Europe's Last Summer Read Free Page A

mean by such words as "cause." There were causes—many of them—for Europe's Great Powers to be disposed to go to war with one another. There were other causes—immediate ones, with which this book is concerned—for them to have gone to war when and where and how they did.
    (iii) A Summer to Remember
To the man or woman in the streets of the Western world—someone who was alive in the vibrant early years of the twentieth century— nothing would have seemed further away than war. In those years men who dreamed of battlefield adventure had been hard pressed to find a war in which they could participate. In the year 1901, and in the thirteen years that followed, the peoples of western Europe and the English-speaking Americas were becoming consumers rather than warriors. They looked forward to more: more progress, more prosperity, morepeace. The United States at that time (commented an English observer) "sailed upon a summer sea," but so did Great Britain, France, and others. There had been no war among the Great Powers for nearly half a century, and the globalization of the world economy suggested that war had become a thing of the past. The culmination of those years in the hot, sun-drenched, gorgeoussummer of 1914, the most beautiful within living memory, was remembered by many Europeans as a kind of Eden.Stefan Zweig spoke for many when he wrote that he had rarely experienced a summer "more luxuriant, more beautiful, and, I am tempted to say, more summery."
Middle-and upper-class Britons in particular saw themselves as living in an idyllic world in which economic realities would keep Europe's Great Powers from waging war on one another. For those with a comfortable income, the world in their time was more free than it is today. According to the historianA. J. P. Taylor, "until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state." You could live anywhere you liked and as you liked. You could go to practically anywhere in the world without anyone's permission. For the most part, you needed no passports, and many had none. The French geographerAndre Siegfried traveled all around the world with no identification other than his visiting card: not even a business card, but a personal one.
John Maynard Keynes remembered it, with wonder, as an era without exchange controls or customs barriers. You could bring anything you liked into Britain or send anything out. You could take any amount of currency with you when you traveled, or send (or bring back) any amount of currency; your bank did not report it to the government, as it does today. And if you decided to invest any amount of money in almost any country abroad, there was nobody whose permission had to be asked, nor was permission needed to withdraw that investment and any profits it may have earned when you wanted to do so.
Even more than today, it was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods. An outstanding current study of the world as of 2000 tells us that there was more globalization before the 1914 war than there is now: "much of the final quarter of the twentieth century was spent merely recovering ground lost in the previous seventy-five years."
Economic and financial intermingling and interdependence were among the powerful trends that made it seem that warfare among the major European powers had become impractical—and, indeed, obsolete.
One could easily feel safe in that world. Americans felt it at least as much if not more than Europeans. The historian and diplomat George Kennan remembers that before the 1914 war Americans felt a sense of security "such as I suppose no people had ever had since the days of the Roman Empire." They felt little need for government. Until 1913, when an appropriate amendment to the Constitution was ratified, the Congress was deemed to lack even the power to enact taxes on income.
Stefan Zweig, the Austrian-Jewish author, remembering those