Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  In 1902 Russia started to reinforce its far eastern fleet, and at the same time Japan completed a programme of naval expansion, helped by Britain. The next year Russia made clear it would not honour its commitment to withdraw from Manchuria, and started strengthening its forces there. If there had been a real willingness to arrive at a peaceful settlement one might have been achieved, but Japan was in expansionist mode and Nicholas was convinced his army could defeat any forces Japan could muster (a conviction expressed in what today would be regarded as amazingly racist terms). Nicholas was wrong.

  In February 1904, six years after America’s attack on Spain’s Pacific fleet, the Japanese without formally declaring war launched a devastating surprise attack on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, sinking the battleship Tsarevich and cruiser Pallada. When Japan later attacked Pearl Harbor America was able to regroup and harness its overwhelming economic superiority to reverse the initial Japanese gains. The tsar was unable to do the same. His dismay was compounded the following year when the Russian Baltic fleet arrived in the Pacific, having travelled halfway round the globe (Japan’s British allies had refused to let it pass through the Suez canal), only to be annihilated by the Japanese. By then Port Arthur itself had fallen. Russia’s forces were as appallingly commanded as they had been in the Crimea. In sailing to the far east, the Russian Baltic fleet managed to create a diplomatic incident by firing on British trawlers in the North Sea – apparently mistaking them for a Japanese fleet!

  The war was only concluded by the intervention of Theodore Roosevelt. Less than a century earlier it had been the Russian tsar, Alexander I, who had tried to use his superpower status to end the 1812 War between America and Britain; now it was the American president who brought Russia and Japan together in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to hammer out a peace treaty. Russia had to give up all claims to Port Arthur, Korea and Manchuria. A secret agreement between America and Japan guaranteed Japan a free hand in Korea in return for Japanese acquiescence in the American occupation of the Philippines. Russia was by now in the military second division of imperial powers, relegated not just by Japan but by the United States and its president.

  Territory Belonging to the United States

  From the first Muscovite princes, through to Stalin and beyond, the Russian empire expanded sometimes at a gallop, sometimes more hesitantly, sometimes even pulling back a little but throughout using its military might to push out the frontiers. American imperialism demonstrated the same continuity of military expansion from the nation’s inception up to the twentieth century, but then it changed: ‘imperialism’ became a bad word and military conquest ceased to be the cornerstone of imperial policy. It is difficult now to remember how fundamental the ideology of empire used to be to the psyche of the American people. Well into the twentieth century a significant body of American opinion was not only openly imperialist but used that term to mean territorial aggrandisement in exactly the form that had characterised American expansion since Independence. Men like the ideologue of empire Senator Albert Beveridge argued that conquests beyond America’s existing boundaries should be treated in the same way that Texas or Florida had been treated. ‘The Philippines are ours forever, “territory belonging to the United States”, as the Constitution calls them,’ he declared. In quoting that phrase the senator adduced in the Founding Fathers an imperialist motivation that has now been largely forgotten. He continued:

  The founders of the nation were not provincial. Theirs was the geography of the world. They were soldiers as well as landsmen, and they knew that where our ships should go our flag might follow. They had the logic of progress, and they knew that the republic they were planting must, in obedience to the laws of our expanding race, necessarily develop into the greater republic which the world beholds today, and into the still mightier republic which the world will finally acknowledge as the arbiter, under God, of the destinies of mankind. And so our fathers wrote into the Constitution these words of growth, of expansion, of empire, if you will, unlimited by geography or climate or by anything but the vitality and possibilities of the American people.

  In Beveridge’s view America was unique. ‘Almighty God’, he said, ‘has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world’, adding ‘We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.’For him the question of America’s role in the world was not a political one but something far more fundamental. In one congressional speech he declaimed:

  Mr President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even;deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: ‘Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.’

  It should not be thought that such views were the rantings of a few on the reactionary right. Beveridge himself eventually left the Republican party and unsuccessfully ran for Senate again as a ‘progressive’. His views on the conquest of the Philippines were shared by millions of Americans, from Theodore Roosevelt down. He believed that the occupation of the Philippines ‘was one of the noblest examples of patriotic devotion to duty in the history of the world’ and laid out a detailed blueprint for the American government of the islands. His only concession to democracy was the suggestion that there might ‘possibly’ be ‘an advisory council with no power except that of discussing measures with the governor-general’. The governor-general, along with the heads of all provincial and district authorities, would of course be American. ‘Self-government and internal development have been the dominant notes of our first century,’ noted Beveridge; ‘administration and the development of other lands will be the dominant notes of our second century.’ Only in the very long term would the people of the Philippines be ready for statehood alongside his own Indiana. A more immediate element of Beveridge’s plan was ‘the establishment of import duties on a revenue basis, with such discrimination in favour of American imports as will prevent the cheaper goods of other nations from destroying American trade’. The empire was to be more about protecting American corporations than spreading democracy.

  The ideology of democracy was not replaced by the ideology of imperialism but fused with it. It was precisely because of its democracy that America was justified in imposing its empire on others. Again Beveridge spelt out the ideological justification for imposing servitude in the name of freedom in words that could have been applied to Iraq a century later. There was no contradiction, in his view, in the Founding Fathers espousing self-government for America while denying it to others:

  Let men beware how they employ the term ‘self-government’. It is a sacred term. It is the watchword at the door of the inner temple of liberty, for liberty does not always mean self-government. Self-government is a method of liberty – the highest, simplest, best – and it is acquired only after centuries of study and struggle and experiment and instruction and all the elements of the progress of man. Self-government is no base and common thing to be bestowed on the merely audacious. It is the degree which crowns the graduate of liberty, not the name of liberty’s infant class, who
have not yet mastered the alphabet of freedom.

  The inherent contradictions in this argument may not have been apparent to Beveridge but they became increasingly obvious to others. For many Americans their nation’s conquests during the Spanish-American War seemed more to resemble the actions of the British empire that the Founding Fathers had fought against than the society they had fought to create. The corporations who were becoming the nation’s economic driving force did not need military conquests to gain global market share, and the mass of the American population did not need new territories to settle. The American empire had come of age and from now on would develop rapidly in new directions. What could not be transformed so quickly was the ideology that underlay the old imperialism. Beveridge’s traditional vision of empire, in which the United States simply kept expanding, disappeared, but the popular belief that America has a unique global destiny remained.

  The distinguishing characteristic of American imperialism has been its extreme flexibility. America’s democratic ideology always had a global dimension, but how that universal vision manifested itself depended on the circumstances of the time. Kagan’s phrase ‘determined opportunism’ was particularly apposite as American imperialism moved from the continental to the global and adjusted to the age of corporate capitalism. The United States had none of the problems Nicholas encountered in his drive to expand his empire. As Japan and Russia were engaged in full-scale war in the far east the United States was flexing its imperial muscle on the other side of the world. US marines were called in to protect America’s imperial business interests by invading the Dominican Republic and reestablishing the control the US business community was in danger of losing. The invasion gave rise to America’s most explicit statement yet of its imperial ‘rights’ in the western hemisphere: Theodore Roosevelt’s development of the Monroe Doctrine known as the Roosevelt Corollary. The government of the Dominican Republic was bankrupt and Roosevelt feared that foreign nations, especially Germany, might intervene forcibly to collect their debts. In his annual message to Congress in December 1904 he declared that ‘chronic wrongdoing’ anywhere in what today would be called the Third World would ‘ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation’. From this he concluded that ‘in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power’.

  What Roosevelt meant by chronic wrongdoing had been illustrated the previous year. The United States wanted to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific through northern Colombia. The Colombian Senate demanded what Roosevelt considered to be an unreasonable rent for the proposed 100-year lease, so a US navy gunboat was dispatched to support a secessionist revolt. The newly formed nation of Panama promptly leased the land to the United States in perpetuity for a ‘reasonable’ rent.

  US marines were soon in action again, in Nicaragua in 1912, and then, having already occupied Cuba, American eyes turned to the other large Caribbean island, Hispaniola. In 1915 the French-speaking half of the island, Haiti, descended into chaos. After a mob hacked the president and the head of the Haitian army to pieces a French naval lieutenant and nine French marines landed to protect the French legation. Claiming that this violated the Monroe Declaration, the United States sent in its own marines who, acting on instructions from Washington, immediately seized $500,000 in gold from the Haitian National Bank. The US occupation lasted nineteen years and provoked bitter resistance; 3,250 Haitians were killed for the loss of just thirteen US troops. The occupation mirrored the brutality witnessed at Abu Ghraib in Iraq less than ninety years later. On one occasion US troops were ordered to shoot all prisoners, and a marine general later testified that many of the Haitian deaths were ‘indiscriminate killings’ designed to discourage resistance. Despite a presidential commission of enquiry, the only person to be found guilty of any crime was a marine lieutenant, who was convicted of torture and committed to an asylum.

  The year after invading Haiti, US marines yet again invaded the Spanish-speaking half of the island, the Dominican Republic, and again the main concern was to gain control of the nation’s financial affairs. The paradoxes inherent in the American belief that it was possible to impose liberty were plainly demonstrated, as for eight years the local press was subject to rigorous censorship in the name of freedom.

  America’s continuing military interventions in the Caribbean and the proclamation of the Roosevelt Corollary were further signs that a mighty new empire had emerged, while at the same time, the end of the nineteenth century, two once-great empires were approaching collapse. The Spanish empire was hastened on its way by American military might, and Russia determined to do the same with the Turkish empire. Turkey had been subject to repeated Russian attacks but still held on to much of the Balkans, and Nicholas II turned his attention in that direction. Once more, however, the crucial difference between the geopolitical circumstances of America and Russia became apparent: while nobody else was likely to intervene if America seized Cuba or the Philippines, the Balkans were a fulcrum of European imperial intrigue and in particular were the back door of another soon-to-be-defunct empire, the Austro-Hungarian.

  The end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an age when the imperial powers played board games with much of the globe. Diplomats, politicians, bankers and monarchs seized and ceded, deposed and disposed without any thought for the occupants of the territories concerned. Great chunks of Asia and Africa in particular were passed around between the great powers. In a typical example Russia mediated in a dispute between France and Germany about whether territory seized by Belgium in the centre of Africa might be taken over by Germany in return for France being given a free hand in Morocco. The European protagonists eventually settled into two camps: Russia, France and Britain in the Triple Entente and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy in the Triple Alliance. America and Japan watched from the sidelines, happy to take advantage of whatever developed.

  The various Balkan wars that preceded the First World War saw Turkey losing most of its European empire and Slavs and non-Slavs slugging it out to see who would gain most of the spoils. Russia cheered on the Serbs, Germany cheered on the Bulgarians, and the heir to the Habsburg throne made the mistake of leaving Vienna for Sarajevo and a fatal encounter with an anarchist’s bomb. Germany blamed Russia’s Slavic ally Serbia for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and the stage was set for the cataclysmic First World War.

  Looking back on the nineteenth century it is clear that America and Russia had started to develop increasing similarities. Particular events invite simple comparison: the emancipation of the Russian serfs and of the American slaves; the assassinations by anarchists of Tsar Alexander II and President McKinley; the violent labour unrest in both countries; pogroms of Jews and blacks. These superficial similarities reflect in part the reality that below the surface many of the same forces were at work, in particular those arising from increasing industrialisation, but the outcomes were fundamentally different. In America democracy proved unable to reconcile diametrically opposed positions on the issue of slavery and the nation collapsed into civil war – but its political institutions emerged from that war largely unchanged. In Russia on the other hand the autocracy was able, on the issue of serfdom, to simply impose its own view, but that postponed civil war rather than avoided it, and when war came centuries of tsarist dictatorship were swept away. By bringing very large groups of workers together for the first time, industrialisation and the factory system, often introduced like everything else in Russia on a massive scale, created breeding grounds for radical dissent. The only other place where the downtrodden could associate in such explosive numbers was within the armed forces, and when revolutionary groups gained footholds in the navy and army the days of Romanov rule were numbered.

  Although dramatic change in Russia became inevitable, the form that such change would tak
e was totally unpredictable. It is now clear that Lenin and his followers were as amazed as anyone else when the Bolsheviks emerged on top. There were after all similar anarchist and revolutionary socialist groups elsewhere who achieved very little. The world seemed to be in turmoil. Not only did anarchist groups assassinate the tsar and other Russian leaders but their attacks spread across Europe. The King of Italy, the President of France, the Empress of Austria and the prime minister of Spain were killed. An anarchist tried to shoot the Prince and Princess of Wales as their train passed through Brussels, and in the United States President McKinley became the third president to be assassinated when he was struck down by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. (Czolgosz was a loner regarded by his own family as crazy and refused admission by various anarchist groups who thought he was a spy; he hatched his assassination plan after reading newspaper accounts of the assassination of the Italian king.) Nicholas II had himself been subject to an anarchist assassination attempt when, as crown prince, he had visited Japan. He was saved by the quick action of his cousin, Prince George of Greece, and was left with a scar on his forehead and a bitter hatred of all things Japanese.

  Mounting discontent in Russia over wages and living conditions in the new industrial suburbs of St Petersburg coincided with the news of the loss of Port Arthur to the Japanese, and protesters took to the streets. In January 1905 soldiers fired on demonstrators in St Petersburg, an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Reports of an enormous massacre swept across the Russian empire, and conspiracy theories abounded. It now seems certain that the protest leader, a priest named Georgi Gapon, had received funds from the tsar’s secret police, the Okhranka (in the same way that front organisations were funded by both the KGB and CIA later in the twentieth century). Gapon fled abroad, and when he returned was murdered by socialists convinced he was an Okhrana agent provocateur.