Twentieth-century violence is unintelligible if it is not seen in its imperial context. For it was in large measure a consequence of the decline and fall of the large multi-ethnic empires that had dominated the world in 1900. What nearly all the principal combatants in the world wars had in common was that they either were empires or sought to become empires. Moreover, many large polities of the period that claimed to be nation states or federations turn out, on close inspection, to have been empires too. That was certainly true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it remains true of today’s Russian Federation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (after 1922 only Northern Ireland) was and is to all intents and purposes an English empire; for brevity’s sake, it is still commonly referredto as England.* The Italy created in the 1850s and 1860s was a Piedmontese empire, the German Reich of 1871inlarge measurea Prussian one. The two most populous nation states in the world today are both the results of imperial integration. Modern India is the heir of the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. The borders of the People’s Republic of China are essentially those established by the Qing emperors. Arguably, even the United States is an ‘imperial republic’; some would say it always has been.
Empires matter, firstly, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. Thereis a demographic limittothe number of men most nation states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are to mobilize and equip large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and to levy the taxes or raise the loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, as weshall see, manyofthe greatest battlesofthe twentieth century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples. Secondly, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the twentieth century’s principal fuel, so too did the Persian Gulf in the Near East. Thirdly, because empires are often associated with the creation of economic order, the flows and ebbs of international commercial integration are closely associated with their rise and fall. Economic constraints and opportunities may also determine the timing and direction of imperial expansion, as well as the duration of an empire’s existence and the nature of post-colonial development. Finally, the widely varying life expectancies of empires may offer a clue as to the timing of violence, since warfare would appear to be more prevalent at the beginning and especially at the end of an empire’s existence.
It is an error not unlike the old economic historians’ search for perfectly regular cycles of business activity to suppose that the rise and fall of empires or great powers has a predictable regularity to it. On the contrary, the most striking thing about the seventy or so empires historians have identified is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as the spatial extent of their dominion. The longest-lived empire of the second millennium was the Holy Roman Empire, which may be dated from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 until its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. The Ming dynasty in China (1368–1644) and its immediate successor, the Manchu or Qing dynasty, lasted together more than five hundred years, as did the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258). The Ottoman Empire (1453–1922) lasted just under five hundred years, showing signs of dissolution only in the last half century of its existence. The continental empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries, expiring in rapid succession at the end of the First World War. The Mughals ruled a substantial part of what is now India for around two hundred years. Of similar duration were the realms of the Mamluks in Egypt (1250–1517) and the Safavids in Persia (1501– 1736). It is more difficult to give exact dates to the maritime empires of the West European states, since these had multiple points of origin and duration, but the Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires may all be said to have endured in the region of three hundred years. The lifespan of the Portuguese empire was closer to five hundred. Nor, it should be noted, do the histories of all these empires exhibit a uniform trajectory of rise, apogee, decline and fall. Empires could rise, decline and then rise again, only to collapse in response to some extreme shock.
The empires created in the twentieth century, by contrast, were all
Figure I.4 Approximate duration of selected early-modern and modern empires
of comparatively short duration. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922– 1991) lasted less than seventy years, a meagre record indeed, though one not yet equalled by the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949. The German Reich founded by Bismarck (1871–1918) lasted forty-seven years. Japan’s colonial empire, which can be dated from 1905, lasted just forty. Most ephemeral of all modern empires was the so-called Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by the end of 1944. Technically, the Third Reich lasted twelve years; as an empire in the true sense of the word it lasted barely half that time. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their lack of longevity, the twentieth-century empires proved to be exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction. Why was this? The answer lies in the unprecedented degrees of centralized power, economic control and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
The new empires of the twentieth century were not content with the somewhat haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterized the old – the messy mixtures of imperial and local law, the delegation of powers as well as status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the nineteenth-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense, they were more like ‘empire-states’ than empires in the old sense. The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than on merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state. It was entirely typical of the new generation of would-be emperors that Hitler could accuse the British of excessive softness in their treatment of the Indian nationalists. This helps to explain why the epicentres of the century’s great upheavals were so often located precisely on the peripheries of the new empire-states. It may also have been the reason that these empire-states, with their extreme aspirations, proved so much more ephemeral than the old empires they sought to supplant.
Figure I.5 The West and Asia: shares of world population
THE DESCENT OF THE WEST
The story of the twentieth century has sometimes been presented as a triumph of the West; the greater part of it has been called the ‘American Century’. The Second World War is often represented as the apogee of American power and virtue; the victory of the ‘Greatest Generation’. In the last years of the century, the end of the Cold War led Francis Fukuyama famously to proclaim ‘the end of history’ and the victory of the Western (if not Anglo-American) model of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet this seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East.
In 1900 the West really did rule the world. From the Bosphorus to the Bering Straits, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form or another of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, the French
Indo-China; the Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China. The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged. This Western dominance was remarkable in that over half the world’s population were Asians, while barely a fifth belonged to the dominant countries we have in mind when we speak of ‘the West’ (see Figure I.5).
What enabled the West to rule the East was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as its systematic application to both production and destruction. That was why, in 1900, the West produced more than half the world’s output, and the East barely a quarter. Western dominance was also due to the failure of the Asian empires to modernize their economic, legal and military systems, to say nothing of the relative stagnation of Oriental intellectual life. Democracy, liberty, equality and, indeed, race: all of these concepts originated in the West. So did nearly all of the significant scientific breakthroughs from Newton to Einstein. Historians influenced by Asian nationalism have very often made the mistake of assuming that the backwardness of Eastern societies in around 1900 was the consequence of imperial ‘exploitation’. This is in large measure an illusion; rather, it was the decadence of Eastern empires that made European domination possible.
It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated that the true narrative arc of the twentieth century reveals itself. This was not ‘the triumph of the West’, but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the descent of the West. Gradually, beginning in Japan, Asian societies modernized themselves or were modernized by European rule. As this happened, the gap between European and Asian incomes began to narrow. And with that narrowing, the relative decline of the West became unstoppable. This was nothing less than the reorientation of the world, redressing a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500. No historian of the twentieth century can afford to overlook this huge – and ongoing – secular shift.
If the Orient had simply ‘occidentalized’ itself, of course, we might still salvage the idea of an ultimate Western triumph. Yet no Asian country – not even Japan in the Meiji era – transformed itself into a replica of a European nation state. On the contrary, most Asian nationalists insisted that their countries must modernize à la carte, embracing only those aspects of the Western model that suited their purposes, and retaining important components of their traditional cultures. This was hardly surprising. Much of what they saw of Western culture – in its imperialist incarnation – did not invite imitation. The crucial point, of course, is that the reorientation of the world could not have been, and was not, achieved without conflict. For the Western powers had no desire to relinquish their mastery over Asia’s peoples and resources. Even when they were comprehensively beaten by Japanese forces in 1942, the Europeans and Americans alike fought back with the aim of restoring the old Western dominance, though with distinctly mixed results. In many ways, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the last European empire in Asia could be said to have fallen. In that sense it seems justifiable to interpret the twentieth century not as the triumph but as the descent of the West, with the Second World War as the decisive turning point. For the death throes of the Occident’s empire in the Orient were as bloody as anything that happened in Central and Eastern Europe, not least because of the extreme reactions against Western models of development that they inspired in countries such as Japan, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. It was a descent, in the sense that the West could never again wield the power it had enjoyed in 1900. It was also a descent, however, in that much of what arose in the East to challenge that power was recognizably descended from Western ideas and institutions, albeit through a process of cultural miscegenation.
THE FIFTY YEARS WAR
The potential instability of assimilation and integration; the insidious spread of the meme that identifies some human beings as aliens; the combustible character of ethnically mixed borderlands; the chronic volatility of mid-twentieth-century economic life; the bitter struggles between old multi-ethnic empires and short-lived empire-states; the convulsions that marked the decline of Western dominance – these, then, are the principal themes that will be explored and elaborated on below.
At the centre of the story, as may already be clear, are the events we know as the Second World War. But only as I tried to write an adequate sequel to my earlier book about the First World War did I come to appreciate just how un-illuminating it would be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to 1945 – yet another book focused on the now familiar collisions of armies, navies and air forces. Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple regional conflicts? After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the underdog more in word than deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe. In 1941, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans. All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 1931; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable. Meanwhile, civil wars raged before, during and after these interstate wars, notably in China, Spain, the Balkans, the Ukraine and Poland. And no sooner had this supposedly homogeneous Second World War ended, than a new wave of violence swept the Middle East and Asia, which historians refer to somewhat euphemistically as decolonization. Civil wars and partitions scarred India, Indo-China, China and Korea; in the last case, internecine war escalated into interstate war with the interventions of an American-led coalition and Communist China. Thereafter the two superpowers made war by proxy. The theatres of global conflict changed, from Central and Eastern Europe and Manchuria-Korea to Latin America, Indo-China and sub-Saharan Africa.
It might therefore be said that the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the crescendo of an entire century of organized violence – a global Hundred Years War. Even to speak of ‘a second Thirty Years War’ is to understate the scale of the upheaval, for in truth the era of truly global conflict began ten years before 1914 and ended eight years after 1945. Nor will Hobsbawm’s attractive idea of a ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1991 quite do. There were discontinuities just as important as that of 1989 – perhaps more so – in 1979. On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet empire saw the revival of ethnic conflicts that had been dormant during the Cold War, not least in the Balkans – a resumption rather than the end of history. In the end, I have elected to locate the war of the world between two dates: 1904, when the Japanese struck the first effective blow against European dominance of the Orient; and 1953, when the end of the Korean War drew a line through the Korean peninsula, matching the Iron Curtain that had already been drawn through Central Europe. But what followed this Fifty Years War was not a ‘long peace’ but what I have called the Third World’s War.
Historians always yearn for closure, for a date when their narratives can end. But in writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the war of the world described here can genuinely be regarded as over even now. Rather like Wells’s science-fiction War of the Worlds, which has been reincarnated as an artefact of popular culture at more or less regular intervals,* the War of the World chronicled here stubbornly refuses to die. As long, it seems, as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men – as lo
ng as we dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste – this war will recur, defying the frontiers of chronology.
PART I
The Great Train Crash
1
Empires and Races
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!
John Maynard Keynes
Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the two last decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, throughout Europe, there rose a kindling fever… people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street; one had faith and was sceptical… one dreamt of ancient castles and shady avenues… but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills… Some [people] hurl[ed] themselves… upon the new, as yet untrodden century, while others were having a last fling in the old one.
Robert Musil
9/11/01
The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed ‘at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages’:
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 5