What changed everything

Monday, May 26, 2014

This has been a special year for anniversaries. We've already marked the 50th anniversary of the arrival in America of the Beatles (which ushered in the "counterculture") and the 50th anniversary of the initiation of LBJ's "War on Poverty" (which changed the culture in other ways, most of them bad). And in November, we will get the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic end of the Cold War.

But the most important anniversary of all because it will commemorate the most important event of modern history will be a centennial--the 100th anniversary of the "Great War" (it became World War I only after we had a second, bloodier one).

As anyone who has taken a course in 20th Century history should know, on June 28th, 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitating the first major war on the European continent since the defeat of Napoleon. Almost everything bad that happened in a 20th Century full of bad things flowed from that assassination.

That we still don't know exactly why all the major powers went to war 100 years ago has only served to magnify the sense of tragedy. Pick up even the most recent accounts (Such as Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, Max Hastings' Catastrophe 1914, and Sean McMeekin's July 1914) and you still get vastly different interpretations. Perhaps no other significant historical event has so many contributing factors or so little consensus among historians over how to weigh and sift them.

Vladimir Lenin blamed it on the imperialistic tendencies of capitalism; Woodrow Wilson on lingering autocracy and denials of self-determination. The "war guilt clause" (Article 231) of the Versailles settlement heaped all the blame in simple-minded fashion upon imperial Germany. Others would later emphasize the tensions arising from the naval "dreadnaught" race between Germany and Britain, the rigidity of interlocking alliance systems, and the hair-trigger nature of military planning.

When teaching the subject myself, I go back further and emphasize the impact of Bismarck's unification of the Germanic states upon the European balance of power; more precisely the manner in which it led an increasingly alarmed Britain to abandon its role of "balancer" and seek allies, thus producing both the more rigid alliance overlays and the hair-trigger mobilization schedules (the German "Schlieffen Plan") that the spark of Sarajevo ignited.

Throw in heaping doses of stupid diplomacy, ignorance of the nature of modern industrial warfare, and perhaps simple boredom on the part of mass publics after all those generations of peace since Waterloo and you move closer to full understanding.

It was, in any event, a "war by accident" because it was a war that nobody save the Austrians wanted (and, for their part, only against weak Serbia); it was also one that none of the participants understood how they got into or why they were fighting it, save but to avoid defeat. So it went on and bloody on, until the German back was finally broken in the spring of 1918 by the entry of hundreds of thousands of well-fed doughboys from farms in Iowa and Ohio.

The machine gun, the warplane, the U-boat, the tank, and so much else came from the Great War. Its bloody consequences and futile nature led to a shift in our view of war itself from chivalric and romantic to stupid and grotesque and gave a sinister new twist to concepts like "civilization," "progress" and "modernity."

Of course, from the vantage point of a century, the "reverse telescope" effect has pushed both of the world wars closer together, such that they now seem to be simply two phases of a broader European civil war with a two-decade cease-fire in between.

This is also because any credible account of the causes of the second installment has to begin with the consequences of the first. When you've said the name Hitler you've said most of what needs to be said about World War II, but you can't explain Hitler until you have, in turn, explained how a Bavarian corporal was devastated by the news of Germany's sudden surrender in 1918 while recovering from a poison-gas attack in a military hospital.

The Great War was the defining event of modernity because it produced the collapse of what was left of European monarchy and the old European social/class order. And also because it gave us not a world made safe for democracy but a new, barbaric form of political organization that severely threatened democracy and which would eventually be called "totalitarianism," first in Bolshevik Russia, later in Nazi Germany.

The Great War coughed up not just communism, fascism, and Nazism but also a "never again" mentality and a strident pacifism that produced the ineffectual League of Nations, the absurd Kellogg-Briand Treaty, and, finally, the disastrous effort to appease the little corporal with the Charlie Chaplin mustache at Munich, almost exactly 20 years after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm.

While the 20th Century featured three world wars (with the Cold War the third), the last two could not have happened without the first.

The short 20th Century actually ended in 1989, but it properly began 100 years ago this summer.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 05/26/2014