As a result the experts generally assumed before 1914 that a war between the powers would lead to a collapse of international capital markets and a cessation of trade which would harm them all and indeed make it impossible for them to carry on a war for longer than a few weeks. Governments would not be able to get credit and their people would become restive as food supplies grew short. Even in peacetime, with an increasingly expensive arms race, governments were going to run into debt, raise taxes or both, and that in turn would lead to public unrest. Up-and-coming powers, notably Japan and the United States, which did not face the same burdens and enjoyed lower taxes, would be that much more competitive. There was a serious risk, leading experts on international relations warned, that Europe would lose ground and eventually its leadership of the world.6
In 1898, in a massive six-volume work published in St Petersburg, Ivan Bloch (also known by the French version of his name as Jean de Bloch) brought together the economic arguments against war with the dramatic developments in warfare itself to argue that war must become obsolete. Modern industrial societies could put vast armies into the field and equip them with deadly weapons which swung the advantage to the defence. Future wars, he believed, were likely to be on a huge scale, draining resources and manpower; they would turn into stalemates; and they would eventually destroy the societies engaged in them. ‘There will be no war in the future’, Bloch told William Thomas Stead, his British publisher, ‘for it has become impossible, now that it is clear that war means suicide.’7 What is more, societies could no longer afford the costs of keeping up in the arms race afflicting Europe: ‘The present conditions cannot continue to exist forever. The peoples groan under the burdens of militarism.’8 Where Bloch, prescient though he was, turned out to be wrong was in his assumption that even the stalemate could not last for long; in his view European societies simply did not have the material capacity to fight wars on such a massive scale for more than a few months. Apart from anything else, the absence of so many men at the front would mean that the factories or mines would fall idle and farms would go untended. What he did not foresee was the latent capacity of European societies to mobilise and direct vast resources into war – and to bring in underused sources of labour, notably from the women.
Described by Stead as a man of ‘benevolent mien’,9 Bloch, who was born to a Jewish family in Russian Poland and later converted to Christianity, was the closest thing Russia had to a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie. He had played a key role in the development of Russia’s railways and founded several companies and banks of his own. His passion, however, was the study of modern war. Using a wealth of research and a multitude of statistics, he argued that advances in technology, such as more accurate and rapidly firing guns or better explosives, were making it almost impossible for armies to attack well-defended positions. The combination of earth, shovels, and barbed wire allowed defenders to throw up strong defences from which they could lay out a devastating field of fire in the face of their attackers. ‘There will be nothing’, Bloch told Stead, ‘along the whole line of the horizon to show from whence the death-dealing missiles have sped.’10 It would, he estimated, require the attacker to have an advantage of at least eight to one to get across the firing zone.11 Battles would bring massive casualties, ‘on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue’.12 (Bloch shared the pessimistic view that modern Europeans, especially those living in cities, were weaker and more nervous than their ancestors.) Indeed, in the wars of the future it was unlikely that there ever could be a clear victory. And while the battlefield was a killing ground, privation at home would lead to disorder and ultimately revolution. War, said Bloch, would be ‘a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political institutions’.13 Bloch did his best to reach decision-makers and the larger public, handing out copies of his books at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and giving lectures, even in such unfriendly territory as the United Services Institute in London. In 1900 he paid for an exhibit at the Paris Exposition to show the great differences between wars of the past and the ones to come. Shortly before he died in 1902, he founded an International Museum of War and Peace in Lucerne.14
The view that war was simply not rational in economic terms reached the wider European public through the unlikely agency of a man who had left school at fourteen and knocked about the world as, among other things, a cowboy, pig farmer, and prospector for gold. Norman Angell was a small, frail man who was frequently ill but who nevertheless lived to be ninety-four. Those who met him over his long career agreed that he was good-natured, kind, enthusiastic, idealistic, and disorganised.15 He eventually found his way into journalism and worked in Paris on the Continental Daily Mail before the Great War. (He also found time to set up the first English Boy Scout troop there.) In 1909 he published a pamphlet, Europe’s Optical Illusion, which grew over many subsequent editions into the much longer The Great Illusion.
Angell threw down a challenge to the widely held view – the great illusion – that war paid. Perhaps conquest had made sense in the past when individual countries subsisted more on what they produced and needed each other less so that a victor could cart off the spoils of war and, for a time at least, enjoy them. Even then it weakened the nation, not least by killing off its best. France was still paying the price for its great triumphs under Louis XIV and Napoleon: ‘As the result of a century of militarism, France is compelled every few years to reduce the standard of physical fitness in order to keep up her military strength so that now even three-feet dwarfs are impressed.’16 In the modern age war was futile because the winning power would gain nothing by it. In the economically interdependent world of the twentieth century, even powerful nations needed trading partners and a stable and prosperous world in which to find markets, resources, and places for investment. To plunder defeated enemies and reduce them to penury would only hurt the winners. If, on the other hand, the victor decided to encourage the defeated to prosper and grow, what would have been the point of a war in the first place? Say, Angell offered by way of example, that Germany were to take over Europe. Would Germany then set out to ransack its conquests?
But that would be suicidal. Where would her big industrial population find their markets? If she set out to develop and enrich the component parts, these would become merely efficient competitors, and she need not have undertaken the costliest war of history to arrive at that result. This is the paradox, the futility of conquest – the great illusion which the history of our own Empire so well illustrates.17
The British, so he argued, had kept their empire together by allowing their separate colonies, notably the dominions, to flourish so that all had benefited together – and without wasteful conflict. Businessmen, Angell believed, had already realised this essential truth. In the past decades, whenever there had been international tensions which threatened war, business had suffered and as a result, financiers, whether in London, New York, Vienna or Paris, had got together to put an end to the crisis ‘not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of commercial self-protection’.18
Yet a majority of Europeans still believed, dangerously so Angell warned, that war was sometimes necessary. On the Continent states were building up their militaries and Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval race. Europeans might think that their strong military forces were only for defensive purposes but the overall effect of militarism and the arms race was to make war more likely. Europe’s political leaders must see that and they too must abandon the great illusion. ‘If the Statesmen of Europe could lay on one side, for a moment, the irrelevant considerations which cloud their minds, they would see that the direct cost of acquisition by force must in these circumstances necessarily exceed in value the property acquired.’19 Given the jittery state of Europe at the time, Angell’s timing was excellent and the reception to his ideas was encouraging to the advocates of peace. The king of Italy apparently read his book and so did the Kaiser ‘with keen inter
est’. In Britain both the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the Leader of the Opposition, Balfour, read it and were deeply impressed.20 So was Jacky Fisher who described it as ‘heavenly manna’.21 (Fisher’s view on war was quite simple: he did not want it but would fight all out if he had to.) Enthusiasts clubbed together to set up a foundation so that the ideas of what came to called Angellism could be studied at universities.22
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first one of the twentieth, organised movements for peace and against the arms race and militarism more generally, which drew support largely but not entirely from the middle classes, were developing as well across Europe and in North America. In 1891 an International Peace Bureau, which still exists today, was established in Berne to bring together national peace societies, specifically religious organisations such as the Quaker Friends for Peace, or international bodies to promote arbitration and disarmament. There were peace crusades, petitions to governments, and international peace conferences and congresses and new words such as ‘pacifist’ or ‘pacifism’ or even ‘pacificism’, which covered a range of opinion from hostility to war under all circumstances to attempts to limit or prevent it, were coined. In 1889, on the anniversary of the French Revolution, ninety-six members of parliaments in nine different countries met in Paris to found the Interparliamentary Union to work for the peaceful settlement of disputes among their nations. By 1912 it had 3,640 members from twenty-one different countries, mostly European but including the United States and Japan. In the same auspicious year of 1899, the first of what were to be twenty Universal Peace Congresses before 1914 met, with 300 delegates from Europe and the United States.23 When the 1904 Congress met in Boston it was opened by John Hay, the Secretary of State. The cause of peace had become respectable enough that the old cynic Bülow welcomed a meeting of the Interparliamentary Union in Berlin in 1908. While he was well aware, he said in his memoirs, that ‘the dreams and illusions’ of most pacifists were foolish, the meeting nevertheless provided a good opportunity ‘for destroying certain anti-German prejudices’.24
Bülow did not have to worry much about home-grown pacifists. The German peace movement never had more than about 10,000 members, who were drawn mainly from the lower middle classes. Unlike Britain, for example, it did not attract eminent professors, leading businessmen or members of the aristocracy. Where senior clergy supported the British or American movements, in Germany the churches generally denounced it on the grounds that war was part of God’s plan for mankind.25 Nor did liberals take the lead in supporting peace in Germany as they did in other countries such as Britain and France. In the heady excitement of the great victory over France and the unification of Germany in 1871, German liberals had by and large forgotten their previous reservations about Bismarck and his authoritarian and anti-liberal regime and thrown their support to the new Reich. Even the left-liberal Progressive Party regularly voted funds for the army and the navy.26 Peace was not an attractive cause in a country which had been created by war and where the military held such a place of honour.
In Austria-Hungary the peace movement was similarly small and lacking in influence. In addition it was increasingly caught in nationalist politics. German-speaking liberals, for example, moved from a position of opposition to war in the 1860s and 1870s to support for the Habsburgs and the empire. While they continued to advocate arbitration they also supported conscription and a more active foreign policy.27 Further east, in Russia, pacifism was confined mainly to fringe religious sects such as the Doukhobors, although it could be argued that Tolstoy was a peace movement in himself.
The strongest and most influential peace movement before 1914 was in the United States, followed closely by Britain and France. In each country, pacifists could point, and frequently did, to their own histories for examples of overcoming deep divisions and outright conflicts from civil wars to revolutions and their success in building stable and prosperous societies with workable institutions. The mission to the world of such fortunate countries was to spread their superior and peaceful civilisation for the benefit of all. ‘We have become a great nation’, Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.’28
American pacifism, which had deep roots in American history, was also fuelled at the turn of the century by the progressive movement which aimed to reform society at home and spread peace and justice abroad. Clergy, politicians and travelling lecturers carried the message across the country and citizens organised themselves to work for honest local government, slum clearance, temperance, public ownership of utilities, or international peace. Some forty-five new peace societies appeared between 1900 and 1914 with support from a cross-section of society from university presidents to businessmen, and powerful organisations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had their own subsections on peace.29 From 1895, the Quaker businessman Albert Smiley sponsored an annual conference on international arbitration at Lake Mohonk in New York State and in 1910 Andrew Carnegie endowed the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When peace had been achieved, he stipulated, the funds could be used to cure other social ills.30
The great orator and politician William Jennings Bryan, who ran three times for President on a progressive platform, was famous for his lecture ‘The Prince of Peace’ at the Chautauqua adult education fairs which spread from their original home in New York State to hundreds of American cities and towns. ‘All the world is in search of peace,’ he told his rapt audiences, ‘every heart that ever beat has sought for peace, and many have been the methods employed to secure it.’ In 1912 Bryan became President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State and he set himself to negotiate ‘cooling off’ treaties where parties would promise not to declare war, sometimes for at least a year, and instead refer their disputes to arbitration. Despite loud criticism from Teddy Roosevelt, who thought Bryan – ‘that human trombone’ – a fool and his plans futile, Bryan had signed thirty of the treaties by 1914. (Germany, however, refused.)
In both the United States and Britain the Quakers, small in numbers but influential, played an important part in the leadership of the movement while in France pacifists were strongly anti-clerical. In France, it has been estimated, there were some 300,000 people involved in various ways in the peace movement before 1914.31 In all three countries, the peace movement was able to draw on strong liberal and radical traditions of hostility to war on moral and social grounds to appeal to significant sections of public opinion. War was wrong but it was also wasteful, diverting much-needed resources from righting the ills of society. Militarism, the arms race, an aggressive foreign policy, and imperialism were all seen as interrelated evils which needed to be tackled if there were to be a lasting peace. In each country, a strong liberal press and organisations devoted to wider social causes as well as leading politicians such as Bryan or Keir Hardie, leader of the British parliamentary Labour Party, helped to disseminate the message. The French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme with its 200,000 members regularly passed motions in favour of peace while teachers’ conferences talked about building a history curriculum that was not nationalist and militaristic.32 In Britain, powerful radical newspapers and journals such as the Manchester Guardian and The Economist put their support behind such issues as disarmament and free trade as a way of making the world a better place. When the new Liberal government took office in 1905 it faced pressure to do more about peace from the increased numbers on its radical wing and from the new and growing Labour Party.33
Individuals and bodies such as church groups also did their bit towards peace by attempting to bring the peoples of potentially hostile nations together. In 1905 the British set up an Anglo-German Friendship Committee headed by two radical peers. Church delegations and a Labour group led by the future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald visited Germany and George Cadbury, the Quaker chocolate tycoon, invited a party of German municipal officials to visit his model town of Bournville.34 The ubiquitous Harry Kessler helped t
o organise an exchange of public letters between German and British artists to express admiration for each other’s culture as well as a series of banquets to promote friendship which culminated in one at the Savoy Hotel in 1906 where Kessler himself spoke along with George Bernard Shaw and Lord Haldane, a leading Liberal politician, in favour of better British relations with Germany. (Kessler found time to note the beautiful nearly naked back and the pearls of Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII, who was among the many leaders of society present.)35 In France, Romain Rolland wrote his great series of Jean Christophe novels, whose central figure is a tormented but brilliant German composer who eventually finds recognition and peace in Paris, to show his love of music but also, so he told Stefan Zweig, in the hopes of furthering the cause of European unity and making Europe’s governments stop and think about the dangers of what they were doing.36
For all the growth in pacifist sentiments there was also wide and often bitter disagreement about how to achieve a peaceful world. Just as some argue today that the spread of democracy is the key – on the debatable grounds that democracies do not fight each other – so in the years before 1914 there were those, often French thinkers citing the great ideals of the French Revolution, who held that establishing republics and, where necessary, freeing national minorities to govern themselves, would ensure peace. An Italian peace activist said in 1891: ‘From the premises of liberty follow those of equality, which by progressive evolution lead to the solidarity of interests, the fraternity of truly civilized … peoples. War, therefore, among civilized peoples is a crime.’37 The lowering of trade barriers and taking other steps to encourage further integration of the world’s economy were seen as yet other ways of promoting peace. Such actions had considerable support, not surprisingly, in Britain, where free trade had brought great benefits in the nineteenth century, as well as in the United States. Or, as forerunners of the Wikileaks activists of today argued, the key goal should be to get rid of secret diplomacy and secret treaties. A small minority, mainly in the English-speaking world, followed Tolstoy in holding that violence should always be met by non-violence and passive resistance while at the other pole were those who argued that wars could be divided into just and unjust and that in certain circumstances, defence against tyrants or unprovoked attacks for example, war was justified.
The War that Ended Peace Page 36