Qno1. Why is it necessary to study the Renaissance in order to understand the Modern World? OR. Write a note on the secular openings created during the Renaissance. OR. How did developments in trade and commerce create conditions for the Renaissance? OR. Do you agree with the view that the Renaissance created the conditions for the creation of Modern World? OR. Discus the salient features of the Renaissance.
Ans: “Renaissance” literally means “rebirth.” It refers especially to the rebirth of learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century, spread to the north, including England, by the sixteenth century, and ended in the north in the mid-seventeenth century (earlier in Italy). During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity.
Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historic era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe, this is a general use of the term. As a cultural movement, it encompassed a resurgence of learning based on classical sources, the development of linear perspective in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform. Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term “Renaissance man”.
There is a general, but not unchallenged, consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Tuscany in the 14th century. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and there has been much debate among historians as to the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. Some have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural “advance” from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age, while others have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras. Indeed, some have called for an end to the use of the term, which they see as a product of presentism – the use of history to validate and glorify modern ideals. The word Renaissance has also been used to describe other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence affected literature, philosophy, art, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.
Renaissance thinkers sought out in Europe’s monastic libraries and the crumbling Byzantine Empire the literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity, typically written in Latin or ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the Renaissance’s greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Protestant Reformation.
Artists such as Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism Pico della Mirandola wrote the famous text “De hominis dignitate” (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), which consists of a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of printing, this would allow many more people access to books, especially the Bible.
In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity, and through novel approaches to thought. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolutist monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented commercial revolution which preceded and financed the Renaissance.
Most historians agree that the ideas that characterized the Renaissance had their origin in late 13th century Florence, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), as well as the painting of Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). Some writers date the Renaissance quite precisely; one proposed starting point is 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins.
During Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended totally on patrons while the patrons needed money to sustain genuises. Wealth was brought to Italy in 14th, 15th and 16th century by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought during Crusades made the prosperity of Genoa and Venice.
Humanism
In some ways Humanism was not a philosophy per se, but rather a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, humanists would study ancient texts in the original, and appraise them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. Humanist education was based on the programme of ‘Studia Humanitatis’, that being the study of five humanities: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy and rhetoric. Although historians have sometimes struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled on “a middle of the road definition… the movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome”. Above all, humanists asserted “the genius of man … the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind.”
Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More (1478–1535) revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers, and applied them in critiques of contemporary government. Machiavelli’s contribution, in the view of Isaiah Berlin, was a decisive break in western political thought allocating a unique reasoning to politics and faith and perhaps making him the father of the social sciences. Pico della Mirandola who lived to only twenty-three years wrote what is often considered the manifesto of the Renaissance, a vibrant defence of thinking, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475).
Another humanist, is most known for his work Della vita civile (“On Civic Life”; printed 1528) which advocated civic humanism, and his influence in refining the Tuscan vernacular to the same level as Latin. Palmieri’s written works drawn on Roman philosophers and theorists, especially Cicero, who, like Palmieri, lived an active public life as a citizen and official, as well as a theorist and philosopher and also Quintilian. Strongly committed to a deep and broad education Palmieri believed this would dispose people to public engagement and enhance the human capacity to do good deeds and contribute to the community. Although holding public office between 1432 and 1475 he is best remembered for these writings extolling the ideal of humanism as combination of learning with civic or political action. Possibly the most succinct expression of his perspective on humanism is in a 1465 poetic work La città di vita, but an earlier work Della vita civile (On Civic Life) is more wide-ranging. Composed as a series of dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, Palmieri expounds on the qualities of the ideal citizen. The dialogues concern how children develop mentally and physically, how citizens can conduct themselves morally, how citizens and states can ensure probity in public life, and an important debate on the difference between that which is pragmatically useful and that which is honest.
Italian Renaissance
While Renaissance ideas were moving north from Italy, there was a simultaneous southward spread of some areas of innovation, particularly in music. The music of the 15th century Burgundian School defined the beginning of the Renaissance in that art and the polyphony of the Netherlanders, as it moved with the musicians themselves into Italy, formed the core of what was the first true international style in music since the standardization of Gregorian Chant in the 9th century. The culmination of the Nether landish School was in the music of the Italian composer, Palestrina. At the end of the 16th century Italy again became a center of musical innovation, with the development of the polychoral style of the Venetian School, which spread northward into Germany around 1600.
The paintings of the Italian Renaissance differed from those of the Northern Renaissance. Italian Renaissance artists were among the first to paint secular scenes, breaking away from the purely religious art of medieval painters. At first, Northern Renaissance artists remained focused on religious subjects, such as the contemporary religious upheaval portrayed by Albrecht Dürer. Later on, the works of Pieter Bruegel influenced artists to paint scenes of daily life rather than religious or classical themes. It was also during the northern Renaissance that Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck perfected the oil painting technique, which enabled artists to produce strong colors on a hard surface that could survive for centuries. A feature of the Northern Renaissance was its use of the vernacular in place of Latin or Greek, which allowed greater freedom of expression. This movement had started in Italy with the decisive influence of Dante Alighieri on the development of vernacular languages; in fact the focus on writing in Italian has neglected a major source of Florentine ideas expressed in Latin. The spread of the technology of the German invention of movable type printing boosted the Renaissance, in Northern Europe as elsewhere; with Venice becoming a world center of printing.
Qno2. What were the central ideas of the Enlightenment? OR. Do you agree with the view that the ideas of Enlightenment ushered in the Modern World. OR. How did Enlightenment thinkers understand the relationship between science and religion?
Ans:”The Enlightenment” is usually associated with the 18th century; its roots in fact go back much further. But before we explore those roots, we need to define the term. This is one of those rare historical movements which in fact named itself. Certain thinkers and writers, primarily in London and Paris, believed that they were more enlightened than their compatriots and set out to enlighten them.
They believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world. Their principal targets were religion (embodied in France in the Catholic Church) and the domination of society by a hereditary aristocracy.
The ideas of enlightenment, in particular, its faith in the scientific method of investigation, its optimism that the new era of scientific technological advancement and industrialization would lead to a world filled with happiness for all and its attempts to create a social order based on the principles of human reason, tolerance and equality, effected a profound social and intellectual revolution.
The influence of enlightenment is evident as much in the modernization theories that dominated the study of societies in the mid-twentieth century as it is in the social reform movements of the nineteenth century in India.
The Renaissance Humanists
In the 14th and 15th century there emerged in Italy and France a group of thinkers known as the “humanists.” The term did not then have the anti-religious associations it has in contemporary political debate. Almost all of them were practicing Catholics. They argued that the proper worship of God involved admiration of his creation, and in particular of that crown of creation: humanity. By celebrating the human race and its capacities they argued they were worshipping God more appropriately than gloomy priests and monks who harped on original sin and continuously called upon people to confess and humble them before the Almighty. Indeed, some of them claimed that humans were like God, created not only in his image, but with a share of his creative power. The painter, the architect, the musician, and the scholar, by exercising their intellectual powers, were fulfilling divine purposes.
This celebration of human capacity, though it was mixed in the Renaissance with elements of gloom and superstition (witchcraft trials flourished in this period as they never had during the Middle Ages), was to bestow a powerful legacy on Europeans. The goal of Renaissance humanists was to recapture some of the pride, breadth of spirit, and creativity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to replicate their successes and go beyond them. Europeans developed the belief that tradition could and should be used to promote change. By cleaning and sharpening the tools of antiquity, they could reshape their own time.
Galileo Galilei, for instance, was to use the same sort of logic the schoolmen had used–reinforced with observation–to argue in 1632 for the Copernican notion that the earth rotates on its axis beneath the unmoving sun. The Church, and most particularly the Holy Inquisition, objected that the Bible clearly stated that the sun moved through the sky and denounced Galileo’s teachings, forcing him to recant (take back) what he had written and preventing him from teaching further. The Church’s triumph was a pyrrhic victory, for though it could silence Galileo, it could not prevent the advance of science (though most of those advances would take place in Protestant northern Europe, out of the reach of the pope and his Inquisition).
But before Galileo’s time, in the 16th century, various humanists had begun to ask dangerous questions. François Rabelais, a French monk and physician influenced by Protestantism, but spurred on by his own rebelliousness, challenged the Church’s authority in his Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing many religious doctrines as absurd.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne, in a much more quiet and modest but ultimately more subversive way, asked a single question over and over again in his Essays: “What do I know?” By this he meant that we have no right to impose on others dogmas which rest on cultural habit rather than absolute truth. Powerfully influenced by the discovery of thriving non-Christian cultures in places as far off as Brazil, he argued that morals may be to some degree relative. Who are Europeans to insist that Brazilian cannibals who merely consume dead human flesh instead of wasting it are morally inferior to Europeans who persecute and oppress those of whom they disapprove?
This shift toward cultural relativism, though it was based on scant understanding of the newly discovered peoples, was to continue to have a profound effect on European thought to the present day. Indeed, it is one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. Just as their predecessors had used the tools of antiquity to gain unprecedented freedom of inquiry, the Enlightenment thinkers used the examples of other cultures to gain the freedom to reshape not only their philosophies, but their societies. It was becoming clear that there was nothing inevitable about the European patterns of thought and living: there were many possible ways of being human, and doubtless new ones could be invented.
The other contribution of Montaigne to the Enlightenment stemmed from another aspect of his famous question: “What do I know?” If we cannot be certain that our values are God-given, then we have no right to impose them by force on others. Inquisitors, popes, and kings alike had no business enforcing adherence to particular religious or philosophical beliefs.
It is one of the great paradoxes of history that radical doubt was necessary for the new sort of certainty called “scientific.” The good scientist is the one is willing to test all assumptions, to challenge all traditional opinion, to get closer to the truth. If ultimate truth, such as was claimed by religious thinkers, was unattainable by scientists, so much the better. In a sense, the strength of science at its best is that it is always aware of its limits, aware that knowledge is always growing, always subject to change, never absolute. Because knowledge depends on evidence and reason, arbitrary authority can only be its enemy.
The 17th Century
René Descartes, in the 17th century, attempted to use reason as the schoolmen had, to shore up his faith; but much more rigorously than had been attempted before. He tried to begin with a blank slate, with the bare minimum of knowledge: the knowledge of his own existence (“I think, therefore I am”). From there he attempted to reason his way to a complete defense of Christianity, but to do so he committed so many logical faults that his successors over the centuries were to slowly disintegrate his gains, even finally challenging the notion of selfhood with which he had begun. The history of philosophy from his time to the early 20th century is partly the story of more and more ingenious logic proving less and less, until Ludwig Wittgenstein succeeded in undermining the very bases of philosophy itself.
But that is a story for a different course. Here we are concerned with early stages in the process in which it seemed that logic could be a powerful avenue to truth. To be sure, logic alone could be used to defend all sorts of absurd notions; and Enlightenment thinkers insisted on combining it with something they called “reason” which consisted of common sense, observation, and their own unacknowledged prejudices in favor of skepticism and freedom.
We have been focusing closely on a thin trickle of thought which traveled through an era otherwise dominated by dogma and fanaticism. The 17th century was torn by witch-hunts and wars of religion and imperial conquest. Protestants and Catholics denounced each other as followers of Satan, and people could be imprisoned for attending the wrong church, or for not attending any. All publications, whether pamphlets or scholarly volumes, were subject to prior censorship by both church and state, often working hand in hand. Slavery was widely practiced, especially in the colonial plantations of the Western Hemisphere, and its cruelties frequently defended by leading religious figures. The despotism of monarchs exercising far greater powers than any medieval king was supported by the doctrine of the “divine right of kings,” and scripture quoted to show that revolution was detested by God. Speakers of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned, or even executed. Organizations which tried to challenge the twin authorities of church and state were banned. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the Middle Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient and powerful.
It was inevitable that sooner or later many Europeans would begin to weary of the repression and warfare carried out in the name of absolute truth. In addition, though Protestants had begun by making powerful critiques of Catholicism, they quickly turned their guns on each other, producing a bewildering array of churches each claiming the exclusive path to salvation. It was natural for people tossed from one demanding faith to another to wonder whether any of the churches deserved the authority they claimed, and to begin to prize the skepticism of Montaigne over the certainty of Luther or Calvin.
Meanwhile, there were other powerful forces at work in Europe: economic ones which were to interact profoundly with these intellectual trends.
The Political and Economic Background
During the late Middle Ages, peasants had begun to move from rural estates to the towns in search of increased freedom and prosperity. As trade and communication improved during the Renaissance, the ordinary town-dweller began to realize that things need not always go on as they had for centuries. New charters could be written, new governments formed, new laws passed, new businesses begun. Although each changed institution quickly tried to stabilize its power by claiming the support of tradition, the pressure for change continued to mount. It was not only contact with alien cultural patterns which influenced Europeans, it was the wealth brought back from Asia and the Americas which catapulted a new class of merchants into prominence, partially displacing the old aristocracy whose power had been rooted in the ownership of land. These merchants had their own ideas about the sort of world they wanted to inhabit, and they became major agents of change, in the arts, in government, and in the economy.
They were naturally convinced that their earnings were the result of their individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited wealth of traditional aristocrats. Whereas individualism had been chiefly emphasized in the Renaissance by artists, especially visual artists, it now became a core value. The ability of individual effort to transform the world became a European dogma, lasting to this day.
But the chief obstacles to the reshaping of Europe by the merchant class were the same as those faced by the rationalist philosophers: absolutist kings and dogmatic churches. The struggle was complex and many-sided, with each participant absorbing many of the others’ values; but the general trend is clear: individualism, freedom and change replaced community, authority, and tradition as core European values. Religion survived, but weakened and often transformed almost beyond recognition; the monarchy was to dwindle over the course of the hundred years beginning in the mid-18th century to a pale shadow of its former self.
This is the background of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Europeans were changing, but Europe’s institutions were not keeping pace with that change. The Church insisted that it was the only source of truth, that all who lived outside its bounds were damned, while it was apparent to any reasonably sophisticated person that most human beings on earth were not and had never been Christians–yet they had built great and inspiring civilizations. Writers and speakers grew restive at the omnipresent censorship and sought whatever means they could to evade or even denounce it.
Most important, the middle classes–the bourgeoisie–were painfully aware that they were paying taxes to support a fabulously expensive aristocracy which contributed nothing of value to society (beyond, perhaps, its patronage of the arts, which the burghers of Holland had shown could be equally well exercised by themselves), and that those useless aristocrats were unwilling to share power with those who actually managed and–to their way of thinking,–created the national wealth. They were to find ready allies in France among the impoverished masses who may have lived and thought much like their ancestors, but who were all too aware that with each passing year they were paying higher and higher taxes to support a few thousand at Versailles in idle dissipation.
The Role of the Aristocrats
Interestingly, it was among those very idle aristocrats that the French Enlightenment philosophers were to find some of their earliest and most enthusiastic followers. Despite the fact that the Church and State were more often than not allied with each other, they were keenly aware of their differences. Even kings could on occasion be attracted by arguments which seemed to undermine the authority of the Church. The fact that the aristocrats were utterly unaware of the precariousness of their position also made them overconfident, interested in dabbling in the new ideas partly simply because they were new and exciting.
Voltaire moved easily in these aristocratic circles, dining at their tables, taking a titled mistress, corresponding with monarchs. He opposed tyranny and dogma, but he had no notion of reinventing that discredited Athenian folly, democracy. He had far too little faith in the ordinary person for that. What he did think was that educated and sophisticated persons could be brought to see through the exercise of their reason that the world could and should be greatly improved.
Rousseau vs. Voltaire
Not all Enlightenment thinkers were like Voltaire in this. His chief adversary was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who distrusted the aristocrats not out of a thirst for change but because he believed they were betraying decent traditional values. He opposed the theater which was Voltaire’s lifeblood, shunned the aristocracy which Voltaire courted, and argued for something dangerously like democratic revolution. Whereas Voltaire argued that equality was impossible, Rousseau argued that inequality was not only unnatural, but that–when taken too far–it made decent government impossible. Whereas Voltaire charmed with his wit, Rousseau ponderously insisted on his correctness, even while contradicting himself. Whereas Voltaire insisted on the supremacy of the intellect, Rousseau emphasized the emotions, becoming a contributor to both the Enlightenment and its successor, romanticism. And whereas Voltaire endlessly repeated the same handful of core Enlightenment notions, Rousseau sparked off original thoughts in all directions: ideas about education, the family, government, the arts, and whatever else attracted his attention.
For all their personal differences, the two shared more values than they liked to acknowledge. They viewed absolute monarchy as dangerous and evil and rejected orthodox Christianity. Though Rousseau often struggled to seem more devout, he was almost as much a skeptic as Voltaire: the minimalist faith both shared was called “deism,” and it was eventually to transform European religion and have powerful influences on other aspects of society as well.
Across the border in Holland, the merchants, who exercised most political power, there made a successful industry out of publishing books that could not be printed in countries like France. Dissenting religious groups mounted radical attacks on Christian orthodoxy.
The Heritage of the Enlightenment
Today the Enlightenment is often viewed as a historical anomaly, a brief moment when a number of thinkers infatuated with reason vainly supposed that the perfect society could be built on common sense and tolerance, a fantasy which collapsed amid the Terror of the French Revolution and the triumphal sweep of Romanticism. Religious thinkers repeatedly proclaim the Enlightenment dead, Marxists denounce it for promoting the ideals and power of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the working classes, postcolonial critics reject its idealization of specifically European notions as universal truths, and postructuralists reject its entire concept of rational thought.
Yet in many ways, the Enlightenment has never been more alive. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law that so inspired Voltaire and Jefferson. Wherever religious conflicts erupt, mutual religious tolerance is counseled as a solution. Rousseau’s notions of self-rule are ideals so universal that the worst tyrant has to disguise his tyrannies by claiming to be acting on their behalf. European these ideas may be, but they have also become global. Whatever their limits, they have formed the consensus of international ideals by which modern states are judged.
If our world seems little closer to perfection than that of 18th-century France, that is partly due to our failure to appreciate gains we take for granted. But it is also the case that many of the enemies of the Enlightenment are demolishing a straw man: it was never as simple-mindedly optimistic as it has often been portrayed. Certainly Voltaire was no facile optimist. He distrusted utopianism, instead trying to cajole Europeans out of their more harmful stupidities. Whether we acknowledge his influence or not, we still think today more like him than like his enemies.
Qno3. What are the main ways in which Romantics differed from the Enlightenment thinkers? OR. How did Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School advance the ideas initiated by the Enlightenment thinkers.
Ans: The Enlightenment conception of individual & its faith in scientific knowledge & free enterprise continue to dominate the popular imagination even today.
Critique of Enlightenment
According to these critics, the Enlightenment brought change all right—a change for the worse:
- Enlightenment science passes itself off as a disinterested search for the truth about nature, but in fact, by disenchanting Nature of her mysteries, nature becomes nothing more than a “standing reserve” of natural resources to be exploited.
- The Enlightenment political narrative is cast as a story of the movement toward freedom and democracy, but in fact, the modern state develops systems of control and bureaucratic administration that extend greater and greater control over the individual.
- Enlightenment economics glories in overcoming local and political obstacles to the free flow of labor, capital, and goods, but the enclosure of common lands and the improvements in agricultural production in 18th century England empties villages of their ancient inhabitants, and fill the cities with rootless workers who must turn their labor into a living wage.
- Western countries glory in spreading enlightened religion, knowledge and technology to the backward native cultures, but this sense of the West’s enlightened superiority becomes an alibi for conquest and subjection of native peoples and cultures.
- Finally, while Enlightenment thinkers promised a steady progressive improvement in manner, morals, technology, and general social well-being, while the 19th and 20th century experienced unprecedented levels of state sponsored violence and economic exploitation.
For the critics of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is most essentially about power: by making a succession of others (nature, religion, the self, other cultures) the object of Enlightenment knowledge, the Enlightenment subject-position subjects others to itself. When, for example, English farmers occupy Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they strip Nature of the aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans invested it. The grid of Enlightenment rationalism is the crucial precondition for those techniques of surveying, map-making, and legal property division with which the English farmer divide and take possession of the American land.
The Enlightenment to Romanticism: Eighteenth-century philosophers weighed in on the subject. The French encyclopedic Denis Diderot maintained that technical facility was not enough to sustain the vitality of dance; he also recommended that dances portray bourgeois characters, rather than the usual gods, goddesses, and aristocrats’. The Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith introduced the notion that dance could be abstract, with no subject other than movement. The French writer Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos wrote firsthand accounts of performances he attended. A strong Milan-Paris-London axis for dance and writing about dance was in place early in the century, and a new form … (100 of 4026 words)
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The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx’s followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx’s ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists experienced that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.
Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions. In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of anti-positivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[1] The school’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud Weber and Lukács. Following Marx, they were concerned by the conditions which allowed for social change and the establishment of rational institutions. Their emphasis on the “critical” component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.
Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas’ work on communicative reason, linguistic inter-subjectivity and what Harbermas calls “the philosophical discourse of modernity”. More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change which originally gave purpose to critical theory’s various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of “conditions of possibility” for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.
It should be noted that the term “Frankfurt School” arose informally to describe the thinkers affiliated or merely associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; it is not the title of any specific position or institution per se, and few of these theorists used the term themselves. The Institute for Social Research (Institute für Sozialforschung) was founded by Carl Grünberg in 1923 as an adjunct of the University of Frankfurt; it was the first Marxist-oriented research center affiliated with a major German university. However, the school can trace its earliest roots back to Felix Weil, who was able to use money from his father’s grain business to finance the Institute.
Weil was a young Marxist who had written his doctoral thesis on the practical problems of implementing socialism and was published by Karl Korsch. With the hope of bringing different trends of Marxism together, Weil organized a week-long symposium (the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in 1922, a meeting attended by Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, Friedrich Pollock and others. The event was so successful that Weil set about erecting a building and funding salaries for a permanent institute. Weil negotiated with the Ministry of Education that the Director of the Institute would be a full professor from the state system, so that the Institute would have the status of a University institution. Although Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch both attended the Arbeitswoche which had included a study of Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, both were too committed to political activity and Party membership to join the Institute, although Korsch participated in publishing ventures for a number of years. The way Lukács was obliged to repudiate his History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923 and probably a major inspiration for the work of the Frankfurt School, was an indicator for others that independence from the Communist Party was necessary for genuine theoretical work.
The philosophical tradition now referred to as the “Frankfurt School” is perhaps particularly associated with Max Horkheimer (philosopher, sociologist and social psychologist), who took over as the institute’s director in 1930 and recruited many of the school’s most talented theorists, including Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), Herbert Marcuse (philosopher) and, as a member of the institute’s “outer circle”, Walter Benjamin (essayist and literary critic). However, the title of “school” can often be a misleading one, as the Institute’s members did not always form a series of tightly woven, complementary projects. Some scholars have therefore limited their view of the Frankfurt School to Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal and Pollock.
Qno4. What is welfare state and what are its forms.
Ans: A welfare state is a concept of government where the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms of economic and social organization.
There are two main interpretations of the idea of a welfare state:
- A model in which the state assumes primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. This responsibility in theory ought to be comprehensive, because all aspects of welfare are considered and universally applied to citizens as a “right”.
- Welfare state can also mean the creation of a “social safety net” of minimum standards of varying forms of welfare.
There is some confusion between a “welfare state” and a “welfare society,” and debate about how each term should be defined. In many countries, especially in the United States, some degree of welfare is not actually provided by the state, but directly to welfare recipients from a combination of independent volunteers, corporations (both non-profit charitable corporations as well as for-profit corporations), and government services. This phenomenon has been termed a “welfare society,” and the term “welfare system” has been used to describe the range of welfare state and welfare society mixes that are found. The welfare state involves a direct transfer of funds from the public sector to welfare recipients, but indirectly, the private sector is often contributing those funds via redistributionist taxation; the welfare state has been referred to as a type of “mixed economy.”
History of welfare states
Modern welfare states developed through a gradual process beginning in the late 19th century and continuing through the 20th. They differed from previous schemes of poverty relief due to their relatively universal coverage. The development of social insurance in Germany under Bismarck was particularly influential. Some schemes, like those in Scandinavia, were based largely in the development of autonomous, mutualist provision of benefits. Others were founded on state provision. The term was not, however, applied to all states offering social protection. The sociologist T.H. Marshall identified the welfare state as a distinctive combination of democracy, welfare and capitalism. Examples of early welfare states in the modern world are Germany, all of the Nordic Countries, the Netherlands, Uruguay and New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the 1930s..
Two forms of the welfare state
There are two ways of organizing a welfare state:
According to the first model the state is primarily concerned with directing the resources to “the people most in need”. This requires a tight bureaucratic control over the people concerned, with a maximum of interference in their lives to establish who are “in need” and minimize cheating. The unintended result is that there is a sharp divide between the receivers and the producers of social welfare, between “us” and “them”, the producers tending to dismiss the whole idea of social welfare because they will not receive anything of it. This model is dominant in the US.
According to the second model the state distributes welfare with as little bureaucratic interference as possible, to all people who fulfill easily established criteria (e.g. having children, receiving medical treatment, etc). This requires high taxing, of which almost everything is channeled back to the taxpayers with minimum expenses for bureaucratic personnel. The intended – and also largely achieved – result is that there will be a broad support for the system since most people will receive at least something. This model was constructed by the Scandinavian ministers Karl Kristian Steincke and Gustav Möller in the 30s and is dominant in Scandinavia.
Qno5. How would you define the state liberal and major perspective of the state? OR. What do you understand by the state? What is the contribution of Marxian view of the State? OR. Briefly compare the conceptions of the welfare State and the minimal State.
Ans: State can be defined as the centralized, law making, law enforcing, and politically sovereign institution in the society. In other words, it is useful to understand & define the state in terms of the functions it performs.
The State may refer to:
- Sovereign state, a sovereign political entity in international public law
- Federated state, a political entity forming part of a federal sovereign state (includes a list)
- State (polity), the state in sociology and political science
- Nation state, a state which coincides with a nation.
The essential characteristic of the liberal theory of the state is the doctrine of jurisdiction. That is, the idea that there is such a thing as a limited area of power and authority for the state — a delimitation of its proper sphere, beyond which, it is improper for the state to trespass. This doctrine is essentially the sole preserve of liberals. Only liberals seriously think about it. Anarchists reject the state altogether. Socialists are simply not concerned about limits of state power. Modern socialist governments may introduce market based reforms. The motivating factor is that of economic efficiency and not appreciation of the importance of individual liberty and limited government.
A night watchman state, or a minimal state, is a form of government in political philosophy where the government’s responsibilities are so minimal they cannot be reduced much further without becoming a form of anarchy. The government’s responsibilities are limited to protecting individuals from coercion, fraud and theft, to requiring reparation to victims, and to defending the country from foreign aggression. Therefore the only governmental institutions in a hypothetical night watchman state would be police, judicial systems, prisons and the military.
Advocacy of a minimal state is known as minarchism . Minarchists propose to enforce a night watchman state with a clearly-defined constitution limiting the government’s powers. They also may make it impossible to amend the constitution after adoption.
Gandhian perspective on the State
Gandhi’s political and moral thought is based upon a simple metaphysics. For him the universe is regulated by a supreme intelligence or the principle which he called TRUTH or GOD. It is embodied in all living beings and above all in Man, in the form of as self conscious soul or spirit. The spirit constitutes man’s essence. Since all men have a share in the divine essence, they are ultimately one. They are not merely equal but also identical. Since they have a spark of divinity in them, man is inherently good and the discovery and cultivation of this goodness is man’s purpose in this earthly life – a realization of true self through self discipline and ahimsa. In other words there is not only the perfectibility of the human self, but also an inherent urge in man to achieve it. The social and political life of man ought to be guided by the knowledge and the light of that goodness or virtue. In search of this goodness and truth, the knowledge and acceptance of evils — whether social, economic or political – and correcting and curing them were the challenges to the creative best of man. It is this context that his view on Indian social structure, religion, untouchability, property, industrialization, politics or state can be understood.
Criticism of the Modern State Like many other Indian leaders, Gandhi had great difficulty in accepting the modern and liberal capitalist state. He took great pains to point out the imperfections and dangers of modern state and sought to cut it to size by propounding a social theory where the state largely loses its deceptive luster and turns into a necessity. He did not consider the state more than a mechanical arrangement superimposed on the nation. It was impersonal, ruling by rules, functioning more or less like a machine with no human beings apparently in charge of it or accepting responsibility for its action.
Feminist theory of the State
Feminist state theory through a comparison of feminist interventions into jurisprudence, criminology, and welfare state theory. Early feminist work on the state analyzed how women were subordinated by a centralized state. More recently, feminist scholars unearthed how states are differentiated entities, comprised of multiple gender arrangements. This discovery of state variation surfaced differently in these three branches of scholarship. Feminist legal theorists concentrated on multiple legal discourses, feminist criminologists on the diverse sites of case processing, and feminist welfare theorists on the varied dimensions of welfare stratification. Because of their different approaches to state gender regimes, these scholars have much to offer, and to gain from, one another. Thus, this chapter argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary feminist dialogue on the state. It also suggests ways to promote such a dialogue and to insert a sociological perspective into this new mode of theorizing.
The Marxist Theory of the State
| Marx’s ideas about the state can be divided into three subject areas: pre-capitalist states, states in the capitalist (i.e. present) era, and the state (or absence of one) in post-capitalist society. Overlaying this is the fact that his own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in his early pre-communist phase, the “young Marx” phase which predates the unsuccessful 1848 uprisings in Europe, and in his mature, more nuanced work.
The Marxist Theory of the State |
| · The Marxist Theory of the State – Part 1
The state did not always exist. Certain sociologists and other representatives of academic political science are in error when they speak of the state in primitive societies. What they are really doing is identifying the state with the community. In so doing, they strip the state of its special characteristic. – |
| The Bourgeois State: the Face of Everyday Reality
· The Marxist Theory of the State – Part 2 Through the struggle waged by the labour movement certain institutions of the bourgeois state become both more subtle and more complex. – |
| The Proletariat in Power
· The Marxist Theory of the State – Part 3 When we say that the state remains in existence up to and including the transitional society between capitalism and socialism, the question arises whether the working class still needs a state when it takes power. |
Qno6. Write a note on the capitalist economy. What are the various criticisms of he capitalist economy that has been made during the last two centuries. OR. What are the essential features of the critique of capitalism as propounded by Marx and Engles? Distinguish pre-1917 critique of capitalism from that of the post 1917 one.Acronyms Terms ?
Ans: A capitalist economy otherwise called as the free market economy can be defined as an economic activity, where the means of production are privately owned. Most of the economies over the world have enriched their economic system by implementing capitalist norm in the recent years. Here in such form of economy there is no Government interference.
The basic characteristics of such types of economic system are as follows:
- More private participation in the field of economic activities.
- Free environment to complete in the economy.
- Individuals and firms act for profit motive.
- High freedom for choice to the consumers.
- Government acts as a police state.
Critique: Capitalism
Capitalism is based on the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest. While I am aware of no nation that practices a pure form of this economic system, several Western countries use a form of capitalism at the core of their economies. Scaled-down examples of capitalism are flea markets, bazzars and black market trading.
Properties of Capitalism
- Social/cultural rules and political laws define the environment.
- Supply and demand provide environmental pressures.
- Those that best “fit” that environment survive and maintain the rules/laws.
- Those that can’t/don’t thrive in the system, and otherwise lack participation, are culled.
- Successful capitalistic systems tend to be open and competitive.
- A healthy capitalistic system results in economic incentives.
Advantages of Capitalism
- Capitalism is an internally stable economic system, in that it is consistent with human behavior. People understand that life is not fair – there’s no “free lunch”. You have to work to survive and only the lucky who manage to thrive within the socio-economic matrix make it to the top. As long as there is a belief/hope that one can advance in the system, there is an incentive to participate.
- Capitalism is also externally stable, in that survival in a capitalistic system requires innovation and flexibility to keep up with the changes in supply and demand. Such a system is generally prepared to deal with the influx of competition from external sources.
- Large populations are likely to be diverse, which is beneficial to healthy capitalistic systems.
- Large, diversified societies tend to gravitate towards hierarchical social systems; capitalism easily adapts to such structures.
Disadvantages of Capitalism
- It is not acceptable in most modern societies to allow portions of their population to be “culled”.
- Those in power tend to construct rules that limit diversity and competition, thereby weakening the flexibility and strength of the system as a whole.
- A vast imbalance in opportunity encourages revolt, which disrupts and destabilizes the system.
Remedies for Capitalism
- Create secondary social mechanisms to support those that do not “fit” in the socio-economic system.
- Encourage the inclusion of all members of the population to compete, and open up competition to external markets, in order to maximize diversity and flexibility.
- Educate the elite to the systemic benefits of resource distribution, and encourage incentives for such distribution.
Criticism of capitalism
Capitalism has been criticized from many perspectives during its history. Criticisms range from people who disagree with the principles of capitalism in its entirety, to those who disagree with particular outcomes of capitalism. Among those wishing to replace capitalism with a different method of distributing goods, a distinction can be made between those believing that capitalism can only be overcome with revolution (e.g. communist revolution) and those believing that change can come slowly through reformism (e.g. classic social democracy). Some critics recognize merits in capitalism and wish to balance capitalism with some form of social control, typically through government regulation (e.g. British Labour Party). Many aspects of capitalism have come under attack from the anti-globalization movement, which is primarily opposed to corporate capitalism.
According to contemporary critics of capitalism, rapid industrialization in Europe created working conditions viewed as unfair, including: 14-hour work days, child labor, and shanty towns.[1] Some popular novels arose during this time that took a critical view of the industrial revolution, such as some written by Charles Dickens. Some modern economists argue that average living standards did not improve, or only very slowly improved, before 1840.
Early socialist thinkers rejected capitalism altogether, attempting to create socialist communities free of the perceived injustices of early capitalism. Among these utopian socialists were Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Other socialist thinkers argued that socialism could not be implemented before historical forces created the right conditions. They saw promise in the industrial revolution, viewing it as a new system that could potentially produce enough goods for the entire human population, but which was hampered by its inefficient method of distributing goods. In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels released the Communist Manifesto, which outlined a political and economic critique of capitalism based on the philosophy of historical materialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon a contemporary of Marx was another notable critic of capitalism, and was one of the first to call himself an anarchist.
By the early 20th century, a myriad of socialist tendencies had arisen based on different interpretations of current events. Monopoly capital, accelerating colonialism, the spread of labor unions, the widening of the franchise, and clearly increasing living standards were new trends which capitalist critics, such as Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin and Eduard Bernstein, worked to understand and which contributed to differences in organizational models (e.g. anarcho-syndicalism, social democracy, and Bolshevism). Identifying problems with free market capitalism, governments also began placing restrictions on market operations and created interventionist programs which attempted to ameliorate perceived market shortcomings (e.g. Keynesian and the New Deal). Starting with the 1917 Russian revolution, Communist states increased in numbers and a Cold War started with the developed capitalist nations. Following the Revolutions of 1989, many of these states adopted market economies. Most of the remaining formally Communist states have implemented widespread market liberalizations.
Contemporary critics have argued for government interventions against capitalism in an age of globalization. These can be in response to perceived market shortcomings around global warming, exploitation of citizens under consumer capitalism, shifts away from production-based economies towards a dependence on financial markets, and economic imperialism. Many current organizations, not necessarily rejecting capitalism outright, focus on changing national and corporate policies (e.g. United Students Against Sweatshops or Greenpeace). Other organizations take a holistic view, supporting social ecology or participatory economics.
Issues of capitalist economy:
- Democracy and economic freedom.
- Imperialism and political oppression.
- Inefficiency and waste.
- Economic inequality.
- Market failure.
- Market instability.
Types of criticism
Marxist criticism
“Capitalism uses force but it also educates the people to its system. Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class society, either through some theory of divine origin or through a mechanical theory of natural law. This lulls the masses since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it is impossible to struggle. Immediately following comes the hope of improvement — and in this, capitalism differed from the preceding caste systems, which offered no possibilities for advancement.”
Karl Marx saw capitalism as a historical stage which could be followed by socialism
Marxists define capital as “a social, economic relation” between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers (“the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer”). In brief, they argue that the owners of capital do not work and therefore steal from or exploit the workers. Gradually, the capitalists will accumulate more and more capital and make the workers continually poorer, in the end causing a revolution. The private ownership of the means of production is therefore seen as a restriction on freedom.
Marx and his followers have proffered various related lines of argument suggesting that capitalism is a contradiction-laden system characterized by recurring crises having a tendency towards increasing severity. They have claimed that this tendency of the system to unravel combined with a socialization process which links workers in a worldwide market are two major factors that create the objective conditions for revolutionary change. Capitalism is seen as just one stage in the evolution of the economy of a society.
Religious criticism
Many religions have criticized or opposed specific elements of capitalism; traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam forbid lending money at interest. Christianity has been a source of both praise and criticism for capitalism, particularly its materialist aspects The first socialists drew many of their principles from Christian values, against “bourgeois” values of profiteering, greed, selfishness, and hoarding.
Some Christian critics of capitalism may not oppose capitalism entirely, but support a mixed economy in order to ensure adequate labor standards and relations, as well as economic justice.
Islamic law recognizes the right to private property but regulates economic activities. A 2.5% alms tax (Zakat) is levied on all gold, crops, and cattle. Shia Twelver Muslims pay an additional 20% on all savings (defined as income minus expenses on necessities like food and shelter.) Usury or riba is forbidden, and religious law encourages the use of capital to spur economic activity while placing the burden of risk along with the benefit of profit with the owner of the capital. Methods of Islamic banking have been developed. The Islamic constitution of Iran, which was drafted mostly by Islamic clerics, criticizes “materialist schools of thought” that encourage “concentration and accumulation of wealth and maximization of profit.” Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist writer, criticized capitalism in his 1951 book The Battle between Islam and Capitalism.
Noam Chomsky’s criticism
Noam Chomsky has argued that the asymmetric application of free market principles creates a “privatized tyranny”: “The talk about labor mobility doesn’t mean the right of people to move anywhere they want, as has been required by free market theory ever since Adam Smith, but rather the right to fire employees at will. And, under the current investor-based version of globalization, capital and corporations must be free to move, but not people, because their rights are secondary, incidental.”
Chomsky argues that the wealthy use free-market rhetoric to justify imposing greater economic risk upon the lower classes, while being insulated from the rigours of the market by the political and economic advantages that such wealth affords. He remarked, “The free market is socialism for the rich—[free] markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.”
Qno7. What are the main features of Modern Social Structure? OR. Modern World is characterized by a new type of Social Structure. Discuss. OR. What are the ways in which human life under modern conditions is different from earlier times? OR. How is he process of secularization a part of modern Social Structure.
Ans:
Social structure is a term used in sociology and the other social sciences to refer to how society is organized into predictable patterns. Whereas ‘structure’ refers to “the macro”, “agency” refers to “the micro”. The idea that a new type of society had begun to emerge around the 18th – 19th centuries under the impulse of modern economy. It is important in the modern study of organizations, because an organization’s structure may determine its flexibility, capacity to change, and many other factors. Therefore, structure is an important issue for management.
Social structure may be seen to influence important social systems including the economic system, legal system, political system, cultural system, and others. Family, religion, law, economy and class are all social structures. The “social system” is the parent system of those various systems that are embedded in it.
Society: self contained, self sufficient population united by social relationships, bounded from other populations by geographic locations
Stratification: unequal distribution of valued goods or holdings in a population (i.e. class, status, resources, grades, wealth, positional goods, etc.)
Network – pattern of relationships in a population of actors
Social Structure Variables: Pattern of relationships, size of institution, income distribution, and concurrency of social relationships.
History
The early study of social structures has informed the study of institutions, culture and agency, social interaction, and history. Alexis de Tocqueville was apparently the first to use the term social structure; later, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Émile Durkheim all contributed to structural concepts in sociology. Weber investigated and analyzed the institutions of modern society: market, bureaucracy (private enterprise and public administration), and politics (e.g. democracy).
One of the earliest and most comprehensive accounts of social structure was provided by Karl Marx, who related political, cultural, and religious life to the mode of production (an underlying economic structure). Marx argued that the economic base substantially determined the cultural and political superstructure of a society. Subsequent Marxist accounts, such as that by Louis Althusser, proposed a more complex relationship that asserted the relative autonomy of cultural and political institutions, and a general determination by economic factors only “in the last instance”.
In 1905, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies first published his study The Present Problems of Social Structure in the U.S.A, in: arguing that only the constitution of a multitude into a unity creates a “social structure” (basing this approach on his concept of social will).
Émile Durkheim (drawing on the analogies between biological and social systems popularized by Herbert Spencer and others) introduced the idea that diverse social institutions and practices Played a role in assuring the functional integration of society — the assimilation of diverse parts into a unified and self-reproducing whole. In this context, Durkheim distinguished two forms of structural relationship: mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity. The former describes structures that unite similar parts through a shared culture; the latter describes differentiated parts united through exchange and material interdependence.
Georg Simmel develop Weber did but more generally), competition, division of labor, formation of parties, representation, inner solidarity coupled with exclusiveness toward the outside, and many similar features in the state, in a religious community, in an economic association, in an art school, and in family and kinship networks (however diverse the interests that give rise to these associations, the forms in which interests are realized may yet be identical (Crothers, 1996)).
The notion of social structure was extensively developed in the 20th century, with key contributions from structuralist perspectives drawing on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Feminist or Marxist perspectives, from functionalist perspectives such as those developed by Talcott Parsons and his followers, or from a variety of analytic perspectives (see Blau 1975, Lopez and Scott 2000). Some follow Marx in trying to identify the basic dimensions of society that explain the other dimensions, most emphasizing either economic production or political power. Others follow Lévi-Strauss in seeking logical order in cultural structures. Still others, notably Peter Blau, follow Simmel in attempting to base a formal theory of social structure on numerical patterns in relationships—analyzing, for example, the ways in which factors like group size shape intergroup relations.
The notion of social structure is intimately related to a variety of central topics in social science, including the relation of structure and agency. The most influential attempts to combine the concept of social structure with agency are Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory. Giddens emphasizes the duality of structure and agency, in the sense that structures and agency cannot be conceived apart from one another. This permits him to argue that structures are neither independent of actors nor determining of their behavior, but rather sets of rules and competencies on which actors draw, and which, in the aggregate, they reproduce. Giddens’s analysis, in this respect, closely parallels Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the binaries that underlie classic sociological and anthropological reasoning (notably the universalizing tendencies of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism). Bourdieu’s practice theory also seeks a more supple account of social structure as embedded in, rather than determinative of, individual behavior.
Other recent work by Margaret Archer (morphogenesis theory), Tom R. Burns and collaborators (actor-system dynamics theory and social rule system theory), and Immanuel Wallerstein (World Systems Theory) provided elaborations and applications of the sociological classics in structural sociology.
Social structure can also be divided into microstructure and macrostructure. Microstructure is the pattern of relations between most basic elements of social life, that cannot be further divided and have no social structure of their own (for example, pattern of relations between individuals in a group composed of individuals – where individuals have no social structure, or a structure of organizations as a pattern of relations between social positions or social roles, where those positions and roles have no structure by themselves). Macrostructure is thus a kind of ‘second level’ structure, a pattern of relations between objects that have their own structure (for example, a political social structure between political parties, as political parties have their own social structure). Some types of social structures that modern sociologist differentiate are relation structures (in family or larger family-like clan structures), communication structures (how information is passed in organizations) and sociometric structures (structures of sympathy, antipathy and indifference in organizations – this was studied by Jacob L. Moreno).
Social rule system theory reduces the structures of (3) to particular rule system arrangements, that is, the types of basic structures of (1 and 2). It shares with role theory, organizational and institutional sociology, and network analysis the concern with structural properties and developments and at the same time provides detailed conceptual tools needed to generate interesting, fruitful propositions and models and analyses.
Sociologists also distinguish between:
- normative structure — pattern of relations in given structure (organization) between norms and modes of operations of people of varying social positions
- ideal structure — pattern of relations between beliefs and views of people of varying social positions
- interest structure — pattern of relations between goals and desires of people of varying social positions
- interaction structure — forms of communications of people of varying social positions
Origins and evolution
Some believe that social structure is naturally developed. It may be caused by larger system needs, such as the need for labour, management, professional and military classes, or by conflicts between groups, such as competition among political parties or among elites and masses. Others believe that this structuring is not a result of natural processes, but is socially constructed. It may be created by the power of elites who seek to retain their power, or by economic systems that place emphasis upon competition or cooperation.
The most thorough account of the evolution of social structure is perhaps provided by structure and agency accounts that allow for a sophisticated analysis of the co-evolution of social structure and human agency, where socialized agents with a degree of autonomy take action in social systems where their action is on the one hand mediated by existing institutional structure and expectations but may, on the other hand, influence or transform that institutional structure.
Critical Implications
The notion of social structure may mask systematic biases, as it is comprised of many identifiable sub variables, for example, gender. Some argue that men and women who have otherwise equal qualifications receive different treatment in the workplace because of their gender, which would be term a “social structural” bias, but other variables (such as time on the job or hours worked) might be masked. Modern social structural analysis takes this into account through multivariate analysis and other techniques, but the analytic problem of how to combine various aspects of social life into a whole remains.
Qno8. What do you mean by Bureaucratization in the Modern World? And what are its different forms of bureaucracy. OR. What is Bureaucratization? Discuss this process with references to the Modern State.
Ans: Bureaucracy is the combined organizational structure, procedures, protocols, and set of regulations in place to manage activity, usually in large organizations. As opposed to adhocracy, it is often represented by standardized procedure (rule-following) that guides the execution of most or all processes within the body; formal division of powers; hierarchy; and relationships, intended to anticipate needs and improve efficiency.
A bureaucracy traditionally does not create policy but, rather, enacts it. Law, policy, and regulation normally originate from a leadership, which creates the bureaucracy to implement them. In practice, the interpretation and execution of policy, etc. can lead to informal influence – but not necessarily. A bureaucracy is directly responsible to the leadership that creates it, such as a government executive or board of directors. Conversely, the leadership is usually responsible to an electorate, shareholders, membership or whoever is intended to benefit. As a matter of practicality, the bureaucracy is where the individual will interface with an organization such as a government etc., rather than directly with its leadership. Generally, larger organizations result in a greater distancing of the individual from the leadership, which can be consequential or intentional by design.
Bureaucracy is derived from the word bureau, used from the early 18th century in Western Europe not just to refer to a writing desk, but to an office, i.e. a workplace, where officials worked. The original French meaning of the word bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before the French Revolution of 1789 and from there rapidly spread to other countries. The Greek suffix -kratia or kratos – means “power” or “rule”. Bureaucracy thus basically means office power or office rule, the rule of the officialdom.
Modern bureaucracies arose as the government of states grew larger during the modern period, and especially following the Industrial Revolution. As the authors David Osborne and Ted Gaebler point out
“It is hard to imagine today, but a hundred years ago bureaucracy meant something positive. It connoted a rational, efficient method of organization – something to take the place of the arbitrary exercise of power by authoritarian regimes. Bureaucracy brought the same logic to government work that the assembly line brought to the factory. With the hierarchical authority and functional a specialization, they made possible the efficient undertaking of large complex tasks.”
Tax collectors, perhaps the most disliked of all bureaucrats, became increasingly necessary as states began to take in more and more revenue, while the role of administrators increased as the functions of government multiplied. Along with this expansion, though, came the recognition of the corruption and nepotism often inherent within the managerial system, leading to civil service reform on a large scale in many countries towards the end of the 19th century.
Types of bureaucratic agencies
- Examining different agencies from a management point of view, they differ in two main ways: whether or not the activities of the operators can be observed, and whether the results of those activities can be observed. The first factor deals with outputs, or what the agency does on a day to day basis. The second factor deals with outcomes, or the overall results of agency work. The extreme cases where outputs and outcomes are either simple or difficult to observe yields four different kinds of agencies: production, procedural, craft, and coping [2].
- Production organizations are those in which both outputs and outcomes are observable. Examples include the Social Security Administration, United States Postal Service, and IRS. In production organizations, managers can observe the outputs of officials, and can (for example in the IRS) measure the amount of money collected in taxes, and estimate with accuracy how much more tax money will be produced by increasing the level of auditing activity.
- Procedural organizations are those where outputs can be observed, but outcomes are unclear or not observable. Examples include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the United States armed forces during peace time. OSHA may observe the actions of health inspectors, but may not be able to measure how these individual actions add up to improved safety and health in the workplace. In the armed forces during peacetime, all aspects of training and deployment can be observed, but it cannot be measured how these activities deter aggression, or prepare for a future (unknown) conflict.
- Craft organizations are those where outputs are hard to observe, but outcomes are fairly easy to evaluate. Examples include the armed services at war, who may operate under a fog of war, but whose battle outcomes can be easily measured. Another example is the United States Department of Labor and their “Wage and Hour Division”. While the outputs of individual inspectors in the field are difficult to measure, overall outcomes of negotiated compliance agreements and referrals to federal attorneys for legal action are easily measurable.
- Coping organizations are those where neither outputs nor outcomes are observable. Typical examples include Police Departments, and the United States Department of State. Some of the activities of diplomats and policeman cannot be observed or measured (e.g. sensitive conversations with foreign leaders, and interactions with citizens on the street), and the outcomes are also difficult to judge (e.g. changes in foreign perceptions of US interests, and the level of order on a policeman’s beat)
- An agency’s type substantially impacts its approach to its mission, (i.e. the degree to which its members are devoted to accomplishing the agency’s stated mission) and to compliance with the law and existing policy.
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Ans: The evolution & the practice of democracy in the modern world have varied greatly. Each of the nation-states that today claims to be democratic has arrived at its own distinctive form of democracy by a quite distinctive route. History, society & economy are powerful influences shaping democracy, as are democratic ideas & ideals. It is a mix of the material & the ideological that must explain democracy anywhere. The struggle for democracy is never concluded; it just constantly assumes new forms.
There are several varieties of democracy, some of which provide better representation and more freedoms for their citizens than others. However, if any democracy is not carefully legislated – through the use of balances – to avoid an uneven distribution of political power, such as the separation of powers, then a branch of the system of rule could accumulate power and become harmful to the democracy itself.
The “majority rule” is often described as a characteristic feature of democracy, but without responsible government or constitutional protections of individual liberties from democratic power, it is possible for dissenting individuals to be oppressed by the “tyranny of the majority”. An essential process in representative democracies is competitive elections that are fair both substantively and procedurally. Furthermore, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential so that citizens are informed and able to vote in their personal interests.
Popular sovereignty is common but not a universal motivating subject for establishing a democracy. In some countries, democracy is based on the philosophical principle of equal rights. Many people use the term “democracy” as shorthand for liberal democracy, which may include additional elements such as political pluralism; equality before the law; the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances; due process; civil liberties; human rights; and elements of civil society outside the government.
In the United States, separation of powers is often cited as a supporting attribute, but in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the dominant philosophy is parliamentary sovereignty (though in practice judicial independence is generally maintained). In other cases, “democracy” is used to mean direct democracy. Though the term “democracy” is typically used in the context of a political state, the principles are applicable to private organizations and other groups also.
Democracy has its origins in Ancient Greece. However other cultures have significantly contributed to the evolution of democracy such as Ancient Rome, Europe, and North and South America. The concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages and the Age of Enlightenment and in the American and French Revolutions. Democracy has been called the “last form of government” and has spread considerably across the globe. The Right to vote has been expanded in many Jurisdictions over time from relatively narrow groups (such as wealthy men of a particular ethnic group), with New Zealand the first nation to grant universal suffrage for all its citizens in 1893. Suffrage still remains a controversial issue with regard to disputed territories, areas with significant immigration, and countries that exclude certain demographic groups.
Ancient origins
The term democracy first appeared in ancient Greek political and philosophical thought. The philosopher Plato contrasted democracy, the system of “rule by the governed”, with the alternative systems of monarchy (rule by one individual), oligarchy (rule by a small élite class) and democracy (ruling class of property owners). Although Athenian democracy is today considered by many to have been a form of direct democracy, originally it had two distinguishing features: firstly the allotment (selection by lot) of ordinary citizens to government offices and courts, and secondarily the assembly of all the citizens.
All citizens were eligible to speak and vote in the Assembly, which set the laws of the city-state. However, the Athenian citizenship was only for males born from a father who was citizen and who had been doing their “military service” between 18 and 20 years old; this excluded women, slaves, foreigners and males under 20 years old. Of the 250,000 inhabitants only some 30,000 on average were citizens. Of those 30,000 perhaps 5,000 might regularly attend one or more meetings of the popular Assembly. Most of the officers and magistrates of Athenian government were allotted; only the generals (strategoi) and a few other officers were elected.
A possible example of primitive democracy may have been the early Sumerian city-states. A similar proto-democracy or oligarchy existed temporarily among the Medes (ancient Iranian people) in the 6th century BC, but which came to an end after the Achaemenid (Persian) Emperor Darius the Great declared that the best monarchy was better than the best oligarchy or best democracy.
A serious claim for early democratic institutions comes from the independent “republics” of India, sanghas and ganas, which existed as early as the sixth century BC and persisted in some areas until the fourth century AD. The evidence is scattered and no pure historical source exists for that period. In addition, Diodorus (a Greek historian at the time of Alexander the Great’s excursion of India), without offering any detail, mentions that independent and democratic states existed in India. However, modern scholars note that the word democracy at the third century BC and later had been degraded and could mean any autonomous state no matter how oligarchic it was. The lacks of the concept of citizen equality across caste system boundaries lead many scholars to believe that the true nature of ganas and sanghas would not be comparable to that of truly democratic institutions.
Even though the Roman Republic contributed significantly into certain aspects of democracy, only a minority of Romans were citizens. As such, having votes in elections for choosing representatives and then the votes of the powerful were given more weight through a system of Gerrymandering. For that reason, almost all high officials, including members of the Senate, came from a few wealthy and noble families. However, many notable exceptions did occur.
Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, there were various systems involving elections or assemblies, although often only involving a small amount of the population, the election of Gopala in Bengal, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Althing in Iceland, the Løgting in the Faroe Islands certain medieval Italian city-states such as Venice, the tuatha system in early medieval Ireland, the Veche in Novgorod and Pskov Republics of medieval Russia, Scandinavian Things, The States in Tirol and Switzerland and the autonomous merchant city of Sakai in the 16th century in Japan. However, participation was often restricted to a minority, and so may be better classified as oligarchy. Most regions in medieval Europe were ruled by clergy or feudal lords.
A little closer to modern democracy were the Cossack republics of Ukraine in the 16th-17th centuries: Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporizhian Sich. The highest post – the Hetman – was elected by the representatives from the country’s districts. Because these states were very militarized, the right to participate in Hetman’s elections was largely restricted to those who served in the Cossack Army and over time was curtailed effectively limiting these rights to higher army ranks.
Qno10. How was welfare as practiced in Britain different from that packetized in Germany? OR. What were the various ideas that were propagated on the concept of welfare? OR, write an essay on the welfare measures taken in Japan.
Ans: A welfare state is a concept of government where the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. The general term may cover a variety of forms of economic and social organization
There are two main interpretations of the idea of a welfare state:
- A model in which the state assumes primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. This responsibility in theory ought to be comprehensive, because all aspects of welfare are considered and universally applied to citizens as a “right”.
- Welfare state can also mean the creation of a “social safety net” of minimum standards of varying forms of welfare.
There is some confusion between a “welfare state” and a “welfare society,” and debate about how each term should be defined. In many countries, especially in the United States, some degree of welfare is not actually provided by the state, but directly to welfare recipients from a combination of independent volunteers, corporations (both non-profit charitable corporations as well as for-profit corporations), and government services. This phenomenon has been termed a “welfare society,” and the term “welfare system” has been used to describe the range of welfare state and welfare society mixes that are found. The welfare state involves a direct transfer of funds from the public sector to welfare recipients, but indirectly, the private sector is often contributing those funds via redistributionist taxation; the welfare state has been referred to as a type of “mixed economy.”
English term “welfare state” is believed by Asa Briggs to have been coined by Archbishop William Temple during the Second World War, contrasting wartime Britain with the “warfare state” of Nazi Germany. Friedrich Hayek contends that the term derived from the older German word Wohlfahrtsstaat, which itself was used by nineteenth century historians to describe a variant of the ideal of Polizeistaat (“police state”). It was fully developed by the German academic Sozialpolitiker—”socialists of the chair”—from 1870 and first implemented through Bismarck’s “state socialism”. Bismarck’s policies have also been seen as the creation of a welfare state.
In German, a roughly equivalent term (Sozialstaat, “social state”) had been in use since 1870. There had been earlier attempts to use the same phrase in English, for example in Munroe Smith’s text “Four German Jurists”, but the term did not enter common use until William Temple popularized it. The Italian term “Social state” (Stato sociale) has the same origin.
The Swedish welfare state is called Folkhemmet and goes back to the 1936 compromise between the Union and big Corporate companies. It is a Mixed economy, built on strong unions and a strong system of Social security and universal health care.
In French, the synonymous term “providence state” (État-providence) was originally coined as a sarcastic pejorative remark used by opponents of welfare state policies during the Second Empire (1854-1870).
In Spanish and many other languages, an analogous term is used: estado del bienestar; translated literally: “state of well-being”.
In Portuguese, a similar phrase exists: Estado Providência; which means “Providing State”, as in the State should provide citizens their demands in order to achieve people’s well-being.
History of welfare states
Modern welfare states developed through a gradual process beginning in the late 19th century and continuing through the 20th. They differed from previous schemes of poverty relief due to their relatively universal coverage. The development of social insurance in Germany under Bismarck was particularly influential. Some schemes, like those in Scandinavia, were based largely in the development of autonomous, mutualist provision of benefits. Others were founded on state provision. The term was not, however, applied to all states offering social protection. The sociologist T.H. Marshall identified the welfare state as a distinctive combination of democracy, welfare and capitalism. Examples of early welfare states in the modern world are Germany, all of the Nordic Countries, the Netherlands, Uruguay and New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the 1930s..
Changed attitudes in reaction to the Great Depression were instrumental in the move to the welfare state in many countries, a harbinger of new times where “cradle-to-grave” services became a reality after the poverty of the Depression. During the Great Depression, it was seen as an alternative “middle way” between communism and capitalism. In the period following the Second World War, many countries in Europe moved from partial or selective provision of social services to relatively comprehensive coverage of the population.
The activities of present-day welfare states extend to the provision of both cash welfare benefits (such as old-age pensions or unemployment benefits) and in-kind welfare services (such as health or childcare services). Through these provisions, welfare states can affect the distribution of wellbeing and personal autonomy among their citizens, as well as influencing how their citizens consume and how they spend their time.
After the discovery and inflow of the oil revenue, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates all became welfare states for some residents.
In the United Kingdom, the beginning of the modern welfare state was in 1911 when David Lloyd George suggested everyone in work should pay national insurance contribution for unemployment and health benefits from work.
In 1942, the Social Insurance and Allied Services was created by Sir William Beveridge in order to aid those who were in need of help, or in poverty. Beveridge worked as a volunteer for the poor, and set up national insurance. He stated that ‘All people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed.’ The basic assumptions of the report were the National Health Service, which provided free health care to the UK. The Universal Child Benefit was a scheme to give benefits to parents, encouraging people to have children by enabling them to feed and support a family. This was particularly beneficial after the Second World War when the population of the United Kingdom declined. Universal Child Benefit may have helped drive the Baby boom. The impact of the report was huge and 600,000 copies were made.
Beveridge recommended to the government that they should find ways of tackling the five giants, being Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. He argued to cure these problems; the government should provide adequate income to people, adequate health care, adequate education, adequate housing and adequate employment. Before 1939, health care had to be paid for, this was done through a vast network of friendly societies, trade unions and other insurance companies which counted the vast majority of the UK working population as members. These friendly societies provided insurance for sickness, unemployment and invalidity, therefore providing people with an income when they were unable to work. But because of the 1942 Beveridge Report, in 5 July 1948, the National Insurance Act, National Assistance Act and National Health Service Act came into force, thus this is the day that the modern UK welfare state was founded.
Welfare systems were developing intensively since the end of the World War II. At the end of century due to their restructuration part of their responsibilities started to be channeled through non-governmental organizations which became important providers of social services.
There are two ways of organizing a welfare state:
According to the first model the state is primarily concerned with directing the resources to “the people most in need”. This requires a tight bureaucratic control over the people concerned, with a maximum of interference in their lives to establish who are “in need” and minimize cheating. The unintended result is that there is a sharp divide between the receivers and the producers of social welfare, between “us” and “them”, the producers tending to dismiss the whole idea of social welfare because they will not receive anything of it. This model is dominant in the US.
According to the second model the state distributes welfare with as little bureaucratic interference as possible, to all people who fulfill easily established criteria (e.g. having children, receiving medical treatment, etc). This requires high taxing, of which almost everything is channeled back to the taxpayers with minimum expenses for bureaucratic personnel. The intended – and also largely achieved – result is that there will be a broad support for the system since most people will receive at least something. This model was constructed by the Scandinavian ministers Karl Kristian Steincke and Gustav Möller in the 30s and is dominant in Scandinavia.
Qno11. What is a nation? Discuss with an overview of different definitions. OR. Discuss the view that Nationalism is a product of modernization? OR. Discuss different models of nationalism.
Ans: Nationalism involves the identification of an ethnic identity with a state. The subject can include the belief that one’s nation is of primary importance. It is also used to describe a movement to establish or protect a homeland (usually an autonomous state) for an ethnic group. In some cases the identification of a homogeneous national culture is combined with a negative view of other races or cultures. Nationalism is sometimes reactionary, calling for a return to a national past and sometimes for the expulsion of foreigners. Other forms of nationalism are revolutionary, calling for the establishment of an independent state as a homeland for an ethnic underclass.
Nationalism emphasizes collective identity – a ‘people’ must be autonomous, united, and express a single national culture. However, some nationalists stress individualism as an important part of their own national identity.
National flags, national anthems, and other symbols of national identity are often considered sacred, as if they were religious rather than political symbols. Deep emotions are aroused. Some scholars see the word “nationalism” as pejorative, standing in opposition to a more positive term, patriotism.
History
Before the development of nationalism, people were generally loyal to a city or to a particular leader rather than to their nation. Encyclopedia Britannica identifies the movement’s genesis with the late-18th century American Revolution and French Revolution; other historians point specifically to the ultra-nationalist party in France during the French Revolution.
The term nationalism was coined by Johann Gottfried Herder (nationalismus) during the late 1770s. Precisely where and when nationalism emerged is difficult to determine, but its development is closely related to that of the modern state and the push for popular sovereignty that came to a head with the French Revolution and the American Revolution in the late 18th century. Since that time, nationalism has become one of the most significant political and social forces in history, perhaps most notably as a major influence or postulate of World War I and especially World War II. Fascism, is a form of authoritarian civic nationalism which stresses absolute loyalty and obedience to the state, whose purpose is to serve the interests of its nation alone.
Some nationalists exclude certain groups. They view people who are, in fact, citizens of their nation, as being not really citizens, in some sense, and therefore not protected by the rights afforded “real” citizens. For example, George H. W. Bush said, “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” Sometimes a mythic homeland is more important for the national identity than the actual territory occupied by the nation.
Civic nationalism
Civic nationalism defines the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights, and allegiance to similar political procedures. According to the principles of civic nationalism the nation is not based on common ethnic ancestry, but is a political entity, whose core is not ethnicity? This civic concept of nationalism is exemplified by Ernest Renan in his lecture in 1882 “Where is the nation?”, where he defined the nation as a “daily plebiscite dependent on the will of its people to continue living together”.
Civic nationalism (or civil nationalism) is the form of nationalism in which the state derives political legitimacy from the active participation of its citizenry, from the degree to which it represents the “will of the people”. It is often seen as originating with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and especially the social contract theories which take their name from his 1762 book The Social Contract. Civic nationalism lies within the traditions of rationalism and liberalism, but as a form of nationalism it is contrasted with ethnic nationalism. Membership of the civic nation is considered voluntary. Civic-national ideals influenced the development of representative democracy in countries such as the United States and France.
Ethnocentrism
Nationalism does not necessarily imply a belief in the superiority of one ethnicity over others; some so-called nationalists support ethnocentric protectionism or ethnocentric supremacy. Studies have yielded evidence that such behaviour may be derived from innate preferences in humans from infancy.
In the USA for example, non-indigenous ethnocentric nationalist movements exist for both black and white peoples. These forms of “nationalism” often promote or glorify foreign nations that they believe can serve as an example for their own nation, see Anglophilia or Afrocentrism.
Explicit biological race theory was influential from the end of the 19th century. Nationalist and Fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century often appealed to these theories. The National Socialist ideology was amongst the most comprehensively “racial” ideologies: the concept of “race” influenced aspects of policy in Nazi Germany. In the 21st century the term “race” is no longer regarded by many people as a meaningful term to describe the range of human phenotype clusters; the term ethnocentrism is a more accurate and meaningful term.
Ethnic cleansing is often seen as both a nationalist and ethnocentrist phenomenon. It is part of nationalist logic that the state is reserved for one nation, but not all nationalist nation-states expel their minorities.
Expansionist nationalism
Expansionist nationalism promotes expansion into new territories, usually with the claim that the existing territory is too small or is not able to physically or economically sustain the nation’s population. One example of this is Adolf Hitler’s territorial demands.
Left-wing nationalism
Left-wing nationalism (occasionally known as socialist nationalism) refers to any political movement that combines left-wing politics with nationalism. Many nationalist movements are dedicated to national liberation, in the view that their nations are being persecuted by other nations and thus need to exercise self-determination by liberating themselves from the accused persecutors. Anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninism is closely tied with this ideology, and practical examples include Stalin’s early work Marxism and the National Question and his Socialism in One Country edict, which declares that nationalism can be used in an internationalist context, fighting for national liberation without racial or religious divisions. Other examples of left-wing nationalism include Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement that launched the Cuban Revolution ousting the American-backed Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Ireland’s Sinn Fein and the African National Congress in South Africa.
Territorial nationalism
Territorial nationalist assume that all inhabitants of a particular nation owe allegiance to their country of birth of adoption. A sacred quality is sought in the nation and in the popular memories it evokes. Citizenship is idealized by territorial nationalist A criterion of a territorial nationalism is the establishment of a mass, public culture based on common values and traditions of the population.
Ultra-nationalism
Ultra-nationalism often leads to conflict within a state, as well as between states, and in its extreme form leads to war, secession, or genocide.
Fascism is a form of authoritarian ultra-nationalism which promotes national revolution, national collectivism, a totalitarian state, and irredentism or expansionism to unify and allow the growth of a nation. Fascists often promote ethnic nationalism but have at times promoted cultural nationalism, including cultural assimilation of people outside a specific ethnic group. Fascism stresses the subservience of the individual to the state, and the need to absolute and unquestioned loyalty to a strong ruler.
Qno12. Define nation. What is the process through which nations emerged in the world?
Ans: A nation is a grouping of people who share real or imagined common history, culture, language or ethnic origin, often possessing or seeking its own government. The development and conceptualization of a nation is closely related to the development of modern industrial states and nationalist movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although nationalists would trace nations into the past along uninterrupted lines of historical narrative.
Benedict Anderson argued that nations were “imagined communities” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”, and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience. Although “nation” is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of “nation” coincides with the political concept of “state” are called nation states.
Qno13. Write an essay on Commercial Capitalism and define the features of commercial capitalism. OR. What historical circumstances commercial capitalism emerged? Discuss briefly. OR. What are the different aspects to the debate over transition from Feudalism to Capitalism?
Ans: Commercial capitalism is the investment of money into large batches of goods in order to make a profit on the market. Commercial capitalism proved to be only transitional. The succeeding form would be distinguished by the pervasive mechanization and industrialization of its productive processes, changes that introduced new dynamic tendencies into the economic system while significantly transforming the social and physical landscape. The transformative agency was already present in Smith’s day, observable in a few coal mines where steam-driven engines invented by Thomas Newcomer pumped water out of the pits. The diffusion and penetration of such machinery-driven processes of production during the first quarter of the 19th century has been traditionally called “the” Industrial Revolution.
The period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is commonly described as mercantilism. This period was associated with geographic exploration of the Age of Discovery being exploited by merchant overseas traders, especially from England and the Low Countries; the European colonization of the Americas; and the rapid growth in overseas trade. Mercantilism was a system of trade for profit, although commodities were still largely produced by non-capitalist production methods.
While some scholars see mercantilism as the earliest stage of modern capitalism, others argue that modern capitalism did not emerge until later. For example, Karl Polanyi, noted that “mercantilism, with its entire tendency toward commercialization, never attacked the safeguards which protected [the] two basic elements of production—labor and land—from becoming the elements of commerce”; thus mercantilist attitudes towards economic regulation were closer to feudalist attitudes, “they disagreed only on the methods of regulation.”
Moreover Polanyi argued that the hallmark of capitalism is the establishment of generalized markets for what he referred to as the “fictitious commodities”: land, labor, and money. Accordingly, “not until 1834 was a competitive labor market established in England, hence industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to have existed before that date.”
Evidence of long-distance merchant-driven trade motivated by profit has been found as early as the second millennium BC, with the Old Assyrian merchants. The earliest forms of mercantilism date back to the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire expanded, the mercantilist economy expanded throughout Europe. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, most of the European economy became controlled by local feudal powers, and mercantilism collapsed there. However, mercantilism persisted in Arabia. Due to its proximity to neighboring countries, the Arabs established trade routes to Egypt, Persia, and Byzantium. As Islam spread in the seventh century, mercantilism spread rapidly to Spain, Portugal, Northern Africa, and Asia. Mercantilism finally revived in Europe in the fourteenth century, as mercantilism spread from Spain and Portugal.
Among the major tenets of mercantilist theory was bullionism, a doctrine stressing the importance of accumulating precious metals. Mercantilists argued that a state should export more goods than it imported so that foreigners would have to pay the difference in precious metals. Mercantilists asserted that only raw materials that could not be extracted at home should be imported; and promoted government subsides, such as the granting of monopolies and protective tariffs, were necessary to encourage home production of manufactured goods.
European merchants, backed by state controls, subsidies, and monopolies, made most of their profits from the buying and selling of goods. In the words of Francis Bacon, the purpose of mercantilism was “the opening and well-balancing of trade; the cherishing of manufacturers; the banishing of idleness; the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws; the improvement and husbanding of the soil; the regulation of prices…”
Similar practices of economic regimentation had begun earlier in the medieval towns. However, under mercantilism, given the contemporaneous rise of absolutism, the state superseded the local guilds as the regulator of the economy. During that time the guilds essentially functioned like cartels that monopolized the quantity of craftsmen to earn above-market wages.
At the period from the eighteenth century, the commercial stage of capitalism originated from the start of the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company. These companies were characterized by their colonial and expansionary powers given to them by nation-states. During this era, merchants, who had traded under the previous stage of mercantilism, invested capital in the East India Companies and other colonies, seeking a return on investment. In his “History of Economic Analysis,” Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter reduced mercantilist propositions to three main concerns: exchange controls, export monopolism and balance of trade.
Marx identified the 16th and 17th centuries as being periods of intense capital accumulation as a direct consequence of the discovery, colonization and exploitation of the Americas, and the development of maritime trade with the East Indies and China. Thus began a process in the development of commercial capitalism, in contrast to the feudal capitalism that preceded it. So also began the rise of a new class within medieval European society, that is, the capitalist class, or as Marx liked to call them, the bourgeoisie.
Medieval society consisted of feudal landowners, a peasantry and a middle level of artisans. Artisans were organized into craft guilds, with entire towns often dedicated to the one craft. Thus the division of labour was across various specialized guilds. Social relations between peasants and landowners, apprentices and masters, etc, was of a hierarchical patron-client type, and more often than not lasted a lifetime, with the patron providing protection and sustenance to their client, in return for the dedicated service and loyalty of that client.
The development of a merchant class was a consequence of the emergence of commercial capitalism. The increasing power of this class laid challenge to both the existing ruling class, the land-owning feudal lords, and to the social order underpinning it.
Marx contends that two types of producer emerged from the beginning; the revolutionary merchant whose production mode is in opposition to the craft guilds and agrarian economy, and the transitional merchant, who continued to maintain direct possession of production through bringing independent craftsmen under his control, but not disenfranchising them from the means of production. Marx saw these transitional merchants as ‘obstacles to the real capitalist mode of production’, and that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. Marx saw this mode of production, where the producer remains in more-or-less direct contact with their product, both as an obstacle to the capitalist mode of production, and also as a future victim of capitalism’s development.
The transformation from feudal exploitation to capitalist exploitation involved a radical shift in the servitude of the peasant-labourer, and importantly, the separation of the labourer from the soil. The emerging capitalist mode of production was triggered by the relatively dramatic expansion of world trade as a consequence of European advance into the Americas and East Asia, and led to a corresponding increase in the need for trade goods. European production of such trade goods was hampered by the existing inefficient feudalistic modes of production and social-class relationships. In order to meet the demand for trade goods, the mode by which products were produced had to improve. This necessarily involved changing the relationship between the product and the producer.
Under the feudal mode of exploitation, the landlord would take a portion of the harvest from the peasant population under his control. The peasants themselves remained in contact with the means of production. Capitalist exploitation requires that the labourer be separated — or alienated — from the means of production, becoming a ‘free’ labourer; free to be exploited as a wage labourer, rather than as a chattel of the feudal lord. It thus becomes necessary for the existing feudal relationships to be broken down in order to produce a pool of free labourers that the capitalist can exploit under the new modes of production. Marx saw this change in the nature of the servitude of the labourer as an advance; as a progression, abolishing as it did serfdom, and creating the free labourer who was not bound to the economic structure of feudal society. He has ‘become a free seller of labour-power’, free from the demands of the land, and from the dominion of the guilds and their impediments on production.
According to Marx, the wage-labourer was free in a double sense. He could carry his labour-power as his own commodity and at the same time have no other commodity for sale. ‘Free labourers’ were one of two types of commodity-possessors, the other being the owners of money, means of production and means of subsistence.
As feudalism broke down, and as feudal lords disbanded their numerous retainers, a period of ‘universal vagabondage’ began as the unattached wandered the countryside. Further to this, the advance of agricultural technology and the conversion of fields into pastures caused the displacement of large numbers of peasants, who flocked to urban centres. The large movement of serfs, peasants, and vagabonds moving and residing in urban areas provided the army of labour required in the new industries. Thus the owner of the means of production meets the free-labourer selling his labour-power in exchange for a wage. The historical moment from feudal serf to wage slave is now accomplished. Labour could now be bought and sold in the market, like a product. Marx saw this not only as a change in the form of servitude, but as a transformation of labour into a commodity.
Along with this change in the social relationships from the feudal means of production to the capitalist, was the change in the nature of the product. Under the capitalist mode of production, products became commodities in that they did not just have a use value, but an exchange value, and in fact were produced especially as exchange goods (ie, trade goods). The use value of the product becomes incidental to — and separate from — its value as a trade good. A commodity ‘may not be produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself’. Commodity production can only occur using the capitalist means of production, isolating the worker as a supplier of commodity labour.
Qno14. Discuss the role of technology in the process of capitalist industrialization. OR. Who is a capitalist entrepreneur? Discuss in the light of the debates around the term. OR. How different was bourgeois culture from the aristocratic culture. Or. Define Capital and Capitalism.
Ans: Current Marxist views of the relationship of imperialism to the non-socialist underdeveloped countries are that the prospects of independent economic development or independent industrialization in such countries are nil or negligible (unless they take a socialist option); and that the characteristics of backwardness, underdevelopment and dependence.
[1] Which prevent such development are the necessary results of imperialist domination. Despite the state of controversy in which the theory of imperialism currently finds itself, these conclusions were generally accepted by all participants in a recent symposium on imperialism.
[2] It will, on the contrary, be the burden of this article that empirical observations suggest that the prospects for successful capitalist economic development (implying industrialization) of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good; that substantial progress in capitalist industrialization has already been achieved; that the period since the Second World War has been marked by a major upsurge in capitalist social relations and productive forces (especially industrialization) in the Third World; that in so far as there are obstacles to this development, they originate not in current imperialist-Third World relationships, but almost entirely from the internal contradictions of the Third World itself; that the imperialist countries’ policies and their overall impact on the Third World actually favour its industrialization; and that the ties of dependence binding the Third World to the imperialist countries have been, and are being, markedly loosened, with the consequence that the distribution of power within the capitalist world is becoming less uneven.
Capital
Capital may refer to:
Political, Economics, and Financial:
- Capital (political), the area of a country, province, region, or state, regarded as enjoying primary status, usually but not always the seat of the government.
- Capital (economics), a factor of production which is not wanted for itself but for its ability to help in producing other goods.
- Capital (architecture), the crowning member of a column or a pilaster.
- A capital letter.
- Five Capitals, a model of sustainable development developed by the organization Forum for the Future.
Forms of capital:
- Financial capital, any form of wealth capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.
- Working capital, short term capital needed by the company to finance its operations.
- Capital requirement or “bank capital”, the requirement that banks keep certain monetary reserves.
- Political capital, means by which a politician or political party may gain support or popularity.
- Infrastructural capital, means of production other than natural capital.
- Human capital, workers’ skills and abilities as regards their contribution to an economy.
- Natural capital, the resources of an ecosystem that yields a flow of goods and services into the future.
- Social capital, the value of social networks to society and the human economy.
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions starting in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spreading throughout Europe, North America, and eventually the world. The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human history; almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in some way.
Starting in the later part of the 18th century there began a transition in parts of Great Britain’s previously manual labour and draft-animal–based economy towards machine-based manufacturing. It started with the mechanization of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. The introduction of steam power fuelled primarily by coal, wider utilization of water wheels and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world, a process that continues as industrialization. The impact of this change on society was enormous.
The first Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, merged into the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850, when technological and economic progress gained momentum with the development of steam-powered ships, railways, and later in the 19th century with the internal combustion engine and electrical power generation. The period of time covered by the Industrial Revolution varies with different historians. Eric Hobsbawm held that it ‘broke out’ in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s, while T. S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830. Some twentieth century historians such as John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts have argued that the process of economic and social change took place gradually and the term revolution is not a true description of what took place. This is still a subject of debate among historians. GDP per capita was broadly stable before the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern capitalist economy. The Industrial Revolution began an era of per-capita economic growth in capitalist economies.[10] Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution was one of the most important events in history.
Bourgeois culture
Marxism describes human culture as being subject to a dominant ruling-class culture; in this sense all modern industrial cultures are currently bourgeois cultures. However, in a more precise manner, a set of shared cultural mores have been attributed internationally to the bourgeois, many having their apparent origins in the shop culture of early modern France. This was ridiculed at length in the Emile Zola novel series, Les Rougon-Macquart. Most noted features of domestic bourgeois culture focus on the central cultural space of the sitting room, and English bourgeois culture is often attacked as a sitting-room culture. Bourgeois material culture has focused on mass-produced, high-quality luxury items, though the material content of this has varied over time. The painted porcelain, machine-printed wallpaper and cotton fabrics, and Sheffield steel of the early nineteenth century have given way to luxury consumer items and contemporary conspicuous consumption. These items are often displayed wealth, rather than used wealth as in nineteenth-century working-class homes. In the past, display of wealth involved cluttered small rooms.[9] However, in the contemporary era this display involves large expanses of open space in the domestic setting.
In an article, ‘Capitalism beyond the Crisis’, Amartya Sen has argued that the present economic crisis demands a new understanding of older ideas, such as those of Adam Smith and Arthur Cecil Pigou. He draws attention to the fact that, while Smith showed the market economy’s usefulness, his analysis went beyond leaving everything to the market’s invisible hand. He viewed the usefulness of capital and markets within their own sphere and at the same time saw, contrary to the popular perception, the need for other institutions, such as sound mechanisms for financial regulations. He was aware, for example, of the need for state regulation to protect citizens from what he called “prodigals and projectors” who took excessive risks in their pursuit of profit.
This is a useful line of inquiry. The current crisis presents not only an immediate challenge but also an opportunity to reconsider established convictions. Max Weber (1864-1920), the noted German sociologist, is relevant. He wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that established him as a canonical figure in the social sciences since its publication more than 100 years ago. Weber equates “the spirit of (modern) capitalism” not with the reign of unscrupulousness in the pursuit of material interests. He sees it instead in the ethos of industry, frugality, punctuality and honest dealings in the pursuit of increasing one’s capital. He does it in line with the thinking of Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), one of the US’s founding fathers. The capitalist entrepreneur is a person who avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure. His life appears to be distinguished by “a certain ascetic tendency”: what he gets from his wealth is above all the satisfaction of having done his job well and of being the recipient of God’s grace.
Qno15. Define underdevelopment with reference to any one underdeveloped country? OR. Write a note on the nature of employment in an underdeveloped economy. OR. Compare the export- promotion and import-substituting strategies for achieving industrial development. OR. Explain why Brazil is considered to be an undeveloped country.
Ans:
Underdevelopment is the state of an organization (e.g. a country) that has not reached its maturity. It is often used to refer to economic underdevelopment, symptoms of which include lack of access to job opportunities, health care, drinkable water, food, education and housing.
The economic and social development of many developing countries has not been even. They have an unequal trade balance which results from their dependence upon primary products (usually only a handful) for their export receipts. These commodities are often (a) in limited demand in the industrialized countries (for example: tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, bananas); (b) vulnerable to replacement by synthetic substitutes (jute, cotton, etc); or (c) are experiencing shrinking demand with the evolution of new technologies that require smaller quantities of raw materials (as is the case with many metals). Prices cannot be raised as this simply hastens the use of replacement synthetics or alloys, nor can production be expanded as this rapidly depresses prices. Consequently, the primary commodities upon which most of the developing countries depend are subject to considerable short-term price fluctuation, rendering the foreign exchange receipts of the developing nations unstable and vulnerable. Development thus remains elusive.
History
The world consists of a group of rich nations and a large number of poor nations. It is usually held that economic development takes place in a series of capitalist stages and that today’s underdeveloped countries are still in a stage of history through which the now developed countries passed long ago. The countries that are now fully developed have never been underdeveloped in the first place, though they might have been undeveloped.
Examples of Underdeveloped Countries and Regions
Africa
Africa is the second-largest contingent on the planet (after Asia) in both land area and population—with more than 800 million people living in fifty-four countries. With a total land area of more than 30,221,532 km2 (11,668,598.7 sq mi), Africa accounts for 20% of the land on the planet; its population accounts for one-seventh of the population of earth. It is also the most underdeveloped continent.
Third World
The Third World refers to the technologically less advanced, or developing, nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They are generally typified as low income, having economies dependent on the export of major products to the developed countries in return for finished products. These nations also tend to have high rates of illiteracy, disease, and population growth, and unstable governments. Many are at the bottom of the league in terms of human development, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Kiribati, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.[2]
Afghanistan
Historically, there has been a deficiency of information and dependable statistics about Afghanistan’s economy. The 1979 Soviet invasion and consequent civil war destroyed much of the country’s limited transportation infrastructure and disrupted normal patterns of economic activity. Gross domestic product had fallen significantly because of loss of labor and capital and disruption of trade and transport. Continuing internal conflict disadvantaged both domestic efforts at reconstruction as well as international aid efforts. The country today however is beginning to make some progress.
South Africa
It is argued that South Africa’s … dualist qualities of a 1st & 2nd economy. The 1st (wealth producing sector) being one that is integrated in the global economy through modern industrialization, mining, agricultural & financial services, and the 2nd a structural manifestation of poverty, underdevelopment & marginalization. With indicators such as GDP/capita at PPP of $11 240 in 2001, placing it as one the 50th wealthiest countries in the world , and on the other hand social indicators that rank it 111th in terms of HDI for the same year.
Some of the causality of the underdevelopment is attributed to the institutionalized apartheid practices in South African politics, society and economics. The reforms that were introduced in 1994 have furthered the increase of inequality and uneven wealth distribution in the nation. As “Hoogeveen andO¨ zler (2005: 15) conclude that ‘Growth has not been pro-poor in South Africa as a whole, and in the instances when poverty declined for certain subgroups, the distributional shifts were still not pro-poor’.” Through the notion of adverse inclusion versus social exclusion du Toit draws attention to the fact that the present dynamics of the nation are not simply a result of being left out of mainstream economy, rather from the terms under which individuals are incorporated, . The individuals who find themselves incorporated are often not those that make up the majority of the population that lives in considerably unfavorable conditions.
Turkey
Ineffective policies in agriculture and government expenditure have been linked to the factors of terrorism in South Eastern Turkey. Agriculture and government services were identified as the more important components of the GDP of Turkey. Wherefore GDP was revealed to be helpful in explaining terrorism, due to the evidence of underdevelopment in South Eastern Turkey
Theories
Modernization Theory
Modernization theory is a socio-economic theory, also known as the Development theory. This highlights the positive role played by the developed world in modernizing and facilitating sustainable development in underdeveloped nations. It is often contrasted with Dependency theory.[8]
The theory of modernization consists of three parts:
- Identification of types of societies, and explanation of how those designated as modernized or relatively modernized differ from others;
- Specification of how societies become modernized, comparing factors that are more or less conducive to transformation.
- Generalizations about how the parts of a modernized society fit together, involving comparisons of stages of modernization and types of modernized societies with clarity about prospects for further modernization. [9]
Dependency Theory
Dependency theory is the body of theories by various intellectuals, both from the Third World and the First World, that suggest that the wealthy nations of the world need a peripheral group of poorer states in order to remain wealthy. Dependency theory states that the poverty of the countries in the periphery is not because they are not integrated into the world system, but because of how they are integrated into the system.
These poor nations provide natural resources, cheap labor, a destination for obsolete technology, and markets to the wealthy nations, without which they could not have the standard of living they enjoy. First world nations actively, but not necessarily consciously, perpetuate a state of dependency through various policies and initiatives. This state of dependency is multifaceted, involving economics, media control, politics, banking and finance, education, sport and all aspects of human resource development. Any attempt by the dependent nations to resist the influences of dependency could result in economic sanctions and/or military invasion and control. This is rare, however, and dependency is enforced far more by the wealthy nations setting the rules of international trade and commerce.
Dependency theory first emerged in the 1950s, advocated by Raul Prebisch whose research found that the wealth of poor nations tended to decrease when the wealth of rich nations increased. The theory quickly divided into diverse schools. Some, most notably Andre Gunder Frank, adapted it to Marxism. “Standard” dependency theory differs sharply from Marxism, however, arguing against internationalism and any hope of progress in less developed nations towards industrialization and a liberating revolution. Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote extensively on dependency theory while in political exile. The American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein refined the Marxist aspect of the theory, and called it the “world system.”
According to Brazilian social scientist, Theotonio Dos Santos, dependence means a situation in which certain countries economies’ are conditioned by the development & expansion of another to which the former is subject to. He goes on to further clarify that the interdependence of two or more economies, and consequently world trade, assumes the form of dependence when dominant countries can create dependency only as a reflection of that expansion, which can have a negative effect on the subordinate’s immediate economy.
Qno16. What are different theoretical explanations for imperialism? Discuss briefly. OR. Explain Imperialism. Write a note on the stages of imperialism. OR. Why was India crucial as a colony in the expansion of British Imperialism.
Ans: Imperialism, defined by The Dictionary of Human Geography, is “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination.” Imperialism has been described as a primarily western concept that employs “expansionist – mercantilist and latterly communist – systems.”
Imperialism is considered the control by one state of other territories. Through political or military means (direct imperialism), the imperial power may take over the government of a particular territory, or through economic processes (indirect imperialism), in which the concerned region is officially self-governing but linked to the imperial power by (often unequal) trade relations. Furthermore, the notion of cultural imperialism is indicated by “existing or traditional ways of life and ways of thinking [that] are subordinated to the culture of the imperialists.”
The term imperialism commonly refers to a political or geographical domain such as the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, the French Empire the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the British Empire, or the American Empire, but the term can equally be applied to domains of knowledge, beliefs, values and expertise, such as the empires of Christianity (see Christendom) or Islam (see Caliphate). Imperialism is usually autocratic, and also sometimes monolithic in character.
Imperialism is found in the ancient histories of Assyrian Empire, Chinese Empire, Roman Empire, Greece, the Persian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (see Ottoman wars in Europe), ancient Egypt, and India and a basic component to the conquests of Genghis Khan and other warlords. Although imperialist practices have existed for thousands of years, the term “Age of Imperialism” generally refers to the activities of nations such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States in the late 19th through the middle 20th centuries, e.g. the “Scramble for Africa” and the “Open Door Policy” in China.
Cecil Rhodes: Cape-Cairo railway project. Founded the De Beers Mining Company and owned the British South Africa Company, which established Rhodesia for itself. He liked to “paint the map British red,” and declared: “all of these star … these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets.”
The word itself is derived from the Latin verb imperare (to command) and the Roman concept of imperium, while the actual term ‘Imperialism’ was coined in the 16th century, reflecting what are now seen as the imperial policies of Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Imperialism not only describes colonial, territorial policies, but also economic and/or military dominance and influence.
The ideas of imperialism put forward by historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson during 19th century European imperialism were influential. They rejected the notion that “imperialism” required formal, legal control by one government over another country. “In their view, historians have been mesmerized by formal empire and maps of the world with regions colored red. The bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal British Empire. A key to the thought of Robinson and Gallagher is the idea of empire ‘informally if possible and formally if necessary.'”
The term imperialism should not be confused with ‘colonialism’ as it often is. Edward Said suggests that imperialism involved “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory’”. He goes on to say colonialism refers to the “implanting of settlements on a distant territory”. Robert Young supports this thinking as he puts forward that imperialism operates from the centre, it is a state policy, and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons whereas colonialism is nothing more than development for settlement or commercial intentions.
Europe’s expansion into territorial imperialism had much to do with the great economic benefit from collecting resources from colonies, in combination with assuming political control often by military means. Most notably, the “British exploited the political weakness of the Mughal state, and, while military activity was important at various times, the economic and administrative incorporation of local elites was also of crucial significance”. Although a substantial number of colonies had been designed or subject to provide economic profit (mostly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Fieldhouse suggests that in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s in places such as Africa and Asia, this idea is not necessarily valid.
Modern empires were not artificially constructed economic machines. The second expansion of Europe was a complex historical process in which political, social and emotional forces in Europe and on the periphery were more influential than calculated imperialism. Individual colonies might serve an economic purpose; collectively no empire had any definable function, economic or otherwise. Empires represented only a particular phase in the ever-changing relationship of Europe with the rest of the world: analogies with industrial systems or investment in real estate were simply misleading.
This form of economic imperialism described above was an early form of capitalism, as European merchants had the ability to “roam the high seas and appropriate surpluses from around the world (sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently) and to concentrate them in Europe.”
Although commonly used to imply forcible imposition of a government control by an outside country, especially in a new, unconnected territory, the term is sometimes also used to describe loose or indirect political or economic influence or control of weak states by more powerful ones. If the dominant country’s influence is felt in social and cultural circles, such as “foreign” music being popular with young people, it may be described as cultural imperialism.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism
European intellectuals have contributed to formal theories of imperialism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), V.I. Lenin said capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism as imperialism to find new business and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.[1] The necessary expansion of capitalism beyond the boundaries of nation-states — a foundation of Leninism — was shared by Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism[2]) and liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt.[3] Since then, Marxist scholars extended Lenin’s theory to be synonymous with capitalist international trade and banking.[4]
Although Karl Marx did not publish a theory of imperialism, he identified colonialism (cf. Das Kapital) as an aspect of the prehistory of the capitalist mode of production. Lenin’s definition: “the highest stage of capitalism” addressed the time when monopoly finance capital was dominant, forcing nations and private corporations to compete to control the world’s natural resources and markets.
Marxist imperialism theory, and the related dependency theory, emphasise the economic relationships among countries (and within countries), rather than formal political and military relationships. Thus, imperialism is not necessarily direct formal control of one country by another, but the economic exploitation of one by another. This Marxism contrasts with the popular conception of imperialism, as directly-controlled colonial and neocolonial empires.
Per Lenin, Imperialism is Capitalism, with five simultaneous features:
(1) Concentration of production and capital led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies — not as in liberal economics, but as de facto power over their markets — while “free competition” remains the domain of local and niche markets:
Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. (Ch. VII)
[Following Marx’s value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capitalism limited by the law of falling profit, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increased. Per Marx, only living labour (variable capital) creates profit in the form of surplus-value. As the ratio of surplus value to the sum of constant and variable capital falls, so does the rate of profit on invested capital.]
(2) Finance capital replaces industrial capital (the dominant capital), (reiterating Rudolf Hilferding’s point in Finance Capital), as industrial capitalists rely more upon bank-generated finance capital.
(3) Finance capital exportation replaces the exportation of goods (though they continue in production);
(4) The economic division of the world, by multi-national enterprises via international cartels; and
(5) The political division of the world by the great powers wherein exporting finance capital to their colonies allows their exploitation for resources and continued investment. This super exploitation of poor countries allows the capitalist industrial nations to keep some of their own workers content with slightly higher living standards. (cf. labor aristocracy; globalization)
Claiming to be Leninist, the U.S.S.R. proclaimed itself foremost enemy of imperialism, supporting armed, national independence or communist movements in the Third World[5][6] while simultaneously dominating Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Marxists and Maoists to the left of Trotsky, such as Tony Cliff, claim the Soviet Union was imperialist. Maoists claim it occurred after Khrushchev’s ascension in 1956; Cliff says it occurred under Stalin in the 1940s (see Soviet occupations).[7] Harry Magdoff’s Age of Imperialism (1954) discusses Marxism and imperialism.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism has been critiqued by many scholars. One problem with Lenin’s theory concerns the measured volumes of trade and capital flow among European capitalist societies and between European capitalist societies and poor Third World societies. European capitalist systems since the nineteenth century have always done the vast bulk of their trading among themselves, with a relative sliver of trade and capital flow going out to non-developed societies in comparison with trade and capital flow within the great European systems.
Lenin’s theory also contradicts Marx’s doctrine of the reserved army of the unemployed (i.e. the lumpen proletariat), which holds that capitalism, for systemic reasons, cannot generate enough capital to employ all those who want to work. Lenin failed to see the contradiction, between the claim that capitalism builds up so much capital that it must send the excess overseas to “exploit” less developed societies, and the claim that capitalism cannot generate enough capital to sustain full employment.
The aforementioned contradiction can be seen as a distortion of Marxist-Leninist Theory. It is true that Marx uncovered systematic failures inherent to capitalism such as the inability of capitalism to provide work for all people. For instance, many modern Nations have an unemployment rate significantly greater than zero. However, Marx attributed such a failure to the dynamics of capitalist production. Capitalists, in general, own the means of production (e.g. factories) and make profit. What is important here is how the profit is re-invested into the capitalist system. Rather than pay their workers higher wages or hire a larger work force, capitalists spend a significant portion of their profits on technological development. For example, the modern assembly line relies heavily on machinery. These machines take away the jobs of human workers. At the same time, capitalists are able to churn out more products using such machinery. Capital, then, can be increased (at least for a short time). In terms of imperialism, Lenin’s theory does not contradict Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Both men believed in and witnessed the formation of monopolies. Both men also stressed the insatiable appetite of capitalism to search for new markets that can increase profit. Since the bottom line for monopolies is to increase profit, Lenin was right insofar as imperialism is caused by the search for new markets.
Criticism
“Imperialism has been subject to moral censure by its critics, and thus the term is frequently used in international propaganda as a pejorative for expansionist and aggressive foreign policy.”
Qno17. Define Colonialism. What are its different stages? OR. What are different approaches to the understand of colonialism. How did it impact the Indian economy? OR. In what ways are Colonialism and Imperialism related to each other.
Ans: Colonialism is the building and maintaining of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. Colonialism is a process whereby sovereignty over the colony is claimed by the metro pole and social structure, government and economics within the territory of the colony are changed by the colonists. Colonialism is a certain set of unequal relationships, between metro pole and colony and between colonists and the indigenous population.
Colonialism normally refers to a period of history from the 15th to the 20th century when people from Europe established colonies on other continents. The reasons for the practice of colonialism at this time include:
- The profits to be made.
- To expand the power of the metro pole.
- To escape persecution in the metro pole.
- To convert the indigenous population to the colonists’ religion.
Some colonists also felt they were helping the indigenous population by bringing them Christianity and civilization. However, the reality was often subjugation, displacement or death.
Colonialism and imperialism were ideologically linked with state-led mercantilism and neo-mercantilism.
Definitions of colonialism
Collins English Dictionary defines colonialism as “the policy of acquiring and maintaining colonies, especially for exploitation.”
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers four definitions including “something characteristic of a colony” and “control by one power over a dependent area or people”.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “uses the term colonialism to describe the process of European settlement and political control over the rest of the world, including Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.” It discusses the distinction between colonialism and imperialism and states that “Given the difficulty of consistently distinguishing between the two terms, this entry will use colonialism as a broad concept that refers to the project of European political domination from the sixteenth to the twentieth century’s that ended with the national liberation movements of the 1960s.”
In his preface to Colonialism: a theoretical overview by Jürgen Osterhammel, Roger Tignor states that “For Osterhammel, the essence of colonialism is the existence of colonies, which are by definition governed differently from other territories such as protectorates or informal spheres of influence.” In the book itself, Osterhammel asks “How can colonialism be defined independently from colony?” He determines on a three-sentence definition.
Colonialism is a relationship between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonisers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to rule.
Types of colonialism
Historians often distinguish between two forms of colonialism, chiefly based on the number of people from the colonising country who settle in the colony:
Settler colonialism involved a large number of colonists, typically seeking fertile land to farm.
Exploitation colonialism involved fewer colonists, typically interested in extracting resources to export to the metropole. This category includes trading posts but it also includes much larger colonies where the colonists would provide much of the administration and own much of the land and other capital but rely on indigenous people for labour.
There is a certain amount of overlap between these models of colonialism. In both cases people moved to the colony and goods were exported to the metropole.
A plantation colony is normally considered to fit the model of exploitation colonialism. However, in this case there may be other immigrants to the colony – slaves to grow the cash crop for export.
In some cases, settler colonialism took place in substantially pre-populated areas and the result was either an ethnically mixed population (such as the mestizos of the Americas), or a racially divided population, such as in French Algeria or Southern Rhodesia.
A League of Nations mandate was legally very different from a colony. However, there was some similarity with exploitation colonialism in the mandate system.
History of colonialism
Modern colonialism started with the Age of Discovery. Portugal and Spain discovered new lands across the oceans and built trading posts. For some people, it is this building of colonies across an ocean that differentiates colonialism from other types of expansionism. These new lands were divided between the Portuguese Empire and Spanish Empire, first by the papal bull Inter caetera and then by the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529).
The seventeenth century saw the creation of the British Empire, the French colonial empire and the Dutch Empire. It also saw the establishment of some Swedish overseas colonies and a Danish colonial empire.
The spread of colonial empires was reduced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the American Revolutionary War and the Latin American wars of independence. However, many new colonies were established after this time, including for the German colonial empire and Belgian colonial empire. In the late nineteenth century, many European powers were involved in the Scramble for Africa.
The Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire existed at the same time as the above empires, but these are often not considered colonial because they did not expand over oceans. Rather, these empires expanded through the more traditional route of conquest of neighboring territories. There was some Russian colonization of the Americas, across the Bering Strait. The Empire of Japan modeled itself on European colonial empires. The United States of America gained overseas territories after the Spanish-American War and the term American Empire was coined.
After the First World War, the German colonial empire and much of the Ottoman Empire were divided between the victorious allies as League of Nations mandates. These territories were divided into three classes according to how quickly it was deemed that they would be ready for independence. However, decolonization did not really get going until after the Second World War. In 1962, the United Nations’ Special Committee on Decolonization, often called the Committee of 24, was set up to encourage this process.
Colonialism and imperialism
A colony is part of an empire and so colonialism is closely related to imperialism. The initial assumption is that colonialism and imperialism are interchangeable, however Robert Young suggests that imperialism is the concept while colonialism is the practice. Colonialism is based on an imperial outlook, thereby creating a consequential relationship between the two. Through an empire, colonialism is established and capitalism is expanded, on the other hand a capitalist economy naturally enforces an empire. In the next section Marxists make a case for this mutually reinforcing relationship.
Marxist view of colonialism
Marxism views colonialism as a form of capitalism, enforcing exploitation and social change. Working within the global capitalist system, colonialism is closely associated with uneven development, he thought. It is an “instrument of wholesale destruction, dependency and systematic exploitation producing distorted economies, socio-psychological disorientation, massive poverty and neocolonial dependency.” Colonies are constructed into modes of production. The search for raw materials and the current search for new investment opportunities is a result of inter-capitalist rivalry for capital accumulation. Lenin regarded colonialism as the root cause of imperialism, as imperialism was distinguished by monopoly capitalism via colonialism.
Qno18. What do you understand by Decolonization? Write a note on the process of decolonization in the context of Britain and France. OR. What do you understand by Decolonization? What are the different theoretical models to understand it? OR. Trace the process of Decolonization in Asia and Africa in the twentieth century. OR. What were the differences between France and England towards Decolonization?
Ans: Decolonization refers to the undoing of colonialism, the establishment of governance or authority through the creation of settlements by another country or jurisdiction. The term generally refers to the achievement of independence by the various Western colonies and protectorates in Asia and Africa following World War II. This conforms to an intellectual movement known as post-colonialism. Decolonization can be achieved by attaining independence, integrating with the administering power or another state, or establishing a “free association” status. The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization has stated that in the process of decolonization there is no alternative to the principle of self-determination. Decolonization may involve peaceful negotiation and/or violent revolt and armed struggle by the native population. It may be intramural or it may involve the intervention of foreign powers or international bodies such as the League of Nations.
Although examples of decolonization can be found from ancient times forward, in modern times there have been several particularly active periods of decolonization. These are the breakup of the Spanish Empire in the nineteenth century, of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires at around the time of World War I, of the British, French, German, Italian and American Empires in the wake of World War II, and of the Russian Soviet Empire following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Methods and stages
Decolonization is a political process, frequently involving violence. In extreme circumstances, there is a war of independence, sometimes following a revolution. More often, there is a dynamic cycle where negotiations fail; minor disturbances ensue resulting in suppression by the police and military forces, escalating into more violent revolts that lead to further negotiations until independence is granted. In rare cases, the actions of the native population are characterized by non-violence, with the Indian independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi being one of the most notable examples, and the violence comes as active suppression from the occupying forces or as political opposition from forces representing minority local communities who feel threatened by the prospect of independence. For example, there was a war of independence in French Indochina, while in some countries in French West Africa (excluding the Maghreb countries) decolonization resulted from a combination of insurrection and negotiation. The process is only complete when the de facto government of the newly independent country is recognized as the de jure sovereign state by the community of nations.
Independence is often difficult to achieve without the encouragement and practical support from one or more external parties. The motives for giving such aid are varied: nations of the same ethnic and/or religious stock may sympathize with oppressed groups, or a strong nation may attempt to destabilize a colony as a tactical move to weaken a rival or enemy colonizing power or to create space for its own sphere of influence; examples of this include British support of the Haitian Revolution against France, and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in which the United States warned the European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the newly independent states of the Western Hemisphere.
As world opinion became more pro-emancipation following World War I, there was an institutionalized collective effort to advance the cause of emancipation through the League of Nations. Under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, a number of mandates were created. The expressed intention was to prepare these countries for self-government, but are often interpreted as a mere redistribution of control over the former colonies of the defeated powers, mainly Germany and the Ottoman Empire. This reassignment work continued through the United Nations, with a similar system of trust territories created to adjust control over both former colonies and mandated territories administered by the nations defeated in World War II, including Japan.
In referendums, some colonized populations have chosen to retain their colonial status, such as Gibraltar and French Guiana. There are even examples, such as the Falklands War, in which an Imperial power goes to war to defend the right of a colony to continue to be a colony. Colonial powers have sometimes promoted decolonization in order to shed the financial, military and other burdens that tend to grow in those colonies where the colonial regimes have become more benign.
Decolonization is rarely achieved through a single historical act, but rather progresses through one or more stages of emancipation, each of which can be offered or fought for: these can include the introduction of elected representatives (advisory or voting; minority or majority or even exclusive), degrees of autonomy or self-rule. Thus, the final phase of decolonization may in fact concern little more than handing over responsibility for foreign relations and security, and soliciting de jure recognition for the new sovereignty. But, even following the recognition of statehood, a degree of continuity can be maintained through bilateral treaties between now equal governments involving practicalities such as military training, mutual protection pacts, or even a garrison and/or military bases.
Modern approaches to decolonization
As stated, decolonization is the process by which an oppressed country or group is self-determined enough to demand its own liberation. It is, in essence, the force of the people to claim their own future, deciding the way they live their lives, from how they expend their efforts, to how they care for themselves, and how they as individuals express the right and need to be free. Many different cultures have spawned throughout the globe, so we see there are many different ways to live. We see there is not one way to live that will fit all.
Though the term “decolonization” is not well received among donors in international development today, the root of the emerging emphasis on projects to promote “democracy, governance and human rights” by international donors and to promote “institution building” and a “human rights based approach” to development is the same concept to achieve decolonization.
In many independent, post-colonial nations, the systems and cultures of colonialism continue. Weak Parliaments and Ministerial governments (where Ministries issue their own edicts and write laws rather than the Parliament) are holdovers of colonialism since political decisions were made outside the country, Parliament were at most for show, and the executive branch (then, foreign Governor Generals and foreign civil servants) held local power. Similarly, militaries are strong and civil control over them is weak; a holdover of military control exercised by a foreign military. In some cases, the governing systems in post-colonial countries could be viewed as ruling elites who succeeded in coup d’états against the foreign colonial regime but never gave up the system of control.
In many countries, the human rights challenges are to empower women and reverse the legacy of proselytism that promoted patriarchy and to empower individuals and civil society through changes in education systems that were set up by colonial governments to train obedient servants of colonial regimes.
Often the impact of colonialism is more subtle, with preferences for clothes (such as “blue” shirts of French officials and pith helmets), drugs (alcohol and tobacco that colonial governments introduced, often as a way to tax locals) and other cultural attributes remain.
Some experts in development, such as David Lempert, have suggested an opening of dialogues from the colonial powers on the systems they introduced and the harms that continue as a way of decolonizing in rights policy documents for the UN system and for Europe. First World countries often seem reluctant to engage in this form of decolonization, however, since they may benefit from the legacies of colonialism that they created, in contemporary trade and political relations.
Qno19. Give an analogical account of the nation-state system. OR. How did the World War and the Cold War elect the nation-state system in the 20th century? OR. In what ways does the nation state system shape modern international relations? OR. How did the German and Italian unification lead to new diplomatic maneuvers which redefined the role of nation-states in international relations?
Ans:
The nation-state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit.[1] The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term “nation-state” implies that the two geographically coincide, and this distinguishes the nation state from the other types of state, which historically preceded it.
History and origins
The origins and early history of nation-states are disputed. A major theoretical issue is: “which came first — the nation or the nation state?” For nationalists themselves, the answer is that the nation existed first, nationalist movements arose to present its legitimate demand for sovereignty, and the nation-state met that demand. Some “modernization theories” of nationalism see the national identity largely as a product of government policy, to unify and modernize an already existing state. Most theories see the nation state as a 19th-century European phenomenon, facilitated by developments such as mass literacy and the early mass media. However, historians also note the early emergence of a relatively unified state, and a sense of common identity, in Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
In France, Eric Hobsbawm argues the French state preceded the formation of the French people. Hobsbawm considers that the state made the French nation, and not French nationalism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century, the time of the Dreyfus Affair. At the time of the 1789 French Revolution, only half of the French people spoke some French, and between 12 percent to 13 percent spoke it “fairly”, according to Hobsbawm. During Italian unification, the number of people speaking the Italian language was even lower. The French state promoted the unification of various dialects and languages into the French language. The introduction of conscription and the Third Republic’s 1880s laws on public instruction facilitated the creation of a national identity, under this theory.
Some nation-states, such as Germany or Italy, came into existence at least partly as a result of political campaigns by nationalists, during the 19th century. In both cases, the territory was previously divided among other states, some of them very small. The sense of common identity was at first a cultural movement, such as in the Völkisch movement in German-speaking states, which rapidly acquired a political significance. In these cases, the nationalist sentiment and the nationalist movement clearly precede the unification of the German and Italian nation-states.
Historians Hans Kohn, Liah Greenfeld, Philip White and others have classified nations such as Germany or Italy, where cultural unification preceded state unification, as ethnic nations or ethnic nationalities. Whereas ‘state-driven’ national unifications, such as in France, England or China, are more likely to flourish in multiethnic societies, producing a traditional national heritage of civic nations, or territory-based nationalities.
The idea of a nation-state is associated with the rise of the modern system of states, often called the “Westphalian system” in reference to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The balance of power, which characterizes that system, depends for its effectiveness upon clearly defined, centrally controlled, independent entities, whether empires or nation states, which recognize each other’s sovereignty and territory. The Westphalian system did not create the nation-state, but the nation-state meets the criteria for its component states (assuming that there is no disputed territory).
The nation-state received a philosophical underpinning in the era of Romanticism, at first as the ‘natural’ expression of the individual peoples (romantic nationalism — see Fichte’s conception of the Volk, which would be later opposed by Ernest Renan). The increasing emphasis during the 19th century on the ethnic and racial origins of the nation, led to a redefinition of the nation-state in these terms. Racism, which in Boulainvilliers’s theories was inherently antipatriotic and antinationalist, joined itself with colonialist imperialism and “continental imperialism”, most notably in pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements. This relation between racism and ethnic nationalism reached its height in the fascist and Nazi movements of the 20th century. The specific combination of ‘nation’ (‘people’) and ‘state’ expressed in such terms as the Völkische Staat and implemented in laws such as the 1935 Nuremberg laws made fascist states such as early Nazi Germany qualitatively different from non-fascist nation-states. Obviously, minorities, who are not part of the Volk, have no authentic or legitimate role in such a state. In Germany, neither Jews nor the Roma were considered part of the Volk, and were specifically targeted for persecution. However German nationality law defined ‘German’ on the basis of German ancestry, excluding all non-Germans from the ‘Volk’.
In recent years the nation-state’s claim to absolute sovereignty within its borders has been much criticized. A global political system based on international agreements and supra-national blocs characterized the post-war era. Non-state actors, such as international corporations and non-governmental organizations, are widely seen as eroding the economic and political power of nation-states, potentially leading to their eventual disappearance.
Before nation-states
In Europe, in the 18th century, the classic non-national states were the multi-ethnic empires, (the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire) and smaller states at what would now be called sub-national level. The multi-ethnic empire was a monarchy ruled by a king, emperor or sultan. The population belonged to many ethnic groups, and they spoke many languages. The empire was dominated by one ethnic group, and their language was usually the language of public administration. The ruling dynasty was usually, but not always, from that group. This type of state is not specifically European: such empires existed on all continents. Some of the smaller European states were not so ethnically diverse, but were also dynastic states, ruled by a royal house. Their territory could expand by royal intermarriage or merge with another state when the dynasty merged. In some parts of Europe, notably Germany, very small territorial units existed. They were recognized by their neighbours as independent, and had their own government and laws. Some were ruled by princes or other hereditary rulers; some were governed by bishops or abbots. Because they were so small, however, they had no separate language or culture: the inhabitants shared the language of the surrounding region.
Characteristics of the nation-state
Nation-states have their own characteristics, differing from those of the pre-national states. For a start, they have a different attitude to their territory, compared to the dynastic monarchies: it is semi-sacred, and non-transferable. No nation would swap territory with other states simply, for example, because the king’s daughter got married. They have a different type of border, in principle defined only by the area of settlement of the national group, although many nation states also sought natural borders (rivers, mountain ranges).
The most noticeable characteristic is the degree to which nation-states use the state as an instrument of national unity, in economic, social and cultural life.
The nation-state promoted economic unity, first by abolishing internal customs and tolls. In Germany this process, the creation of the Zollverein, preceded formal national unity. Nation-states typically have a policy to create and maintain a national transportation infrastructure, facilitating trade and travel. In 19th-century Europe, the expansion of the rail transport networks was at first largely a matter for private railway companies, but gradually came under control of the national governments. The French rail network, with its main lines radiating from Paris to all corners of France, is often seen as a reflection of the centralized French nation-state, which directed its construction. Nation states continue to build, for instance, specifically national motorway networks. Specifically trans-national infrastructure programmes, such as the Trans-European Networks, are a recent innovation.
The nation-states typically had a more centralized and uniform public administration than its imperial predecessors: they were smaller, and the population less diverse. (The internal diversity of, for instance, the Ottoman Empire was very great.) After the 19th-century triumph of the nation-state in Europe, regional identity was subordinate to national identity, in regions such as Alsace-Lorraine, Catalonia, Brittany, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. In many cases, the regional administration was also subordinated to central (national) government. This process was partially reversed from the 1970s onward, with the introduction of various forms of regional autonomy, in formerly centralized states such as France.
Qno20. What do you mean by Cold War? How did it affect world politics? Where does world polity stand at the end of the 20th century.
Ans: The Cold War (1947–1991) was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition existing after World War II (1939–1945), primarily between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, particularly the United States. Although the primary participants’ military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, a nuclear arms race, economic and technological competitions, such as the Space Race.
Despite being allies against the Axis powers and having the most powerful military forces among peer nations, the USSR and the US disagreed about the configuration of the post-war world while occupying most of Europe. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955–1991). The US and some western European countries established containment of communism as a defensive policy, establishing alliances such as NATO to that end.
Several such countries also coordinated the Marshall Plan, especially in West Germany, which the USSR opposed. Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and others formed the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension – the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.
In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures against the USSR, which had already suffered severe economic stagnation. Thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika (“reconstruction”, “reorganization”, 1987) and glasnost (“openness”, ca. 1985). The Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, and Russia possessing most of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The Cold War and its events have had a significant impact on the world today, and it is commonly referred to in popular culture.
Origins of the term
During the World War II, George Orwell used the term Cold War in the essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a “peace that is no peace”, which he called a permanent “cold war”, Orwell directly referred to that war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. Moreover, in The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that “[a]after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a ‘cold war’ on Britain and the British Empire.”
The first use of the term to describe the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential advisor. In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech (by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope) saying, “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.” Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book Cold War (1947).
Background
There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began towards the end of World War I, although tensions between the Russian Empire, other European countries and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century.
As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (followed by its withdrawal from World War I), Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international diplomacy. Leader Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a “hostile capitalist encirclement”, and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad.
Subsequent leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a “socialist island”, stated that the Soviet Union must see that “the present capitalist encirclement is replaced by a socialist encirclement.” As early as 1925, Stalin stated that he viewed international politics as a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union would attract countries gravitating to socialism and capitalist countries would attract states gravitating toward capitalism, while the world was in a period of “temporary stabilization of capitalism” preceding its eventual collapse.
Several events fueled suspicion and distrust between the western powers and the Soviet Union: the Bolsheviks’ challenge to capitalism; the 1926 Soviet funding of a British general workers strike causing Britain to break relations with the Soviet Union; Stalin’s 1927 declaration that peaceful coexistence with “the capitalist countries … is receding into the past”; conspiratorial allegations in the Shakhty show trial of a planned French and British-led coup d’état; the Great Purge involving a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in which over half a million Soviets were executed; the Moscow show trials including allegations of British, French, Japanese and German espionage; the controversial death of 6-8 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine; western support of the White Army in the Russian Civil War; the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933; and the Soviet entry into the Treaty of Rapallo. This outcome rendered Soviet–American relations a matter of major long-term concern for leaders in both countries.
End of the Cold War (1985–91)
By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985; the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.
An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring. Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country’s resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector.
In 20th Century was indeed an age of extremes and provided ample empirical data to support or refute various social and political theories. Also, it was in the 20th Century that International Relations came to be recognized as an academic discipline separate from history or political science, & a respectable body of theoretical literature on relations among states was accumulated.
Qno21. What is the theoretical debate around the idea of unipoarity. OR. In what ways has the dominance of USA over world polity led to the establishment of the unipolar world?
Ans: “Unipolar World” is a term used to describe a world political climate in which one superpower stands above the others, forestalling the prospect of a Bipolar World in which nation’s form factions built around one of two comparatively equal superpowers.
A superpower is a state with a leading position in the international system and the ability to influence events and its own interests and project power on a worldwide scale to protect those interests; it is traditionally considered to be one step higher than a great power.
Alice Lyman Miller (Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School), defines a superpower as “a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemon.”
It was a term first applied in 1944 to the United States , the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. Following World War II, as the British Empire transformed itself into the Commonwealth and its territories became independent, the Soviet Union and the United States generally came to be regarded as the only two superpowers, and confronted each other in the Cold War.
After the Cold War, the most common belief held that only the United States fulfilled the criteria to be considered a superpower, although it is a matter of debate whether it is a hegemon or if it is a besieged global power. China, the European Union, India, Brazil and Russia are also thought to have the potential of achieving superpower status within the 21st century.
Others doubt the existence of superpowers in the post Cold War era altogether, stating that today’s complex global marketplace and the rising interdependency between the world’s nations has made the concept of a superpower an idea of the past and that the world is now multipolar.
Application of the term
The term superpower was used to describe nations with greater than great power status as early as 1944, but only gained its specific meaning with regard to the United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union after World War II. This was because the United States and the Soviet Union had proved themselves to be capable of casting great influence in global politics.
There have been attempts to apply the term superpower retrospectively, and sometimes very loosely, to a variety of past entities such as Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, China, India], the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, France, the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
Recognition by historians of these older states as superpowers may focus on various superlative traits exhibited by them. For example, at its peak the British Empire was the largest in history with 1 in every 4 people in the world living under its flag.
Origin.
The term in its current political meaning was coined by Dutch-American geostrategist Nicholas Spykman in a series of lectures in 1943 about the potential shape of a new post-war world order. This formed the foundation for the book The Geography of the Peace, which referred primarily to the unmatched maritime global supremacy of the United Kingdom and United States as essential for peace and prosperity in the world.
A year later, William T.R. Fox, an American foreign policy professor, elaborated on the concept in the book The Superpowers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union – Their Responsibility for Peace (1944), which spoke of the global reach of a super-empowered nation. Fox used the word Superpower to identify a new category of power able to occupy the highest status in a world in which, as the war then raging demonstrated, states could challenge and fight each other on a global scale.
According to him, there were (at that moment) three states that were superpowers: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The British Empire was the most extensive empire in world history, which was considered the foremost great power and by 1921, held sway over 25% of the world’s population and controlled about 25% of the Earth’s total land area, while the United States and the Soviet Union grew in power in World War II.
Characteristics
Military assets such as a U.S. Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier are a means of power projection — one hallmark of a superpower. Ten different countries control one or more aircraft carriers. The US Navy has eleven.
The criteria of a superpower are not clearly defined and as a consequence they may differ between sources.
According to Lyman Miller, “The basic components of superpower stature may be measured along four axes of power: military, economic, political, and cultural (or what political scientist Joseph Nye has termed “soft power”).
In the opinion of Kim Richard Nossal of Queen’s University, “generally this term was used to signify a political community that occupied a continental-sized landmass, had a sizable population (relative at least to other major powers); a super ordinate economic capacity, including ample indigenous supplies of food and natural resources; enjoyed a high degree of non-dependence on international intercourse; and, most importantly, had a well-developed nuclear capacity (eventually normally defined as second-strike capability).”
In the opinion of Professor Paul Dukes, “a superpower must be able to conduct a global strategy including the possibility of destroying the world; to command vast economic potential and influence; and to present a universal ideology”. Although, “many modifications may be made to this basic definition”. According to Professor June Teufel Dreyer, “A superpower must be able to project its power, soft and hard, globally.”
Unipolarity
Unipolarity in international politics is a distribution of power in which there is one state with most of the cultural, economic, and military influence. This is different than hegemony since a hegemon may not have total control of the sea ports or “commons”.
Examples of unipolarity
The most recent example of a unipolar world has been one dominated by the United States since 1991, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Other states and empires in the past have dominated their known worlds in a unipolar fashion. Some examples are below. Note that most of the cases as well as the dates given are open to some debate.
- The Egyptian Empire from c.3150 BCE to c.1285 BCE with some long breaks – from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt to the conflict with the Hittites.
- The Akkadian Empire from c.2279 BCE to c.2193 BCE.
- The Assyrian Empire from 675 BCE to 626 BCE – from the invasion of Egypt to the revolt of Babylon.
- The Persian Empire from 539 BCE to 449 BCE – from the conquest of Babylon to the Peace of Callias at latest.
- Alexander’s Empire from 331 BCE to 323 BCE – from the Battle of Gaugamela to his death.
- China from 221 BCE to 1644 CE, with several long breaks – from unification under the Qin Dynasty to the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
- The Roman Republic/Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire from 188 BCE to 395 CE and then 533 to 565 – from the breakup of the Seleucid Empire to the division of the Roman Empire, with a later brief revival under Justinian (although it could be argued that by this stage a bipolar world had been formed with Sassanid Persia).
- The Mongol Empire from 1227 to 1279 – from about the death of Genghis Khan to its peak.
- The Aztec Empire from c.1481 to 1521 – from regional dominance to the invasion by Cortez.
- The Inca Empire from c.1470 to 1532 – from the conquest of the Chimu to the invasion Multipolarity.
Qno22. What is the legacy of the French Revolution for the modern world? OR. Explain the main features of modern political culture which emerged in France during the revolutionary phases. OR. Bring out the contribution of the French Revolution in the evolution of modern socialist thought. OR. What has caused the formulation of the conspiracy theory?
Ans: The French Revolution (1789–1799) was a period of radical social and political upheaval in French and European history. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years. French society underwent an epic transformation as feudal, aristocratic, and religious privileges evaporated under a sustained assault from liberal political groups and the masses on the streets. Old ideas about hierarchy and tradition succumbed to new Enlightenment principles of citizenship and inalienable rights.
The French Revolution began in 1789 with the convocation of the Estates-General in May. The first year of the Revolution witnessed members of the Third Estate proclaiming the Tennis Court Oath in June, the assault on the Bastille in July, the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August, and an epic march on Versailles that forced the royal court back to Paris in October. The next few years were dominated by tensions between various liberal assemblies and a conservative monarchy intent on thwarting major reforms. A republic was proclaimed in September 1792 and King Louis XVI was executed the next year. External threats also played a dominant role in the development of the Revolution. The French Revolutionary Wars started in 1792 and ultimately featured spectacular French victories that facilitated the conquest of the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, and most territories west of the Rhine—achievements that had defied previous French governments for centuries. Internally, popular sentiments radicalized the Revolution significantly, culminating in the brutal Reign of Terror from 1793 until 1794. After the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the Directory assumed control of the French state in 1795 and held power until 1799, when it was replaced by the Consulate under Napoleon Bonaparte.
The modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution. The growth of republics and liberal democracies, the spread of secularism, the development of modern ideologies, and the invention of total war all mark their birth during the Revolution. Subsequent events that can be traced to the Revolution include the Napoleonic Wars, two separate restorations of the monarchy, and two additional revolutions as modern France took shape. In the following century, France would be governed at one point or another as a republic, constitutional monarchy, and two different empires.
Causes of the French Revolution
Adherents of most historical models identify many of the same features of the Ancien Régime as being among the causes of the Revolution. Economic factors included widespread famine and malnutrition, due to rising bread prices (from a normal 8 sous for a 4-pound loaf to 12 sous by the end of 1789), which increased the likelihood of disease and death, and intentional starvation in the most destitute segments of the population in the months immediately before the Revolution. The famine extended even to other parts of Europe, and was not helped by a poor transportation infrastructure for bulk foods.
Another cause was France’s near bankruptcy as a result of the many wars fought by Louis XV and in particular the financial strain caused by French participation in the American Revolutionary War. The national debt amounted to almost two billion livres. The social burdens caused by war included the huge war debt, made worse by the monarchy’s military failures and ineptitude, and the lack of social services for war veterans. The inefficient and antiquated financial system was unable to manage the national debt, something which was both caused and exacerbated by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of taxation. Meanwhile the conspicuous consumption of the noble class, especially the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette at Versailles continued despite the financial burden on the populace. High unemployment and high bread prices caused more money to be spent on food and less in other areas of the economy. The Roman Catholic Church, the largest landowner in the country, levied a tax on crops known as the dime or tithe. While the dime lessened the severity of the monarchy’s tax increases, it worsened the plight of the poorest that faced a daily struggle with malnutrition. Internal customs barriers caused serious problems for internal trade, as well as periodic grain shortages.
There were also social and political factors, many of which involved resentments and aspirations given focus by the rise of Enlightenment ideals. These included resentment of royal absolutism; resentment by the ambitious professional and mercantile classes towards noble privileges and dominance in public life, as many of these classes were familiar with the lives of their peers in commercial cities in the Netherlands and Great Britain; resentment by peasants, wage-earners, and the bourgeoisie toward the traditional seigneurial privileges possessed by nobles; resentment of clerical advantage (anti-clericalism) and aspirations for freedom of religion, resentment of aristocratic bishops by the poorer rural clergy, continued hatred for Catholic control, and influence on institutions of all kinds by the large Protestant minorities; aspirations for liberty and (especially as the Revolution progressed) republicanism; and anger toward the King for firing Jacques Necker and A.R.J. Turgot (among other financial advisors), who were popularly seen as representatives of the people.
Revolution and the Church
In this caricature, monks and nuns enjoy their new freedom after the decree of 16 February 1790.The Revolution brought about a massive shifting of powers from the Roman Catholic Church to the state. Under the Ancien Régime, the Church had been the largest single landowner in the country, owning about 10 percent of the land in the kingdom. The Church was exempt from paying taxes to the government; however it levied a tithe – a 10% tax on income, often collected in the form of crops — on the general population. The power and wealth of the Church was highly resented. Non-Catholics and Protestants wanted an anti-Catholic regime and revenge against the clergy in power. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire helped fuel this resentment by denigrating the Catholic Church and destabilizing the French monarchy. As historian John McManners argues, “In eighteenth-century France throne and altar were commonly spoken of as in close alliance; their simultaneous collapse … would one day provide the final proof of their interdependence.”
War and Counter-Revolution (1792–1797)
The politics of the period inevitably drove France towards war with Austria and its allies. The King, the Feuillants and the Girondins specifically wanted to wage war. The King (and many Feuillants with him) expected war would increase his personal popularity; he also foresaw an opportunity to exploit any defeat: either result would make him stronger. The Girondins wanted to export the Revolution throughout Europe and, by extension, to defend the Revolution within France. Only some of the radical Jacobins opposed war, preferring to consolidate and expand the Revolution at home. The Austrian emperor Leopold II, brother of Marie Antoinette, may have wished to avoid war, but he died on 1 March 1792. France declared war on Austria (20 April 1792) and Prussia joined on the Austrian side a few weeks later. The invading Prussian army faced little resistance until checked at the Battle of Valmy (20 September 1792), and forced to withdraw. However, by this time, France stood in turmoil and the monarchy had effectively become a thing of the past.
Qno23. Why did the Socialist Revolution take place in Russia? OR. In what ways were the ideas of the Socialist Revolution different from the manner in which the revolution actually came about? OR. Write a note on the legacy of the Russian revolution.
Ans: The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political unrest through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included terrorism, worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. It led to the establishment of the limited constitutional monarchy, the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the multi-party system and the Russian Constitution of 1906.
Tsar Alexander II, who had emancipated the serfs in 1861 and passed a range of local government and military reforms, was assassinated on March 1, 1881 by members of the Peoples’ Will, a small militant group. His successor, Alexander III, was a reactionary who governed with an iron fist. Both the state and the church were subordinate to this autocracy. He died in 1894 and was succeeded by his son Nicholas II, of the Romanov family who governed at the time of the 1905 Revolution.
In December 1904, a strike occurred at the Putilov plant in Saint Petersburg. Sympathy strikes in other parts of the city raised the number of strikers above 80,000. Controversial Orthodox priest George Gapon, who headed a police-sponsored workers’ association, led a huge workers’ procession to the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the Tsar on Sunday, January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1905. The troops guarding the Winter Palace who had been ordered to tell the demonstrators not to pass a certain point, as Witte confirmed, opened fire on them, which resulted in more than 200 (Witte) to 1000 (Communists) deaths. The event became known as Bloody Sunday, and is usually considered the start of the active phase of revolution.
The government responded fairly quickly. The Tsar dismissed the Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirskii, on January 18 [O.S. January 5] 1905 and appointed a government commission “to enquire without delay into the causes of discontent among the workers in the city of St. Petersburg and its suburbs” in view of the strike movement. Commission was headed by Senator N.V. Shidlovsky, a member of the State Council, and included officials, chiefs of government factories, and factory owners. It was also to have included workers’ delegates elected according to a two-stage system. Elections of the workers delegates were blocked by the socialists, trying to divert the workers from the elections to the armed struggle. On March 5 [O.S. February 20] 1905, the Commission was dissolved without having started work.
Following the assassination of his uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, on February 4 [O.S. January 22] 1905, the Tsar agreed to give new concessions. On February 18 [O.S. February 5] 1905 he published the Bulygin Rescript, which promised the formation of a ‘consultative’ assembly, religious tolerance, freedom of speech (in the form of language rights for the Polish minority) and a reduction in the peasants’ redemption payments.
On May 24 and 25 [O.S. May 11 and 12] 1905, about 300 Zemstvo and municipal representatives held three meetings in Moscow, which passed a resolution, asking for a popular representation at the national level. On June 6 [O.S. May 24] 1905, Nicholas II had received a Zemstvo deputation. Responding to speeches by Prince Sergei Trubetskoi and Mr. Fyodrov, the tsar confirmed his promise to convene an assembly of people’s representatives.
On February 5 [O.S. January 22] , Nicholas II agreed to the creation of a consultative State Duma of the Russian Empire. When the slight powers of this and the limits to the electorate were revealed, unrest redoubled and culminated in a general strike in October, when Saint Petersburg Soviet was formed. It called for a general strike, refusal to pay taxes and withdrawal of bank deposits.
On October 14 [O.S. October 1] , the October Manifesto, written by Sergei Witte and Alexis Obolenskii, was presented to the Tsar. It closely followed the demands of the Zemstvo Congress in September, granting basic civil rights, allowing the formation of political parties, extending the franchise towards universal suffrage, and establishing the Duma as the central legislative body. The Tsar waited and argued for three days, but finally signed the manifesto on October 30 [O.S. October 17] 1905, owing to his desire to avoid a massacre, and a realization that there was insufficient military force available to do otherwise. He regretted signing the document, saying that he felt “sick with shame at this betrayal of the dynasty… the betrayal was complete”.
When the manifesto was proclaimed there were spontaneous demonstrations of support in all the major cities. The strikes in Saint Petersburg and elsewhere either officially ended or quickly collapsed. A political amnesty was also offered. The concessions came hand-in-hand with renewed, and brutal, action against the unrest. There was also a backlash from the conservative elements of society, with right-wing attacks on strikers, left-wingers and Jews.
While the Russian liberals were satisfied by the October Manifesto and took preparations for upcoming Dumas elections, radical socialists and revolutionaries denounced the elections and called for an armed uprising to “finish off the tsarism”.
Some of the November uprising of 1905 in Sevastopol, headed by retired naval Lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included terrorism, worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies and was only suppressed after a fierce battle. The Trans-Baikal railroad fell into the hands of striker committees and demobilized soldiers returning from Manchuria after the Russo–Japanese War. The Tsar had to send a special detachment of loyal troops along the Trans-Siberian Railway to restore order.
The uprisings ended in December with a final spasm in Moscow. Between December 5 and 7 [O.S. November 22 and 24] , there was a general strike by the Russian worker class. The government sent in troops on December 7, and a bitter street-by-street fight began. A week later the Semenovskii Regiment was deployed, and used artillery to break-up demonstrations and shell workers’ districts. On December 18 [O.S. December 5] , with around a thousand people dead and parts of the city in ruins, the Bolsheviks surrendered.
Qno24. Explain the term Russia in the First World War.
Ans: The Russian Revolution is the collective term for the series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. In the first revolution of February 1917 (March in the Gregorian calendar), the Tsar was deposed and replaced by a Provisional government. In the second revolution, during October, the Provisional Government was removed and replaced with a Bolshevik (Communist) government.
The February Revolution (March 1917) was a revolution focused around St Petersburg. In the chaos, members of the Imperial parliament or Duma assumed control of the country, forming the Russian Provisional Government. The army leadership felt they did not have the means to suppress the revolution and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last Tsar of Russia, abdicated, effectively leaving the Provisional Government in power. The Soviets (workers’ councils), which were led by more radical socialist factions, initially permitted the Provisional government to rule, but insisted on a prerogative to influence the government and control various militias. The February Revolution took place in the context of heavy military setbacks during the First World War, which left much of the army in a state of mutiny.
A period of dual power ensued, during which the Provisional Government held state power while the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower-class citizens and the political left. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies and many strikes. When the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions campaigned for the abandonment of the war effort. The Bolsheviks formed workers militias under their control into the Red Guards (later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control.
In the October Revolution (November on the Gregorian calendar), the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the workers’ Soviets, overthrew the Provisional Government in St Petersburg. The Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside, establishing the Cheka to quash dissent. To end the war, the Bolshevik leadership signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. Civil war erupted between the “Red” (Bolshevik), and “White” (anti-Bolshevik), factions, which was to continue for several years, with the Bolsheviks ultimately victorious. In this way the Revolution paved the way for the USSR. While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and St Petersburg, there was also a broad-based movement in cities throughout the state, among national minorities throughout the empire, and in the rural areas, where peasants took over and redistributed land.
World War I
Russia’s first major battle of the war was a disaster: in the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, over 30,000 Russian troops were killed or wounded and 90,000 captured, while Germany suffered just 20,000 casualties. However, Austro-Hungarian forces allied to Germany were driven back deep into the Galicia region by the end of the year. In the autumn of 1915, Nicholas had taken direct command of the army, personally overseeing Russia’s main theatre of war and leaving his ambitious but incapable wife Alexandra in charge of the government. Reports of corruption and incompetence in the Imperial government began to emerge, and the growing influence of Grigori Rasputin in the Imperial family was widely resented. In the eyes of Lynch, a revisionist historian who focuses on the role of the people, Rasputin was a “fatal disease” to the Tsarist regime.
In 1915, things took a critical turn for the worse when Germany shifted its focus of attack to the Eastern front. The superior German army — better led, better trained and better supplied — was terrifyingly effective against the ill-equipped Russian forces, driving the Russians out of Galicia, as well as Russian Poland, during the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive campaign. By the end of October 1916, Russia had lost between 1,600,000 and 1,800,000 soldiers, with an additional 2,000,000 prisoners of war and 1,000,000 missing, all making up a total of nearly 5,000,000 men.
These staggering losses played a definite role in the Mutinies that began to occur and, in 1916, reports of fraternizing with the enemy started to circulate. Soldiers went hungry, and lacked shoes, munitions, and even weapons. Rampant discontent lowered morale, which was further undermined by a series of military defeats.
Casualty rates were the most vivid sign of this disaster. Already, by the end of 1914, only five months into the war, around 390,000 Russian men had lost their lives and nearly 1,000,000 were injured. Far sooner than expected, scarcely-trained recruits had to be called up for active duty, a process repeated throughout the war as staggering losses continued to mount. The officer class also saw remarkable turnover, especially within the lower echelons, which were quickly filled with soldiers rising up through the ranks. These men, usually of peasant or worker backgrounds, were to play a large role in the politicization of the troops in 1917.
The war devastated not only soldiers. By the end of 1915, there were manifold signs that the economy was breaking down under the heightened strain of wartime demand. The main problems were food shortages and rising prices. Inflation shoved real incomes down at an alarmingly rapid rate, and shortages made it difficult to buy even what one could afford. These shortages were especially a problem in the capital, St Petersburg, where distance from supplies and poor transportation networks made matters particularly bad. Shops closed early or entirely for lack of bread, sugar, meat and other provisions, and lines lengthened massively for what remained. It became increasingly difficult both to afford and actually buy food.
October Revolution
The October Revolution was led by Vladimir Lenin and was based upon Lenin’s writing on the ideas of Karl Marx, a political ideology often known as Marxism-Leninism. It marked the beginning of the spread of communism in the twentieth century. It was far less sporadic than the revolution of February and came about as the result of deliberate planning and coordinated activity to that end. Though Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Party, it has been argued that since Lenin wasn’t present during the actual takeover of the Winter Palace, it was really Trotsky’s organization and direction that led the revolution, spurred by the motivation Lenin instigated within his party. Critics on the Right have long argued that the financial and logistical assistance of German intelligence via their key agent, Alexander Parvus was a key component as well, though historians are divided, for the evidence is sparse.
Soviet membership was initially freely elected, but many members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, anarchists, and other leftists opposed the Bolsheviks through the soviets. When it became clear that the Bolsheviks had little support outside of the industrialized areas of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, they barred non-Bolsheviks from membership in the soviets. Other socialists revolted and called for “a third Russian revolution.” The most notable instances where the Tambov rebellion, 1919–1921, and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921. These movements, which made a wide range of demands and lacked effective coordination, were eventually defeated along with the White Army during the Civil War.
Qno25. In what concrete ways is the growth of knowledge related to technological growth. OR. Write a note on the development and expansion of education in Europe. Or. The development of print technology and the beginning of newspapers truly constitute a revolution. Comment.
Ans: The knowledge revolution refers to a global-scale paradigm shift that many compare to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The revolution is about a fundamental socioeconomic change from adding value by producing things which is, ultimately limited, to adding value by creating and using knowledge which can grow indefinitely. The nature of the final form of the revolution is not yet known, but it will be very different from the industrial society from which it emerged.
Overviews of the knowledge revolution were provided by Marilyn Ferguson (1980), who refers to the ascendance of an irreversible shift in the global state of mind; a fundamentally new world view that encompasses insights from ancient times through current breakthrough science. Sakaiya (1991) indicates that three major disrupters of the established order – population shifts, resource supply, and technological developments are producing phenomena never before encountered in the industrial society. Brown (1997) states that the revolution will not flow from the mobilization of new machines; rather it will require a fundamental revamp of the human context in which machines are used. Finally, Johnson (1997) observes that when such paradigm shifts occur only once every few centuries, one has to be a visionary to see beyond the limits of current forms.
From a perspective of understanding this global societal sea change, Savage (1990) states that the shift is one of attitudes, values, and norms. It will only come through a struggle of thought because many of the changes are counterintuitive from a traditional point of view and they are difficult to conceptualize with industrial era vocabulary. He also notes that it will not be a simple or cumulative process, in that new principles will have to be learned and some old principles will have to be unlearned. Brown (1999) indicates that creating new frameworks for the evolving world will require challenging the assumptions that support our traditional intellectual constructs.
In terms of what will shift, Gilder (1989) states that the basic tenet of the knowledge revolution will be the “overthrow of matter.” Wealth, in the form of physical assets will diminish, while wealth, in the form of knowledge assets will increase. The power of mind will usurp the brute force of things. Similarly, Jeremy Rifkin (2000) indicates that whereas the industrial age emphasized the exchange of goods and services, the coming age will emphasize the exchange of concepts.
From an organizational perspective, Amidon (1997) indicates that the knowledge movement is reshaping how organizations are created, evolve, mature, and evolve or die. It is reshaping how business is done, how economies develop, and how societies prosper. Ruggles and Holtshouse (1999) note that the movement is characterized by a dispersion of power and by managers who lead by empowering knowledge workers to contribute and make decisions.
From a societal perspective, John Seely Brown (1997) asks a number of key questions, including who will control the keys to the digital domain? Who will be the trusted intermediary in the marketplace? How transparent will their mediation be? What standards will be used for accountability? Thomas A. Stewart (1997) points out that just as the industrial revolution did not end agriculture because people have to eat, this revolution will not end industry because we still need physical products.
Qno26. Discuss the major breakthrough that occurred in the field of medical sciences both prior to and during the course of the 20th. OR. Mention some of the major technological developments in communications.
Ans: The technology revolution is upon us. In recent years there have been many triumphs in technology. Now more than ever, people are able to communicate over thousands of miles with the greatest of ease. Wireless communication is much to thank for the ease of communication. What used to take weeks threw mail, now takes seconds over the Internet. But just like any revolution there are social consequences, especially when the revolution takes place around the globe. Since the world does not evolve at the same pace, lesser developed countries as well as minorities in developed countries have not even come close to reaping the benefits of a world connected at the touch of a button. The social argument is that as this revolution proceeds, the gap between the haves and have-nots will widen to the point of ill repute. Others argue that because of technological advances the world is a much better place. This seems to be the debate at hand. The problem domestically is that providing high-speed Internet services to rural communities is difficult. Tom Daschle, a senator from Senator from South Dakota highlighted the “digital divide” between those who have access to high-speed Internet services and those who live in underserved areas where such capabilities may not be readily available. The reason that this so critical to Senator Daschle is because those without access to high-speed Internet services could be cut off from affordable information on education and healthcare. The major issue domestically is the distance problem. Rural areas are so far from the more technologically advanced urban areas that getting high-speed phone connections to these rural areas is difficult. To help remedy this problem many phone companies are trying to enter the long-distance market. By doing this, it will enable telephone companies to make greater investments in rural areas at a lower more affordable cost. Another option to connect these distant areas is the exploiting of wireless technology. Wireless technology can be a way around the distance problem posed by offering these rural communities Internet access over traditional landlines. John Stanton of western Wireless says, ”Economically, wireless is a better way of providing universal service.” There is also another problem with Internet access on the domestic front. This problem is that of race. According to a new Federal survey, African-Americans and Hispanics are less than half as likely as whites to explore the Internet from home, work or school. This study also reinforces the fear that minority groups are increasingly at a disadvantage in competing for entry-level jobs because most of these jobs now require knowledge of computers and comfort in navigating the Internet. Donna L. Hoffman, a professor at Vanderbilt University says, “The big question is why African-Americans are not adopting this technology, it’s not just price, because they are buying cable and satellite systems in large numbers. So we have to look deeper to cultural and social factors. I think there is still a question of ‘What’s in it for me?’” Most division in computer use correlates to income levels and education. Sixty-one percent of whites and 54 percent of blacks in households earning more than $75,000 used the internet regularly, but the figures drop to 17 percent of whites and 8 percent of blacks when families are earning $15,000 to $35,000. It has become obvious that race and socio-economic standing has something to do with the involvement in this technological revolution. Internationally is where the largest problems lie. In many corners of the world, there are dozens of developing countries where widespread access to the Internet remains a distant possibility. While some of the world’s most remote places have the internet, there are still no connections in Iraq, North Korea and a handful of African countries. In many of the developing countries with internet access, the access is basically concentrated in the largest cities and is prohibitively expensive when set against an individual’s income. In order to shorten the gap of technology between developed and lesser-developed countries, especially in the realm of the internet, there is an annual conference called INET. The purpose of this conference is to educate those who are not as technologically advanced and sending participant’s home with additional technical and administrative skills for running networks. Poor and expensive telecommunications play a large part in the reason why these third world countries are lacking Internet access, but another major factor is politics. In countries such as Laos, the communist government considers the internet a destabilizing force because of the free flow of information associated with the Web. Basically old hardware, a weak telecommunications infrastructure and in some cases local political opposition have rendered the promised benefits of technology elusive. In the developed world, the Internet has ushered in the greatest period of wealth creation in history. It has undermined traditional power structures and changed the way industry conducts business. For many developing agencies, the was no reason to think technology could not have a similar affect on third world countries. But reality has not lived up to expectations. The real question is has the Internet been an effective tool in helping these lesser-developed countries? The United Nations thinks it can use the internet to help these countries. The United Nations has teamed up with Cisco Systems, Inc. in order to help the world’s poor. They are attempting to help by televising a concert called Netaid, which will be seen, around the world. Contrary to popular belief this will not just be another charity telethon. The heart of Netaid is the web site that is being created to allow people around the world to participate in antipoverty efforts long after the music is over. The Web sites intent is to get groups from developed countries to contact and assist groups in these lesser-developed countries. This could possibly be a solution to bringing the Internet into the homes and lives of the entire world.
Qno27. How are transport, electricity and telegraph connected to one another? OR. Examine some of the major technological innovations made in the 20th century.
Ans: The early arms races of the 20th century escalated into a war which involved many powerful nations: World War I (1914–1918). This war drastically changed the way war was fought, as new inventions such as machine guns, tanks, chemical weapons, and grenades created stalemates, resulting from the trench warfare created by these weapons and the strategy of the armies involved, on the battlefield and millions of troops were killed with little progress made on either side. After more than four years of trench warfare in western Europe, and 20 million dead, those powers who had formed the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia, later replaced by the United States and joined by Italy) emerged victorious over the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire). In addition to annexing much of the colonial possessions of the vanquished states, the Triple Entente exacted punitive restitution payments from their former foes, plunging Germany in particular into economic depression. The Russian Empire was plunged into revolution during the conflict and transitioned into the first ever communist state, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dismantled at the war’s conclusion. World War I brought about the end of the royal and imperial ages of Europe and established the United States as a major world military power.
At the beginning of the period, Britain was arguably the world’s most powerful nation. Fascism, a movement which grew out of post-war angst and accelerated by the Great Depression of the 1930s, gained momentum in Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in World War II (1939–1945), sparked by Nazi Germany’s aggressive expansion at the expense of its neighbors. Meanwhile, Japan had rapidly transformed itself into a technologically advanced industrial power. Its military expansion into eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean helped to bring the United States into World War II. Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union in the east and by the D-Day invasion of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Free France from the west. The war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Japan later became a U.S. ally with a powerful economy based on consumer goods and trade. Germany was divided between the western powers and the Soviet Union; all areas recaptured by the Soviet Union (East Germany and eastward) were essentially transitioned into Soviet puppet states under communist rule. Meanwhile, western Europe was influenced by the American Marshall Plan and made a quick economic recovery, becoming major allies of the United States under capitalist economies and relatively democratic governments.
World War II left about 60 million people dead. When the conflict ended in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as very powerful nations. Allies during the war, they soon became hostile to one other as the competing ideologies of communism and democratic capitalism occupied Europe, divided by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. The military alliances headed by these nations (NATO in North America and western Europe; the Warsaw Pact in eastern Europe) were prepared to wage total war with each other throughout the Cold War (1947–91). The period was marked by a new arms race, and nuclear weapons were produced in the tens of thousands, sufficient to end most life on the planet had they ever been used. This is believed by some historians to have staved off an inevitable war between the two, as neither could win if their full nuclear arsenals were unleashed upon each other. This was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Although the Soviet Union and the United States never directly entered conflict with each other, several proxy wars, such as the Korean War (1950–1953) and the Vietnam War (1957–1975), were waged to contain the spread of communism.
After World War II, most of the European-colonized world in Africa and Asia gained independence in a process of decolonization. This, and the drain of the two world wars, caused Europe to lose much of its long-held power. Meanwhile, the wars empowered several nations, including the UK, U.S., Russia, China and Japan, to exert a strong influence over many world affairs. American culture spread around the world with the advent of Hollywood, Broadway, rock and roll, pop music, fast food, big-box stores, and the hip-hop lifestyle. British culture continued to influence world culture, including the “British Invasion” into American music, leading many top rock bands (such as Swedish ABBA) to sing in English. The western world and parts of Asia enjoyed a post-World War II economic boom. After the Soviet Union collapsed under internal pressure in 1991, a ripple effect led to the dismantling of communist states across eastern Europe and their rocky transitions into market economies.
Following World War II, the United Nations was established as an international forum in which the world’s nations could get together and discuss issues diplomatically. It has enacted laws on conducting warfare, environmental protection, international sovereignty, and human rights, among other things. A peacekeeping force consisting of troops provided by various countries, in concert with various United Nations and other aid agencies, has helped to relieve famine, disease, and poverty, and to contain local wars and conflicts. Europe slowly united, politically and economically, into what eventually became the European Union, which consisted of 15 European countries by the end of the century.
In approximately the last third of the century, concern about humankind’s impact on the Earth’s environment caused environmentalism to become a major citizen movement. In many countries, especially in Europe, the movement was channeled into politics partly through Green parties, though awareness of the problem permeated societies. By the end of the century, some progress had been made in cleaning up the environment though pollution continued apace.[citation needed] Increasing awareness and pessimism over global warming began in the 1980s, sparking one of the most heated social and political debates by the turn of the century.
Medical science and the Green Revolution in agriculture enabled the world’s population to grow from about 1.6 billion to about 6.0 billion. This rapid population increase quickly became a major concern and directly caused or contributed to several global issues, including conflict, poverty, major environmental issues, and severe overcrowding in some areas.
Culture and entertainment & Science.
- As the century began, Paris was the artistic capital of the world, where both french and foreign writers, composers and visual artists gathered.
- Movies, music and the media had a major influence on fashion and trends in all aspects of life. As many movies and much music originate from the United States, American culture spread rapidly over the world.
- Visual culture became more dominant not only in movies but in comics and television as well. During the century a new skilled understanding of narrativist imagery was developed.
- Computer games and internet surfing became new and popular form of entertainment during the last 25 years of the century.
- In literature, science fiction, fantasy (with well developed, rich in detail fictional worlds), alternative history fiction gained unprecedented popularity. Detective fiction gained unprecedented popularity between the two world wars.
- Blues and jazz music became popularized during the 1910s and 1920s in the United States. Blues went on to influence rock and roll in the 1950s, which only increased in popularity with the British Invasion of the mid-to-late ’60s. Rock soon branched into many different genres, including heavy metal, punk rock, and alternative rock and became the dominant genre of popular music. This was challenged with the rise of hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s. Other genres such as house, techno, reggae, and soul all developed during the latter half of the 20th century and went through various periods of popularity.
- In classical music, composition branched out into many completely new domains, including dodecaphony, aleatoric (chance) music, and minimalism.
- Synthesizers began to be employed widely in music and crossed over into the mainstream with new wave music in the 1980s. Electronic instruments have been widely deployed in all manners of popular music and have led to the development of such genres as house, synthpop, electronic dance music, and industrial.
- The art world experienced the development of new styles and explorations such as expressionism, Dadaism, cubism, de stijl, abstract expressionism and surrealism.
- The modern art movement revolutionized art and culture and set the stage for both Modernism and its counterpart postmodern art as well as other contemporary art practices.
- Art Noveau began as the most advanced architecture and design but went unfashionable after World War I. The style was very dynamic and highly inventive, however the depression of the Great War made it difficult to keep up such a high standard.
- In Europe, modern architecture departed radically from the excess decoration of the Victorian era. Streamlined forms inspired by machines became more commonplace, enabled by developments in building materials and technologies. Before World War II, many European architects moved to the United States, where modern architecture continued to develop.
- The automobile vastly increased the mobility of people in the Western countries in the early to mid-century and in many other places by the end of the century. City design throughout most of the West became focused on transport via car.
- The popularity of sport increased considerably—both as an activity for all, and as entertainment, particularly on television. Several dictators in the 20th Century supported organized sport.
- Technology
- The number and types of home appliances increased dramatically due to advancements in technology, electricity availability, and increases in wealth and leisure time. Such basic appliances as washing machines, clothes dryers, furnaces, exercise machines, refrigerators, freezers, electric stoves, and vacuum cleaners all became popular from the 1920s through the 1950s. The microwave oven became popular during the 1980s. Radios were popularized as a form of entertainment during the 1920s, which extended to television during the 1950s. Cable television spread rapidly during the 1980s. Personal computers began to enter the home during the 1970s-1980s as well. The age of the portable music player grew during the 1960s with the development of 8-track and cassette tapes, which slowly began to replace record These were in turn replaced by the CD during the late 1980s and 1990s. The proliferation of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s made digital distribution of music (mp3s) possible. VCRs were popularized in the 1970s, but by the end of the millennium, DVDs were beginning to replace them.
- The first airplane was flown in 1903. With the engineering of the faster jet engine in the 1940s, mass air travel became commercially viable.
- The assembly line made mass production of the automobile viable. By the end of the century, billions of people had automobiles for personal transportation. The combination of the automobile, motor boats and air travel allowed for unprecedented personal mobility. In western nations, motor vehicle accidents became the greatest cause of death for young people. However, expansion of divided highways reduced the death rate.
- The triode tube (Audion), transistor and integrated circuit revolutionized computers, leading to the proliferation of the personal computer in the 1980s and cell phones and the public-use Internet in the 1990s.
- New materials, most notably stainless steel, plastics, polyethylene, Velcro, and teflon, came into widespread use for many various applications.
- Aluminum became an inexpensive metal and became second only to iron in use. Semiconductors were put to use in electronic objects.
- Thousands of chemicals were developed for industrial processing and home use.
- The Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union gave a peaceful outlet to the political and military tensions of the Cold War, leading to the first human spaceflight with the Soviet Union’s Vostok 1 mission in 1961, and man’s first landing on another world—the Moon—with America’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Later, the first space station was launched by the Soviet space program. The United States developed the first (and to date only) reusable spacecraft system with the Space Shuttle program, first launched in 1981. As the century ended, a permanent manned presence in space was being founded with the ongoing construction of the International Space Station.
- In addition to Human spaceflight, unmanned space probes became a practical and relatively inexpensive form of exploration. The first orbiting space probe, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Over time, a massive system of artificial satellites was placed into orbit around Earth. These satellites greatly advanced navigation, communications, military intelligence, geology, climate, and numerous other fields. Also, by the end of the century, unmanned probes had visited the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and various asteroids and comets. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, greatly expanded our understanding of the Universe and brought brilliant images to TV and computer screens around the world.
Medicine
- Placebo-controlled, randomized, blinded clinical trials became a powerful tool for testing new medicines.
- Antibiotics drastically reduced mortality from bacterial diseases and their prevalence.
- A vaccine was developed for polio, ending a worldwide epidemic. Effective vaccines were also developed for a number of other serious infectious diseases, including influenza, diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), chickenpox, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B.
- A successful application of epidemiology and vaccination led to the eradication of the smallpox virus in humans.
- X-rays became powerful diagnostic tool for wide spectrum of diseases, from bone fractures to cancer. In the 1960s, computerized tomography was invented. Other important diagnostic tools developed were sonography and magnetic resonance imaging.
- Development of vitamins virtually eliminated scurvy and other vitamin-deficiency diseases from industrialized societies.
- New psychiatric drugs were developed. These include antipsychotics for treating hallucinations and delusions, and antidepressants for treating depression.
- The role of tobacco smoking in the causation of cancer and other diseases was proven during the 1950s (see British Doctors Study).
- New methods for cancer treatment, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and immunotherapy, were developed. As a result, cancer could often be cured or placed in remission.
- The development of blood typing and blood banking made blood transfusion safe and widely available.
- The invention and development of immunosuppressive drugs and tissue typing made organ and tissue transplantation a clinical reality.
- Research on sleep and circadian rhythms led to the discovery of sleep disorders.
- New methods for heart surgery were developed, including pacemakers and artificial hearts.
- Cocaine/crack and heroin were found to be dangerous addictive drugs, and their wide usage had been outlawed; mind-altering drugs such as LSD and MDMA were discovered and later outlawed. In many countries, a war on drugs caused prices to soar 10x-20x higher, leading to profitable black market drug dealing, and to prison inmate sentences being 80% related to drug use by the 1990s.
- Contraceptive drugs were developed, which reduced population growth rates in industrialized countries.
- The development of medical insulin during the 1920s helped raise the life expectancy of diabetics to three times of what it had been earlier.
- The elucidation of the structure and function of DNA initiated the development of genetic engineering and the mapping of the human genome.
- Masturbation was found to be a harmless activity. Beliefs that it seriously harms physical and mental health, shared by 19th century physicians, were found to be wrong.[4]
- As a result of some of the above developments, most notably antibiotics and vaccines, child and young people’s mortality decreased drastically.
Electricity is a general term that encompasses a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning and static electricity, but in addition, less familiar concepts, such as the electromagnetic field and electromagnetic induction.
In general usage, the word “electricity” is adequate to refer to a number of physical effects. In scientific usage, however, the term is vague, and these related, but distinct, concepts are better identified by more precise terms:
- Electric charge – a property of some subatomic particles, which determines their electromagnetic interactions. Electrically charged matter is influenced by, and produces, electromagnetic fields.
- Electric current – a movement or flow of electrically charged particles, typically measured in amperes.
- Electric field – an influence produced by an electric charge on other charges in its vicinity.
- Electric potential – the capacity of an electric field to do work on an electric charge, typically measured in volts.
- Electromagnetism – a fundamental interaction between the magnetic field and the presence and motion of an electric charge.
Qno28. How did technology revolutionize the modern warfare? OR. How did the introduction of modern warfare lead to larger social, political changes? OR. What do you understand from limited war, modern war and total war? OR. How is modern warfare different from the wars that were fought in pre-modern times? Discuss.
Ans Modern warfare, although present in every historical period of military history, is generally used to refer to the concepts, methods and technologies that have come into use during and after the Second World War and the Korean War. The concepts and methods have assumed more complex forms of the 19th and early-20th century antecedents largely due to the widespread use of highly advanced information technology.
Although Total war was thought to be the form of international conflicts from the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars to the Second World War, the term no longer describes warfare in which countries or nations use all of their resources to destroy another country’s or nation’s organized ability to engage in war. The practice of total war which had been in use for over a century, as a form of war policy has been changed dramatically with greater awareness of tactical, operational and strategic battle information.
The most identifiable consequence of total war in modern times has been the inclusion of civilians and civilian infrastructure as targets in destroying a country’s ability to engage in war. The targeting of civilians developed from two distinct theories. The first theory was that if enough civilians were killed, factories could not function. The second theory was that if civilians were killed, the country would be so demoralized that it would have no ability to wage further war. However UNICEF reports that civilian fatalities are down from 20 percent prior to 1900 AD to less than 5 per cent of fatalities in the wars beginning in the 1990s.
With the advent of nuclear weapons, the concept of full-scale war carries the prospect of global annihilation, and as such conflicts since WWII have by definition been “low intensity” conflicts, typically in the form of proxy wars fought within local regional confines, using what are now referred to as “conventional weapons,” typically combined with the use of asymmetric warfare tactics and applied use of intelligence.
More recently the US Department of Defense introduced a concept of Battle space as the integrated information management of all significant factors that impact on combat operations by armed forces for the military theatre of operations, including information, air, land, sea and space. It includes the environment, factors and conditions that must be understood to successfully apply combat power, protect the force, or complete the mission. This includes enemy and friendly forces; facilities; weather; terrain; and the electromagnetic spectrum within the operational areas and areas of interest.
Types
Asymmetric
A military situation in which two belligerents of unequal strength interact and take advantage of their respective strengths and weaknesses. This interaction often involves strategies and tactics outside the bounds of conventional warfare, often referred to as terrorism.
Biological
Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of any organism (bacteria, virus or other disease-causing organism) or toxin found in nature, as a weapon of war. It is meant to incapacitate or kill an adversary. It may also be defined as the employment of biological agents to produce casualties in man or animals and damage to plants or material; or defense against such employment.
Chemical
Chemical warfare is warfare (associated military operations) using the toxic properties of chemical substances to kill, injure or incapacitate an enemy.
Electronic
Electronic warfare refers to mainly non-violent practices used chiefly to support other areas of warfare. The term was originally coined to encompass the interception and decoding of enemy radio communications, and the communications technologies and cryptography methods used to counter such interception, as well as jamming, radio stealth and other related areas. Over the later years of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century this has expanded to cover a wide range of areas: the use of, detection of and avoidance of detection by Radar and Sonar systems, computer hacking, Space warfare etc.
Fourth generation
Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is a concept defined by William S. Lind and expanded by Thomas X. Hammes, used to describe the decentralized nature of modern warfare. The simplest definition includes any war in which one of the major participants is not a state but rather a violent ideological network. Fourth Generation wars are characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, conflict and peace, battlefield and safety.
Ground
Ground warfare involves three types of combat units, Infantry, Armor and Artillery.
Infantry in modern times would consist of Mechanized infantry and airborne forces. Usually having a type of rifle or sub-machine gun, an infantryman is the basic unit of an army.
Guerrilla
Guerrilla warfare is defined as fighting by groups of irregular troops (guerrillas) within areas occupied by the enemy. When guerrillas obey the laws of conventional warfare they are entitled, if captured, to be treated as ordinary prisoners of war; however, they are often executed by their captors. The tactics of guerrilla warfare stress deception and ambush, as opposed to mass confrontation, and succeed best in an irregular, rugged, terrain and with a sympathetic populace, whom guerrillas often seek to win over or dominate by propaganda, reform, and terrorism. Guerrilla warfare has played a significant role in modern history, especially when waged by Communist liberation movements in Southeast Asia (most notably in the Vietnam War) and elsewhere.
Guerrilla fighters gravitate toward weapons which are easily accessible, low in technology and low in cost. A typical arsenal of the modern guerrilla would include the AK-47, RPGs and Improvised explosive devices. The guerrilla doctrines’ main disadvantage is the inability to access more advanced equipment due to economic, influence, and accessibility issues. They must rely on small unit tactics involving hit and run. This situation leads to low intensity warfare and asymmetrical warfare. the rules of Guerrilla warfare are to fight a little and then to retreat.
Psychological
Psychological warfare had its beginnings during the campaigns of Genghis Khan through the allowance of certain civilians of the nations, cities, and villages to flee said place, spreading terror and fear to neighboring principalities. Psychological actions have the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.
Information
Made possible by the widespread use of the electronic media during the Second World War, Information warfare is a kind of warfare where information and attacks on information and its system are used as a tool of warfare. Some examples of this type of warfare are electronic “sniffers” which disrupt international fund-transfer networks as well as the signals of television and radio stations. Jamming such signals can allow participants in the war to use the stations for a misinformation campaign.
Naval
Naval warfare takes place on the high seas (blue water navy). Usually, only large, powerful nations have competent blue water or deep water navies. Modern navies primarily use aircraft carriers, submarines, frigates, cruisers, and destroyers for combat. This provides a versatile array of attacks, capable of hitting ground targets, air targets, or other seafaring vessels. Most modern navies also have a large air support contingent, deployed from aircraft carriers.
Network-centric
Network-centric warfare is essentially a new military doctrine made possible by the Information Age. Weapons platforms, sensors and command and control centers are being connected through high-speed communication networks. The doctrine is related to the Revolution in Military Affairs debate. The overall network which enables this strategy in the United States military is called the Global Information Grid.
Nuclear
Nuclear war is a type of warfare which relies on nuclear weapons. There are two types of warfare in this category. In a limited nuclear war, a small number of weapons are used in a tactical exchange aimed primarily at opposing military forces. In a full-scale nuclear war, large numbers of weapons are used in an attack aimed at entire countries. This type of warfare would target both military bases and civilians.
Space
Space warfare is warfare that occurs outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The weapons would include Orbital weaponry and Space weapons. High value outer space targets would include satellites and weapon platforms. Notably no real weapons exist in space yet, though ground-to-space missiles have been successfully tested against civilian satellites.
Qno29. What is Total War? Trace its roots historically. OR. How has the coming of total war led to large-scale changes in the making of our society? Discuss briefly.
Ans: Total war is a war of unlimited scope in which a belligerent engages in a mobilization of all available resources at their disposal, whether human, industrial, agricultural, military, natural, technological, or otherwise, in order to entirely destroy or render beyond use their rival’s capacity to continue resistance. The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was only in the middle to late 19th century that total war was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, there is less and sometimes no differentiation between combatants and non-combatants (civilians) than in other conflicts, as nearly every human resource, civilians and soldiers alike, can be considered to be part of the belligerent effort.
One of the earliest forms of total war occurred in the Warring States Period, when the State of Qín or Ch’in (778 BC-207 BC) enacted reforms that transformed the nation into a war machine. The population was divided between soldiers who actively fought in the armies and farmers who fed the armies. Industrial development was concentrated on war, resulting in the perfection of bronze weaponry technology: Qin had some of the finest weapons of that era despite using outdated technology (iron had mostly replaced bronze in most parts of China). The Qin state’s mobilization for total war was a decisive factor in its victory over its rivals and the subsequent unification of China.
An early example of total war, and possibly the first to be fairly well documented, was the Peloponnesian War, described by the historian Thucydides. This war was fought between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 BC. Previously, Greek warfare was a limited and ritualized form of conflict. Armies of hoplites would meet on the battlefield and decide the outcome in a single day. During the Peloponnesian War, however, the fighting lasted for years and consumed the economic resources of the participating city-states. Atrocities were committed on a scale never before seen, with entire populations being executed or sold into slavery, as in the case of the island of Melos (now known as Milos). The aftermath of the war reshaped the Greek world, left much of the region in poverty, and reduced once influential Athens to a weakened state, from which it never completely recovered.
During the Middle Ages, the Mongols in the 13th century practised total war. The military forces of Ghenghis Khan slaughtered whole populations and destroyed any city that resisted during the invasions of Khwarezmid Empire, Kievan Rus’, Baghdad, China, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Hungary and northern Iran. During the sack of Baghdad in 1258 between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed in an orgy of violence. Total war created the Mongol Empire which, by the death of Ghenghis Khan, would be the largest contiguous empire in history.
Many regions of 16th century Europe were subject to conflicts that could be described as total war. The descent into large scale violence at this time was partly due to population pressures, and partly the product of tensions caused by the Protestant Reformation. The German Peasants War of 1524-25 was an early example; Total warfare was also employed in the French Wars of Religion, with assassins being engaged wantonly by both sides in the conflict. The Elizabethan wars in Ireland, such as the Desmond Wars and the Nine Years War, were extreme examples of what is today known as total war.
The subsequent Thirty Years War may also be considered a total war. This conflict was fought between 1618 and 1648, primarily on the territory of modern Germany. Virtually all of the major European powers were involved, and the economy of each was based on fighting the war. Civilian populations were devastated—”the war nourished the war”. Estimates of civilian casualties are approximately 25-30%, with deaths due to a combination of armed conflict, famine, and disease.[4][5] The size and training of armies also grew dramatically during this period, as did the cost of keeping armies in the field. Plunder was commonly used to pay and feed armies.
18th and 19th Centuries
French Revolution
The French Revolution reintroduced some of the concepts of total war. The fledgling republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations. The only solution, in the eyes of the Jacobin government, was to pour the nation’s entire resources into an unprecedented war effort—this was the advent of the levée en masse. The following decree of the National Convention on August 23, 1793 clearly demonstrates the immensity of the French war effort:
From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn linen into lint; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.
Following the August 23 decree French front line forces grew to some 800,000 with a total of 1.5 million in all services—the first time an army in excess of a million had been mobilized in Western history. Over the coming two decades of almost constant warfare it is estimated that somewhere in the vicinity of five million died—probably about half of them civilians—and France alone counted nearly a million (by some sources in excess of a million) deaths—a considerably higher portion of its population than perished in either of the world wars.
In the Russian campaign of 1812 Adam Zamoyski estimates almost a million died—this in under 6 months of fighting. In this campaign the Russians resorted to destroying infrastructure and agriculture in their retreat in order to hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. In the campaign of 1813 Allied forces in the German theater alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilization of some 2.5 million men (though at most a fifth of this was managed by the time of the French defeat at Waterloo). During the prolonged Peninsular War from 1808–1814 some 300,000 French troops were kept permanently occupied by, in addition to several hundred thousand Spanish, Portuguese and British regulars an enormous and sustained guerrilla insurgency—ultimately French deaths would amount to 300,000 in the Peninsular War alone.
Qno30. Differentiate between Mao Tse Tung’s theory of Guerrilla Warfare and Clausewitz’s view regarding the role of the non-state actors in war. OR. Point out the similarities and dissimilarities of Irregular Warfare in the Ancient and Modern eras. OR. Explain the colonial legacy as regards low-intensity threats in the post-colonial state.
Ans: Violent non-state actor refers to any organization that uses illegal violence (i.e. force not officially approved of by the state) to reach its goals, thereby contesting the monopoly on violence of the state. The term has been used in several papers published by the United States military.
Rise of violent non-state actors
Nation-states were characterized in 1919 by Max Weber as having a “monopoly on violence” within a territory. Phil Williams, in an overview article, argues that “in the 21st century, the state monopoly on violence is being reduced to a convenient fiction. Relatively few of the sovereign states of the United Nations can truly claim a monopoly on force within their territorial borders.” Williams points out that while Europe benefited from the “state-building impetus of the total wars of the 20th century”, other parts of the world did not undergo that cementing experience.
Williams identifies various types of non-state actors. Warlords and militias have a territory over which they exercise some of the control functions of a government. Insurgencies are engaged in a civil war to take over the state or a portion thereof. Criminal organizations and youth gangs are essentially illegal business organizations. (“Crime for them is simply a continuation of business by other means”.) Terrorist organizations are sometimes an early stage of an insurgency.
Relation to terrorism
Williams distinguishes between nationalist organizations which use terrorism, and “groups rooted in militant Islam.” The former represents an early stage of an insurgency, where the goal is to take over territory. The latter has been discussed extensively elsewhere.
Origin and motives
Some VNSAs (being non-state actors) are in one way or another sponsored by the state, or by local authorities (see also state-sponsored terrorism or para-militaries).
Most VNSAs however emerge in response to deficiencies, inadequacies, or shortcomings; i.e. when the state does not provide safety, security, (economic) stability and the basic public services for its citizens, or certain groups of citizens (minorities). When the state lacks legitimacy and/or capacity, others will fill the gap, take advantage, or directly confront the state. (see also Relative deprivation, Failed state and Fragile state).
Motives of VNSAs can be either mainly materialistic (like the Mafia), or mainly political/ideological (like the ETA or EZLN), or religious (like Al-Qaeda), or a mix of these. In reality these distinctions are often not clear. Hamas or FARC for instance might be viewed by their supporters as freedom fighters, and by their detractors as terrorists or criminal conspiracies.
Non-state actor
Non-state actors, in international relations, are actors on the international level which are not states. The admission of non-state actors into international relations theory is inherently a rebuke to the assumptions of realism and other “black box” theories of international relations, which argue that interactions between states are the main relationships of interest in studying international events.
Types of non-state actors
- Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
- These groups are typically considered a part of civil society.
- Multinational Corporations (MNCs)
- Multinational corporations are for profit organizations that operate in three or more sovereign states.
- The International Media
- Violent non-state actor
- Armed groups: for example rebel opposition forces, militias, and warlords[citation needed]
- Terrorist organizations, including groups such as Al-Qaeda, Lashkar e Tayyaba, Jaish e Mohammed.
- Criminal organizations, for example drug cartels such as the Gulf Cartel.
- Religious Groups
- The Quakers are quite active in their international advocacy efforts and their supportive role at international conferences. They have in part founded other non-state actors such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and OXFAM.
- Transnational Diaspora communities
- Most types of non-state actors would be considered part of civil society, though some function within the international market (e.g. MNCs and organized crime).
The effects of non-state actors on the Westphalian State Model
The proliferation of non-state actors in the post-Cold War Era has been one of the factors leading to the theorizing of the Cobweb Paradigm in International Politics. Under this paradigm, the traditional Westphalian nation-state is experiencing an erosion of power and sovereignty, and non-state actors are part of the cause. Facilitated by Globalization, NSAs have challenged nation-state borders and claims to sovereignty. MNCs are not always sympathetic to home-country’s or host-country national interests, but instead loyalty is given to the corporation’s interests. NGOs are challenging the nation-state’s sovereignty over internal matters through advocacy for societal issues, e.g. human rights and the environment.
There exist many armed non-state actors, e.g. opposition groups, that operate without state control and are involved in trans-border conflicts. The prevalence of these groups in armed conflicts has added layers of complexity to traditional conflict management and resolution. These conflicts are often fought not only between non-state actors and states, but also between non-state actors. Any attempts at intervention in such conflicts has been particularly challenging given the fact that international law and norms governing the use of force for intervention or peacekeeping purposes has been primarily written in the context of the nation-state. [2] So, the demands of non-state actors at the local and international level have further complicated international relations.
Qno31. How is demographic change important to an understand of world history. OR. Discuss Malthusian theory of demographic change. Can it be applied universally? OR. What are different historical contexts which have led to different demographic patterns in areas like Europe, India and Asia.
Ans: Demographic change is one of the most pressing problems facing the modern world today. The problems are different, specific to societies &countries & are closely related to wider economic & social changes.
Demography is the statistical study of human populations. It can be a very general science that can be applied to any kind of dynamic human population, that is, one that changes over time or space (see population dynamics). It encompasses the study of the size, structure and distribution of these populations, and spatial and/or temporal changes in them in response to birth, migration, aging and death.
Demographic analysis can be applied to whole societies or to groups defined by criteria such as education, nationality, religion and ethnicity. In academia, demography is often regarded as a branch of either anthropology, economics, or sociology. Formal demography limits its object of study to the measurement of population’s processes, while the broader fields of social demography population studies also analyze the relationships between economic, social, cultural and biological processes influencing a population.
The term demographics is often used erroneously for demography, but refers rather to selected population characteristics as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research.
Data and methods
There are two methods of data collection: direct and indirect. Direct data come from vital statistics registries that track all births and deaths as well as certain changes in legal status such as marriage, divorce, and migration (registration of place of residence). In developed countries with good registration systems (such as the United States and much of Europe), registry statistics are the best method for estimating the number of births and deaths.
A census is the other common direct method of collecting demographic data. A census is usually conducted by a national government and attempts to enumerate every person in a country. However, in contrast to vital statistics data, which are typically collected continuously and summarized on an annual basis, censuses typically, occur only every 10 years or so and thus are not usually the best source of data on births and deaths. Analyses are conducted after a census to estimate how much over or undercounting took place.
Important concepts
Important concepts in demography include:
- The crude birth rate, the annual number of live births per 1000 people.
- The general fertility rate, the annual number of live births per 1000 women of childbearing age (often taken to be from 15 to 49 years old, but sometimes from 15 to 44).
- Age-specific fertility rates, the annual number of live births per 1000 women in particular age groups (usually age 15-19, 20-24 etc.)
- The crude death rate, the annual number of deaths per 1000 people.
- The infant mortality rate, the annual number of deaths of children less than 1 year old per 1000 live births.
- The expectation of life (or life expectancy), the number of years which an individual at a given age could expect to live at present mortality levels.
- The total fertility rate, the number of live births per woman completing her reproductive life, if her childbearing at each age reflected current age-specific fertility rates.
- The replacement level fertility, the average number of children a woman must have in order to replace herself with a daughter in the next generation. For example the replacement level fertility in the US is 2.11. This means that 100 women will bear 211 children, 103 of which will be females. About 3% of the alive female infants are expected to decrease before they bear children, thus producing 100 women in the next generation.
- The gross reproduction rate, the number of daughters who would be born to a woman completing her reproductive life at current age-specific fertility rates.
- The net reproduction ratio is the expected number of daughters, per newborn prospective mother, who may or may not survive to and through the ages of childbearing.
- A stable population, one that has had constant crude birth and death rates for such long time that the percentage of people in every age class remains constant, or equivalently, the population pyramid has an unchanging structure.
- A stationary population, one that is both stable and unchanging in size (the difference between crude birth rate and crude death rate is zero).
Transition
Contrary to Malthus’ predictions and in line with his thoughts on moral restraint, natural population growth in most developed countries has diminished to close to zero, without being held in check by famine or lack of resources, as people in developed nations have shown a tendency to have fewer children. The fall in population growth has occurred despite large rises in life expectancy in these countries. This pattern of population growth, with slow (or no) growth in pre-industrial societies, followed by fast growth as the society develops and industrializes, followed by slow growth again as it becomes more affluent, is known as the demographic transition.
Similar trends are now becoming visible in ever more developing countries, so that far from spiraling out of control, world population growth is expected to slow markedly in this century, coming to an eventual standstill or even declining. The change is likely to be accompanied by major shifts in the proportion of world population in particular regions. The United Nations Population Division expects the absolute number of infants and toddlers in the world to begin to fall by 2015, and the number of children under 15 by 2025.
The figure in this section shows the latest (2004) UN projections of world population out to the year 2150 (red = high, orange = medium, green = low). The UN “medium” projection shows world population reaching an approximate equilibrium at 9 billion by 2075. Working independently, demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria expect world population to peak at 9 billion by 2070. Throughout the 21st century, the average age of the population is likely to continue to rise.
Science of population
Populations can change through three processes: fertility, mortality, and migration. Fertility involves the number of children that women have and is to be contrasted with fecundity (a woman’s childbearing potential). Mortality is the study of the causes, consequences, and measurement of processes affecting death to members of the population. Demographers most commonly study mortality using the Life Table, a statistical device which provides information about the mortality conditions (most notably the life expectancy) in the population.
Migration refers to the movement of persons from an origin place to a destination place across some pre-defined, political boundary. Migration researchers do not designate movements ‘migrations’ unless they are somewhat permanent. Thus demographers do not consider tourists and travelers to be migrating. While demographers who study migration typically do so through census data on place of residence, indirect sources of data including tax forms and labor force surveys are also important.
Demography is today widely taught in many universities across the world, attracting students with initial training in social sciences, statistics or health studies. Being at the crossroads of several disciplines such as geography, economics, sociology or epidemiology, demography offers tools to approach a large range of population issues by combining a more technical quantitative approach that represents the core of the discipline with many other methods borrowed from social or other sciences. Demographic research is conducted in universities, in research institutes as well as in statistical departments and in several international agencies. Population institutions are part of the Cicred (International Committee for Coordination of Demographic Research) network while most individual scientists engaged in demographic research are members of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population or, in the United States, the Population Association of America.
Malthusian theory
In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, describing his theory of quantitative development of human populations:
I think I may fairly make two postulates. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations. .
Assuming then my postulate as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.—Malthus 1798, Chapter 1
A series that is increasing in geometric progression is defined by the fact that the ratio of any two successive members of the sequence is a constant. For example, a population with an average annual growth rate of, say, 2% will grow by a ratio of 1.02 per year. In other words, the ratio of each year’s population to the previous year’s population will be 1.02. In modern terminology, a population that is increasing in geometric progression is said to be experiencing exponential growth.
Neo-Malthusian theory
Neo-Malthusian theory argues that unless at or below subsistence level, a population’s fertility will tend to move upwards. Assume for example that a country has 10 breeding groups. Over time this country’s fertility will approach that of its fastest growing group in the same way that
will eventually come to resemble
Regardless of how large the constant a is or how small the constant b is. Under subsistence conditions the fastest growing group is likely to be that group progressing most rapidly in agricultural technology. However, in above-subsistence conditions the fastest growing group is likely to be the one with the highest fertility. Therefore the fertility of the country will approach that of its most fertile group. This, however, is only part of the problem.
Qno32. What is the linkage between the process of industrialization and ecological damage? Discuss briefly. OR. Describe the process of European colonization of new lands and the environmental losses with respect to one particular area discussed in this question. OR. How has the progress of modernity led to the awareness towards ecological issues?
Ans: The scientific discipline of ecology encompasses areas from global processes (above), to the study of marine and terrestrial habitats (middle) to interspecific interactions such as predation and pollination (below).
Ecology (from Greek: “house” or “living relations”; “study of”) is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the distributions, abundance and relations of organisms and their interactions with the environment. Ecology is also the study of ecosystems. Ecosystems describe the web or network of relations among organisms at different scales of organization. Since ecology refers to any form of biodiversity, ecologists research everything from tiny bacteria’s role in nutrient recycling to the effects of tropical rain forest on the Earth’s atmosphere. The discipline of ecology emerged from the natural sciences in the late 19th century. Ecology is not synonymous with environment, environmentalism, or science. Ecology is closely related to the disciplines of physiology, evolution, genetics and behavior.
Like many of the natural sciences, a conceptual understanding of ecology is found in the broader details of study, including:
- life processes explaining adaptations
- distribution and abundance of organisms
- the movement of materials and energy through living communities
- the succession development of ecosystems, and
- The abundance and distribution of biodiversity in context of the environment.
Ecology is distinguished from natural history, which deals primarily with the descriptive study of organisms. It is a sub-discipline of biology, which is the study of life.
There are many practical applications of ecology in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agriculture, forestry , fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, basic & applied science and it provides a conceptual framework for understanding and researching human social interaction (human ecology).
Levels of organization and study
Ecosystems regenerate after a disturbance such as fire, forming mosaics of different age groups structured across a landscape. Pictured are different serial stages in forested ecosystems starting from pioneers colonizing a disturbed site and maturing in succession stages leading to old-growth forests.
Because ecology deals with ever-changing ecosystems, both time and space must be considered when describing ecological phenomena. In regards to time, it can take thousands of years for ecological processes to mature. The life-span of a tree, for example, can include different succession or serial stages leading to mature old-growth forests. The ecological process is extended even further through time as trees topple over and decay.
Ecosystems are also classified at different spatial scales: the area of an ecosystem can vary greatly from tiny to vast. For instance, several generations of an aphid population and their predators might exist on a single leaf. Inside each of those aphids exist diverse communities of bacteria. The scale of study must at times be quite large, when studying the life of the tree in the forest where bacteria and aphids live. To understand tree growth, for example, soil type, moisture content, slope of the land, forest canopy closure, and other local site variables must all be examined; to understand the ecology of the forest, complex global factors such as climate must be considered.
Long-term ecological studies provide important track records to better understand ecosystems over space and time. The International Long Term Ecological Network manages and exchanges scientific information among research sites. The longest experiment in existence is the Park Grass Experiment that was initiated in 1856.Another example includes the Hubbard Brook study in operation since 1960. Ecology is also complicated by the fact that small scale patterns do not necessarily explain large scale phenomena, otherwise captured in the expression ‘the sum is greater than the parts’. These emergent phenomena operate at different environmental scales of influence, ranging from molecular to planetary scales, and require different sets of scientific explanation. To structure the study of ecology into a manageable framework of understanding, the biological world is conceptually organized as a nested hierarchy of organization, ranging in scale from genes, to cells, to tissues, to organs, to organisms, to species and up to the level of the biosphere. Ecosystems are primarily researched at (but not restricted to) three key levels of organization, including organisms, populations, and communities. Ecologists study ecosystems by sampling a certain number of individuals that are representative of a population. Ecosystems consist of communities interacting with each other and the environment. In ecology, communities are created by the interaction of the populations of different species in an area.
Biodiversity (an amalgamation of the words biological diversity) describes all varieties of life from genes to ecosystems and spans every level of biological organization. There are many ways to index, measure, and represent biodiversity. Biodiversity includes species diversity, ecosystem diversity, genetic diversity and the complex processes operating at and among these respective levels. Biodiversity plays an important role in ecological health as much as it does for human health. Preventing or prioritizing species extinctions is one way to preserve biodiversity, but populations, the genetic diversity within them and ecological processes, such as migration, are being threatened on global scales and disappearing rapidly as well. Conservation priorities and management techniques require different approaches and considerations to address the full ecological scope of biodiversity. Populations and species migration, for example, are more sensitive indicators of ecosystem services that sustain and contribute natural capital toward the well-being of humanity. An understanding of biodiversity has practical application for ecosystem-based conservation planners as they make ecologically responsible decisions in management recommendations to consultant firms, governments and industry.
History of ecology
Ecology has a complex and winding origin due in large part to its interdisciplinary nature. Several published books provide extensive coverage of the classics. In the early 20th century, ecology was an analytical form of natural history. The descriptive nature of natural history included examination of the interaction of organisms with both their environment and their community. Such examinations were conducted by important natural historians including James Hutton and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck contributed to the development of ecology. The term “ecology” (German: Oekologie) is a more recent scientific development and was first coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in his book Generelle Morpologie der Organismen (1866).
By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature-the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment; including, above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact-in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle of existence.
Qno33. What are the ways in which the term consumerism is understood? OR. Rise of industrial capitalism led to the coming of modernization of Consumerism. Discuss briefly. OR. Critiques of consumerism have also led to consumer rights movement. What are its different aspects?
Ans:
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen or, more recently by a movement called Enoughism. Veblen’s subject of examination, the newly emergent middle class arising at the turn of the twentieth century, comes to full fruition by the end of the twentieth century through the process of globalization.
In economics, consumerism refers to economic policies placing emphasis on consumption. In an abstract sense, it is the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society (cf. Producerism, especially in the British sense of the term).
Webster’s dictionary defines Consumerism as “The movement seeking to protect and inform consumers by requiring such practices as honest packaging and advertising, product guarantees, and improved safety standards” or alternatively: “The theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial”. It is thus the opposite of anti-consumerism or of producerism.
- Anti-consumerism is the socio-political movement against consumerism. In this meaning, consumerism is the equating of personal happiness with the purchasing material possessions and consumption.
- In relation to producerism, it is the belief that consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society, rather than the interests of producers. It can also refer to economic policies that place an emphasis on consumption.
History
Consumerism has strong links with the Western world, but is in fact an international phenomenon. People purchasing goods and consuming materials in excess of their basic needs is as old as the first civilizations (e.g. Ancient Egypt, Babylon and Ancient Rome).
A great turn in consumerism arrived just before the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, capitalist development and the industrial revolution were primarily focused on the capital goods sector and industrial infrastructure (i.e., mining, steel, oil, transportation networks, communications networks, industrial cities, financial centers, etc.).
At that time, agricultural commodities, essential consumer goods, and commercial activities had developed to an extent, but not to the same extent as other sectors. Members of the working classes worked long hours for low wages – as much as 16 hours per day, 6 days per week. Little time or money was left for consumer activities.
Further, capital goods and infrastructure were quite durable and took a long time to be used up. Henry Ford and other leaders of industry understood that mass production presupposed mass consumption. After observing the assembly lines in the meat packing industry, Frederick Winslow Taylor brought his theory of scientific management to the organization of the assembly line in other industries; this unleashed incredible productivity and reduced the costs of all commodities produced on assembly lines.
While previously the norm had been the scarcity of resources, the Industrial Revolution created an unusual economic situation. For the first time in history products were available in outstanding quantities, at outstandingly low prices, being thus available to virtually everyone. So began the era of mass consumption, the only era where the concept of consumerism is applicable.
Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings, rather than just developing out of capitalism. As an example, Earnest Elmo Calkins noted to fellow advertising executives in 1932 that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use”, while the domestic theorist Christine Frederick observed in 1929 that “the way to break the vicious deadlock of a low standard of living is to spend freely, and even waste creatively”.
In the 21st century
Beginning in the 1990s, the most frequent reason given for attending college had changed to making a lot of money, outranking reasons such as becoming an authority in a field or helping others in difficulty. This statement directly correlates with the rise of materialism, specifically the technological aspect. At this time compact disc players, digital media, personal computers, and cellular telephones all began to integrate into the affluent American’s everyday lifestyle. Madeline Levine criticized what she saw as a large change in American culture – “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”
Businesses have realized that wealthy consumers are the most attractive targets for marketing their products. The upper class’ tastes, lifestyles, and preferences trickle down to become the standard which all consumers seek to emulate. The not so wealthy consumers can “purchase something new that will speak of their place in the tradition of affluence”. A consumer can have the instant gratification of purchasing an expensive item that will help improve their social status.
Emulation is also a core component of 21st century consumerism. As a general trend, regular consumers seek to emulate those who are above them in the social hierarchy. The poor strive to imitate the wealthy and the wealthy imitate celebrities and other icons. The celebrity endorsement of products can be seen as evidence of the desire of modern consumers to purchase products partly or solely to emulate people of higher social status. This purchasing behavior may co-exist in the mind of a consumer with an image of oneself as being an individualist.
Criticism
In many critical contexts, consumerism is used to describe the tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services they consume, especially those with commercial brand names and perceived status-symbolism appeal, e.g. a luxury automobile, designer clothing, or expensive jewelry. A culture that is permeated by consumerism can be referred to as a consumer culture or a market culture.
Opponents of consumerism argue that many luxuries and unnecessary consumer products may act as social mechanism allowing people to identify like-minded individuals through the display of similar products, again utilizing aspects of status-symbolism to judge socioeconomic status and social stratification. Some people believe relationships with a product or brand name are substitutes for healthy human relationships lacking in societies, and along with consumerism, create a cultural hegemony, and are part of a general process of social control in modern society. Critics of consumerism often point out that consumerist societies are more prone to damage the environ U Z0020ment, contribute to global warming and use up resources at a higher rate than other societies. Dr. Jorge Majfud says that “Trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combating drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction.”
Contents
- Renaissance and the Idea of the Individual.
- The Enlightenment.
- Critiques of Enlightenment.
- Theories of the State.
- Capitalist Economy and Its Critique.
- The Social Structure.
- Democratic Politics.
- Modern State and Welfare.
- Commercial Capitalism.
- Capitalist Industrialization.
- Nation-State System.
- International Rivalries of 20th
- The Unipolar World and Counter-Currents.
- Political Revolution: France
- Political Revolution: Russia.
- Knowledge Revolution: Printing and Informatics.
- Technological Revolution: Communications and Medical.
- Modern Warfare.
- Total War.
- Violence by Non-State Actors.
