As the necessary and important reflections on the Great War are published throughout this year, historians have tried to grapple with the lessons of what American historian Fritz Stern memorably called “the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.” The challenges of making sense of such a complex conflict are immense ‒ 20 years ago, one estimate placed the number of books which examined the origins of the war at 25,000 ‒ and mastery of the material obviously exceeds the grasp of any single writer. Even so, re-evaluations of the First World War ‒ particularly those which seek to understand how it came to happen, rather than trying to explain why, and who was to blame ‒ have emphasized striking parallels between the politics and tensions of pre-war Europe with those of our new century.
Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers, a compelling account of how regional issues like ‘The Albanian Question’ or the ‘Bulgarian Loan’ fed into and gave momentum to the wider conflict, writes that many of the most illuminating revisionist histories have argued that “far from being inevitable, this war was in fact ‘improbable’ ‒ at least until it actually happened.” In a similar vein, the historian Margaret MacMillan pointed out last year, in an essay for the Brookings Institution, that one reason why the war fascinates us is that “we still cannot agree on why it happened.” She notes that in 1915 “a bitter joke made the rounds: ‘Have you seen today’s headline? ‘Archduke Found Alive: War a Mistake.’” A quip that touches on what she calls “the most dispiriting explanation of all ‒ that the war was simply a blunder that could have been avoided.”
MacMillan writes that one clear lesson from the Great War is that “Globalization can have the paradoxical effect of fostering intense localism and nativism, frightening people into taking refuge in small like-minded groups [and uniting] fanatics who will stop at nothing in their quest for the perfect society.” Recent history, especially since theend of the Cold War, is filled with depressing proofs of this assertion. It is, in fact, sobering to the point of shame to consider how little our capacity for handling international crises has evolved during the last century.
Today we remain reluctant to acknowledge that ideas like the Responsibility to Protect doctrine ‒ designed to prevent the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda from recurring ‒ have proved toothless, especially in the face of dictators like President Assad, whose determined slaughter of his own citizens now seems unstoppable. The twentieth century’s first genocide, of the Armenians, took place in full view of international observers and the carnage in the Congo war ‒ which claimed up to five million lives ‒ has shown that the international community remains almost as powerless to deal with similar situations today.
When wars are forgotten, their victims are dishonoured. Much has been written about the death of the soldiers who fought so bravely in the trenches of the Great War and their bravery remains an inspiration to all their countrymen and allies. But hardly any attention is paid to the victims of more recent wars, such as the Ugandans whose children were kidnapped by the warlord Joseph Kony. Last week the Guardian published an account of a social scientist who is gathering data on killings carried out by the Lord’s Resistance Army in the early 1990s. When the researcher visits the village of Kitgum, to collect details of a massacre, a villager tells him “There’s no one to listen to our story. It’s good you have come.” The story notes that there are believed to be more than 100 unmarked mass graves in the vicinity of this village alone.
The anniversary of the last century’s first calamity should remind us of how little progress we have made towards peacekeeping in a globalized world. And as historians unravel the tangled motives of the half-dozen countries that transformed what looked like a limited, temporary conflict into one that mobilized 65 million men, killed 20 million and toppled three empires, we should remember that the world we live in is no less tumultuous.
