By Niall Ferguson
August 2, 2014
It is dangerous to believe that the skirmish in Ukraine will not develop into a calamity
A century has passed since the guns of August 1914 ended the era of European predominance with a deafening bang. Could such a catastrophe recur in our time?
The sequence of events since the Malaysian jet MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine is remarkably similar to the one that followed the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. Now, as then, the crisis begins with an act of state-sponsored terrorism. Now, as then, Russia sides with the troublemakers. Even the request by the Dutch government for access to the site where so many of their nationals perished is reminiscent of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Now, as then, ownership of a seemingly unimportant region of eastern Europe is disputed.
In 1914 it was Bosnia-Herzegovina, formerly an Ottoman province, annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908, but claimed by the proponents of a united South Slav state. Today we have not only the annexation of Crimea by Russia but also the potential secession from Ukraine of Donetsk and Lugansk, where pro-Russian separatists have proclaimed independent “people’s republics”.
And now, as then, the crisis is escalating. Even before the downing of MH17, Washington had tightened sanctions against Russia. This week both the US and the EU have taken the next step, imposing sanctions on whole sectors of the Russian economy, rather than just individuals and specific firms. The tighter the economic squeeze, the more President Vladimir Putin is cornered. In effect, the west is now confronting him with a choice between capitulation – ending his support for the separatists – or escalation – making sure that they are not crushed by the forces of the Kiev government. For a man like Mr Putin, the first option does not exist.
The July crisis of 2014 therefore looks ominous. At the very least, the hope has now been dashed that a post-Soviet Russia could peacefully be integrated into a western world order based on free markets and democracy. At worst, what began as a little local difficulty in eastern Ukraine could be about to explode into a much larger struggle for mastery in Europe.
So how to explain the relative equanimity of financial markets in the face of this gathering storm? Blame the historians. To those who subscribe to the view that the first world war had its origins in distinctive pathologies of early 20th-century Europe such as imperialism, militarism, nationalism and secret diplomacy, today’s crisis is nothing to worry about. For modern Europeans have renounced imperialism, have all but disarmed themselves, feel embarrassed by nationalism and conduct their diplomacy via Twitter rather than secret telegrams.
Even more complacent are those who insist on laying all the blame for 1914 on Germany. Today’s Germans prefer winning world cups to losing world wars. In almost every respect, Angela Merkel, their chancellor, is the historical antithesis of Kaiser Wilhelm II: female, democratically elected, supremely cautious and almost comically circumspect when asked what makes her feel proud to be German. (“Our well-sealed windows,” she once told Bild newspaper.)
Yet the narratives woven by historians over the past 100 years must be treated with caution. Whether they blame “isms” or Germans, the majority of academic explanations of the first world war suffer from a fundamental flaw. The deep-seated causes they posit seem largely to have been missed by contemporaries, for whom – with very few exceptions – the war came as a complete surprise.
As the year 1914 began, The New York Times looked forward to a “growing rapprochement between Germany, France and England” over the Balkans. “The British horizon in the direction of Germany seems to be clearing,” the Times also reported. In Germany “all signs” pointed to “numerous conflicts between the government . . . and the Social-Democratic party during the coming year”. Plans were afoot for an international conference in New York to celebrate “100 years of peace among English-speaking peoples”.
“The west is confronting Vladimir Putin with a choice between capitulation – ending his support for the separatists – or escalation. For a man like Putin, the first option does not exist”
Among the best informed people in 1914 were the bankers of the City of London, who certainly stood to lose a lot of money in the event of a world war.
Yet the correspondence of the Rothschilds, then the most powerful financial dynasty, reveals an almost total failure to anticipate the scale of the conflagration.
As the Economist reported, it was only on July 31 – by which time fighting had begun – that the financial world saw “the meaning of war . . . in a flash”.
It has become a commonplace idea that today’s frothy financial markets are oblivious to the stream of bad news from eastern Europe, not to mention the Middle East. But that does not mean the news is not really bad at all. New York and London were equally blasé about the origins of the first world war. It was not until three weeks after the Sarajevo assassination that the London Times even mentioned the possibility that a European political crisis might lead to financial instability. Nine days later the stock exchange closed its doors, overwhelmed by panic selling as investors suddenly woke up to the reality of world war. Let no one reassure you that this crisis has somehow been “priced in”. No one priced in the guns of August 1914.
This should give not only historians pause. If great historical events can sometimes have causes that are too small for contemporaries to notice, might not a comparable crisis be in the making today? What exactly makes our July crisis different? Is it because we now have the UN and other international institutions? Hardly: with Russia a permanent member of the UN Security Council, that institution has been gridlocked over Ukraine. Is it because we now have the EU? Certainly, that eliminates the risk that any west European state might overtly take Russia’s side, as France and Britain did in 1914, but it has not stopped EU members with significant energy imports from Russia fighting tooth and nail against tougher sanctions.
What about the role of globalisation in diffusing international conflict? Sorry, you could have made the same argument 100 years ago (indeed, Norman Angell did, in his book The Great Illusion). Very high levels of economic interdependence do not always inoculate countries against going to war with each other.
Often I am told that it is the existence of nuclear weapons that has reduced the probability of a world war in our time. But even if that were true it surely does not apply here. In making their calculations about sanctions, European leaders did not give a moment’s thought to Russia’s vast superiority in missiles and warheads.
A better answer relates to the balance of conventional forces – and the balance of the will to use them. Since the end of the cold war, by any meaningful measure, Europeans have disarmed themselves and are incapable of fighting wars unassisted by the US. More importantly, European peoples have lost their stomach for fighting.
“As we commemorate the outbreak of the first world war, let no one swallow the old but tenacious lie that their “sacrifice” was a necessary and noble one. On the contrary, the war is best understood as the greatest error of modern history”
A century ago the overwhelming majority of Britons supported the government’s argument that the German violation of Belgian neutrality was a legitimate casus belli – including my grandfather, who rushed to enlist.
And today? Even after the downing of MH17, just one in 10 British voters would favour deploying western troops to defend Ukraine against Russia. The fundamental asymmetry in the Ukrainian crisis is that the Kremlin is able and willing to use military force; Europeans – and Americans, for that matter – want to go no further than economic sanctions.
And yet there is another and still better way of explaining the difference between 1914 and 2014 – and that is to recognise that what happened 100 years ago was itself a very improbable disaster, which required a whole succession of diplomatic and military miscalculations to happen. One way of making this point is to use computer simulations to re-run the 1914 crisis, something which is now possible thanks to the sophisticated strategy game Making History: The Great War.
Like Muzzy Lane’s earlier War of the World game, which allowed players to replay the events of the second world war, this game makes it clear that decision makers are not in the grip of vast, impersonal forces but have meaningful strategic choices. It is perfectly possible to re-run the July 1914 crisis multiple times and not end up with a world war.
The real lesson of history is that a relatively small crisis over a chunk of third-rate eastern European real estate will produce a global conflict only if decision makers make a series of blunders.
As it happens, I think it is a blunder to use sanctions to give President Putin no choice but folding or fighting. But – assuming there are no more MH17s – the price for that blunder will be paid mainly by the people of Ukraine. The blunders of a century ago led to the deaths of more than 10m people, mostly young men, drawn from all over the world.
As we commemorate the outbreak of the first world war, let no one swallow the old but tenacious lie that their “sacrifice” was a necessary and noble one. On the contrary, the war is best understood as the greatest error of modern history. That is a harsh truth that many historians still find unpalatable. But then, as AJP Taylor once observed, most people who study history only “learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones”.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and the author of ‘The Pity of War’ and ‘The War of the World’ (Penguin)
No comments:
Post a Comment