I recently read Christopher Clark’s excellent and
informative tome The Sleepwalkers: How
Europe Went to War in 1914. He sets out to understand the July Crisis (the
confusing sequence of diplomatic moves which linked the assassination of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the outbreak of the Great War thirty seven days
later) as a modern international crisis. Far from monolithic imperial states
jostling with each other, Clark portrays the jostling between government
departments, officials and personalities that produced policy and
pronouncements and traces the way these were transmitted to other governments,
both through (often contradictory) diplomatic communications and through the
echo chamber of the international press. It is difficult to summarise his
thesis, as he doesn’t have an explicit explanation for the war, except that
no-one really intended it (though if it came to a war, they were ready to fight
it, by Jingo!), and that the chances of a war were increased by each of a
number of factors including (but not limited to):
·
the polarisation of Europe between the
Entente powers of Britain, and Russia, and the Central powers of Germany and
Austria-Hungary
·
the willingness of international players to
commit themselves strongly in the tinderbox of the Balkans
·
an unwillingness to think through how
one’s own actions might appear to another state
·
the developing view in Britain, France and
Russia of Austria-Hungary as an empire on the verge of collapse with no
legitimate interests outside its borders
·
an upsurge in militarism, particularly
France, in the years before 1914
·
an anti-German phobia in the British
press and political class that viewed its intentions as predatory and
dishonest, focused particularly on the Kaiser
·
Russian enthusiasm for pan-Slavism and
supporting Slavic peoples beyond its borders
·
An ambiguity on the part of the British
foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who privately committed Britain to support
France and Russia, but denied any alliances in public. This meant that on the
one hand France felt insecure and upped its military spending, while on the
other Germany was confident Britain would not intervene in a European war.
The list could be doubled many
times over, but these are the ones that particularly stick in my mind when
comparing the world in 1914 and 2014. Clark’s great strength is in making the
July Crisis feel contemporary, by giving it a cast of worried politicians and
obsessive policy wonks. Looking at the international stage a hundred years
later, the actors themselves may have changed, but the roles and portions of
the script seem very familiar. A century after the catastrophic breakdown of
the international system of European world empires, how much has changed? Allow
me to hand out some prizes for similarities.
The Wilhelm II Award for Closeted Homoerotic Bombast must
surely go to Vladimir Putin. While he may have swapped the Kaiser’s fabulous
collection of uniforms for topless photo-ops, the Russian President has constructed
a hypermasculine image of himself, simultaneously bringing a certain amount of
domestic respect (rather more than Wilhelm, at any rate) and Western ridicule.
Indeed, the Western media’s obsession with Putin as the autocratic driver of an
aggressive policy mirrors its previous portrayal of the Kaiser. See this piece on how the media regularly fits Russia and its leader into the ‘threatening
autocrat’ box. This isn’t to deny the truth of many of the charges against
Putin; indeed, he fits the box rather better than the Kaiser, who had far less say
in the running of his government and was terrified at the prospect of an actual
war. But there is a striking similarity to the ‘press wars’ which preceded the
Great War, in which the newspapers of different nations frequently panicked
about each other’s ambitions and painted each other as bellicose imperialists. Putin’s
defence of annexing Ukraine in the name of defending its Russian inhabitants
has echoes of Imperial Russia as the defender of the Slavic people, which can
only be worrying for the Baltic states which have large Russian minorities.
Annexation is classic Great Power stuff.
However, the outraged rumblings among hawks in America also
have the feel of the old Great Powers about them, and they are worthy
recipients of the Raymond Poincaré Medal for Blinkered Paranoia. They worry about how Russian success shows up
their own impotence, and demand action in response. There is little
consideration how their own actions, in extending NATO to the borders of Russia
and planning for a defensive missile shield, are seen by Russian hawks as
aggressive. They deny that Russia has
any legitimate interest in Ukraine, while at the same time project American
military power across the world. I don’t mean to say that Russia does in fact have
a right to intervene in what it regards as its backyard. But there is a similar
hypocrisy to American objections to Russian actions in Ukraine and Georgia
after their own invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as there is in the French
spluttering over the 1908 Austrian annexation of Bosnia before making Morocco a
French protectorate in 1911 (having sent in troops, incidentally, on the
pretext of protecting the European population). The international system is
viewed by its main benefactors in a similarly one-sided way.
There are many worthy contenders for the Habsburg Memorial
Prize, awarded to that state or empire made up of many nationalities, whose
chaotic politics make it appear to be constantly about to collapse. The EU, a
multilingual bureaucratic nightmare of a polity to rival the Austro-Hungarian Empire
if ever there was one, is a strong runner, but seems oddly calm so far this
year, with no worries (yet) of the imminent exit of its indebted Mediterranean
members as there has been in previous years, and the possibility of a British
exit is (thankfully) unlikely to materialise for several years, if at all. However,
there are other wavering polities about: Ukraine itself is obviously terribly
divided, Britain has an upcoming referendum on Scottish independence, and Spain
is facing an increasingly assertive movement for Catalan independence. These
all deserve recognition, so I shall have to invent some more categories. The
Irish Home Rule Bill Prize for Country That Looks Most Likely to Descend into
Civil War goes, without a doubt, to Ukraine. The Ottoman Cup for Inability to
Deal With Breakaway Regions must go to Mariano Rajoy, whose government is
refusing to accommodate Catalan nationalists, which looks likely to provoke a
unilateral response.
This means the Habsburg Memorial Prize goes to the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This isn’t intended as a
prediction of dissolution, but instead one of hope: the Habsburg Empire was
able to greatly extend its life through the Compromise of 1867, giving essentially
separate jurisdiction to Hungary and the Austrian lands, and Franz Ferdinand
himself was an advocate of greater federalisation. Indeed, the parallels
between the UK in 1914 and 2014 are striking: in 1914 the imminence of Irish
Home Rule and the likelihood of civil war loomed over the nation, and people
wondered just how the rest of the United Kingdom might get on following the
devolution of power and/or secession of one part of it. ‘Home rule all round’
was the slogan proposing greater devolution of powers to all the nations, and
it’s started to be picked up again as a rallying cry in our own times. Today,
we similarly ponder the consequences of Scottish independence or ‘devo-max’. I
don’t approve myself of the splitting of countries simply on the basis on
nationalism (this, in fact, is one of the lessons of 1914), but I predict that
whatever the outcome of the Scottish referendum, we shall hear similar
proposals about greater devolution and power for regional governments across
the UK.
We come now to the Sir Edward Grey Trophy for Unhelpfully Ambiguous
Diplomacy. In recognition of Grey’s love of cricket, it is a small urn
containing the ashes of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella. In an accolade even
more unwelcome than his Nobel Peace Prize, I award it to the President of the
United States of America, Barack Obama. It is not often I agree with Neil
Ferguson, but the comparison he draws here (behind the Times paywall, I’m afraid) is too apt. Sir Edward Grey walked the
difficult tightrope of promising support to France in private, while denying
any such continental entanglements in public (and, indeed, in Cabinet
meetings). As the world’s greatest power, it is conceivable that had Britain made
more explicit its support of France and Russia in 1914, Germany and Austria
might have been cowed into backing down. Similarly, Ferguson and others think
that the current international status quo
depends on the world’s foremost power, the USA, being more explicit about its
willingness to support its allies (South Korea, Japan, Israel, the Baltic
members of NATO) against rising, threatening powers (Russia, China, Iran). Unlike
Ferguson, I think both these interpretations are based on a militaristic
wishful thinking, and that greater commitment would be as likely to raise
tensions as solve problems.
While it’s possible to draw many parallels between 1914 and
2014 as years of international crisis, there are thankfully elements Clark
identifies as preconditions for the Great War that are absent. There isn’t a
theatre or region in which the big actors have so committed themselves that a
local crisis could escalate into a global conflict. In 1914, the Russians were
busy committing themselves to Serbia, with French blessing and tacit British
approval, while the Germans were happy to offer unconditional support to
Austria-Hungary. Consequently, when the First Balkan War of 1912-13 and the
Second Balkan War of 1913 were followed by another conflagration in 1914, the
result was not the Third Balkan War but the First World War. Looking at the
trouble spots of the world today nowhere quite contains the series of dominoes
that the Balkans in 1914 did. In the Middle East, an Israeli and/or US
intervention in Syria and/or Iran now seems unlikely in itself, and unlikelier
still to provoke an armed response from Russia on behalf of her allies. No-one
has proposed the West goes to war over Ukraine or Crimea. However, one can see
there are areas that might develop
such a trigger mechanism. Should Russia start fiddling around in Lithuania,
say, in the way it has in Ukraine, then it would force NATO to weigh its
willingness to go to war against its alliance commitments. The dispute between
Japan and China over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands also threatens to drag the US into a
regional conflict. Indeed, the comparison with 1914 has already been made by no
less a figure than Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, who said
Japan and China were like Britain and Germany a century ago.
However, despite some sabre-rattling, there does not appear
to be a resignation to war on the part of any of the international players.
Although none of the Great Powers actually intended war in 1914, many soldiers
and diplomats were convinced that one was coming (because of the other chaps,
obviously), and were quite prepared to fight it when it did. It was fatalism
that led Germany to mobilise against Russia, reckoning that it was better to
fight before the latter’s militarisation was complete. Russia and France, too,
assumed that a conflict with Germany was inevitable, and armed themselves for
it. Austria-Hungary and Serbia equally thought they would one day come to
blows, whether or not they wanted to. Today there is thankfully no such sense
of looming conflict. China’s rise is being greeted peacefully and does not
appear to portend global war. It is difficult to imagine Russia, China, America
and the European nations seriously considering war with each other. Everyone
simply has too much to lose.
After a century, we have, perhaps learnt that it
is a good idea to avoid the horrors of war, even it is probably the threat of
nuclear annihilation rather than the dreadful cataclysm of 1914-18 that has
taught us it. Therefore the final prize, the Gavrilo Princip Medal for Sparking
Global Conflict will not be awarded this year. But it is only May.
