The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  Europe was starting to look more like the world we know. Cities were getting rid of their old slums and narrow laneways and building more spacious roads and public spaces. In Vienna, the government opened up for development the swathes of land that had protected the approach to the old city walls. The Ringstrasse with its huge public buildings and elegant apartment blocks became the symbol of the new modern city. And Vienna, like other European cities, was cleaner and more salubrious by the end of the century, brighter too as electric lights replaced the old gas ones. You were surprised and delighted whenever you revisited one of the great European cities, recalled Stefan Zweig, the famous Austrian writer, in his autobiography. ‘The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant.’6 Prosaic improvements such as better drains, indoor bathrooms and clean water supplies meant that the old diseases such as typhus and cholera which had once been commonplace began to vanish. At the 1900 Exposition the Palais de l’Hygiène showed off new systems of heating and ventilation for public buildings such as hospitals and one room, devoted to the conquest of disease, gave a bust of the great Louis Pasteur the place of honour. (A Canadian visitor said she would have enjoyed those exhibits more ‘had there not been so many horrid Frenchmen about’.)7

  In another exhibit, for fabrics and clothing, the French showed off the work of their best couturiers but also the ready-made clothes which were bringing fashion within the reach of the middle-class consumer. New consumer goods – bicycles, telephones, linoleum, and cheap newspapers and books – were becoming part of everyday life, and the big new department stores and catalogue shopping were making them available to everyone who could afford them. And that was an increasing number of Europeans. Thanks to mass production, what had been luxury goods were now affordable by ordinary households. In the 1880s German factories were producing 73,000 pianos a year. Public entertainments and amusements were both cheaper and more elaborate. The new medium of film stimulated the building of special cinema theatres, often beautifully decorated. The French also had their café-concerts where for the price of a drink or a coffee patrons could watch a singer or two, perhaps a comic, even dancers. In Britain, the public houses, with their bright lights, shining brass, overstuffed chairs and embossed wallpaper brought a touch of glamour to an evening outing for members of the lower classes.

  Europeans were also eating much better. One of the palaces at the Exposition showed the glories of French agriculture and foods (as well as a colossal sculpture of the apotheosis of a bottle of champagne) but others such as the Palais de l’Horticulture Etrangère showed foodstuffs from around the world. Europeans were becoming accustomed to pineapples from the Azores, mutton and lamb from New Zealand or beef from the Argentine, brought in the new refrigerator ships or packed into tins. (Campbell’s tinned soup won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition.) Improvements in farming and the opening up of new agricultural lands around the world as well as cheaper and faster transportation brought a drop in food prices by almost 50 per cent in the last third of the century. Life was good, especially for the middle classes.

  Stefan Zweig, who was nineteen in 1900, has left a picture of his carefree youth. His family were prosperous and indulgent and let him do whatever he pleased at the university in Vienna. He did a minimum of academic work but read widely. He was just starting on his career as a writer, publishing early poems and his first articles. In the last thing he ever wrote, The World of Yesterday, he chose to call the time of his youth before the Great War ‘the Golden Age of Security’. For the middle classes in particular, their world was just like the Habsburg monarchy, seemingly stable and permanent. Savings were secure and property was something to be passed down safely from one generation to the next. Humanity, particularly European humanity, was clearly moving onto a higher plane of development. Societies were not only increasingly prosperous and better organised but their members were also kinder and more rational. To Zweig’s parents and their friends the past was something to be deplored while the future was increasingly bright. ‘People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation’.8 (At the start of 1941 Zweig, by now in exile in Brazil, sent his manuscript to his publisher. A few weeks later he and his second wife committed suicide.)

  His Golden Age of Security and the evidence of progress before the Great War were greatest in western Europe (including the new Germany) and in the developed parts of Austria-Hungary such as the German and Czech lands. The great powers, combining wealth, territory, influence and military power, were still all European: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and, on Europe’s eastern edge, Russia, a nation which had always been seen as not quite European, was starting its dramatic rise to world power. Still considered by many in the West to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century, Russia was in fact on the verge of an economic take-off – and perhaps a political one as well. The Russian displays at the Paris Exposition included the obligatory homage to the glories of Russian history and civilisation but they also showed locomotives, machines, and weapons. In the special pavilion devoted to Russia in Asia, visitors could sit in railway carriages which rocked gently to and fro to give the illusion of movement while a painted panorama showing the vast new lands of the Russian east rolled past. The message was that a dynamic Russia was acquiring new colonies, linking them with the Trans-Siberian Railway, and bringing them the benefits of modern civilisation including the technology to develop their rich natural resources.

  This was not just wishful thinking on the part of the Russians. From the 1880s onwards Russia’s development by most measures had been extraordinary. Like later success stories, the Asian Tigers after the Second World War, for example, it was shifting from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one. Russia’s growth rates – an average of 3.25 per cent per year – matched or exceeded those of world leaders such as Great Britain and the United States when the latter two had been at a similar stage. Although the war with Japan and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals in 1905 set Russian development back, it picked up again rapidly in the last years before the Great War. By 1913 Russia was the biggest agricultural producer in Europe and in industry was catching up fast with the other industrial powers. On the eve of the war, it was fifth among the world’s nations in industrial production.9 And there was evidence, mixed to be sure, that Russian society and politics were moving in a more liberal direction.

  What would have happened to Russia if the Great War had not come? Or if Russia had somehow managed to stay out? Would there have been a revolution in 1917? Without the war and the collapse of the old regime, would the Bolsheviks, that revolutionary splinter group, ever have been able to seize power and impose their rigid and doctrinaire policies? We will never know but it is not difficult to imagine a different, less bloody and less wasteful path for Russia into the modern age. And it is tempting to imagine a different future for Europe as well. It had so much to celebrate in 1900 and so did its other great powers. Britain still was secure and prosperous even though it had rivals around the world and in Europe. France seemed to have put its decades of revolutions and political upheavals behind it and had recovered from its humiliating defeat by Prussia and its German allies in the war of 1870–71. Germany had Europe’s fastest-growing economy and was rapidly spreading its influence east and south through trade and investment. It looked set to become the powerhouse at Europe’s core – and without any need to use its powerful army; as it had at last done in the late twentieth century. Austria-Hungary had survived, which was a triumph in itself, and its many nationalities enjoyed the benefits of being part of a larger economic and political unit. Italy was gradually industrialising and modernising.

  The colonial displays at the Exposition hinted too at the extraordinary power that a very small part of the world had amassed in the cours
e of the previous centuries. Europe’s countries dominated much of the earth’s surface whether through their formal empires or by informal control of much of the rest through their economic, financial and technological strength. Railways, ports, telegraph cables, steamship lines, factories around the world were built using European know-how and money and were usually run by European companies. And Europe’s dominance had increased dramatically in the nineteenth century as its scientific and industrial revolutions gave it, for a time at least, an edge over other societies. The first Opium War at the end of the 1830s between Great Britain and China saw the British using an armour-plated steamship (appropriately named the Nemesis) against a Chinese navy still equipped with the junks that had served China well for centuries. In 1800 before the gap in power opened up, Europe had controlled approximately 35 per cent of the world; by 1914 that figure was 84 per cent.10 True, the process had not always been a peaceful one and European powers had come close to war several times over the spoils. By 1900, however, the tensions caused by imperialism seemed to be subsiding. There was not much left to divide up in Africa, the Pacific or Asia, and there was, or so it seemed, a general agreement that there should be no sudden land grabs in such declining states as China or the Ottoman Empire, tempting though their weakness made them to imperialists.

  Given such power and such prosperity, given the evidence of so many advances in so many fields in the past century, why would Europe want to throw it all away? There were many Europeans, like Stefan Zweig’s parents, who thought that such recklessness and folly was simply impossible. Europe was too interdependent, its economies too intertwined, to break apart into war. It would not be rational, a quality greatly admired at the time.

  The march of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, in so many fields from geology to politics, had, it was widely assumed, brought much greater rationality in human affairs. The more humans knew, whether about themselves, society, or the natural world, the more they would make decisions based on the facts rather than on emotion. In time, science – including the new social sciences of sociology and politics – would uncover everything we needed to know. ‘The history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature,’ wrote Edward Tylor, who was one of the fathers of modern anthropology, ‘and our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motions of the waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.’11 Tied to this faith in science – or positivism, as it was usually referred to at the time – was an equal faith in progress, or, as Europeans often wrote, Progress. Human development was, so it was assumed, linear, even if not all societies had reached the same stage. Herbert Spencer, in his time the most widely read British philosopher, argued that the laws of evolution applied as much to human societies as they did to species. Moreover, progress was generally seen to be across the board: advanced societies were better in all respects from the arts to political and social institutions to philosophy and religion. European nations were manifestly in the lead (although there was room for disagreement about rankings among them). Other nations, the old, white dominions of the British Empire being promising examples, would eventually follow along. At the Exposition there was considerable interest in the Japanese exhibits since, said the guide, Japan had adapted with marvellous rapidity to the modern world. And Japan was now a player in international relations, if not globally then certainly in Asia.

  The other challenge that was unfolding to Europe’s dominance came to its west, from the New World. When the United States was left out initially from the row of important foreign pavilions along the Seine, its chief representative to the Exposition, a rich Chicago businessman, explained why this would not do: ‘The United States have so developed as to entitle them not only to an exalted place among the nations of the earth, but to the foremost rank of all in advanced civilization.’12 By 1900 the United States had recovered from the Civil War. Its government had crushed the last Indian resistance and American domination of its land mass was complete. Immigrants were pouring to work in its farms, its factories and its mines and the American economy was expanding rapidly. Where Britain had led the first industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century based on coal, steam power and iron, the United States with its grid of electricity and its seemingly limitless ability for technological innovation was in the forefront of the second at the end of the century. By 1902, American plants produced more iron and steel than Germany and Great Britain together. American exports, from cigarettes to machinery, tripled between 1860 and 1900. By 1913 the United States had 11 per cent of the world’s trade and that share was increasing annually.

  At the Exposition, the American pavilion, which did end up in a prime location by the river, was a model of the Capitol in Washington, with, on its dome, a giant sculpture showing Liberty drawn by four horses in the Chariot of Progress. The correspondent for the New York Observer described the American exhibits for his readers: the superb works by American sculptors such Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the magnificent displays of jewels from Tiffany and Company, or the watches and clocks which were the equal of any from Switzerland. Only a couple of displays from London and Paris, he said dismissively, ‘approached the perfection of the gold and silver work which was displayed by the United States’. And there were samples of American technology – Singer sewing machines, typewriters, vast electrical dynamos – and of the raw materials – copper, wheat, gold – which were pouring out on to the world’s markets. ‘Enough was done’, he reported complacently, ‘to make a profound impression upon the millions of visitors, of the power, wealth, resources and ambition of the United States.’13 And in his view the Paris Exposition paled by comparison with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.14 His was the voice of a new American self-confidence and a growing American nationalism with ambitions to play a greater part in the world.

  The time had now come, so historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner argued, to move beyond American shores and spread American influence to nearby islands and to other countries. Talk of the United States’ manifest destiny in the world found many eager listeners, from businessmen searching for new markets to evangelicals looking for souls to save. While Americans did not see their expansion as imperialist – unlike that of the European powers – the United States did somehow still acquire both territory and spheres of influence. In the Pacific it established a presence in both Japan and China and gathered up a series of tiny islands whose names – Guam, Midway, Wake – were going to become famous in the Second World War. In 1889 the United States got involved in a complicated dispute with Germany and Britain over the sharing out of the Samoan islands and in 1898 annexed the Hawaiian islands. As a result of the Spanish–American War in the same year, the United States found itself in control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Central America and the Caribbean became an increasingly important backyard as American investment flowed southwards. By 1910 Americans owned more of Mexico than the Mexicans themselves. To the north, Canada remained a temptation to annexationists.

  The growing American world presence brought what was at first the unwelcome realisation that the United States was going to have to spend money on a modern navy and one, moreover, which could operate in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1890, at a time when even little Chile had a stronger navy than the United States, Congress reluctantly approved the first three modern American battleships. The gradual building of American military power was accompanied by an increasing willingness on the part of the United States to assert its rights against other powers. In 1895 the new Secretary of State, Richard Olney, raised the rank of American representatives abroad to that of ambassador so that they could talk as equals with their fellow diplomats. The same year the headstrong and pugnacious Olney intervened in Britain’s dispute with Venezuela over its borders with the British colony of Guiana (today Guyana) to warn off Salisbury, the British Prime Minister. ‘Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its
fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition,’ wrote Olney, adding that ‘its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers’. Salisbury was annoyed but Britain had enough troubles elsewhere and so he was content to let the dispute go to arbitration. When the United States seized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in the war of 1898, Britain again did nothing. In the succeeding years, the British renounced any interest in building a canal across the isthmus of Panama and moved their Caribbean Fleet back into home waters, thus effectively conceding dominance in the region to the United States.