It is Boxing Day, 2013. The next holiday in the chute is New Years of course, and with it we may end the world's worst century. If we are luckier than wise.
100 years ago the world seemed secure and peaceful. Some statesmen knew it was a fragile peace, but few had any idea what the costs of shredding the peace would be.
In 1878, Otto von Bismark is reputed to have said "Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal ... A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all ... I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where ... Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off."
But 35 years later, in 1913, the statesmen, in their wisdom (or hubris?) were sure they had figured it out, that they could "manage" war should it come.
At the end of 1913, Great Britain worried far more about trouble in Ireland than anywhere in the Balkans. There was also uncertainty in Europe's capitols, as well as in Washington DC, as to the fate of investments in China as Sun Yat Sen's revolution swept away the Manchu Dynasty. Washington was mostly worried about Mexico and its troubles.
Great power politics in Europe resembled a family reunion or squabble; the Hohenzollerns in Berlin, the Romanovs in Moscow, and the Hanovers in London were linked through marriage and blood. George V of England was easily mistaken for his Cousin Nicholas II of Russia and both bore a family resemblance to their cousin Willy--Wilhelm II--of Germany. And they were united (well, related) as well to the Hapsburgs who ruled over the decrepit Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On Europe's southeast flank, the relatively new Serbian kingdom sought to reclaim an imagined glory by uniting the Slavic peoples and carving off a corner of Austria's domains. Serb leaders appealed to a pan-Slavic identity and, bolstered by Russia--who had their own issues with Vienna and the Hapsburgs--stirred trouble in the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina through ultra-nationalist terrorist gangs such as The Black Hand.
Six months into the new year, on 28 June 1914, a damned foolish thing happened in the Balkans.
Gavrilo Princip, a Black Hand terrorist in his 20s shot and killed the Hapsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, in Sarajevo. Vienna demanded harsh reparations from the Serb government in Belgrade and appealed to their partner in the Triple Alliance, Germany, for help. Belgrade in turn, turned to Moscow for help and attempted to negotiate less onerous reparations from Vienna. Although Europe was a web of treaties and alliances; some secret, some open, no one thought that the "thing" in Sarajevo would lead to general war. Cooler heads would prevail.
Professor Michael Neiberg examines the first weeks of July 1914 in his new book, The Dance of the Furies. He looks at the correspondence of "ordinary" Europeans as well as press reporting in those fateful weeks of July and reveals that no one thought much about the event beyond noting it as a tragedy. Certainly there was no sense of far greater tragedies dead ahead. Dr Neiberg discusses his conclusions in a lecture at the National WWI Memorial Museum in March of this year.
What is most striking about the beginnings of the war is that the leaders thought they had it under control. They thought that, at worst, it would be a manageable minor conflict on Europe's periphery. They weren't fools; in his lecture Dr Neiberg talks about his desire to rescue the the people of July 1914 from "the stupid box," to show that they were on ground they thought they understood and were buffeted by forces wholly beyond their ken. Neither fools or knaves, they were the best their nations could offer as leaders and public servants, and yet...
The Great War they unleashed destroyed their world. At its end, the family businesses of the Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, and Hapsburgs (aka the German, Russian and Austrian empires) were gone. Britain's empire was mortally wounded. Ideologies that were gasping for oxygen--or didn't even exist--before the war became conflagrations of thought and emotion. And the embers were laid for a greater war to come.
A poem from that second war captures some of the statesmans' folly in their surety.
Son, written by a Russian Jewish poet, Pavel Antokolsky, in 1943 is a dialog between a father and his son who was killed in action the previous year. In the poem the son tells his father:
"We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our tracks.War is indeed a route uncharted; it is easy to get into and damnably difficult to navigate and get out of again. War releases forces beyond our imagination and beyond our ability to recapture.
On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords. "
It was not entirely cowardice that led many in England and France to dread the thought of another war in the 1930s. It was also a healthy regard for what the last one had unleashed. The Second World War was made necessary by the First, which had released unimaginable evil. In its resolution however, the second war perpetuated the problems of the first, along with new ones and required accommodating one evil to defeat a worse evil.
Today there are statesmen and leaders who would take us into war for the best of reasons; to protect the helpless, to combat terrorism, control weapons of mass destruction. No one goes to war for ignoble reasons, in public. No one ever imagines how much worse it can be.
Perhaps we will learn or perhaps we will get lucky and not repeat the mistakes of the past 100 years. Perhaps we will pay attention to the past and its lessons and expect no less of our leaders.
Answering his son in the poem, Pavel Antokolsky writes:
"Farewell…
"I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son, is come to its close"
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