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Today’s globalization is
uncannily similar to that leading up to the World War I. Paraphrasing Churchill,
Santayana and Edmund Burke, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to
repeat it.”
The Great War’s Ominous Echoes
by MARGARET
MacMILLAN
Dec. 13, 2013
Oxford, England — Earlier
this year, I was on holiday in Corsica and wandered into the church of a tiny
hamlet in the hills where I found a memorial to the dead from World War I. Out
of a population that can have been no more than 150, eight young men, bearing
among them only three last names, had died in that conflict. Such lists can be
found all over Europe, in great cities and in
small villages. Similar memorials are spread around the globe, for the Great
War, as it was known before 1940, also drew soldiers from Asia, Africa and North America.
World War I still haunts us,
partly because of the sheer scale of the carnage — 10 million combatants killed
and many more wounded. Countless civilians lost their lives, too, whether
through military action, starvation or disease. Whole empires were destroyed
and societies brutalized.
But there’s another reason
the war continues to haunt us: we still cannot agree on why it happened. Was it
caused by the overweening ambitions of some of the men in power at the time?
Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers, for example, wanted a greater Germany with a global reach, so they challenged
the naval supremacy of Britain.
Or does the explanation lie in competing ideologies? National rivalries? Or in
the sheer and seemingly unstoppable momentum of militarism? As an arms race
accelerated, generals and admirals made plans that became ever more aggressive
as well as rigid. Did that make an explosion inevitable?
Or would it never have
happened had a random event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater not lit the fuse?
In the second year of the conflagration that engulfed most of Europe,
a bitter joke made the rounds: “Have you seen today’s headline? ‘Archduke Found
Alive: War a Mistake.”’ That is the most dispiriting explanation of all — that
the war was simply a blunder that could have been avoided.
The search for explanations
began almost as soon as the guns opened fire in the summer of 1914 and has
never stopped. The approaching centenary should make us reflect anew on our
vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophes, and sheer accident. History,
in the saying attributed to Mark Twain, never repeats itself but it rhymes. We
have good reason to glance over our shoulders even as we look ahead. If we
cannot determine how one of the most momentous conflicts in history happened,
how can we hope to avoid another such catastrophe in the future?
Though the era just before
World War I, with its gas lighting and its horse-drawn carriages, seems very
far-off, it is similar to ours — often unsettlingly so — in many ways.
Globalization — which we tend to think of as a modern phenomenon, created by
the spread of international businesses and investment, the growth of the
Internet, and the widespread migration of peoples — was also characteristic of
that era. Even remote parts of the world were being linked by new means of
transportation, from railways to steamships, and communication, including the
telephone, telegraph and wireless.
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
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.
The great advances of Europe’s science and technology and the increasing output
of its factories during its long period of peace had made going on the attack
much more costly in casualties. The killing zone — the area that advancing
soldiers had to cross in the face of deadly enemy fire — had expanded hugely,
from 100 yards in the Napoleonic wars to over 1,000 yards by 1914. The rifles
and machine guns they faced were firing faster and more accurately, and the
artillery shells contained more devastating explosives. Soldiers attacking, no
matter how brave, would suffer horrific losses, while defenders sat in the
relative security of their trenches, behind sandbags and barbed wire.
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.
British children played with toys, including lead soldiers, made in Germany, and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden resounded with the voices of German singers
performing German operas. But all that did not translate into friendship.
Quite the contrary. With Germany cutting into Britain’s traditional markets and
vying with it for colonies and power, the British felt threatened. As early as
1896, a best-selling British pamphlet, “Made in Germany,” painted an ominous
picture: “A gigantic commercial State is arising to menace our prosperity, and
contend with us for the trade of the world.” Many Germans held reciprocal
views. When Kaiser Wilhelm and his naval secretary Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz
built a deepwater navy to challenge British naval supremacy, the unease in
Britain about Germany’s growing commercial and military power turned into
something close to panic.
It is tempting — and sobering
— to compare today’s relationship between China
and America to that between Germany and England a century ago. Lulling
ourselves into a false sense of safety, we say that countries that have McDonald’s
will never fight one another. Yet the extraordinary growth in trade and
investment between China and
the United States
since the 1980s has not served to allay mutual suspicions. At a time when the
two countries are competing for markets, resources and influence from the
Caribbean to Central Asia, China
has become increasingly ready to translate its economic strength into military
power.
Increased Chinese military
spending and the buildup of its naval capacity suggest to many American
strategists that China intends to challenge the United States as a Pacific
power, and we are now seeing an arms race between the countries in that region.
The Wall Street Journal has published authoritative reports that the Pentagon
is preparing war plans against China
— just in case.
Before 1914, the great powers
talked of their honor. Today, Secretary of State John Kerry refers to America’s
credibility or prestige. It amounts to much the same thing.
Once lines are drawn between
nations, reaching across them becomes difficult. In the Europe
of 1914, the growth of nationalist feeling — encouraged from above but rising
from the grass roots where historians, linguists and folklorists were busy
creating stories of ancient and eternal enmities — did much to cause ill will among
nations who might otherwise have been friends. What Freud called the
“narcissism of small differences” can lead to violence and death — a danger
amplified if the greater powers choose to intervene as protectors of groups
outside their own borders who share a religious or ethnic identity with them.
Here, too, we can see ominous parallels between present and past.
Before World
War I, Serbia
financed and armed Serbs within the Austrian Empire, while both Russia and Austria stirred up the peoples
along each other’s borders. In our time, Saudi
Arabia backs Sunnis, and Sunni-majority states, around
the world, while Iran
has made itself the protector of Shiites, funding radical movements such as
Hezbollah. The Middle East today bears a
worrying resemblance to the Balkans then. A similar mix of toxic nationalisms
threatens to draw in outside powers as the United States, Turkey, Russia and
Iran all look to protect their interests and their clients. We must hope that Russia will have more control over the Damascus government to compel it to the negotiating table
than it had over Serbia
in 1914.
Like our predecessors a
century ago, we assume that all-out war is something we no longer do. The
French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, a man of great wisdom who tried unsuccessfully
to stanch the rise of militarism in the early years of the 20th century,
understood this well. “Europe has been afflicted by so many crises for so many
years,” he said on the eve of World War I, and “it has been put dangerously to
the test so many times without war breaking out, that it has almost ceased to
believe in the threat and is watching the further development of the
interminable Balkan conflict with decreased attention and reduced disquiet.”
With different leadership,
World War I might have been avoided. Europe in
1914 needed a Bismarck or a Churchill with the strength of character to stand
up to pressure and the capacity to see the larger strategic picture. Instead,
the key powers had weak, divided or distracted leaders. Today, America’s president faces a series of
politicians in China who,
like those in Germany
a century ago, are deeply concerned that their nation be taken seriously. In
Vladimir V. Putin, President Obama must deal with a Russian nationalist who is
both wilier and stronger than the unfortunate Czar Nicholas II.
Mr. Obama, like Woodrow
Wilson, is a great orator, capable of laying out his vision of the world and
inspiring Americans. But like Wilson
at the end of the 1914-18 war, Mr. Obama is dealing with a partisan and uncooperative
Congress. Perhaps even more worrying, he may be in a position similar to that
of the British prime minister in 1914, Herbert Asquith — presiding over a
country so divided internally that it is unwilling or unable to play an active
and constructive role in the world.
The United States
on the eve of 2014 is still the world’s strongest power, but it is not as
powerful as it once was. It has suffered military setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has had difficulty
finding allies that will stand by it, as the Syrian crisis demonstrates.
Uncomfortably aware that they have few reliable friends and many potential
enemies, the Americans are now considering a return to a more isolationist
policy. Is America reaching
the end of its tether, as Britain
did before it?
It may take a moment of real
danger to force the major powers of this new world order to come together in
coalitions able and willing to act. Instead of muddling along from one crisis
to another, now is the time to think again about those dreadful lessons of a
century ago — in the hope that our leaders, with our encouragement, will think
about how they can work together to build a stable international order.
Margaret MacMillan is
warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford,
and the author, most recently, of “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.”
This article is adapted from The
Brookings Essay, a series published by the Brookings Institution.
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