In response to the respected War
Historian Prof Gary Sheffield’s recent article for History Today entitled ‘The Great War was a Just War’
I felt it necessary to offer my own opinion on the subject. Regardless of the
context, the idea of any war being 'just' is morally ambiguous at best.
While it is essential, as
Professor Sheffield rightly argues, to encourage a balanced historical view, it
remains highly contentious to declare who was or was not to blame for the war
(See Chris Clark's The Sleepwalkers
(2012)). While I would not argue that Germany did not seek to seize
upon the opportunity to attack once the war broke out, the suggestion by
Sheffield and others that Wilhelmine Germany was some kind of proto-Nazi state
intent upon taking over the world is best left to counter-factual writers (e.g.
Niall
Ferguson) and novelists.
As Richard
Evans recently argued, this view was discredited fifty years ago during the Fischer Controversy.
Evans rightly stated that even while the War was going well huge numbers of Germans
(especially the Social Democrats, Catholic Centre and the Liberal Left) forced
the Kaiser’s High Command to concede to Parliamentary Democracy by the middle
of 1917. Evans stated clearly:
‘Nobody can say with any certainty what would have happened had the Germans won the war, but it is safe to say that the rigid imposition of a monolithic dictatorship on Germany and the rest of Europe by the Kaiser would not have been on the cards.’
I am entirely in favour of
honouring the memories of the fallen victims of a global conflict, but do we
really need a 'bad-guy' explanation to make sense of it? We must not forget
that the almost entirely British blockade of the Central Powers during the war
led to the deaths of hundreds and thousands of civilians towards to end of the
conflict, destitution and starvation. Furthermore, the infliction of a brutal
and cruel peace treaty in 1918-19 by the Allied Powers cannot be considered
'Just' or morally neutral. Versailles precipitated many of the tragic
consequences of the following decades. Britain also continued to impose its imperial rule
upon increasingly restless populations across the world, despite signing up to
US President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ self-determination pledge.
The war was tragic and was not
entirely inevitable, but armed conflict was endemic in global culture during
that period. Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Japan, the USA
and Britain (the imperial powers) all coqueted with the notion of war with
other ‘Great Powers’ throughout the pre-war period, all invaded other countries
during the decades before the war and shared responsibility, to some extent, for
the unprecedented mechanized butchery between 1914-18. As rightly pointed out
by a friend the other day, “It takes two to make an Arms Race”, and Britain had
been in many with France, Russia and Germany since the 1880s.
One aspect which has gone
unmentioned during debates about the Centenary of the War has been the global
nature of the First World War. At Queen Mary, University of London, I am
working as part of a cross-institutional project to investigate the truly
global nature of the conflict. It is important that in Britain we recognize
the huge numbers of troops and civilians from the Indian Sub-Continent,
Africa, Australasia, North America, the Caribbean, Ireland and many other
imperial territories who lost their lives across the world for the British
Imperial cause. Chinese migrant labourers were brought in en masse to work
behind the lines in truly awful conditions, only to be dismissed back to China at
the end of the conflict. Does this fit with the narrative of the ‘just’ war for
national survival? Or does it fit better as part of a bloody imperial history
in which Britain had previously invaded and dominated the nations of others? Imperial
Britain might easily be accused of similar aims and objectives that Sheffield attributed
to the Kaiser’s Germany.[2]
My view is that for a popular national commemoration
we can step beyond the extremely divisive and contentious 'blame game'. As a multicultural and international society we should remember the tragic deaths of millions of humans regardless
of nationality, the terrible legacies of the war, and respect
all of those ordinary men and women, whatever their nationality, who suffered or
died. The human experience of war - friendship, fear,
loss, love, isolation, community, death and regeneration - should be the most important lesson we
learn as a society.
The commemoration of the First
World War Centenary during 2014-18 presents an opportunity to celebrate the steady
overall decline in human violence (see Stephen Pinker, Better
Angels of Our Nature) and the rise of supra-national cooperation, Human Rights
and democracy. It should remind us to continue the battle to safeguard
the social freedoms we as Britons, and Europeans, currently enjoy and to help others to achieve
their own.
Most of all we should recognise
that war itself is one thing which we can all
feel justified in fighting against.
[1] 'Unlike
Hitler's regime, the Kaiser's was not consciously genocidal, but it was
aggressive and brutal enough. In 1918 the British army was fighting a war of
liberation. If Germany had won the First World War Britain, although probably
safe from invasion thanks to the Royal Navy, would have been reduced to a state
of siege, shut out of Europe. As British planners recognised during the First
World War, had London been forced to come to terms with a victorious Germany,
any peace could only have been temporary. Sooner or later Germany would have
renewed the war and Britain and its empire would have been at a terrible
disadvantage.' http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/1914-18-not-futile-war
[2] By
no means do I seek to blame Britain, merely to point out that the moral ‘high-ground’
is always subjective and divisive
