ABSTRACT
The year 1890 is not a climactic date, like 1789, 1848, or 1871, although it marked the dismissal of Otto von Bismarck as Chancellor of Germany. But generally in Western and Northern Europe, including Germany, AustriaHungary, Italy, as well as the United States, the political systems that had been in place in 1871 remained intact. The situation was more volatile in the Balkans and in Russia. The social changes that we had observed after the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization and on the political level the emergence of a mass electorate, mass parties, and a mass press, accelerated and created a setting that, as we shall see, directly affected the ways in which history was written. By 1890 strong socialist movements, often shaped by Marxist ideas, had become vocal in all continental European countries, foremost in Germany, and by 1900 a non-Marxist Labour Party had come into existence in Great Britain. Everywhere universal male suffrage had been introduced, belatedly in Austria in 1907 and in Italy in 1912, and while women generally did not yet have the vote, there were vocal movements for their suffrage in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia, which set the stage for granting women the vote in all of these countries very shortly after the end of World War I. Moreover, middle-class democratic parties gained in strength, even in Germany where the power of parliament was seriously curbed, In France, Great Britain, and Scandinavia, close cooperation between these parties and labor came about, as exemplified by the entry of the socialists into the government in France in 1900 and in Great Britain by the coalition of the Liberal and Labour parties in 1906. Labor parties begin to play an important role in Australia and New Zealand, as did Social Democrats in Scandinavia. In the United States, the Progressive party emerged as an advocate of social and democratic reform, but it avoided taking a stand on the discrimination of blacks. There were also anti-Semitic and chauvinistic movements in Germany, Austria, and
France representing agrarian interests, traditional craftsmen, and shopkeepers threatened by the emergence of large corporate businesses.
