Gallipoli and Crimea

Thanks for this John. Not even the worst disaster of the war for Australia, that would be Fromelles in July 1916 where my great uncle died fighting with the Australian Machine Gun corps. (To underline the horror, another great uncle – of whom I was unaware – lingered in an institution until the 1960s, destroyed by his wounds).

I’ve been thinking, with the 100th anniversary of the war approaching, that I should read something good on the origins, but googling suggests a confusing number of competing hypothesese. Any recommendations?

“I’ve been thinking, with the 100th anniversary of the war approaching, that I should read something good on the origins, ”

There a new book out on the origins, called Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark, that I’ve had recommended, though havent read. Here’s a review

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/421230.article

Though it also comes with blurbs from Niall Ferguson and Max Hastings, so I dont know what to make of that

John Q,
as a fellow Australian – have you any thoughts on why Australians (almost uniquely I think) have such odd days for their National holidays. (Australia day – which isn’t really an “Australia” day at all but is the beginning of the European invasion – initially almost catestrophic for the invaders – and the establishment of the great city of Sydney; and Anzac day – a senseless loss of valuable Australian lives and Winston Churchhill’s greatest mistake).
Is it a reflection of the pflegmatism of Australians – that brave failures (Sturt or Ned Kelly or Eureka Stockade) are often their heroes – that they see success as always elusive but struggle as being admirable. (Quite different from the US for instance). Any ideas?

Is it a reflection of the pflegmatism of Australians – that brave failures (Sturt or Ned Kelly or Eureka Stockade) are often their heroes – that they see success as always elusive but struggle as being admirable. (Quite different from the US for instance).

It’s a thing for a lot of countries. In Britain there’s the evocation of Dunkirk (which, while an extraordinary achievement, was still an evacuation in the face of utter defeat) and Captain Scott; in the US they have the Alamo, and, of course, the sympathy for the gentlemanly General Lee and his Lost Cause…

ajay
true (billy the kid too), but what other countries celebrate such things as public holidays.
Of course Australia rather stuffed it up by federating on Jan 1.

10: led by the delightful Vladimir Jabotinsky. Just saying

Nice try, but actually they were not led by Jabotinsky, but by an Ulster Protestant lion hunter played by Val Kilmer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Patterson_%28author%29

[I]t’s clear that any search for rational causes is pointless – the war was a product of delusion

You’ve expressed this idea several times on this blog John, but I’m not quite sure I agree. Or rather, I think that though this might be true from the anglo-american point of view, it is less so from the continental european point of view. The fact remains that in the 150 years or so between 1790 and 1940, neither France nor Germany (in its various political incarnations) accepted the political legitimacy of each other. So we had revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (leading to the rational belief on the part of the Germanic élite that only the military defeat of France could ensure a stable Germanic polity), then the 1870/71 war, leaving the two major continental military powers with a serious territorial conflict (and a rational belief in the part of the French élite as well as public that only military defeat of Germany could ensure a stable French polity).

Now it is almost certainly true that imperialism, delusion of grandeur and diplomatic maneuvers transformed a regional conflict into a catastrophic world war, but the point remains that the legacy of the war of 1870/1871 (itself a legacy of the Napoleonic wars, and thus ultimately of the French Revolution) made it impossible to imagine peace between the two majors continental military powers.

Then, in light of the apparent popularity of Wilson’s peace plank, how was it possible to gin up massive support for entry (outside of the massive ethnic German population)? Why do so? My understanding is that foreign trade was not central to the US economy back then, so why would unrestricted submarine warfare have been non-trivial?

I can entirely agree with JQ’s cri du coeur, but I have to say that it’s bad history and, worse, it completely fails to grasp – does not even really attempt to grasp – the motives and intentions that made and carried on World War I, and does no honour even to the humblest participants, who are seen as unwitting tools in the hands of evil or witless statesmen. The sad truth is that the modern social democratic world so dear to John (and to myself) was not made by reason and compromise, but wrested by force from people who had quite another vision of the way the world ought to be run. And World War I was one of the great contests in that struggle.

It could – perhaps – have been waged less destructively (although it is hard, once one is familiar with the issues confronting those people, to see quite what else many of them could have done). It was not even spectacularly destructive by the standards of European great wars (proportionally, loss of life was about the same as the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, and much less than, say, the Thirty Years War). It is certainly not clear that it led directly to Nazism and Bolshevism – the Russian state was rotten and ripe for revolution well before the war, and Nazism was built on much the same social coalition that the Kaiser relied on in entering the war. That coalition survived the war, undermined the peace and tried again.

In thinking about the war, you need not only to note the blunders and idiocies, but also that Australians enlisted in large numbers (there was no conscription) until the end, that the French fought on despite a million casualties in the first few months, that Germans did likewise, but that Russians largely gave up after two years and turned on their own government and so on. That, in fact, quite ordinary people mostly thought that it was worth fighting and dying for the various ends involved. And that when they did not, they did not in fact fight.

marcel :

“My understanding is that had the U.S. not entered on the side of the Entente, Russia would still have collapsed, but the remaining combatants would have likely ended the fighting when, close enough to simultaneously for government work, none were any longer able to continue. At this point, none would have been in any condition to repay any debts to anyone. Beneficial results from this outcome would have been both that the Carthaginian peace of Versailles would not have happened (along with all that followed from it), and the Russian civil war, with all of its attendant horrors, would likely have been less awful since fewer outsiders would have been in any position to intervene.”

From my casual knowledge, outside intervention in the Russian civil war wasn’t that big – it might have made the Soviet government more paranoid, but that in the end they were quite capable of slaughtering each other in massive numbers.

As for who would have won on the Western Front, Germany seemed to be more capable. They were still able to mount a dangerous offensive in 1918, at which point French and British morale was improved by American intervention, and American supplies were hitting French and British factories and troops. Subtract those,…….

On American entry in the war. Wasn’t unrestricted submarine warfare the equivalent of today’s terrorism? We’ve seen how we’ve let the later infect our national psyche in such a way that we are/were willing led into war. Being outraged about your fellow citizens becoming innocent and helpless victims has an effect far disproportionate to the actual numbers.

Long ago, in U.S.A., John Dos Passos told me that the reason for U.S. participation in World War 1 was that its ruling class had invested heavily in British bonds. Or at least he has one of his good-guy characters say that.

D Kornreichs @20
Martin Gilbert wrote a book on the Somme in 2006. … I didn’t read it through, but parts of it struck me as an apologetic aimed at shoring up support for the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyone else get that impression?

Didn’t read it so i can’t say, but i wdn’t be completely shocked if that were the case. OTOH there are more direct ways, to put it mildly, to write an “apologetic…for the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan” if that were one’s aim.

Btw, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is a WW1 memoir still worth reading (a judgment based on reading parts of it).

This week appears to be an anniversary of the Armenian genocide. At least, on Wednesday, I saw many cars driving around different parts of Los Angeles with Armenian flags on them, and the bus was on detour for a demonstration of some sort.

@David Kornreichs: complete agreement re the Fussell book.

And: here’s E.M. Forster on memorializing the war dead:
http://tinyurl.com/cjzk8dl

” If the USA hadn’t declared war the Germans would still have reached breaking point in October 1918 while Britain had enough reserves to carry on into 1919, it doesn’t really change the outcome.”

You may be correct, but the Germans still had a fair number of troops in the east whom they could’ve moved to the western front, and could have made bad trouble for the western Allies had they stayed on the defensive. Nor could the British have done much without the French in tow, and the French were not interested in taking the offensive. As it turned out, Ludendorff squandered his forces because the clock was ticking with the Americans having entered the war.

“We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President [of Mexico] of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.”

How could that not result in war?

Ataturk, who commanded and defended brilliantly at Gallipoli, gave a famous eulogy for his former enemies that that never fails to choke me up. I’m sure many here know it:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Anderson:
They, which is to say Ludendorf and Hindenberg, left “too many” troops in the East because they wanted to keep what they had conquered.

It’s one thing to say the German decision was stupid and silly, which it may have been and which the war certainly was, and it another thing to say that they didn’t leave the troops in the East to keep what they had conquered, stupid and silly may the decision have been.

As to the against whom, one might consider some of the various forces active in the Russian Civil War, say Ukrainian nationalists (who were briefly German stalking horses), or say the emergent Red Army or the still existent White Army or the other etc who might look unkindly on German expansionism. One leaves troops in place in territory one conquers to make sure one keeps it. Stupid and silly though it might be.

“and is still convinced it was a good idea”

So your best argumentative tactic at this point is defamation? Where did I say WW1 was a good idea? I didn’t, and you are dishonest.

Saying that Gallipoli “arose from” imperialism is a little too much explanation, since it’s only true in the sense that nitrogen-based fertilizers, U-boats, and “All Quiet on the Western Front” “arose from” imperialism, or for that matter from the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Peking.

Britain launched a campaign in Turkey based on the notion that it was better for Britain to supply a land power (Russia) with the means to fight than to become a major land combatant itself. For various reasons this failed, so that conscription, and British bloodbaths, ensued. “Imperialism” was not any sort of direct motive.

A side light, at least to me, is how the same mistake is repeatedly made by the militaery and then excused as irrelevent to the outcome because.. Just because.

My point is that a major failing at Gallipoli was the failure to seize the high ground around the landing beaches immediately while resistence was its weakest.
This failure enabled the opposition to high a perch from which they could monitor and target anything in what had become essentially a shooting gallery.

Flash forward to 1944 and the Anzio landings and it is a bad rerun. The only thing that saved Allied ( US troops) at Anzio was the continued pressure by allied forces ( including notably Polish and Jewish units besides US and British forces) Alas Gallipoli had no such saving forces squeezing the Ottoman forces.

Flash forward again to 1982 in Lebanon where failure to seize the high aground again inhibited, and contributed, to the failure of the MNF in Beirut. No where near the debacle of Gallipoli or Anzio but still an example of a repeatable failure.

I am confident that a military historian could cite many more of these failures to learn from history.

Object lesson. The Military mind does not learn from repeated failure.

Brett, I respectfully disagree. (1) Foch was appointed *after* the German onslaught, because the British were panicking, not because anyone (other than Foch!) was thinking about taking the offensive. See Taylor’s survey of the war, at 218-19. (2) The Germans did not opt for attrition in the West in 1918. If you mean that without the Americans’ entry into the war, they would have been resorting to attrition, okay, but I am missing the reasons why the Germans couldn’t have stayed on the defensive at least until 1919. Between the French mutinies and Passchendaele, would Britain and France alone have been in any hurry for the offensive in 1918?

Because of the Americans, Germany bet the farm on winning in 1918 or not at all, which accelerated its defeat. That is why it was stupid to leave anything but a screen in the East. But who could argue with Ludendorff by that point?

The Great War did not protect our freedom, or that of the world

WWI was a horrible tragedy, but this is a really curious point to make. What would the correct actions by the French and British governments have been? Certainly they made many mistakes, but was defending against the invasion of France one of them? Could they have forestalled that diplomatically? It seems that the war was necessary for France and Britain once Germany had resolved its international policy objectives and it is only the prosecution of the war, namely it’s resolution, that you could find fault with. Is there another interpretation of the choices facing France and Britain someone would like to offer?

“Is there another interpretation of the choices facing France and Britain someone would like to offer?”

I think there’s a difference though between acknowledging the difficulty of the decisions that had to be made, and perhaps the inevitability of the war, and selling it as a clear case of good vs bad, or of freedom vs tyranny etc (as WW2 could be sold)

Mentioned once in this thread in passing is Fritz Fischer’s “Griff nach der Weltmacht” (edited English translation published as “Germany’s Aims in the First World War”). To my knowledge no more enlightening, well-researched, or important book about the First World War has been written. In my opinion, it is not possible to understand the war without coming to terms with the internal politics of Imperial Germany that largely motivated the war and determined its course. It is also impossible to understand 20th century German history more broadly without knowing what Fischer reveals about the political culture of Imperial Germany. (Bonus points for historical literacy if you compare Fischer with his archnemesis in the establishment Gerhard Ritter, whose “Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: das Problem des “Militarismus” in Deutschland” (English edited translation as “Sword and Sceptre,” I believe) is the defining apologetic for Imperial Germany)

Please let me emphasize this again: whether you ultimately are convinced by Fischer’s causal arguments or not, the factual points he raises are incredibly important to a knowledge of modern German history.

Peter T @19
That, in fact, quite ordinary people mostly thought that it was worth fighting and dying for the various ends involved. And that when they did not, they did not in fact fight.

I don’t entirely agree w this. Some thought the ends were worth fighting for, but many others had relatively little idea of what the war was (ostensibly) about and/or became disillusioned fairly quickly (I think a glance at cultural histories of the war, eg Fussell which has already been mentioned or eg Modris Ekstein’s Rites of Spring, and various memoirs, will support this point). On motivations for fighting: loyalty to immediate friends and fellow soldiers, knowledge that one cd be shot for desertion, desire not to show cowardice etc probably counted for more than abstractions for many, as has been the case in a lot of wars. The British eventually had to introduce conscription, as has already been noted upthread, and by the end of the war prob. all the belligerents had conscription, I guess except for the Australians according to Peter T.

Davis X. Machina @48
you recommend The Sleepwalkers but fail to say anything about where the author is or may be coming from — see my comment on this @22.

” The best answer that I’ve managed to come up with is that major banks were anglophile and, more to the point, had much more in the way of loans outstanding to the UK than to Germany.”

Adam Tooze did touch on this slightly ( although in the context of the inter war years) in a recent NLR review of Michael Mann’s new book:

“But to have brought that into sharp relief would have required Mann to focus, as Eichengreen refuses to do, on the principal medium through which US power was excercised: inter governmental debt. From the moment the Entente contracted its first war loan with JP Morgan in 1915, down to the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, it was political debt that defined a novel problem of hegemony: loans distributed not to private borrowers or the Imperial periphery, but from one political centre to another within the core..”

Though I’m not sure what he’s saying, if it’s relevant, how important loans were in US war decisions etc Any ideas?

spelling correction: Hochschild

I also agree w previous suggestions re Angell, Bloch, Bernhardi, though I confess to having read secondary works about them rather than the works themselves. Obvs. any historian w the relevant interests will have read them; not being an historian, I have an excuse. (Angell’s argument, as I’ve had occasion to note here before, is often mischaracterized.)

One could add that the Welsh miners and English farm labourers who found that in the army you were safer, better fed and worked less than in the mine or on the farm went on to ask just why that was so. The Oxbridge poets who came face to face with the realities of industrial life are good reading, but much of what they found so disturbing was part of daily life in Sheffield or Peebles.

Barry (at 21):

“From my casual knowledge, outside intervention in the Russian civil war wasn’t that big…”

Wikipedia suggests a total of over a quarter of a million foreign troops, including 40,000 British, 12,000 French and 13,000 Americans. Then there was military assistance to White forces. Pretty big.

Stephen (at 52):

“…One, that it would have been far better if WW1 had never happened: total agreement…”

Mph. So Tsarism would have continued in Russia, and the Ottoman Govt. in the ME, and that would have been fine? Or, the costs (repression, backwardness, misery etc.) of the continuance of these antique regimes, though high, would have been less than the costs of WWI? I suspect you mean the latter, but of course the price then would have been paid by the Russian and Ottoman peasantry rather than the French, Belgians, British (incl. Imperial) and Americans. You could be accused of cost-shifting rather than an impartial estimation of costs and benefits.

‘the price then would have been paid by the Russian and Ottoman peasantry rather than the French, Belgians, British (incl. Imperial) and Americans’ (gordon, 73)
Russian peasants paid for that change in the Great War and later in the Russian Civil War, the early 20’s famine, the Collectivization and more famine, the Great Terror and the WWII.
The Ottoman peasantry got off more lightly, unless they were Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Kurdish or something like that.

What would the correct actions by the French and British governments have been?”
1. Not entering an alliance with Russia in the first place
2. Seeking peace on the basis of the status quo ante from the moment the initial German advance was halted

But see John, this is exactly what I would characterize as too anglo-centric. The French were extremely dissatisfied with the status quo ante and had been preparing for war for 40 years in order to change it. To me, saying that WWI could have been averted or stopped by reverting to the status quo ante is slightly akin to saying that peace could be achieved in the middle east if only the Palestinians were ready to accept the territorial status quo. They’re not, and legitimately so. Likewise with the French in 1914.

Frankly, I would ask this of the Palestinians too. I understand their national aspirations, but how is firing rockets at Israel a justified response?

“So Tsarism would have continued in Russia, and the Ottoman Govt. in the ME, and that would have been fine? Or, the costs (repression, backwardness, misery etc.) of the continuance of these antique regimes, though high, would have been less than the costs of WWI? ”

How was what followed any better?

Also, although counterfactuals are obviously speculative and unprovable, I highly doubt that those regimes would have survived to the present even had there been no WWI. The Ottoman Empire had been declining in power and prestige for centuries before WWI, and had already lost almost all of it’s European territory in the Balkan Wars. By 1914, it was clearly in a state of near-terminal decline, and I doubt it would have survived for more than a few decades at most. The Russian monarchy was also clearly heading towards some kind of social revolution even before WWI, given the vast level of social discontent in that country,and the utter incompetence of the Tsars, as well as their complete unwillingness to reform even when it was urgently needed. It is possible that these states would somehow have reversed their decline, or that the damage they caused to their populations as they tried to cling to power would exceed the damage done in the World War. But I find that unlikely. WWI may have been the immediate cause of those regimes’ collapse, but the rot had set in long, long before it.

But what precisely is “legitimate” about this? Was Alsace-Lorraine really enough to justify French participation in the war?

I don’t get it. Between 1,2 and 2 millions people lived under occupation (depending on when you count). The occupied zone was 1/40th of the size and 1/20th of the population of France. In (current) US terms, that would be a middle-sized state and 15 millions people. Add to that that Alsace-Lorraine was then the industrial heart of France. How does that not justify the wish to regain territorial integrity?

Gordon, remember that we’re talking about Russia here; a quarter-million troops isn’t that much.

If I wanted to find out more about the origins of the First World War, I would begin with the work of Annika Mombauer, notably her 2002 book “The origins of the First World War” NB she’s my friend so I need to declare an interest here. But it’s good.

I’m just saying that I dont think 40 million deaths was a price worth paying for regime change in Turkey/Russia

Peter T

So is it your argument that Germany was solely responsible for the war, just as in 1939, and that the Allies were right to assign it all blame?

jb

How does one blame a country? And the German elites of 1914 were seriously delusional – even if they were to “blame” they were plausibly unfit to plead (as they were not in 1939). The German delusions were the most serious, because they were the central power, had the biggest army and their agendas impacted Europe directly, but their mindset was, in varying degrees, shared across Europe and the US. The war points up the limits of rationality as much as anything else.

The thing so amazing to me about WW1 was nor so much why it started, but why it became such a desperate existential struggle for most of the participants. Not only did it stalemate, but advancing any sort of peace terms was unthinkable -even in the face of millions of casualties. Thats what drove participants to try to break the stalemate by dragging in yet more combatants, until it truly became a world war.

I have lost all track what Quiggin is trying to say, if anything. Germany declared war on France, invaded and occupied Belgium, seized NE France, all in hopes of quashing France and joining Austria-Hungary in defeating Russia. And I am supposed to imagine that it was somehow illegitimate for France and the UK to resist that? Germany should have been acknowledged as the warlord of Europe, because fighting back would have been insufficiently pacifist or something?

So anti-imperialist bleating ends up rationalizing German imperialism. What idiocy.

JQ

If I recall correctly, the sequence was – 1. Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia; 2. Serbia basically accepted the terms of the ultimatum; 3. Austria (in consultation with Germany) rejected Serbia’s capitulation as inadequate and started to mobilise; 4. Russia served notice that it would mobilise to protect Serbia: 5. Germany demanded that Russia de-mobilise and that the French declare neutrality; 6. When these demands were refused, Germany mobilised and struck at France through Belgium.

The record is quite clear – Austrian moves were made in concert with Berlin, indeed with Berlin as the acknowledged senior partner, and in full knowledge that they would probably precipitate general war. Austria – and Germany – were not interested in any settlement that did not absolutely crush Serbia, knew that this was unacceptable to Russia, and went ahead anyway.

More generally, the record does not support the view in the OP that this was all a miscalculation, a mistake, or the imposition of awful policy by small coteries. Europe 1914 was a bit like the Soviet joke that Brezhnev communism is an Ilyushin airliner: everyone wants to be sick but no-one can get out. In the end they all decided jumping without a parachute was preferable to staying on board, and this ended very badly. Economics says people don’t do these things. Well, sometime they do.

Fair enough, John. But the more you look at this, the more you see something like a trolley problem. Stopping the war in December 1914 would have been social and political suicide for the German, Austrian and Russian elites (and probably equated to actual suicide for a lot of the Russian elite, given that country’s politics), and for their numerous supporters. Their “duty to humanity” was over-ridden, as far as they were concerned, by their duty to their families their friends and their class.

And, again , there was no way out without German cooperation – and the Germans were not going to cooperate.

Bolshevism may have been a product of the war – but it was pretty much inevitable that Russia was going to have a revolution and a nasty time of it. The Chinese had a revolution and no bolshevism, and the suffering there was pretty intense (civil war, famine etc).

Ze’ev Sternhell makes a good case that Nazism was a really peculiar outcome. The usual outcome in the other countries (Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Poland, Spain) where the old order was discredited was fascism, reaction or militarism. Any of these in Germany would have been less nasty than Nazism, but still pretty horrible. For one thing, German dreams of lebensraum in the east were a staple of the right well before 1914, and maybe a non-Bolshevik but weak Russia would have played the role of China to Germany’s Japan? The flavour of what a military – but non-Nazi – Germany would be looking to do is given by the Kreuznach Conference I referenced above.

Hektor Bim,
We even have records of how the citizens of Alsace-Lorraine felt, as reflected in their voting. […] It is by no means clear that the Alsace-Lorrainers themselves wished to rejoin France

We have even better records: 200,000 Alsacians left occupied Alsace-Lorraine. The German Empire had a strong policy of (internal) emigration of German residents to Alsace-Lorraine. As far as I know, no significant number of Alsacians left french Alsace-Lorraine. In addition, there was a huge passive resistance movement to germanization of Alsace (especially). Just ask anyone named Yvon (the reference might be very hard to get for anyone outside France, and even for most French: the germanization policy of Alsace mandated that children were given a germanized version of their french name. In the short list of names with no known german equivalent, and thus tolerated in its French form, was Yvon; hence the disproportionate number of people so named around the turn in the century in Alsace). I don’t want to play the propagandist: if historical blame is to be looked for, it is clear to me that France under Napoleon bears the blame for the enduring geopolitical hostility between France and Germany , but it seems pretty clear to me that people in Alsace-Lorraine definitely wanted to be part of France and definitely did not want to be part of the German empire (even the numbers you quote indicate so: any party garnering 30% of the vote at its minimum is reflecting a hugely popular position, in any situation, and especially with 10% of the population having left already. What electoral score did the pro-German party get when Alsace was French?).

If there were any arguments advanced by the propagandists of 1914 and after that have not made it into this comments thread, I can’t think of them,

What did I write to be characterized as a propagandist for war? I took issue with your claim that there was no rational cause at the time. So of course I’m going to use arguments from then, not now. Of course millions of dead for Alsace-Lorraine seems utterly pointless, and of course the pacifist of the time (say Jean Jaurès or Rosa Luxemburg) were absolutely right, from our current point of view. But the fact remained that France in 1910 had a legitimate significant territorial grievance that Germany was absolutely not prepared to address diplomatically (as proved by the fact that it refused to do so in 1916). So there was a rational (or maybe better, understandable) cause (and again, if historical blame is to be traced, I think France, not Germany, is ultimately to blame). Pretending otherwise does not help the cause of peace, not then and not now.

What Alsace-Lorraine demonstrates, and even more so areas of Central Europe and the Balkans, is how the issue of national self-determination was so unclear in practice as to make it very problematic as a justification for mass slaughter. The boundaries were usually drawn to the benefit of the ‘victors’, and in many cases there were such mixed populations as to make self-determination a completely arbitrary criterion for setting borders. The complications that ensued undoubtedly helped to persuade more zealous regimes to resort to ethnic cleansing in order to make matters more straightfoward. The national tensions and hatreds of the time would undoubtedly have led to problems, but the ideology of national self-determination often seems to have obscured rather than created solutions.

“Clearly, what we’ve failed to do is to inform our intellectual peers about what we’ve found out.”

What has been found out? (Genuinely, out of interest…..)

“I took issue with your claim that there was no rational cause at the time. So of course I’m going to use arguments from then, not now.”

I”ve been avoiding this thread, but this is a perfect example of contemporary thought. Pacifists are marginalized by the elites always, so their arguments never count as rational ones made at the time. They only count as rational afterwards, once the bad effects of the war — which are generally quite easy to predict, ahead of time — are apparent. But then “they were right for the wrong reasons”. So their opinions certainly don’t count as being rational in the run-up to the next war.

Z,

After 1918, the French forcibly deported everyone who they believed to be a “German” settler in Alsace-Lorraine after 1870. So Alsatians did in fact leave French Alsace-Lorraine. The French government divided the population into four classes. Contrast this with the German approach, where every person in Alsace-Lorraine automatically became a German citizen or was allowed (not forced) to leave the country. It is also interesting that the French language was allowed to be used from 1871-1914 where French speakers were a majority (a small part of Alsace-Lorraine), and it was only repressed during the war itself, when French language street signs were pulled down in Metz, for example. This isn’t as strange as it sounds, since the first direct French action against German forces in WWI was to invade Alsace-Lorraine to attempt to conquer it. Contrast with the French repression of German education, language, and media after WWI, which was near total. You weren’t allowed to have German names in Alsace-Lorraine after WWI, for example.

Also, everyone who didn’t vote for the Autonomists in Alsace-Lorraine voted for pan-German political parties, which suggests that a majority of the electorate supported the union with Germany, at least in some sense. Alsace-Lorraine was a stronghold for the SPD, for example.

One other thing, the statistics I have seen suggest 100-130,000 left for France, which is closer to 5% of the population.

I don’t think we actually disagree that strongly, but complaining about German regulations on acceptable names is laughable for a Frenchman, where the regulations on every linguistic minority up until very recently were extremely onerous.

JQ@96: “If there were any arguments advanced by the propagandists of 1914 and after that have not made it into this comments thread, I can’t think of them, but feel free to prove me wrong.”

If there were any arguments advanced by the propagandists of 1914 and after that began by saying ” it would have been far better if WW1 had never happened”, I can’t think of them, but feel free to prove me wrong.

With deep respect, I fear you are confusing two propositions. One, that it would have been far better if WW1 had never happened: total agreement. Two, that there is no rational account of how and why the war happened.

I find myself in perfect agreement with this comment of Stephen FWIW, and like him I agree perfectly with the first statement and disagree with the second.

Chris Williams @89 and 110 is upset that no one has referred to Annika Mombauer’s book, but he/she (‘Chris’ can be either a male or female name of course, though I’ll assume Chris is male based on the nature of his post) has not said anything substantive.

This happened the last time there was a post on this topic, as I recall. A professional historian came along and said virtually everyone on the thread was uninformed and ignorant and that they shd go away and read X before commenting so confidently. For better or worse, that’s the way blogs tend to work: whether the subject is history, philosophy, economics or whatever, people, often less informed than they might/should be, make confident claims, then other people explain why (in the opinion of the commenters) they’re wrong, then they have an argument. Of course someone should not make a confident claim based on having read a bk published in 1968, but it’s not v. helpful simply to scold people for their ignorance and tell people to go away and read a particular bk which, chances are, most people are not going to read no matter how forcefully you tell them to. You didn’t even bother to say why Mombauer than X Y or Z, except to note that Mombauer is a friend of yours.

Then there is this:
Clearly, what we’ve [historians] failed to do is to inform our intellectual peers about what we’ve found out.
So, as Ronan already asked, what have you found out? Or is your position that only you deserve to know because you are a professional historian, and moreover anyone who has not done archival research on the origins of WW1 should basically go fu*k themselves?

I can’t even type a correction properly. It’s that kind of a day.

Chris Williams@89: I’ve not read the book by your friend Annika Mombauer, “The origins of the First World War”. Amazon however makes it possible to dip into it, and what she says is:

“The current consensus among most historians attributes the largest share of responsibility to the decisions made by German leaders in 1914 …
Even in July 1914 a European war was not inevitable. Right until the last moment, some were desperately trying to avoid the outbreak of war and to resolve the crisis at the conference table, while others did everything in their power to make it happen. That war finally broke out was less the product of fate or bad fortune than the result of intention. In order to understand why the crisis escalated into full-scale war, we must look at Vienna and Berlin, for it was here that war (at least a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia) was consciously risked and planned … Most historians would today agree that Berlin’s decision-makers put substantial pressure on Vienna to demand retribution from Serbia, and that they were happy to take the risk that an Austro-Serb conflict might escalate into a European war.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Dipping into the book, of course, does not make it easy to decide whether this is her summary of what most historians think, or her own views: possibly there is a bit I’ve not found in which she argues that most historians today are completely wrong. Could you explain?

But if we go along with the analysis of Berlin/Vienna causing the war as per most historians, and of JQ@103’s description of the central powers as autocracies (which France, Britain and the US really weren’t, you know) we do I think have a non-propagandist and rational account of how the war began.

JQ may still argue that, even if the war was begun by militarist autocracies, it was wrong to fight them. If so, it would be interesting to know why.

The argument that Tsarist Russia was also an autocracy has its weak points. Soviet Russia, after it stopped being a German ally, was also an autocracy, but that doesn’t mean the other allied powers were wrong to fight.

Sorry, that was in answer to 123.

“Ronan(rf) at 91 thinks it wasn’t worth it. Maybe he’s right.”

But it also goes beyond the specifics of how bad the Ottoman Empire/Tsar were, (which Ill leave up to others with more knowledge to judge) and the fact that what followed wasnt really much better..it’s the fact you’re selling a war which developed in the heart of Europe, (involving countries that ran their own empires with a good deal of brutality) as a force for good because it helped ‘free’ those living under Ottoman tyranny etc

123, 125: yep. Germany chose a two-front war. When folks act like only X is possible, despite the existence of W Y and Z, it’s a good bet X is what they really want to do.

Igor Belanov@127: “the interests of the traditional ruling elites in Austria, Germany and Russia would have been safeguarded much better by the maintenance of the Dreikaiserbund, but internal pressures drove them into militaristic and nationalistic dead-ends.”

Remind me who abandoned the Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia, and what “internal pressure” made them do so.

Z,

We don’t know what the Alsace-Lorrainers wanted in 1918 because none of the great powers were interested in finding out. The vote totals are a poor measure of that, but they do show a majority of voters favoring pan-German parties even after the Zabern affair. We don’t know how they felt in 1918, and the French were not going to allow an independent state.

If France had lost the war, a lot of people would say that Alsace-Lorraine was obviously German as demonstrated by their fidelity to the German language.

JQ@136: re WW1, “The predictable harm outweighed the benefits”.

Here we differ. You would be entirely right to say, the harm which we (with 20:20 hindsight) knew would happen outweighed the benefits: which is why I said, it would have been better if the war had never been fought.

But predictable harm? Do you really mean to argue that intelligent, well-informed people in responsible positions in 1914 predicted the harm the war would cause, knew they could have avoided it, and went ahead anyway? Really?

“Given the existence of the Entente … the only way to prevent [a general European] war after Russia’s mobilization was an explicit declaration of neutrality.”

Given the existence (not known to the Entente) of the Schlieffen plan, which called for an invasion of neutral Belgium to get at France as soon as Russia mobilised, that seems a rather dodgy statement.

Quigginism apparently would have let Germany take over Europe “one piece at a time,” because a general war would have been worse than any particular conquest. If one were trying to make pacifism look absurd, one could do little better.

I’m not sure why this doesn’t carry over equally to WW2. Why not let Hitler have Poland? and France? Better than a general war and 30 million dead, right?

When your position matches up with the Cliveden Set and Pat Buchanan, it’s time to check one’s premises.

Andy Lowry: “Quigginism apparently would have let Germany take over Europe “one piece at a time,” because a general war would have been worse than any particular conquest. If one were trying to make pacifism look absurd, one could do little better.”

Yes, because Hitler’s rise to power had absolutely nothing to do with Germany’s defeat in WWI — right? You’re seriously saying that it wouldn’t have been better to let Germany keep Alsace-Lorraine if you could thereby avoid WW II?

Maybe you should check your premises. They appear to depend on counterfactuals that depend for their apparently convincing quality on other people not getting to present their own counterfactuals.

“Only you, I’m sure, could have predicted ”

This from someone who felt free to make his own counterfactual predictions. But his are all tough and macho, so they must be true! I think that I read that in a history book somewhere.

I wonder how many people here were in the Keyboard Kommandoes during the Iraq War? Feels like that kind of crowd. A century from now people will still be going on about how we had to take down Saddam because he was gassing his own people, and how those WMDs are still going to turn up. Why, if we hadn’t invaded the county and killed hundreds of thousands of people, Saddam would have killed tens of thousands forever and no one would have stopped him.

‘Lest We Forget’

Hardly possible given the wall-to-wall coverage of ANZAC Day here in Australia. Not a criticism of the memorial day itself, or the need to remember past sacrifices, but the whole thing hasd become a little qwarped IMHO.

As someone who’s been to Gallipoli Cove (thankfully not on the actual day) and seen the behaviour of the Australian tourists ‘on pilgrimage’ in Istanbul afterwards (done the visit; got the commemorative T-shirt; got pissed and urinated in the streets to the strains of ‘I Come From a Land Down Under’; now I’m off the the running of the bulls in Pamplona…).

You’d be surprised (or maybe not?) how many think the ANZACS actually won against the Turks…

How the Turks actually put up with this influx of drunken nongs is beyond me.

We need to think hard about what it is we are remembering.

If both sides are predicting an early victory, at least one must be wrong. If neither side is completely crazy (confident of an easy win, when any objective observer would predict a rapid loss), then this is a situation when a long and/or indecisive war is more likely, not less.

“I might just mention here that I agree with Stephen (at 139) when he queries the predictability of the huge cost of WWI. From memory, in August 1914 most Govts. were quite convinced that a general war would be short – “Home before the leaves fall!” So I also disagree with Prof. Quiggin (at 136): “The predictable harm outweighed the benefits”. Predictable?”

Wow, another perfect example. So because their official predictions were universally very bad, the harm was not predictable. They were wrong, but they were wrong for the right reasons. Meanwhile the people who said “I think that a major war in Europe will predictably cause a lot more harm than good” were right, but they were right for the wrong reasons, so they don’t count.

I think that maybe I’ll try this if I ever feel like crashing a car. I’ll set out and while I’m driving I’ll blindfold myself, or get really drunk. That way I won’t be able to see the crash coming, or think about it. When I’m brought into court, I’ll tell the jury that the crash wasn’t predictable, because I didn’t predict it, and really there was no way that I could have.

Or maybe Prof. Quiggin is right, the long duration of the war was predictable. After all, Bloch and Kitchener predicted a long war, and if somebody predicts something then you can call it predictable. So maybe the problem was that the Very Serious People of 1914 declined to believe the predictions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gotlib_Bloch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Kitchener,_1st_Earl_Kitchener

To JQ

No. Most people of the time thought of war as a “normal” and acceptable instrument of state. But most British and French policymakers did not want a general European war, or even any war in Europe at all. They had gone out of their way to avoid this over Fashoda (which was more a press beat-up than a serious issue), Bosnia, Morocco etc. Russian leaders feared that war would mean the end of the regime – but they also feared that yielding to Germany or Austria would end the regime. So they were prepared to cut deals that avoided war, so long as they could save face. The Germans and Austrians were not prepared to deal – too many of those at the top actually wanted war.

But it bears repeating – this was not based on any rational calculation, but on a melange of fears, panics, dreams and illusions. The lunatics really were in charge of the asylum. Picture Tony Abbot and colleagues faced with a climate crisis.

Quiggin-

I think the reason people have taken exception to that line is that it implies that all participants in the conflict were equally guilty. Many of the posters here seem to be asserting that while all parties bear some responsibility for the war, the primary responsibility belongs to Germany (and Austria and Russia as well).

If I’m not misunderstanding, I think many posters here are not arguing that WWI was a good thing, still less something they would wish to repeat. They are arguing that the decisions Germany made were the primary cause of the war, and that those decisions narrowed the options that Britain and France had to avoid war. Given this, the argument goes, Britain and France were justified in responding. (And I’m not sure that all of your opponents would actually add the preceding sentence to this argument).

I don’t really agree with this argument, but it is, at least, somewhat defensible. It is also increasingly prevalent amongst several historians (many of them German, interestingly enough). It has a number of weak points, but to dismiss it as ‘Entente propaganda’ is a mistake.

“And all of this is typical of war, and of warmongers, as is evidenced by this thread. To make the point yet again, the pro-war group commenting here have seen the end of the movie, but they are still convinced that the good guys did the right thing at every stage (except for some unfortunate tactical blunders)….The fact that tens of millions of people ended up dead is no more of a problem for them than are the millions of dead, wounded, orphaned and exiled Iraqis in the war they just backed there”

Look, its true that WWI caused massive amounts of suffering, death, and destruction. That is the nature of wars. All wars cause death and suffering, which is why they are so terrible. War is NEVER a good thing. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes nessecary. If a nation is attacked by another nation, for instance, most people would argue that the attacked nation has a right to fight back. Moreover, it may have to do so, to avoid being conquered. Word War II is considered by almost everyone (except those who are pacifists*), to have been a justified war. Yet it caused even more death, suffering, and destruction than World War I did, and this suffering occurred over a much larger part of the world. I could be wrong, but I assume that you think WWII was justified. Therefore, the presence of suffering does not automatically mean the war was unnecessary.

*note to Rich P: I do not mean to disparage pacifism. If Quiggin is a pacifist that is fine. Pacifism is a perfectly reasonable position to take. (And frankly, I much prefer pacifists to ultra-nationalists, and those who declare war at the drop of a hat.) I just don’t agree with it.

@162
The quote hits it.

“Everyone” did not include many professionals (Kitchener, Moltke, Fisher…) who thought the war would be long and hard. What amazes is that that some were prepared to go ahead anyway.

The long tradition that “war is the school of the nation” – toughening, ennobling etc is – fortunately – very nearly extinct now, and so hard to understand, but was quite prevalent then. This despite that the UK and Russia had been through major wars not much more than a decade previously.

Quiggin-
This does not mean that I necessarily agree with your critics here either. A few of them, frankly, seem to be motivated by their own nationalism. I have never seen Steven, for instance, criticize a single thing done by the British, and he often seems to take the UK’s side in every single historical debate here. His contributions on Irish history, in particular, are laughably biased. He also seems to take a perverse pleasure in contradicting anything that you or Chris Bertram say, and often seems to be deliberately annoying. There are times I think he takes certain positions for the sole purpose of irritating people. Anderson is much more reasonable, but his posts also seem to show a certain British nationalism.

Quite frankly, I believe states should only go to war when they are directly attacked, and World War I does not seem to have met this criteria. I can see making some exceptions to this principle, as in the case of something like the Holocaust, but the German atrocities in Belgium did not really rise to that level. I can understand why Britain and France felt they had to participate, but American participation in the Great War has always seemed inexplicable to me.

Additionally, as something of a socialist, I have a hard time seeing good in the American participation, given that it resulted in the suppression, not just of the Socialist Party, but of numerous anti-war groups. It also resulted in a huge increase in nativism, and the persecution of various immigrants, as well as giving rise to a climate where dissent was equated with disloyalty.

Quiggin-
I think he’s saying that it was primarily the choices of Germany’s rulers that were responsible for the war, and that the choices of Britian and France had much less to do with it.

Not offence as such – more irritation with projecting back onto the past our own attitudes and judgements, Doing this gets in the way of understanding what happened, and turns what were genuinely difficult issues into rather facile exercises involving unknowable alternate histories.

There was, as an example, no likely way either to deter the Germans of 1939 from war, or to defeat them once it had begun, or to rescue their various victims. Whatever you did, there was going to be a great deal of blood and suffering. We project back from that horror, and say “well, if only this or that had been done in 1914, then…[no Nazism, no Bolshevism]..”

The economic and social transformations of the C19 and C20 had a wrenching impact across Europe and the US: they forced millions into migration, other millions into conditions that were felt as uniquely exploitative and unjust, confronted elites with a choice that often seemed to them to be between extinction and a desperate fight. The reaction of the German and Austrian elites was to retreat into illusions and, finally, to fight – a flucht nach vorn, as they say. Given the centrality of Germany to Europe and to the system of which they were a critical part, other elites had little choice but to seek to soothe and, when that failed, to fight back.

The useful lessons from the period are not ones about who was right or wrong. They are about how a whole social system can paint itself into a corner and then take the most desperate gambles. It is also a sad, but useful, reminder of the limits of reason.

147, 171 et al: Efforts to imply that everyone defending – or even trying to explain – Entente actions in 1914 is secretly a militarist, a warmonger, delusional, fooled by century-old propaganda or a supporter of George Bush and the war in Iraq are, frankly, pretty grubby stuff.

Oh boy.

This thread has been really nasty.

Look JQ,

I actually agree with you, at least in large part, about WWI. It was, in large part, an imperialist war.

And I do not regard President Wilson with much fondness. It’s hard for me to think well of someone who (a). was a massive racist even by the standards of his time and (b) introduced authoritarian legislation and imprisoned socialists and anti-war activists.

And that’s not even getting into what he did in Latin America.

But the reason people aren’t taking you seriously is that your rhetoric is very extreme and you dismiss all people who disagree with you as militarists and nationalists. Look, you are entitled to your opinion on the war. But please don’t act as though your position is the only moral one. That tends to irritate people.

Again, I agree with you, yet you are alienating even me.

Think about that.

PeterT @ 169

There was, as an example, no likely way either to deter the Germans of 1939 from war, or to defeat them once it had begun, or to rescue their various victims. Whatever you did, there was going to be a great deal of blood and suffering.

Is this actually true? My (limited) understanding is that had the Allies not fallen for the Von Manstein Plan hook, line and sinker the Germans would have been in a desperate position. The Allies had intelligence warnings of where the German forces were concentrated and roughly where the attack would come, but disregarded them. German victory in the West in 1940 was hardly pre-ordained.

Anyone more knowledgeable care to comment?

” German victory in the West in 1940 was hardly pre-ordained.”

Correct. See e.g. Ernest May’s “Strange Defeat.” One can argue how “decadent” the French were, but a first-rate division covering the Ardennes could have made the difference. Almost as many “terrible ifs” as 1914.

[/wargaming]

PeterT @ 184

I’m not really sure what you are saying here. I’ve bolded the part of your original comment that I disagreed with:

There was, as an example, no likely way either to deter the Germans of 1939 from war, or to defeat them once it had begun, or to rescue their various victims.

So my comment was arguing against the view that there was no way to defeat the Germans once war had started not that it would be quick or easy or even that war should be entered into lightly.

I’m also not sure what to make of your generality of “Great powers are not defeated in a single battle – or a single campaign.”

France was a great power that was defeated in a single campaign. The Germans did achieve victory in a single campaign. Although to do so they had to take a massive gamble that would have pretty much lost them the war had it failed.

France was a great power that was defeated in a single campaign. The Germans did achieve victory in a single campaign. Although to do so they had to take a massive gamble that would have pretty much lost them the war had it failed.

Add to this the fact that, in 1914, the most recent war between two sort-of-Great Powers was the 1905 Russian-Japanese war. From that, a not-too-bright general could have deduced
a) that wars between states with modern armed forces would be over very quickly – the land fighting lasted barely 12 months;
b) that the Russian army was not up to much.

“The problems to be understood are not ones of individual ethical judgements (although they are not absent) but of institutions and structures.”

I didn’t say that they were problems of individual ethical judgements — that’s just as dismissive as everything else you’ve written about this. Yes, I think that they’re problems of institutions and structures.

People in the U.S. during the distant era of the Bush Presidency Iraq War don’t seem to have “feared war as we do” either. Some people tried to organize against the war, but theirs was not a “popular stance” evidently — why not? Perhaps because people said that theirs was an individual ethical judgement that had nothing to do with the reasons of state for why we had to go to war? That it was a difficult issue, and that we didn’t have sufficient understanding, and so on?

Does “understanding what happened” around “genuinely difficult issues” mean that effectively we’ve decided that the decisions made were the only decisions reasonably possible, given the social system then?

Human beings are natural story-tellers. We look for the meaning of things in dramatic narratives. And, dramatic narratives have their own rhetorical logic of moral challenge and moral intent, which has no necessary relationship to the functional requirements of physics, let alone social institutions. That’s why magic works so well in stories. The problem with spinning out alternative histories as counterfactuals isn’t just that they are counterfactual (and not factual, and therefore not evidence to be interpreted), but that they tend to be alternative narratives, structured around some other narrative “moral logic”, and therefore fantasy. What if, Pickett’s Charge had won the day at Gettysburg, what a wonderful world it would be . . . and similar nonsense. So, yes, you can imagine that slavery was an institution doomed by economic development and, therefore, would have ended anyway, and, therefore, the horrifyingly bloody and destructive Civil War was “unnecessary”, but when you embark on such a flight of fancy, you miss that the Civil War did, in fact, end slavery. And, if that’s an historian’s Type I error, then, yes, there’s a Type II error, where the Civil War is inevitable, and none of the leaders had any choices (when, of course, all they did, all day long, in their actual lives, was to take, what, for them, were gambles, choices). History, it can be truly said, only happens one way, and historians construct their narrative analyses, knowing the future, but having to imagine the past, while the experience of their subjects was just the opposite, and shaped by confusion and contingency, which can be lost in straining to produce an economical narrative account of how we got to where we are, which does not drown in the minutiae, most of which proved more or less irrelevant to the outcome.

The carnage of the First World War on the Western Front, and at Gallipoli and some other more forgotten locales, was a spectacle, which truly and rightly horrified the world, (then far more intensely than it does now in our dim retrospect). I don’t think it was “intended” by any one individual; it was a product of how states were structured and governed and interacted with one another. The institutional structures channeled behavior, and leaders found themselves carried along by the channels built by others, which they neither fully understood, nor controlled. And, in the aftermath, they made a mess of the task of re-fashioning those institutional channels of national governance and the international order. Clemenceau, who played France’s Churchill, embodying the national will to persist during the late war, said something like, Moses gave us Ten Commandments and we broke them all; Wilson has presented us with Fourteen Points and we shall see, and then went merrily on blindly creating the Second World War at Versailles. And, of course, it is wrong to say literally that the Treaty of Versailles created the Second World War, as if, all the political actors and movements of the interwar period were mere automatons, falling like dominos across a twenty year period. My figurative accusation against Clemenceau is about the importance of institutions, and their architecture.

I don’t agree that those, who thought, that it would be a short war, were especially guilty of crime, any more than those, like Kitchener, who seemed to understand that it would be a long and enormously costly one (though not particularly effective in conveying to their political leadership why political choices were leading in that military direction), were less culpable for going ahead, and doing what they regarded as their duty, with that knowledge. The wars of German unification at mid 19th century had been short and decisive, perhaps because Bismarck was a master of the Game of Great Power alliances and diplomatic maneuver, and the scale of warfare had not yet been elevated by the industrial revolution and democracy (outside of the American Civil War).

I don’t think the imperialists, like Sykes and Picot, with their secret treaties, understood what they were doing in an institutional context, which made what they were doing individually unethical. I think the secrecy involved might have given even them a clue, that what they were doing was not for anyone’s greater good or a national interest, so they certainly don’t get off without blame, in my book. But, historically, what I think our interpretations should especially notice is the institutional context, and how that institutional complex was becoming obsolete, its pernicious consequences escalating as a result of being ill-adapted to the times and circumstances: to wit, the rising nationalism of the Middle East. (So, yes, Wilson Point 1).

The First World War owed a great deal to the feudal legacy of Empires ruled by hereditary aristocrats, whose business was rentier domination, in the context of the new capitalism, and glorious conquest of the world, in the old context of fancy titles and uniforms and the Great Game. It was, in a sense, a consequence of the failures of 1848, when Reaction triumphed, and put a cork in the tea kettle’s spout. The dissolution of Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, and the emergence of the nation-state as a standard template for governance, is the capital fact of the First World War; it doesn’t justify the carnage, or imply inevitability, but it is the way it happened, and ought to be noticed.

Bruce: “I don’t think Bush’s invasion and conquest of Iraq presented “a difficult issue”. It was wrong, a mistake, and, in my view, a crime of the worst sort.”

History is going to disagree with you. I have no doubt that historians are going to go through the same routine with the invasion of Iraq as they’re going through with WW I now. It will be all about structure — with the plutocracy displacing a democracy as it was, what else could have been expected? The people then were of another time, and didn’t understand how institutional structures channelled their behavior, and we can’t judge them by the contemporary standards of 2100. And our looking back at them shouldn’t be about individual ethical judgements about whether they committed “crimes” or not. They were after all never convicted, much less charged with anything, by the laws of their era. No, the lessons of that time that we should take for the world of 2100 are something safe and abstract and best considered by experts.

You don’t have to support every war to be a ‘militarist’, you just have to buy into the trappings of militarism (a glorification of fallen heroes, an unrelenting support for *your* military, a belief (somewhat) in the exceptionalism of your national narrative etc)
There really isnt any difference between telling war stories on Remembrance Sunday* and slurring ballads to fallen marytrs every friday night..nothing wrong with either, really, but they’re both nothing more than manifestations of nationalistic nonsense

*except if you fought in the war, I guess

And people then do not seem to have feared war as we do. It took the two World Wars to generate that fear.

Adding to bexley’s point, we have to be careful about what we mean by “people”, and, for that matter, “war”. This fear of war that we were all supposed to have acquired in 1945 didn’t translate into any actual unwillingness to send troops to fight in pretty much every year since.

To be fair to the British and French leaders at the outbreak of World War One, at least they didn’t deliberately lie and manipulate evidence in order to start a war fought thousands of miles from their home territories.

“I honestly can’t see how one can justify the actions of the Allied leaders in the Great War, in particular the carve-up of the Middle East and the lies and propaganda used to promote the war, and yet condemn Bush and Blair for similar actions 100 years later. ”

Bush and Blair did it a few years ago, before historians have had time to come in and tell everyone that the point isn’t to make ethical judgements and anyways people are missing the really deep meaning of what happened.

Well I guess the argument is that they had to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, and that the greater Arabia they promised the Sharif of Mecca wasn’t feasible, so the Mandates were the only responsible way to bring the regional state system into life .. which would be fine if they weren’t run overwhelmingly in the interests of the French and British (afaik) Rashid Khalidi wrote a short book(resurrecting empire) during the build up to Iraq, which (afaicr) drew parrells between the post war Manadates and the upcoming war

The important point:

‘A broader question arises. Why did Congress and the American people accept the
characterization of the war on the side of the Allies as a war for Democracy, when Britain was an elitist governed parliamentary monarchy, Japan a militarist empire, Serbia an irresponsible dictatorship and only nominally a monarchy (which had sponsored theterrorist act that initiated the war in Sarajevo), Russia was in the turmoil of overthrowing the Czar, and French troops were in outright mutiny against their government? Doenecke raises this question and provides answers for some, but not all, of these nations. The objection that the Allies were hardly all ‘democracies’ was raised to the claim that the United States was joining “a war to make the world safe for democracy” in 1917. The answer as to why such a view b ecame broadly accepted can be found in the studies of the propaganda effort of the Wilson administration over the nineteen months of the war and the very foggy popular understanding of foreign governments that existed then..”

John –
I think we can all agree that many of the actions of the Entente in the war were foolish, or wicked, or both. Sykes-Picot is the poster child for the wickedness, but I think your critics are right that Gallipoli falls more under “foolish” than “wicked”. And given the deep unattractiveness of the alternative offered by General Haig I’m not sure it wasn’t worth a try anyway.

And, conditional on it being August 1914, I really don’t see what alternative the British or French governments had. Whereas in July 1914 the German and Austrian governments did have alternatives.

I don’t, either, see what alternative the US had in 1916. Just let people keep torpedoing all your ships on sight? The giveaway here is that the GERMAN government expected they would have no alternative.

Last thing:

Anderson said:

“Bad history indeed. Turkey could have stayed neutral, but instead declared the straits closed, then allowed the Germans to use them and to bombard Russian positions in the Black Sea. Of course the Allies declared war. Bigger picture, the Ottomans were hostile to Russia, so Germany was the enemy of their enemy. If one is going to chatter about “imperialisms,” perhaps it bears remembering that the Ottoman Empire was, hello, an empire? Had Germany won the war, presumably the Ottomans would have obtained some Russian territory?”

From Eugen Rogan’s The Arabs

“The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in alliance with Germany in November 1914. It was a war that the Ottomans would have preferred to avoid. The empire was battle weary after fighting the Italians in 1911..and two devastating wars with the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. As a major European war loomed in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman government hoped to stay out of the fight and secure a defensive alliance with Britain or France. However, neither Britain nor France was willing to enter into binding commitments against their Entente partner, Russia, whose territorial ambitions the Ottoman Empire feared most of all.
One of the leaders of the Young Turk government, Enver Pasha, was a great admirer of Germany. He believed Germany, as the only European power without territorial ambitions in the Middle East, could be trusted. Russia, France and Britain had enlarged their own empires at the Ottomans’ expense in the past and were likely to try and do so again. Enver was impressed by German military prowess and he argued forcefully that Germany alone could provide the protection the Ottomans needed against further European encroachment….”