Colonialism and Confrontation: The International Consequences of the Triumph of the Nation-State Model
After Italian and German unification and the 1905 Russian revolution, throughout Europe regimes would come to prevail under which a bourgeois, commercial, industrial and financial oligarchy held power.
As a result, these groups advanced policies transforming their states into major economic powers adopting plans to colonize different regions around the world. The model of the liberal state which prevailed in most European countries in the nineteenth century embraced the expansion of “national capitalism”, an approach based on each nation-state seeking to promote its own economic development in open competition with others, and struggling to acquire more markets by way of colonial expansion. Thus, the last third of the nineteenth century became a golden age of colonialism. This model, fused with the principle of nationalism, would give rise to considerable tensions at the international level (Bridge and Bullen 2005).16.9.1 The Golden Age of Colonialism
It was during this period that the Europeans explored and colonized much of Africa, a virgin continent with huge potential, especially because of its abundance of raw materials. Western powers also managed to colonize much of Asia, where states boasting centuries of history (such as China), were successively conquered by European nations in a series of armed conflicts. In China, these included the
Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) and the Boxer Rebellion (18991901).[943] Similarly, the Boer War (1899-1902), allowed England to occupy South Africa, hitherto controlled by the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers. Western influence in Japan also led to the transformation of the country during the Meiji Era (1868-1912).[944]
16.9.2 Nationalism and Confrontation: The Europe
of the “Armed Peace”
By the end of nineteenth century, Europe’s nation-states controlled the world but were disunited.
The triumph of the principle of nationalism had created powerful countries, but had weakened mechanisms for cooperation and accord between them. In fact, the colonial, overtly imperialist policies advanced by the European ruling classes in each nation soon generated significant international tensions.The consolidation of nation-states weakened the European political model of stability through coalition which Metternich had striven to maintain from 1815 to 1848, replacing it with a dynamic in which powerful nations squared off against and competed with each other (Holsti 1991, 138-173). The triumph of the nation-state in Italy and Germany, for example, precipitated successive wars, as Italian unity was not achieved without bloody clashes between French-Sardinian and Austrian troops. The battles of Magenta and Solferino (1859), were particularly grim, not so much in terms of those killed in combat, but because of the fact that the medical services were so deficient that most men died as a result of preventable infections and treatable wounds.[945] This appalling situation would inspire Swiss businessman and philanthropist Henri Dunant (1828-1910), to found the Red Cross.[946] Three years later, German nationalism, embodied and advanced by Bismarck, waged war to defeat Austria (1866) and, 4 years later, France (1870). Prussia’s triumph over Austria and France led to the 1871 founding of the Second Reich, and the generation of serious resentment in France because of Prussia’s seizure of the Alsace and Lorraine[947] regions. The Russians, meanwhile, after defeating Napoleon, also managed to gradually overpower the Ottoman Empire, thereby becoming another great colonial power (Geyer 1987, 186-219).[948]
All these wars, however, were nothing more than the beginning of an escalation which would end up taking on global dimensions in the first half of the twentieth century.
The root cause of the international tension that arose between the European states during the last third of the nineteenth century, was that Italy and Prussia, the new European nation-states unified in the last third of the century, undertook the process of colonial expansion relatively late, a dynamic hitherto dominated by the British Empire and France, which in 1830 launched an ambitious colonial program.[949] Even the U.S. got involved as well, expanding the Union by overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893, annexing the islands in 1898 (Vowell 2012),[950] and waging war on Spain over Cuba and the Philippines in the same year (Hendrickson 2003), thereby spreading American influence in these areas.[951] [952]Italy, forged into a nation-state before Germany, moved to exploit territories in Africa: Somalia, Ethiopia, Abyssinia and Tripolitania (Libya). Prussia, however, barely managed to occupy Namibia. This meager achievement was all the more frustrating because the German Empire had become a major industrial power in need of raw materials and new markets. As a result, William II (1888-1918) launched an aggressive expansionist policy which collided head-on with the colonial interests of England and France. It was Bismarck’s aspiration for central Europe (Mitteleuropa)10 to overpower the English Empire through expansion to the east (Ostraum), to the detriment of Russia (Katzenstein 1997, 9). The upshot was widespread rearmament and the constitution of defensive alliances aimed at regulating colonial expansion, such as that signed between France and Russia in 1892, or that between England and France in 1904 (Entente cordiale), a union which the United States would ultimately end up joining (Williamson 2000, 11).
In response to these alliances, William II’s German Empire signed others with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, which ratcheted up tensions, creating an international situation which historians have come to call the “Armed Peace” referring particularly to the crucial period from 1895 to 1911 (Bridge and Bullen 2005, 251-302).[953] Trade disputes and economic conflicts ended up degenerating into a cataclysmic conflict which would spread throughout the world: World War I (1914-1918).[954]
16.10