A Lesson from World War I

Sunday, November 11, is the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day, which ended the war that was “to end all wars.” Less than a year later, however, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of the next world war, with its humiliation of Germany, its heavy reparations, and its signatories’ horror of taking early military action.

I have not formally studied the war, but my interest in its causes helped motivate me to study history in more depth. The war was pivotal in European history, so I have read several books about it. Probably the most helpful is The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark.[1]

Clark is a British historian who tries to look at big topics without letting the known outcome influence his description (in a similar vein, he also wrote The Iron Kingdom about the history of Prussia). He begins his 698-page book by saying that others’ explanations for the war include “remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization.”[2] He takes a somewhat different tack, holding back on the “why” in favor of the “how it came about,” especially once the crisis—the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne—took place on June 28, 1914.

Clark treats the road to war as a complicated matrix of multiple protagonists making multiple decisions in multiple countries. Each country (at least 5 major nations plus ethnic regions were involved) had its own policies and interests; officials had their own interests and political strengths and weaknesses. They ”filtered the world through narratives that were built from pieces of experience glued together with fears, projections and interests masquerading as maxims.”[3] Sometimes contingency intervened—a Russian former minister who wanted Russia to stay out of the Balkans turned down the job of prime minister; the man who took the job could not fend off the military’s enthusiasm for war.

Could different decisions have been made, and would they have prevented war? Two previous crises—the Moroccan crises of 1905-6 and 1911—ended peacefully, unless they are viewed as part of the buildup to the 1914 débacle.

Indeed, can serious international crises ever end peacefully? Clark mentions two that did. One was the Cuban missile crisis—which concluded with a return to the uneasy “peace” of the Cold War—but he observes that only two major nations were involved. That made it feasible.

His other example is the Eurozone crisis of 2011-2012—a financial emergency that would not have caused war but might have destroyed the euro and perhaps the European Union. (It was going on as Clark was writing his book.) Clark sees in that multi-nation crisis attitudes similar to those of 1914: the protagonists’ fear that a disaster might occur, their need to respond to unexpected and fast-changing events, their sensitivity to their own interests, and even possibly their desire to use fear of the impending disaster as “leverage in securing their own specific advantages.”[5]

One difference from the run-up to World War I is that in 2011 there were “supranational institutions” that allowed multi-party communication, he says; also,  there was agreement about the problem—the euro was in danger due to the insolvency of member states.  In 1914 there was no consensus about what mattered and what did not—every country and every official saw the problem differently. Was an alliance at stake? A nation’s pride? An emperor’s pride? A nation’s independence? Peace?

The lesson:  preventing war may be impossible when too many threats occur at once, too many decision-makers must take part, and the goals of each decision-maker are far apart from one another.

[1] Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012). Others are The War That Ended Peace, by Margaret MacMillan (New York: Random House, 2013), The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman (New York: Random House, [1962] 2014), and To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild (Boston: Mariner Books, 2011).

[2] Clark, xxix.

[3] Clark, 558.

[5] Clark, 555.