Hi, welcome back, make yourself comfortable. This time I want to talk about how all the modern nation states are revolutionary. Why is that? It's because in this world we're describing, inertia is not an option. See, we're accustomed to thinking of a conservative party doesn't want change. And maybe a liberal party or radical party, they want change. And that's what I'm trying to get away from; in this period, everybody wants change. It's just the kind of change they want. All of these states feel that they have to do something. [NOISE] They have different agendas that may mark them out as, quote, unquote, conservative. But even the conservative parties are extremely activist. All of these states are doing things that are turning their society upside down or changing them in dramatic ways. It's just a matter of what direction the change is going in. You can't avoid the change. That's why these more powerful nation states are revolutionary. They don't feel they have the option of, well I'm just not going to provide any education. I'm not going to provide any education to anybody. I'm not going to build any railroads. I'm not going to change my economy at all. They cannot immunize themselves from all these outside forces. Those outside forces are interacting with their local societies one way or another. And the states are the key agent of the interaction, and they're going to do something. So in response to that, people are organizing their systematic beliefs about what should happen to their communities. You have to have some point of view about this, because it's happening. And therefore we see huge mass political parties get created. What I mean by a mass party is, parties are no longer just a province of the handful of politicians who gather in the capital and form factions, often factions around patronage or personal loyalty. Instead, this is the age, say between 1880- 1890 and the early 1900s, in which parties formed that have millions of members. Indeed, with the exception of the United States, which had mass political parties going back much earlier, practically every modern country develops mass parties between no earlier than about the 1870s and the early 1900s. Why, in Britain most people, most men, don't even get the right to vote until after 1867. So, as millions of people are voting they're joining mass parties trying to argue for direction of change one way or another, because they have this fundamental choice to make. The fundamental choice they have to make is this: How will we organize these modern industrial societies? So, my argument to you as a historian is that the debates over how to answer this question, and the mass parties and ideologies that form around it, structure a Hundred Years War. We think of things like the Cold War and so on, but really between, Oh, to put it very crudely about 1890 to 1990, more or less, there's a pitched struggle between mass ideologies about how to organize these modern societies. All of these sides in these struggles accept that revolutionary change is going to happen. Let's zoom in and make these abstractions a little more concrete by taking a few minutes to examine one place, Barcelona, Spain. So here's Barcelona. And Barcelona is part of a larger region, with a long history in the traditional era called Catalonia, in which the historic language is Catalan. The Catalans now in the late 1800's live a little bit in France, but mainly they live in the state called Spain. And their great city is Barcelona. If you think about organized society in Barcelona, in say 1890, there are issues like national versus local. In other words, what's the role of the Spanish government and Spanish traditions versus the Catalan government and Catalonian traditions? Or, the standard issues of industrial and factory life, because Barcelona is the leading city in Spanish manufacturing; the great textile mills in Spain are built in Barcelona. The powerful businessmen who run these mills are getting their cotton from plantations in a Spanish colony, Cuba. So you have all the issues of industrial life versus large numbers of workers. There's also an issue of imperial policy, because one reason the Barcelona businessmen thrive is they're in an imperial system, in which they're getting cotton grown in Cuban plantations that are being brought back through a protected system to make into clothes for a Spanish market being protected from outside imports of say cheaper British textiles. So all these issues are bound up in the community of Barcelona, and all of them are going badly by the late 1890s. By the late 1890s, to the people of Barcelona, a modernizing Spanish government is encroaching on the prerogatives of what people want in Barcelona. Workers are more and more unhappy with conditions in the cotton mills. There's growing unemployment, in part because Spain has just lost the war in Cuba. The Cubans have fought for and won their Independence. That protected imperial system, from which they got their cotton and which made the fortunes of so many Barcelona business men, has fallen to pieces, aside from the general humiliation that Spain has just lost this war. Barcelona also happens to be a center of modern artistic expression in the 1890s. One of these movements called Modernisme was very much about depicting reality, depicting things as they were, looking at the lives of ordinary people, some of them unhappy ordinary people. Here's an example of one of the work of those artists working in Barcelona in the late 1890s. You may have heard of him. His name: Pablo Picasso. Picasso here is painting some people hanging out in a local cafe called Els Quatre Gats [FOREIGN], The Four Cats. A lot of the unrest in these new industrial cities, in the 1870s and 1880s, simply expresses itself with an overwhelming alienation from the hierarchies of modern life: the corporate bosses, the emblems of the state, the rich ruling class. Some of these people were drawn to a movement called anarchism. Anarchism was usually not a formally organized political party. It was a transnational movement, but it didn't have a central headquarters. There were some charismatic exiles, urging followers to strike blows against the apparatus of oppression, to wage the propaganda of the deed. If this seems reminiscent of some of the violent Islamist terrorism that we've experienced in recent years, you're right, these are similar kinds of movements with similar sources. And anarchist terrorists were launching a variety of violent attacks in Italy, in France, in Spain, in parts of the United States, in the 1880s and 1890s. In the 1890's and early 1900's, six different heads of state, including a President of the United States, are assassinated by anarchists. The president who was assassinated was William McKinley, in September 1901. And the anarchists are striking in Barcelona. They're throwing bombs in opera houses and striking terror in the propertied classes. Here's a painting depicting the way the state retaliated against these anarchists. This painting is titled "The Garroting"; it's by a painter named Ramon Casas. In Spain in the 1890s, public executions were carried out using the garrote, in which a rope was tied around a victim's neck and the executioner slowly tightens the rope as the victim slowly strangles. Here, a captured anarchist is being executed in a public square. The executioner is there doing his work. You see the somber mood of the hundreds of people who've gathered to witness the execution. The square ringed off by soldiers. In the center, those are representatives of an order of the Holy Church, a kind of latter day descendant of the Inquisition, a society dedicated to purity of blood. What Casas is doing here, when you see the thin line of the uniformed forces of order, including the church, holding back the onlookers, comes out much more strongly in another painting that Casas did. This one, Barcelona in 1902, is depicting the aftermath of a strike. Here the workers are striking. The mills are in the background of the painting. In the foreground, you see the forces of order, the Civil Guard, the Guardia Civil, riding down the protesters, forcing them back. These struggles you�re seeing, these are the harbingers of generations of struggle to come, over how states are going to reinvent themselves. In all the imperial powers, small ones like Spain or even the larger ones, the really great issues in their national lives are coming back home. These issues are bound up in their interactions with the rest of the world, but those interactions are creating new situations, new debates, mainly at home. Instead of worrying about the new colonies they're going to conquer, the really great issues in the first years of the 20th century are really about what directions these nation states are going to take in revolutionizing and reinventing themselves. So in these divided societies, they're creating new structures as to how many manage now chronic tension between these polarized parts of their communities. The battle lines are being drawn for generations of struggle. We're going to trace the contours of those battle lines in the next presentation. See you then.
