The Anglo-Saxon experience

The expansion of the state into Eastern Europe took place against the background of populations which, though not exactly advanced for their age, at any rate were comparable to those of the West in terms of civilization, race, and religion.

The earliest region to be settled by the Anglo-Saxons was the Atlantic seaboard of North America. The settlements were established at a time when ‘‘absolute” government in the mother country was at its zenith and government itself in many ways a form of capitalist enterprise by rulers; hence the colonies tended to assume a patrimonial character. In return for giving or advancing the crown - which in an era of conflicts with Parliament was chronically short of funds - sums of money, various individuals, groups, and companies were granted huge tracts of land that was largely unexplored, seldom mapped, and rarely provided with clear borders.

The settlers' own motives varied.³⁸ Some, such as the Puritans who came to live in New England, were driven by religious dissent and the wish to set up a new, sin-free Jerusalem; accordingly, for years on end they discouraged others from following them. Others shared the peren­nial human need for additional cultivable land, while others still were probably adventurers hoping to strike it rich in various honest and not so honest ways. Whatever their motives, sooner or later they were bound to come into conflict either with each other over religious issues - as was the case in Massachusetts and elsewhere - or else with the concessionaires who, having been granted the land, attempted to bind their human charges to themselves and exploit them as much as possible for as long as possible. Some of the dissatisfied moved out of Massachusetts, as did the founders of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Others sought to redress their grievances by appealing to the crown. Either way the ultimate result was likely to be a transition to direct rule - in other words, the appointment of a royal governor who either took over from the concessionaires or else established a government ex novo.

Compared to earlier empires, the British one in America arose at a time when the difference between private proprietorship and political rule was

⁷ Vinland Saga (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 61 and n. 1.

⁸ For a short account, see M. A. Jones, American Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), ch. 1. becoming firmly established. At no point could there be any question of royal governors owning the colonies in any way; on the contrary, their very establishment was meant to take those colonies out of private owner­ship and put them under a political regime presumably more able to resolve conflicts and secure the inhabitants’ loyalty to the crown.

Equally decisive for America’s future political development was the fact that governors did not have extensive bureaucracies at their disposal. In part this continued the tradition of England as being undergoverned by continental standards; but mostly it reflected the desire to economize so as to make the colonies turn a profit to the homeland as well as the sheer size of North America itself. Deprived of a proper administrative ma­chine, willy-nilly the governors sought to avail themselves of their sub­jects’ aid by means of councils recruited from preeminent Americans, mainly prominent landowners and merchants. The first councils were appointed from above; later they tended to become elected. Increasingly they concentrated the functions of government, including legislation, taxation, and the payment of officials, in their own hands. They also offered the population scope for political activity that was unusual for the time. For example, in the colonies of the Chesapeake area, 80 to 90 percent of the free adult male population was permitted to vote.

By 1752, the year in which Georgia got rid of its proprietors (the Oglethorpe family) and received its first royal governor, all of the then existing colonies had emancipated themselves from private ownership. At Westminster, responsibility for looking after them fell to the Board of Trade whose main concern was to use them as a vehicle for increasing Britain’s own wealth. To this end it imposed various restrictions, in­cluding, at one time or another, a prohibition on the colonies to engage in maritime trade with each other, an obligation on them to sell their products solely in the London market, and an obligation on all vessels bound for the colonies to stop at London and pay duties.

So long as the French and Spanish maintained a threatening presence in Canada and Florida respectively, the alliance between Britain and its North American colonies held in spite of occasional tensions. No sooner had the threat been removed by the French and Indian War, however, than tensions erupted: the more so since the colonial militias had played an important part in the conquest of Quebec in particular and were consequently flushed with confidence in their own military prowess.³⁹ The various disputes over taxation, representation, Britain's right to maintain standing armies, etc. that finally led to the outbreak of the Revolution need not be recounted here. Suffice it to say that, perhaps for the first time in history (or at any rate since the tyrannicides of classical antiquity), this was a revolt conducted not by would-be rulers and their followers but by elected representatives on behalf of a nascent abstract state; or, to be precise, states, since relationships among the various colonies and the form that their common institutions would take had by no means been worked out even by the time the struggle ended and independence from Britain was achieved.

Reflecting its origin in diverse colonies spread over a vast territory - excluding Florida, which reverted to Spain, from north to south it was equal to the distance between Stockholm and Palermo - the United States under its first constitution was an extremely loose entity.

³⁹ For the pretensions of the American military, such as they were, see D. Higginbotham, ‘‘The Military Institutions of Colonial America: the Rhetoric and the Reality,” in Lynn, Tools of War, pp. 131-54.

In the event, the decisive factor that finally caused the governing elites of the various states to put their differences aside was probably the fear of a revolution by the underprivileged classes - a fear which Shay's Rebel­lion of 1787 did nothing to allay. Originally the purpose of the Philadel­phia Congress, which met in May of 1788, was merely to amend the Articles of Confederation; but this was overtaken by the so-called Virginia Plan which envisaged the creation of a much more centralized polity on which, to quote John Marshall, ‘‘the prosperity and happiness'' of the people depended. The Constitution which was adopted in 1788 was based primarily on the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu.

With all political power ultimately resulting from popular elections the new polity, though surely dwelling under God, owed less to Him than any of its predecessors. Originally different states had their differing views and policies concerning religion: for example, Massachusetts and Connec­ticut came close to persecuting both Quakers and Baptists. Once they had finally agreed to join together, there was a strong tendency among the colonies to overcome these differences by keeping religion and gover­nment apart. Perhaps most importantly of all, the American system of government, instead of being built on top of existing foundations, was deliberately created almost ex nihilo. This gave it an artificial quality of which people who visited the country at the time were quite conscious⁴⁰ and which from then to the present has been by no means its least important characteristic. If there is anything wrong with the United States, the citizens get organized by means of a ‘‘grass-roots'' movement and set out to fix it. Should they fail to achieve perfection and build a heaven on earth, then perhaps to a greater extent than the citizens of any other country they have nobody to blame but themselves.

The adoption of the Constitution, as well as the first ten amendments introduced in 1791, did not end the debate between the advocates of state

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See, e.g., A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1945 [1835­40]), vol. II, ch. 8. rights on the one hand and those of the federal government on the other. As usual, at the heart of the conflict there was money: in other words, whether there should be a single national debt (and, consequently, a central bank to manage it) or whether each state should be responsible for its own. Support for the former view came from the Federalists who were concentrated in the north, whereas the opposite one was held by the Republicans and the southern states. At the head of the Federalists was Alexander Hamilton, a New York politician who was acting as George Washington’s secretary of the treasury and whose main concern was to ‘‘borrow cheap’’ in case of another foreign war. In return for agreeing to have the Republic’s capital city moved from Philadelphia and established on Virginia’s northern border, as the South demanded, Hamilton was able to push the Bank Act through Congress and establish the US Bank. Thus it was by his efforts that a single national debt was brought into being - though nowadays few people, watching the clock in New York race through its figures, would share his view that it represented ‘‘a national blessing.’’^[327]

The election of Jefferson as president in 1800 effectively put an end to the Federalist Party and opened an era of Republican government, Nevertheless, by and large the drive toward greater centralization con­tinued. Partly this was because of continued expansion to the West; as critics such as Aaron Burr did not fail to point out, the more territory came under federal rule (even temporarily, until new states could be established), the greater the power of the government in Washington, DC. Inspired by John Marshall, the Virginia lawyer who had been ap­pointed Chief Justice in 1800 and served until 1835, several Supreme Court decisions also tended to strengthen the Union at the expense of state rights. Thus McCullogh v. Maryland (1819) instituted the doctrine of ‘‘implied powers,’’ enabling Congress to act in matters which, though not specifically written into the Constitution, were a ‘‘proper and neces­sary’’ part of government - in this case setting up the second central bank after the first one had been closed. In 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden gave Congress power to regulate interstate commerce even if it overrode state law by doing so; finally, Weston v. Charleston (1829) prohibited the states from taxing federally issued bonds.^[328]

These developments were preceded by the War of 1812 which, having ended in a devastating (if unnecessary) victory over the British at New Orleans, brought about a new sense of power and, for a time at any rate, unity. They were soon followed by the transportation revolution which, beginning in the 1820s, started knitting together a huge and rather disparate continent into a single integrated polity. More federal money was spent on transportation under Andrew Jackson (1829-37) than under all previous administrations put together; but even so the gover­nment only put up a fraction of the sums invested by private individuals, corporations, and the states. As had been the case in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the first great projects involved waterways. Among many smaller works, the Erie Canal and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal acquired well-deserved fame as triumphs of organization and engineering skill. From the 1830s on the advent of steam-propelled paddleboats revolutionized shipping on the Great Lakes. By turning the Mississippi River system into the backbone of the United States, they also enabled people and goods to be transported from north to south and vice versa with previously undreamed-of convenience and reliability. But whereas steamships proved profitable, canals, coming perhaps half a century too late, by and large did not. That they did not was due to that other all-important nineteenth-century invention, the railways.

As noted by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, throughout history the cost of transport by water had been a mere fraction of its price by land, thus explaining why the earliest commercial and industrial civiliza­tions always arose either near the sea or where navigable rivers existed. Railways were the first technical device to reverse that relationship; by so doing they enabled polities which did not rely primarily on waterways to grow as large, and as cohesive, as those which did. Given proper man­agement, the effect of railways was to permit large states to mobilize their resources almost as efficiently as small ones - sometimes more so, indeed, since there exists a limit below which both rail transport and the construction of the lines themselves becomes uneconomic. Thus their development worked in favor of those who were in possession of land masses - the United States and, after an interval of some decades, Russia - at the expense of the rest.^[329] Already Napoleon during his exile at Saint Helena was able to prophesy the development of those two states into what, during the Cold War, people were fond of calling ‘‘superpowers.’’ Pace some modern historians,^[330] such a development could never have been brought about without the timely appearance and spread of the railways.

Against the background of slowly increasing centralization and rapidly, even spectacularly, growing economic and industrial power the question of slavery continued to prove a bone of contention between North and South. As it tended to become more rather than less profitable,⁴⁵ its role in the question of federal versus state rights grew and grew, the more so because it became entangled with other questions such as that of high tariffs favored by the northern states against the low ones demanded by the southern ones. In the long run the contradiction between a modern, nonproprietary, politically governed state and a situation whereby a con­siderable part of the population was considered the private property of others proved intolerable. This is not the place to spell out the immensely complicated train of events that led to the Civil War, let alone describe the course of the conflict. Suffice it to say that the war was the most decisive single event in American history; not for nothing is Gettysburg, where a special structure still marks ‘‘the high tide of rebellion,” by far the most visited of all American battlefields. There and at Vicksburg on the Missis­sippi, but perhaps most of all during Sherman's march through Georgia which made the price of rebellion plain for all to see, it was determined that the United States should not be a loose gathering of states, each with the right to secede when it pleased. Instead there was to be a Union, one and indivisible and jointly ruled by the three powers, however con­stituted. All had their seat within a mile or two from each other in Washington, DC - a remarkably small area from which to govern a country that was soon to reach ‘‘from California to the New York island'' and occupy no fewer than 3,680,000 square miles.

Symbolized by the completion of the first transcontinental railway line in 1869 - by which time the United States possessed almost 40,000 miles of track, more than all the rest of the world combined - industrial expansion proceeded even more rapidly after the Civil War than before. Between 1880 and 1900 alone, the quantity of steel coming out of the factories each year increased from 1,400,000 to over 11,000,000 tons, while the value of all manufactured goods increased from $5.4 billion to $13 billion.⁴⁶ By 1929 manufacturing output was almost as large as that of the remaining powers together; though it failed to retain that position during the Depression, it remained the largest single economy by far.⁴⁷ Long before that, the United States, having developed into a giant, felt the urge to match itself against others, as giants will. The War of 1812 had already put an end to the ability of any other state to threaten American

⁴⁵ R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: Norton, 1974).

⁴⁶ Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. XXIX, p. 242, ‘‘United States.”

⁴⁷ See data in H. C. Hillman, ‘‘Comparative Strength of the Great Powers,” in A. Toynbee, ed., The World in March 1939 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), p. 439. security, effectively turning Canada into a hostage for Britain's good behavior in the New World. First the detachment of Florida from Spain (1819), then the Monroe Declaration (1823), and then the conquest of Texas and the Southwest from Mexico (1845-8) made the western hemisphere into an American domain; once the Civil War was over, the execution of Emperor Maximilian in 1867 marked the last time any other power was able to seriously interfere on the continent. In 1851 the Hawaiian Islands, hitherto governed by tribal chiefs with hand-thrown spears as their principal weapon, were brought under American protec­tion. This led to the establishment of a forward base several thousand miles off the California coast and, as Japan in particular was very soon to find out, turned the United States into a Pacific force to be reckoned with.

Aware of its growing power, during the late 1880s and 1890s the United States also began to develop a robust nationalism. Its most important organs were William Randolph Hearst's American and Joseph Pulitzer's World, its principal representatives, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Herbert Crolie, and their coterie. Roosevelt in particular represented a generation too young to have taken part in the Civil War and forever marked by their elders' tales of heroism - the war, after all, claimed as many lives as all other conflicts fought by the United States combined. Another factor that may have been instrumental in creating the new mood was the closing of the frontier, announced by historian Frederick Turner Jackson in 1893⁴⁸ and perhaps serving to turn the nation's energies outward. Unlike many of their opposite numbers in other countries, the exponents of American imperialism were not reac­tionaries but self-styled ‘‘Progressives.'' Usually they paid at least lip service to the democratic principles on which, after all, their ability to attain and maintain power absolutely depended. Concerning foreign affairs, however, their doctrines differed little from those advanced by contemporary European nationalists such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Theodor von Bernhardi in Germany.⁴⁹ It was in tune with the spirit of the age that such people thought of ‘‘strong'' and ‘‘weak'' races; the states that these races set up for themselves were thought of as animal species engaging one another in a Darwinistic struggle for survival. Both the states and the ideologues who claimed to speak on their behalf were usually quite prepared to go to war even if they did not positively hanker for it to happen - as Theodore Roosevelt, with his constant talk of the ‘‘rougher and manlier virtues,'' clearly did.⁵⁰

⁴⁸ Fora good discussion of Turner’s ideas, see above all R. A. Billington, TheFrontier Thesis (Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1966).

⁴⁹ For nationalist attitudes to war before 1914, see M. Howard, The Causes of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 23ff.

⁵⁰ A good account of the rise of American imperialism is R. Hofstaedter, The American­Political Tradition (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), ch. 9.

To accuse the United States of being the aggressor in the Spanish- American War - let alone World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts such as Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf - would be going much too far. From the atrocities committed by the Spaniards in their attempt to put down the Cuban rebels, through the German sinking of the Lusitania and the Japanese aggression against China, to the occupa­tion of Kuwait by the Iraqis, US wars were triggered by the actions of others. However, all also involved an exceptionally, some would say disproportionally, strong response on the part of the ‘‘chip-on-the-shoul- der nation” - a term coined by the greatest American anthropologist, Margaret Mead. Colonial conflicts apart, most other twentieth-century states fought wars against enemies from whom they were separated by only a line on the map and who, accordingly, presented an immediate, sometimes overwhelming threat to their interests, territory, and even existence. Not so the United States which, fortunately for it, occupies the position of a global island. Any attempt to invade it across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean was, and remains, sheer lunacy; even in 1939-45, the largest war in history, the closest any enemy came to threatening the continent involved a handful of fire-balloons which the Japanese sent in the general direction of the Californian coast. Except for the Mexican episode of 1916, itself more a punitive expedition than a war, from the occupation of the Philippines onward, the United States has invariably sent its troops to fight several thousand miles away. No wonder American parents often took a long time before they could be convinced of the need to commit their sons - of late, daughters too - on other continents, even other hemispheres, to causes for which they did not care and among people of whom they knew nothing.

The absence of a serious external threat fact also helps explain why the US armed forces and central government apparatus took such a long time to develop even at a time when, as was clearly the case after 1865, the economic muscle for building both had come into being. It is true that the navy began to expand during the 1890s; driven by Mahan's theories concerning the need to command the sea as well as the interests of big business,^[331] after 1919 it attained parity with Britain's. However, except for the years 1917-18 the land army remained almost ridiculously small.^[332] During the late nineteenth century it numbered in the low tens of thousands; as late as 1940 it still had fewer than 300,000 men (including the army air force) and scarcely any battle-ready reserves. Following the tradition whereby its main function had been to fight Amerindians, its formations were scattered in small groups all over a huge continent. As a result, hardly any large-scale exercises could be held and readiness for waging modern war was lower even than what these figures suggest.

Nor did the United States go nearly as far as other countries in building the fourth organ of government, namely a centralized bureaucracy. Orig­inally there were just three departments of the government, Foreign Affairs, Finance, and War; but even in 1800, after Customs, Lighthouses, US Attorneys, Marshals, the Post Office, Revenue Cutters, Indian Super­intendents, Commissioners of Loans, Internal Revenue, Surveyor Gen­eral, Land Tax, and Land Offices had all been added, the federal work­force totaled only 3,000 persons. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Post Office remained the largest federal agency by far; as late as 1913 the government had only 230,000 employees compared with 700,000 in Austria-Hungary, 700,000 in Italy, and 1.5 million in Germany - all with much smaller populations, let alone territories - during the last years before the war.^[333] Though the New Deal did something to change the picture, its achievements were limited; in the event, it was World War II and the subsequent Cold War which really ushered in the age of Big Government. In chapter 6 of this book the rise and decline of that government will be studied more closely. Meanwhile suffice it to say that the United States, living in a world of states and often engaging in competition with them, behaved much as other states did. Internal and external power grew pari passu. During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, unprecedented prosperity provided the muscle for an equally unprecedented military buildup both at home (where it was known as the military-industrial complex) and abroad (which saw the stationing of hundreds of thousands of American troops). The climax came in the form of the ‘‘imperial presidency” of the Johnson and Nixon years when the United States, having humiliated the USSR over Cuba, seemed to bestride the globe like a colossus - until, with startling sudden­ness, the tide turned and the retreat of both the military machine and the industrial complex that supported it got under way.

The achievement of American independence, which took place in 1783, served the British government both as an example and a warning: an example since it showed what a well-governed, democratic state established in what was practically virgin country (North America's population at the time of the European discovery is estimated at 1.5 million) could achieve; a warning since it proved that continued posses­sion depended absolutely on granting the colonists ‘‘the rights of English­men” and allowing them to run their own affairs as soon as they were willing and able to do so.^[334] In the event the warning was heeded and the construction of the Dominions proved to be a smashing success. Sooner or later it enabled each one to attain the status of a fully independent state complete with its own government, laws, and courts whose judgments were not subject to review in the mother country; armed forces, as well as diplomatic services, followed. Symbolically maturity came in 1919-20 when the Dominions, which hitherto had their foreign affairs run for them by Whitehall, insisted on putting their own signatures on the peace treaties and gained seats in the League of Nations; in the same year Canada appointed its first independent diplomatic representatives (to Washington, DC) instead of working through the British Embassy as it had previously. Only in South Africa did the clash of British imperialism with the Dutch settlers lead to the use of force on any scale, but even there it soon led to a remarkably generous peace settlement and, shortly there­after, complete self-government. In sum, the various constitutional arran­gements - whose crown was formed by the Imperial Statute of 1931 - preserved the colonies' allegiance to the mother country during the years, from 1914 to 1945, when it needed them most. This was a triumph of diplomacy that is probably unequaled before or since.

It is true that, from one continent to another, the development of the Dominions displayed striking variations. The largest and most important one was Canada. Conquered from France at a time when its white population numbered only 7,000, it was the first to develop its own institutions; modeled on those of Britain, in many ways they were strik­ingly different from those of the neighboring, and, after 1816, by and large friendly United States. The first attempt at responsible government, taking the form of the Quebec Act of 1774 which excluded the French majority, proved unworkable. This led to the Constitutional Act of 1791 which gave Quebec a government with a governor, an executive council, a legislative council, and an assembly elected on a franchise wider than that of Britain itself, with the result that, when the first elections were held in the next year, the new assembly already had a majority of French mem­bers. As they have done ever since, the French, dissatisfied with British government but on the whole disinclined to use violence in resisting it, promptly began creating difficulties for the English-speaking population. And, as they have done ever since, many new immigrants who were deterred by these difficulties chose to settle further west where they created their own institutions under British guidance.

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In 1841 Canada West (Upper Canada) was united with Canada East (Lower Canada) under a single government. Between then and 1873 it was joined by British Columbia as well as the smaller, English-speaking maritime colonies; the one exception was Newfoundland, which re­mained a British colony until 1914. By this time Britain, having turned itself into the workshop of the world and switched to free trade, no longer felt inclined to use force in order to hold on to the ‘‘wretched colonies” - or so Disraeli, with much public opinion behind him, said in 1852. Yet paradoxically British indifference made the Canadians themselves seek closer union with Britain. It was feared that, if they did not form a united front, the western territories and possibly even some of the provinces themselves might be swallowed up by the powerful and extremely dy­namic neighbor to the south; nor did the United States during the years immediately following the Civil War make any secret of its wish to expand if the opportunity presented itself. Both factors together prepared the way for the establishment of the Dominion of Canada. Effectively it took place in October 1864: the relevant questions having been informally discussed for years, a congress made up of representatives from all the provinces needed only two weeks in order to pass no fewer than seventy-two resolutions. The work was completed in 1867 when the British North America Act came into force.

Unlike the United States the new polity was provided with a par­liamentary system of government, so that the prime minister, instead of being directly elected, was dependent on a majority in parliament. Like the United States, it had a written constitution and a supreme court responsible for interpreting it. Like the United States, too, Canada was a federation - although Canadians, anxiously watching the Civil War and determined to prevent anything similar from taking place in their coun­try, gave the government in Ottawa much greater powers over justice and banking in particular. On the other hand, the huge empty spaces made the relationship between the Canadian government and its people re­semble that which prevailed in the United States, more than the one which existed in densely populated, long-united Britain. Not even the onset of a terrible economic depression during the 1930s persuaded Quebec and Ontario to prop up the prairie provinces whose plight was the worst; thus it was only in 1940 that the first nationwide scheme of social insurance came into being. However, a late start proved to be a good start. Using the tremendous mobilization effort during World War II as its starting point, the Canadian government surged ahead after 1945, creating a welfare state similar to most European ones and far surpassing that of the United States.

Thus the evolution of the Canadian state was shaped - as, in some ways, it continues to be - by the different pulls exercised by the British and American models on the one hand and by friction between French- and English-speaking people on the other. The first factor also applied to Australia; but the second did not. Following a century and a half of exploration along the coast, the first white settlers arrived in 1788 in the form of 980 people, 730 of whom were convicts and the rest royal marines charged with overseeing them. As additional immigrants, some convicts and some free, came in, they settled in widely dispersed locations; having little in common, each one subsequently became the nucleus of a separate colony. Though the system of government in each colony was never proprietary - the governors were officers and wardens, not owners - initially it was strongly authoritarian and run on prison-like lines. The turning point came between 1810 and 1820 when the colonists, having discovered sheep-raising, got on their economic feet. The first executive and legislative councils, both of them nominated, were set up in 1824 and 1829 respectively. As in Canada, the need for revenue soon led to democratization. In 1842 the colony of New South Wales became the first to hold elections on the continent; fifty years later South Australia gained the distinction of becoming one of the first countries to enfran­chise women. On the other hand, progress toward establishing a unitary state was slower than in Canada, given that settlement was extremely sparse and limited to the rims; the interior was, and remains, essentially a desert.

When it came, the impetus toward unity and eventual statehood was provided by the fear of German imperialism on the one hand and of Asian, particularly Chinese, immigration on the other. The former caused the government of Queensland to force the hand of a reluctant Gladstone and take possession of New Guinea. The latter soon resulted in a veritable Asiaphobia which in some ways has persisted to the present day. The first continental congress, whose purpose was to discuss com­mon measures against both threats, met in October 1883, opening the way to the first constitutional conventions which were held between 1891 and 1898. By 1900 they had worked out a constitution for what, develop­ing on Canadian lines, was soon to become a Dominion whose continu­ing relationship with Britain was based entirely on a voluntary associ­ation. As in Britain, there was a prime minister elected by parliament and dependent on maintaining a majority among its members. As in the United States, the lower house of that parliament was based on a popular franchise, while the upper one had an equal number of representatives from each state. As in the United States and Canada, too, there was a written constitution and a high court responsible for interpreting it.

With these arrangements in place, the real turning point toward the establishment of a unified Australian state proved to be World War I. At one time or another almost 10 percent of the population served in the military; as Australian units distinguished themselves at Gallipoli - the anniversary of the landing, which took place on 25 April 1915, became a national holiday equivalent to the Fourth of July - and other battles a new sense of unity was created. Riding a nationalist wave, the movement toward centralization continued and in 1927 Canberra was officially designated as the national capital. Next, the shift in global power resulting from World War II caused a shift from a British to an American orien­tation; in the 1960s Australia was one of the few nations, and the only white one (apart from New Zealand), to send troops to Vietnam. Unlike Canada, which in 1982 went independent and set itself up as a new state centering around the maple leaf, Australia, though completely sovereign, did not cut the constitutional link with Britain, though it may yet do so in the future. More prosperous than most, it was slow to expand gover­nment authority into social affairs. State-run old-age and invalid insur­ance schemes were provided in 1908, but there matters got stuck. Only in the late 1950s and the early 1960s did the welfare state arrive, and even then the rule of the Labor Party, which introduced the reforms, lasted for only a few years.

The Dominion model was equally successful in New Zealand, which to this day remains more English in character than any other. Coming under the British crown in 1839, it was given responsible government in 1852. Once the Maori Wars had ended, it developed peacefully from 1870 on, going further than Australia in constructing a welfare state which is now (from the early 1990s on) being dismantled. Peace, however, did not prevail in South Africa where the situation was much more complicated. The European settlement at the Cape originated as a trading station where ships bound for Asia stopped to refresh their provisions and crews. For a long time it remained the property of the Dutch East India Com­pany; but already during the eighteenth century some Boers, or farmers, broke away. Using their ox-drawn wagons as mobile homes they moved inland. There they developed their own language - a combination of colloquial Dutch interlaced with French words introduced by an infusion of Huguenots - and adopted a nomadic life in many ways similar to that of the natives whom they conquered and exploited.⁵⁵ Other Afrikaners, as they called themselves, were able to save money and emancipate

55

For the Boers’ lifestyle during these years, see C. W. de Kiewit, A History of South Africa, Social and Economic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 19ff. themselves from Company rule, becoming freeholders in the Cape itself. In 1814 the entire area, which at that time had some 22,000 white inhabitants in addition to an unknown number of others, passed from Dutch to British rule. The steady influx of white immigrants, British rather than Dutch, continued while the population was also augmented by the import of Asian labor. As happened in other British colonies, the need for revenue caused representative institutions to emerge from 1853 on; nineteen years later the Cape was granted full responsible gover­nment. Originally it was based on a color-blind, though property-based, franchise - the intention being that the more prosperous blacks would support the white minority against the rest.

Meanwhile, however, the introduction of British law, including above all the abolition of slavery, had caused conflicts with the resident Dutch. During the 1820s the latter started emigrating north and east, a move­ment which became institutionalized during the 1830s; coming to be known as the Great Trek, it ultimately involved a possible 15,000 people. Clashing with the native population - primarily the Zulu, Ndbele, and Xhosa tribes, at that time expanding in the opposite direction and setting up strong chiefdoms - the Boers defeated them in a series of wars that took place between about 1850 and 1870. The upshot was the establish­ment of two small republics, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, with constitutions ironically modeled upon that of the United States. In both of them the right to participate in politics was reserved for whites only. The remaining 80 percent or so of the population were excluded from the polity and, the lands on which they used to graze their cattle having been taken way from them, survived by squatting where they could and wor­king for the Boers. The first British attempt to take over was defeated at Majuba Hill in 1881. But no sooner had this been accomplished than vast deposits of gold were discovered around Johannesburg. This led directly to an influx of immigrants from all over the world, the Jameson Raid, and so to the Boer War of 1899-1902.

Though 200,000 British troops were finally able to overcome the Boers, as early as 1907 self-rule was restored to them. In 1910 the Union of South Africa, made up of four former provinces (Orange, Transvaal, the Cape, and Natal) and populated by about 1,250,000 whites as well as perhaps four times as many others, came into being. Its first prime minister was Louis Botha, who, less than a decade earlier, had been commander-in-chief of the Boer army. From then on, but particularly after the country emancipated itself from its Dominion status in 1948, South African politics have been dominated by the relationship between the white minority (itself divided into English- and Boer-speaking groups) and the immense black majority.^[335] The latter was constantly augmented by newcomers seeking employment in the continent’s largest economy. The more it grew, the harsher the measures considered neces­sary to keep it in its place, i.e., as a cheap labor force with no political and hardly any personal rights. Though priding itself on being part of the West, South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s developed into a police state of the worst kind with laws against everything from free residence and mixed sporting teams to interracial marriage^{56 [336] - one which, though primarily intended to discriminate against the black population, was almost equally repressive on whites.}

To summarize, the American Revolution which emancipated the orig­inal thirteen colonies permitted a modern state to emerge: one which, over the next two centuries, grew progressively more powerful and more centralized as one move after another enabled the federal government to take on additional functions and increase its authority at the expense of both the individual states and, some would say, the American people. Elsewhere developments took a different course. Experience had taught the British the futility of denying the inhabitants of their white colonies the rights which they themselves possessed and of which, indeed, they were proud; by and large they were ready to grant those inhabitants representative government almost as soon as it was demanded. In return, the Dominion status acquired by the colonies in question ensured that their foreign policies remained in British hands and that their resources and military manpower - even those of South Africa, however recent the defeat of the Boers - would remain available to the mother country during the critical era of total war. Though certainly not without their troubles - Canada in particular never outgrew the hostility between English and French and may still disintegrate into two or more states - all these countries were immensely successful in establishing stable governments, flourishing economies, and strong civil societies with well-developed institutions. The one exception was South Africa where prosperity, and indeed the state itself, belonged to the white minority only. The presence of a massive, economically backward, native population divided into numerous antagonistic tribes makes it doubtful whether the state can survive at all; but that is a question which, properly speaking, belongs to the last chapter of this book.