The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 Read Free Page B

Germany looked apprehensively eastwards. Russia was developing fast and rearming; if Germany did not fight Russia soon it might never be able to. Britain had much to gain from a continuation of the peace but it feared, as it had always done, a single power dominating the continent. Each power feared others but also its own people. Socialist ideas had spread through Europe and unions and socialist parties were challenging the power of the old ruling classes. Was this a harbinger of violent revolution, as many thought? Ethnic nationalism as well was a disruptive force, for Austria-Hungary but also in Russia and in Britain where the Irish question was more of a concern to the government in the first months of 1914 than foreign affairs. Could war be a way of bridging divisions at home, uniting the public in a great wave of patriotism?
    Finally, and this is true of our own times as well, we should never underestimate the part played in human affairs by mistakes, muddle, or simply poor timing. The complex and inefficient nature of both the German and the Russian governments meant that the civilian leaders were not fully informed about military plans even when these had political implications. Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian archduke who was assassinated in Sarajevo, had long stood out against those who wanted war to solve Austria-Hungary’s problems. His death, ironically, removed the one man who might have been able to prevent his country from declaring war on Serbia and thus setting the whole chain reaction in motion. The assassination came at the start of the summer holiday period. As the crisis mounted, many statesmen, diplomats and military leaders had already left their capitals. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was bird watching; the French President and Prime Minister were on an extended trip to Russia and the Baltic for the last two weeks of July and frequently out of contact with Paris.
    Yet there is a danger in so concentrating on the factors pushing Europe towards war that we may neglect those pulling the other way, towards peace. The nineteenth century saw a proliferation of societies and associations for the outlawing of war and for the promotion of suchalternatives as arbitration for settling disputes between nations. Rich men such as Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel donated fortunes to promote international understanding. The world’s labour movements and socialist parties organised themselves into the Second International, which repeatedly passed motions against war and threatened to call a general strike should one break out.
    The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time of progress, in science, industry, and education, much of it centred on an increasingly prosperous and powerful Europe. Its peoples were linked to each other and to the world through speedier communications, trade, investment, migration, and the spread of official and unofficial empires. The globalisation of the world before 1914 has been matched only by our own times since the end of the Cold War. Surely, it was widely believed, this new interdependent world would build new international institutions and see the growing acceptance of universal standards of behaviour for nations. International relations were no longer seen, as they had been in the eighteenth century, as a game where if someone won someone else had to lose. Instead, all could win when peace was maintained. The increasing use of arbitration to settle disputes among nations, the frequent occasions when the great powers in Europe worked together to deal with, for example, crises in the decaying Ottoman Empire, the establishment of an international court of arbitration, all seemed to show that, step by step, the foundations were being laid for a new and more efficient way of managing the world’s affairs. War, it was hoped, would become obsolete. It was an inefficient way of settling disputes. Moreover, war was becoming too costly, both in terms of the drain on the