Using historical counterfactuals in constructing open-system
explanations
What explains the 1914–18 war that claimed the lives of 10 million people, caused unprecedented levels of social and industrial mobilisation and trig- gered some of the most remarkable military and, subsequently, political revolutions? There are thousands of scholarly and popular works on the Great War. However, many well-known historical accounts of the First World War contextualise the war only briefly before moving to discussing in detail its outbreak, escalation, strategies, battles, negotiations and outcomes (e.g.
Stevenson 2004); or tend to focus on the armaments race of the last decade before the war (e.g. Stevenson 1996). However, there have also been longer- term historical accounts, such as A.J.P. Taylor’s (1971) standard benchmark treatise The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918; Joachim Remak’s (1976) The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914; and Eric Hobsbawm’s (1994a) repeatedly reprinted The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, focusing on the war in the last chapter.1
The academic discipline of International Relations (IR) was founded in 1919 in response to the Great War. As a social science, IR has been expected to search for generalisable theories and causal accounts. Its original task was to find out the causes of war in order to prevent the catastrophe of 1914–18 from ever being repeated. The catastrophe was soon repeated – or, in an important sense, continued – in the form of the Second World War. Before long, in the cold war context, the First World War lost its special importance for IR. For instance, both Neorealist (Waltz 1979: 172; Gilpin 1981: 145, 192–94, 200–7) and neo-Marxist (Wallerstein 2000: 258) theories of hege- monic stability and succession present the outbreak of the First World War as a mere instance of theory-derived and simple law-like regularities in world politics. These studies do not compare different explanatory stories or assess critically the available empirical evidence about trends and episodes that led to the outbreak of the war. Even the more open-minded empirical studies of war and peace (e.g. Vasquez 1999: 268–69, 272–74) have characteristically discussed the origins of the First World War only as an empirical case of one war among numerous wars. A notable exception to this tendency to neglect concrete analysis of the causes of the First World War has been the lateral pressure theory. This was developed by Nazli Choucri and Robert C. North
(1975) to synthesise historical narratives of the long-term developments that led to the 1914–18 war and, simultaneously, test quantified hypotheses against the available data. With the exception of the lateral pressure theory and a few notable articles (e.g. Lebow 2000; 2001), and with a partial excep- tion of works such as Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig’s (2003) The Origins of World War I that focuses on the summer 1914 decisions, late twen- tieth-century IR has not really challenged the long-term accounts of the classical theorists of imperialism.
Hence, the explanatory story that I sketched at the conclusion of chapter 3 provides the starting point for this chapter. To summarise, at the time when Britain was losing its unique position as the industrial workshop of the world, and when the unification of Germany in 1871 was also perceived to signal the military significance of competing industrialisations, the conserva- tive elites of Europe, following Prime Minister Disraeli’s new line for Britain, (re)turned gradually to explicit policies of imperialism in the 1870s and 1880s. European neo-imperialism was later imitated also by the US and Japan. The turn to competing imperialisms also coincided with the long downward wave of 1873–95, involving deflation and recurring economic crises and depressions. The population growth of the industrialising countries was rapid and there was also some per capita growth, even if only by fits and starts and often at a sluggish pace. The new upward wave began in the second half of the 1890s, at the time when the logic of territorial competition was already prevailing. Moreover, the key elements of the geo-historical complex that led to the armaments race and, ultimately, to war, included changing relations of domination, market mechanisms, democratisation, nationalism and the role of mass media.
Although classical theorists of imperialism seem to provide a tentative outline for an adequate explanatory story, the accounts of Schumpeter, Veblen, Hobson, Kautsky and Lenin were in many ways contradictory. Moreover, they were constrained by the limitations of the available sources and conceptual resources of the Edwardian era. Further, the classical theorists left important aspects of both imperialism and the 1914–18 war unexplained. While they recognised that industrialisation implied a rapidly growing increase in the destructive and war-making powers of the states, they did not explain the outbreak of the war, or why it eventually lasted for more than four years, or how both imperialism and the war can also be seen in terms of long-term trends of modernisation in Europe. The classical theorists made divergent background assumptions about the role of military (aristocracy, dynastic rules), about the nature of the territorial state, and about the origins and essential structures and mechanisms of capitalism. In particular, they were involved in a scattered and uncompleted debate concerning the role of mechanisms of industrial capitalism in co-generating the conditions for imperialism and war. In this chapter I will explicate and assess critically these assumptions in order to construct an empirically plausible and also theoretically adequate explanatory story.
This chapter thus deepens, recontextualises and in some ways also revises the explanatory story developed tentatively in chapter 3. I shall discuss the relevant components and geo-historical layers in a reverse temporal order.
First I will try to explain why the war did become so ‘Great’ (why did it last for more than four years and result in 10 million casualties)? Second, why did the war start the way it did? What were the immediate conditions for the outbreak of the war? Would it have been possible to avoid the war, even under the conditions of the 1910s? Third, moving towards deeper geo-historical layers and higher levels of abstraction, what exactly were the connections between wars, the state, dynastic institutions and aristocracy? What about sovereign territorial states and the globalising mechanisms of capitalist market economy? To what extent was the ‘Great War’ a result of the dynamics of industrial capitalism? To what extent is it plausible to use uneven indus- trial developments and aggregate economic imbalances as explanations of imperialism and the war (also in the light of later economic theories)? Having tackled these big questions as concisely as possible, I will summarise and discuss the lateral pressure theory of Choucri and North. Although their account omits important layers, mechanisms and processes, it also enables a systematic assessment of the role of different conditions and processes in setting the stage for the outbreak of the 1914–18 war. In conclusion, I will also try to identify critical geo-historical nodal points by using the method- ology of counterfactual scenarios and thereby explicate my own explanatory model and story of the origins of the First World War.
Why did the war did become so ‘Great’?
Industrial Revolution complicated and obscured the relationship between resources and control over land. Despite a number of military innovations, the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon – the struggle before 1914 known in English as the ‘Great War’ – still followed the millennial tradition of wars between military-agrarian civilisations and empires. However, already the American civil war of 1861–65 and the Franco-German war of 1870–71 were in important regards modern industrial wars (for a discussion of the industrialisation of war in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Giddens 1987: 222–32).
The nineteenth century was exceptional because for the first time in centuries there were long periods of relative peace in Europe. A few wars notwithstanding, Europe was no longer plagued with recurrent warfare. The contrast to the inter-dynastic era of 1689–1815, characterised by nearly constant warfare both in Europe and European colonies, was evident (see Hamilton and Herwig 2003: 2–10). The core of the modern world seemed to have become relatively peaceful. Hence, in 1914, the war came as an immense surprise to most Europeans, even though there had been writers and intel- lectuals anticipating a major war – but only very few of them warning that it would be unprecedented in destructiveness and likely to spread to imperial
peripheries (see Clarke 1966: 68–69). Moreover, after the outbreak of the war, the prevalent expectation remained that the war would soon be over. This miscalculation made, in part, some of the decisions to begin or join the war easier. The better informed general staffs often concealed their misgivings from their political leaders (Stevenson 2004: 8).
The first thing to be explained is thus the long duration and exceptional destructiveness of the First World War. The opening months of the war were about movements and manoeuvres, although the speed of these movements remained limited by the bodily velocity of humans and horses (the internal combustion engine lorry was becoming increasingly widespread and soon aeroplanes added a new dimension to warfare, but nothing resembling the fully motorised blitzkrieg was yet technically possible). It was only after the failed attempts to end the war quickly that the first trenches were dug and hidden machine gun posts were built in autumn 1914. Those early months of the war in 1914 reveal all kinds of counterfactual possibilities. The German plan was to win the war rapidly – the spectre for the German general staff was to be stuck in a non-winnable war on two fronts – by a sweep through Belgium and into France. At first, the intended main war offensive was against France, and it was assumed that Britain would stay aside. The Germans anticipated that the British liberal government of Herbert Asquith would not see their invasion into Belgium as a reason to go to war against Germany.
‘The evidence seemed to indicate that Great Britain would maintain its trad- itional hands-off policy’ (Cowley 2001: 266). However, the evidence was misleading. After the British learnt about the German ultimatum to Belgium, they decided to join the war. Nonetheless, until early 1916, the British remained a junior partner in the continental land war.
At first the Germans seemed to have a real chance to win the war, at least against France, and thereby, subsequently, also against Russia, in alliance with the Austro-Hungarian empire. The German army had prepared a plan to win a war against France in less than two months, by approaching Paris from the north-east. Despite some alterations and setbacks, in August-September 1914 the Germans came relatively close to realising their plan and were already reaching the outskirts of Paris. However, perhaps in part because they compromised the original plan – seen in some ways as too risky – with a more cautious strategy of spreading the German forces across the Western front and also to the Eastern front (ibid.: 272–75), the momentum was soon over and the trench warfare began.
In 1914 Germany was the most populous country and the biggest indus- trial economy in Europe. In 1913, Germany’s population was 65 million, against France’s 41 million and UK’s 46 million. Also in terms of its national product, Germany was bigger than France, and about the same size as Britain (Maddison 2001: tables A1-a and A1-b, 183–84). As shown in Table 4.1, in 1870–71 Germany already produced more steel and coal than France and its products were often of very high quality. Germany bypassed British levels of production in the late 1890s. Moreover, universal male franchise in the
federal parliament (Reichstag) elections came with a price: obligatory military service (conscription), following the Prussian model. The dense German rail- way network made it possible to mobilise, transport and, to an extent, also supply the well-trained and large German army. However, with the rapid movements into France in the first weeks of war, supply-lines became a major problem.
After the momentum of August-September 1914 was lost, it turned out that Germany could not win the war rapidly. Particularly once the British had decided to join the war, the stalemate on the Western front led to a gradual escalation of the war. At first Britain sent a mere 80,000 troops to France.
Eventually about a million British men would lose their lives in the war; and large parts of the British Empire would be mobilised to join the war in Europe. In the Balkans and on the Eastern front too, the war remained inconclusive despite German and Austro-Hungarian advances. A number of countries joined the war, including Italy, Japan and Ottoman Turkey.
Turkey’s entry opened the whole of the Near East as a new arena of hostilities.
Both parties were trapped in the conflict:
From now on, the drama would unfold without a script. The war plans had been tried and failed, with hundreds of thousands of killed and wounded as the consequence. This fact alone virtually precluded a nego- tiated return to the status quo, with its implication that the dead had died in vain.
(Stevenson 2004: 81) New military and industrial innovations followed, such as military planes, poison gas and tanks, resulting only in more killing and suffering but with- out yielding a military breakthrough for either coalition. In 1916 the battle of the Somme alone claimed more than a million dead. While men were killing each other, women at home produced weapons and supplies. Gradually, the balance was tipped in favour of the Anglo-French-Italian alliance, despite the defeat of Russia in 1917 on the Eastern front. Already by 1914 Germany had
Table 4.1 Industrial production and trade: Britain, France and Germany Industrial production (iron and steel) Value of merchandise exports
– million metric tons – million dollars at current exchange rate
1870 1913 1870 1913
Britain 15 24 971 2555
France 4 25 541 1328
Germany 5,5 45 424 2454
Sources: Choucri and North 1975: 30–31; Maddison 2001: Table F-1, 359.
lost its overseas colonies and some of its supply lines and global trading possibilities. Slowly, this also started to affect its industrial and war-fighting capabilities. Although it seems that in some of the large battles such as the Somme, Germany in all likelihood lost fewer men than the Allied Powers (at the Somme, for instance, the inexperienced British faced particularly heavy casualties), time was working against Germany (ibid.: 136–38). Little by little it was losing the best-trained parts of its army and had to mobilise less fit men with less time to train them to the front, while fresh troops were arriving at the Western front from the British Empire (mostly from the UK but in large numbers also from overseas). In 1917, the USA’s decision to join the war slowly but surely made the German and Austro-Hungarian posi- tion intolerable. The final German attempt to seize a military initiative was defeated in summer 1918.
The war and its end had dramatic and far-reaching consequences. For half a century after 1815, the aristocratic and conservative elites of Europe – led by Austria’s foreign minister von Metternich for decades – had understood war as a potential cause of revolution, which they worked hard to avoid. By 1914, however, the lessons of the French Revolution and Napoleon had been par- tially unlearnt. Elites had begun to represent war as a possible solution to at least some of the political problems at hand (Taylor 1971: 529–31). Yet it was widely anticipated that a long and bloody war would probably lead to social upheavals and revolutions. Although in every country there were competing views about vital national interests, the ruling elites agreed at least on the need to sustain prevailing politico-economic structures. Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s infamous war plan for the German army was premised on the idea that only a short war would allow Germany to avoid damage to its economic and financial systems but also what he called the ‘red ghost’, that is, workers’
revolts and possible revolution (Herwig 2003: 153). Thus the German deci- sion to risk war and its strategy of winning the war by invading France through Belgium both stemmed from the understanding that timing is decisive. However, it was this risky strategy that brought Britain to the war.
Slowly but surely after von Schlieffen’s plan had failed, the fears of con- servative leaders turned out to be right. The 1905 Russian revolution after the Russian defeat against the Japanese set a precedent for 1917–18. The October 1917 Revolution in Russia2 was accompanied by mutinies, coups d’etats, nationalist separations, revolutions and civil wars all over Europe, particularly in the defeated countries (in 1917 the French army was also at the brink of collapse). After the collapse of the regime of the Dual Monarchy and the subsequent resignation of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers in November 1918. The First World War had formally ended.
Its outcome was ultimately decided by the number of men who could be consumed in trench warfare and by each country’s industrial capabilities of producing means of destruction.3 The first century of industrialising the world economy had thus resulted in a tragic catastrophe. This catastrophe – and the subsequent Versailles treaty – set the stage for a century that would
prove even more disastrous. The war and its aftermath had direct far-reaching effects that lasted at least until 1991 when the Soviet Union, the outcome of Lenin’s revolution, eventually collapsed.
Why did the war break out?
In 1900–14, Europe was an insecurity community, characterised by compet- ing imperialisms, an armaments race between the major powers, and a high state of preparedness by the state leaders to use organised violence against other states. Even under these conditions, would it have been possible to avoid the war? At least there was nothing inevitable in the precise timing of the beginning of the war. The 28 June 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, succeeded out of sheer luck.4 Moreover, the assassination could have constituted just another serious diplomatic crisis among many others. There had been similar incidences before. The expectation that a peaceful resolution of crises was not only possible but likely may also have made it easier to resort to acts of aggression. For instance, in summer 1911, a conflict over the fate of Morocco was very close to taking the Anglo-German conflict to breaking-point:
Toward the middle of August, 1911 Churchill went to the country for a few days. ‘I could not think of anything else than the peril of war,’ he recalled in subsequent years. But Germany decided to back away – she and France reached a settlement. Part of the French Congo was added to the German Cameroons, and France was allowed to do as she pleased in Morocco. The Panther was withdrawn from Agadir in late November.
(Choucri and North 1975: 102) Although fear of war was widespread, the diplomatic conference system worked as long as none of the state leaders was willing to risk a major war.
However, at some point fear may also contribute to the readiness to take extra risks. For different reasons, both the leaders of the Dual Monarchy and Germany had concluded by summer 1914 that time was working against them (and similar learning processes were going on elsewhere in Europe). For the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the most immediate problems were internal to the multinational and multi-cultural empire, but the proposed solution was a potential war against Serbia. The war-planners in Vienna knew that an invasion of Serbia would risk war against Russia, but they were predisposed to take this course of action. Aware of the risks, Germany was nonetheless willing to support its main ally because German leaders were concerned with Russia’s rapid military recovery from the 1905 war against Japan. Germans reasoned that if a war was to break out, it was better to take the initiative as soon as possible. Also the Russian leadership was willing to take the risk of a major war by supporting Serbia even under the circumstances of June 1914 and by mobilising its army without considering the military-strategic