Civil Society by Dominic Lieven

Studying Russian public opinion helps one understand both why Russia entered World War I  and why it was defeated. Although the Russian case is unique, in this respect too international comparisons are never-the-less very important. In the two generations before 1914, European society as a whole had been transformed more fundamentally than in centuries of earlier history. It was hard for anyone to keep his balance amid dramatic economic, social, and cultural change; predictions as to where change might lead in the future could inspire even greater giddiness. A common feature across Europe was the growth of civil society and its impact through the press, lobbies and political parties on governments. In contemporary parlance, civil society is always supposed to be on the side of angels. As regards international relations in pre-1914 Europe, this was not true. Civil society, meaning above all the press, often played a big role in stoking international conflict. This might be just a question of pandering to public prejudices and thirst for sensations, but it rattled and bedeviled policy makers nonetheless. More serious systemic efforts to use foreign policy as a means to generate nationalist support for governments at home in the process undermining rational calculations on which diplomatic bargaining was based. No great power, Russia included, was entirely innocent in this respect.

Whereas the nationalism of the dominant people might inject dangerously irrational and unpredictable elements into foreign policy, nationalist movements among minorities might put an empire’s very existence in question . . .

Rather than speaking of ‘public opinion’, or liberal imperialism’ taking over the Russian government, we more accurately should see a consensus developing on the fundamentals of foreign policy between the dominant element in the Foreign Ministry and mainstream public opinion. In the European context, there is nothing surprising about this. On the contrary, all European foreign ministries in this era were increasingly influenced by the press, public opinion, and rapidly strengthening civil society. As always, most citizens showed intermittent interest and less understanding of international relations, which made a state’s foreign policy especially vulnerable to special interests and lobbies, not to mention nationalist politicians, Matters were made worse in Germany and Russia, whose constitutions tilted power toward precisely those political interests most inclined to beat the nationalist drum. But even in more democratic politics, the same principle applied. Italy was taken into World War I by a nationalist lobby against the wishes of most parliamentary deputies, let alone the Italian people. Recent historians of Anglo-German relations stress the nefarious impact of both the British and German press in dramatizing conflicts and encouraging mutual fears and resentments. In both countries, lurid press campaigns were also used by parties, lobbies, and special interests to win elections, boost military budgets, or even just wake up the public to what some members of the elite perceived as dangerous external realities.

To make Whitehall’s response to Germany aggression depend upon the attitude of British public opinion as Sir Sir Edward Grey informed the Russian Ambassador he did, was a terrifying message, even riskier than putting one’s faith in the hands  of the German Kaiser in one of his more nervous months. Any public opinion, especially the public opinion of a foreign country, is a fickle and absentminded master. British public opinion was ill-informed about European geopolitical realities and influenced by assumptions and illusions a drawn from Britain’s own unique history. Nor was the British public ever much interested in eastern Europe, whose affairs were assumed to be of little consequence.

 If is often stated,even indeed assumed- that a key cause of World War I was the survival of aristocratic elites and their atavistic values at the center of power. Professional, intelligent, and “modern” middle-class men are sometimes presumed to be more liberal and pacific. This is a comforting view for twenty-first century observers but often a false one. Genuinely reactionary aristocrats were usually far less dangerous than intelligent professionals and intellectuals with ‘modern’ views about power, history, race and masculinity, especially if the ‘new men’ were skilled at playing popular politics. Nikolai Hartwig is a fine case in point, being simultaneously the most middle class and most dangerous of Russia’s leading diplomats before 1914.

The divorce between the tsarist state and most of educated society, however, was a key reason why Russia lacked equivalents to the large-scale patriotic pressure groups that flourished in much of Europe. Whereas Germany’s Navy League was a massive popular organization, Russia’s two equivalent naval societies were tiny groups patronized by members of the  imperial family but with no support beyond a narrow elite. Militarism and Russian nationalism were identified with the tsarist regime and were therefore disliked and feared by most educated Russians. Jingoism and saber-rattling were not popular among among most educated Russians at the time. . . .

[The author has ‘descended from generalities to adopt a worm’s eye view’, as he promised in his Introduction, which makes this a very interesting and useful book, the best I have ever read on the topic. Impossible to justice to it here.]