After Tamerlane (56 page)

The massive aftershocks of the First World War had a collective significance. They marked the breakdown of the
ancien régime
across Eurasia. The war had become a graveyard of empires, European and Asian. The Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Romanovs had been dethroned (or worse) and their domains broken up. The Ottoman Empire had followed in their wake. The ill-fated attempt to revive Ch'ing imperial rule under a parvenu dynast collapsed in 1916. The vast centre of the world became a political cockpit in which movements, ideologies, religions, nationalities and interests struggled to build a new system of states, and the imperial powers (or what remained of them) manoeuvred to protect their claims and privileges. By
the late 1920s an uneasy truce had settled over many of these conflicts. It did not last long. With the political fallout of the great depression after 1930, the post-war order dissolved in acrimony. By the middle of the decade it was openly flouted by the virulent new imperialisms of Germany, Italy and Japan – far more aggressive in style and far less modest in ambition than their European forerunners of the 1880s and '90s. Between 1937 and 1942 they set in motion a vast Eurasian crisis. In the global Armageddon that followed, it seemed almost inevitable that, whoever they might be, the winners would have no choice but to fashion a new world order.

The most vital prop of Europe's primacy in Eurasia, and of the powerful position of the great European states in the Outer World beyond, had been their collective determination not to fight each other. It had been this and the Atlantic peace between Europe and the Americas that had allowed the rapid growth of international trade, the steady extension of European influence and authority, and the ironic achievement of the African partition. The reluctance of European governments to upset their continental balance of power and risk the social and political upheaval that a general war would bring had restrained their pursuit of national and imperial advantage. Even where their interests seemed deeply engaged (as in the Ottoman Empire), or economic opportunities seemed especially promising (as in China), they acquiesced in makeshift arrangements that prolonged the old local regime rather than face the consequences of a ‘final solution' by partition or conquest. Of course, to many observers, both then and subsequently, this untidy pattern seemed inherently unstable. Sooner or later an intense local crisis would become unmanageable by these hand-to-mouth methods. The balance of strength between the rival great powers might shift just enough to lessen their mutual restraint and create a sense of impatience with the existing share-out of spheres. The influence of lobbies, masquerading as ‘public opinion' and projected through newspapers, threatened the cosmopolitan tradition of ‘old' diplomacy, with its aristocratic disdain for the interests of mere ‘business'. The imperial monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe, ruling uneasily over multi-ethnic empires (even the German Empire contained several million Poles), might be dangerously prone to treat
dynastic prestige (rather than material interests) as a reason for war and be all too susceptible to the militarist ethos of their courts and armies.
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Even the means that the great powers had used to deter each other's aggression – the build-up of armaments – might be the trigger for war if fear of future weakness encouraged a pre-emptive attack.

But up to 1914 the great European powers' competition in Africa, the Pacific, East Asia and the Middle East (including the Asian parts of the Ottoman and Iranian empires) showed little sign of creating an uncontrollable vortex of military conflict. In turn, this acted as a strong deterrent upon further Japanese expansion in North East Asia at the expense of either China or Russia. The critical breakdown of great-power relations occurred not over the powers' ambitions in the extra-European world but over their balance of influence in Europe's Balkan backyard. In reality, of course, the volatile politics of the Balkans arose directly from the progressive failure of the Ottoman Empire to contain the militant nationalisms of its Christian subjects. In the terrible crisis of 1911–13, the Ottomans were assailed first by the Italians (who seized modern Libya and parts of the Dodecanese) and then by a coalition of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria which all but expelled the empire from Europe – the Turks clung on to a small part of Thrace. Unlike in previous crises, the great powers failed to prop up a vestige of Ottoman rule in Europe. The result was not to settle the politics of the region – indeed, the Balkan states promptly fought a second internecine war to divide the spoils. It merely posed much more starkly than before the question of which outside power would predominate there. For no one supposed that the Balkan governments could be trusted to honour their frontiers, restrain their militants, suppress inter-ethnic conflicts, or resist the temptation to exploit great-power intrigues for local advantage.

The shocking feature (as it seems in retrospect) was the failure of the great powers to agree on a peaceful partition of spheres in the way so familiar in their extra-European diplomacy. Yet it was never going to be easy to exert indirect control over an inaccessible region steeped in a tradition of localized ethnic violence, where governments were weak and the land awash with weapons. It was also the case that the geopolitical stakes in the Balkans seemed higher than anywhere else in Eurasia, let alone the Outer World. It was easy to imagine that a
setback here might do irreparable damage to the long-term strategic interests (and hence political cohesion) of either Russia or Austria–Hungary – and by extension to the European alliances of which they were part. If the Balkans were consolidated as a virtual protectorate of the Habsburg monarchy and its great northern ally, then Austro-German influence would soon be supreme at the Straits as well, where a Turkish coup of 1913 had strengthened ties with Berlin. Germany and Austria–Hungary would have scored a smashing victory without firing a shot. A great swathe of their client states would fence Russia in, grasp its commercial windpipe between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and put out of reach for ever the cherished Russian goal of ruling Constantinople (today's Istanbul). The prestige of the Romanovs would fall like a stone. Alternatively, if the much-enlarged Serbia was allowed to foment anti-Habsburg nationalism among the monarchy's South Slavs with the protection of Russia, the triangular geometry of Austria–Hungary's politics (the mutual antagonisms of its Germans, Magyars and Slavs) might break up in chaos.
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A vast zone of weakness in Eastern and Central Europe would wreck the balance of power and expose a weakened Germany to the darkest nightmare of strategic encirclement. The implications were breathtaking. The extraordinary events of 1911–13 had extended the old Balkan fault line in great-power diplomacy into the heart of Europe and drawn Asia Minor into the earthquake zone.

It would thus have required exceptional skill and goodwill to prevent the murder of the Habsburg heir by a Serb assassin in Bosnia from provoking an armed confrontation between the great powers. The July Crisis in 1914 grewout of the Austrian demand that, to make amends for hosting the assassin's secret society, the Serbs accept Austrian supervision of their internal security. Serbian rejection of this semi-colonial status relied on the diplomatic support of Russia. In 1908–9 the Russians had been forced into a humiliating climbdown after challenging the Austrian annexation of Bosnia. But in 1914 they could not back away without suffering a huge geopolitical defeat, with alarming domestic repercussions. Nor did they do so. As the Russians and Austrians began to mobilize their armies to showthey meant business, the immediate question was whether the other European great powers would insist on a conference to settle the matter.

This was the crucial stage of the crisis. It was now that the Germans were forced to show their hand. Without their unqualified backing, the Vienna government – facing a war on two fronts, against Serbia and Russia – might be forced to retreat and let the Serbs escape. Russia's Balkan influence would recover sharply. Its growing military strength, to which German planners attached an exaggerated importance (Russia's ‘grand programme' was expected to create an army three times as big as Germany's by 1917),
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would further tilt the balance of power along the Balkan fault line. To stiffen the resolve of their weaker partner, the Germans gave Vienna carte blanche, effectively vetoing a conference. But the logic of this was to widen the crisis and reduce the chances of peace. For, if Germany was forced into a war against Russia, its strategic plan required that France, Russia's ally, should be defeated first or effectively neutralized. Only then could the full weight of German military power be safely deployed in the vast spaces of the east. To intimidate France and isolate Russia, Germany threatened the neutrality of Belgium (the invasion route to Paris) and demanded a promise from the British not to take sides. In little more than a month, Austria's attempt to coerce a disorderly Balkan state had grown into Germany's claim for a Europe-wide hegemony. It required little imagination to foresee the results if the Franco-Russian alliance broke up (the inevitable consequence of French neutrality) and the Anglo-French entente became a dead letter. With the British rejection of the German demand, an all-out European war became practically certain.
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The July Crisis revealed that the Achilles heel of Europe's global primacy was the underdevelopment of the European states system. It was Europe's sudden expansion on its Balkan doorstep, the brittle structure of its multinational empires, and the chaotic politics of its smallest states that turned a political murder into a general war. The European balance of power was unable to cope with the final collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. To a shrewd insider just before the war, it seemed obvious enough that international peace must depend on the judgement and skill of statesmen and diplomats. Kurt Riezler (the private secretary of the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg) argued that, in a closely interlocked world, the price of war was almost always too high. But he also assumed that states were bound to
behave in an assertive way just because their interests had become so entangled (splendid aloofness was no longer an option), and to build up armaments to showtheir resolve. In the game of nations, it was often necessary to bluff: it was ‘over-bluffing' that brought on the risk of war.
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Riezler's theory was a persuasive account of great-power diplomacy since the 1870s. What it failed to predict was a European ‘super-crisis', in which both sides believed that a compromise solution would mean a major defeat, and when (worse still) both sides thought that they had a good chance of winning. Still less did it allow for the effects of myopia: the inability of decision-makers to foresee all the ramifying consequences of a general war.

Indeed, the European war between the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain and the Central Powers (Germany and Austria–Hungary) quickly became global. At the end of October 1914 the Ottoman Empire (fearful of the results of an Entente victory) joined the Central Powers. That spread the war to the Caucasus, the Sinai border with British-ruled Egypt, and the Persian Gulf, then navally speaking a British lake. In East Asia, Japan joined the war as an ally of Britain, but with the obvious motive of seizing the Germans' Chinese base at Kiao-chao and their commercial rights in the nearby province of Shantung (Shandong). In West, East and South West Africa, colonial wars broke out between the British, French and Belgians on one side and the Germans on the other. And the war was oceanic. German surface-raiders and (increasingly) submarines waged war on the sea lanes radiating out from Britain, to choke off the supply of foodstuffs, rawmaterials and munitions on which the British war effort depended. The British in turn waged naval war by blockade to squeeze the German economy, and deny it overseas sources of food and strategic materials. Here was the proof that, with a world economy and a single system of world politics, there was no escape from the fallout of war, wherever it started.

But if Europe's war had become global, it had to be settled within Europe itself. By the end of 1915 an outright victory for either side seemed very unlikely. In the western war, the Germans had rapidly occupied parts of Belgium and France. The inconclusive campaigns of 1915 showed that, with the resort to trench warfare, a stalemate had set in. The French and British could not drive the Germans out; the
Germans in turn could not force them to give in. In the eastern war there was a similar pattern. By September 1915 the German and Austrian armies had forced the Russians back to a defensive line deep inside their empire (it ran from Riga to Czernowitz) and occupied a vast frontier zone that they called ‘Ober-Ost'.
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They swallowed Serbia, and, with Bulgarian help, controlled a wide Balkan corridor towards the Ottoman Empire. Yet without victory in the west they could hardly hope to muster all the men and materiel to overcome Russia, with its bottomless pit of military manpower. In the Entente camp, the resilience of the Ottomans in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Palestine – and, worse still, at Gallipoli – was a crushing disappointment. The soft underbelly of the Central Powers proved as hard as nails. Yet neither side drewthe conclusion that the war had confirmed a balance of military power. Neither side accepted the case that a diplomatic solution was necessary. Instead, both pinned their hopes on raising the odds: mobilizing more men and resources to achieve the breakthrough or to wear down the enemy by a war of attrition. Both assumed tacitly that the rupture of war had revealed the bankruptcy of the pre-war order.

As a result, the year 1916 marked the beginning of a newphase in the war, and, as it turned out, a new phase in world history. The commitment to win whatever the cost lay behind the terrible slaughter at Verdun, on the Somme, and in Brusilov's offensive on the eastern front, where Russia lost more than a million men. As the losses mounted, the preconditions for peace in a post-war world became more and more drastic. Britain, France and Russia agreed to partition the Ottoman Empire. The break-up of Austria–Hungary into nation states became an Allied war aim. The reconstruction of Germany to obliterate its ‘militarism' was the best guarantee of ‘never again'. On the German side, it was the Russian ‘menace' that had caused all the trouble. The final destruction of the tsarist empire became the minimum needed for post-war security. In Germany, France and Britain, 1916–17 brought newleaders to power, committed to fight the war to a finish. But, long before there was any question of peace, the whole landscape of power was reshaped by the strains of fighting a total war. Germany's resort to unrestricted use of submarine warfare, in a desperate effort to shorten the war, was the catalyst for the
entry of the United States in April 1917. Any peace settlement would now have to square the territorial aims of the European powers with the American demand for an ‘open door' to trade and American antagonism to European-style empires at home and abroad. But most dramatic of all was the sudden collapse of the Russian monarchy.