Download from the great war to globalization - MindMatters

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WITF MIND MATTERS
THE GREAT WAR AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Carl Strikwerda
Professor of History and President, Elizabethtown College
This year Americans have commemorated one of the terrible battles of our Civil War, the
battle of Gettysburg, as part of the 150th anniversary of that conflict. But 2013 is also the
one hundredth anniversary of the last full year of peace before the First World War, a war
known in its own time as simply the Great War. While the Civil War determined the
history of the United States as a nation, the Great War shaped the entire course of the
twentieth century for the world. Indeed, in some ways, its echoes can still be heard
today, in the twenty-first century, in the conflicts in the Mideast and in the search for a
peaceful and prosperous global order. Understanding the First World War, I would argue,
is essential in order to understand our recent past and the challenges we face as educated
citizens of the twenty-first century.
It is sobering to realize that only a hundred years ago, in 1913, the world
looked, in some profound ways, like 2013. The world had experienced an era of
unparalleled economic globalization, ever closer communication across continents, and
growing international cooperation. At the same time, there was anxiety about economic
crises and terrorism. In many ways, then, the world of a century ago was quite like our
own. In fact, the phrase “the good ship Earth” was coined in 1913 when observers
realized that the entire human race shared a common fate.
And yet, in a few short years, everything that the people of 1913 had known was
swept away. The Great War, as it was known already within months of its outbreak,
destroyed the globalization of the nineteenth century, divided nations and social
movements, and left a bitter legacy for decades. The war’s wake swept away centuriesold empires, created new countries, and profoundly changed customs, habits, and even art
and literature. As philosopher William Barrett wrote in his classic study, Irrational Man,
“August 1914 is the axial date in modern Western history, and once past it we are
confronted with the present-day world.”
The Great War had virtually no justifiable purpose except the calculated hope by
a few German and Russian leaders that they could use a diplomatic confrontation that
began in reaction to an act of terrorism for their countries’ advantage. Once their armies
and navies began to move, as did those of Austria-Hungary, Britain, and France, the war
developed its own dynamic. Very soon, the original purposes of the war were largely
forgotten, and neither side had any chance of easy victory. By December, 1914, only four
months after the War began, the major sector of the war in Western Europe became a set
of trenches 400 miles long across which four million soldiers faced each other for almost
four years with little change in their positions, despite millions of casualties. The war
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became, as was said later about the Vietnam War, a war about itself. To pull out, for
either side was to risk, they thought, endangering their own legitimacy. Better to keep
fighting, even with no clear purpose, than to take the risk that ending the conflict might
weaken one’s position or strengthen one’s enemies.
The First World War ended the longest period of peace in modern history. For a
hundred years, the world had not known a major war among more than two of the great
powers. Most wars had been short. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was also known as
the Seven Weeks’ War, lasting 49 days. The nineteenth century had seen the greatest
explosion of wealth and innovation in history. International trade in 1914 was 30 times
larger than it had been in 1815. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, travelers and
news moved across the oceans at virtually the same pace as they had in the days of
Columbus, or Julius Caesar for that matter. Ships took two months to cross the Atlantic.
Emigrants to the New World rarely returned to Europe, understandably since the cost of a
voyage might equal several years’ wages for a laborer. By 1912, ships, like the ill-fated
Titanic, normally crossed the Atlantic in a little over a week. Telegraph cables circled the
globe so that news, and prices, went from India to New York, for example, in a matter of
minutes.
The War destroyed both peace and progress. As many as nine million people died
in the war. The level of economic activity in 1913 was only regained in 1926, only to be
destroyed again by the Great Depression and the Second World War. In 1948, with a
larger population, the world’s economy was only as large as it had been 35 years earlier.
In other words, the world was poorer than it had been 35 years earlier. The War cost, in
today’s terms, about 10 trillion dollars. Armies and navies went into battle in 1914 with
what appeared to be the most modern, technologically advanced weapons ever devised—
repeating rifles, long range artillery, and ironclad, oil-fueled battleships. Within four
years, all of these were outdated by weapons that had been merely experimental
innovations, or only the stuff of science fiction, in 1914—machine guns, tanks, poison
gas, flame-throwers, fighter planes, long-range bombers, submarines, and aircraft
carriers. The technological revolution in aircraft, in which innovations that might have
taken years in peacetime came within weeks, heralded the revolution of the twentieth
century in research and development. For the first time, societies learned how to devote
vast resources of scientific expertise, capital, and organization to solve a problem in as
short a time as possible. In 1915, it was how to fire machine gun bullets in synchronized
bursts through airplane propellers. Later, it was how to cure polio or reach the moon, or
how to destroy whole cities with a single bomb.
The First World War was the conflict that led to the expression that “the generals
always fight the last war.” In 1914, every army assumed that the advantage lay with the
offensive. Napoleon had nearly conquered all of Europe a hundred years earlier by
always striving to attack the opposing army in battle, even if he was heavily
outnumbered. Having studied Napoleon exhaustively in military academies, generals
were gripped by what one scholar has called “the ideology of the offensive.” The rankand-file soldiers in 1914 soon learned that machine guns, heavy artillery, and barbed wire
gave a decided advantage to the defensive. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the
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First World War in futile charges against entrenched positions. Only on the Eastern
Front, where the Russian army was poorly led and equipped, was one side, in this case,
the Germans, able to conquer large areas through a series of offensives.
It took Germany over three years, however, to force Russia out of the war.
Germany’s major ally, Austria-Hungary, proved only of marginal value. While Britain
and France, Germany’s enemies in the West, were unable to defeat Germany on the
battlefield, Germany was slowly being bled white by fighting a two front war and being
blockaded by the British navy. Russia’s defeat in 1917 gave Germany one final chance
to win. Germany’s military leaders, Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, shifted troops
from east to west for a knock-out blow on the Western Front in 1918. Meanwhile,
Germany unleashed unrestricted submarine warfare against any ship—Allied or neutral—
supplying Britain. Germany gambled that the United States, even if it entered the war in
response to the U-boat campaign, could not create and train an army quickly enough to
make a difference on the Western Front. Even if the United States did mobilize quickly,
U-boats would keep U.S. ships from reaching Europe with troops and supplies.
Germany’s gamble nearly worked. Every European country in the war was
exhausted. Like the Russians, the Italian, French, and Austro-Hungarian armies had all
experienced mutinies. Strikes broke out in all countries. By 1918, the two sides on the
Western Front were like staggering prizefighters trying to land one last blow to win while
knowing the other might just as easily knock him down. From March to July, 1918,
Germany made its biggest gains on the Western Front since the beginning of the war.
New tactics sent small groups of specially trained stormtroopers through Allied lines and
forcing Allied soldiers to retreat. But the Allies outwitted the U-boats through the use of
convoys. American troops and supplies were pouring into France. The Allies exploited
their economic advantage by building tanks and fleets of aircraft that the Germans could
not match. Allied soldiers always had enough food and supplies. In their last offensives,
German soldiers often stripped dead Allied soldiers of their boots and uniforms and
devoured their rations.
From August through early November, the Allies pushed the Germans back,
while the Germans’ own allies—Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey—all sued for
peace. Finally, revolts broke out in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm fled to the Netherlands. As
the German army began to disintegrate, the German high command agreed to an
armistice, whose harsh terms meant the end of the war. “At the eleventh hour of the
eleventh day of the eleventh month”—November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent.
The war led to a bitter peace. The Allies vacillated between punishing Germany
irreparably and integrating it back into the family of nations. They ended up doing
neither. Germany was left merely wounded, but vengeful. The United States failed to
help Europe. It returned to isolationism, even though the War had left the U.S. by far the
greatest economic power and potentially the greatest military power. Once the
Depression began and the Nazis under former Western Front soldier Adolf Hitler came to
power, it was only a matter of time before another war broke out.
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Almost none of the major political movements or turning points in the twentieth
century could have happened without the First World War--Communism, Nazism, the
Great Depression, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Without the
slaughter at Verdun, where armies suffered 700,000 casualties in ten months and neither
side gained any ground, neither Auschwitz nor Hiroshima could have happened. In the
18th and 19th centuries, Europeans, although they might still slaughter African and Asians
indiscriminately, at least learned how to confine their wars in Europe to killing soldiers.
The First World War taught Europeans, and Americans, how to make war on civilians on
a massive scale. The British blockade probably resulted in the deaths of 600,000
Germans from malnutrition and disease. Unrestricted submarine warfare was designed
by Germany to starve Britain, while aerial bombardment sought to terrorize cities.
The War transformed the place of Europe in the world and began the long process
over the twentieth century that has led to rise of new economic powers around the globe.
In 1914, Europe was the center of the world. European states ruled vast empires in Asia
and Africa. The Mideast was still ruled by the Ottoman Turks who had conquered
Constantinople in 1453 and whose empire was once the largest in world history since the
Romans. The Turkish empire, China, and Iran, although not outright colonies, were
protectorates of Britain, France, and Germany. Europeans controlled their banks,
railroads, and taxes and humiliated them by refusing to have Europeans obey their laws.
In the wake of the War, nationalists like Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-Tung began
the unraveling of Europe’s empires by building nationalist movements that would
eventually force Europeans out of their countries.
In other ways, the war left long, long shadows. The reaction to the War led to
some significant breakthroughs that improved the life of many citizens—much expanded
social welfare systems, extension of the right to vote to women, and more egalitarian
taxation. Yet the ultimate cost of the War dwarfed the gains. By destroying the basis of
international economic cooperation, the War eventually led to the Great Depression with
its devastating unemployment. The War also polarized both domestic and international
politics. The authoritarian control of the economy which the Nazis imposed on Germany
and the Communists imposed on the Soviet Bloc was modeled after the wartime
measures of World War I.
Communism itself could never have come to power in Russia without the First
World War. Russia’s struggle and defeat in the War devastated the economy, destroyed
the legitimacy of the Czarist government, and frightened Russians into supporting radical
solutions. The fear of invasion and the police state methods that fueled the Communist
side of the Cold War grew directly out of the Bolsheviks’ experience of fighting the
Germans, the Allies, the Poles, and non-Communist Russians during the First World War
and the civil war that followed. Through the Cold War, the legacy of the Great War
lasted very long indeed. I vividly remember on the morning of November 10, 1989, when
the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall the night before reached us. A wise old professor
at my university, steeped in European culture, stopped me in the hall. He asked, “Did the
twentieth century just end?” I answered that perhaps, after 75 short years, 1914-1989, it
had, and the twentieth first century, whose future is still unclear even now, had begun.
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What lessons can we take from this past for our present and the future?
First, globalization is not inevitable, no matter how powerful an economic force it
may seem. My daughter, a few years ago, spent a summer in Sana’a, Yemen. She could
buy, even amidst the 500 year old market of the old city, almost every U.S., European,
Japanese, or Chinese good one could want. But globalization was a powerful a force a
century ago, and it all came crashing down. Globalization depends on peace, on
international cooperation, and financial stability. If these were to weaken, globalization
could stop, and even retreat. My daughter noted that economic globalization in Yemen
did not prevent the persistence of old hatreds to simmer beneath the surface nor to divert
angry youths from turning to terrorism. If the current world economic crisis would be
combined with a major international conflict, 2033 might look like 1933.
Second, a focus on economic forces can easily blind a generation to the latent
power held by governments in their midst and the lurking problems within society that
defy easy solutions. Governments have tremendous power to mobilize their populations,
even for the most foolish of ends. We today, including historians, explain the willingness
of French and Germans to die by the hundreds of thousands in the Great War by claiming
that they lived in an era of nationalism. In fact, it was such an era, but less than fifty
years before the War, both countries fought civil wars, where Frenchmen killed
Frenchmen and Germans killed Germans. Both going into and during the Great War,
these countries were deeply divided by religion, politics, and class. But in France and
Germany, as in almost every country during the First World War, governments held
power firmly in their grasp. The relative peace and prosperity before the War obscured
how much latent power governments still held. They also obscured how frightened
leaders were of economic globalization, social conflict, diplomatic rivalries, and sharing
power with domestic opponents. It was these fears that drove elites to plunge a continent
into war. The lesson for us is to remember that governments hold tremendous power
over their populations, power that is usually unquestioned and which they can use for
either good or ill. Like the generation before 1914, we who live before 2014 can easily
miss the underlying conflicts and profound fears in the world around us—the desperation
driving migrants and refugees, the environmental crises and disease in poor countries,
and failures of democracy to replace dictatorship in too much of the world. Allowing
these problems to fester eventually encourages rash recourse to military means in order to
suppress or escape from these concerns. Except in the clearest cases of self-defense or
humanitarian intervention, war is never a solution.
The importance of government means, too, that, despite the daunting economic
issues we face, it can be international politics that ultimately determine whether or not we
can deal with our economic problems. The generation before 1914 faced a new situation
in international politics. Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, Russia, had dominated the
nineteenth century, both them creating vast non-European empires. They were then
challenged by new powers—Germany, Japan, and the United States. This “multi-polar”
system proved unstable. Similarly, we, too, face a “multi-polar” world for the first time
since before the Second World War. The United States is no longer the dominant
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military or diplomatic power in the world. We share an uneasy stage with China, India,
and Russia. The Victorian era when Great Britain ruled the oceans and the brief postCold War period, when the United States was the sole great power, were exceptional
times. Over the last three centuries, a multi-polar system has been much more typical.
And, tragically, multi-polar systems have often not ended well. The eighteenth century,
around the time of the American Revolution, saw the competition among France, Austria,
Britain, Russia, and Prussia result in the wars and empire of Napoleon. We know how
the multi-polar rivalries before 1914 ended. The even more confused multi-polar
situation of the 1920s and 30s ended in a still more destructive conflict. It is the present
generation that has the challenge to bring China, India, and Russia into a more
harmonious relationship with the western alliance of United States, Japan, the European
Union, and our allies. Only by arriving at a more collaborative situation with these and
other emerging powers can we tackle the daunting problems we face.
Of all the political lessons that we might take from the First World War the
confrontation between Britain and Germany may be the most instructive. Britain had
long been an industrial power, one with enormous financial, political, and trading
connections spanning the globe. Germany was the rapidly growing economic colossus of
Europe. By 1914, Germany produced more steel than Britain, France, and Russia
combined. It decided, fatally, that its economic power needed to be matched by military
dominance. German General Friedrich von Bernhardi argued in a notorious 1911 book,
Germany and the Next War, that war was an economic necessity and that Germany
needed to do all it could to prepare for a war. Yet, without war, Germany’s trade had
been growing enormously, especially to Britain and British colonies and dominions. The
only way that Germany’s economy might suffer was if the Germans threatened war with
Britain. This is what the Germans proceeded to do by building battleships to attack those
of Britain and endanger the international economy in which both countries had thrived.
Seldom in world history have the rulers of a powerful country so recklessly mis-read their
own interests. The consequences were the more dire because Britain, under the weak
leadership of its Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, failed to warn Germany against war.
Chinese and U.S. leaders today would do well to read and re-read the history of the pre1914 world to understand how a rising economic and military power and an established
power which is militarily dominant but economically vulnerable can collide.
Third, and finally, remembering the First World War should give us a sense that
history matters, and not only because it shows us tragic courses of action to avoid. The
First World War changed forever the way we commemorate military conflicts. In the
wake of the war’s slaughter, raising statues of generals waving their swords on rearing
horses as memorials seemed almost blasphemous. Instead, World War I was the first
conflict to spawn memorials to the average soldier. The Vietnam Veterans War
Memorial in Washington, D.C., is the logical extension of the memorials that recognized
every individual life lost as equally valuable. Out of the war, too, in every country, came
the Tomb of the Unknown Solider. One-half of the military dead in the war died
anonymously. Remembering World War One should also give us hope for some of our
seemingly intractable world problems. The wounds of the War were deep but they have
healed. There is no conflict in the world today, not between Israelis and Palestinians,
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Indians and Pakistanis, or North Korea and its neighbors, that is as deep or long-lasting as
that which fueled the First and Second World Wars. Over 75 years, five million French
and Germans died in three wars in which the two countries fought each other. It is
moving, now, to see these two countries as the staunchest of allies. One can visit Verdun
and see the grandchildren of those who died in the battle walk side by side in silent
meditation on conflicts that have long since died.
The War, too, began the long debate in which we are still engaged about
America’s proper place in the world. The debate over whether the United States should
enter the war nearly tore the country apart. Central Pennsylvania was a hotbed of
isolationist, pro-German sentiment in the first years of the War until pro-war fever
overwhelmed it after April, 1917 when the U.S. declared war. Tragically, the enthusiasm
for the war effort was matched by waves of disillusion after the War. Americans realized
that this war, like all others, could not bring easy solutions. Only decades of sustained
effort and wise leadership could bring solutions, and Americans declined to take that
course. The United States rejected the Treaty of Versailles that was to have ended the
war, rejected the League of Nations that President Wilson hoped would ensure peace in
Europe, and turned its back on the problems of the world beyond our own shores.
America and the world paid a terrible price for our isolationism.
Nothing demonstrates so clearly that one can learn from history as the difference
between the actions of the United States in 1919 and 1945. After 1945, the so-called
greatest generation created the international institutions that still define our world and
provide the bedrock for globalization and international cooperation—the United Nations,
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, and GATT, now turned into
the World Trade Organization. For all their problems, and they are many, these
institutions have helped give us a far better world than that before 1914 or between the
First and Second World Wars. Whether we in the twenty-first century will continue to
manage the tensions of a multi-polar world and economic globalization better than our
great-grandparents did is the greatest challenge of our time.
Ultimately, America learned from the First World War that it could not avoid
responsibility for the world and that we must learn from history, sometimes, time and
again, the same lessons. The changes of our own era may seem breathtaking. The human
choices, however, about war and peace, conflict and cooperation, isolation and
responsibility are much the same as those of generations before us. Victor Hugo said that
revolution changes everything, except the human heart. The same could be said of war
and the apparent novelty of our own day. But because we are fundamentally the same as
the men and women of an earlier era, they have much to teach us. As long as we can look
back with introspection upon history, we will be better able to meet the challenges of the
future. Thank you very much.