The Anxious Triumph
Page 58
Belgian Catholics, like Belgian Liberals, did little for the workers: the Child and Labour Act of 1889 on working hours, health, and safety, and limiting abuses at the workplace, was less significant than the legislation adopted in Britain by Liberals and Conservatives decades earlier. In 1903 there was the more significant Workplace Accident and Insurance Act. Until then courts and judges had been more active than politicians in promoting the welfare of workers.86 The succession of Catholic-led governments in the period between 1884 and the First World War were generically pro-capitalist. The longest-serving Prime Minister in Belgium before 1914, Count Paul de Smet de Naeyer, in office 1896–1907, had no reason to be hostile to capitalism. He came from one of the wealthiest cotton manufacturing families of Ghent, and, before entering politics, had been the boss of the Société générale de Belgique, the largest enterprise in the country that dominated the railways, coal and steel, and played an active part in Belgian colonialism.
Socialists emerged in Belgium as a significant force only at the close of the century, as the suffrage expanded. The Socialist-led general strike of 1893 (the first general strike in Europe) in favour of universal manhood suffrage forced Catholics and Liberals to bow to the inevitable and concede the suffrage (though some people with more money and/or more education had more than one vote). Paradoxically, this helped the Catholics consolidate their power while dividing the non-Catholic vote almost equally between Socialists and Liberals.87
Some social legislation was promulgated by successive Catholic governments to maintain their not inconsiderable support among Catholic workers. Catholics themselves had organized trade unions well before the Pope’s Rerum Novarum, in 1857 when the union of cotton weavers had been formed. As the Socialists became stronger, the Catholic faction within the union split and created in 1886 the aptly named Anti-Socialist Cotton Workers’ Union (Antisocialistische Katoenbewerkersbond). Thus Catholic trade unionists were forced into politics by the Socialists. This led to the creation, in 1904, under the guiding spirit of Père Rutten, a Dominican friar, of the Confédération des syndicats chrétiens. To this day the Catholic trade union confederation remains stronger than that of the Socialists. The word ‘socialist’ frightened even the workers, which is why the Socialist Party called itself the Parti ouvrier or, in Flemish, Belgische Werkliedenpartij (Labour Party).
Catholics, pace Weber, turned out to be just as good at promoting capitalist ethics as the Protestants. They developed a consensual view of society as an organic whole modelled on the idea of the family. It allowed for differences in power and inequality to be justified in terms of the greater good. They thus shared some elements of socialism (the final goal of human brotherhood) and of liberalism (the justification of differences). In practice Christians were closest to the traditional populist view that defended small-scale private property (i.e. the farmers and shopkeepers) against ‘soulless’ large-scale capitalism and the Godless labour movement.
American populism also spoke out for the local against the central state, for the ‘small’ against the ‘big’ (corporations, trade unions, etc.). But one of the many differences between European countries and the United States is that, though religiosity was strongly present in American political discourse, the USA, in keeping with the doctrine of the separation of Church and State (the first state to adopt it), always lacked an explicitly religious party. Yet religion itself mattered a great deal more in America than in Europe. And it still matters: in their inaugural addresses American presidents routinely refer to God: John F. Kennedy (1961) affirmed that the rights of man come ‘not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God’; Jimmy Carter (1977) mentioned the Bible his mother had given him and ‘a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah’; Ronald Reagan (1981) expressed his wish that subsequent Inaugural Days should be declared a ‘day of prayer’; Barack Obama (2009) explained that the proposition that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to ‘pursue their full measure of happiness’ was a ‘God-given promise’. ‘The Bible tells us,’ Donald J. Trump (2017) declared, ‘how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.’88 It is difficult to find an inaugural address of an American President without a reference to God or the Bible. By contrast, God is hardly ever mentioned in official speeches by Charles de Gaulle (a fervent Catholic) or by the even more Catholic Konrad Adenauer (German Chancellor 1949–63) or by any of the main leaders of the Italian Christian Democratic Party that dominated Italian politics from 1945 to 1991 with the unswerving support of the Roman Catholic Church.
The American republic, though strictly secular, was never anti-clerical. Religion was an important element uniting small farmers together but was never an autonomous political force. The separation of Church and State was designed not in order to keep the clergy out of politics (as in Europe) but so as not to take sides between the competing Churches and religions. And there were many of these. Note the constant development and multiplication of Churches throughout the nineteenth century: Mormons (1830), Seventh-Day Adventists (1863), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1870s), Christian Scientists (1875), and many others, in addition to Churches and sects previously established or imported from Europe (mainly England), such as Evangelicalism, Quakers, Baptists, Plymouth Brethren (from Dublin in the 1820s), Episcopalian (the American adaptation of the Church of England), and, of course, Catholicism. This also meant the unusually high religious profile that political leaders, outside the two main parties, have had throughout the last two hundred years or so of American history, particularly in the fight against slavery and for civil rights. First, Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831, and who, before his execution, explained that he was taking on the yoke of Christ and that he had been ‘ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty’.89 Then: Frederick Douglass (1818–95), former slave, great orator, abolitionist, and preacher for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (mainstream Methodism was segregated); Harriet Tubman (1822–1913), abolitionist as well as active suffragette and also devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; the staunchly religious John Brown, who led the famous raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 hoping to start an armed campaign against slavery (and whose body, according to the famous Civil War marching song, ‘lies a-mouldering in the grave’ while ‘His soul’s marching on!’); down to, a century later, the Reverend Martin Luther King, a Baptist preacher; and Malcolm X, who converted to Islam. On the ‘other’ side, on the side of slavery, was a now far less celebrated array of preachers and clergymen such as James Henley Thornwell (1812–62), who justified slavery on the basis of the Bible while being horrified at the condition of the English poor (he had been to England). He concluded that Europe was already facing, and the American North would soon face, all-out class war and revolutionary turmoil. Consequently, he regarded slavery as the Christian solution to the social question. In the bluntest possible language, he predicted that the capitalist countries would have to institute a wage-labour system so close to Southern slavery as to be indistinguishable from it.90
The Civil War was paved with good intentions or, at least, the pretence of good intentions. Both sides sought the moral high ground and, once they found it, killed each other until one side won. The Bible, being the archetypal ‘open text’, could be used by all sides, as Abraham Lincoln was only too aware. In his Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865) he said of the contending parties that had just finished fighting each other in America’s bloodiest war: ‘Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other … The prayers of both could not be answered … The Almighty has His own purposes.’ He then concluded with these much-cited conciliatory words: ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in …91 Five weeks later he was assassinated.
Europe too had a tradition of using religion for political ends, but it was strongest befo
re the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century such use was rather limited. One can think of William Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian who led the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade, and some messianic preacher of only local relevance, such as Davide Lazzaretti (1834–78), one of Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘primitive rebels’.92 Otherwise religion remained in the hands of institutions such as the Churches and political parties. Even Gladstone did not claim that God was a Liberal.
PART FOUR
Facing the World
17
Europe Conquers All
In 1847, after a campaign lasting more than fifteen years, the Emir (Prince) Abd el-Kader, leader of the resistance against the French occupation of Algeria, was finally vanquished and captured. This milestone in the colonization process was celebrated by Friedrich Engels, in the pages of the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star, as follows:
it is … very fortunate that the Arabian chief has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blameable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation … And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers, whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions either upon each other, or upon the settled villagers, taking what they found, slaughtering all those who resisted, and selling the remaining prisoners as slaves. All these nations of free barbarians look very proud, noble and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilised nations, are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means. And after all, the modern bourgeois, with civilisation, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.1
Abd el-Kader, far from being a ‘marauding robber’, was a remarkable guerrilla fighter. He had admirers everywhere. William Thackeray, inspired by his plight, wrote a ballad in his honour (‘The Caged Hawk’, 1848):
’Twas not in fight they bore him down; he never cried amàn;
He never sank his sword before the Prince of Franghistan;
But with traitors all around him, his star upon the wane,
He heard the voice of Allah, and he would not strive in vain.2
Finally freed by the French in 1852, in exile in Damascus, Abd el-Kader dedicated himself to literature and theology. In 1860 he saved members of the local Christian community from a massacre by the Druzes, an achievement that earned him the respect of many in the West, including the Pope, Napoleon III, and Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times reported that ‘It is no light thing for history to record, that the most uncompromising soldier of Mohammedan independence … became the most intrepid guardian of Christian lives and Christian honor in the days of his political downfall …’3 And even before this achievement, even before his capture, a town in Iowa (Elkader) was named after him by its founders in 1846. It is still there, in Iowa, with its 1,273 inhabitants (2010 census).
The man who defeated Abd el-Kader, Maréchal Thomas Bugeaud, mentioned by Engels, was a pioneer of what is now known as a ‘scorched earth’ policy. He had warned the Algerians that if they did not submit:
I will enter your mountains, I will burn your villages and your crops, I will cut down your fruit trees, then you will have only yourselves to blame; I will be, before God, completely innocent of such disasters; for I would have done much to spare you.4
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great liberal thinker, warmly approved:
In France I have often heard people I respect, but with whom I disagree, deplore that we burn harvests, we empty granaries and even seize unarmed men, women and children. These, in my opinion, are unfortunate necessities that any people who wishes to wage war on the Arabs must accept.5
Tocqueville’s commitment to the French occupation of Algeria was based on the idea of a mission civilisatrice (though the term had not yet been coined); but it was also based on the objective of preventing the formation of a modern Arab state close to France and led by a man he called, with admiration, the ‘Muslim Cromwell’.
If the narrative espoused by romantic colonialism could be defined as the enterprise of far-sighted and enlightened settlers who, at great risk, bring the joys and benefits of civilization and modernity to miserable savages, melancholic colonialism is its more responsible development. As represented above by Engels and Tocqueville, it recognizes the cruelties and brutalities committed by settlers and colonialists, yet approves of the process, because, in the end, it is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.6 Civilization, the Enlightenment’s substitute for religion in whose name one can justify almost anything, was repeatedly invoked by imperialists (and not just by them). Such sentiments remained pervasive: ‘You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs,’ explained Joseph Chamberlain, amid cheers, and deploying a not yet stale cliché at the Royal Colonial Institute half a century later, in 1897, ‘you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force …’7 You did not need an empire to have a mission civilisatrice, as long as you had a ‘manifest destiny’, a term coined by the American journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845 when trying to justify the annexation of Texas: ‘Texas is now ours …’, and he added that no other nation (alluding to England and France) would ‘in a spirit of hostile interference against us’, try to thwart ‘our policy’, hamper ‘our power’, limit ‘our greatness’ and check ‘the fulfillment of our manifest destiny…’.8
The possible future of Algeria, and the rest of the so-called Third World, had it not been ‘civilized’ by the West, has been debated ever since. Engels and Tocqueville, and those who followed them, liberals as well as Marxists, assumed that modernization was the way out of under-development. The methods might have been brutal, as both sides acknowledged, but the ultimate consequences would be beneficial, bringing modernity to the colonized, including, in the fullness of time, the highest fruits of civilization such as equality and human rights.
Against such views are ranked the cohorts of ‘dependence theorists’ who argue that poor states, once they are forcibly integrated into the world economy, make rich states richer while remaining poor.9 While the optimist supporters of ‘stages of development’ theories claim that laggards must imitate pathbreakers, and thus overcome their traditional and backward structures, the pessimists of the dependency school argue that the real conflict is not internal to each country but between the core (the West) and the periphery (the Third World). Only by breaking the links of dependency can the laggards succeed in controlling their gradual insertion into the world economy. Otherwise they would be forcibly dragged into it under conditions they did not negotiate or create. There is plenty of evidence to argue either case – and both require some complex counter-factual calculations – which is why the controversy is unlikely to be resolved soon. Besides, dividing the world between advanced and backward areas is too crude. By the standards of Sweden, Brazil is ‘under-developed’, but to lump Brazil with Haiti does not seem useful.10
Dependency or no dependency, one thing is certain: the industrialization of the West in the nineteenth century brought about the de-industrialization of at least some of ‘the Rest’. The reasons are connected to the process of industrialization that requires the constant expansion of markets. An increase in productivity due to improvement in technology will inevitably bring about a decisive competitive edge on the part of the ‘advanced country’. The greater productivity of an English spinner in the period 1830–40 compared with that of an Indian textile craftsman, at a time when English wages were just a little higher than those of India, meant that England could flood India with its manufactured textiles and wipe out local markets.11 Between 1780 and 1830 the p
roduction cost of a yard of cotton cloth in Britain fell by 83 per cent. British cotton production was extremely concentrated. It is estimated that, between 1800 and 1840, one-third of the population of Lancashire worked in the industry. Producers in Manchester, Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, and Whalley (each with over a hundred cotton factories) accounted for over half of British production. The cloth produced in this small area was then exported throughout the world.12 This epitomized what globalization meant then: concentration of production in a few centres and consumption in a wider periphery. The consequence is that events in one part of the world, such as the American Civil War (1861–5), would provoke untold hardship in others such as cotton manufacturing in Lancashire where, by the end of 1863, half a million people were out of work.13
The influx of British goods into India led to the significant de-industrialization of India. Before the nineteenth century Indian textiles represented 60–70 per cent of India’s total exports. As soon as the East India Company’s monopoly was ended (1833), the influx of English textiles into India increased considerably and India became a significant market for Britain.14 By 1857, as a result of what the British called the Indian Rebellion or Indian Mutiny and the Indians the First War of Independence, India became a colony and the British Raj (‘rule’ in Hindi) was born. By 1900, 78 per cent of British cotton was exported, much of it to India, which had been a leading producer of cotton for centuries.15 The de-industrialization of India was celebrated by British cotton manufacturers. In 1860, Edmund Potter, an industrialist and MP (grandfather of Beatrix Potter), speaking at the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, announced to rapturous applause that Indian weavers were losing their jobs and were ‘returning to the occupation we wish them to follow, namely, agricultural operations’.16