Introduction
THE years 1870 to 1945 were the period in which Europe feared Germany. Before that it was France, afterwards the Soviet Union. In this perspective the Second World War is the end of an era.
In this period much was lost. The European states system disintegrated. One international economic order foundered and was not replaced by another. Concurrently with these two great dislocations Europe’s primacy in the world disappeared. Given the centrality of Germany – geographical and dynamic – much retrospective attention has been focused on German responsibility, even (which is not the same thing) culpability, in this tide of events.
The European states system, which evolved and prevailed over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gave priority to the state over the system – it was a system in which the whole was subordinate to the parts – but nevertheless it was a political reality recognized and used by statesmen. It rested on the proposition that where there is a plurality of states there is a community of interests; and that these common interests may be served by constant communication and mutual accommodation, even though the ultimate sovereign right to decide and act unilaterally is retained. The working of such a system required two crucial pre-conditions: that the states which mattered should be few but not too few, and that for most of the time most of them should prefer peace to war and find the system useful in keeping the peace. Its principal feature was balance. It had inherent mobility between its parts, and statesmanship was largely defined by the capacity of statesmen to manage the balancing through alliances and reversals of alliances. It was at risk whenever it became rigid through incompetent management or when any principal statesman had no use for it: that is to say, in the first case, when too many of its possible permutations were blocked or, in the second, when a man like Hitler preferred (to adapt Ludwig Dehio’s phrase) Hegemonie to Gleichgewicht, empire to system. It was also at risk when the sovereign states, which were its components, became too numerous and unequal in power and resources, particularly when (as happened after 1919) the Great Powers were reduced in number and new, lesser states proliferated.
After 1870 Bismarck’s new Reich was the greatest industrial and military power in Europe. Bismarck preferred Gleichgewicht to Hegemonie but he fashioned for his successors a Europe which was not only re-shaped by German victories but also systemically constricted by two fateful acts: the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 and his treaty with Austria in 1879. The first eliminated from the system any Franco-German permutation and therefore weakened the system itself; the second tied Germany to Austria’s ambitions and apprehensions in the Balkans when the last stage in the slow Ottoman retreat from Europe was setting the Habsburg against the Russian monarchy in south east Europe. Bismarck’s successors, often more liberal than he but never as powerful or intelligent, failed to extricate themselves from this unnecessary strait-jacket. That is part of Germany’s responsibility for the onset of the First World War. There were other parts, by no means all of them German, although two German factors contributed powerfully to the trend to war: the personality and antics of Kaiser William II, not a bad man but an uneducated one; and the post-Bismarckian attempt to challenge British naval power in the world as well as throw German weight about on the continent. These two factors put paid to another of the system’s possible permutations: an Anglo-German condominium.
The two World Wars have obscured the extent to which Great Britain and Germany entertained good feelings for one another throughout most of the period from Bismarck to Hitler. Von Tirpitz and Hitler were potent destroyers of these feelings, but before the First World War there were inklings of an Anglo-German joint power structure, while after that war and the abdication of the Kaiser, British statesmen were keen to re-establish relations with Germany and restore it to the comity of European states – as France had been embraced in the Concert of Europe after the abdication of Napoleon. Great Britain even pursued this endeavour for several years after Hitler became Chancellor and then President in a Third German Reich. One of the main paradoxes of the period under discussion is the tenacity of British hostility in wartime to a country with which, for most of the time, Great Britain had no quarrel.
In the First World War Germany defeated Russia and was then defeated by a western alliance; in the second, Germany was defeated on both fronts. Among the consequences of the first war were the disappearance for ever of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires; the revolution in Russia, which removed the Tsarist monarchy and, with the aftermath of foreign invasions and civil war, removed Russia itself from European affairs for a generation; the emergence in eastern (but not western) Europe of a string of new or revived or enlarged states, all of them economic weaklings and none of them adept performers in a European states system; the reduction therefore of the managers of that system from five or six to two (or three, if Italy be accounted a competent and willing third); and the enfeeblement of Germany, prolonged until the time when it was able by its own exertions to reclaim its place in Europe on its own terms.
The instrument of the curbing of Germany was the treaty of Versailles. In 1919, as during the Second World War, plans for partitioning Germany were abandoned and its French proponents had to be content with a limited occupation of parts of the Rhineland, the emasculation of Germany’s armed forces, a swingeing bill of costs and a (broken) promise of an Anglo-American guarantee against renewed German attack. Making the losers pay for a war was nothing new – after the Franco-Prussian war Bismarck imposed heavy payments on France, which paid them more than punctually – but the inclusion in the treaty of the famous ‘war guilt’ clause in order to justify a big bill rankled unforgettably in Germany; the haggling over the total sum went on for ten years; the American insistence on keeping inter-allied debts, the bulk of them due to the United States, distinct from reparations payments bedevilled post-war international finances, particularly in the case of France, which, owing twice what it was owed, looked to reparations from Germany to enable it to pay its debts to the United States.
The First World War was not only a huge shock. Its cost too was huge. It accelerated, if it did not cause, a breakdown in the international economic order which compounded the breakdown of the European states system. For much of the previous century relations between the (relatively few) sovereign economies were stable. The economic order was dominated by Great Britain, under the signs of free trade and gold. Their balances were measured and settled in gold, and the exchange rates of their currencies were steady. The war greatly devalued all the currencies, even more greatly disrupted the relations between them, exposed Great Britain’s inability any longer to combine an international regulatory role with the pursuit of its national economic interests, and provided no alternative leadership since the United States – the world’s greatest economic power – abjured any such role. (The United States gave restorative aid to Europe through investment and loans in the 1920s, but the provision of this finance made its withdrawal at the end of the decade all the more painful and disastrous. This withdrawal, beginning in 1928, had mixed causes: the failure to cut back American wartime agricultural production, leading to falling farm prices and rising farmers’ indebtedness; enticing opportunities for investment at home instead of in Europe; and maniacal speculation, the stock market crash of 1929 and the consequent rush for liquidity.) So, within the very short space of a decade, the economic consequences of the war and of the Treaty of Versailles combined to create bewildering economic confusion. The Depression of 1929–31 was followed in 1933 by a world Monetary and Economic Conference whose failure – engineered by the United States – deepened the gloom, accelerated nationalist protectionism and promoted revolution.
Revolution was most feared in France but occurred in fact in Germany. Great Britain’s was the first major economy to turn a corner, through a policy of substantial spending on new housing which reanimated the construction industry and associated trades. In France, by contrast, governments nailed their colours to deflation, gold and balanced budgets; lent large sums to banks and other undertakings, and lost it; and cut real wages, forced women out of jobs and so added social unrest and political instability to economic disorder. When Leon Blum’s Popular Front government tried to go into reverse, it discovered that it could not do so without a coordinated international strategy which did not exist. Frenchmen talked of 1789 and threw Blum out, but although there were violent disturbances there was (as in 1968) no revolution. In Germany, however, there was. There Heinrich Brüning, hagridden by the inflation of 1922 which was ended by decreeing that 1 million million marks made I mark, also clung until too late to deflation in a deflating world. The moribund Nazi Party won votes and total power: twelve seats in the 1928 Reichstag elections became 107 in 1930 and the largest party block in 1932. In the next year Hitler was Chancellor.
Hitler knew what he wanted and had written a book saying what he wanted: Lebensraum (living space, for Germans). It could not be got without war. Hitler envisaged war and did not at all disapprove of it. Therefore Hitler’s contribution to the Second World War was altogether different from any German contribution to the First. One may plausibly conclude that Germany’s responsibility for the first war was greater than others, either much greater or only a little greater; but in relation to the second war Germany’s responsibility is close to total. This judgement may be challenged only by disjoining a country from its rulers, by considering a term like ‘Germany’ to be an abstraction incapable of carrying responsibility. That within Germany many people did not want war is self-evident. But in so far as wars are waged by states, and in so far as the responsibility for a war may be apportioned between states, then German responsibility for the Second World War in Europe is in a class of its own.
The responsibility for starting the war resurrected the old charge of Germany’s peculiar war guilt in the twentieth century, but in a much altered context, since it is psychologically difficult to separate Hitler’s responsibility for the war from related atrocious and guilt-laden policies, particularly the killing – with the machinery of the state and for purely racial reasons – of all attainable Jews and gipsies and the design to reduce the numbers of the Slavs by 30 million. (The fact that until about 1941 Hitler still preferred to export Jews rather than kill them is relevant neither to his racialism nor to the criminality of the subsequent genocide.) Hitler’s plans for Europe were not original in as much as they were an expanded version of visions of Mitteleuropa, which had allured an earlier generation of thrusting financiers and industrialists. If such visions lead to war the man in the street feels only a limited responsibility (at most) for the outcome. In the sixties Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961) reopened the case against Germany in 1914–18 with a scrupulous and scholarly investigation of German aims, before and during the war, to seize for Germany dominion in Europe and the world. The debate which ensued became at times heated but remained essentially academic. But a later debate about German guilt in the thirties and forties went wider and deeper because it went beyond the war-making propensities of governments and ruling classes to the racial and criminal accompaniments of Hitler’s conquests, which demanded widespread personal involvement in the bestialities perpetrated in death camps and in territories occupied by the German armies in the east. This later debate, although conducted mainly by historians, was not confined to academics and very many Germans felt a shame akin to guilt. The swell of disgust prompted a counter-attack which tried to explain away conduct so unbecoming a civilized people. A conservative school of writers, more nationalist than scholarly in their inspiration, argued that the mass murders of Jews and Slavs were a secondary crime, secondary because they reflected a mode of thinking and acting with which Europe had already been infected and polluted by the enormities of Stalinist communism. Others have fallen back more modestly on the argument that no man is responsible for another’s crime, no generation may be saddled with moral guilt except through its own acts or connivance. But the first post-war generation acknowledged, it would seem, some guilt by association and endorsed the view that the new German state, as the successor in title of the Third Reich, was morally right to accept an obligation to Jewry and offer the sort of reparation (money) which alone can be offered after the event: an acknowledgement and a payment which lie somewhere between expiation and ex gratia disbursement.
These debates and their outcome are one indication among others that the Germany which emerged from its second defeat was much more radically altered than was Germany after the first war. The two other principal states of western Europe – Great Britain and France – have changed far less since 1870 than Germany appears to have done: their fundamental political and constitutional assumptions (not to mention their frontiers) have remained the same, their national temper has been, compared with Germany’s, subdued, and the trend of their domestic policies has been fairly consistent and equable in a liberal direction. Germany’s history in the same years has been episodic. The Second Reich began as a monarchical régime under a Kaiser who was more a military than a civilian figure; its main props, in addition to the army, were a landowning aristocracy (the Junkers of the east) and a new plutocracy (the industrialists and financiers of the west). This was something like the régime envisaged a generation earlier by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina who, before the Civil War, hoped for a partnership between the plantation society of the South and the developing industrial economy of the North, but in a very different constitutional, civilian context. The Second Reich degenerated into a monarcho–military autocracy and then, during the first war, into a military dictatorship which first overrode and then sacrificed the Kaiser. After the war the Weimar Republic, democratic and even socialist in intent, was immediately beset by armed threats from left and right which persisted to 1924 and from which the government was able to save the Republic only with the help of what was left of the army. With the revival of industry in the boom years 1924–9, Weimar governments had either to displease the military and the plutocracy or to lean on them, from which dilemma it had not extricated itself before the advent of the Great Depression and Hitler. Both the military and industry – a nationalist and protectionist combination – welcomed Hitler up to a point, and he in turn was dependent on industry for rearmament and on the army for his aggressive foreign designs. While the Nazis were in many ways repulsive and alarming to these old pillars of the state, there was enough common ground to stifle the Weimar ideals of parliamentary democracy and social responsibility. It took a second war and defeat to bring Germany into line, mentally as well as formally, with the main stream of western political and social attitudes. This alignment of the three main western European states is one of the second war’s most significant consequences.
When the second war ended the European states system was left even more jejune than in 1919. In the east the Soviet conquest was a further stage in the division of the continent into east and west, an accentuation of a process already marked by the dissolution in 1919 of its old autocracies (senior members of an overall European system) and by the Treaty of Locarno in 1926 whereby a new order was established for the west from which, on British insistence, the east was excluded. With the Second World War the Soviet Union erased the three Baltic Republics and took large bites out of Poland and Rumania and a smaller bite out of Slovakia. Otherwise the map looked in the east much the same as before the war, but a map is not the best guide to reality and the states shown on it were states only in name. In the west the map was unaltered: the causes of Hitler’s war lay in eastern, not western, Europe. But the states of western Europe, although intact, had lost their confidence in their ability to construct or operate a purely European system; the old European Great Powers were no longer the top powers but were outranked by two Superpowers, and in order to safeguard themselves they prayed the United States, a geographical outsider, to become a political insider. To regulate economic affairs a new international economic order had been devised in 1944 at Bretton Woods but it lasted for less than thirty years and was followed by a fresh bout of economic instability reminiscent of the leader-less inter-war years – widely fluctuating currencies, barely controlled expansion of credit, boom and bust in stock markets, unpayable foreign debts. The new political order, resting on the mutual nuclear deterrence of the Superpower arbiters of the continent, was accepted as a fact of life for about the same span. But the régime in the east, erected by Stalin to protect his western frontiers, was a failure. Subordinate communist parties ruled in the several pre-war states. They were installed by the Soviet armies (except in Yugoslavia, which broke away from the Soviet block almost at once) and were secure so long as Soviet armies might come back in an emergency. This they did in Hungary and Poland in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, but in Poland in 1980 the Soviet government deemed it inexpedient to intervene with force even to prevent the overthrow of the party’s rule. In western Europe the alliance with the United States remained almost unchallenged. It was an insurance against Soviet hostility and, even when the Kremlin put on a more benign face with Khruschchev or Gorbachev, fear of Soviet might and distrust of Soviet intentions could not be lightly assuaged. Yet the Nato alliance, initially easy and popular, began to become irksome as commercial rivalries developed between Europeans and Americans; world policies, particularly in the Middle East, diverged; and, perhaps temporarily, Europe’s assessment of United States leadership lapsed into amazed contempt and ridicule. The terms upon which a European-American alliance might endure needed to be discussed but could not be discussed so long as political leaders on both sides pretended that what was needed was maintenance and not a new model.
As the war ended all the eventual victors abandoned the idea of partitioning Germany. But Germany was partitioned. Partition was a yearning to undo Bismarck’s work, a feeling that Europe might cope with pre-Bismarckian Prussia but not with Prussia-writ-large, alias Germany. Within a few years of the war’s end two entirely new states were born: the Federal Republic of Germany and the Democratic Republic of Germany, both of them as new-fangled as the German Reich had been in 1870. But partition did not have its expected effect. The German impact on events did not evaporate. The (western) Federal Republic quickly became, at first in association with the United States but later by its own exertions, a Great Power – only half armed in as much as it might neither make nor possess nuclear weapons, but an economic giant which by the end of the eighties was the second (after Japan) provider of capital for the rest of the world. This resurgence raised once more an old question whether all, or nearly all, Germans ought not naturally to form one state, and what the power of such a state might be. The war had cut Germany in two and recreated the separate republic of Austria. Before the war and until Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938 the separation of Austria from Germany had been maintained only because a union had been ruled out by the Geneva Protocol of 1922; but because it was maintained it came to seem proper. By analogy the separation of the two post-war German republics may also come to seem immutable. Yet these two states have long insisted that their relations with one another are not as the relations between other sovereign states, and – unlike Austrians who identify themselves as Austrians – citizens of both German republics identify themselves as Germans. A first post-war generation accepted the separation because it was clearly unable to end it without starting a war, but it will be surprising if a succeeding generation does not mate west with east as surely as the Rumanians once mated Moldavia with Wallachia.
But the future contribution of Germany to Europe’s affairs does not depend on reunification. The Federal Republic is by itself strong enough to have and exercise choices, which it is beginning cautiously to consider. It is inhibited by fear of the Soviet Union and a commensurate reluctance to annoy the United States, but within the foreseeable future it may choose one or more of a number of political courses and experiment in combining them: reunion with eastern Germany; a condominium with France; substantially improved relations with the Soviet Union. The code-name for this last option is Rapallo – but with the reminder that the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 did little for either party except enable it to thumb its nose at everybody else while they were not looking. There is once again a German power. Germany is not a Superpower or likely to become one, but there is no law in politics which says that only Superpowers count nor is there a law which says that no state may deal with a Superpower except another Superpower. The main thrust of Superpower detente is not confined to arms deals but leads in the longer run to political debate and manoeuvre, and once the United States has given a lead in intercourse with the Soviet Union, others will not be far behind.
The only European state which won in both the World Wars was Great Britain. Except in the obvious sense – it is more agreeable to win than lose -these victories have been a mixed blessing. They have veiled and accelerated Great Britain’s industrial decline, for however one may admire the economic management of the British war efforts, the wars were enormously costly and Great Britain stumbled out of them with only partial confidence and independence. A victor’s natural inclination to return to what he sees as attainable normality was demonstrated in 1925 by the return to the gold standard with an overvalued pound sterling which could be maintained only by severe and damaging deflation. By reversing such policies Great Britain staged a comparatively early recovery from the Great Depression but the second war was won only at the cost of selling precious overseas assets and incurring large debts. Post-war recovery was gratifyingly swift but without a sufficiently radical transformation of industry, from those which had made fortunes in the past to the materials and methods of a new industrial revolution. With the revival of the French and west German economies Great Britain seemed once more to be flagging. Renewed international instability and inflation in the seventies propelled it, in the eighties, into a fresh bout of extravagant deflation which throttled economic activity and precipitated bankruptcies and unemployment on an unforeseen and unnecessary scale. In spite of remarkable bonanzas (North Sea oil, the collapse of world prices of raw materials, prolific proceeds of denationalization) Great Britain was forced to the bottom of the table of advanced industrial countries and forfeited unrecoverable opportunities. A half-hearted abandonment of the nostrums of the early eighties stimulated recovery, but this sad performance diminished Great Britain’s standing in Europe.
The ambiguity of the British position in Europe was enhanced by a different wartime experience: the special relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt. Before the war relations between the two countries had not been close or cordial, and leaders on either side were wont to be derogatory about the other, in private sometimes very derogatory. But the war wrought a big change, not merely through the imperatives of an Anglo-American alliance and the exhilaration of a shared victory but also through the exceptional personal relations which were initiated by Churchill and welcomed by Roosevelt. With other leaders after the war this relationship became something of a fetish, but a fetish grounded in enough reality – a common experience, a common language, shared traditions – to give substance to the magic. The relationship, however, was special in a more restricted sense than the British imagined. It made for an ease of communication at all levels which neither British nor Americans attained with others, but it could not create a special identity of interests in political or commercial matters and so far from putting American weight behind British ideas it threatened to pull British politicians into a toadying indulgence of American adventures and misadventures. On the British side the belief in this special relationship strengthened hesitations about joining the European Community (whose value and durability the British grievously underrated in the fifties and sixties) and made Great Britain, when it did join, a partner with a difference, less than fully committed to the Community’s larger aims. Great Britain muffed its chances of playing a linking role between Europe and America and lapsed into a petulant limbo between the two. Where once in the community Great Britain’s absence had been deplored, its presence became a matter of some indifference, even vexation. Germany’s obvious European partner was no longer Great Britain but France.
The European Community was a child of war, an experiment for mustering and reasserting Europe’s diminished status and diminished economic clout in the world. Its success is problematic because it has not solved the question how much unity and central authority are necessary to make a community effective. Too much unity goes against the European grain. The Community was established in the first place by Europeans who observed Europe’s economic (and therefore political) decline and wished to reverse it by joining forces and resources. The forces and resources to be joined were economic, and the Community in its first phase was an association of advanced industrial and trading states. But it failed to take a leaf out of the book of the German Zollverein and, instead of consolidating before expanding, it did the reverse. It did so moreover for non-economic reasons and was to that extent untrue to its first purpose. The original six members welcomed newcomers for, mainly, political reasons. They believed that membership of the Community would deter anti-democratic antics in countries like Greece and in pursuit of this implausible aim attenuated the Community’s economic strength by admitting to it economic weaklings which, at this stage, it had difficulty in supporting. The political aspect of the Community has been sharpened by attempts, only half successful, to achieve common policies in extra-European affairs. What the Community most needs is not policies about other continents but a central bank and a common currency: the mobilization of resources before attempts to exert inchoate power. The untimely distension of the Community, in size and in purpose, has jeopardized it.
To argue that the Community is ill-advised to devote its ingenuities to fabricating common external policies is not to deny that some European states have crucial external interests or that these interests are often the same. This is particularly true of the Middle East, a stamping ground for Europeans for centuries, a vital crossroads and an inescapable source of fuels. When the First World War dissolved the Ottoman empire, its Arab subjects hoped for independence but got British and French rule. This rule was eliminated by the second war which, in this area, complemented the first. The second war also gave, in the most horrible manner, a great boost to modern Zionism, which had been a not very successful Jewish minority movement originally founded to find a way to save the persecuted Jews of Russia and Rumania. The founder of this modern Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, was an attractive but naive Austrian Jew (Jewish by race but an atheist) who was so appalled by the pogroms of the 1880s that he devoted his life and wealth to finding somewhere – preferably in the Ottoman empire – for oppressed Jews to live a decent life. He grievously misjudged Ottoman readiness to accommodate – as opposed to listen to – his schemes, and after his death and after the First World War his successors were equally unsuccessful in getting British sympathy or support, in spite of the Balfour Declaration (1917) by which the British had promised to look favourably on the creation of a home for Jews in Palestine. (By home, the British understood a refuge for a limited number of Jews without statehood. The Zionists wanted a state.) The second war’s horrors created unprecedented sympathy for Europe’s surviving Jews, and by allying their own ruthlessness with this sympathy Zionists won their state, evicting all the British and half the Palestinian Arabs. Subsequently financed by the American state and by American Jewish well-wishers (who, however, did not want to go to Israel except as tourists) the new state defeated all Arab attempts to exterminate or contain it but failed to achieve a modus vivendi with the Arab world, with the consequence that the Middle East has been almost perpetually at war since the end of the war in Europe. Forty years on the future of the state of Israel appears a great deal less than certain.
In the years 1870–1945 Germany lost whatever chance it may have had to dominate Europe either imperially, as Hitler wanted, or by manipulating the European states system, as Bismarck envisaged. After two catastrophic wars the western German Republic, the more important relic of the Reich, has come to terms with its western foes but is on an uneasy footing with the Soviet Union, a footing which could get better or worse as the one or the other grows richer or stronger. The eastern German Republic lacks formal relations in the one direction and satisfactory ones in the other. The prime question in eastern Europe is the degree of independence which its sovereign states may exact from the Soviet Union, which is perplexed about how to change Stalin’s failed post-war settlement without reviving Stalin’s fears for the Soviet Union’s defences. The prime question in western Europe is whether the exceptional resources and skills of its principal national economies may be integrated to create once more a power in Europe commensurate with other world powers.
Europe’s position is a double dilemma. Not only is the deployment of its resources impeded by its fragmentation into sovereign authorities – a luxury which it can hardly now afford. In addition it seems trapped in the ambiguities of power. In the first years after the Second World War power was equated with nuclear weapons. The war in Europe was the last widespread pre-nuclear war, but within a few months of its termination the concomitant war in the Pacific and East Asia saw the use of nuclear bombs. Since then wars have been divided into nuclear and non-nuclear, and states have been sharply categorized in the same way. Yet world powers are not the same as nuclear Superpowers, for the World Powers include, confusingly, Japan which has overwhelming economic power without possessing post-modern nuclear armament. Nor are all the increasingly numerous nuclear states the equals in resources of some non-nuclear ones. Western Europe, epitomized in this respect by western Germany, senses a capacity to graduate to the top level economically but feels unsafe without some kind of nuclear protection, which, however, may so mortgage its resources as to cancel its hopes of emulating Japan. After two mutually destructive wars west Germany and its associates may not do as Japan has done, because Europe’s Soviet hinterland is a great deal more menacing than anything that Japan yet perceives in China. Europe therefore is constrained in a way in which Japan is not. A hundred years ago conflict between Russia, China and Japan was already a major element in world affairs, but to most Europeans it was peripheral. Now, by contrast, this continuing power dance on the other side of the globe may condition Europe’s future as decisively as the material and psychological ravages of Europe’s wars or the loss of Europe’s worldwide empires.
Europe’s response is not as novel as it looks. Proponents of Mitteleuropa in Germany in the early decades of this century were moved by, among other things, the fear that Europe in general and Germany in particular were in danger of being squeezed between Russian and American empires. (They were moved too by greed.) They argued that Europe must be united to meet this eventuality. Being German and nationalist and exuberant they equated unification with German domination. Their visions stretched from France on the one side to Turkey on the other, inclusively. They were opting for a German Power almost coterminous with continental Europe in place of the German World Power with a European base which Bismarck and his intellectual heirs had hoped to build through manufacturing, commerce and (with hesitations) colonies: Germany would become a World Power by incorporating Europe rather than by expanding beyond Europe. This continental vision, never attractive to non-Germans, was extinguished by the defeat of 1918 but was revived with variations a few years later by Hitler and his early coadjutor, ex-Field Marshal Ludendorff. In Hitler’s mind German domination of Europe was required in order to provide living space for the German race – non-Germans might be reduced to serfdom or exterminated, not merely subordinated; but the notion of creating a Great Power by territorial and economic unification was close kin to the Mitteleuropa of earlier generations and, subject to one very big qualification, is kin too to the expectations of the European Community. The qualification is the substitution of supranational collaboration for German dominion – a qualitative change that makes the European dream at once more palatable and yet more difficult to attain, since there is no precedent for a World Power created neither by conquest nor nationalism.
The authors of the European Community look beyond the world of Superpower bipolarity to the re-emergence of an international system (similar on a broader scale to the extinct European states system), in which ‘Europe’, alongside the United States and Japan, the USSR and China, will be the principal actors. In such a world, if it comes to pass, the European Power will need to ponder the experience of Italy in the old European Concert, a member whose credentials were not universally accepted.
Patterns of power change, but power itself remains a prime factor in international affairs. Wars accelerate shifts in power, but their impact on the use or abuse of power is problematic. A great war, by inflicting great suffering and great damage, may be expected greatly to affect attitudes to war, but how deeply or lastingly is again problematic. At the end of every great war people say that such a thing must never happen again, but they say so with more longing than conviction. How, if at all, has the Second World War been different?
It was extraordinarily callous and savage. Half a century afterwards people still shudder at the recollection of the horrors, while those too young to recollect wonder at the atrocities perpetrated and the degree to which they were tolerated: at the deliberate mass bombing of civilians by all sides, the taking and shooting of innocent hostages in droves, the holocaust of the Jews in Europe, the sadistic treatment of prisoners of war at Japanese hands. New weapons, however horrible, are at least a tribute to man’s inventiveness; the accompanying inhumanity and acceptance are unrelievedly evil unless they spark a more potent and more effective opposition to the waging of yet more wars in which such things may happen again.
The sources of war include appetites and attitudes. The appetites are easy to identify: greed, envy and the like deadly sins. Of the attitudes which have encouraged the recourse to war and have sanctified its ruthless conduct, two stand out, the one ancient and the other comparatively new. The one is resignation – the feeling that wars are inevitable and that the exhortations of pacifists, the protests of moralists and the arguments of those who point out the futility of war are a waste of breath. The other is the uncomfortable fact that war became at one time popular. Nationalism, nourished by propaganda (much of it false but some of it valid), fashioned a mass approval of war, even a demand for war, which not only propelled governments into war but enabled them, once in, to conduct it with a violence which knew few bounds. It quelled the basic belief that war, although perhaps inevitable, was at bottom a curse. The wars of the mid twentieth century, which coalesced into the Second World War, have posed the question whether this trend has been reversed. Is there a limit to the tolerance of cruelty or does the limit limitlessly recede?
A stouter opposition to war requires the reinvigoration of old ideas about the place of war in human society and the limits which should be imposed on it, together with the application of these ideas to what is new in the war-making of the twentieth century. For centuries war has been widely regarded as an inevitable, even a necessary, evil. Those who glorify it, and those who condemn and hope to eliminate it altogether, are on the fringes. Centrally, the crux has been how to rationalize the conflict between, on the one hand, accepting war as a fact of life and, on the other, condemning it as immoral multiple homicide. The idea of war as a necessary evil has emerged from this dilemma and has dominated all thinking (in Europe) about war since early Christian times. It is what most people felt about war against Hitler. Beginning with St Augustine, Christian and other moralists have tried to resolve the irreconcilable by arguing that war, like the use of other forms of violence, may be justified. By dividing wars into the permissible and the impermissible, they sought to control recourse to war and conduct in war, even though by proscribing some wars they automatically legitimized others. They foreswore the pacifists’ simple proposition that all wars are wrong, because this proposition exposed Christianity to the danger of annihilation through a refusal to defend itself or to support the newly Christianized state (the Roman Empire) whose arms were to be the salvation of Christianity against heathen barbarians. It was better to regulate the evil, since in the rejection of war lay a greater evil.
The regulation began as moral justification but developed by legal definition. The ancestry of the Charter of the United Nations includes lawyers and political thinkers who have devised schemes and mechanisms for keeping the peace, as well as preceptors such as St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas who laid the basis for the conditional legitimization of war. Whether by divine command or by human contrivance, wars are to be limited, since war cannot be safely eliminated: wars of a kind have a proper place in the world, and the main question is what kind. In every age, including the nuclear age, the problem is to prescribe within the circumstances of that age when a war may justly be started and within what limits it may be waged – and to influence opinion accordingly.
The rules and their interpretation have inevitably varied, but three conditions governing the initiation of war have provided the perennial groundwork. First, a war may be begun only by a sovereign. This category included the Pope and kings and was gradually refined to mean nobody else. In modern times it has meant a duly constituted sovereign state. In very modern times attempts have been made, not so far successfully, to confer legitimacy on wars waged by bodies fighting against states but not themselves invested with the trappings of a state (guerrilla groups, liberation movements within colonial empires, embryonic states – the PLO, the ANC). These attempts seek to widen the laws of war into laws of armed conflict; they face opposition from states, which have arrogated to themselves the sole right to wage war.
The second condition for the initiation of a Just War is that it be righteous. Roman legists regarded a war as justified if the aggressor were bent on recovering stolen territory or property, but Christians had a different point of view. They regarded a Just War as essentially punitive. What made it just was not the aggressor’s grievance but the victim’s transgression. Therefore a Just War might be undertaken by any sovereign, regardless of his own interest in the matter. If President Nyerere had said that he was attacking Idi Amin’s Uganda because its government was evil, he would have been within the Just War tradition, but he preferred to rely (precariously) on the terms of the UN Charter. The right or duty of punitive intervention has fallen into disfavour, partly because the governments of states have successfully contrived to make the state a law unto itself and partly because the claim to be waging war for a righteous cause can so easily be made in bad faith. Thus Hitler could pose as a champion of justice in his aggression against Czechoslovakia, and Brezhnev and Reagan have come close to doing in their attacks on -again – Czechoslovakia and Nicaragua. So malleable a provision is a reed half broken from the start. Thirdly and finally, a Just War must be pure in the sense that it must not be undertaken by the aggressor for gain or other selfish purpose. This too is a provision more easily judged by God than man.
The rules concerning the initiation of war were radically altered at the end of the Second World War when the signatories of the UN Charter abandoned their sovereign right to make war on other members of the United Nations except in self-defence. Subsequent history suggests that this bold innovation was, to say the least, ahead of its time – as are many bold innovations.
The proponents of Just War sought to regulate behaviour in war as well as the resort to war. The commonest prescriptions of this second aspect of the doctrine were: that fighting must be suspended on special days; that certain classes of person must not be killed or harmed, notably women and children, ambassadors, clergy, sometimes peasants; that new weapons must be eschewed; that warlike acts must be proportionate to the offence which justified the making of war in the first place. The first of these requirements has lost its force long since, although there were attempts as recently as the First World War to suspend killings at Christmas. The second was evaded at an early stage by the counter-argument that it was up to the protected species to keep out of the way of the fighting. The third is a compound of the conservatism of the fighting classes who damned or derided the weapons to which they were not accustomed and, on the other hand, the fear and distress caused by every inventor of crueller and more lethal weapons. Nuclear weapons have given it new force. Most flagrantly breached in the wars of the twentieth century is the requirement of proportionality: that means should bear some acceptable relation to ends. The scale and indiscriminate nature of death and destruction by modern weapons are the most shocking parts of modern war, and both anti-war and anti-nuclear movements have rested much of their case on the impossibility of keeping warfare within just bounds. The logic of the argument is that a Just War is no longer possible if nuclear weapons or other weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction are likely to be used. It unites moral, legal and intellectual traditions with the emotional sentiments evoked by the experience of modern war.
A pessimistic reading of history suggests that mankind has an almost infinite capacity to tolerate horror, particularly in the context of war which suspends prevailing precepts and standards of behaviour. It is therefore rash to suppose that the record of our own times marks the limit of their toleration. There have been dozens of wars since the end of the Second World War and some of them have been at least as frightful and shameful as any which went before. The rules devised to govern the resort to war and the conduct of war have been ignored by governments and individuals with almost complete impunity and with sparse popular outcry. This passivity, or auto-gullibility, has been facilitated by the galloping industrialization of war, which has enabled the instruments of death to function more and more remotely – remote not merely from people hundreds and thousands of miles away from scenes of horror, but also out of sight of the warrior himself up in the dark in his bomber or behind his long-ranging naval gun, endowed by the latest technology with the gift of divorcing the fascination of his doings from their consequences. For a century or so, technology has veiled the facts of war.
Yet here we touch upon one of three developments which point in a more optimistic direction. They are: the new visibility of war through television; the impact of nuclear weaponry; and satellite photographic intelligence. These developments have occurred preponderantly since the Second World War but they have their origins in it.
The reporting of war on television is one of those innovations which may revolt the mind or habituate it. In the case of Vietnam it so sickened the audience that the directors had to cancel the unfinished performance. That the war was brought to an end by the US administration’s interpretation of television’s effect on American opinion and attitudes is hardly to be gainsaid, however considerable the weight of other matters. This television exposure coincided with a particular turn in the techniques of war. The high-level bomber had been superseded by the low-level helicopter gunship, so that what the cameras showed was not material destruction far away but lifesize figures fleeing helplessly and dying in torment. That, at last, was more than human nature could stomach. Thousands of people knew during the Second World War that Jews were being rounded up, deported and presumably killed, but comparatively few saw these things being done. There is no dodging the evidence of one’s own eyes.
Images, it has to be admitted, fade. The holocaust has turned inevitably from a proceeding into a fact of history, and attempts to keep it a present reality cannot in the nature of things succeed; it must lose much of its potency. The same will be true of the atrocities in Vietnam, even as it has been true – to cite a single remoter example – of the once famous genocidal slaughter of Armenians by Turks in 1895 and 1915. What endures is not the event itself but the knowledge that the event took place; and knowledge is a far weaker force than the senses. If wars are to become fewer and behaviour in war less atrocious there will have to be other aids to better conduct. There are two, the one ambivalent but the other more positively hopeful, the one much conversed but the other less frequently remarked. Both impinge upon the incidence of war by affecting, not so much sentiment, as calculation.
The Second World War ended with the dropping of two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. These bombs appalled people, even though other bombing operations killed as many people in the space of not much more time. But they were more than just the latest invention in the history of war, for they destroyed the traditional basis for calculating the chances of war. Contrary to popular belief, wars do not happen by mistake; they are initiated by calculation (including miscalculation), and the calculations are made by more or less rational persons reckoning the chances of winning and profiting from war. Hitler, in company with the great majority of warmongers before him, started wars when and where he calculated he would win them. The opposition to him in his own military circles in the thirties derived from the calculation of certain officers that the wars which the Führer planned would lead not to victory but defeat: they too calculated, but otherwise. With the invention and manufacture of nuclear weapons, all these calculations become obsolete and nonsensical if, as was generally supposed, a nuclear war must be suicidal or at least unacceptably costly. So any war likely to involve the use of nuclear weapons must not be started. This axiom has regulated the course of the Cold War (i.e. non-war) between the Superpowers, although its application to wars between the increasing number of other states with nuclear weapons has remained uncertain. Nuclear weapons, in other words, have been treated as unilaterally useless. They can bring death but not victory or gain. Their function, to invert Gibbon, is ostentation, not use – and they have in consequence been accumulated at enormous cost as deterrents in super-abundant armouries which would be equally deterrent with a fraction of their contents. In the Superpower conflict these weapons have been a powerful force for peace because of their promise of mutual deterrence. They are what early Christians would have liked the wrath of God and the promise of damnation to provide: a guarantee of peace, albeit in the limited context of nuclear war only. It is an open question whether they will continue to impose this constraint or, with familiarity, will lose their hold over the calculations of impatient or irascible statesmen.
The same caveat applies to the impact of nuclear weapons on the imagination. The special influence of nuclear weapons has been a combination of restraints on both calculation and sentiment, but there was a short space of time when only the latter operated. So long as the United States alone possessed nuclear bombs, their use was inhibited not by the calculations but by awe. American presidents, including Truman who in 1950 authorized the making of the ‘Super’ or hydrogen bomb, have refused to use nuclear weapons when arguments for doing so were no less seductive than in August 1945 and when neither the USSR nor any other state had retaliatory power. This refusal was not solely due to doubts about whether the use of the bomb might be disadvantageous in a military sense. There was also the sense that to use it would be wrong and the sense too that public opinion would not countenance the incineration of several thousand Russians or Chinese or Koreans in one flash. Since 1945 some 100,000 nuclear warheads have been made and none has been used. Old morality and new public opinion have had a share in this outcome. Those with the power to make nuclear war have apparently recoiled from doing so because of its inhuman consequences as well as its military un-profitability – a powerful combination.
Yet not enough for comfort. Nevertheless, modern technology has produced another peace-keeper, less spectacular and less scaring, but perhaps more effective. In the pre-nuclear age, adversaries accumulated and refined their armouries and kept them secret. They aimed to excel and also to surprise, so that in a crisis they might win. But since nuclear weapons have, for the possessors of these weapons, put deterrence above winning, it has become expedient to let the enemy know how strong you are. (It is also much more difficult to prevent him finding out.) There is little point in assembling an overwhelming deterrent force if the enemy cannot assess it, since the greater his awareness of it the more will he be deterred. Photographic intelligence in the Second World War was incomparably better than in the first, but the deployment of photographic satellites has been an even more striking technological advance and has simultaneously transformed intelligence from the competitive business of keeping and stealing secrets into the spreading of knowledge to mutual benefit. To that extent adversaries are becoming influenced more by what they know than by what, perhaps incorrectly, they fear. Technology, which has done far more for war than for peace, has at last put a substantial weight into the other scale.