The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (53 page)

He did not have much more success with stirring up the Second International to action even though the issue of what it should do to prevent war or in the face of a general European war was on the agenda at every one of its congresses from 1904 onwards. Unfortunately it was clear from early on that profound and potentially damaging divisions of opinion existed. Jaurès and those who thought like him, such as the British Labour MP Keir Hardie, believed that socialists should use all weapons possible against war, whether agitation in parliament, mass demonstrations, strikes or, if necessary, an uprising. The German socialists, however, for all their revolutionary talk, showed the same caution in practice as they did at home. The key issue over which the different sides fell out was whether there should be agreement on concrete steps to be taken should war come. The Germans were simply not prepared to commit themselves or the Second International in advance to such measures as calling a general strike even though most socialists (and indeed Europe’s political and military leaders as well) believed that this would make it impossible for nations to wage war. Jaurès, for his part, was not prepared to split the socialist movement by insisting on it. The differences were concealed behind fine-sounding resolutions which condemned war, asserted the determination of the working classes of the world to prevent it, and were deliberately vague about how this would be done. As the Stuttgart congress resolution said in 1907: ‘The International is not able to lay down the exact form of working class action against militarism at the right place and time, as this naturally differs in different countries.’
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Seven years later the International was going to be faced with the biggest challenge of its existence.

In the remaining years before the Great War, the Second International remained confident that it could work effectively for peace. Despite its rhetoric, it was losing some of its old tendency to see capitalism in black and white terms as the enemy. With the spread of investment and trade, capitalism was knitting the world together and surely this made the chances of war less. Even the old hardliner Bebel said in 1911: ‘I openly admit that perhaps the greatest guarantee of world peace lies in this international export of capital.’ And when the powers successfully managed the crises in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913, these seemed more evidence that capitalism was now on the side of peace. At
its Basle congress in 1912 the Second International went so far as to state that it would now work with middle-class pacifists.
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There was also encouraging evidence of socialist solidarity in the face of international tensions. In January 1910, the socialist parties from the different Balkan countries met in Belgrade to find common ground. ‘We must break down the frontiers’, their statement said, ‘that separate these peoples whose cultures are identical, these countries whose economic and political fortunes are closely linked, and thus shake off the yoke of foreign domination which robs nations of the right to determine their own fate.’
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In the spring of 1911, as relations were particularly strained between Austria-Hungary and Italy, socialists from both countries campaigned against higher military expenditures and the threat of war.
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The moment of greatest hope came in the autumn of 1912 when the First Balkan War broke out. Socialists across Europe, 200,000 of them in Berlin, another 100,000 outside Paris, held massive demonstrations for peace, and the Second International held an emergency congress. Over 500 delegates from twenty-three different socialist parties (only the Serbs had chosen not to come) met in the Swiss city of Basle. Children dressed in white led them through the streets to the great red sandstone Gothic cathedral. Luminaries of the socialist movement climbed up into the pulpit to condemn the war, indeed war in general, and to assert the power of the working classes. Jaurès, who spoke last, made one of his greatest speeches. ‘We will leave this hall’, he concluded, ‘committed to the salvation of peace and civilization’. The congregation, for that is what it seemed, sang one last song and the organ played Bach. ‘I am still dizzy with all I have lived through,’ the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai wrote ecstatically to a friend.
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Three months later, the two largest parties in the Second International, the French and the German, issued a joint manifesto condemning the arms race and promising to work together for peace.
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That summer, however, while the French socialists were opposing a proposal that would make the French army bigger, the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag voted for an increased budget for the German army.

The fundamental weakness of the Second International was not merely national differences on strategy and tactics; it was nationalism itself. This too was masked by language; at every congress before 1914 speakers from all countries uttered noble sentiments about the
international brotherhood of the working classes and no doubt most meant what they said. As early as 1891, however, a Dutch delegate to the Second International’s second congress had uttered the awkward but prophetic words: ‘The international sentiments presupposed by socialism do not exist among our German brothers.’
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He could have said the same of the other socialist parties and of the unions. Nationalism, it turned out, was not merely something whipped up and imposed on the rest of the nation by the ruling classes; it had deep roots in the different European societies. It manifested in the nationalistic songs of French workers or the pride which German workers took in their military service.
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It is easier perhaps to see the impact of nationalism on the Second International in retrospect, the inability, for example, of the different socialist parties to agree on how May Day should be celebrated, the polemics in 1905–6 between the leaders of German and French unions during the first crisis over Morocco, or the criticisms of the German and French socialist parties of the other’s way of doing business.
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The attempt in 1910 by socialists in the Balkans to build a united front foundered the following year as the Bulgarian socialists who were already busy fighting among themselves turned on the Serbs.
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In 1908 the Austrian Socialist Party criticised its own government’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina but showed little sympathy for Serbian resentment at the action. Indeed, Austrian socialists tended to assume that their own country had a civilising mission in the Balkans.
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Nor were they alone. Although it was a given in socialist theory that imperialism was bad, in the years before 1914 there was an increasing tendency for European socialists to defend the possession of colonies on the grounds that the superior civilisation was bringing benefits to the inferior one. Some German socialists went further still and argued that Germany needed more colonies for the economic benefits they brought the German working classes.
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In 1911, when Italy launched an openly imperialist war on the Ottoman Empire in order to seize territory in North Africa, the right wing of the Italian Socialist Party voted with the government. Although the party later expelled the deputies its secretary made it clear that he resented the pressure from the Second International: ‘All criticism must cease and all requests for more energetic manifestations – from whatever quarter they emanate – must in justice be described as exaggerated and irrational.’
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The following year the Belgian Camille Huysmans, who ran the Second International’s bureau, had to give up temporarily the idea of holding its next congress in Vienna because of tensions among the socialists of different nationalities. ‘The situation in Austria and Bohemia’, he wrote, ‘is
quite deplorable
. Our comrades there devour each other. Discord has reached a peak. Feelings are running high and if we assemble in Vienna we shall have a congress of strife which will make the worst possible impression on the world. Not only the Austrians and Czechs are in this situation; the same is true of Poland, the Ukraine, Russia, and Bulgaria.’
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The relationship between German and French socialists was the cornerstone of the Second International (just as that between Germany and France is the key one for the European Union today) and both sides repeatedly stressed how important it was. Yet in 1912 Charles Andler, a professor of German at the Sorbonne, known for his sympathies towards both socialism and Germany, brought into the open an uncomfortable truth. German workers, he wrote in a series of articles, were more German than they were internationalists and they would, if war came, for whatever reason, support Germany.
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The middle-class peace movement proved no more immune to nationalism than the Second International. Italian pacifists were bitterly disappointed when their Austrian counterparts refused to demonstrate in favour of the rights of minorities (who included, of course, Italians within Austria-Hungary).
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Alsace-Lorraine had long caused trouble between German and French pacifists with the former arguing that the inhabitants of the two provinces were happy and prosperous under German rule while the French pointed to evidence of their oppression, for example the numbers of French-speakers who were emigrating.
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Both sides found it difficult to trust each other. ‘Were we to disarm,’ said a German pacifist in 1913, ‘the chances are a hundred to one that the French … would attack.’
¹⁰⁰
There was no more trust between British and the German pacifists. When there was a crisis over Morocco in 1911 which threatened to bring war between Britain and Germany, Ramsay MacDonald said in the House of Commons that he hoped ‘no European nation will assume for a single moment that party divisions in this country will weaken the national spirit or national unity’. The following year a leading German pacifist criticised his colleagues for defending Britain, which, he said, ‘is threatening the vital security of our national
growth’.
¹⁰¹
Pacifists across Europe tried to reconcile their convictions with their nationalism by making a distinction between wars of aggression and defensive ones. And surely it was right to defend liberal institutions, even imperfect ones, against autocratic regimes. French pacifists, for example, were always clear that the republic had to be defended just as their forebears had defended the French Revolution against its foreign enemies.
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In 1914 one of the goals of Europe’s leaders as the crisis deepened was to persuade their own populations that a decision to go to war would be entirely for defensive reasons.

War itself was the final element that undermined the attempts to maintain peace in Europe. Bloch had hoped that as the technology changed to make war both more deadly and more industrial, the glamour surrounding it would dissipate. In fact the contrary happened; the spread of militarism and the sheer excitement of war made it enormously appealing to many Europeans. Even Angell, who tried so hard to persuade his readers that war was irrational, was obliged to admit: ‘There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action.’
¹⁰³

CHAPTER 11
Thinking about War

Helmuth von Moltke, the architect of Prussia’s victories in the German Wars of Unification, was a handsome man, who with his iron cross and his well-fitting uniforms, looked like what he was, an officer from Prussia’s landowning Junker class. The picture is at once true and misleading. Moltke the Elder – as he is now known to distinguish him from his nephew, the chief of Germany’s general staff in 1914 – was indeed a Junker, from that class which over the centuries had farmed their estates in the north and north-east of Prussia, had lived simply and honourably, and had sent their sons to be officers in the Prussian army. Generation on generation, as Prussia had expanded, they had fought and died in its service, as they were expected to. (Names that were there in the Seven Years War appear again in Hitler’s war.) Junkers, both men and women, were brought up to be physically tough, uncomplaining, brave, loyal, and honourable. Von Moltke shared his class’s conservative values, its uncomplicated piety, and its sense of duty. In personal terms, though, he was far removed from the ‘brainless virility and punctilious brutality’ that, according to the satirical weekly
Simplicissimus
, characterised the Junker officer. Moltke loved art, poetry, music, and theatre. He read widely, from Goethe to Shakespeare to Dickens and in several languages. He translated several volumes of Gibbons’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and wrote a romantic novel as well as a history of Poland. More importantly for the evolution
of Germany and its army, he was in certain crucial ways a very modern man who understood that large organisations need such things as systems, information, training, and a shared vision and ethos if they are to succeed. If he had been born in another time and place, he could have been Germany’s Henry Ford or Bill Gates. As it was, he dealt as well as anyone could with the challenge faced by the officer corps of armies all over Europe: how to combine the values of a warrior caste with the demands of industrial warfare. The tensions that brought, however, were going to carry on into the Great War itself.