The 1848 Analogy

Fouad Ajami, whose academic credentials are impressive, said in an op-ed in today's New York Times:

[Today's Arab demonstrators for political freedoms] will make their own world and commit their own errors. The closest historical analogy is the revolutions of 1848, the Springtime of the People in Europe. That revolution erupted in France, then hit the Italian states and German principalities, and eventually reached the remote outposts of the Austrian empire. Some 50 local and national uprisings, all in the name of liberty.

(The last phrase is a sentence fragment, but it is the exact wording of the original.) There's a lot that's valid in that comparison, but a great deal that is not.

The part that is valid is, Professor Ajami did not compare the wave of political revolutions to 1989 in Eastern Europe, the way this journalist and that one did.  At this point I want to warn you, dear reader, that the enormous upheaval in the Arab world is of historic significance, and we are looking to make sense of it by means of historical knowledge: so the comment today (to be honest it is going to take some days to complete; but the comment is in the month of March, 2011) will be considerably more wide-ranging than my usual entry in this blog.  You have been warned.

Let us begin with the explanation for why the journo-babble comparing the events of the last few weeks to 1989 makes no sense whatsoever.  It is true that, over-all, we are looking at dictators being overthrown by popular revolt.  The dictators who fell in the 1989 wave of revolution, however, were put in place and maintained by a world power, the Soviet Union, which had hitherto crushed previous efforts at autonomy in 1953, 1956, and 1968.

It is the United States that has invaded the Arab world in the last few decades, and has crushed regimes it has found intolerably opposed to its authority.  

The leader of the Soviet Union in 1989 had already gone to the capitals of Eastern Europe and invited the governments there to end their slavish imitation of the Soviet order: in Prague, in the very city where the writ of the Soviet Union had been re-established 19 years previously at the point of the bayonets of the Red Army, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Michael Gorbachev stated on 10 April 1987:

The achievements of the Soviet Union in various spheres of societal activity are well known.  However, against the backdrop of these achievements, the serious problems and phenomena of stagnation that made their presence felt in the [19]70s [ -- a decade before Gorbachev was speaking -- MM] were particularly intolerable.  I'll say it frankly, sharp contrasts arose in our country.  

On the one hand we have the enormous production of steel, raw materials, and fuel resources, an area in which we have long known no equal, while on the other we experience shortages of these items as a result of using them wastefully and inefficiently.  We hold one of the top spots on the grain production list, but each year we have to purchase millions of tons of grain for fodder purposes.  The achievements of Soviet science are generally acknowledged, particularly in the field of fundamental research.  We have the greatest number of doctors and hospital beds per thousand members of the population, yet substantial shortcomings exist in the quality of medical care.  Our rockets find Halley's Comet with surprising accuracy and fly out to meet Venus, but right next to this triumph of scientific and engineering thinking we see a clear lag in the practical application of scientific achievements for the needs of the economy, along with annoying defects in simple household devices.

. . . .  

We know not only from books but also from our own enormous experience that success in developing socialism and forward progress is impossible without criticism and self-criticism.  Unfortunately, this wise rule has not always been observed in practice.  The "problem-free" depiction of reality did a bad service.  A gap developed between word and deed, which gave rise to public passivity [emphasis added -- MM.  Imagine the impact of condemnation of 'public passivity' in Prague, in 1987! ] and lack of faith in slogans that were proclaimed.

As for the attractive power of socialism, in the end it is created not by words but by real actions.  Honestly acknowledging our own omissions and failures and having the determination to eliminate them only increases the prestige of socialism.

Our efforts are now aimed at reorganizing the entire societal mechanism.  In the economy this means a shift from extensive methods to intensive ones and accelerated socioeconomic progress on the most advanced scientific-technical foundation.

In the political sphere it means developing broad democracy and popular self-government, eliminating bureaucratism and abuses of power, and strengthening socialist legality.

In ideology and the intellectual and cultural sphere, it means creatively developing Marxist-Leninist theory to counter peremptory attitudes and dogmatism and affirming principles of lofty morality and socialist values.

In short, a fundamental turnaround is needed both in the organization of all our activities and in public consciousness, in people's thinking and their attitude toward matters at hand.  And this turnaround must be revolutionary in nature.

                                                                                Pravda, No. 101 (25088), Wednesday, April 11, 1987, p. 1.

For the analogy of the 1989 revolts in Eastern Europe to hold, the Cairo speech which Obama made a couple of years ago would have had, not to promise an opening to the Arab world, but to have denounced the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as leading to "passivity" and to promise a "revolutionary" restructuring, not only of the relations between the United States and the nations of the Arab Middle East, but of the United States itself, on the basis of its many failures to its own people.

That is very far from the case.  Indeed, the exact opposite is happening: the White House and the State Department presume to lecture the leaders and the peoples of the Arab world what they are to do from day to day.  We from our superior moral position debate whether and to what extent we ought militarily to intervene on the side we favor.  1989 it is not.

To that extent, then, Professor Ajami has the right idea. "They will make their own world and commit their own errors."  D'accord.

The Continent-wide outbursts of 1848, he then says, is "the closest historical analogy."

That's where the lack of validity comes into play.  Our author, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, turns out not to know very much about the 1848 revolutions.

It's not the "Springtime of the People," first of all.  He's got the name wrong.

The period preceding the revolutions of 1848 is often spoken of as the "springtime of nations" (from the German Völkerfrühling), referring specifically to the growing sense of national consciousness, especially among many peoples of central and eastern Europe that had long been submerged under Hapsburg or Ottoman rule.  

                                    William L. Langer, Political and Social Upheaval 1832-1852 (Harper & Row, 1969) p. 238.

Anyone could overlook -- even if it is painful -- the use of the singular rather than the plural; and the use of Peoples as the translation for the word "Völker" is possible (the French say printemps des peuples); but the Springtime is the lead-up to the revolutions, not the revolutions themselves.  No one uses the term in any other way.

Then, our learned author says

That revolution erupted in France, then hit the Italian states and the German principalities, and eventually reached the remote outposts of the Austrian Empire.

where in actual fact, the first revolutionary outbreak was in Galicia, a formerly Polish province annexed by Austria in 1795: one of those "remote outposts" beneath the dignity of being given a name by Professor Ajami.  

Absurdly optimistic reports reached Paris [and the Polish émigré groups plotting an uprising against the Austrian authorities] that the peasants [a historically Ukrainian population -- MM] had been won over to the national cause.

writes C. A. Macartney, in The Habsburg Empire  1790-1918 (New York: 1969), the most thoroughly detailed history of the period, on pp. 307-308.

They [the optimistic reports] were so plausible [Macartney continues immediately] that in the autumn of 1845 the Paris Committee decided that the time was ripe to strike again [again, that is, following the unsuccessful 1830 uprising -- MM].  This time the peasants were to be invited to join in, being promised land and liberty for their reward.  The revolution was to embrace the territories of all three Partitioning Powers [since 1795 Russia, Prussia, and Austria each had occupied each about one-third of Poland], but it was to begin in Posen, Cracow and West Galicia, where the first objective was to be the Kreis capital of Tarnow.  Zero day was fixed for 21 February 1846.

. . . . Russia and Prussia got wind of it and nipped the preparations in the bud.  The Austrians, too, received warnings, but the Archduke was incurably optimistic and [Prime Minister] Metternich, too, underestimated the danger.  The Austrians therefore took next to no precautions.

. . . . [T]heir failures elsewhere did not deter the Poles of Cracow and Galicia.  On 17 February the Kreishauptmann of Tarnow, Frh. von Breinl, received a message from Cracow that the revolt was about to break out (the date having been advanced) there and in Tarnow.  Breinl was a man well-liked and trusted by the local peasants, and the next day a stream of peasants from the neighboring villages arrived at his office, all with the same story: at 11 p.m. that night they were to assemble, armed with scythes and flails, then to march upon Tarnow and 'massacre the Germans there'. . . .

Breinl afterwards swore that all he had told the peasants was that they were to obey only their lawful masters, i.e. the Austrian authorities. . . .  One inclines to believe Breinl, for it is certain that he afterwards saved many nobles from the peasants' hands, but almost anything said in such a situation could easily be misinterpreted.  In any case, it was on their lords [the Polish-speaking landlords, not the Austrian -- hence German-speaking -- civil authorities] that the peasants turned, and during the next three days a procession of peasant carts arrived in Tarnow laden with Polish nobles, some living, but others dreadfully mutilated corpses . . . .

Similar scenes, on a small scale, had taken place elsewhere in Galicia.  Practically everywhere, where the peasants had moved at all, it had been to attack their lords, of whom 1,458 were counted afterwards to have been killed or wounded.  With this the 'rising' was over in Galicia before in had begun.

Unsuccessful, complex, and the reverse of what the revolutionary plotters hoped: their own people, the Poles, were slaughtered in rather large numbers as a consequence of the effort to overthrow the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian authorities.  

I think it likely that Professor Ajami knew nothing whatever of this first of the "1848" revolutions when selecting this wave of revolutions as the one most similar to what is playing out at the present time in the Arab world.  Well, perhaps we are being somewhat unfair.  He said that 

. . . the revolutions of 1848 . . . The revolution erupted in France, then hit the Italian states . . .

so the fact that there was an uprising in Galicia in 1846 -- one which threatened to lead to outbursts in many of the other Lands of the Austrian Empire --

It is safe to say that only the larger revolution of 1848 forestalled a separate peasant revolution in most Austrian Lands. (Macartney 1969, p.312)

does not explicitly invalidate the statement that the first of the 1848 revolutions "erupted in France."

Except for the fact that, in reality, there was in 1848 a revolutionary outbreak in Italy before there was one in France.  The standard biographer of the life-long fighter for Italian Republican unification, Giuseppe Mazzini, writes:

Mazzini took pride in the fact that they [the "revolutionary outbreaks"] started in Italy.  In January there were serious disturbances throughout much of the country . . .  In Milan a refusal to pay taxes led to forcible repression by the Austrian Marshal Radetsky [northern Italy being at the time one of the Lands of the Austrian Empire -- MM], with many casualties.  In Venice the police were warned that Mazzini was planning "a national enterprise", and Daniele Manin was imprisoned by the Austrian authorities after presenting a demand for Venetian home rule.  In Tuscany there was rioting in Livorna against the Grand Duke, and in Genoa a impressive popular demonstration was attributed by [King] Charles Albert to Mazzini's influence.

The motivation behind these disturbances was diverse.  In Sicily, where a successful rising took place at Palermo against Naples and its Bourbon king, some insurgents flew the yellow and red flag of Sicilian separatism, while others raised the tricolour flag that was the symbol of Italian union. . . .

One dramatic result of the Sicilian revolt was to frighten King Ferdinand [the Bourbon ruler in Naples] into granting to his subjects an "irrevocable" constitution with a representative assembly. . .

Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (Yale University Press, 1994), p. 56.

Macartney lists (p. 320) among the calls upon the military resources at Radetsky's command 

. . . the Field-Marshal had to keep order in Lombardy-Venetia, garrison Ferrara, and guard against a possible attack from Piedmont; and he might have had also to garrison Naples, for when trouble broke out there in January 1848, King Ferdinand appealed to Austria for help, invoking a secret treaty of 1819 -- but the Pope refused to allow the troops passage.

All this, then, before the outbreak in Paris in February.

The bloody massacre in Galicia set off, with a delay of fifteen or twenty months, uprisings in other Lands of the Austrian Empire, beginning with Italy.  There was a revolution in Paris in February, 1848, and it had effects throughout Germany, but the Habsburg Lands had their own home-grown revolutionary outbursts, quite independent of the City of Light.  We won't now even go into the lead-up to the Hungarian Revolution, which the Austrian authorities were quite helpless to quell, and which was repressed only by a Russian invasion, across the Carpathian mountains.

But I would like to stop at this point and ask my reader, rhetorically if you will, What Value Is There to Faoud Ajami's Analogy?  It's pretty clear just how Francocentric his historical model is, how little it corresponds to factual events.  There is value, but Professor Ajami is so unclear on it that we have to construct it here.

In fairness to the professor, others have made similar misrepresentations.  In 1931 the Russian exile, Baroness Wrangel, commented in a footnote to her translation of a Russian-language biography of the nineteenth-century Russian czar, Alexander I Romanov, that Alexander's foreign minister, Pozzo di Borgo, was a "foreigner," since he spoke of provinces of what is now the country of Belarus as "conquests of Catharine":

The Poles [commented the Baroness in a "translator's footnote"] give that name to the Russian provinces which they have torn from Russia, even using it for the Ukraine, whose epic struggle to liberate itself from Polish oppression is little known to foreigners.

Grand Duc Nicolas Mikhailovitch, Le Tsar Alexandre Ier, tr. Baronne N. Wrangel (Payot, 1931), p. 176 fn.

-- and it is not too much to suggest that the Galician Uprising of February, 1846 formed a part of the "epic struggle" which the Baroness had in mind of historically Russian ethnic groups against Polish overlords, a struggle "little known to foreigners".

The Revolutions of 1848 do include an uprising in France.  The vast majority of the revolutionary wave, however, were uprisings against, not the sort of constitutional monarchy already in place in Paris, but against the ancien régime kings, dukes, and emperors who had imposed their rule since the Congress of Vienna, announcing at that time that their purpose was to stamp out popular rule in any form.  The epicenter of the revolutionary wave was Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire, still ruled by the same Metternich who had presided over the 1815 Congress.

It was an imperial system, dating from the victorious war against Napoleon and the French Revolutionary values he claimed to represent.

The value of the historical comparison is not something that we can draw using, as Professor Ajami does, vague terms such as "prisons" or "shame" as terms of analysis of political change; his comments on the topic of the wave of revolts, it seems to me, have about as much validity as his understanding of the 1848 revolutions.  Every person feels shame, at least sometime (I hope).  Every country, to some extent, is a prison; and to some extent, a marvelous opportunity.

What we do have is an Empire.  The Arab countries are throwing over dictators who are enlisted in the service of the modern-day equivalent of the Austrian, Russian, and Holy Roman Empires of the the mid-nineteenth century.  That Empire has intervened militarily repeatedly, and is now explicitly opposed to "the Arab street" which it fears as unalterably opposed to its interests.

The revolutionary wave of 1848 failed, in a wide variety of different ways.  The French elected a successor to Napoleon, and so surrendered their Second Republic.  The Germans talked the Revolution to death.  Metternich fled, and the Austrian court had to take refuge in Innsbruck, but eventually military forces crushed all of the popular regimes throughout Austria.  The Habsburgs promised the Russians to spare the lives of leaders of the Hungarian Republic who had surrendered to the Russian army, and then the next day hanged them all.  (Six years after that, Austria chose not to raise a finger in Russia's defense when she was invaded in the Crimean War: what contemporaries called "Habsburg gratitude.")

Even though the revolutions failed, Austria was too shaken by the 1848 revolutions to continue as it had been.  If there is an analogous situation today in the Arab world, it is centered on Saudi Arabia, the model of the opposition to popular rule -- and not coincidentally, the closest of allies with the imperial metropolitan power, the United States.

The revolutions are in progress.  The reaction against them, the effort to crush by military means the popular movement, is yet to be heard from.  The active bombing, by the former colonial powers and the United States, of Libya, is not a good sign.