Viewed on a timeline, the events and the people of history seem to grow ever more distant as the past slips away from a “modern” world that is constantly being made anew. For us, it is axiomatic that “this time it’s different”, because we are always covering new ground, always leaving the past further behind us.
But the truth is that we have a non-linear relationship with the past, both with our own personal stories and with history more generally. There are moments when a history that had seemed finished and packed away suddenly moves into our vicinity, grabs us by the shoulders and starts to speak to us. Right now, this is happening with the 19th century.
Take the “Eastern Question”. This central preoccupation of 19th-century European diplomacy bundled together problems arising from the enfeeblement of the Ottoman empire, the issue of access to the waterways linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, imperial rivalries in north Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia and the struggle to secure control over the land and sea routes linking the great powers with their global empires.
In the course of the 20th century, the Eastern Question receded from view. The Ottoman empire was no more, Turkey was admitted to Nato, and in the light of the bipolar stability of the cold war, the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean no longer seemed of such pressing importance. There was no shortage of conflict in the region, but it unfolded within the framework imposed by the standoff between the two nuclear superpowers. In recent years, the Eastern Question (or at least the bundle of issues that were once known under that rubric) has acquired a new salience.
We see it in the heightened geopolitical tension between Greece and Turkey, the squabbling between Egypt, Turkey and other players over the future of Libya, the disastrous effects of intervention in Syria, the conflict over grain exports from the Black Sea ports, and the consciously neo-Ottoman language and gestures of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president.
Our epoch is marked – this is hardly a new observation – by the return of a genuine multipolarity, such as we have not known since 1945. This multipolarity has many dimensions. New regional powers have emerged, determined to shape events in their own spheres – Turkey and Iran are two of the most important examples. The transition from Deng Xiaoping’s policy of restraint under the maxim: “hide your power and always be patient” to the confident demeanour of today’s China is another facet of the new multipolarity. The tension between the US and Russia remains, but it no longer has the power to stabilise the system as a whole. This multipolarity is unsettling for us; for the people of the 19th century, it was all they knew.
There are other commonalities. In the 20th century (or for most of it at least), Russia represented a radical alternative to western-style liberal democracy, a power driven by a philosophy of historical change whose attraction for people on the political left worldwide was never entirely extinguished. In today’s world, Russia has returned to its 19th-century role as the reactionary negation of western “liberalism”. To be sure, the special status of Russia and the US as custodians of the world’s largest strategic nuclear arsenals persists, as a legacy of the cold war. But the current war in Ukraine has less to do with the binary ideological oppositions of the 20th century than with a deeper history of wars and annexations along the Russian imperial periphery, a history that extends through and beyond the 19th century.
I have spent the past few years writing a book about the 1848 revolutions – a cascade of political tumults that extended across the European continent – and here too I have been struck by the many resonances with our own time. The present anxiety around social precarity, the working poor and the cost of living – exacerbated today by the return of supply chain disruptions and fuel and grain price shocks – is reminiscent of the panic around the “Social Question” of the 1840s. Then, as now, people argued over whether mass impoverishment was the consequence of over-regulation, whether it resulted from deregulation and the resulting erosion of older forms of social cohesion, or whether it could be something produced by the modern economic system itself.
The fascinating – and vexing – thing about these revolutions is their polyvocality, the fact that so many programmes and aspirations found simultaneous expression. The political forces that coalesced in the revolutionary spring of 1848, shaking the foundations of monarchies across the continent, soon spiralled off in different directions. The slow liberal politics of chambers and the fast radical politics of clubs and demonstrations came unstuck from each other. The rivalry between national groups pitted German and Croatian liberals and radicals against their Czech and Hungarian fellows.
Nothing cohered. For contemporaries, it was difficult to make out the general direction of travel, so paradoxical and contradictory were the forces that the revolutions had unleashed. The complexity of 1848 was not primarily a function of the intrinsic difficulty of the problems confronting European societies, but rather of the great number and diversity of political groups and perspectives brought to bear on them. Karl Marx anticipated this when he observed in an essay of 1842 that the many-sidedness of the world was a function of the one-sidedness of its countless constituent parts.
History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it often rhymes. What do these moments of déjà vu mean? They may in part be symptomatic of a narrow “presentism” that can see in the past nothing but endless reflections of its own preoccupations. But we should not exclude the possibility that such resonances reveal authentic affinities between one moment in history and another.
The revolutions of 1848 seemed as old as ancient Egypt when I learned about them at school in the 1970s. Their complexity was a futile, antiquarian scrawl. But it’s different today. We are re-emerging from something that they did not yet know. The era of high industrialisation; the “take-off into sustained growth”; the rise of the great ideological party-political formations; the ascendancy of the nation-state and the welfare state; the rise of the great newspapers and the national television audience. These things, which we used to call “modernity”, are now in flux, their hold on us is waning. And as we cease to be the creatures of high modernity, new patterns of attention become possible. As the 20th century begins to lose its power over our imagination, it becomes engrossing, even instructive, to contemplate the people and situations of the 19th century: the fissured, multifarious quality of their politics; the churn and change without a settled sense of the direction of travel; the anxieties around inequality and the finiteness of resources; the entanglement of civil tumult with international relations; the irruption of violence, utopia and spirituality into politics.
In 2011, as a chain of political upheavals cascaded across the Arab world, attention turned once again to the forgotten revolutions of 1848, which had exhibited a similarly contagious quality. In the west, too, we have seen symptoms of instability – chamber invasions, pop-up protest movements, crosscurrents of activism on social media – that recall the volatility of 1848. If a revolution is coming, it may look something like 1848: poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions.
Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark will be published on Thursday
