The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (7 page)

This stylized narrative, it should be stressed, applies to a limited sample of countries and to somewhat arbitrarily defined sub-periods. As will become clear, it would be a mistake to regard the performance of the major industrial economies as a proxy for the performance of the world economy as a whole. The severity of the inter-war extremes of inflation and deflation, growth and contraction, varied greatly between different European countries. And there were quite different trends in volatility in African, Asian and Latin American economies from the 1950s onwards.

Economic volatility matters because it tends to exacerbate social conflict. It seems intuitively obvious that periods of economic crisis
create incentives for politically dominant groups to pass the burdens of adjustment on to others. With the growth of state intervention in economic life, the opportunities for such discriminatory redistribution clearly proliferated. What could be easier in a time of general hardship than to exclude a particular group from the system of public benefits? What is perhaps less obvious is that social dislocation may also follow periods of rapid growth, since the benefits of growth are very seldom evenly distributed. Indeed, it may be precisely the minority of winners in an upswing who are targeted for retribution in a subsequent downswing.

Once again it is possible to illustrate this point with reference to the best-known of cases, that of the Jews of Europe. Traditionally, historians have sought to explain the electoral success of anti-Semitic parties in Germany and elsewhere – as well as that of the occasionally anti-Semitic Populists in the United States – with reference to the Great Depression of the late 1870s and 1880s. However, the decline in agricultural prices that characterized that period provides only part of the explanation. Economic growth was not depressed; nor did stock markets fail to recover from the setbacks of the 1870s. What was galling to those trapped in relatively stagnant economic sectors like traditional handcrafts and small-scale agriculture was the evident prosperity of those better placed to profit from international economic integration and increased financial intermediation. As a rule, sudden and violent punctuations like stock market bubbles and busts had a bigger impact than long-run structural trends in prices and output. The polarizing social and political effects of economic volatility proved to be a recurrent feature of the twentieth century.

Twentieth-century violence is unintelligible if it is not seen in its imperial context. For it was in large measure a consequence of the decline and fall of the large multi-ethnic empires that had dominated the world in 1900. What nearly all the principal combatants in the world wars had in common was that they either were empires or sought to become empires. Moreover, many large polities of the period that claimed to be
nation states or federations turn out, on close inspection, to have been empires too. That was certainly true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it remains true of today’s Russian Federation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (after 1922 only Northern Ireland) was and is to all intents and purposes an English empire; for brevity’s sake, it is still commonly referredto as England.
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The Italy created in the 1850s and 1860s was a Piedmontese empire, the German Reich of 1871inlarge measurea Prussian one. The two most populous nation states in the world today are both the results of imperial integration. Modern India is the heir of the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. The borders of the People’s Republic of China are essentially those established by the Qing emperors. Arguably, even the United States is an ‘imperial republic’; some would say it always has been.

Empires matter, firstly, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. Thereis a demographic limittothe number of men most nation states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are to mobilize and equip large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and to levy the taxes or raise the loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, as weshall see, manyofthe greatest battlesofthe twentieth century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples. Secondly, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the twentieth century’s principal fuel, so too did the Persian Gulf
in the Near East. Thirdly, because empires are often associated with the creation of economic order, the flows and ebbs of international commercial integration are closely associated with their rise and fall. Economic constraints and opportunities may also determine the timing and direction of imperial expansion, as well as the duration of an empire’s existence and the nature of post-colonial development. Finally, the widely varying life expectancies of empires may offer a clue as to the timing of violence, since warfare would appear to be more prevalent at the beginning and especially at the end of an empire’s existence.

It is an error not unlike the old economic historians’ search for perfectly regular cycles of business activity to suppose that the rise and fall of empires or great powers has a predictable regularity to it. On the contrary, the most striking thing about the seventy or so empires historians have identified is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as the spatial extent of their dominion. The longest-lived empire of the second millennium was the Holy Roman Empire, which may be dated from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 until its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. The Ming dynasty in China (1368–1644) and its immediate successor, the Manchu or Qing dynasty, lasted together more than five hundred years, as did the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). The Ottoman Empire (1453–1922) lasted just under five hundred years, showing signs of dissolution only in the last half century of its existence. The continental empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries, expiring in rapid succession at the end of the First World War. The Mughals ruled a substantial part of what is now India for around two hundred years. Of similar duration were the realms of the Mamluks in Egypt (1250–1517) and the Safavids in Persia (1501– 1736). It is more difficult to give exact dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, since these had multiple points of origin and duration, but the Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires may all be said to have endured in the region of three hundred years. The lifespan of the Portuguese empire was closer to five hundred. Nor, it should be noted, do the histories of all these empires exhibit a uniform trajectory of rise, apogee, decline and fall. Empires could rise, decline and then rise again, only to collapse in response to some extreme shock.

The empires created in the twentieth century, by contrast, were all

Figure I.4
Approximate duration of selected early-modern and modern empires

of comparatively short duration. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922– 1991) lasted less than seventy years, a meagre record indeed, though one not yet equalled by the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949. The German Reich founded by Bismarck (1871–1918) lasted forty-seven years. Japan’s colonial empire, which can be dated from 1905, lasted just forty. Most ephemeral of all modern empires was the so-called Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by the end of 1944. Technically, the Third Reich lasted twelve years; as an empire in the true sense of the word it lasted barely half that time. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their lack of longevity, the twentieth-century empires proved to be exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction. Why was this? The answer lies in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control and social homogeneity to which they aspired.

The new empires of the twentieth century were not content with the somewhat haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old – the messy mixtures of imperial and local law, the delegation of powers as well as status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the nineteenth-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense, they were more like ‘empire-states’ than empires in the old sense. The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than on merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler could accuse the British of excessive softness in their treatment of the Indian nationalists. This helps to explain why the epicentres of the century’s great upheavals were so often located precisely on the peripheries of the new empire-states. It may also have been the reason that these empire-states, with their extreme aspirations, proved so much more ephemeral than the old empires they sought to supplant.

Figure I.5
The West and Asia: shares of world population

The story of the twentieth century has sometimes been presented as a triumph of the West; the greater part of it has been called the ‘American Century’. The Second World War is often represented as the apogee of American power and virtue; the victory of the ‘Greatest Generation’. In the last years of the century, the end of the Cold War led Francis Fukuyama famously to proclaim ‘the end of history’ and the victory of the Western (if not Anglo-American) model of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet this seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East.

In 1900 the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Straits, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form or another of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, the French
Indo-China; the Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China. The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged. This Western dominance was remarkable in that over half the world’s population were Asians, while barely a fifth belonged to the dominant countries we have in mind when we speak of ‘the West’ (see
Figure I.5
).

What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as its systematic application to both production and destruction. That was why, in 1900, the West produced more than half the world’s output, and the East barely a quarter. Western dominance was also due to the failure of the Asian empires to modernize their economic, legal and military systems, to say nothing of the relative stagnation of Oriental intellectual life. Democracy, liberty, equality and, indeed, race: all of these concepts originated in the West. So did nearly all of the significant scientific breakthroughs from Newton to Einstein. Historians influenced by Asian nationalism have very often made the mistake of assuming that the backwardness of Eastern societies in around 1900 was the consequence of imperial ‘exploitation’. This is in large measure an illusion; rather, it was the decadence of Eastern empires that made European domination possible.