Abstract
In the previous chapter we noted that globalization in the nineteenth century heavily contributed to the global spread of European modernity. In this chapter, we will focus on some of the most prominent political aspects of this modernity, which came to acquire a global character in the twentieth century. In the sphere of politics some of the most notable developments included the advance of constitutionalism (which came in three waves), the emergence of modern political parties, the spread of universal enfranchisement, the global “liberation of slaves,” and the appearance of the prototype of the modern social welfare state. Multidimensional, profound, and very fast (in the Big History perspective) modernization processes developed unevenly and frequently exposed the World System core countries to new types of traps, which could result in revolutions and periods of political turbulence. As globalization forced modernization processes to increasingly penetrate the semi-peripheral and peripheral parts of the World System, such turbulence spread across the world and generated episodes of sociopolitical instability in various modernizing countries throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
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- 1.
Probably the most famous example is the Napoleonic Code in France. Another classic example relates to German civil legislation.
- 2.
- 3.
Nevertheless, in some cases, rapid modernization can be accompanied by fast population growth, which does not cause any large-scale socio-political turbulence thanks to successful domestic and foreign policy. The most salient examples of this are provided by the Scandinavian countries.
- 4.
The Whig Party declined and ceased to exist in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, a party demanding the abolition of slavery served as the basis for the formation of the Republican Party (Dwyre 2010: 33).
- 5.
The National Convention was the highest legislative and executive body of the French First Republic during the French Revolution.
- 6.
Paradoxically, however, Napoleon III soon took advantage of this universal suffrage to establish the Second French Empire through national referendums.
- 7.
In different provinces this amount ranged from 20 to 100 florins.
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With the exception of a very few peripheral/hinterland zones of the World-System.
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About 6.5 million slaves were taken from Africa during the eighteenth century, including 2.5 million by British slave traders (Quirk 2011: 30).
- 10.
The USA also provided pensions to the veterans of the Civil War, even though other significant aspects of social security developed here much later than in Western Europe (Skocpol 1993).
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Zinkina, J. et al. (2019). Global Sociopolitical Transformations of the Nineteenth Century. In: A Big History of Globalization. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05707-7_9
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