Hey all! Smaller update, catching us up on what’s going on in the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and South America. Mostly focused on political economy with the latter two - I will cover politics and labor in more detail when there are more significant divergences from OTL.
The Global Great War
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire fought a long war, longer perhaps than any of the other combatants. Since the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the nation had been at arms; full demobilization would only occur well into the 1920s. Fighting devastated not only the borderlands of Iraq and Palestine, but also the heartlands of Turkish Anatolia. The urban population would not recover until the early 1960s.
Many in the ruling Committee of Union and Progress had some sense that the Empire was at grave risk, and there was broad support in the party for a project of national revitalization. The difficulties came, as always, in the specifics: a pacific majority looked to England and France for protection and hoped for integration into the British-led global market, while a more radical minority faction led by the Ottoman general Enver Pasha sought to imitate Germany’s militarized, heavy-industrial pattern of modernization. The bold and frequently secretive maneuvering of the military faction forced the party majority into a purely reactive stance; the popular acclamation of the successful Albanian gamble led the pro-entente majority to endorse the provocative coup against their better instincts. However, it is likely that the greatest weakness of the anti-German faction was England’s persistent indifference to Ottoman diplomatic entreaties, which delegitimized their attempt to chart a different course for the declining Empire.
Although the Committee of Union and Progress had rapidly turned Turkey into a one-party state, power was still broadly dispersed. In addition to the Central Committee, there was a general assembly of party-members and a government cabinet; the leaders of the party were forced to vie with each other for the support of CUP representatives, introducing some elements of internal democracy. With the onset of war, Russian and Serbian bellicosity helped rally the general assembly to the radical faction, and general mobilization began weeks in advance of the other powers, in response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Western Armenia.
Turkey’s war has frequently been compared to Italy’s: marked at its beginning by disastrous military failures which would only worsen over time, delegitimizing the national leadership and paving the way for revolutionary upheaval. By the end of 1915, Enver and Djemal Pasha, two of the most important figures in the CUP, had been humiliated by crushing defeats in Armenia and Sinai (respectively). The loss of Lebanon, Palestine, and much of Syria in the war’s first year led to the dismissal of Djemal from army command, while Enver was demoted and cast out from party leadership. The one remaining member of the so-called “triumvirate”, Talaat Pasha, steadily accumulated power as his rivals were exiled. Russia’s weakened position following the Polish offensive allowed the Ottomans to retake a good deal of Western Armenia in 1916, which bolstered Talaat’s position. Increasingly, he surrounded himself with hardline Turkish nationalists; the Armenian massacres and death-marches carried out in the wake of the reconquest of Western Armenia killed at least 1.1 million people, and in 1955 was officially recognized as an ethnocide by the League of Nations.
The Dardanelle Campaign soon presented Tasha with a new crisis. The German commander in the area, Lyman von Sanders, had repeatedly urged the Turks to expand the local defensive fortifications, but Talaat and his military advisors believed that there was little chance of Britain launching a concerted assault after they had already committed such sizable troop contingents to Syria and Iraq. Additionally, most thought - here, perhaps, more justifiably - that Britain would not risk its battle-fleet in a suicidal operation in the Dardanelle Staits.
The British attack, particularly the bold and daring maneuvers of the Navy, achieved strategic surprise. The horrific losses incurred - over ten ships sunk in total, with many more damaged - did not stop the bulk of the fleet from breaking through into the Sea of Marmara, where it could act as mobile artillery. Even more devastating was the blow to Ottoman Morale following the shelling of Constantinople, which spread panic in the city, hampering the resupply of Ottoman defenders. When British soldiers finally approached the city, threatening to encircle what remained of Turkey’s European armies, many predicted that Talaat would sue for peace. An additional blow came just days later when the city of Smyrna fell to a revolt of the Ottoman Garrison, which declared loyalty to Mehmeht Sabahaddin, an exiled member of the pro-entente Liberal party.
While the Ottoman government began entering negotiations for an armistice, Mustafa Kemal, a corps-level commander, made the decision to evacuate the entirety of the 3rd Army in Constantinople, requisitioning a small fleet of sailing boats and dinghies to cross the Bosphorus in the middle of night, in some cases mere dozens of yards from British patrol boats. The success of this operation greatly enhanced Kemal’s prestige, who was shortly thereafter given command of the entire 3rd Army. His reputation only grew when he marched this force to Smyrna, crushing the rebellious garrison and capturing Sabahaddin, who would be executed for treason shortly thereafter.
Emboldened by Kemal’s heroics and outraged by British armistice terms, the Turks resolved to go on fighting. Talaat Pasha remained as the de facto head of the CUP, but faced increased challenges from an ultra-nationalist, ultra-secularist segment of the party aligned with Mustafa Kemal and the Ziya Gokalp. Simultaneously, a minority faction associated with the previous Grand Vizier, Said Halim Pasha, pushed for an end to the war and the acceptance of British terms.
The next two years seemed to validate the decision to continue the war. Germany looked to be on the cusp of victory, and the chaos following the October revolution allowed the Turks to regain additional territories in the caucuses and eastern anatolia. Army reforms improved the effectiveness of the military, which prevented several attempts by British forces to break out from Aleppo. The larger problem was the inability to procure weapons and ammunition from Germany; efforts were made at creating a domestic arms manufacturing sector, but these could only supply a fraction of the weapons that the army needed. The state had to turn to smuggling operations to supply its troops, which were frequently forced to ration artillery rounds and small arms ammunition. The hope was that the British would launch no major offensive, and that the nation could remain in the war and survive until Germany victory in the west forced British capitulation. In 1919, these assumptions would be cruelly disappointed.
Spain
Unlike the Nordic neutrals and the Netherlands, Spain’s decision to adopt a policy of neutrality was informed less by its lack of war goals and territorial ambitions than the fragility of the state, the weakness of its army, and Spanish economic reliance on various belligerents. The Spanish constitutional system was in large part meant to empower landowning elites, with protectionist conservative interests and free trade, liberal ones alternating power in a corrupt system known as El Turno Pacifico. The exclusion of both the laboring masses and industrial bourgeoisie from political participation created political tensions that rendered the state weak and reliant on the military to prop up its rule. Uneven industrial development had also begun to exacerbate preexisting regionalist sentiments in Catalonia, the center of Spain’s small but growing domestic industry.
Even though Spain did not fight in the Great War, the pressures it unleashed ushered in a transformation of the Spanish economic order with long consequences. In just over a half-decade, wealth and power shifted decisively from the old landowning elite to the Northern bourgeoisie and well-organized labor movements. The inability of the state to reconcile itself to the emerging class of industrial capitalists gave rise to regionalist movements and eventually created an improbable (and temporary) cross-crass alliance between the military and bourgeoisie which threatened the foundations of the Spanish social order.
In the near-term, the outbreak of the war led to a sharp decline in imports as Spain’s traditional trading partners, Britain and France, scaled down their civilian industries and dedicated the produce of those which remained to domestic consumption. This led to a sharp rise in the price of every-day commodities, particularly foodstuffs and coal, which was followed by a more general inflation. For the millions of Spaniards who lived at a subsistence level, this rise in prices was an intolerable assault on their livelihood, and protests from the laboring poor brought down the conservative Dato government in early 1916. Even for workers who lived above subsistence level, the decline in standard of living was comparable to that of workers in the belligerent powers.
Equally important to Spain’s wartime development was the surge of exports, caused by the demand of the warring powers for raw materials to feed their war machines. In the short-term, this led to a tremendous growth in corporate profitability and domestic capital, which was employed to expand the extractive sector, and in the medium-term, civilian-goods production. By late 1915, it appeared that the chronic import crisis and the attendant social unrest would act as a bottleneck of sorts on Spain’s industrial expansion, but then the decline in trade between Britain and America allowed Spanish markets to absorb the difference. Not only did American imports spike during this period, bringing down inflation and gradually improving the standard of living for the working class, but exports to Britain increased once again as it sought iron and textiles which did not have to be purchased in dollars.
The wealth this brought to Spain bolstered the government of the Prime Minister Alvaro de Figueroa, also known as the 1st Count of Romanones. One of the most liberal figures in the political establishment, he was unable to solve the social problems that plagued the country, though the temporary rise in living standards did buy his government time and allow it to pass a budget through Parliament for the first time in many years. More consequential was his dalliance with the Entente, which led many of the Pro-German conservatives to suspect he was preparing to bring Spain into the war. In early 1917, a vicious, German-funded press campaign was initiated to bring down Romanones’ government; it succeeded in sullying his reputation, but not in toppling him from power.
The next challenge to the government came from the “defense juntas”. These were organizations of peninsular soldiers displeased with the system of army promotion, which was based on merit rather than seniority. In practice, this meant that soldiers stationed in the Army of Morocco received much better pay and were, on average, of higher rank. The count was dismissive of these juntas, and he issued an order for them to be disbanded in June; they refused, and the soldiers sent to arrest them were soon inconspicuously absent. Romanones government fell shortly thereafter. Dato came back to power, and issued a series of pay raises to the juntas that eventually convinced most of the soldiers to disband.
Dato’s government would soon confront its own challenges, collectively called the “Crisis of 1918”. Most date its beginning to the resumption of German unrestricted submarine warfare, which wrecked the Spanish merchant marine. Within 6 months, nearly 35% of ships had been lost, and merchants were refusing to send out more unless their safety could be guaranteed. The blow to Spanish imports was also severe, causing living standards to begin declining once again, though this took some time. In the near-term, the submarine warfare inflamed anti-German sentiment, contributed to the radicalization of the northern middle-class, and nearly led Spain into war with Germany.
In March, the regionalist league of Catalonia, an interest group for the Catalonian bourgeoisie, demanded that the government convene a regional Catalonian parliament to discuss foreign policy and the best means of revitalizing trade; when this was denied by Dato’s government, the elected deputies met illegally and demanded the recognition of Catalonian regional autonomy. In response, the government sent the military to crack down on the meetings, which it did successfully in mid-April. Yet this proved to be only a temporary salve, for as soon as most military units had left, the meetings began again, prompting the Dato government to dedicate a division to “occupy” Catalonia. The socialist UGT narrowly voted to strike against the repressive military occupation, creating the bizarre spectacle of workers leaving their factories to protest in defense of a body constituted primarily by representatives of their employers.
Tensions eased somewhat with the fall of the Dato government and its replacement with a liberal one led by Manuel Prieto, who promised to negotiate with the Catalonian autonomists. Yet these attempts at diplomacy proved manifestly unsuccessful, and as 1919 neared, the two major Spanish trade unions prepared for a general strike, a prospect that put both the Catalonian bourgeois and Spanish government on edge.
South America
While the different nations of South America had varying cultures and patterns of immigration, they occupied a sufficiently similar place in the international economy to warrant speaking of them as a group. As a whole, these nations organized their economies around the export of agricultural goods and raw materials to overseas markets. By the turn of the century, Argentina had been the clearest beneficiary of this developmental pattern, becoming one of the wealthiest societies in the world off the back of its lucrative meat and grain trade with Britain. The relative lack of domestic capital and the weakness of the state (which lacked sophisticated means for raising revenue) meant that South American countries were dependent on wealthier, more developed ones to fund infrastructure and capital goods expansion, particularly Britain, Germany, France and America. On the political plane, they excluded most of the population from active participation in politics, despite having nominally democratic constitutions.
The onset of the war brought drastic inflation as imports shriveled and exports soared. The relative lack of domestic capital also meant that the expansion of export-oriented industries was slower than in other places. This was exacerbated by an evacuation of European investment capital from the entire continent, a process that began in the Second Balkan War as the outbreak of international conflict looked increasingly likely. In 1916, this process gained further steam after Britain overhauled its war financing; the new, high-yield bonds on offer led to another selloff of South American assets, which the nascent national bourgeois were now in a better position to buy. American capital did make some inroads, particularly in Brazil and the Northern countries, but following the crisis of confidence in the Entente foreign investment shifted to China rather than South America.
On the whole, these nations conducted most of their wartime trade with Britain and France, though with American neutrality and the leakiness of the British blockade, there continued to be significant trade with Germany and Austria until 1917. The contraction of trade with the Central Powers following the failure of Britain and America to renew the Alexandria Accords only led to a fall of total exports in Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia; the giant of the continent, Brazil, had already been strong-armed by British bankers into winding down its trade with Germany.
Overwhelming British naval superiority, economic ties to the Entente, and traditional francophilia precluded any of the South American nations from joining the Central Powers. In early 1918, during the high tide of German submarine warfare, several nations grew close to declaring a war on Germany, but balked once William Jennings Bryan made clear that such a move would incur American sanctions. Even Bryan’s warnings were not enough to stop Argentina from declaring war on Germany at the end of 1918; the loss of over a dozen merchant vessels had fed a sense of nationalist aggrievement, and elites believed that they could slow the meteoric growth of the anarchist-influenced trade union movement through the mobilization of an army. In this, they were to be gravely mistaken.
In almost all South American countries, the war strengthened labor and political radicals. Social catholicism, indeginism, and Hispanism flourished in both the cultural and political spheres. Increasingly, Spanish societies were turning away from European models of state-building and development, which were discredited by the horror of the trenches. While some looked to the social-democratic model of Bryan’s America, more turned to a form of rural-communalist romanticism, which shared some affinities with the anarcho-syndicalism of the trade unions. Art and literature concerned with the local and particular flourished; South America was imagined as a “Golden Land”, unperturbed by the conflicts in Europe. While some have viewed this tendency as a form of romanticist retreat, it also contributed to the emergence of modern states and unified national identities.
Summary of Divergences from OTL
Spain
In Spain, the largest difference is that there is an even larger industrial expansion, with somewhat less social strife due to a higher standard of living for the working class. Compared to OTL, there is more growth in the socialist CGT rather than the anarchist CNT, but on the whole, both unions are around 20-35% bigger. Consequently, the labor movement is moderately more powerful, and slightly less radical.
The differences in Spain’s development mean that there’s no general strike in 1917. This leads to a pretty important change - without a big strike to scare the regional bourgeois into the hands of the state, the secessionist movement in Catalonia refuses to compromise with the government, causing an escalating spiral of repression and radicalization. Expect a lot of divergences from here on out.
South America
In South America, the largest change is the emergence of a much larger national bourgeois due to the more thorough evacuation of European capital. Industrial development is about the same; slightly faster in the south (Argentina and Chile), and slightly slower in the north (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia). However, this development is also much more uneven than IOTL, occurring more tepidly before 1916, and more rapidly thereafter. The consequence is increased labor radicalization and the consolidation of anarchism in the Brazlian, Chilean, and Argentinian trade unions. All of this (plus Argentina’s participation in the war without American assistance) is going to lead to some big downstream effects, but we won’t begin to see them until the next few years. Stay tuned!
Bình luận
0