Editor’s note:

The following review of the book “The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914” is recommended especially because it emphasizes that conflict and war are not inevitable and there are always choices to be made.

THIS is a very readable, comprehensive account of the interrelated economic, social, political and military events leading to the outbreak of World War I.

Professor MacMillan gives us an in-depth look at many of the key players of this costly tragedy, the story of which is an important cautionary tale for our own time. (I also recommend an older work from which I gained an even more inclusive understanding, “The Great Illusion: 1900-1914” by Oron Hale.)

“It is easy,” Dr MacMillan writes, “to throw up one’s hands and say the Great War was inevitable but that is dangerous thinking, especially in a time like our own which in some ways resembles that vanished world of the years before 1914 ... We need to think carefully about how wars can happen and about how we can maintain the peace.”

Indeed, the principal reason to study the critical decades before that Great War — which was supposed to be the war to end all wars — is to comprehend how easy it is to slide into war. If we could only truly absorb that lesson for our own times, it might prevent us from stumbling into another — unthinkably greater — calamity.

For it is the very things we take for granted, the unexamined “truths” that are widely shared, that inevitably lead decision makers to make foolish choices.

These include what we “know” about ourselves, including goals and motives, as well as the equal certitude we have about others’ goals and motives.

Unquestioned ‘knowledge’

Since such “knowledge” easily becomes unquestioned, we are unaware of both how these ideas can be in error and in how those assumptions channel — and limit — the options we perceive to be available to us.

In many ways, the conditions within Europe of the first decade of the 20th century were eerily similar to our own time.

International trade and vigorous intercultural dialogue was extensive.

Because of this, and that fact that it had been a century since the last truly European-wide conflict, the belief that “only an idiot” would wish for the insanity and destruction of war was widespread, as was the accompanying myth that humankind had simply advanced too far to again turn on itself in mutual bloodletting.

Europe shared other familiar, but more troubling, things with us, too: festering nationalism; cultural, economic, and political rivalries fueled by prejudices large and small; terrorists who believed that killing noncombatants was a legitimate means towards attaining their goals; and the widespread conviction that “we” (no matter if this “we” was British, German, French, Russian, or Austro-Hungarian) not only had a culture superior to that of others, but also that “our” honor and rights must be maintained. 

What were the principal reasons for the collapse of peace and the dizzyingly quick descent into chaotic violence? 

The following is just my own list (and not that of either Dr MacMillan or Dr Hale).

First, the fact that it had been 100 years since a European-wide struggle fostered a sense of complacency not really supportable by facts. Relatedly, the very fact that warfare had not been experienced by most of the people alive meant that the excruciating suffering — and chaotic social, economic, and political consequences — that it always caused had faded from memory.

Second, in the years since 1900 there had been several crises which had brought various combinations of European states to the brink of overt violence, but in each case sufficient hesitation about the consequences of plunging into war — combined with the mediating intervention of other European states — had resolved these situations peacefully.

Misplaced hope

Therefore, among leaders and public alike, even as the situation markedly deteriorated in late 1913 into 1914, widespread hope remained that “they” would once again pause at the brink, allowing the larger international community’s efforts towards mediation to successfully avert disaster.

Third, during this same period, the political and military leadership of those countries who had repeatedly “backed down” in these earlier crises — especially those of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany — came to feel growing pressure that the “next time” they would have to be more firm, lest national honor and their international reputation be sullied.

For Austria-Hungary and Germany, in particular, among the military-political leadership there was a growing sense in the shortening time before August of 1914 that they had no other choice than to do what they did. 

Fourth, rising nationalist sentiments among the principle players occurred concurrently with restive ethnic minorities within dominant cultures vigorously asserting their own rights as a “people,” even calling for independent nation-state status for themselves.

Darwin distorted

Fifth, distorted interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theories about evolution led some to believe that they could discern which living humans were “less evolved” than others (reinforcing, among other things, pre-existing prejudices against people of color), and that even entire peoples could be — and actually were — more advanced than others.

The racial superiority myth that achieved full, ugly flowering in Hitler’s Nazi Germany actually began in the latter decades of the 19th century, and influenced how the British, French, Germans, Italians (and others) favorably compared their own cultures and countries to those of Africa, India, Japan and China. 

While many individuals can deservedly be faulted for their roles in allowing/causing this disaster to happen, it is the larger collective malaise that was really at fault. None of the leaders were eager for war, but some of their civilian and military subordinates came to believe that now was the decisive time to act before matters became even more unfavorable.

War came to appear as a better — even desirable — alternative to the maintenance of a “dishonorable” peace. 

But for we who remember not just the Great War begun in 1914, but also the even more horrific cataclysm of the 1930s and ‘40s, can we say that war can ever be preferable to peace?

The consequences of World War I were made even worse because of the harsh, vindictive terms of the Peace of Versailles (see Dr Maynard Keynes’ “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” 1920) that effectively sowed the seeds of economic and social chaos that directly led to the fanatical dictatorships of the ‘30s and World War II itself.

“Peace, of a sort, came in 1918,” Dr MacMillan writes, “but to a very different Europe and world. Four great empires had fallen to pieces: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The old international order had gone forever. Weakened and poorer, Europe was no longer the undisputed master of the world.”

“And if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.”

The author has been a college teacher of American history and political science and the director of the US National Catholic Rural Life Conference. He served as a member of the Iowa State House of Representatives, and retired from public service in the Iowa executive branch in 2004. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.