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Transcript of The crisis of imperial societies
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The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies’ 1
Christophe Charle
Foreword
In order to explain the link between the theme of my paper and the work of Pierre Bourdieu
which in the focus of this book, I would like to recall some aspects of his own intellectual
project which present some convergences with mine, both as regards themes and concepts, and
also method of analysis.
When Bourdieu decided to turn his intellectual activity from philosophy to sociology it was
due to his Algerian fieldwork experience. In his books Algérie 60 (1977) and Sociologie de
l’Algérie (1958), he described the transformations of the colonial system in a revolutionary era
and the effects of the war (1954-1962) on the traditional Algerian way of life. That is exactly
what I call here an imperial society founded on a twin domination: political (and economic) but
symbolic and cultural too.
Later in his academic life, Pierre Bourdieu came back to these themes when he tried to found an
European intellectual network to create a critical counterpoint to neoliberal symbolic and
economic domination. He defined this new domination as an ‘impérialisme de l’universel’, i.e.,
the international domination by the USA which is presented as a rational and universal one and
which therefore cannot be contested without risk of being charged with being ‘irrational’ or
‘backward’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999: 41-58). This position was similar to what French
1 I have limited my references to the minimum since the complete bibliography may be found in Charle (2001). Printed version in R. Lardinois & M. Thapan (eds), Reading Bourdieu in a Dual Context Essays from India and France, London, Delhi: Routledge, 2006:56-76.
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governments had claimed at the turn of the nineteenth century when they justified their conquests
as bringing ‘liberty’ and ‘enlightenment’ to other peoples, which some liberal élites in Italy,
Spain or Germany had accepted as the truth. During the whole of the nineteenth century, the
United Kingdom too had tried to develop its imperial domination thanks to the spread of free
trade. Imperial domination had been presented as the only rational way of entering into and
maintaining relations between countries. However, in fact it was the best manner for a country
with imperial designs to develop its own national interests.
A final, more personal, point. I finished the book which is summed up in my contribution in
the Fall of 2000. Pierre Bourdieu, very kindly, found the time to read the manuscript. Perhaps he
found it interesting since not only the theme but also the method present strong links with his
own approach. In a way, ‘imperial societies’, as I conceived them, mobilize the relational way of
thinking about social links. This is central to Bourdieu’s work, as is the notion of ‘habitus’,
transposed at a national level, and also the concept of symbolic violence. These concepts make it
possible to understand why so many people accepted with relative passivity and sometimes even
with enthusiasm the terrible wars of the twentieth century.
Introduction
My aim in this essay is to explain my project, including part of the hypothesis and the
concepts that underlie my book which bears the same title as this paper (Charle 2001: 11).
What I want to understand is a classic historiographical question, one that has already been
addressed by a huge bibliography that includes such important and diverse works as Lenin's
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Eric J. Hobsbawm's The Age of Empire (1987)
and The Age of Extremes (1994), Arno Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981) and
the like. This question concerns not only the ‘origins of the First World War’ or the ‘Age of
Catastrophes’, nor simply ‘The Thirty Years War’ of the twentieth century’ (to use an
expression coined by Général de Gaulle and quoted by Arno Mayer), or even the ‘Age of
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Totalitarianism’. It is by far a more naive and simple question, not blurred by retrospective
problematics linked to ideological preferences. My question was originally raised by Romain
Rolland, the first intellectual who refused to accept the collective hysteria at the beginning of
the crisis that beset ‘imperial’ societies. Rolland says:
Ainsi, les trois plus grands peuples d’Occident, les gardiens de la civilisation, s’acharnent
à leur ruine et appellent à la rescousse, les Cosaques, les Turcs, les Japonais, les
Cinghalais, les Soudanais, les Sénégalais, les Marocains, les Egyptiens, les Sikhs et les
Cipayes, les barbares du pôle et ceux de l’équateur, les âmes et les peaux de toutes les
couleurs (Rolland 1915: 12).
In spite of his obsolete rhetoric, the cosmopolitan intellectual who refused to be mobilized
in what he considered to be a European civil war reminds us of the heart of the enigma of the
crisis that was initiated in August 1914 and that lasted till 1945, perhaps even later, if we look at
the difficulties in dealing with their recent past evinced by of France, the UK and Germany in the
1950s and 1960s. This enigma is not the war, or the apparent futility of its origin, or even the
classic question of who bears primary responsibility for it. The enigma is this: Why did these
‘three keepers of civilization’, as Romain Rolland calls them, rush into total war and return to the
barbarian practices that the nineteenth century, in its secular effort, wanted to banish? Why could
this first confrontation not be ended properly, and why did it lead to a second and more total one?
And why was this second round linked to regressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and of
Vichy? Why did it lead to a decline of the first industrial power – the UK? It is all of these
questions that I sum up in the expression ‘ the crisis of imperial societies’.
I shall address here four major points. The first is to explain what I mean by ‘imperial
societies’. The second is to determine the origins of imperial societies. In the third section, I ask:
Why are these societies what we might call ‘enemy-sisters’? And finally, I specify: which
crisis?
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Imperial Societies
All of the authors I mentioned at the beginning while introducing my problem also employ
concepts like ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’. They affirm, in spite of their divergences (be they
Marxists, Leninists or Liberals), that all European countries implied in the conflict and more
generally in the crisis of the Age of Extremes shared the same will for power and domination that
pushed the international crisis of the summer of 1914 to those very extremes. My first
hypothesis, which is expressed by the new meaning I give to the expression ‘imperial society’, is
that the usual point of view is too global and misses the specificity of some of the participants in
the confrontation. Terms as equivocal as ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, for example, hide the deep
differences between the types of societies and types of imperialisms involved in the struggle in
1914. More importantly, these common words simplify the social and cultural basis of a war
without precedent. Other confrontations of empires did not lead to these extremes. The new
specificity of three of these empires – France, the UK and Germany – is that they happened to be,
concurrently – and for the first time in their history – mature and full established nations. It is
because these three nation-empires chose to enter into a conflict, which, at the beginning,
concerned only two old, classic empires, Russia and Austria, that the conflict led to extremes.
Only these imperial societies, these nation-empires, could really impose a total and long-lasting
mobilization of all of their inner material, social and cultural forces on their own populations.
And because they could succeed in this huge effort (a surprise to even their own governments),
the war became a total war, and their allies, the old empires, collapsed in this new type of war.
I call these three central nations ‘imperial societies’. Only France, the UK and Germany
really suit this concept, and I will explain why shortly. With somewhat equivalent demographic,
economic and financial capacities, they were among the four or five most powerful nations in the
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first half of the century. (This was not true previous to that period and was not true henceforth,
either.) Furthermore, they also dominated the diplomatic and cultural scenes.
More important than this more or less equivalent potential (a key factor in the balance and
competition between them, but also an element contributing to the impossibility of a true,
decisive and quick victory), these societies were imperial because they exercised a twin
domination: first, a territorial one, like classic empires, over colonies and/or over portions of
their national territory occupied by minorities of another national origin. But they also exercised
a cultural domination, because their national culture had universalist ambitions and their idiom
was used widely beyond their national limits – and this is not true of other empires. During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain occupied a somewhat similar position in the world, but
lost it definitively when it was defeated by the United States in 1898 and lost its last colonies. At
the same time, Latin America was pulled into France’s cultural orbit from the second half of the
nineteenth century, right up until the Second World War (Rolland 2000). Recently unified, Italy
also aspired to recover the cultural hegemony it had enjoyed during the Renaissance and
cultivated the myth of a new imperial domination along the lines of the Roman Empire.
(Fulfilling these two ambitions would be fascism’s program.) Yet, at the turn of the century, this
unfinished nation was unable to really imitate the three imperial societies, as we can see by
Italy’s failure to colonize East Africa, and by the difficulties it experienced in choosing a camp in
1914 and mobilizing its population thereafter.
The third characteristic unique to imperial societies (compared to other empires or weaker
and divided nations, such as Spain or Italy), is that the large majority of the metropolitan
population shared a national ideal based on a common culture and language transmitted, for the
first time, by a universal school system. This is not true of the three other European empires:
Austria, Turkey and Russia. They were composed of various populations, speaking different
languages and with very low or uneven literacy levels and diverging national aspirations. This
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explains, in part, why these empires could not resist being pulled into the centrifugal force
inherent in the shock of the world wars. With a low level of literacy (and cultural consciousness)
in the south, Italy was also strongly destabilized by this traumatic experience. Even if acute
internal schisms appeared after 1916, owing to the sacrifices asked of their populations (and
particularly their working classes or their younger generations subjected to overwork or heavy
casualties), the three imperial societies resisted and were able to use the war and its memory as a
new weapon in the ‘nationalization of the masses’, to invoke George Mosse’s famous phrase
(1975).
The origins of the strong rivalry among the imperial societies points to their fourth
specificity. They justified their colonial enterprises or their will for international domination by
an obligation to civilize ‘primitive’ peoples or to export their values, represented as superior, to
other cultures. This cultural imperialism (masked in early modern times by religious conversion)
is a new phenomenon. Previous imperialisms were primarily political and/or economic regimes
of domination but preserved the primary cultural features of their dominated or exploited peoples.
The cultural and economic influence of these three imperial societies also appears in their
informal empire, which includes their language, their way of life, and the artistic, scientific, and
technical inventions that influenced large parts of Europe and of the civilized world. Examples
of this influence include British sports, French fashion, luxury products and literature, or German
music, science and technology. In each case, this multiple domination resulted in a national
superiority complex, more acute than the more general European superiority complex apparent at
the beginning of the twentieth century. This feeling of superiority was not limited to the
governments, the ruling classes or the privileged strata who were the principal beneficiaries of
this multidimensional domination. It also influenced – more generally – the whole society, since
the complex appeared in common representations (racism, xenophobia, and stereotypes of
neighboring or rival countries). Moreover, the complex provided social opportunities for middle
classes that their peers in non-imperial societies lacked. For example, there was the possibility of
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emigration to colonies or countries influenced by their culture, which gave them a chance for
social mobility or facilitated adaptation to a foreign environment, providing them with the
distinctive resource of having mastered a dominant language spoken by world and European
élites, as well as with the cultural and political prestige of being a member of a chosen nation.
(As we learn from contemporary school texts or popular literature, England, France and Germany
shared this belief in several ways.)
Obviously, there are also significant historical differences between these three imperial
societies. The United Kingdom and France had built their empires before 1900. After this date,
they were challenged by competition from recently formed nations like Germany and Italy, as
well as from non-European countries like the United States and Japan. Germany, the ‘delayed
nation’, occupies an intermediate position between the older imperial societies and eastern
empires. Over a period of thirty years, imperial Germany had succeeded in accumulating the
economic, cultural and political resources necessary to the constitution of a similar empire, one
more or less equivalent to those of older nations. Furthermore, Germany laid the foundations for
social institutions that aimed to integrate the popular classes into dominant bourgeois society, and
in so doing, became a model for other industrial nations. In spite of its failures (such as the lack
of political reforms and a real parliament) and mistakes (like the arrogance of its martial caste),
the German governing class followed this route to supremacy stubbornly before and after World
War I. The ruling class, though, oscillated between two imperial options: an overseas empire
before 1914, created by colonial conquests in Africa and in the Pacific, penetration into the
Ottoman Empire and the protection of German-speaking emigrants in the USA and Brazil ; or a
European one, made possible by the extension of the German zone of influence in central and
eastern Europe and based on German language, the cultural and scientific prestige of German
universities, the political domination of western Poland and industrial exports in backward
countries.
Let us now turn to the origins and historical dynamics of imperial societies.
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Origins of Imperial Societies
History explains the specific dynamics inherent in the three imperial societies that led to their
confrontation. The three old empires that collapsed during the Era of Catastrophe were the
products of territorial accumulation by a dynasty over a long period: the Ottoman Empire, the
Russian empire and the Habsburg empire had emerged gradually from their origins in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The three imperial societies resulted from different constitutive
processes. The common matrix (with variations) of the United Kingdom and France was that of a
small nation-state becoming a greater nation by absorbing peripheral regions, claiming its place
in the sun with the traditional empires of the early modern period. They forged their mutual
identity in their bilateral conflict for European and worldwide hegemony during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries (Brewer 1989; Colley 1992). German imperial society, on the contrary,
originated in the shrinking and collapse of a former empire (the Holy German Empire destroyed
by French national imperialism under Napoleon), then progressively mutated into a new national
monarchy. This new monarchy was influenced – positively or negatively – by both the French
monarchy (unification through wars and annexations, revolutionary attempts) and by the British
one, preserving some polycentrism and regional autonomies for recently unified territories as
well as some traditional institutions. But it continued to aspire to imperial grandeur (that of its
past and that of its western challengers), as the pan-German movement or the desire to maintain
an ethnic link with German expatriates demonstrates.
These converging processes of emergence explain both why the three states and their
national communities were articulated in a similar way, and why this similarity led to
competition and antagonism. Unlike in traditional empires, where identity stemmed from feudal
links with the monarch or dominant power or religion and thus allowed for the preservation of
some heterogeneity or inner diversity among the composing elements, national identity in each of
these three nations was shaped through conflicts with the neighbor nation. Struggles between
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these nations lasted from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Fashoda in
1898 – tension over the control of Central Africa) between France and England, and from the end
of the eighteenth through the twentieth century between France and Germany. The epic length of
these conflicts forced these nations to foster greater internal unification in order to accomplish
three objectives: to balance political forces competing for state power; to extract the growing
financial resources necessary for warfare; and to diminish any potential centrifugal forces aligned
with enemies or advocating civil war. Unlike empires that exploited larger and larger territories
and various colonized peoples, the two older nations were obliged to ask their own native
populations for relatively greater sacrifices (human or financial), resulting in, for example, the
mutual exhaustion of France and England after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
This recurrent pattern of war obliged the different regimes to permanently mobilize resources and
populations to this end. Defense was designated a vital priority. It was no longer the specific
province of specialized minorities, but everybody’s business, and armies became a reduced image
of the whole society. These paroxysmal phases of conflict left sites of memory and
commemoration (such as heroes, national memorials, generations marked by a conflict, and
transmitting the memory of war). They also resulted in reflexes of national union around an
event, models of collective mobilization, stereotypes of the enemy (which helped to foster
internal unification), as well as institutional and cultural inventions that developed the capacity
for national mobilization in similar circumstances, like drafts, paramilitary forces, a national
history disseminated by the school system, a national religion, and political reforms after national
crises (Nora 1984-92; Samuel 1989; François and Schulze 2001-2002). These national crises
often entailed mobilizing against internecine division by extending new rights in order to gain the
loyalties of peripheral regions (as in the case of Scotland) or of less privileged peoples. For
example, after 1870, France imitated Prussian schools and military politics, Germany inaugurated
both a new social policy and a moral and religious intervention of the state in schools, and
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England instituted the progressive extension of the franchise to working classes, social measures
after the relative failure of the Boer War, and the cult of empire and monarchy.
Enemy Sisters
In 1914, observers identified these three national and imperial societies with the other empires
because of the large territories they had conquered in Africa or Asia. But Lenin’s and Hobson’s
theses notwithstanding, this new imperialism had varying and often divergent origins that could
not be reduced to economic interests. First, these overseas conquests were the continuation of the
traditional mutual rivalries (France/UK in Egypt, France/Germany in Morocco, Germany/UK
with the fleet policy of William II) and not a new version of traditional empires. This point is
underscored by the debates held in each nation over the ends of colonialism. Polemicists hostile
to colonialism accused pro-imperialists of weakening the nation, wasting military resources that
could be more useful against its European rival, or overlooking internal problems for the sake of
foolish and costly adventures. Pro-imperialists had to respond on the same grounds; for them,
imperialism was a national enterprise, protecting markets (and thereby the national economy and
employment in national industries), offering opportunities for expatriation of ambitious
individuals, creating wealth profiting the whole community, and developing the influence of
national culture (called ‘civilization’) abroad. Discourses of national greatness were thus
transmuted into an imperial discourse. In France, colonies would supply the demographic pool
lacking in the metropolitan territory for a national conscription against a prolific Germany. In the
UK, national industry, at the end of nineteenth century, would obtain protected markets without
requiring a completely protectionist policy. In Germany, the construction of the fleet and the
colonial policy were new attempts to rejuvenate the national unity forged during the wars of
unification, since German workers, German peasants and German élites could, according to the
official propaganda, find benefits in this Weltpolitik: jobs, economic prosperity, new careers
(Korinman 1999; Girault 1988: 111-27, especially 120-21).
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In addition to these debates over imperialism, there was a more discreet one about
international preeminence on cultural grounds, a dispute that did not exist in classic empires. At
the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural conflict appeared in the scientific arena. Struggles
included the battle to obtain archeological sites in Greece and the Near East, the linguistic war at
scientific conferences over the issue which of the three dominant languages would be the most
used by ‘small’ nations? (Gran-Aymerich 1988: chapter 6), and the race for scientific legitimacy
that transformed the first Nobel prizes into chauvinistic contests. Art was also enlisted in this
cultural war, evident in the campaigns to protect national artistic masterpieces and in the capital
cities’ museum policies (Rasmussen 1996; Crawford 1988). In literature, both classic and
contemporary writers were engaged in the national competition for international preeminence
(Charle 1998: 177-199; Casanova 1999). It was also a period when universities in each country
strove to attract foreign students; they wished to advertise their international reputations and their
ability to disseminate their national culture in other countries. France was the first to have a
systematic policy with the Ecole française d’Athènes' foundation in 1846, a weapon against
British and German influence in the new kingdom of Greece. Britain and Germany followed its
example after 1870 (Monnier 1996; Gaehtgens 1992; Valenti 1999; Singaravélou 1999; Réunion
des Musées Nationaux 1993).
These examples show that the notion of imperial society is a tool that allows us to explain
the global problem at stake in the crisis that begins in 1914. It gives a specific worldview to the
separate groups composing each nation, distinct from both non-imperial societies and classical
empires, and differing from each other in each of the three national situations. It may be
comparable to an invisible frontier in the American meaning of the term: a possible solution to
internal contradictions or problems, problems that were unsolvable in other nations because they
lacked this twin imperial domination. For France, imperial society offered the hope of
compensating demographic decline and the relative weakness of industrial growth, and thus of
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continuing to be a great power taken into consideration by larger or stronger countries. For Great
Britain, imperial society maintained the illusion of relative independence from Europe and the
possibility for social mobility outside the motherland without changing social rules or the class
structures. Obviously, this benefited the dominant classes more, but the middle classes, workers,
and peasants did derive some indirect gains.
Imperial Germany, on the other hand, was an incomplete imperial society, and the historical
gap explains why Germany played a central role at the beginning of the 1914 crisis. It also
explains why the Weimar Republic, frustrated by its unequal status, ended in a new regime whose
program was clearly to succeed in what the Kaiser’s regime had failed to achieve in the first
place. Instead of accepting the status of an ordinary nation, a large fraction of Germans,
destabilized by the economic crisis, preferred to believe those who promised to build again a new
empire, even if it meant eliminating all the elements accused of bearing responsibility for the
previous disaster (Jews, Marxists and so on).
At this point, it is necessary to dispel a possible misunderstanding concerning the use of
this concept. One common fault of macro-historical comparisons is to create large classifications
that overlook specificities that need to be explained. Thus, in this case, French or even foreign
historians of France might be surprised that I include France in this group of societies. After all,
France was marked by the political struggles of the nineteenth century and by a triple aspiration
to secularization, democracy and even the elimination of aristocracy, while Britain and Germany
remained, on the eve of World War I, stratified, aristocratic societies with strong links between
Church and State. Is this specificity not more important to an understanding of the social
dynamics of France than the common features I mentioned earlier? I am certainly aware of this
difference, having written elsewhere (Charle 1994) about some of the specificities of French
society (élites, intellectuals, the university, and so on). Nevertheless, this comparative endeavor
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has the great virtue of forcing us to displace our usual gallocentric viewpoint and of highlighting
what the historical vulgate neglects or understates. For example:
The French Republic, where political rights for women were concerned, was conservative
when compared to the British monarchy where certain categories of women had achieved some
type of franchise;
French democracy was corrupted by lobbies as influential as some of the minorities that
dominated the German empire;
Secularization did not prevent the erection of strong social, regional and sexist barriers,
incompatible in principle with this notion; and
Human rights were completely overlooked in the colonies and very restricted for immigrants,
who suffered owing to a backward social policy.
Another response to the specificities of French society and political situation is to note that
in a European context dominated by monarchies and empires, where France’s principal rivals
were globally more powerful, the Third Republic élites were forced to imitate some of the
policies and strategies of their aristocratic neighbors.
Among imperial societies, France was the product of a defeat that dissolved the universalist
pride inherited from the French Revolution (a pride briefly restored by the imperial and national
diplomacy of Napoleon III) and that brought deep disillusion as new nations emerged. Obsessed
by this defeat, republican governments employed a double strategy inspired by the rival powers:
they attempted to integrate heterogeneous populations using the school system and conscription
(similar to efforts in Prussia and imperial Germany), and they founded a financial and overseas
empire competitive with the UK’s. This strategy was combined with the traditional monarchic
international policy of the Ancien Regime, based on a new alliance aimed at isolating the
dominant European power, Germany. Even the anticlerical politics leading to the separation of
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church and state was a paradoxical contribution to national unity since it weakened the sway of
the French Catholic Church, linked to the Papacy's influences.
This analysis shows that the notion of imperial society must not be taken as an ‘essence’ or
a stable framework. It is instead a complex of different and moving forces, changing in each
context, but always in interaction with the forces present in other imperial societies. It may be
compared to a field in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. This double dimension (internal and
external, material and cultural) is specific and gives it a greater analytical interest than the more
one-dimensional (and restrictive) concepts like aristocratic society, industrial society, imperialist
society, balance of power, and so on, concepts often used to analyze the European context of
1914. These terms reduce reality to a particular group’s viewpoint (diplomats, businessmen,
politicians) – making it unrepresentative -- or to that of a tiny minority of decision-makers. For
example, two of these societies, France and Germany, were also agrarian societies, and their rural
forces played an important role in social conflicts. Britain, unquestionably industrial, was perhaps
also just as much a service society, and British historians have recently insisted on the weight of
the City and related forces to explain some of Britain’s strategic economic choices (Cain and
Hopkins 1993a; 1993b; Cassis 1994; Schneer 1999). All of these groups were influenced by the
imperial dimension in combination with national achievement.
Which Crisis?
I must now return to the term ‘crisis’. It does not simply refer to an historical fact already
analyzed by a huge bibliography. What we have here is the fact that these three countries
declined and came under the influence of two new superpowers, losing not only their colonial but
also their cultural empires that were the foundations of their specific national pride. What is
unique to the crisis of imperial societies is that, unlike other nations shaken by war and social
upheavals, in this case either élites or large segments of each society refused to accept the
diagnosis of definitive decline. In fact, they tried to preserve or restore the former situation. In
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their refusal to adapt, groups not only invoked general causes (such as mistakes by or short-
sightedness of the élites, economic difficulties, struggles with social and radical movements, or
panic in the middle class) but also middle-range or short-range changes, initiated by four years of
total war. These changes were numerous and included a crisis in urban structures, tensions
between city and country, changes in familial structures induced by mobilization and
exceptionally high mortality rates for young men, changing relations between the sexes due to
war losses and mobilization of women for wartime jobs, new tensions between generations (those
touched and those untouched by war), necessary reforms in education after a new life experience
incompatible with traditions, the decline of economic power and of the state’s legitimacy and
authority due to obvious policy or management errors during the military crisis, or deep anxiety
about the future after such a traumatic experience. All of these mutations contributed to a
pessimistic mood among ruling élites (enhanced by the victory of communism in Russia, which
represented a possible future for other countries if they failed to restore the old order) and to the
extension of a new radical sentiment among middle and popular classes, urban or rural. This
pessimistic stance explains why minorities who sought a reformist solution to all of the problems
found themselves in a difficult situation, like the Labour party in Britain, enlightened élites
asking for reforms or reformist socialists in France, or the Social Democrats in Germany.
A simple revival or restoration was not possible because of the multiplicity of the social
and cultural changes that followed war. Moreover, these changes were not entirely compatible,
nor could they converge to build a coherent new order. On the contrary, in the two most shaken
societies, France and Germany, they contributed to the generation of a brutal, voluntary and
regressive reaction, relatively quickly in Germany with extreme right movements and Nazism, a
little later in France with rightist or fascist leagues followed by the Vichy new order. Though
specific and born in different contexts (social crisis on one side, military crisis on the other), both
regimes shared the desire to purge from their societies those novelties linked with the previous
national crisis: minorities, the extreme left, emancipated women, and so on (Burleigh and
Wippermann 1991).
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To understand the violence and multidimensional character of the crisis, it is necessary to
recall an historical fact, often forgotten because of the division of labor between historians of
domestic politics and foreign affairs and specialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the
process of building the three imperial societies took three quarters of a century in France and a
half-century in the UK and Germany, while the central crisis lasted only twenty years. This
temporal difference is one of the key reasons why the crisis could not be overcome smoothly. At
the height of the crisis, the three societies were being ruled by generations who were adults or
who had come of age during either the society’s highest point or its last phase of emergence. For
these leaders or central groups of imperial societies, it was quite impossible to accept the new,
inverted society born from war’s upheavals, a society where outsiders or dominated groups
obtained new rights or powers or even, as in the new Bolshevik society and its European
imitations, claimed to be the new rulers.
Among élites and intellectuals there were, truly, many Cassandras or think tanks proposing
decisive adaptations of imperial societies; they were partially inspired from an American model
that seemed to be the future of modern Europe. But these innovators and reformists, opposed to
mainstream opinion, remained an isolated and contested minority. Faced with the reactionary
attitude of older élites, encouraged by their objective decline, a larger part of the popular classes
adopted a new subversive attitude linked to the want, deprivation and suffering they experienced
during World War I. Many people were mobilized on the front or in civil activities linked to
national defense on the basis of ‘sacred union’. After this drama, a simple return to normalcy or
a program of limited change was unthinkable. Political and economic leaders of the three nations
were very conscious of and anxious about this new situation.
In this extremely tense situation, which led to a lack of agreement even about the rules of
the social game, the crisis of imperial societies became a multidimensional phenomenon. In each
case, the crisis was resolved in different ways, depending upon the élites’ capacity to adapt, and
17
upon the degree of opposition. In the UK a provisional compromise was forged, but only at the
cost of a reluctance to battle authoritarian regimes and a relative failure to prevent a new total
war. Moreover, this solution did not keep dominated groups from being the primary victims of
an aging economy’s hardships. In the other two societies, we see a double failure, internal and
external, both intimately related. This does not mean, even in the German case (where the
situation was the most desperate because of the defeat and the loss of an imperial society’s main
attributes) that nothing other than the Nazi seizure of power could have succeeded. At the same
time, my interpretation, even if it seeks social bases for other changes, does not exclude the
specific effects of other factors, such as political choices, cultural and educative national features,
the influence of external models and so on.
To be more concrete, it would be necessary at this point to discuss one of the historical
situations in more depth, to demonstrate how I try to mobilize these different terms. It would also
be necessary to develop another concept, what I call national habitus, an identity principle
specific to each imperial society, constructed by the societies through an interactive and mutual
process of rivalry parallel to the history of their relations. This national habitus means that each
population in general believed not only in defending itself against foreign aggression but at the
same time associated this patriotic defense with a specific social ideal judged superior to that of
its enemy. In France, it was equality against aristocratic nations. In the UK, liberty against
militarist and protectionist powers’ will of domination; in Germany, it was Kultur and social
protection of the state against Russian barbarism, or against the anarchic individualism of France
or England. Even if these stereotypes were products of propaganda, the success of the
mobilization efforts in August 1914 (a success that was not certain even for the élites of each
country) indicates that the national habitus that had been gradually disseminated at the end of
nineteenth century was now an efficient guideline in a crisis situation. It was one of the
mediations that explains why the mass majority of the populations in 1914 supported
mobilizations for an accessory cause (the ‘Great Illusion’ of Jean Renoir's film), sincerely
18
believing – and this without strong short-term preparations – that their country was right, and that
the ‘enemy’ was a true menace to their identity and way of life.
The true paradox at the beginning of the crisis is that each nation, even countries who were
eventually in an aggressive position, in its large majority had the impression to act in legitimate
defense and to struggle for its survival and identity. It would be necessary to analyze how this
representation was produced, diffused and accepted in depth in each imperial society, largely
before the opening of the dramatic sequence of July 1914. It is too simple to identify this
phenomenon with ‘the spread of nationalism’, social darwinism, or militarism (or ‘war culture’),
neither is it possible to equate it to a ‘natural’ reflex. It was both a social, a political and a cultural
construct but one which succeeded thanks to social and cultural transformations independent of
the will of élites or organized groups. I define this through the notion of national habitus. Since
the historiography of each nation has been influenced for a long time by this self-representation
(be it in a positive or negative stance), the true difficulty of my enterprise is to change our own
national viewpoint which remains influenced, willy-nilly, by the historiography which formed us
in each national context. So the general methodological conclusion, I would suggest, at the end of
this provisory sketch, is to form groups of historians of different national origins to study these
phenomena and to try and put into question this inherited national bias by a collective self
analysis. Hopefully this would lead to an European historical viewpoint – a perspective that
eludes us till today.2
2Even an unorthodox attempt like Niall Ferguson’s book, The Pity of War (1999), remains deeply embedded in the confrontation of national viewpoints. Criticizing the responsibilities of his own country, UK, the author is led to adopt arguments borrowed from the other national historiographies which already used these critical arguments after 1918 (cf. this rather optimistic sentence: “if a war had been fought, but without Britain and America, the victorious Germans might have created a version of the European Union, eight decades ahead of schedule”, p. 458!). It is only through an analysis in terms of “field” in Bourdieu’s definition of the word that it is possible to escape these pitfalls and adopt a “transnational” prospect both freed from nationalist or marxist limitations.
19
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