In the second of spiked’s series of essays on the First World War, Frank Furedi says the battle of ideas that both fuelled and followed the war remains unresolved.
The cause of the First World War has long been a source of controversy. Often the finger of blame for the war is pointed at a particular party, such as the Prussian military caste or French generals seeking revenge for the humiliation suffered in the war of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Bismarck. Others locate the origins of the war in factors such as the arms race, nationalism, imperialism, or various nations’ domestic social pressures.
Current debates about whether or not Britain fought a just war and about the role of the Kaiser reveal more about the preoccupations of our times than they do about the patterns of the past. This anachronistic tendency has achieved its most caricatured form in the attempt to assign blame for the war to Serbia, which is now said to have inadvertently set in motion the forces that led to the slaughter of millions between 1914 and 1918. Reading history backwards, some historians have discovered that the ancestors of Slobodan Milošević were already busy back in 1914. The Serb nationalists who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand have been recast in the role of members of an international terrorist network, and in this recycled position as a state sponsor of international terrorism, Serbia circa 1914 is deemed a legitimate target for Austrian wrath.
For all the controversy surrounding the outbreak of the Great War, the fact is that this conflict is not reducible to a singular cause. The precarious balance of power that prevailed in the early twentieth century was clearly not up to the job of containing underlying conflicts of geopolitical and economic interests. The intensification of imperialist conflict from the late nineteenth century onwards always threatened to transform local disputes into global ones. One ominous consequence of imperial rivalries was the militarisation of international relations. The arms race did not simply mean expanded expenditure on weapons; it also encouraged a situation in which a militaristic and nationalistic culture could flourish and could have an influence on a significant minority of society. Chauvinistic attitudes were further consolidated by the emergence of the modern mass media, which thrived on promoting sensationalist nationalist propaganda.
This unstable international situation fostered a climate in which governments felt that the real question was not if but when a conflict would erupt that affected their national interests. However, governments’ behaviour was not simply a reaction to external pressures. It just so happened that the destabilisation of the global balance of power coincided with new threats within the domestic political sphere. By 1914, the rulers of most European societies found themselves confronted by a very new problem: the question of how to reconcile the prevailing political order with the aspirations of a new force – the public opinion of the masses.
The quest for legitimacy
The First World War coincided with a moment in history when, for the first time, governments were directly exposed to the scrutiny of public opinion and, in many cases, were subject to the pressures of a mass electorate. Wars could no longer be declared, fought or won without public support. Governments understood that they could no longer simply issue diktats. Policies needed to be publicly justified; they required the support, or at least acquiescence, of the people. So just as governments had to attend to a massive challenge thrown up by an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, they were also hit with the realisation that the consent of the public had become essential to the maintenance of order.
In his influential essay on the domestic causes of the First World War, the historian Arno Mayer argued that it is precisely during periods of heightened social tension that calculations about the maintenance of order come to be intertwined with foreign affairs. Pointing to the high levels of internal strife faced by many nations in the period leading up to the Great War, Mayer says this was an important historical example of geopolitical tensions coinciding with domestic conflict. He argued that this ‘symbiotic growth of domestic and international tensions’ occurred at a time when, in the West, ‘government policies, including foreign policies, were shaped in the crucible of organised party pressure, and interest politics’. In other words, foreign policy and diplomacy, which had hitherto been mostly insulated from domestic pressure, now became increasingly exposed to the influences and forces that emanated from mass politics and public opinion. Consequently, political conflicts and debates about the future course of society influenced foreign policy and even military affairs. And when domestic issues become entangled with foreign ones, wars can become a medium through which political objectives and domestic concerns are played out.
‘War is merely the continuation of politics by other means’, said the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In Clausewitz’s sociology of war, domestic pressures are seen as being meshed with foreign concerns. From this viewpoint, war is as much about domestic politics as it is a response to interstate relations. Mayer points out that Clausewitz ‘invariably opts for the comprehensive concept of politics which subsumes diplomacy, thus leaving open the possibility that recourse to war can be not only influenced but, in some instances, even determined by internal political considerations’. The emergence of so called ‘war parties’ in European societies during the early years of the twentieth century shows that domestic political rivalries were increasingly being refracted through conflicting attitudes to military affairs.
With the ascendancy of public opinion, modern media and a mass electorate, relations between states ‘ceased to be the private preserve of an encapsulated elite’, says Mayer. Pointing to the arms race in the run-up to the First World War, Mayer says that the 50 per cent increase in military spending in the five years before the war ‘may not have been exclusively a function of mounting international distrust, insecurity, and hostility’. No, the expansion of military spending was most likely also influenced by nationalist politicians who were playing the patriotic card to ‘maintain the domestic status quo’, he says. The immediate pre-war era was one in which ‘European nations experienced more than routine political and social disturbance’.