The New Penguin History of the World (166 page)

Only a perspective which Englishmen of the day found hard to recognize reveals the fundamental change that had come about in the international position of the United Kingdom within the preceding half-century or so. This is provided by a view from Japan or the United States, the two great extra-European powers. The Japanese portent was the more easily discerned of the two, perhaps, because of the military victory over Russia, yet there were signs for those who could interpret them that the United States would shortly emerge as a power capable of dwarfing Europe, and as the most powerful nation in the world. Her nineteenth-century expansion had come to a climax with the establishment of her supremacy on an unquestionable footing of power in her own hemisphere. The war with Spain and the building of the Panama canal rounded off the process. American domestic, social and economic circumstances were such that the political system proved easily able to handle the problems it faced once
the great mid-century crisis was surmounted. Amongst these, some of the gravest resulted from industrialization. The confidence that all would go well if the economically strongest were simply allowed to drive all others to the wall first began to be questioned towards the end of the nineteenth century. But this was after an industrial machine of immense scale had already matured. It would be the bedrock of future American power. By 1914 American production of pig-iron and steel was more than double that of Great Britain and Germany together; the United States mined almost enough coal to outpace them, too, and made more motor cars than the rest of the world put together. At the same time the standard of living of her citizens continued to act as a magnet to immigration; in her natural resources and a stream of cheap, highly motivated labour lay two of the sources of America’s economic might. The other was foreign capital. She was the greatest of debtor nations.

Though her political constitution was older in 1914 than that of any major European state except Great Britain or Russia, the arrival of new Americans helped to give the United States the characteristics and psychology of a new nation. A need to integrate her new citizens often led to the expression of strong nationalist feeling. But because of geography, a tradition of rejecting Europe, and the continuing domination of American government and business by élites formed in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, this did not take violent forms outside the western hemisphere. The United States in 1914 was still a young giant waiting in the wings of history, whose full importance would only become manifest when Europe needed to involve America in its quarrels.

In that year a war began as a result of those quarrels. Though it was not the bloodiest nor most prolonged war in history, nor strictly, as it was later termed, the ‘first’ World War, it was the most intensely fought struggle and the greatest in geographical extent to have occurred down to that time. Nations from every continent took part. It was also costlier than any earlier war and made unprecedented demands upon resources. Whole societies were mobilized to fight it, in part because it was also the first war in which machines played an overwhelmingly important part; war was for the first time transformed by science. The best name to give it remains the simple one used by those who fought in it: the
Great
War. This is sufficiently justified by its unprecedented psychological effect alone.

It was also the first of two wars whose central issue was the control of German power. The damage they did ended Europe’s political, economic and military supremacy. Each of these conflicts originated in essentially European issues and the war always had a predominantly European flavour; like the next great struggle detonated by Germany, though, it
sucked into it other conflicts and jumbled together a whole anthology of issues. But Europe was the heart of the matter and self-inflicted damage in the end finished off her world hegemony. This did not happen by 1918, when the Great War ended (though irreparable damage had already been done, even by then), but it was obvious in 1945, at the end of a ‘Second World War’. That left behind a continent whose pre-1914 structure had vanished. It has led some historians to speak of the whole era from 1914 to 1945 as an entity, as a European ‘civil war’ – not a bad metaphor, provided it is borne in mind that it is a metaphor. Europe had never been free from wars for long and the containment of internal disorder is the fundamental presupposition of a state: Europe had never been united and could not therefore have a true civil war. But it was the source and seat of a civilization which was a unity; Europeans saw themselves as having more in common with other Europeans than with black, brown or yellow men. Furthermore, it was a system of power which in 1914 was an economic unity and had just experienced its longest period of internal peace. These facts, all of which were to vanish by 1945, make the metaphor of civil war vivid and acceptable; it signifies the self-destructive madness of a civilization.

A European balance had kept the peace between great states for over forty years. By 1914 this was dangerously disturbed. Too many people had come to feel that the chances of war might offer them more than a continued peace. This was especially so in the ruling circles of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. By the time that they had come to feel this, there existed a complicated set of ties, obligations and interests between states which so involved them with one another that it was unlikely that a conflict could be limited to two, or even to a few of them. Another force making for instability was the existence of small countries enjoying special relations with larger ones; some of them were in a position to take the effective power to make decisions from the hands of those who would have to fight a major war.

This delicate situation was made all the more dangerous by the psychological atmosphere in which statesmen had to work by 1914. It was an age when mass emotions were easily aroused, in particular by nationalist and patriotic stimuli. There was widespread ignorance of the dangers of war, because nobody, except a tiny minority, foresaw a war which would be different from that of 1870; they remembered the France of that year, and forgot how, in Virginia and Tennessee only a few years earlier, modern war had first shown its face in prolonged slaughter and huge costs (more Americans died in the Civil War than have died in all the other wars in which the United States has taken part, even to the present day). Everyone
knew that wars could be destructive and violent, certainly, but also believed that in the twentieth century they would be swiftly over. The very cost of armaments made it inconceivable that civilized states could sustain a prolonged struggle such as that with Napoleonic France; the complex world economy and the tax-payer, it was said, could not survive one. This perhaps diminished misgivings about courting danger. There are even signs, too, that many articulate Europeans were bored by their lives in 1914 and saw in war an emotional release purging away a sense of decadence and sterility. Revolutionaries, of course, welcomed international conflict because of the opportunities they thought it might bring. Finally, it is worth remembering that the long success of diplomats in negotiating grave crises without war was itself a danger. Their machinery had worked so many times that when it was presented with facts more than ordinarily recalcitrant in July 1914, their significance for a time seemed to escape many of those who had to deal with them. On the very eve of conflict, statesmen were still finding it difficult to see why another conference of ambassadors or even a European congress should not extricate them from their problems.

One of the conflicts which came to a head in 1914 went back a very long way. This was the old rivalry of Austria-Hungary and Russia in south-eastern Europe. Its roots lay deep in the eighteenth century, but its last phase was dominated by the accelerated collapse of the Ottoman empire in Europe from the Crimean War onwards. For this reason the First World War is from one point of view to be seen as another war of the Ottoman succession. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878 had pulled Europe through one dangerous moment, Habsburg and Romanov policy had settled down to a sort of understanding by the 1890s. This lasted until Russian interest in the Danube valley revived after the checking of Russian imperial ambition in the Far East by the Japanese. At that moment, events outside the Habsburg and Turkish empires were giving a new aggressiveness to Austro-Hungarian policy, too.

At the root of this was revolutionary nationalism. A reform movement looked for a while as if it might put the Ottoman empire together again and this provoked the Balkan nations to try to undo the status quo established by the great powers and the Austrians to look to their own interests in a situation once again fluid. They offended and humiliated the Russians by a mismanaged annexation of the Ottoman province of Bosnia in 1909; the Russians had not been given a corresponding and compensating gain. Another consequence of Bosnia’s annexation was that the Dual Monarchy acquired more Slav subjects. There was already discontent among the monarchy’s subject peoples, in particular, the Slavs who lived under
Magyar rule. More and more under the pressure of Magyar interests, the government in Vienna had shown itself hostile to Serbia, a nation to which these Slav subjects might look for support. Some of them saw Serbia as the nucleus of a future state embracing all South Slavs, and its rulers seemed unable (and perhaps unwilling) to restrain South Slav revolutionaries who used Belgrade as a base for terrorism and subversion in Bosnia. Lessons from history are often unfortunate; the Vienna government was only too ready to conclude that Serbia might play in the Danube valley the role that Sardinia had played in uniting Italy. Unless the serpent were scotched in the egg, many servants of the empire felt, another loss of Habsburg territory would follow. Having been excluded from Germany by Prussia and from Italy by Sardinia, a potential new South Slav state, whether a greater Serbia or something else, now seemed to some Habsburg counsellors to threaten the empire with exclusion from the lower Danube valley. This would mean its end as a great power and an end, too, of Magyar supremacy in Hungary, for fairer treatment of Slavs who remained in Hungarian territory would be insisted upon by south Slavdom. The continuing subsidence of the Ottoman empire could then only benefit Russia, the power which stood behind Serbia, determined there should not be another 1909.

Into this complicated situation the other powers were pulled by interest, choice, sentiment and formal alliances. Of these, the last were perhaps less important than was once thought. Bismarck’s efforts in the 1870s and 1880s to ensure the isolation of France and the supremacy of Germany had spawned a system of alliances unique in peacetime. Their common characteristic was that they defined conditions on which countries would go to war to support one another, and this seemed to cramp diplomacy. But in the end they did not operate as planned. This does not mean that they did not contribute to the coming of war, but that formal arrangements can only be effective if people want them to be, and other factors decided that in 1914.

At the root of the alliances was the German seizure of Alsace and Lorraine from France in 1871, and the consequent French restlessness for revenge. Bismarck guarded against this first by drawing together Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary on the common ground of dynastic resistance to revolutionary and subversive dangers, which France, the only republic among the major states, was still supposed to represent; there were after all still alive in 1871 people born before 1789 and many others who could remember the comments of those who had lived through the years of the great Revolution, while the upheaval of the Paris Commune revived all the old fears of international subversion. The conservative alliance none
the less lapsed in the 1880s, essentially because Bismarck felt he must in the last resort back Austria-Hungary if a conflict between her and Russia proved unavoidable. To Germany and the Dual Monarchy was then added Italy; thus was formed in 1882 the Triple Alliance. But Bismarck still kept a separate ‘Reinsurance’ treaty with Russia, though he seems to have felt uneasy about the prospect of keeping Russia and Austria-Hungary at peace in this way.

Yet a conflict between them did not again look likely until after 1909. By then, Bismarck’s successors had allowed his Reinsurance treaty to lapse and Russia had become in 1892 an ally of France. From that date the road led away from Bismarck’s Europe, where everyone else had been kept in equilibrium by Germany’s central role, to a Europe divided into two camps. This was made worse by German policy. In a series of crises, it showed that it wanted to frighten other nations with its displeasure and make itself esteemed. In particular, in 1905 and 1911 irritation was directed against France, and commercial and colonial issues were used as excuses to show by displays of force that France had not won the right to disregard German wishes by making an ally of Russia. German military planning had already by 1900 accepted the need to fight a two-front war if necessary, and made preparations to do so by a quick overthrow of France while the resources of Russia were slowly mobilized.

As the twentieth century opened, it had therefore become highly probable that if an Austro-Russian war broke out, Germany and France would join in. Moreover, Germans had within a few years made this more likely by patronizing the Turks. This was much more alarming to the Russians than it would have been earlier, because a growing export trade in grain from Russia’s Black Sea ports had to pass through the Straits. The Russians began to improve their fighting-power. One essential step in this was the completion of a railway network which would make possible the mobilization and delivery to the battlefields of eastern Europe of Russia’s vast armies.

In all this, there was no obvious need for Great Britain to be concerned, had not German policy perversely antagonized her. At the end of the nineteenth century Great Britain’s quarrels were almost all with France and Russia. They arose where imperial ambitions clashed, in Africa and central and south-eastern Asia. Anglo-German relations were more easily managed, if occasionally prickly. As Great Britain entered the new century it was still preoccupied with empire, not with Europe. The first peacetime alliance it had made since the eighteenth century was with Japan, to safeguard its interests in the Far East. Then came a settlement of long outstanding disputes with France in 1904; this was in essence an agreement about Africa, where France was to be given a free hand in Morocco in return
for Great Britain having one in Egypt – a way of settling another bit of the Ottoman succession – but it rounded up other colonial quarrels the world over, some going back as far as the Peace of Utrecht. A few years later, Great Britain made a similar (though less successful) agreement with Russia about spheres of interest in Persia. But the Anglo-French settlement grew into much more than a clearing away of grounds for dispute. It became what was called an
entente
, or special relationship.