Week 1 Flashcards
Define Congress of Vienna
An assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars by redrawing borders. It opened in 1814, five months after Napoleon I’s first abdication, and lasted till 1815, shortly before the Waterloo campaign and Napoleon’s final defeat. The main countries involved were the quadruple alliance with Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain. Who produced a peace settlement that stopped major warfare for the next 50 years through leniency with France and strong defensive measures. Domestically, they attempted to restore order and limit the impact of revolutionary ideas.
Define conservatism
Conservatism is a political doctrine that emphasises the value of traditional institutions and practices. The Congress of Vienna aligned with conservative views, wanting to restore monarchies and suppress revolution and liberalism. For example, in 1819, Metternich had the repressive Karlsbad Decrees issued, which required the German confederation to root out radical ideas in their universities and newspapers, and a permanent committee was established to investigate and punish any liberal or radical organisations.
Define liberalism
A political and economic doctrine that emphasises individual autonomy, equality, and the protection of individual rights (primarily to life, liberty, and property), originally against the state. It grew after Napoleon, for example, King Emmanuel had a liberal constitution, and later, in 1859, German liberals assumed control of the German parliament, which had emerged from the upheavals of 1848 in Prussia. Liberalism was typically paired with nationalism. The Congress of Vienna attempted to repress liberals for fear of revolution and disruption of their conservative values as seen in the Karlsbad Decrees.
Define nationalism
An ideology that prioritizes loyalty to a nation over individual or group interests. In 1871, most of Europe’s heartland was organized into powerful national states, while only on Europe’s borders —in Ireland and Russia, in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans — did people struggle for national unity and independence. Simultaneously, socialist parties grew rapidly. Ruling elites manipulated nationalism to create a sense of unity and divert attention from underlying class conflicts, like the French, who created compulsory elementary schooling. Policies like these helped manage domestic conflicts but only at the cost of increasing international tensions that led to World War I.
Define socialism
A social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources in the hopes of equality. It began in France, where they felt a sense of disappointment after the French revolution. They were also alarmed by the rise of laissez faire and the emergence of modern industry, which they saw as fostering inequality and selfish individualism. There was, they believed, an urgent need for a further reorganization of society to establish cooperation and a new sense of community. Then in 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto, which became the guiding text of socialism and helped to modernise the ideology.
Define bourgeoisie
The social order dominated by the so-called middle class. In social and political theory, the notion of the bourgeoisie was largely a construct of Karl Marx and those influenced by him. In Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie plays a heroic role by revolutionising industry and modernising society. However, it also seeks to monopolise the benefits of this modernisation by exploiting the propertyless proletariat, thereby creating revolutionary tensions. According to Marx, the end result will be a final revolution in which the property of the bourgeoisie is expropriated, and class conflict, exploitation, and the state are abolished.
Define proletariat
The lowest or one of the lowest economic and social classes in a society. In Marx’s view, one class had always exploited the other, and with the advent of modern industry, society was split more clearly than ever before: between the well-educated and prosperous middle class— the bourgeoisie— and the modern working class— the proletariat. Just as the bourgeoisie had triumphed over the feudal aristocracy in the French Revolution, Marx predicted that the proletariat would conquer the bourgeoisie in a new revolution. While a tiny majority owned the means of production and grew richer, the ever-poorer proletariat grew in size and class consciousness. Marx believed the critical moment when class conflict would result in revolution was very near.
Define modernization
Changes that enable a country to compete effectively with the leading countries at a given time. This is associated with Russia after its military failure in the Crimea War 1853-6, which motivated reform, such as freeing the serfs in 1861 and establishing independent courts and equality before the law. Russia’s greatest strides toward modernisation were economic rather than political. Rapid, government-subsidized railroad construction to 1880 enabled agricultural Russia to export grain and thus earn money for further industrialisation. In 1881, an anarchist assassinated Alexander II, and the reform era came to an abrupt end. Political modernisation remained frozen until 1905, but economic modernization sped forward in the massive industrial surge of the 1890s.
Define October Manifesto
The tsar, Nicholas II, issued the October Manifesto, which granted full civil rights and promised a popularly elected Duma (parliament) with real legislative power. This came after a revolutionary surge culminated in October 1905 due to the government’s violence on Bloody Sunday. In a paralysing general strike, the government was forced to capitulate. Under the new constitution, Nicholas II retained great powers, and the Duma had limited authority. In 1907, Nicholas II and his reactionary advisers rewrote the electoral law to increase the weight of the propertied classes greatly.
Define germ theory
This theory, created by Louis Pasteur, replaced the miasmatic idea that disease spreads through foul odours. Pasteur demonstrated that specific living organisms caused specific diseases and that those organisms could be controlled. These discoveries led to the development of several effective vaccines. Surgeons also applied the germ theory in hospitals, sterilising the wound and everything else that entered the operating room. The achievements of the bacterial revolution, coupled with the public health movement, saved millions of lives, particularly after about 1890. In England, France, and Germany, death rates declined dramatically, and diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, cholera, and yellow fever became vanishing diseases in the industrialising nations.
Define evolution
Darwin, an evolutionary thinker, believed that all life had gradually evolved from a common ancestral origin in an unending “struggle for survival.” Darwin’s theory of evolution is summarised in the title of his work “On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection” published in 1859. His findings reinforced the teachings of secularists such as Marx, who scornfully dismissed religious belief in favour of agnostic or atheistic materialism. Many writers also applied the theory of biological evolution to human affairs.
Define Social Darwinism
English philosopher Herbert Spencer saw the human race as driven forward to ever-greater specialisation and progress by a brutal economic struggle determining the “survival of the fittest.” The idea that human society also evolves and that the stronger will become powerful and prosperous while the weaker will be conquered or remain poor became known as Social Darwinism in the 1880s. Powerful European nations used this ideology to justify nationalism and expansion, and colonisers used it to justify imperialism.
Define Romanticism
Began in 1798- 1837 in part a revolt against what was perceived as the cold rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was characterised by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in art and personal life. Preoccupied with emotional excess, Romantic works explored the awesome power of love, desire, hatred, guilt, and despair. In Central and Eastern Europe, literary Romanticism and early nationalism reinforced each other. Romantics turned their attention to peasant life and transcribed the folk songs, tales, and proverbs that the cosmopolitan Enlightenment had disdained.
Define Dreyfus affair
In 1894, Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. In 1898 and 1899 the case split France apart. On one side was the army, which had manufactured evidence against Dreyfus, joined by anti-Semites and most of the Catholic establishment. On the other side stood the civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans. This battle, which eventually led to Dreyfus’s being declared innocent, revived militant republican feeling against the church. Between 1901 and 1905, the government severed all ties between the state and the Catholic Church after centuries of close relations.
Define Zionism
Jewish Journalist Theodor Herzl started the movement toward Jewish political nationhood, Zionism, in 1896. Originally, Herlz was a German nationalist, but anti-Semitism was revitalised after the stock market crash in 1973, and they had even created modern political parties. In Austrian Vienna in the early 1890s, Karl Lueger, the popular mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, combined fierce anti-Semitic rhetoric with his support of municipal ownership of basic services, pushing Herz to Zionism.
