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| Map of Europe - August 1914 - click image to enlarge |
I will be the first to admit that I am a history nerd. I've always loved history because, in my view, it explains how the world has gotten to its current situation and, if one will bother to understand it, how to avoid the same mistakes of the past. Sadly, most politicians - particularly Americans - and rulers around the world seem to never learn from history's lessons. Anyone with a knowledge and understanding of the history of the Middle East could have predicted the disasters that ensured (and continue to unfold) in Afghanistan and Iraq which have now spread to envelop more of the Middle East. One of America's biggest problems is one of hubris and a misguided belief in "American exceptionalism." Americans think they know better than others and that they can succeed where others have failed. The truth s that America is no different that other countries despite the xenophobia of the Christofascists in particular.
A piece in The Daily Beast looks at two new books that examine how hubris and a lack of any serious true long term plan on the eve of and during World War I set the stage for many of today's problems not to mention the blood bath of World War II. What happened during World War I - a war that many expected to be over in 6 months when it began - ought to make all politicians think in terms of the long game and not short term policies that will excite their party's base and/or policies that ignore the historic realities of the regions where America would seek to impose its will. As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Right now, there is plenty of reason to be very afraid. Both books ought to be mandatory reading for every politician in Washington and every senior military officer. Here are some article highlight (I encourage readers to read the entire piece):
During the first half of the 20th century European civilization embarked on a journey into the abyss: it moved from being the epicenter of sophistication, civilization, high culture, and knowledge, to become home to the most savage episodes of collective-barbaric-violence ever witnessed in the history of mankind.
World War I was a catastrophic turning point for humanity: 70 million men were mobilized to fight; nearly 10 million perished; communities were annihilated, and massive populations were displaced across Europe. The so call “war to end all wars,” paradoxically, created a more violent planet than what had existed before the first shots were fired.
Much of Europe in 1914 resembled a world of cosmopolitan tolerance, noble aesthetics, grand opera houses, and paternal kingdoms—which in some cases, but not all, ruled with benevolence, providing the subjects were loyal and obedient to their masters. By the time the Great War had ended just four years later, however, the sweep of democracies that had replaced the Tsarist, Habsburg, Ottoman, and German empires resembled something closer to Dante’s Inferno: a chaotic-hellish nightmare razed to the ground. And any semblance of normality that had previously existed seemed to have evaporated.
So did this seemingly stable world, which inherited its rational values from key Enlightenment thinkers— who believed in the progress of humanity— tumble into chaos by mere chance? Or was there any truth to Leon Trotsky’s remark that while history offers no guarantees, it is not without logic.
Technology played an important role in helping to destroy the existing social order. In his 1901 book, Anticipations, the British science fiction author H. G. Wells predicted the decay of political systems across Europe, describing how the mechanization of warfare—which developed rapidly in tandem with modernity—would bring about unprecedented violent changes to the world.
Horrific suffering and horror emerged across both the eastern and western fronts during this period. And by 1918 there had been a tumultuous upheaval of the four dynasties that dominated East and Central Europe. Politics across the continent would never be the same again.
As early as 1905, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned that while a war between his own nation and Germany would be the “end of everything,” an even darker force was presenting itself in the East: revolutionary socialism.
[I]t would return European civilization back to a period of darkness not witnessed since the Middle Ages.
The sudden collapse of these societies is what the late British historian Eric Hobsbawn referred to in his book The Age of Extremes as “capitalist in its economy; liberal in its legal and constitutional structure; bourgeois in the image of its characteristic hegemonic class; glorying in the advance of science, knowledge and education, and profoundly convinced of the centrality of Europe [whose] major states constituted the system of world politics.”
To fully comprehend the short century that Hobsbawn has famously referred to as the “Age of Catastrophe”—that is the years 1914-1989—we need to understand how, and why, the existing social order dramatically disintegrated, almost without warning, as the First World War concluded.
{t}wo new books by two distinguished British historians both take a fresh approach in analyzing the conflict.
In the introduction to Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War 1914-1918, Alexander Watson claims this is the first modern history book to narrate the Great War from the perspective of the two major Central Powers.
The war began a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohneberg, by Serbian terrorists, on June 28, 1914. And it was existential fear, rather than feelings of certainties in the central powers’ military capabilities, that propelled the conflict into existence in the first place.
[T]he major losses of the First World War profoundly changed the political landscape of central Europe indefinitely. The ramifications of this can still be seen today. One needs only to look at the violent culture that pervades in places like Ukraine, and some of the Balkan states—where respect for the rule of law is minimal, and ethnic tensions run extremely high—to see how they are a direct result of the politics of the First World War.
Watson also reminds us that the armistice signed at Versailles in November 1918 humiliated Germany into taking full responsibility for the war, as well as landing them with incredible debt that crippled the German economy and brought on massive hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic of the ’20s. In turn, this economic catastrophe subsequently led to the rise of the Nazi party.
Because the region was such a diverse mix of ethnicities, the self-determining-homogenous nation states that the American president, Woodrow Wilson, rather naively wished to see flourish actually sent this part of Europe into complete chaos, rather than creating the stability that he had predicted. . . . ethnic conflicts in the countries that emerged in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire nearly doubled after 1918.
If Watson’s book focuses predominantly on the voices of ordinary citizens across Central and Eastern Europe who actually fought in the war, Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931 views the conflict from a geopolitical perspective.
Tooze is intent on analyzing this period from a revisionist perspective. He wants to make sense of how the politics of World War I shaped the interwar period and led to the nightmare of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and all hell broke loose.
Tooze’s thesis continually comes back to a single point: how the United States emerged from the conflict as the most dominating force in the world economy. In this sense, he argues, it is unique as a nation. In no previous era in human history had one country ever completely dominated world finance with such ease.
In Tooze’s view, the political landscape that emerged from World War I was a failed ideological liberal-progressive project launched primarily by Woodrow Wilson, who used America’s position of privileged detachment to frame the transformation of world affairs.
Wilson wanted to end imperialist rivalries in European politics. And only a “peace without victory”—the goal he announced to the U.S. Senate in January 1917—could ensure that the United States would emerge as the undisputed arbitrator of world affairs.
Tooze provides the reader with numerous questions here, such as: What had gone so wrong after 1918? Why was American policy miscarried at Versailles? Why did the world economy implode in 1929? And why did the Western Powers lose their grip in such a spectacular fashion in the decade following the end of the war?
By way of answering these questions, Tooze guides us through the numerous diplomatic and economic catastrophes that emerged from World War I. Eventually we start to get a well-rounded and extremely comprehensive insight into why Wilson’s American foreign policy was so misguided.
Wilson placed his faith 100 percent in American capitalist values, which he believed were natural byproducts of American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States is guided by God’s will to be morally and spiritually superior to the rest of the world.
But Wilson was gravely mistaken when he placed his faith in the idea that “markets and business would replace politics and military power.’ As Tooze writes, “the consequences of this push to depoliticize the world economy were perverse.
Wilson’s biggest mistake was to place “the self-determination of peoples’” at the center of his post-war vision. While this slogan may have made for healthy wartime propaganda, and increased his popularity in the short term, it was an extremely naïve view of how the emerging order would eventually play out on European soil. And it merely delayed the apocalyptic maelstrom that followed rather than preventing it.
Both authors suggest that today we must recognize that a failed American foreign policy during this time only helped to aid the drastic ideas that emerged in the coming decades.
Following the Great War, tolerance across Europe would be replaced by extreme hatred. And ideas promising utopian living—in the form of both fascist and communist politics—would fairly quickly come to shape the new era: which was a zero sum game style of politics.
Back in 1918, as the remains of 10 million corpses began decomposing into the bloody soil of a world that would be forever changed, there were constant cries from statesman, citizens, and civil society of “never again.”
But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the past doesn’t prevent us from making the same mistakes, over and over again.
With each passing day the battle in the Middle East between Islamic State militants and the West more closely resembles Europe’s religious wars of the 17th century, and global stability once again looks increasingly under threat.
Therefore one can only remain optimistic: hoping that the brighter sides of our humanity, which increases our altruistic side as a species, will somehow overcome fear and hatred at all costs.
A first step in avoiding disaster is for American politicians to cease always believing that they/America knows best and toss aside the hubris embodied in the myth of American exceptionalism. Will this happen? Likely not, especially among the Republican Party base.
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| the fruits of hubris |
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