Brief History of Tripartite Alliance Earth
"Progress is the life-style of man."
La Belle Époque (1871-1913)
The hallmark of this era was the diffusion of power worldwide, away from France and Britain and towards other Western states (Germany, Russia, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Argentina) and even to non-Western Japan and Egypt. Although nationalists in France and Britain aroused hysteria by claiming that this power shift was evidence of national decadence, in actual fact this was merely the product of these countries catching up to France and Britain. In central Europe, the Americas, and points elsewhere, industrialization finally took hold. This increase in economic strength was accompanied by rapid population growth in each of these industrializing countries even as French and British population growth decelerated. To be sure, this shift away from France and Britain did not seriously challenge Franco-British prestige; indeed, the rising new powers generally emulated French or British models of law, literature, and philosophy. Still, the rise of these new powers forced tremendous change on the world, which quickly evolved into a decentralized complex of competing world powers. Eventually, the strains became too much and the system collapsed in bloody war; in the interim, these strains fostered an unparalleled fluorescence of culture and wealth known to posterity as la belle époque.
The worldwide spread of a common popular culture based on western European -- in particular, French -- models had begun long before the 1870’s. It was only in this period, though, that advanced communications and transportation technologies, the growth of mass literacy, and the emergence of a large middle class with substantial purchasing power allowed for a truly rapid spread of a common culture. Influenced equally by the Romantics’ idealization of emotion and by the Enlightenment’s identification of humans as beings possessing innate capacities and rights, many of the leading artists of the period pushed realism to its extreme limits. In literature, for instance, naturalist writers such as the French Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola and the English Thomas Hardy adopted a quasi-scientific attitude in their writing about formerly taboo subjects such as sex, crime, extreme poverty, and corruption in officialdom, while the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the Brazilian Paulo Carnheiro, and the Anglo-American Henry James explored the repressed psychological motivations of human beings. Some authors -- like the French symbolist poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen, and the Anglo-Irish satirist Oscar Wilde -- even went out of their way to demonstrate their contempt for bourgeois life or to shock complacent audiences in the hopes of awakening people to their everyday realities. Similar breaks with tradition were present in music, whether in the form of Debussy’s atonal orchestral music, Stravinsky’s innovative classical music, or the new popular musics emerging in the major cities of the Americas and France, inspired by non-European musical styles and including once-taboo lyrics. In the graphic arts, impressionist and postimpressionist art -- the latter genre exemplified by Cézanne -- defied long-cherished conventions of representation and showed a willingness to learn from primitive and non-European art: Indeed, the French Gauguin was inspired by Tahitian life, while the Flemish Van Gogh was inspired by the hyperrealism of japonaiserie, or Japanese prints. Other major styles included fauvism, in which artists such as Matisse exploited bold color areas; cubism, as painted by the Spanish Picasso, which combined several views of an object on a single flat surface; and futurism, pioneered by Italians, who tried to depict the energy of speed and motion. Architecture was marked by the exploration of the uses of steel structures, using either neoclassical, curvilinear Art Nouveau, or functionally streamlined façades. It is safe to say that throughout the West and in the most modern non-Western countries, this radical new popular culture achieved near-universal penetration of urban populations and substantial influence elsewhere.
This rapid spread of a common global popular culture was remarkable in itself, but this period’s mass migrations -- mainly from Europe, but also including some Asian emigrants -- was even more spectacular, the 45 million international migrants over this period easily ranking as the single largest wave of migrants in world history. The vast majority of these migrants emigrated to the rich republics of non-Andean South America and to the self-governing British colonies in Australia and South Africa, but France (and France’s Algerian and South Pacific provinces) also absorbed millions of immigrants over this period. Even North America absorbed tens of thousands of people annually. Prohibited from entering these destinations by racist laws, most of the Asian emigrants -- overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese -- settled in Southeast Asia and some of the islands of the Caribbean Sea and Indian Ocean under the auspices of colonial powers, taking advantage of their relative wealth and education to create prosperous diasporas. These ceaseless migrations helped bind together many different countries by creating new hybrid identities (like Italo-French, Germano-Australian, and Judeo-Brazilian) and by introducing elements of one culture to another (for instance, the popularity of the Spanish Catalan sardana dance in southern France, brought by Catalan immigrants), though in places it gave rise to violence.
The creation of a unified global culture was parallelled by the creation of a unified global economy, which was itself driven by this period’s rapid technological and organizational advances of this period, and the rapid dispersion of these advances worldwide. In communications, a transatlantic telegraph network -- based on an 1844 invention by the American Morse -- linking the Americas with Europe and selected points in the Southern Hemisphere had evolved by the end of the 1870’s, while British and American inventors independently happened upon the principles behind the telephone in the late 1870’s. These startling advances were replicated in the realm of transportation as railroads were rapidly expanded -- in the 1880’s, more than 150 thousand kilometres of railway were built in addition to the 300 thousand kilometres already built, much of this length being built in the vastness of America, eastern Europe, and Asia. Other advances came in the area of manufacturing, with the construction of more efficient machines and more efficient processes. The human element was not neglected, as the perfection of the principles of mass production through the budding science of sociology caused rapid increases in the per capita output of workers in industrializing countries. The economic cooperative movement pioneered in the United Kingdom also enjoyed great popularity in the industrial world among urbanites and peasants alike, as each group seized upon cooperatives as organizations that could allow them to enjoy some economic autonomy from impersonal government and corporate bureaucracies.
These immense technological and organizational changes, along with material innovations like sewer systems, electric subways, parks, and bargain department stores, helped improve living standards for many in the industrial world. They also made it essential for the world’s countries to modernize their economies using these techniques else risk falling catastrophically behind. In fact, many of the events of this period were driven by technological advances and the accompanying intense economic competition. The rapid spread of colonialism worldwide, for instance, was driven by the demand for raw materials and new markets.
The United Kingdom, as the first industrial country of the world, remained at the centre of the global economy. Britain remained a prosperous country, despite slow economic growth compared to France or Germany; indeed, its slow population growth helped the rate of GNP per capita growth remain high even by European standards. Furthermore, Britain enjoyed a cultural golden age, as evidenced by its acclaimed playwrights, prose writers, and musical composers. The fact remained, though, that since the United Kingdom as a whole grew only slowly relative to its various competitors, it came to increasingly depend upon the resources provided by its wider empire to remain abreast. The most visible example of this was the large-scale recruitment of Indians as labourers and bureaucrats in the non-white areas of the Imperial; in areas as diverse as Fiji, Guyana, Malaya, and Natal, the British crown sponsored the formation of Indian colonies of settlement. At the same time, though, the British Empire began to show signs of falling apart. These included trends as various as the overwhelmingly non-British flood of European immigrants into the British colonies of Australia and South Africa, the growing independence of Britain's colonies of settlement, the growth of Indian nationalism, and the failure of Imperial trade protectionism in the last quarter of the 19th century and its replacement with limited free trade with British allies. Perhaps the most significant proof of this to Europeans, though, was Britain's dependence upon the entente cordiale signed in 1894 with France.
France, though humbled by the Franco-Prussian War, remained a dominant European state throughout this period. The quick replacement of the unstable Third Republic by the much stabler Second Orleanist Kingdom gave France the political stability that it so desperately needed. After a brief period of post-war economic recovery in the 1870's, France made a successful transition to stable liberal democracy and enjoyed a period of considerable prosperity and cultural innovations. The city of Paris became the largest city in Europe in this period, the cultural capital of Europe -- and indeed, the entire world -- and the centre of one of the largest industrial districts in Europe.
To be sure, among the Great Powers of western Europe it was the German Empire that enjoyed the most spectacular growth. To be sure, from its wartime foundation the Empire was troubled. Germany's minorities, based outside the German-speaking Protestant north German core of the empire, remained discontented; an ill-judged campaign against the Roman Catholic Church alienated German Catholics, while the Francophile Alsatians, the Danes of Schleswig, and the Poles of eastern Prussia remained latently separatist. Even more worrisomely, the German system of government -- a combination of militarism with autocratic rule worryingly reminiscent of the French Second Empire -- created periodic international crises. Nonetheless, Germany enjoyed a uniquely rapid industrialization and urbanization. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, despite a GNP per capita only two-thirds of its western neighbours, Germany's population of 65 million allowed it to rank as productive an industrial power as France and behind only the United States. Moreover, Germany's central position in Europe let it evolve into Europe’s supreme land military power.
A cluster of smaller countries made similarly rapid progress. These countries -- like the Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway with the Russian but autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in northern Europe, and the three Low Countries with Switzerland in western Europe -- had numerous advantages. The Low Countries, in particular, possessed a long history of domestic wealth and international trade, while various religious and nationalist movements ensured that the populations of these eight countries were literate. Too, various factors ensured the decentralization of power, to the hands of specific segments of society and the emerging bourgeoisies. This relative social equality and political pluralism ensured the extremely rapid progress of these countries over the 19th century, in particular, over the last quarter of the 19th century. Already, Belgium and Luxembourg had emerged as some of the most prosperous industrial countries in the world by the middle of the 19th century. In the following generations, Sweden would also rapidly evolve into a modern industrial power, as did Denmark and Switzerland to lesser degrees. Agriculture also expanded, as colonization plans led to the settlement of northern Sweden and Finland, and the agriculture of Denmark and southern Sweden was modernized to become some of the most productive in the world. Politically, these countries developed into liberal democratic states; indeed, these were the first countries in the world to give women the vote. All but Finland remained outside of the great alliance systems, and even Finland was recalcitrant in the face of Russian efforts to assimilate Finns to Russian foreign policy. These societies were pluriethnic -- Finland possessed a Swedish minority amounting to almost one-fifth of its total, while Belgium’s population was divided between Francophone Walloons, Netherlandophone Flemish, and Limburgers, and Denmark's demand for labour was so great that Denmark absorbed hundreds of thousands of Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faorese immigrants -- but interethnic relations were quite friendly. With their basically egalitarian societies, these nations all took quickly to Owenite cooperatives and to social-democratic ideology; by 1910, the Scandinavian countries had developed some of the most extensive networks of cooperatives in the world, and their counterparts in western Europe were not far behind.
Elsewhere in Europe, though, countries lagged. The Austrian Hapsburg empire and Italy did the best -- indeed, industrialized Vienna and Bohemia-Moravia in the Hapsburg empire, and the Kingdom of Piedmont in the Italian empire, ranked as world-class empires. In these countries, though, development was uneven and often coincided along politically uncomfortable lines: in Italy, for instance, the Neapolitan and Sicilian kingdoms lagged behind their northern neighbours, while Austrian Galicia and Transylvania were impoverished. In the Austrian empire, these problems would compounded by the matter of ethnicity, by the latent separatism of the Hungarians in their self-governing kingdom and by the emerging nationalisms of Czechs, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, and even Slovaks and Romanians. The richer and stabler areas of this Great Power were almost as stable as Germany or France; the poorer regions seemed hopeless. Spain -- not a Great Power but still moderately important -- was worse off than Italy. Though its empire was relatively small, Spanish resources were drained by the unending nationalist insurrections of Cuba and the Philippines. (In 1895, Spain sold its Micronesian colonies to Japan.) Despite Spain's numerous ideological and ethnic cleavages, though, towards the end of the period the Spanish political system did seem to stabilize, as the Catalan provinces in the east and the Basque provinces in the north began to industrialize and a working constitutional monarchy with many democratic features was being hammered out.
Elsewhere -- in Portugal, in the Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek kingdoms in the Balkans, in the European and Anatolian territories of the Ottoman Empire, and in the vast Russian empire -- backwardness was rife. Certain regions had advanced sectors -- for instance, the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire were almost as well-developed and educated, if less politically liberal, as Scandinavia or Finland, while Poland was also reasonably industrialized and the Greek merchant marine was the strongest of any country in southern Europe -- but the general picture was one of appalling poverty, retrograde politics marked by extensive violence, and mass emigration, to France and to the Southern Hemisphere. Liberal revolutions were periodically followed by conservative counterrevolutions, and there were numerous officially-sanctioned pogroms against vulnerable ethnic minorities like Russia’s Jews and Turkey’s Armenians.
Outside of Europe, the single most prosperous area was the Americas. Broadly speaking, there were two loci of economic development in the American continents. The first of these loci was found in North America, centred upon the United States and including parts of southeastern Canada, the latter united as an autonomous federation within the Empire since 1873. Though this region depended substantially upon foreign technologies and investment, it was detached from global trade and migration flows and concerned with the solitary development of its vast western hinterland. Both the United States and Canada were modern democratic polities with British-inspired popular cultures, though only the United States had world-class cities and industries. The United States had the potential to be a Great Power, but its self-imposed isolation gave it a low profile internationally.
The second locus was in South America, in the continent’s southern (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay) and eastern (Brazil, Guyana) regions, along with parts of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Unlike North America, this region depended very heavily upon the flow of Europe's emigrants -- Germans, Italians, Iberians, Central Europeans, and Jews flooded in by the millions, while Guyana attracted hundreds of thousands of black immigrants from the French Antilles and West Africa. After the deposition of the Brazilian monarchy in 1881, these regions were composed entirely of radical and liberal democratic republics, home to boisterous popular cultures inspired by French models and based in such thriving cities as Santiago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janerio, and Bogotá. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were the most modern of these countries, depending heavily upon the export of primary products like foodstuffs and ores with Franco-British investment and increasingly upon rapidly growing and highly competitive manufacturing industries protected by protective tariffs. Brazil emerged as a Great Power by the end of the 19th century, with its purchase of Angola in 1888 and its rapid industrialization. (Argentina and Chile were more concerned with their economic development and assimilation of immigrants to countenance anything but strictly regional roles.)
Other prosperous countries of immigration were to be found in the Southern Hemisphere, in the autonomous British federations of South Africa and Australia, and in the French colonies of Nouveau-Dauphiné and Nouvelle-Calédonie. The French colonies were sparsely populated by only a quarter-million French settlers in the two colonies combined, living in societies based mainly on agriculture with some nickel mining in Nouvelle-Calédonie, and with large indigenous populations. The Australian continent, to the west of the French colonies across the Tasman Sea, was much the larger, united in a quasi-independent state since 1881 and home to almost 11 million people descended from various British, German, and Scandinavian immigrants, as a prosperous and socially egalitarian urban-industrial society with few surviving natives. In South Africa, the native Africans remained comfortably in the majority, but just as in contemporary Algeria were relegated to subordinate positions as unskilled and oppressed labourers in agricultural plantations and mines to make way for a cosmopolitan English-using bourgeoisie that included numerous British, Dutch, German, Polish, and Italian immigrants.
Outside Europe and the major receiving areas of European immigration, the world remained comparatively backward. Africa, for instance, was fragmented into a patchwork of local empires, states, and chiefdoms, while Asia and the middle Americas were easily subjected to various forms of imperial economic and military control. This era saw the apogee of colonialism, as a wide variety of countries -- Russia in central Asia, Brazil in Angola, Germany in east Africa, Italy in Tunis and Libya, even Japan in Taiwan, Shandong, and Micronesia -- acquired limited colonial holdings for reasons of prestige. This Western expansion into the wider world was relentless, driven by the West's overwhelming superiority. Spain gracelessly tried to hold on to its remaining territories -- in the Caribbean, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia -- while the Netherlands was left with the anomalous holdings of the Dutch East Indies, including the major islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo along with hundreds of smaller islands. By far the largest empires were those of Britain and France, whose possessions included both temperate-climate colonies of settlement (Algeria, Australia, Canada, Nouveau-Dauphiné, Nouvelle-Calédonie, South Africa) and vast stretches of densely populated territories still home to intact native civilizations, in French Yucatán and Indochina, in British India, and in the possessions of both countries in Africa. (Indeed, for Britain and France, in a world where the populations and economies of their competitors consistently grew more rapidly than their own, their colonial holdings gave credence to their claims to be world leaders.)
The initial effects of colonialism were negative, as the cultures of the colonized were systematically undermined by Christian missionaries and colonial dictates, their economies were transformed to provide raw materials and markets for the industries of colonial powers, and indigenous elites destroyed. In Africa, for instance, only Yorubaland, under a British protectorate, and Ethiopia, under an Italian protectorate, retained any of their former autonomy. In the Middle East, fitful attempts at general modernization by dirigiste elites -- for instance, in Iran -- did nothing to alter the fundamental backwardness of most of the region, while even in the large and historically powerful Ottoman Empire Balkan nationalisms and European imperial incursions left the country unable to modernize. British India and the Dutch East Indies were important markets for industrialized nations by virtue of their large populations and abundant resources, and enclaves of industrialism took hold in each colony, but periodic devastating famines were worsened -- or in some cases, created -- by insensitive colonial administrations. The vast Chinese empire likewise had pockets of modern industry and a growing Western-educated elite. In the 1860’s and 1870’s, China’s "self-strengthening" movement presided over the improvement of railroads, ports, and arsenals and the foundation of metal and textile mills. Despite these achievements, even China was unable to effectively respond to Western imperialisms.
Japan and Egypt were the only non-Western independent states that successfully industrialized. Under the Tokugawa, Japan had many of the same traits -- large urban populations, high literacy, growing merchant classes -- that appeared in industrializing Europe. Following the Meiji restoration, Japan was able to use its inherent advantages to begin a grand campaign of general modernization through the adoption of modern technologies in industry and warfare and the hiring of foreign technical and military experts. Egypt was physically much closer to Europe than was Japan, but the country’s early adoption of a program of modernization and adroit exploitation of Europe's balance of power let Egypt evolve into an independent state even as it followed Japan. Other backward countries that managed to achieve lesser degrees of modernization and prosperity included (in the Americas) Mexico, Yucatán, and Paraguay, and Europe’s Caribbean islands, and independent Thailand, British Malaya, and French Indochina in Southeast Asia. In all these cases save Japan, this prosperity was based mostly on exports of natural resources to industrial economies, and marred by high rates of income inequality and poverty. Further, all these states remained politically authoritarian to varying degrees, and all were forced to give preferential treatment to Western citizens and imported manufactures at the expense of their own citizens and manufactured goods.
All of these countries -- like all of the countries of the industrialized world -- were firmly and irreversibly integrated into the Western-dominated world economic system, regardless of popular and elite opinion. As the 19th century came to a close, it became clear that those countries that were industrially proficient, technologically advanced, and possessing abundant resources thrived given stable participatory governments, most often based on the active participation of the middle and upper classes. These countries responded to the West’s economic, military, and religious incursions by adopting Western ideas of progress and freedom, but inefficient states and detached elites were rarely able to adapt quickly enough to new political dictates. Among the colonized, resentments were building up. In India, the British alliance with the remaining princely states masked reform sentiment among the Westernized urban elite, which founded the Indian National Congress in 1885 in order to acquire a larger role in government for Indians, while in Russian Turkestan brutal Tsarist oppression encouraged Turkestan’s Muslims to turn inward and retreat from public life.
This anti-imperialist reaction in the non-industrial world corresponded with the growth of nationalism in the industrial world. The new wave of nationalism drew from the Romantic notion of a national spiritual and cultural essence and the rapid spread of democratic and radical ideologies, as stateless ethnic populations -- including Celts in the United Kingdom, Slavs and Magyars in.Austria, Poles in their triply-divided homeland, the Finns, Balts, Ukrainians, and other peoples of Russia, and the Catalans and Basques of Spain -- demanded full civil and political equality with the ethnic majority population of their titular state. To this end, ethnic leaders demanded that their ethnic homelands be accorded considerable self-government, in order to ensure the survival of traditional cultures. Only in the United Kingdom and Spain, however, were these demands met to any considerable degree; where these demands were not met, as they were not in Russia, nationalism blossomed into full-fledged separatism.
Another important political trend in the industrial world was the broadly-defined movement for the inclusion of the working classes and women in the nation. Uprooted from their rural homes, lacking job security, and suffering from dangerous overcrowded conditions at work and at home, workers and their families responded by organizing trade unions and economic cooperatives in order to try to acquire some measure of bargaining power. Women lacked this conspicuous organization, but some women from prosperous backgrounds had enough education and autonomy to organize the feminist movement. For both campaigns, the most important symbol of social inclusion was the ability to vote, and accordingly these campaigns centred upon the acquisition of the franchise. By the end of the 19th century, in most industrial countries and some non-industrial countries all adult males did gain the vote, providing an electoral base for new Socialist and Communalist political parties that sought to enforce a more equal distribution of national income. In order to limit the appeal of these parties, even conservatives came to support legislation that limited child labor while regulating conditions for workers and providing government funding for social services.
As the 20th century began, the rate of technological change accelerated noticeably. In 1901, the Franco-Argentine Auguste Lemoyne became the first man to fly a powered heavier-than-air vehicle. Within a year of Lemoyne’s pioneering flight over the Argentine pampas, a dozen different national governments and innumerable businesses set to work exploiting this miraculous new technology. The automobile, too, came into its own as the introduction of assembly-line mass production techniques in the United States and France made the invention financially profitable; by 1910, nearly 600 thousand cars were registered in those two countries alone. Sea travel was not neglected either, as new technological and material developments allowed ships to travel at significantly greater speeds, even as newly-dredged canals -- most spectacularly the Nicaragua Canal -- allowed for further time savings. Communications were revolutionized following the Italian Marconi’s 1900 discovery of the techniques involved in the radio transmission of human speech, and by the telegraphic transmission of photos that was achieved in 1903, lending immediacy to news reports. The mass media gained new strength as it became technically possible and financially profitable to produce sound recordings (phonographs) and video recordings on film (motion pictures), allowing new musical styles to spread rapidly even as motion pictures allowed some actors and comedians to become international stars. In turn, these new technologies accelerated economic growth in those industrial countries which possessed the trained workforce and the capital required to make use of these technologies.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was accurate to conclude that these new communication and transportation technologies were helping knit the world into a single more-or-less cohesive unit. Indeed, observers such as the English H.G. Wells who observed the continuing international mass migrations and the popularity of global popular culture in the industrial world predicted that within a single human lifetime, the world would become a united and peaceful realm.
Observers who made such utopian predictions, however, failed to consider the fact that the same technologies that helped integrate the world also made it easy for major world powers to wage war on a global scale, never mind the continued existence of national rivalries. In Europe alone, Franco-German relations remained poisoned by the legacy of the Franco-Prussian War, while Germans and Russians feared the strength of the other empire, and Britons were fearful of the expansion of a threatening German navy just as Germans were enraged by Britain’s exclusion of German influences from the British colonial empire. Outside Europe, the different colonial powers frequently found themselves at odds with each other, as disputes over colonial boundaries and tariff agreements -- to be sure, often needlessly provoked by the unstable nationalist government of Germany -- periodically threatened war. To a certain extent, one could even talk of protracted conflict between the Western and non-Western worlds, as non-colonized non-Westerners tried to remain independent and colonized non-Westerners tried to regain their independence. Japan, exceptionally, emerged in this period as a successful imperial non-Western imperial power, in Korea and north China, after its victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.
These competing imperialisms and nationalisms, in turn, contributed to the formation of the international alliance systems and the polarization of Europe between two rival military blocs. This shift from post-Napoleonic practices -- precipitated by the formation, in German unification, of a German state of potentially destabilizing power in the heart of Europe -- began when France sought Russia as an ally against Germany. Despite their widely variant political systems, the Kingdom of France and the Russian Empire were united by their fear of Germany’s tremendous power; in 1891 the Franco-Russian entente was formed. In turn, the German government felt so threatened by the Franco-Russian combination that in 1892 the German and Austrian empires formed an alliance of their own. Britain, alarmed by the rapid growth of the German navy and by Germany’s illiberal and militarized politics, broke from its traditional isolationist foreign policy and signed an alliance with France in 1894.
The alliance network failed to expand much beyond Europe, although Japan entered into alliances with France and Britain early in the 20th century and the extra-European empires of the member-states of these alliances were necessarily involved. Even inside Europe, some strategic middle powers like the Scandinavian kingdoms and Spain -- even a Great Power like the Italian Empire -- remained outside this framework. Nonetheless, these two alliance systems affected the entire world through their polarization of Europe into two competing and hostile military blocs, constructed so as to risk the worldwide spread of even minor local conflicts.
In the shadow of the threat of global world, cultural changes continued. The wit Oscar Wilde observed in 1910 that "nothing has changed […] save that all of the changes proceed with vulgar rapidity." In politics; the worldwide trend was towards greater participation on the part of all social elements; in popular culture, continuing migration and the emergence of mass media promoted a new naturalistic sensationalism; in the economic realm, economic growth accelerated in advanced countries and declined in backwards countries. Specific problems -- for instance, the growth of nationalism among the different peoples of central and eastern Europe, the development of a sophisticated German military that threatened the Franco-British alliance’s positions worldwide, and the growth of political radicalism in discontented populations -- became steadily more serious, while the feminist and anti-colonialist movements active in the industrial world began to gain strength.
An alarming new trend was the destabilization of the Russian and Chinese empires, as foreign imperialism and domestic political and social problems became steadily more threatening. In both empires, revolutionaries began to form secret terrorist groups devoted to the overthrown of the existing governments, while the reactionary governments were unable to countenance any change. In 1905, following Japan’s decisive military victory over Russia in northeast China and the Russian Far East in the Russo-Japanese War, the Tsarist government was suddenly faced with empire-wide revolution by oppressed non-Russian nations, urban workers, and even Russian peasants. Though this revolution was ultimately suppressed, it demonstrated the vulnerability of the Russian state to military defeat, and the profound alienation of the Russian Empire’s population.
The drift of Europe towards general war between the German-Austrian alliance and the Triple Alliance (Britain, France, Russia) might not have been inevitable, despite the very real nationalist and military rivalries that existed between the two blocs. Each bloc was bound to the other, and to the rest of the world, through ties of trade and popular culture, while adherents of this era’s rising political ideologies -- the Socialists and Communalists in particular -- rejected war altogether. With luck, these trends towards peace could have supplanted the trends leading towards war. Events in the Ottoman Empire intervened.
The Ottoman Empire’s frontiers had been in retreat since the mid-18th century, and the development of Egypt and Greece as independent states in the first part of the 19th century signalled an acceleration of this retreat. In the belle époque, this disintegration turned into full-fledged collapse as the Empire’s Christian populations -- Lebanese, Armenians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs -- fought for their political independence, often with the military assistance of Greece and Turkey. In 1912, a grand coalition of states that included Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and even Italy waged war against the Ottoman Empire and stripped it of almost all of its European provinces.
The regional instability produced by the Ottoman Empire’s European collapse and conflicts over the liberated provinces drew in both European blocs. Austria was concerned by the emergence of a powerful Serb nation-state that could claim Serb-populated lands in Austria, in particular Austria’s ex-Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the Triple Alliance, Orthodox Christian Russia was concerned about the fate of its coreligionists in the Ottoman successor states, and was particularly concerned about Serbia, Russia’s regional proxy and a self-styled Empire. Although Austrian and Russian geopolitical aims conflicted sharply, neither empire could back down since each feared (respectively) disintegration on ethnic lines and the collapse of the Tsarist regime if they withdrew their positions. As the world entered the year 1914, it seemed clear to an increasing number of observers that Europe was a powderkeg.
On to: First World War, Interregnum, and Second World War (1914-1944)