Chapter Sixteen

Europe and Africa in the Late 19^th Century

Greece

It’s been 2000 years, but now it’s time for us to return to Greece. The intervening centuries had not been kind. Greece had been trampled and looted by one invader after another. Their monumental architecture had been burned, blown up and earthquaked into rubble. Their fine art broken, lost, looted, buried or shattered. They were now a superstitious peasant people living far off the main road, playing out their own history unconnected to the big world around them. As we rejoin them, the Greeks had been subjugated by the Turks for some 400 years.

The Greeks revolted against Turkish tyranny in 1821. They attacked and massacred Turkish garrisons and communities throughout the country. Then the Turks retaliated against Greek communities. The uprising quickly became the type of war that killed many more civilians than soldiers. Eventually the Great Powers decided that enough was enough, so their combined fleets destroyed the Turkish fleet at Navarino and brought Greece under international protection.

The first revolutionary constitution of 1822 established Greece as a limited bourgeois republic. Because this was the first successful shakeup of the post-Napoleonic status-quo, Greece drew the worried attention of the rest of Europe. The Great Powers certainly didn’t want revolution and democracy to become a habit again, so they kept their hand in Greek politics. During the 1820s, political parties in Greece openly and shamelessly formed around which foreign sponsor they sided with: the French Party (founded 1824), English Party (1825) and Russian Party (1827). Full male suffrage came to Greece in 1829, although the unemployed were not allowed to vote until 1877. The rest of Europe still didn’t trust republics, so they forced the Greeks to take a teenage Bavarian prince as an absolute king in 1832 in order to keep unfettered democracy from running rampant.

However, after the Bavarian troops that had arrive with King Otto went home and left him to fend for himself, the Greeks mobbed the palace and imposed a new constitution in 1844. It was vague on whether the king could appoint and dissolve cabinets at will, so king and parliament argued about it for years. Additionally, the Catholic king and his Protestant queen could never find an amicable relationship with the Greek  Orthodox Church. Finally, parliament threw out King Otto in 1862 and replaced him with a Danish prince, born Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg but ruling Greece as King George. The new democratic constitution of 1864 limited the king’s power, established popular sovereignty and required a parliamentary majority for a prime minister. To break free from foreign meddling, all the Greek parties dissolved and reformed around local issues in 1865. Greece now became the first country in Europe to elect its parliament by direct, secret, universal male suffrage.

Greece probably couldn’t have asked for a better king to get them through the childhood of their democracy. King George was diligent in his ceremonial duties and he conspicuously deferred to parliament on governance. He sat on the throne for 50 years and stabilized Greek democracy. The only hiccup occurred in 1909 when the military took governing away from parliament during a diplomatic crisis, but within a year, they had stepped back and returned power to democrats in parliament.

E Pluribus Duum: Germany and Italy

Mapmakers had their jobs massively simplified in the middle of the nineteenth century by the unifications of Germany and Italy. These regions began as jigsaw puzzles of ministates run by random royals, but after some jostling and shaking, they ended up making a whole lot more sense, with reasonably similar people living in large unified nation-states. The process of assembling these new states was mostly accomplished by fighting little wars, but the end results tended to be semi-democratic. Each unified state ended up as a constitutional monarchy with a parliament of upstanding citizens, and all the bits and pieces were given a fair voice in the united whole.

After the unification of Germany (1864-1871) was finalized by the Franco-Prussian War, the King of Prussia became the German Emperor, the Kaiser, meaning Caesar. The central government of the new German Empire was about a democratic as anyone could hope for – universal male suffrage and so forth – but the federal legislature only handled big, boring issues that spread across borders such as mail and trade. Foreign policy, including war-making, was pretty much the private playground of the emperor and his personally appointed chancellor. Day-to-day domestic governing was left up to the member nations of the federation which got to keep the original governments they had before unification. These were a varied bunch. Some were traditionally democratic city-states (Hamburg and Bremen, for example) and others were vast estates barely out of the age of divine monarchy (Baden and Bavaria, for example). Prussia was the largest state in the federation by far – around 60% of Germany’s population and 67% of its territory – so it pretty much got to call the shots. It was still run by the Eastern landed aristocracy, or Junkers, in their upper house of parliament.

Meanwhile, the Risorgimento – as the Italian unification (1858-1870) is called – brought all of Italy under the 1848 constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which, you’ll recall from 1848, was actually focused on the northern mainland region of Piedmont. Although this was probably an improvement in civil rights for many Italians who lived in old-fashioned feudal states, Sardinia/Piedmont was a not democracy but a constitutional monarchy under a bourgeois oligarchy. The upper house, the Senate, was made of old soldiers, cardinals and elder statesmen selected by the king. The lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, was elected by men who were 25 years old or older and who paid 40 lire per year in taxes. Only about 2% of the population qualified to vote under this rule. The electoral reform of 1882 lowered the tax qualification to 20 lire (which was waived for any man with enough schooling) which enfranchised 7% of the population.Ⓐ

Italy began to sharply industrialize after 1896, creating a large urban working class that wanted more say in how their nation operated. By 1914, national income had risen by 50% and industrial investment had doubled. Liberal politician Giovanni Giolitti was the alpha reformer of this era. Under his urging, universal male suffrage was instituted in 1912, making 25% of the population eligible.

Christians, Socialists and Democrats

It's probably no coincidence that the two principle parties in many European states nowadays take their names from Socialism and Christianity, two deep-rooted and evangelical philosophies that deliberately transcend narrow nationalism in favor of a larger community of believers. Europeans are more likely to share a worldview with one of these widespread ideologies than with lesser, stranger philosophies.

Both Socialism and Christianity began with not-entirely-undeserved reputations for being unfriendly to democracy. It wasn’t until after the Paris Commune that the far-left wing split into communists (who believed that voting was rigged and only a worker revolution would change society) and socialists (who believed that voting could be enough to change the system). Before that, most socialists were rather revolutionary. Meanwhile, national churches had allied with kings and other antidemocratic forces as long as anyone could remember. The religious establishment routinely fought change of any sort and preferred to keep political power in the hands of the manageable few rather than the unpredictable many.

In both cases, once democracy had taken root and political parties began to form around these philosophies, they often tacked on the word “Democrat” like a big yellow smiley face to reassure the voters that they were committed to the democratic process and totally harmless. They were Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, and they would certainly not censor the press and force everyone to live under some sort of rigid dogma. Where would voters even get a silly idea like that?

The International Workingmen's Association (later informally called the First International) was set up in 1864 to bring together socialists of all stripes from across the world to argue with each other at periodic conferences. Then came the Paris Commune, which had begun with such promise only to be snuffed out so brutally, and a bitter post-mortem debate erupted over whether it should have been handled differently. Karl Marx praised the Commune's spontaneity and audacity but criticized the Communards for halting in the middle of the socialist revolution to organize elections. He felt they should have just followed the momentum to international victory.  At the 1872 Hague Congress of the IWA, Mikhail Bakunin, leader of the Anarchists, criticized Marx as being dictatorial. The argument got angry enough for the Anarchists to get thrown out of the organization. That was the last full Congress of the First International, and the IWA fell apart a few years later in 1876.

The Second International started in 1889 and kept going strong until the First World War killed international cooperation everywhere. On the hard Left, communists under Marx continued to block anarchists under Bakunin. Most importantly, the Social Democrats who had first appeared in the First International now became the dominant faction of socialists. It was during the Second International that the Left Wing definitely turned away from revolution in favor of voting, now that the vote was being granted to more and more people.

Generally opposed to the socialists were the Christian Democrats, although they didn’t commonly call themselves that until after World War Two, when European conservatives tried to distance themselves from the fascists; however, the basic philosophy was in place under Germany’s Center Party founded in 1870. Christian Democracy was largely formalized in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo the 13th, May 15, 1891, which rejected both Communism and unrestrained capitalism in favor of a top-down paternalistic society. The movement was socially conservative with a rigidly Catholic view of family life, morality, conformity and order, but it also had a strong sense of community in education and charity. Not surprisingly, it approved of a strong partnership between church and state to promote all these goals.

The autocratic Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, being a German first, last and always, tried to tyrannically crush any internationalist movements that threatened to take root in his country. Bismarck outlawed socialist activities from 1878 to 1888 by prohibiting meetings and shutting down newspapers. Then, from 1872 to 1880, Bismarck unleashed a culture war (Kulturkampf) to break the power of the Catholic Church in Prussia. Catholic schools were subjected to strict inspections. Civil marriage became the only type recognized. State subsidies to the church were cut off. The Catholic Church refused to cooperate with any of the new laws.  By 1876, all the Catholic bishops assigned to Prussia were in exile or jail, and one third of parishes were without a priest. Ultimately, the persecution had the opposite effect and energized the political passions of the German Catholics. In the elections of 1874, the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) doubled its popular vote and became the second-largest party in Germany, behind the old-style free market liberals of the National Liberal Party. As it became more difficult to form a government without them, Bismarck backed off.

The Kulturkampf highlights one of the difficulties of trying to label a nation democratic.  On the one hand, you can’t call a government democratic if it persecutes a religion as blatantly as Prussia did.  On the other hand, the persecution was resisted and stopped by entirely peaceful political processes so maybe Prussia was democratic after all.

Africa

Like every other human society, Africans had their share of protodemocracies in which local leaders gathered all the important people together to discuss matters and make decisions collectively; however, the first real republics arrived in Africa when a couple of alien intrusions from overseas planted colonies. In both cases the settlers just moved in, cleared the wilderness, shot the wildlife and pretended the natives didn’t exist, making little provision for incorporating native voice into the government.

Freed slaves from the United States began to settle in Liberia in 1821, which became an independent country in 1847. Using a constitution modeled closely on the United States, politics was personal at first – voters chose the man, not the party; however, by 1869 an effective two-party system had developed in Liberia wherein the True Whig and Republican parties campaigned politely against each other for slots in the legislature. This ran for fifteen years, but it wasn’t democratic. Only the wealthy or the educated were allowed to take part in governing. The African natives beyond coastal settlements like Monrovia were excluded. The two-party system collapsed after Hilary Johnson won the presidency running on a unified ticket in 1883. In 1884 he declared himself a True Whig and outlawed the Republicans.Ⓑ For almost a century, until 1980, the government of Liberia remained in the hands of the True Whigs and the descendants of the American colonists. It’s the longest stretch of one-party authoritarian rule in modern history.

Meanwhile the Dutch colony at Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa had been conquered by the British as part of the Napoleonic Wars. Then around 1835, masses of disgruntled Dutch colonists, (called the Boers. Dutch for “farmers”) who were sick of being told by the British all the things they couldn’t do anymore, like owning slaves, pulled up stakes and moved inland. Deep on the High Veldt (the interior prairie) the families on this Great Trek came to a halt, planted crops, slaughtered any natives who tried to stop them, and started new lives as free men once again. In 1854, the British formally recognized these communities as two independent nations – the Orange Free State and, across the Vaal River, the South African Republic (informally known as Transvaal).

Nowadays as we view them at a distance across history, the two Boers republics look alike, but if we get closer, we can see differences. The Orange Free State was the more democratic of the two. In fact, Polity IV counts Orange as the 5th most democratic nation in the world in 1860, out of 59 total, ahead of, for example, the United Kingdom and Denmark (and tied with Liberia).Ⓒ Considering that the Orange Free State offered no political rights to its vast African majority and still ranked ahead of almost every other country on the planet shows you just how far the world would need to come to become democratic. As soon as it became independent in 1854, Orange Free State adopted a constitution with a unicameral legislature elected by all white males who had lived in the state for 6 months and had registered for military duty. They even let a few educated men of color vote.

The first president of OFS, Josias Philip Hoffman, secured treaties of mutual respect with the neighboring natives, but then his people discovered he had given a large keg of gunpowder to a native king as a gesture of friendship. This was an unpopular act. A delegation of prominent Free State citizens arrived to have a chat with him about it, but instead of offering a polite petition, they seized the capital fortifications and turned the cannon around, facing inward, onto the president’s house, forcing him to resign. After this rocky start, however the citizens soon settled into a solid respect for governmental institutions. Elections came and went with peaceful regularity.

Next door, Transvaal had a stormier history. It only adopted a constitution in 1860 after much wrangling and delays. Factions often fought in the street. When the government of Transvaal went bankrupt in 1876, the British took over for a short while but soon were thrown out with a small war. Citizenship in Transvaal was not precisely defined except in the negative: The Constitution forbade both church and state to recognize the equality of whites and nonwhites. As if the division between white and black, British and Dutch weren’t enough, Transvaal also eliminated Catholics from full citizenship. Only Protestant church-goers were allowed to vote.Ⓓ Transvaal tended to fall under the spell of stout Calvinist strongmen, such as Paul Kruger, who pretty much ran the country himself between 1880 and 1900. Transvaal overshadowed the smaller Orange Free State and eventually dragged it into a war it couldn’t win.

When gold was discovered in Transvaal and diamonds in Orange, the Boer republics were swarmed by new colonists from all over the world, especially from the British Isles and British colonies. These uitlanders (outlanders) soon outnumbered the Boer population by two to one, maybe more. Having already stolen the country from the natives, the Boers didn’t want another round of immigrants stealing the country from the Boers so soon. By imposing long residency requirements before granting the right to vote (but not so long that the Boers themselves would be ineligible) the Boers retained control for the time being. Meanwhile, they imposed high taxes on the outlanders to keep the nation’s wealth from draining oversees.

The British threatened to intervene, annex the countries and forcibly provide equal rights to the outlanders, which, by happy coincidence, would also bring all those rich mineral deposits into the British Empire. They began keeping an eye out for an opportunity to take over the Boer republics, and they stationed huge numbers of troops conveniently beside the border, waiting for the opportunity to invade. As it turned out, the Boers handed the British an engraved invitation. In 1899, Transvaal demanded the British pull their troops back from the border or else. When the deadline lapsed, the Boer Republics declared war. It took a few years for all the fighting to play out, but in 1902 the republics ended up as British colonies.

-Matthew White