From Margaret MacMillan in the New York Times:
The decades leading up to 1914 were, as now, a period of dramatic shifts and upheavals, which those who experienced them thought of as unprecedented in speed and scale. New fields of commerce and manufacture were opening up, such as the rapidly expanding chemical and electrical industries. Einstein was developing his general theory of relativity; radical new ideas like psychoanalysis were finding a following; and the roots of the predatory ideologies of fascism and Soviet Communism were taking hold.
Globalization can have the paradoxical effect of fostering intense localism and nativism, frightening people into taking refuge in small like-minded groups. Globalization also makes possible the widespread transmission of radical ideologies and the bringing together of fanatics who will stop at nothing in their quest for the perfect society. In the period before World War I, anarchists and revolutionary Socialists across Europe and North America read the same works and had the same aim: to overthrow the existing social order. The young Serbs who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo (the June 1914 incident that led to the war) were inspired by Nietzsche and Bakunin, just as their Russian and French counterparts were.
Terrorists from Calcutta to Buffalo imitated one another as they hurled bombs onto the floors of stock exchanges, blew up railway lines, and stabbed and shot those they saw as oppressors, whether the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary or the president of the United States, William McKinley. Today, new technologies and social media platforms provide new rallying points for fanatics, enabling them to spread their messages to even wider audiences around the globe.
With our “war on terror,” we run the same risk of overestimating the power of a loose network of extremists, few in number. More dangerous may be our miscalculations about the significance of changes in warfare. A hundred years ago, most military planners and the civilian governments who watched from the sidelines got the nature of the coming war catastrophically wrong. …
A comparable mistake in our own time is the assumption that because of our advanced technology, we can deliver quick, focused and overpowering military actions — “surgical strikes” with drones and cruise missiles, “shock and awe” by carpet bombing and armored divisions — resulting in conflicts that will be short and limited in their impact, and victories that will be decisive. Increasingly, we are seeing asymmetrical wars between well-armed, organized forces on one side and low-level insurgencies on the other, which can spread across not just a region but a continent, or even the globe. Yet we are not seeing clear outcomes, partly because there is not one enemy but a shifting coalition of local warlords, religious warriors and other interested parties.
Think of Afghanistan or Syria, where local and international players are mingled and what constitutes victory is difficult to define. In such wars, those ordering military action must consider not just the combatants on the ground but the elusive yet critical factor of public opinion. Thanks to social media, every airstrike, artillery shell and cloud of poison gas that hits civilian targets is now filmed and tweeted around the world.
Globalization can heighten rivalries and fears between countries that one might otherwise expect to be friends. On the eve of World War I, Britain, the world’s greatest naval power, and Germany, the world’s greatest land power, were each other’s largest trading partners. … But all that did not translate into friendship. Quite the contrary.
There is global danger in unenforced threats, then and now.
From Victor Davis Hanson, in The National Review:
This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and we should reflect on the “lessons” we have been taught so often on how to avoid another such devastating conflict. Chief among them seems to be the canard that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that officially ended the war caused a far worse one just 20 years later — usually in the sense of an unnecessary harshness accorded a defeated Imperial Germany. …
In truth, by the Germans’ own standards, Versailles was not harsh. The problem was not so much its terms per se, but its timing, its language, and the methods of its enforcement. By the time the treaty was accepted by the major parties — over seven months after the cessation of fighting (an armistice rather than an unconditional surrender) in the West — many of the Allied forces in the field had stood down. There was certainly less chance of seriously occupying Germany to ensure enforcement. And while the Allied leaders often talked loudly and harshly about German culpability, they failed to grasp that such tough rhetoric without commensurate consequences would only incite a wounded adversary in ways that a combination of quiet and coercion would not. One of the lessons of the aftermath of World War I is that danger mounts when threats go unenforced, and sermons prove both annoying and empty.
There are also myriads of assumed causes of World War I, both immediate and longer-term. The list is well known: arms races, entangling alliances, unchecked nationalism, miscalculation and accidents, lack of diplomacy, ethnic tensions in the Balkans, irrevocable mass mobilizations, the lack of a League of Nations, and on and on.
But why exactly did Germany believe in late summer 1914 that it could invade neutral Belgium, start a war with France, draw in Britain and Russia (and eventually the U.S.), and expect to knock out France in a matter of weeks, allowing a redirection to Russia to ensure the same there?
Yet what seems fantastical today was deemed entirely logical in the Germany of 1914 — given prewar British reluctance to support France, American isolation, the utter French collapse in 1871, the Russian humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 … and the inability of France, Britain, and Russia — and the United States — to craft a credible deterrent force to convince Germany of the folly of any aggressive act.
One of the lessons of the outbreak of World War I is the importance of perceptions. At some point in 1914 the German military and diplomatic community concluded that the country not only could pull off a successful lightning strike against France, but could do so without starting a world war — given various events over the prior decades.
Such flawed thinking is a good reminder that appearances often matter as much as reality in provoking wars.
Major powers cannot regulate the affairs of the entire world.
From Hew Strachan, in Foreign Affairs:
The role of World War I in shaping the 20th century is becoming ever more obvious. It triggered the collapse of the three major empires of eastern Europe and central Asia: Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. It gave rise to the Russian Revolution and to the Soviet Union; it prompted the first major U.S. incursion into world affairs; and it both failed to resolve the problems of the Balkans and generated new ones in the Middle East. These perspectives on World War I have become even more immediate since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The events of 1914 were so important many of them are still on the table. As commonplace as that realization may now be, however, it has not prompted a scholarly reassessment of the war itself. Its connotations of waste, futility, and military incompetence have remained remarkably persistent and indeed were restated in the two main British-authored works published to mark the 80th anniversary of 1918: John Keegan’s “World War I” and Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. For these authors, as for many of the conflict’s participants, the war was a behemoth, possessed of a life and dynamic of its own and creating unintended consequences independent of the designs of either statesmen or generals. The war, or so the story goes, proved Clausewitz’s much-abused aphorism spectacularly wrong: it was not a political instrument, but an end in itself. ….
World War I lost its meaning, therefore, not only because of the massive casualties its conduct incurred but also, and more directly, because its peace settlement apparently failed to deliver on the expectations with which it was encumbered. In 1919 Paris became the focus for a whole range of aspirations that went beyond the diplomatic and territorial — from female suffrage to socialism, from civil rights to racial equality. When U.S. President Woodrow Wilson set sail for Europe on December 4, 1918, he was not just bringing the wisdom and idealism of the new world to redress the balance of the old. He was carrying the hopes and aspirations of Europeans themselves, as their enthusiastic welcome when he reached the other shore made abundantly clear. The ambitiousness of the Paris peace conference thus fully reflected the scale of the conflict that had preceded it.
… The only precedent that the diplomats of 1919 could refer to was the 1815 Congress of Vienna. But there were two cardinal differences. The first was wrought by democracy: whereas in Vienna the peacemakers aspired to restore rather than innovate, in Paris they sought to create nothing less than a new, liberal international order. Second, the very connotations of the word “international” had changed; what had in 1815 implied “European” now meant “global.” To address these challenges Wilson had two ideas, both of them admirable but neither well defined. First, he championed national self-determination. Yet given that the United States was itself made up of immigrant communities, his presumption against multiethnic empires was both arrogant and naive. Insofar as he recognized that there would be problems for and from the minorities marooned in the “wrong” nation-states … he relied on his other overarching concept, the League of Nations, to sort things out.
The Paris peace conference was a lengthy and complex process, running on for six months. The details were thrashed out by regional committees, but the “big four” — Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, and Wilson himself — made the key decisions. In reality, however, few issues were truly self-contained. In April 1919, Italy walked out of the conference in protest over the claims of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia’s precursor) to territory that Rome had been promised by the allies four years earlier. Then Japan was outraged by the refusal of the United Kingdom, backed by the United States, to accept its proposed clause on racial equality. But neither the British nor the American position on race was as influenced by a dread of the “yellow peril” as the rantings of Australia’s prime minister (whom Wilson loathed) suggested. Instead … their attitudes were determined by their racist perceptions of the black populations of Africa and America itself. The episode showed the limits to Wilsonian democracy as well as the penalties incumbent in trying to regulate the affairs of the entire world.
The war even affected the future standing of blacks in Britain, U.S.
From Hugh Muir, in the U.K. Guardian:
With the centenary upon us, military historians debate the first world war. Was it a necessary war, is the question that concerns them. But I gained an interesting perspective on where we have been and where we are now, while leafing through “Staying Power,” Peter Fryer’s classic, scholarly history of black people in Britain, first published in 1984.
But the bit that jumped out at me was the migrant controversy in the aftermath of the great war. Black labour had been welcomed, especially at sea, but “when the armistice was signalled on 11 November 1918, the wartime boom for black labour fizzled out as quickly as it had begun.” The cry instead was too many foreigners; British jobs for British workers. Black job-seekers were shunned and the complicit Ministry of Labour resolved not to tell them about benefits to which they were entitled. Destitute, they were targeted. By 1919, there were violent mob attacks in Liverpool, Cardiff and London. Everyone joined in, apparently.
What to do with these foreign troublemakers? Rid them from our small island, came the still popular reply, especially those with the gumption to organise others. And so a repatriation scheme was established by the Home Office. Some left with a bounty. Some were promised compensation but got nothing, not even adequate food on the voyage. And this seemed a good outcome; irritants removed, the populist rage rewarded. But what goes around comes around. In a memorandum, Lord Milner, the colonial secretary, warned that many under attack had served in the war, done their bit and “bitterly resented the ingratitude.”
He “feared the effect their return to the colonies would have on attitudes to white minorities there,” Fryer says. “His fears were soon justified.” Before long, the brightest and best of those repatriated were leading anti-colonial agitation in Trinidad, Jamaica, Belize and St Kitts, and the British government was warning the U.S. of “Unrest among the negroes.” Those campaigns would, in time, end Britain’s colonial hegemony. Then as now; sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
A single nation’s decision not to fight could have changed everything.
From BBC History, by Emma McFarnon:
Britain made a terrible mistake in taking up arms in 1914, historian Niall Ferguson has claimed.
In an interview with BBC History Magazine, Ferguson said Britain could not only have lived with a German victory in the First World War, but it would in fact have been in its “interests to stay out in 1914.”
Speaking to the magazine’s editor, Rob Attar, ahead of his BBC Two documentary “The Pity of War,” Ferguson said: “The cost of the First World War to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state. … Arguments about honour, of course, resonate today, as they resonated in 1914 but you can pay too high a price for upholding that notion of honour, and I think in the end Britain did.”
Ferguson told Attar: “We should feel dismay that the leaders, not just of Britain, but of the European states, could have taken decisions that led to such an appalling slaughter. … I feel a sense of sorrow that 10 million people (more by some estimates) died prematurely and often violently because the statesmen of the European empires gambled on war for really quite low stakes.”
The historian explained: “The right way for Britain to proceed was not to rush into a land war, but rather to exploit its massive advantages at sea and in financial terms.”
He added: “A better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later, when Britain could respond on its own terms.”
Ferguson went on to describe the First World War as “the biggest error in modern history.”
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