by Ian Morris
Figure 5.2. Dark satanic mills: industrial output per person in five major economies, 1750–1913 (Britain’s output in 1900 is treated as 100 points)
In purely economic terms, this was in fact good for Britain, because as the world industrialized, the pie got bigger. Fourteen percent of the world’s manufacturing and trade in 1913 added up to a lot more than 23 percent in 1870. Further, Britain was moving up the value chain. It had shifted from agriculture toward more profitable industries after the 1780s, and in the 1870s it shifted again, abandoning investment in industry for greater profits from services (particularly banking, shipping, insurance, and foreign loans). Britain’s GDP more than doubled between 1870 and 1913, and with all this extra wealth Britain (and other industrializing nations) could afford to expand its open-access order aggressively. Germany led the way, introducing health insurance and old-age pensions for workers in the 1880s, and by 1913 most industrialized nations had followed. Free primary education, universal male suffrage, and eventually votes for women became the norm.
Strategically, though, the economic triumph was a disaster for Britain, because its strategy, much like the strategies of the ancient empires seventeen centuries earlier, had overshot its culminating point. The United States’ economy outgrew Britain’s in 1872, and in 1901 so did Germany’s (Figure 5.3). Every newly wealthy government now built a modern fleet to project its power and prestige. Britain stayed in front, more than quadrupling the size and firepower of its navy between 1880 and 1914, but its share of global gunnery nonetheless declined (Figure 5.4). The globocop could take on any plausible combination of enemies but could no longer intimidate everyone at once.
Figure 5.3. The rise of the rest: the size of five major industrial economies, 1820–1913
Figure 5.4. Unhappy lot: the decline of the globocop’s naval power relative to Germany, Japan, and the United States, 1880–1914
If Britain was the world’s policeman, we might think of the new industrial giants as being rather like urban gangs. The globocop, like any cop, had to decide whether to confront these rivals, cut deals with them, or do some combination of the two. Britain could wage trade wars on its rivals, wage shooting wars on them, or make concessions. The first two options threatened to ruin the free trade that made Britain rich; the third, to strengthen the rivals so much that Britain would no longer be able to play globocop.
Matters came to a head first with the United States. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine had in theory banned European meddling in American waters, but in the 1860s the prospect of the Royal Navy intervening in the Civil War remained Abraham Lincoln’s worst nightmare. By the 1890s, though, it was clear to all that Britain was no longer strong enough to project power into the western Atlantic while also meeting its other obligations. Facing facts, London initiated a “great rapprochement” with Washington. The globocop effectively took on a deputy, giving it its own beat.
Britain retreated even further in eastern waters. Japan was the only non-Western country that had succeeded in responding to the European onslaught by industrializing itself, and in the 1890s it was without doubt the greatest power in northeast Asia. Its fleet was not yet one of the world’s top half-dozen, but given the distance separating Britain from the western Pacific, London concluded in 1902 that the only way to maintain some influence on the far side of the globe was a formal naval agreement, the first in Britain’s history, with Japan.
Exactly a hundred years later, the U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld would tell journalists, “There are known unknowns, that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know; but there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” So long as the nineteenth century had a single, stable globocop, strategic problems were mostly known unknowns. When the Russians threatened Constantinople in 1853, or the Indians mutinied in 1857, or the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, they did not know what the globocop would do to protect the world-system, but they did know it would do something. By the 1870s, however, unknown unknowns were multiplying. It became harder to predict whether the globocop would do anything at all. Uncertainty increased, and few could foresee the consequences of their actions. British strategists knew this, but given the grim alternatives, they kept taking on deputies. Their next deal, an entente cordiale agreed on in 1904, entrusted the Mediterranean to France so that Britain could concentrate on the biggest unknown unknown of all: Germany.
What made Germany so unknowable was its geography. In the same year that Britain cut its deal with France, Halford Mackinder—geographer, explorer, and the first director of the London School of Economics—gave an extraordinary public lecture. Twentieth-century history, he announced, would be driven by the balance between three vast regions. At the center of the story was what he called the heartland—“the pivot region of the world’s politics, that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads” (Figure 5.5).
Figure 5.5. Mackinder’s map: the heartland, inner rim, and outer rim
Until the fifteenth century, Mackinder explained, raiders from the steppe heartland had dominated the rich civilizations of China, India, the Middle East, and Europe, which he called the inner rim. Beyond this inner rim, he also identified an outer rim, which counted for little—until, after 1500, European ships drew this huge region together. By the eighteenth century, outer-rim powers were projecting force into the inner rim, contesting the heartland’s control of it, and in the nineteenth the outer rim’s strength was so great that it penetrated into the heartland itself (British troops were marching into Tibet even as Mackinder delivered his lecture). Control of the outer rim’s seas delivered domination of both the inner rim and the heartland—and therefore the world.
British politicians did not like sharing the outer rim with the United States, Japan, and France, but they gambled that they could strike deals with like-minded men who faced outer-rim problems much like Britain’s own. Germany, though, was a different matter. It belonged to the inner rim, which gave it direct access to the heartland. Seen from London, a strong, united, industrialized Germany looked like the kind of place that might turn the heartland’s resources against the outer rim. “If Germany were to ally herself with Russia,” Mackinder worried, it “would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight.”
Seen from St. Petersburg, however, the other side of the same coin seemed more urgent—the danger that Germany might get the upper hand against France and Britain and then turn the outer rim’s resources against the heartland. The real risk was not of Germany’s allying with Russia; it was of Germany’s conquering Russia. Napoleon had tried this, but reaching all the way from the outer rim to Moscow had been too much for him. Germany, however, might find the reach from the inner rim more manageable.
Politicians in Berlin saw a third dimension. To them, the big danger was not that Germany would exploit the outer rim or the heartland; it was that the outer rim and the heartland would combine to crush Germany between them, which had almost happened several times since the eighteenth century. That, German leaders concluded, had to be prevented at all costs, and this simple strategic fact largely explains twentieth-century Germany’s tragic history.
The three visions of where Germany fit into the world pointed toward very different ways of arranging European politics, but initially the Germans had things their own way. They owed much of this success to Otto von Bismarck, arguably the least scrupulous but most clear-sighted diplomat of the nineteenth century. Bismarck saw that Germans needed to be violent in the 1860s. Short, sharp wars against Denmark, Austria, and France turned the muddle of weak German principalities into the strongest national state in the inner rim. But having won these wars, Bismarck saw that in the 1870s Germans needed to renounce violence. The best way to escape being squeezed between the heartland and the outer rim was to keep everyone else off balance, which meant making and breaking alliances in east
ern and central Europe, placating Britain, and isolating France.
Bismarck kept all these balls in the air into the 1880s, but the proliferation of unknown unknowns as Britain’s position deteriorated made such subtle juggling increasingly difficult. In 1890 a young new kaiser fired his aged chancellor and began wondering—as did heads of state everywhere—whether force might not, after all, be the best solution to the problems his nation faced in this uncertain world. He ordered his generals to plan preemptive wars, just in case, and German politicians played on the risk of war to distract voters’ attention from the class conflicts at home caused by rapid industrialization. Bosses and workers might hate each other, but so long as both hated foreigners more, all might yet be well.
Germany’s leaders found themselves taking chances that would have seemed insane in Bismarck’s day, because the alternatives looked worse. Grabbing African colonies and building battleships were bound to provoke Britain, but not grabbing and building appeared to be the path to encirclement. At best, that might mean Germany’s rivals could shut it out of overseas markets; at worst, it might mean war on two fronts. Germany had to do everything it could to break the circle, and yet everything it did just seemed to push its enemies closer together. With unknown unknowns multiplying and rumors of war weighing on all minds, continental powers bought more weapons, conscripted more of their young men, and kept them under arms longer—even though that threatened to turn the rumors into reality.
By 1912 the kaiser and his advisers felt that drastic measures were the only options left. Sometimes they talked about forging a United States of Europe, dominated of course by Germany; at other times, as a Viennese newspaper put it on Christmas Day 1913, they envisioned “a central European customs union that the western states would sooner or later join, like it or not. This would create an economic union that would be equal, or perhaps even superior, to America.” In London or Washington, this sounded like fighting talk.
None of this made war inevitable in 1914. Franz Ferdinand could easily have survived June 28; calmer heads could easily have prevailed in the weeks that followed. Most people, in fact, thought calmer heads had prevailed: investors in the bond markets showed little anxiety until late July, and politicians and generals went ahead with their summer vacations. With just slightly better luck, the abiding memory of 1914 would have been its fine weather, not its killing fields.
But what would have happened then? Avoiding war in 1914 would not have revived the globocop, because the continuing spread of industrial revolutions around the world—caused by the globocop’s success—would have made its position steadily less tenable. Unknown unknowns would have kept on multiplying. New crises would have followed the crisis of 1914, just as the Balkan crisis of 1914 had itself followed Moroccan crises in 1905 and 1911 and another Balkan crisis in 1912–13. Had every diplomat in twentieth-century Europe been a Bismarck born again, perhaps they could have carried on defusing emergencies indefinitely, but this was the real world, and its diplomats were, on average, no better and no worse than those of earlier ages. Every crisis was in effect a roll of the dice, and sooner or later—if not in the 1910s, then surely in the 1920s—some king or minister was going to conclude that war was, after all, the least bad solution to whatever problems were pressing on him.
And so, a month after Princip shot Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, banking on the kaiser’s assurance that he had “considered the question of Russian intervention and accepted the risk of a general war.” After all, the German chancellor mused, the alternative was “self-castration.” A week later most of Europe was on the march. There was no slithering over brinks, no planets spinning from their orbits; it was just a world in which the globocop had lost its grip.
The Storm Breaks
“The general aim of the war,” said a document drafted for the German chancellor a month into the fighting, “is security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.” To achieve that, “France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time [and] Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany’s eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.” Annexations would follow in Belgium and France, former Russian provinces would become German satellites, and British goods would be shut out of French markets. The goal was a counterproductive war, breaking the larger alliance that encircled Germany and dealing the globocop a terrible—perhaps fatal—blow.
Whether Germany went to war with this plan in mind or only formulated it in reaction to the terrible casualties of the first few weeks of fighting remains unclear, but either way the Germans were taking gigantic, terrifying risks. Bismarck’s worst-case scenario came to pass in 1914, exposing Germany to the full weight of the heartland and the outer rim, and the German General Staff concluded that their one hope was to exploit their central position and industrial organization to knock France out of the war before Russia could mobilize.
Pulling off an administrative masterstroke, German bureaucrats commandeered eight thousand trains and rushed 1.6 million men and half a million horses to the western frontier. From there they swept through neutral Belgium, marching and fighting without rest. By September 7, the vanguard was across the Marne River, just twenty miles from Paris. On the map, it looked as if the war were almost won, with the French army being enveloped and forced away from its capital, but Helmuth von Moltke, the German chief of staff, was about to discover how modern warfare really worked. His twentieth-century Leviathan had called up a million-man army, which was now spread across a hundred miles, but he only had nineteenth-century ways of communicating with it. Radios were rare and unreliable, telephones were worse, and there were virtually no spotter planes.
Moltke had no idea what was actually happening in September 1914. Reports took days to reach him. One would say the French were collapsing; the next, that they were counterattacking. With no other way to find out what was going on, Moltke put a staff officer into a car and sent him to the front. “If the pessimistic [Lieutenant Colonel] Hentsch had crashed into a tree … somewhere on his journey of 8 September,” another German officer later lamented, “or if he had been shot by a French straggler, we would have had a ceasefire two weeks later and thereafter would have received a peace in which we could have asked for everything.” But Hentsch did reach the front and, horrified by the risks the men on the ground were taking, prevailed on them to order a retreat.
Despite a century of hindsight, we are no better placed today than Moltke was in 1914 to know whether Hentsch snatched defeat from the jaws of victory or saved the Germans from catastrophe. But to men who thought triumph was within their grasp, the decision to retreat was devastating. It came “like a bolt of thunder,” said the commander of the 133rd Reserve Infantry Regiment. “I saw many men cry, the tears rolled down their cheeks; others simply expressed amazement.” Moltke had a nervous breakdown.
Germany’s great gamble had not paid off, and it had no Plan B. However, the alliance opposing it was little better-off. Its own Plan A had been, just as the Germans expected, to crush Germany between simultaneous attacks from France and Russia, but by October the Russians had suffered a string of defeats, and the French were lucky still to be in the war. The Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance did have a Plan B, in which Britain’s huge fleet would bottle up Germany’s battleships in their harbors, impose a naval blockade, and snap up the enemy’s overseas colonies. With the exception of East Africa, where an extraordinary German colonel was still waging guerrilla war when hostilities in Europe had ended, all this went smoothly, but unfortunately Plan B could only produce victory very slowly, by starving Germany’s people and industry.
Churchill, in charge at the Admiralty, pushed for a more decisive use of naval supremacy. The admirals had rejected an invasion of northern Germany as too risky, but Churchill insisted that amphibious operations could instead split open the Central Powers’ soft underbelly. A landing at Salonica (ig
noring the detail that Greece was neutral) got nowhere; another in Iraq led to a humiliating surrender; and a third, at Gallipoli, was such a disaster that it almost ended Churchill’s career. By 1915, even the most determined navalists recognized that the war would be won or lost on land.
But how to do that? There is a saying that generals always refight the last war, but initially Europe’s military men were even further behind the times. The Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars had shown that armies could not survive in the open against modern firepower, and as long ago as the 1860s the last stages of the American Civil War had revealed that troops who dug trenches were almost immovable. Yet in 1914, the armies massed their men, unfurled their flags, and charged, much as they had in Napoleon’s day. Offensive à outrance was their motto: “Attack to excess.”
Just three weeks into the war, a young French lieutenant named Charles de Gaulle was shot leading one such charge in Belgium. “The enemy’s fire was precise and concentrated,” he later wrote. “Second by second the hail of bullets and the thunder of shells grew stronger. Those who survived lay flat on the ground, amid the screaming wounded and the humble corpses. With affected calm, the officers let themselves be killed standing upright … but all to no purpose. In an instant it had become clear that not all the courage in the world could withstand this fire.” Ernst Jünger, who served Germany with much the same reckless bravery that de Gaulle displayed for France, coined the perfect label for this as the title of his war memoirs (to my mind, the finest ever written): Storm of Steel.
After the war, it became a commonplace that the de Gaulles and Jungers had been “lions led by donkeys”—heroes sent to their deaths by champagne-swilling buffoons who knew little and cared less about the horrors at the front. In reality, though, leaders learned from their mistakes just as quickly as those of earlier ages and rapidly modified their methods. In France, it was obvious by October 1914 that with millions of men crammed into a three-hundred-mile front, continuous lines of trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea were perfectly possible, and once both sides had dug trenches, the overriding question became how to break through them.