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Battle Lines

Course video 44 of 46

This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.

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Ministrado por

Philip Zelikow
White Burkett Miller Professor of History

Transcrição

Hi, welcome back.

So as we're trying to understand these struggles over how

to organize modern industrial society, let's trace the battle lines.

Well, to do that we need kind of, a map.

But instead of a map showing this division here or that division

there, we need kind of a map of the different political contenders.

I'm going to zero in on about five basic political movements.

I'm generalizing, these are ideal types, but this is a pretty good depiction

of the five main sets of ideas between, oh, 1890 and 1910.

Which is really a formative period for a lot of modern politics.

Let me emphasize that word again, SETS of ideas.

Kind of clusters of ideas.

If I'm a member of one of these movements, I hold

four or five kind of associated positions that tend to run together.

These sets of positions become ideologies. Ideologies in

a way are scripts for followers.

And in a previous presentation, I pointed out

that one of the functions of these ideologies

and the rise of a mass press and so on is to give people common narratives

to help them understand here's what's happening, here's

what I care about, here's what I think,

what I and the 10,000 people who agree with me, think should be done about this.

So think about it as if I'm introducing

you to five characters in a story. Five sort of families of beliefs.

Number one are people who believe in upholding National Tradition.

They're under a variety of different names, but you

can identify them by a distinctive family of ideas.

They tend to celebrate national values.

Or they might celebrate the values of a racial or

ethnic identity.

So, for instance, you might see a party that celebrates pan-Slav values.

These are parties that support the established religion, whether

it's the Catholic Church or the Greek Orthodox Church.

These are parties that, therefore, emphasize important of national purity

or the purity of the group whose ideals they represent.

They're pretty suspicious about immigrants and certainly are uneasy

about giving these immigrants full citizenship that will dilute

the character of the nation.

Theyï¿½re very oriented around the personification of

order, a symbol of authority like the monarch.

All these parties in European countries support the monarchy.

They're also in favor of institutional sources of order that can maintain the

hierarchy of things, above all the army. They believe, naturally, in empire,

empire that shows the power of the nation, empire that brings profit and glory.

These parties are also fearful of social

revolutionaries that will overthrow the established order.

Who are their supporters?

Look for their supporters especially in

rural society, among farmers who are suspicious of

bankers, businessmen, the life of the city, and all these newfangled ideas.

And also

among large landowners who derive their property and income from large estates.

Let's introduce family number two: National Conservatives.

If you were following American politics in this era, the National Conservatives

look a little bit like the American Republican party of the 1890s.

The term conservative here really needs to be put in quotation marks because these

people are not just about conserving what is.

This party is very much about modernizing the country.

You can think of them as modernizers from the top down.

They believe in a strong national government.

A good example of a national conservative leader

would be the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

These modernizers tend to be secular, either wanting to control

the church or at least keep it out of politics.

They definitely believe in having a modern military.

They want to retain an empire for power or profit.

But, they're also interested in spiritual uplift and a civilizing mission.

These are modernizers; they believe in progress.

They also are likely to believe in protectionism:

government has a strong role to protect industry and from

tariffs you earn the money that helps keep the national government

strong, that pays for the army and building up a navy.

Government in this view would have a close

relationship with corporations, protecting them from foreign competition.

Sometimes partner, maybe occasionally acting as an umpire among them.

The government might take a lead, as Bismarck did in Germany, in social reform,

to try to ease the pressures for social revolution.

This is a very much party that has a base

of support in the new professional classes and among modern businessmen.

The capitalist elite.

A third family will be a little familiar to us.

These are the hold overs from the mid-19th century liberal ascendancy.

Liberals.

Again, this is Liberals in the 19th century sense

of the term, not the way Americans use it nowadays.

Liberals in American politics in the 1890s might describe the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party in the 1890s wanted a limited central government,

a weak national government,

especially true of Democrats in the South who

were anxious to get the national government

out of their way so they could govern race relations the way they preferred.

These Liberals believed in individual liberty,

with some exceptions, as in the case of

those American Southern states that I just mentioned.

Liberals emphasized religious tolerance.

They were either secular, or they might be fervent

zealous Christians, as William Gladstone was, who believe in reform.

The Liberals tend to be wary of large armies, and they tend to be

wary of international ventures because that'll increase

the strong national state and is likely

to threaten liberty, including economic liberty.

They tend be more anti-militarist, more in favor of ideas for world peace.

The Liberals are instinctively distrustful of ideas about expanding empire, or if

they support the empire, they support it because of its civilizing mission:

the goal of bringing reform, progress, and enlightenment

to other parts of the world.

The Liberals want a light hand of government in the economy.

They tend to believe in free trade, free markets, less government interference.

Therefore, they oppose bigness.

They oppose bigness of all kinds: they oppose big government;

they oppose big business; and they oppose the power of big workers' unions.

Instead, the Liberals tend

to see their base of support among small

farmers, small businessmen, and the smaller unions of craftspeople.

By the way, Liberals also are more likely to be interested in granting

women more civil and political rights, even in some countries the right to vote.

Now I turn to my fourth family.

This is a relatively modern ideology: Democratic Socialism.

The Socialists believe that you do need a strong central government,

but that's because they see the strong central

government as a counterweight to powerful big businesses.

Indeed, the strong central government needs to

be strong enough to eventually take control

of private property in order to convert

private property to public gain and public use.

Democratic Socialists are very strongly secular.

They oppose the intrusion of religious authority.

In a country like France and Spain, hatred of the established Catholic Church

is almost one of the defining ingredients

of the liberal, radical, or socialist parties.

Naturally, Democratic Socialists want to protect the right of workers to organize,

to organize not just by craft but also by

workplaces, by the kind of jobs they're in, or even just organize generally by the

fact that they all feel a sense of

solidarity as members of a common working class.

The Democratic Socialists tend to identify less with the nation as the key unit, more with

the solidarity of fellow members of the working classes across national lines.

Therefore, a Democratic Socialist is inclined

to be internationalist, pacifist (regarding wars between nations

as artifacts of the quarrels of big businessmen).

They're against the expansion of empire (more use of government

to serve the purposes of big business), and they tend to

be anti-military, especially since the military is so commonly

used by powerful national governments to crush the power of unions

and instead serve the interests of their corporate allies.

At least, that's the point of view of a Democratic Socialist.

The Democratic Socialists want to organize for self-help, in the sense of:

I'm going to organize a union in which the members of the union will

protect each other, will raise monies almost as a kind of cooperative, provide

insurance and other services for the union

members that society otherwise might not provide.

But, they'll also organize in order join together in democratic politics, in order

to form political parties and blocks

of representatives in parliaments and then to use

that, at least in the interim before the full takeover, to

get needed benefits from the state, like

social insurance and other kinds of protections.

Interestingly, Democratic Socialists are often supporters

of big business as well as big unions. Why would that be so?

Big businesses create the environment in which you can organize a large group of

workers; and also the Democratic Socialists see

the need for these very large organizations

because, ultimately, theyï¿½re going to need to take over those

large organizations in order to turn them to public use

in providing the services society will need.

But that kind of compromise, in the interim, with

business and with democratic institutions is what distinguishes them

from the fifth family of belief that has become

so important by the 1890s and into the early 1900s:

these are the Revolutionary Socialists.

The Revolutionary Socialists feel they are the true

believers in the ideas of Marx and Engels,

that the existing order is simply intolerable.

They cannot work either with or within the existing system.

Of course they're secular.

Of course they'll attack religious authority, and the army,

and the police that's used to buttress the status quo.

The Revolutionary Socialists know that they're a threat to the established order.

Yes, they'll need to organize.

But, they believe, they need to organize underground,

in highly discipline cells in order to prepare

themselves for direct action, violent action, if need be.

They may use general strikes, in which all the

workers will go out, or selected violent acts when the time is right.

The Revolutionary Socialists also see their agenda as internationalist.

Some Revolutionary Socialists are organizing for

mass action, like a general strike.

Other Revolutionary Socialists, like the young

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, are emphasizing the

development of rigorously disciplined, professional revolutionary cells,

an elite that will be needed as the vanguard to

provide the leadership, when the time for general revolution arrives.

So, it takes some time to introduce you to these five kinds contending ideologies.

But it's worth investing the time in just getting to know them,

getting a feel for the different principals at

work, who their supporters are, and the like,

because these five kinds of forces are really going to

define the struggles over how to reinvent the modern state.

In the next presentation, I'll give you some examples of how that struggle is

playing out, all over the world, in the first years of the 20th century.

See you then.

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