Introduction the world at the beginning

1.2 Political situation in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century

The generation that reached maturity by the beginning of the twentieth century had the opportunity to experience for themselves how life is changing for the better, becoming more comfortable and safe. Europeans were full of self-confidence and determination to improve the world according to their own will and understanding.

Industrial civilization made Europe much more unified — all states were connected by a network of railways; the volume of international trade increased dramatically, and with it the economic interdependence of previously untouched regions; thanks to the telegraph, any news instantly reached the most remote corners; uniform European fashions and standards of life emerged. The laws of different countries became closer; borders between states became transparent, and people, as a rule, freely traveled from one country to another.
But at the same time, a powerful force appeared that divided the European peoples — nationalism.
The concept of nation is relatively new. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, the borders of states on the map of Europe had little in common with the borders of the settlement of peoples, and no one saw anything abnormal in this. For many centuries, people have recognized themselves as subjects of their sovereign, as residents of their small homeland-Burgundy, Bavaria, Lombardy-but not as French, Germans, or Italians. When a particular monarch claimed certain lands, he proved them not by the fact that people who spoke the same language as him lived there, but by the fact that these lands once belonged to his ancestors.
In the 19th century, the situation changed: it was the belonging to the nation that now determined the identity of the European. At the same time, the nation began to be imagined as a kind of superpersonal, endowed with its own consciousness, reason, will, and just as capable of suffering from lack of freedom as an individual.
The idea суверенитетаof a nation's sovereignty, i.e. its right to determine its own destiny, has emerged. The lack of sovereignty and fragmentation began to feel like a bleeding wound that needed immediate treatment.
Philosophers from different countries reflected on the meaning and purpose of their nation, its uniqueness and place among other nations. School history textbooks began to tell not about the fate of royal dynasties, but about the birth of a nation and its path to prosperity.
The nineteenth century produced a huge amount of literature devoted to national ideas-German, French, Italian, and Spanish...
Nationalism became the main source of military conflicts in Europe — all the wars that were fought between 1815 and 1914 were somehow connected with the process of national disengagement. During these wars, Germany and Italy united, gained independence from the Ottoman Empire, and created their own states-the Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs, and Montenegrins. Gradually, the idea that each nation should have its own separate national state became stronger in the mass consciousness.
The old multiethnic empires — the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires-were increasingly challenged by the conflicting national ambitions of their constituent peoples.
In the first half of the 19th century, nationalism was romantically revolutionary: its edge was directed not against other peoples, but against "tyrants-oppressors". But after gaining national independence, nationalist feelings not only did not weaken, but also intensified. At the beginning of the twentieth century, national interests, national power (or vice versa, national humiliation) began to occupy a huge place in the minds of millions of Europeans.
Education of "national pride" has become a necessary element of mass education. Politicians of different parties and trends began to play on national feelings, seeing this as the surest way to reach the hearts of voters.
Nationalism everywhere degenerated into chauvinism — a belief in the superiority of one's own nation over all others. Relations between nations were presented by analogy with competition in the market (or with the Darwinian struggle for the existence of biological species). Each "healthy national organism" had to fight for the expansion of its territory, elbowing away its rivals. The whole world has become the scene of this interethnic rivalry.
One of the British prime ministers at the beginning of the twentieth century wrote: "Roughly speaking, all the world's nations can be divided into living and dying... Weak states are getting even weaker, and strong ones are getting stronger... The living nations will gradually encroach on the territories of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflicts between civilized nations will grow rapidly."
The heightened national consciousness of the peoples of Europe prevented the expansion of any country, even the most powerful, on the continent. But the rest of the world was still completely open to such expansion: there, the Europeans were confronted not by cohesive nations, but by weak, badly in need of money, often hostile to each other and often despising their own people. Subjugating them to his influence was usually not very difficult. The technological (primarily military) advantage of the Europeans made the once great civilizations of the East defenseless. Even small Western countries have managed to establish their control over vast territories.
Having one's own colonial empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was not always dictated by economic benefits, but it was considered a matter of national prestige, an indispensable sign of a great power.
Gone are the days when different cultures on the planet could exist completely independently of each other. Virtually all non-European countries were faced with a forced choice: either submit to foreign rule and lose their independence (as happened with India, Indochina, and the peoples of Africa), or independently begin to rebuild their economy, political organization, and culture in a European way.
One way or another, the distinctive existence of many traditional societies was interrupted. Since the industrial civilization of Europe has developed, the so-called dependentor catch-up development has become the fate of the rest of the world.
In the mid-19th century, the guns of American and European frigates forced the most" closed " country in the world, Japan, to open its ports to Western merchants and missionaries (Japan in the 17th century stopped contact with the outside world, fearing their corrupting influence on local traditions. Self-isolation was so severe that even shipwrecked Japanese fishermen who accidentally found themselves in foreign countries were forbidden to return to their homeland under pain of the death penalty).
The humiliating experience of powerlessness before foreigners mobilized and rallied Japan. The country has begun an era of decisive and consistent transformations, subordinated to one clear goal - to match the power of the great powers of the West.
Realizing that it was pointless to borrow only military equipment without changing the entire society, the Japanese began large-scale reforms according to European recipes. The land was transferred to the peasants as property, all previous restrictions on the movement of people were lifted. Foreign specialists supervised the construction of railways and industrial enterprises; the organization of universal school education was borrowed from the French, and the school curriculum — from the Americans; the land army was rebuilt on the German model, the navy — on the English one. For half a century, Japan has come a long way-the path of national self-denial for the sake of national self-affirmation - and was the first Asian country to become one of the great powers.
The oldest and most populous empire in the East, China considered it beneath its dignity to adopt anything other than firearms from the "white barbarians"-and paid a heavy price for it. The great country was powerless to contain the onslaught of Europeans and Japanese. After a series of humiliating military defeats, the empire collapsed, and for four decades China was plunged into a bloody civil war.
The policy of social reforms, which was increasingly implemented in the leading countries (England, Germany, the USA, etc.), helped to ease tensions in society. The state and society were increasingly linked by mutual interests, which ensured the evolutionary path of development of the leading industrial countries and minimized the risk of internal conflicts. The society gradually became civil, i.e. it created a system of organizations and mass movements independent of the state apparatus, defending the rights and interests of citizens.
But civil society was not an alternative to state institutions, but rather a complement to them, sometimes even predetermining their development. Thus, the struggle of trade unions for the expansion of workers ' rights often forced the authorities to make changes to the official labor legislation, and the movement for the emancipation of women (i.e., their equal rights in political and public life) - to take into account the requirements of this movement.
Having reached a high level of economic development, the states of the industrial "center" still sought to use all the latest achievements of science and technology to strengthen their economies. But the countries of the" semi-periphery", which were in a hurry to get into the" center", sometimes found themselves in a better position: after all, starting to develop new sectors of the economy, they immediately equipped them according to advanced technologies. And the old countries of the "center" had to rebuild a lot in the structures that had been formed for decades. Therefore, at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Japan, Russia, Austria-Hungary and other countries that tried to catch up with the "center" have made great strides in the development of industry. And Germany, which started this leap forward even earlier, managed to reach the second place in the world in terms of gross industrial output.
By the end of the 19th century, the first place was firmly established in the United States, whose development rate was constantly accelerating after the Civil War of 1861-1865. The British, whose championship was undisputed for a long time, fell back to third place. They clearly did not maintain such high rates, did not have time to introduce new technologies into production in a timely manner. If, for example, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the industry of the United States, Germany, and some other countries had largely switched to using electricity, steam still remained the main energy source of British industry.
Britain also lost out to Germany and the United States in the struggle for markets. The British traded in the old-fashioned way, while German and American merchants carefully studied local demand, market needs, and provided preferential and long-term loans to wholesale buyers. The goods of Germany and the United States all over the world crowded the English, including in England itself and its colonies.
The economic success of the United States was particularly striking. In terms of iron and steel smelting and coal mining, the United States by the beginning of the century left far behind the leading European powers and continued to increase the gap. The length of railroads grew rapidly in the country, and the United States became the birthplace of the mass automobile industry. The famous entrepreneur G. Ford, having improved the invention of German engineers G. Daimler and K. Benz, designed a car and at the beginning of the century established mass production. By 1915, up to 250,000 cars a year were being rolled off the assembly lines of Ford's factories. Their cost was constantly decreasing, and the purchase of a car became available to more and more segments of the population. The development of the highway network strengthened the United States ' single domestic market, which contributed to economic and social stability in the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average income of American workers was about $ 700 a year, with a living wage of $ 150. Since the early 1880s, the interests of American workers have been protected by strong trade unions led by the largest of them — By the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
In general, US foreign policy continued to be guided by the isolationist principles of the " doctrine. According to this doctrine, the United States limited its area of interest to the Western Hemisphere, voluntarily withdrawing from participation in European affairs. This suited the American commercial and industrial circles quite well: after all, the possibilities of the domestic market of the United States and the young Latin American states had not yet been exhausted. And foreign policy expansion, in contrast to a purely commercial one, threatened unpredictable complications.
Nevertheless, in the United States, as in other leading countries of the "center" (primarily in Germany, England, and France), the constant growth of industrial production dictated the need for economic expansion, which in the conditions of that time somehow went side by side with political expansion. And the process of expansion, in turn, led to a clash of interests of different powers: after all, it was physically impossible to divide new territories and sales markets "equally". Consequently, with any such division, there were, relatively speaking, satisfied and offended. The former sought to consolidate what they had achieved, while the latter craved revenge, a new redistribution. Some countries of the "semi-periphery" (Russia, Japan, etc.) were in a hurry to join this balancing dispute on the verge of conflict, realizing that the main prey was too much for them, but they did not want to miss the opportunity to get their "piece".

3.