Could the Bloody 20th Century Have Been Prevented?

GELFAND’S WORLD-Saturday (June 28, 2014) will be the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. That single act led to a series of diplomatic failures that led to the worst catastrophe to hit mankind in its then history. 

The outcome of what we now call World War One was the destruction of the European and middle eastern systems of government, the creation of world communism, and the maiming and slaughter of tens of millions. 

When we read about the events in the aftermath of the assassination, we are entitled to ask why things weren't settled in a more peaceful way. We can ask ourselves this question: Had the current kind of diplomatic structures been in existence then -- something like our United Nations -- might the conflict have been prevented? In short, could the bloody 20th century have been avoided? 

The Archduke was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The assassination led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia. This led to a chain reaction of other declarations by Serbia's allies, and suddenly the world's generals had an excuse to invade and fight each other. The first shots were fired a month later, on July 28, and we all experience the changed world it brought on. 

Perhaps we might conclude that the assassination was just an excuse for the major European powers to do what they wanted, which was to wage war. But we shouldn't let the diplomats off so easily. Perhaps under a more intelligent system of diplomacy and governmental cooperation, it could have been avoided. 

In reading popularizations of the onset of the war such as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and in looking at the popular writings and movies of the time, we are continually faced with the realization that the world of pre-1914 had no idea what it was getting into. The people and the political leaders alike believed that the war would not take long to resolve. You can see the evolution of attitudes displayed in the popular culture from before and after the war. The human meat grinder of the Western Front was unimagined at the outset. Trench warfare, a polite euphemism for misery on an incredible scale, was yet to come. 

There had to have been something missing in the entire concept of diplomacy and great power thinking both before, during, and after the war. The idea that the most powerful nations in Europe and the British isles, bursting with pride and the desire for vengeance over previous conflicts, could settle their differences without resorting to mass slaughter, seems to have been absent. 

The waging of the war seems to have been equally crazed, what with commanders sending their lightly armored troops in waves against deadly weapons. 

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the allied casualties came to 60,000, largely from sending soldiers against machine gun fire. As described in sites such as firstworldwar.com, it is obvious that the generals failed to understand that sending unprotected troops against machine guns was a fatally flawed idea. 

Or perhaps they just had no immediate alternative and weren't willing to give up on their carefully drawn plans. When you read the history of the battle of Verdun (even the short version in Wikipedia), with its history of the same ground being taken first by one side and then by the other, leading to a total of nearly a million casualties, you understand why the word Verdun has come down as a part of the English language, and you also understand the overall insanity of the situation in 1916. 

The war descended into competing armies living in trenches, blowing each other to pieces with artillery, and leading charges against each other from time to time. It was the ultimate war of attrition, both of men and armaments, even if nobody foresaw this at the start. A book describing the war from a German enlisted man's point of view, All Quiet on the Western Front, is a calmly written, devastating look at this aspect of the war, not only from the military, but the social points of view. 

The attrition of arms and men, combined with advanced weapons such as the tank, led to Germany's defeat. But the allies still couldn't figure out that peace was more important than vengeance. We know all about attempts to create a League of Nations, but the surrender terms forced on Germany made a defeated foe into a poor and hungry mess. There are whole libraries full of discussions of the surrender terms and postwar period, but there is no disputing the fact that the allies made decisions that led to the second World War breaking out a mere twenty years later. 

It really seems like a lot could have been avoided had the leaders of June and July, 1914 been more eager to avoid war than to start it. We might have avoided Stalin and Mao, Hitler and the Eastern Front, had only the power structures that existed in 1914 been attuned to keeping the peace rather than some perversion of the concept of honor and national preeminence. 

We've learned something in the intervening years. The Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe and to bring Germany into a peaceful, democratic postwar era is one of the great triumphs of American diplomacy (not to mention our agricultural and manufacturing power of the time). 

When you read Tuchman or other historical accounts of the First World War and the events that brought it on, you have to conclude that the monarchs and parliaments of that prewar era were a lot less interested in preventing war than in waging it. Tuchman's book is, if nothing else, the story of the failure of the generals, but it is also an exposition of prewar attitudes that we would find downright scary in this post-20th century, nuclear age. 

Still, we are entitled to ask ourselves the following question. Had there been an early day United Nations or League of Nations, could the whole catastrophe have been avoided? I think that most of us view the United Nations with a bit of contempt, but it does have one positive attribute. It allows for cooling off periods when things start to heat up. 

The recent situation involving Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula had all the attributes of that assassination so long ago, but we are not currently in a massive war over Russian posturing. Somehow the world has learned that some things are worse than swallowing your pride, and massive slaughter is one of those things. 

The aftermath of the First World War is brought back to us every day. The breakup of the old Ottoman Empire and the resulting creation of arbitrarily drawn middle eastern countries seems not to have been taken all that seriously at the time, but we still face the problems it created in the form of the current middle east instability. Russian paranoia over surrounding countries existed before 1914, but it was exacerbated by fighting in two world wars and by the deaths of millions of its citizens. 

The idea of a hereditary nobility seems peculiar to us Americans, but it was the war and its massive rearrangement of nations and national boundaries that led to the end of kings and dukes as anything but tourist attractions in our modern world. The idea of power concentrated in crowns and sceptres, or even the idea of small semi-autonomous duchies hidden away in central Europe, was already dwindling before the Guns of August 1914, but by 1918 the world was forever changed. 

At this distance in time, what's left in our tourist guidebooks is the loss due to wartime destruction of great parts of Europe -- many of its cities and towns -- some in the first war, and some in its logical extension, the second war. 

When we feel like laughing contemptuously at what goes on in the United Nations -- the posturing and grandiose speech making and incessant antisemitism -- we are entitled to do so, but we might remember that once in a very great while, the institution gets used properly and, every so once in a while, succeeds in doing what the European powers could not, or would not, do in July of 1914. 

Could the aftermath of the Archduke's assassination, almost exactly 100 years ago, been different? Could the full scale war have been averted? 

There are lots of reasons to think that it could not have been. When countries want to have a war, they will find a way to start one, and the European balance of power in June, 1914 was obviously unstable. But suppose there had been enough wise men in power to say, "Stop. Let's figure this out because we care about our people and don't want to see them killed." What might the 20th century have looked like? 

Perhaps the European system of constitutional monarchies and independent republics would have evolved, ever so slowly, into a democratic stronghold. It's the sort of subject that science fiction and alternate history likes to take up. 

We can't really know what a world without the Great War would have been like over these past 100 years, but we have to think it would have been nicer. 

● For those with an interest in the history of the war itself: 40 maps that explain World War I by Beauchamp, Lee, and Yglesias in Vox.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 52

Pub: June 27, 2014