1900: The Dilemma of Empire

By 1900, all rulers of empire faced a common dilemma. In the age of High Imperialism, empire appeared to be the wave of the future. Possessing an empire was seen as a guarantee of a country's virility and its long-term status and significance in world affairs.

It was widely accepted that only countries of continental scale would be true great powers in the twentieth century. In part this reflected economic developments. Technology—above all but not exclusively the railway—now allowed the penetration and full exploitation of continental heartlands. The trend toward protectionism and neo-mercantilist thinking increased the arguments for exercising political control over raw materials and export markets. With new great powers such as Germany, Japan, and the United States now entering the imperialist competition, there seemed good reasons to grab whatever “free” territory was still available before it disappeared down the throat of a rival empire. One never knew what lay beneath even the most barren soil and might be accessible to today or tomorrow's technology. Geopolitics was also crucial to imperialist thinking in this era. The United States had survived the challenge of the Civil War, which had been followed by decades of rapid economic growth. This behemoth was certain to acquire a might that would relegate all the merely European countries to second- class status. Only those with empires had any chance of staying in the competition.

But the nineteenth century had also witnessed the enormous strength and attraction of ethnic nationalism. German and Italian unification had captured the European imagination. By 1900 nationalism in the Balkans and central Europe was growing apace. Nationalism was a very mixed blessing for the rulers of empire. Metropolitan nationalism took pride in its people's imperial power and status. Conservative leaders could exploit this to strengthen their position against socialist and liberal challenges.

Where the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli led, others followed. Generals often saw nationalism as the surest way to motivate civilian conscripts faced with the potentially devastating challenges of the modern battlefield. But the nationalism of an empire's core people could easily excite a powerful response from ethnic minorities. By 1900 no observer of the Habsburg or Ottoman empires could doubt that minority nationalism was a growing threat and that it was far from merely confined to “historic nations” such as the Hungarians or Poles with indigenous aristocracies and long traditions of independent statehood. A new nationalism was spreading among previously subject peoples, rooted in ethnicity, language, folklore, and historical myths. The bearers of this nationalism were above all intellectuals, but also the broader indigenous middle classes created by economic development and the spread of mass education.^[2280]

All this applied too to the Russian Empire. The state, to an increasing extent, tried to mobilize Russian nationalism to buttress its declining legitimacy. Faced with the Polish rebellion of 1863, Russian public opinion had rallied around the dynasty and this lesson was not forgotten. After the humiliations of defeat and revolution in 1905, Petr Stolypin attempted to re-legitimize the regime and mobilize Russian support by nationalist rhetoric and policy, but with limited success. The Russian peasantry still mostly lived in rural isolation and were almost immune to Stolypin's appeal. Some elements of upper- and middle-class Russia were attracted, in particular members of the Russian minority in the western borderlands. But not merely were most Russian liberals appalled by Stolypin's strategy, many intelligent conservatives also believed that alienating the empire's minorities in this manner was counterproductive. In 1914, though of all the non-Russians the Poles and Jews remained the most hostile to the regime, other minorities were catching up.

But although Poles, Jews, Finns, and Georgians might grab the headlines, intelligent Russian observers saw the still relatively weak Ukrainian nationalist movement as potentially the greatest threat.^[2281]

According to the 1897 census, Ukrainians were the second-most numerous people in the empire, making up 17.8 percent of the population. Ukrainian grain fed the food-deficit central Russian region. It also provided the exports on which Russia's balance of trade and its ability to repay foreign loans depended. The huge expansion of the Ukrainian coal and metallurgical industries in the decades before 1914 put it in the center of the empire's economic development. Not until the 1930s would the Urals begin to regain its former preeminence. Ukraine was also the gateway from the west to the booming economy of Russia's southeastern region and the growing oil industry of the Caucasus. The term “gateway” had special significance at a time of increasing tension with Austria and Germany. Though 80 percent

of the world's Ukrainians lived in the Russian Empire, most of the remaining fifth dwelled in Austrian Galicia. Here for decades they had enjoyed much greater civil and political freedoms than in Russia. A strong Ukrainian sense of identity had developed, along with a distinct literary language and the usual array of nationalist historical myths. It was no secret that nationalists in Galicia dreamed of unifying all Ukrainians in a separate polity or that they enjoyed the discrete patronage of powerful elements in Vienna.³⁸

Not merely was the emergence of a separate Ukrainian identity a major potential threat to Russia, it also undermined their traditional perception of their empire. The overwhelming majority of educated Russians compared their empire to the leading imperial polities of their day. Russian self-esteem always required that comparisons be made with the leading great powers in this and other respects. To compare their vast empire with its enormous future potential to the polyglot and seemingly failing Austrian and Ottoman empires would have been seen as demeaning.

Russian diplomats viewed Austria's descent into semi-federalism as a major cause of its weakness. By contrast, a vibrant Russian core identity was the key to their empire's strength.

Of course intelligent statesmen and observers knew that their empire contained many non-Russians, some of whom were discontented. But in a manner familiar to most European elites, they largely discounted many of the non-Russians in their political calculations. Many Muslims, and in particular the inhabitants of central Asia, were seen as too primitive to be interested in any version of modern nationalism. It was believed too that the empire's smaller peoples could not defend themselves or sustain an independent high culture on their own. In any case, and correctly, it was reckoned that Latvians or Armenians, to take but two examples, far preferred Russia to the alternative in an imperialist age, in other words, German or Turkish rule. The basic assumption on which all these calculations rested was that the 22.5 percent of the empire's population who were Ukrainian and Belorussian were in political terms Russian. Most upper- and middle-class Russians eyed Ukraine in 1900 rather as their English equivalents viewed Yorkshire or (if the Russian was broad-minded) possibly Wales: in other words, as a region whose plebeian elements had some charming customs and spoke a strange dialect but whose elites had long since identified with the dominant culture and for whom independent statehood was unthinkable. If so, the tsar's subjects were two-thirds Russian and a strategy based on the idea of consolidating a Russian national empire might be viable. But if separate Ukrainian and Belorussian nations emerged, then the Russian Empire would begin to look like despised Austria.

Even in 1914, St. Petersburg knew that Ukrainian nationalism as a political movement still lacked a mass base. The peasantry was still mostly beyond its reach, and Ukrainian cities were dominated by Russian, Polish, and Jewish culture.

But the Russians had watched carefully the development of ethnic nationalism in central Europe. They understood the process whereby what began as movements for the collection of folklore and the molding of literary languages could easily lead in time to mass political nationalism. For that reason they had attempted to constrain the development of a separate Ukrainian language, high culture, or political identity. The circular of Minister of the Interior Valuev in 1863 and the so-called Ems decree of 1875 were key stages in this strategy of repression. Publications in Ukrainian and the use of the Ukrainian language in schools, to take two key issues, were strictly forbidden. Government policy inhibited but could not stop the development of nationalist feeling among educated Ukrainians, especially after 1905, when the new semi-constitutional political system allowed society more room to breathe and to organize itself.³⁹

Growing alarm on the political right and center about the threat of Ukrainian nationalism fed into the general sense of crisis that possessed Russian society in 1914. The future of both the social order and the empire seemed very uncertain. The traditional principles and strategies on which a great empire had been constructed and had flourished for generations no longer appeared viable. Alternative strategies were much contested, uncertain of success, and often beyond the means or the imagination of tsarist's Russia's rulers.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

1900: The Dilemma of Empire

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