This decade is going to see a lot of centenaries – the
beginning and end of the First World War, the Spanish Influenza that killed so
many afterwards, the rebellions and independence of so many European countries,
the Russian revolution, the suffragette movement – and the commemorations will
probably not only be about what we remember but how we remember it. Already
there’s a debate in the UK over how the First World War is remembered: a time of patriotism, a disaster, a war that Britain never should have got involved in…
I’ve not had much patience with Michael Gove’s emphasis on
patriotism (which seems to be more about deference to authority and the
government of the day than anything), but I’ve been wondering if the debates
and commemorations this year will change my view of the war. Like many people
the First World War is an immense tragedy, and the horrors of trench warfare
are unimaginable. The war need not have happened: sabre-rattling had been going
on for a long time without war, and it did not necessarily have to break out in
1914.
However I have some understanding for how and why the war
broke out. In a Europe ruled by the logic of the balance of power and bound up
in alliance blocs, once the situation got out of hand and war started, it was
hard to stop. Geopolitical and tactical considerations – whether Britain’s need
to keep the Low Countries free to protect its coastline, or Germany’s aim to
knock France out first via Belgium to prevent a war on two fronts – propelled the
war forward, making it harder and harder to back down.
From today’s standards, it’s hard to see the First World War
as just. We just don’t act like that in Europe anymore – our borders are
virtually undisputed (and where they are disputed, war is unlikely), and it is
not the empire-driven dog-eat-dog world out there anymore. Expansion and
geopolitical positioning no longer drive our thoughts on our place in Europe,
so it’s harder to think of going to war in the same circumstances. The shock of
what the First World War actually cost pushed us away from the culture and
assumptions of pre-war Europe, so it has become more of an alien concept to us
today.
Before the First World War periodic Great Power wars were
simply part of the balance of Europe: they happened when the other states felt
that one country or another was getting too strong and threatening their
strategic position, so there was a war to contain the growing power of other
countries. The shock of the World Wars and the end of the age of imperialism
has moved us to a stage where “just wars” are wars of defence or maybe of
humanitarian intervention. So we should probably be a bit wary of projecting
our values back on to the people of the time.
I wonder if our view of the war is not only coloured by the
Second World War, but because the First may have straddled a shift in
attitudes. The War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War,
the Franco-German War – we don’t seem to single out these wars out for being
wasteful in the same way as the First World War, despite being similar Great
Power wars in many ways. But the First World War did popularise the concept and phrase “never again”. The League of Nations was set up.
Though the Second World War swept it away, the United Nations replaced it and
the attitudes to war continued to shift from the pre-WWI outlook.
This is simply my impression at the moment and I wonder if
this year of commemorations will bring new viewpoints and change my own. But
there’s no question that it was a war that changed us.
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