‘get to Denmark’. Size does not matter so much in this new more open, and hitherto less geopolitically dangerous, world; coherence and flexibility seem to be the name of the new world of political economy. But there is a background condition that Denmark brings to mind. The United States has done much to establish an open trading system. This may yet change, especially if internal class and nativist sentiments join with the ecological. There could be a return of empire (Lieven, 2002). Second, to recognize the impact of pressures brought by middle-class and statist actors within great powers should alert us to the situation in China (Gries, 2004). An old quip has it that on occasion such groups can demonstrate against American actions on the first and second days, before challenging their own state on the third. Weiss (2013) has suggested that nationalism has been encouraged by the elite so as to show the world that it is constrained, with this conscious policy being but a signaling device. But what starts at the top can gain teeth at the bottom.