"Misrepresentation of a conflict"

I've written two posts recently taking issue with commentators who have criticised current Anglo-American foreign policy from their understanding of the peace settlement that concluded World War I. The commentators are, respectively, Simon Jenkins and Pat Buchanan. Jenkins is an urbane and civilised man whereas Buchanan is a demagogue, and I do not imply that they make the same argument or have the same interpretation of 20th-century history. But they do have this much in common: a conviction that the post-WWI settlement was punitive and destabilising. From this historical precedent, they infer that current Western foreign policy, by being indifferent to or uncomprehending of the injustices that others perceive in our conduct, is needlessly provocative. (A peculiarly repugnant popular term for this notion - as argued with indecency and indecent haste here by the author Chalmers Johnson, a fortnight after the destruction of the Twin Towers - is "blowback".)

I've argued that this view of WWI and its aftermath, while popular, is - even in its softer form as expounded by Jenkins - against the weight of recent scholarship in German and in English. I found by chance today, when looking for something else, coverage of this subject on the BBC History website. I'm bowled over by it.

I'd expected a site for a general readership would be an anodyne summary of dates and persons with some reference to current debates. In fact, that part of the site devoted to World Wars is excellent, and the section covering WWI is superb. I particularly direct you to two articles. The first is entitled "World War One: Misrepresentation of a Conflict" by Dan Todman. The misrepresentation Todman refers to is the picture of the war gained from popular historians such as the late Alan Clark and films such as Oh, What a Lovely War (or, more recently, Blackadder), which stress the futility of the war and the incompetence of the British generals. He notes:

The self-reinforcing power of these myths gives them tremendous power. Since the 1980s, a boom in carefully conducted archival investigation has done much to uncover the war’s complexity: how it was fought and won by the British army on the Western Front, how domestic support and dissent were encouraged and managed, and how the war was remembered.

Yet this academic research has had almost no impact on popular understanding. This should not be a cause for despair or disdain. Societies have always misrepresented the past in an attempt to understand the present.

The second article is entitled "The Origins of World War One" by Gary Sheffield. Even if you think you're not especially interested in the subject, I urge you to spend ten minutes reading this. It's a small masterpiece of concision about the event that dominated the twentieth century. Dr Sheffield wrote a fine book a few years ago (simultaneously with the article, I think) entitled Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities, 2001, which expounds his case in detail. (The book is especially strong on British military strategy; Sheffield was formerly Land Warfare Historian at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, and is now Professor of War Studies at Birmingham University.) Sheffield states that case in a brisk conclusion to the article:

Far from being fought over trivial issues, World War One must be seen in the context of an attempt by an aggressive, militarist state to establish hegemony over Europe, extinguishing democracy as a by-product. To argue that the world of 1919 was worse than that of 1914 is to miss the point. A world in which Imperial Germany had won World War One would have been even worse.

And, I might add, a world in which Imperial Germany had lost but suffered nugatory consequences would have been almost as destructive. As it turned out, the consequences were nothing like stringent enough.

It's my impression that even many who stand roughly where I do politically, on the Left and espousing militant anti-totalitarianism, do not necessarily hold this view. For example, one of the greatest socialist theorists of the last century, the American pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, whose works have influenced my political thinking more than any other modern writer, did not. In his outstanding political memoir Out of Step, 1987, Hook recalls (pp. 298-9) his grave error in initially opposing US entry in WWII. He changed his mind in 1940, but one of the reasons for his earlier anti-war stance was a conviction "that the causes of World War II were essentially the same as those of WWI" - which members of the Socialist Party had resisted as an imperialist war. In fact, the causes of WWII were essentially the same as those of WWI. Wilhelmine Germany was not Nazi Germany, and did not pursue genocidal aims (or at least not in Europe; Africa was a different matter). But in both cases, an aggressive, militarist and autocratic Germany sought domination of Europe and needed to be defeated rather than merely rebuffed. Hook came belatedly (rather like George Orwell) to the right position on WWII, having at first mistakenly believed that war would be a precursor to American fascism. But he never came to see that his fellow American Socialists, who had shown much courage in defending their position against mob violence and intimidation, had misunderstood WWI as well.

History of course does not follow neat schemes. How we interpret the appalling conflagration of WWI - in particular what it was about and how those issues were settled - does not necessarily tell us much of importance, if anything, about how Western statesmen 90 years later should deal with autocratic states such as Iran and semi-autocratic states such as Russia. But I'm not the one saying it does. It is critics of the Blairite stance in foreign affairs who are apparently turning to this supposed historical analogy; and they have it all wrong.

NOTE: One of these days, I shall write a proper appreciation of Sidney Hook. Hook's life closed at a historically fitting moment. Born in 1902, he lived just long enough to witness the collapse of the East European police states that had debased the name of socialism and which he had determinedly opposed. Only a matter of months before that he had engaged in one of his periodic controversies with an academic opponent less skilled in debate than he. The opponent in this case was the radical historian Howard Zinn, the feebleness of whose historical grasp I commented on at length in this post. In their exchange, Hook and Zinn debated "How Democratic Is America?"; Hook is not right in every respect (his distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is otiose), but you can forgive the occasional hyperbole for the ruthlessness of the demolition.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post I mistakenly identified Dr Gary Sheffield as a historian at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. His current post is Professor of War Studies in the Department of Modern History at Birmingham University; I have altered the post accordingly.