Such tensions are familiar to the historian. Today’s economic optimists celebrate the fact that ‘the earth is flat’, a level playing field where all countries can compete for world market share on equal terms. A hundred years ago, globalization was celebrated in not dissimilar ways as goods, capital and labour flowed freely from England to the ends of the earth. Yet mass migration in around 1900 was accompanied by increases in ethnic tension from Vladivostok to Višegrad, with ultimately explosive consequences. In 1914 the first age of globalization ended with a spectacular bang because of an act of terrorism by a radicalized Serb in a predominantly Muslim province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. War escalated because of the German violation of the neutrality of another multi-ethnic country, Belgium. In the mayhem of world war, an extreme anti-capitalist sect gained control of Russia and her empire, proceeding to betray its early promises of self-determination for that empire’s minorities. And in the succeeding decades, three diabolical dictators, Stalin, Hitler and Mao, rose to control vast tracts of the great Eurasian landmass that stretches from the English Channel to the China Sea. Their totalitarian regimes and pseudo-religious cults caused unquantifiable suffering and tens of millions of violent deaths, with the peoples who lived on the strategic borderlands between the empire-states suffering the most in relative terms. Could a similar fate befall the second age of globalization in which we live?
Today it is China not Japan that is the rising power in Asia. But it is not difficult to imagine a clash between East and West that would dwarf the Russo-Japanese War of a century ago. What if there were a setback to economic growth in China? Rather than risk popular protests against their monopoly on power (and the rampant corruption that goes with it) might the Chinese Communists be tempted to take refuge in patriotism? Just as Belgium was for Britain and Germany in 1914, so Taiwan could be the casus belli that sparks a conflict between China and the United States. The People’s Republic has always treated Taiwan as a renegade province and has repeatedly stated that any attempt by it to declare formal independence would warrant military intervention. Meanwhile, as I write, the possibility grows of renewed conflict in the Persian Gulf as Iran is referred to the UN Security Council on account of its suspected nuclear weapons programme. Israel struggles to extricate itself from the territory it occupied in 1967 and to establish a Palestinian state with which it can coexist; yet the Palestinians vote for Hamas, an organization committed to the destruction of Israel tout court. The hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East seems precarious, as Iraq stubbornly refuses to follow the neo-conservative script by becoming a peaceful and prosperous democracy; a descent into civil war still seems the more likely outcome. Galloping economic growth in Asia exerts increasing pressure on global energy supplies, increasing the leverage of the undemocratic regimes that sit on so much of the world’s oil and gas reserves and in creasing the likelihood of a new era of imperial scrambles for scarce raw materials. A scenario-builder who entirely dismissed the danger of a new War of the World – a new era of ethnic strife, economic volatility and imperial struggle – would be a Pangloss indeed.
In the fifty-second chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam? ‘Perhaps’, speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ‘the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.’ The idea was to amuse his readers, and perhaps to make fun of his old university. Yet today work is all but complete on the new Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford, which features, in addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, a prayer hall with a dome and minaret tower. That fulfilment of Gibbon’s unintended prophecy symbolizes perfectly the fundamental reorientation of the world which was the underlying trend of the twentieth century. The decline of the West has not taken the form that Oswald Spengler had in mind when he wrote Der Untergang des Abendlandes soon after the First World War. Rather it was precisely that reawakening of ‘the powers of the blood’ by the ‘new Caesars’ whom Spengler anticipated – and the assault they launched on ‘the rationalism of the Megalopolis’ – which accelerated the material, but perhaps more importantly the moral descent of the West.*
A hundred years ago, the West ruled the world. After a century of recurrent internecine conflict between the European empires, that is no longer the case. A hundred years ago, the frontier between West and East was located somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now it seems to run through every European city. That is not to say that conflict is inevitable along these new fault lines. But it is to say that, if the history of the twentieth century is any guide, then the fragile edifice of civilization can very quickly collapse even where different ethnic groups seem quite well integrated, sharing the same language, if not the same faith or the same genes. The twentieth century also demonstrated that economic volatility increases the likelihood of such a backlash – especially in the context of the new kind of welfare state that emerged in the first half of the century, with its high levels of redistributive give and take. For ethnic minorities are more likely to be viewed with greater hostility when times are hard or when income differentials are widening. Finally, it was not by chance that the worst killing fields of the mid-twentieth century were in places like Poland, the Ukraine, the Balkans and Manchuria; while extreme violence in the later twentieth century shifted to more widely dispersed locations, from Guatemala to Cambodia, from Angola to Bangladesh, from Bosnia to Rwanda and, most recently, the Darfur region of Sudan. Time and again it has been in the wake of the decline of empires, in contested borderlands or in power vacuums, that the opportunities have arisen for genocidal regimes and policies. Ethnic confluence, economic volatility and empires on the wane; such was and remains the fatal formula.
On the eve of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells had imagined a ‘War of the Worlds’ – a Martian invasion that devastated the earth. In the hundred years that followed, men proved that it was quite possible to wreak comparable havoc without the need for alien intervention. All they had to do was to identify this or that group of their fellow men as the aliens, and then kill them. They did so with varying degrees of ferocity in different places, at different times. But the common factors that link together the bloodiest events of the twentieth century should now be clearly apparent.
The War of the Worlds remains science fiction. The War of the World is, however, historical fact. Perhaps, like Wells’s story, ours will be ended abruptly by the intervention of microscopic organisms like the avian influenza virus, which could yet produce a worse mutation and pandemic than that of 1918. Until that happens, however, we remain our own worst enemies. We shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one – the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.
Appendix
The War of the World in Historical Perspective
In the introduction, I make the claim that ‘The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.’ It seems worth substantiating that assertion, which is by no means beyond dispute. To attempt to do so is to enter a realm of great statistical confusion. Estimates for death tolls in twentieth-century conflicts are unreliable enough. Those for earlier wars are worse. Dividing such figures by estimates for population only tends to widen the range of possible error.
There are conceptual as well as empirical problems. The notion of violent death – as opposed to natural death – may seem straightforward to a modern reader. Yet many of the millions of victims of war, genocide and other acts of organized violence were no
t directly killed by a weapon operated by another human being. They died in famines or epidemics that (it seems probable) would not otherwise have happened had it not been for antecedent acts of ‘direct’ violence. Many of the death tolls calculated by historians are therefore the products of subtraction sums: the population before a war or other violent event minus the population after it, where census figures or credible estimates are available. Clearly, however, figures obtained in this manner are bound to include some deaths by natural causes. Moreover, it is debatable how far even those deaths authentically due to war-induced starvation or disease should be regarded as equivalent to deaths due to weaponry. It is not always possible to say for sure whether or not such indirectly caused mortality was an intended consequence of the original acts of aggression. And what of the unborn? Sometimes historians calculate the net demographic impact of a particular event by estimating a counterfactual population, that is the population as it would have been if there had been no war. Yet here too there is a tendency to inflate the death toll, by counting among the victims ‘people’ who were never in fact born. It is clearly a dubious procedure to juxtapose figures calculated in this way with figures based on, say, the number of soldiers recorded by military authorities as killed in action. Matters are further confused when aggregate casualty figures – including men missing (but not dead), captured or wounded – are confused with figures for battlefield mortality. In some wars, being taken prisoner or wounded amounted to a death sentence; in others it was a reprieve from the much more dangerous business of combat. As medical science has advanced, so soldiers’ chances of surviving battlefield injury have improved. But there has been no such progressive trend in the way prisoners have been treated. Finally, there is the problem of disorganized violence. In times of war and revolution, opportunities are more plentiful for individual acts of murder than in times of peace and political order. Yet this kind of violence is generally treated as a separate phenomenon from organized violence, rather than just another form of ‘deadly quarrel’, in the phrase of L. F. Richardson, perhaps the most methodologically careful statistician of modern violence.
When expressing non-natural mortality in percentage terms in order to allow for variations in population size, the choice of denominator is also problematic. Is it a worthwhile exercise to express the estimated death tolls of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century great-power wars as percentages of estimates for world population, when none of these conflicts was strictly speaking a world war (with the possible exception of the Seven Years War)? Would it not be more worthwhile to have country populations as denominators, so that we may compare, say, the proportion of Germans killed by the Thirty Years War with the proportion killed by the Second World War? Here, too, there are difficulties, not the least of which is the changing character of the entity called Germany. The Holy Roman Empire was a very different thing from the Third Reich. A large proportion – perhaps as many as one in thirteen – of the men killed while fighting on the side of the Third Reich were not German citizens, but members of other nationalities that had been recruited or drafted into the Wehrmacht, the SS and other auxiliary formations. Should we therefore narrow the political or geographical unit down still further, and compare mortality rates in regions or cities? Perhaps, but to do so is to risk concluding that, say, the massacre of the population of a village in German South-West Africa during the Herero Uprising was a more violent act than the destruction of Warsaw during the Second World War, since the dead in the former accounted for a larger percentage of the population than the dead in the latter. Small denominators can produce large percentages, because it is on the whole easier to kill a hundred villagers than to kill a hundred thousand city-dwellers.
This, in turn, raises the question of destructive technology. Should we somehow adjust for the greater ‘bangs per buck’ of twentieth-century weaponry? Does it require a greater quantity of violence (though I remain unsure in which unit violence should be measured) to kill a hundred people with a machete than with a bomb? Finally, does intention matter? Is it worse to kill people out of racial or religious prejudice than to kill them in pursuit of a strategic objective? Should we allow for the fact that in some cases organized violence is asymmetrically perpetrated against defenceless civilians, while in others it is reciprocally inflicted by well-matched armies? To put it differently, is ‘genocide’ merely a term for a civil war in which only one side is armed? None of these questions is easily answered, as The War of the World makes clear.
There is no question that the twentieth century witnessed a mind-bogglingly large number of deaths by organized violence. Estimates for the total number, which can rest only on some heroic if not downright reckless assumptions, range from 167 million to 188 million. One survey of the available published death tolls concludes that one in every twenty-two deaths during the century was caused by the action of other human beings. But – as I seek to show in this book – lethal organized violence was highly concentrated in both space and time. Indeed, a distinctive feature of twentieth-century warfare noted in the introduction is precisely that it was much more intense (in terms of battle deaths per nation year) than warfare in previous centuries. So the interesting question is not really, ‘Why was the twentieth century more violent than the eighteenth or the nineteenth?’ but, ‘Why did extreme violence happen in Poland, Serbia and Cambodia more than in England, Ghana and Costa Rica?’; and ‘Why did so much more extreme violence happen between 1936 and 1945 than between 1976 and 1985?’ Altogether, the best available estimates suggest, somewhere in the region of 58 or 59 million people lost their lives as a result of the Second World War. That can be expressed as a percentage of the pre-war world population (2.6 per cent), though it should be borne in mind that many of those people who were living in 1938 died of natural causes by 1945 and some of the babies born after 1938 were killed in the war. Military and civilian death tolls varied widely from country to country in absolute and in relative terms, however. In absolute terms, as is well known, many more Soviet citizens died violently between 1939 and 1945 than people of other nationalities – perhaps as many as 25 million, if not more. This suggests that more than one in ten Soviet citizens was a victim of the war, though it might be more accurate to say that one in ten was a victim of totalitarianism between 1939 and 1945, given the number of lives lost to Stalin’s domestic policies.* In percentage terms Poland was the country hardest hit by the war. The Polish mortality rate (total military and civilian fatalities as a percentage of the pre-war population) amounted to just under 19 per cent, of whom a large proportion were Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust. Among other combatants, only Germany (including Austria) and Yugoslavia suffered mortality rates close to 10 per cent.† The next highest rates were for Hungary (8 per cent) and Romania (6 per cent). In no other country for which figures have been published did mortality rise above 3 per cent of the pre-war population, including a number of Central and East European countries, Czechoslovakia (3 per cent), Finland (2 per cent) and Bulgaria (0.3 per cent). For four of the principal combatants, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, total wartime mortality was less than 1 per cent of the pre-war population.‡ For the three West European countries, the First World War was, at least by this measure, a more costly conflict. Turkey was of course far worse affected by the First World War (some put the total mortality rate at 15 per cent, including the Armenian genocide), since it remained neutral during the Second. Note, too, that Japan’s mortality rate during the Second World War (2.9 per cent) was significantly lower than Germany’s, as was China’s (at most, 5 per cent). These differentials reflect two important features of the war. War itself was waged at a much higher human cost in Central and Eastern Europe than anywhere else. The Germans fought to kill. Soviet commanders were also wasteful of the lives of their men. This region also witnessed exceptionally systematic violence against civilians.
The incidence of violent death in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 was high, but other co
nflicts came close. Between 9 and 10 million men were killed in the First World War, with Serbia and Scotland suffering the highest mortality rates, though the mortality rate was also high in the campaigns between the Entente and the Ottoman Empire, where disease was worse and reserves fewer. Estimates vary widely for the number of deaths in China attributable to Mao’s policies, but they must certainly have run to several tens of millions. The total victims of Stalinism within the Soviet Union may have exceeded 20 million. Mortality rates in excess of 10 per cent have also been estimated for Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, as well as for the civil wars in Mexico (1910–20) and Equatorial Guinea (1972–79), and the Afghan War that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979. By one estimate, sixteen twentieth-century conflicts – wars, civil wars, genocides and sundry mass murders – cost more than one million lives each; a further six claimed between half a million and a million victims; and fourteen killed between a quarter and half a million people. In all, according to the Correlates of War Project, there were at least two hundred inter-state or civil wars between 1900 and 1990. Using slightly different criteria, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that there were over a hundred armed conflicts in the last decade of the century, of which more than twenty were still in progress in 1999.
It might be argued that there are precedents in human history for such high rates of lethal organized violence. First, it is clear from archaeological and anthropological studies that pre-historic and pre-modern tribal societies were very violent indeed. The percentage of male deaths due to warfare among the Amazonian Jivaro Indians is known to have been as high as 60 per cent within the recent past. Rates in excess of 20 per cent have been recorded for at least five other tribes.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 78