Was the 1914 world war a good thing
after all?
On Monday 4 August 2014 there
was a state celebration of the outbreak of the 1914 war, that had broken out a
hundred years earlier, attended by the Prime Mister, David Cameron, and Prince
William who both joined about 500 other state functionaries, from the various European
states, at a war cemetery near Mons in Belgium.
The UK government has also
announced, this centenary week, a £50m 1914 war commemorative to be spent, despite
the supposed and declared age of austerity, over the next four years.
All this year, many
historians, led apparently by Hew Strachan, who denies that there ever was a
lost generation [The First World War
(2006) p.xvi] seem to have been
attempting to overthrow the 1960s fashion that is still reflected in such
recent comedy shows, like Blackadder,
that the 1914-’18 war as a complete folly. The recent historians, for the most
part, want to say that it was actually a very worthwhile war after all. It
looks like this is a clear majority in the profession of historians, for it clearly
is a majority in television audiences on the many programmes that have so far
been put out on the media on this year, for only the odd bod, like Niall
Ferguson, or Dominic Sandbrook who wrote in The
Daily Mail that the UK should have kept out of the 1914 war, seems to
protest against this almost uniform tide of experts, and there are currently 8
000 books on the war in print in the UK today, in addition to lots of broadcasting
on the topic this year so far, that sets out to put the public right on the non-wasteful
nature of what was once thought to be the war to end all future war, for the
fashion amongst most of the historians this year is that the 1914 war was a
very good thing.
Those celebrations tend to
have been a factor in the recent revival jingoism in the press, and at
Westminster too, against Russia, the target of pristine jingoism some century
and a half ago, all seemingly overlooking that the prolonging of NATO, as well
as other unilateral actions against Russia, that seem to be way more
warmongering or gratuitously aggressive than has come in reaction from members
of the former WARSAW PACT motherland of Russia, who seem to be doing what the jingoists
are moaning about only in reaction to the aggression of “the west”.
One might have expected NATO
to follow the WARSAW PACT example of going into oblivion once that the USSR
became defunct. But few state-run institutions tend to accept that their time
is up, though the likes of Max Hastings, in yet another of his frequent warmongering
articles in The Daily Mail, this time
on 9 August 2014 (p7), says he has the historian Michael Howard, now 92, who
has write books against the liberal solution to war but not well argued books.
Anyway, Howard is with Hastings, as ever, on the naivety of ever cutting back
on the UK’s armed forces, or in its support of a strong USA, NATO or the UN,
especially as things is now in the Ukraine and in the Middle East, though, mercifully,
Hastings does not want UK or USA troops back in Iraq; despite the dire events going
on there of late, caused mainly by the earlier warmongering of the west, of
course.
Richard Cobden and Norman
Angell, of whom Howard showed no clear understanding of, are not often,
explicitly, cited but the liberal idea that free trade, or globalisation, crowds
out war is very often ridiculed, if not often understood, and it has been
openly ridiculed on the media again recently, both before, on and since Monday 4
August 2014. We have been told on the BBC media, both on radio and on television,
that many in 1913 believed that war was an impossibility in a world of global
trade and international progress by trade, but that is a celebrated
misunderstanding; both of Cobden in the 1840s and of Angell from his
publication of The Great Illusion (1910)
onwards, despite both authors being very clear in what they wrote. The pristine
liberal thesis, that is also in The Wealth
of Nations (1776) Adam Smith, was
only that it would make the price of war way clearer to the public, but, as we
can see over the last few months, that clear price or cost of war, or of the
recent sanctions imposed on Russia lately, and the willingness of facing a similar
additional cost of the reaction by the Russians to them of their own sanctions,
is a cost that normal politicians are all too willing to pay, for it is a high price only to the taxpayers for what
the politicians, very oddly, tend to suppose their warmongering be their moral position or duty. It is not being
paid with their own money after all. And politicians do not often lose their own
lives in war.
Many in the media imagine
that there is something of value to be learnt from the 1914 conflict of a hundred
years back, but is the examination of the horrors that those who went through
those four years of war truly ever informative? Are we ever surprised by the
horrors we read about in the books on the war? I tend to think not. We can
adequately imagine the horrors beforehand.
It seems that current common sense could draw
more lessons from the pre-1914 fears of Angell, or the pre-Crimean War fears of
Cobden other than that both liberal propagandists feared the said wars rather
than is still current misunderstanding that they both thought that the wars
they feared were quite impossible. A high cost only tends to deter, it need
never render what it tends to deter impossible. Cobden first, then later Angell,
saw as clearly as we can today that a high cost was not bound to deter the
warmongering politicians. The lesson the
politicians seem to need to know is that war is always wasteful, indeed, so is
the negative sum cold war of normal politics that gives rise to war, for Hobbes
got it exactly wrong in thinking that politics imposes peace on society, for it
does instead institutionally imposes politics, which is a war of all against
all, it is cold war seeking forever to get hot in what we can all see as actual
war. Hobbes was right that war is not only naked violence but the continual
threat of it viz. naked coercion only. The state is perennially exactly that,
as it is the negative sum game where we oppose people who we have never even
met. For even any vote, that current common sense sees as being peaceful, is, in
fact, a vote against other people. It always coerces the other people in a
proactive manner. So the normal outlook of the politicians is cold war. The common
idea that their current push for unmistakable war is a sort of investment, one to stave off some yet more
expensive or worse later war is a political delusion. War is not a means, as
most people seem to think today but rather the acme of politics. So we can
expect war to emerge later on only owing to state institutions with their
traditional authority to tax the public, for taxation is about the only means
of paying this grand cost that war
imposes.
There is no war that is going
to get more dire should the dutiful politicians neglect this supposed duty of standing up to
this or to that latest supposed Hitler, or latest little-Hitler, sooner rather than
later. Voltaire said that if God did not exist then we would need to invent
him. I am not entirely clear what he meant there, but it does seem clear that Hitler
certainly did seem to supply a vital need for the warmongers to use in their
warmongering today.
Thank you
for your comment, Steve.
You are
quite right that all war is internecine to some extent, so it is the very
opposite of economic activity. A zero-sum game were we can win at the expense
of another and that may be harsh, or even anti-social, but at least it makes
sense, but a negative-sum game where we are bound to lose out, to some extent,
even if the other side loses out far more, look foolhardy at best. Indeed, we
might think it is stupid.
Yes, the
1914 war set up a return in 1939, but the first war might have been dodged had
the old liberalism survived.
Mark Brady
pointed out to me that Campbell-Bannerman was of the pristine liberal school,
and he seems even to have been an old Peelite. He was very old when he led the
Liberal party into power in 1906, of course, but it is a pity he did not make a
few converts to take over. Instead, there were only statist candidates when he
died as Prime Minister in 1908.
They did
fear Dillon and Home Rule in Belfast, Steve, which is mainly why Gladstone
failed in that prolonged quest of his for Home Rule from 1886 onwards. He
seemed to turn his back on this important part of the problem, the Puritans in
the north and their reaction to the rampant newly coined enthusiastic
Catholicism in the south. Catholicism was a thing that Gladstone abhorred all
his life, though he was a High Church Anglican himself. Not only many of Gladstone’s
friends, especially those in the fashionable Oxford movement that Gladstone was
almost part of, but even members of his family,
went over to Rome. Despite this nearness in creed, he was only prevented from
cutting his sister, Helen, off altogether when she converted to Rome by his
father’s reaction to it. So he should
have realised the reaction of the Puritans, up north in Ireland, to this very enthusiastic
new Catholicism. Irish Catholicism only actually
emerged as a reality only in the 1820s and not from St Patrick, as is commonly
thought, and as is claimed by most historians even today.
It is most
ironic that the Puritans still had Home Rule imposed on them after Eire had broken
away, in the 1920s, but it, by then, had ceased to mean Rome rule.
Yes, “domination”
of Germany on the market means giving service rather than ruling over people. We
do not feel we are truly dominated when we buy wares we like, but rather we are
pleased for such wares to the extent of being willing to freely pay for them.
Yes, it was
the Liberal Party that Joseph Chamberlain changed when he took it from free
trade to his own new ideas of state ownership and man-management on a rather
clever generational basis against Gladstone; before leaving in 1886, owing to Gladstone’s
new policy on Ireland.
It was this
new statist party that went to war; for most of the younger members were statists
when Chamberlain left in 1886. It still had anti-war people in it, but they
rejected the Cobdenite solution of free trade crowding out war, even though it
brought them back to power in 1906. Indeed, 1906 was the acme of the Cobdenite free
trade legacy.
By then, Chamberlain
was in his rightful Tory place, or he had been before his illness in 1903, as
the main man out to reject free trade with his tariff reform schemes in 1906. Campbell-Bannerman
was the Liberal leader so we still had a pristine Liberal as leader, but only neo-liberals
or statist liberals came later, as all the pristine liberals had died off, or
were not good enough to be in contention by 1908.
Economics
takes us away from war but political economy, or statist man-management is
almost on par with warmongering. It is certainly coercive relations, as
politics always is.
David Lloyd
George had opposed the Boer War but his statism soon over-ruled his pacifist outlook.
Indeed, political economy always tends to crowd out peace.
It was the
two leaders problem that led to the downfall in 1918, for David Lloyd George
took over as Prime minister during the war in December 1816, but Herbert Henry
Asquith would not give up the Liberal leadership, and the feud over that between
them somewhat detracted the Liberal Party from dealing with the new doubling of the franchise anywhere near as
well as did the Tories or as did the rising Labour Party in the election of 1918
as a result. The feud over the
leadership was indulged in too much for this courting of the new voters.
For Labour, Arthur
Henderson was an organiser that grabbed a very rare opportunity for a rising
party to replace one of the big two in the normal two-horse race.
A thoughtful piece by David. In wars, both victors and vanquished lose. Apart from the endless slaughter, the First
World War spawned Bolshevism and National Socialism. Far from being ‘the war to end all wars’, it laid the basis for
another major war 20 years later.
From a particularly British point of view, it finished any
hopes of fixing the Irish problem. In
1914, John Redmond and the British Government had reached a deal which should
have been enough to sideline the revolutionary wing of Irish nationalism. It was never to see the light of day.
One of the war aims of the German chancellor, Bethmann
Hollweg, was a custom’s union dominated by Germany. Well, it took a while, but Germany finally got there. Now we are demonstrating that we can perfectly well live in a Europe dominated by Germany.
So, who were the guilty men? Sir Edward Grey bears a massive responsibility for redirecting
British foreign policy towards more engagement with continental Europe. But we should remember that the Liberal
Party, the anti-war party, was in power in 1914. Many of the Liberal cabinet had opposed the Boer war, but could
not find it within themselves to oppose a much more serious war. So, with the honourable exceptions of John
Burns and John Morley who resigned on the declaration of war, it is the Liberal
government which has to carry the can for this disaster. Fitting then, that the war saw the
elimination of the Liberal party as a major political force in British
politics.