Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (5 page)

Hughes had funded an entire political career on being an enthusiastic promoter of the militia. During the Boer War, when his offer to raise a volunteer force was rejected by the British, he had invented a job for himself with the railway line of communications forces there. The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, tried beyond endurance by Hughes’s bumptious and loudly stated conviction of his
own inestimable military worth (especially compared to the plodding and limited intellects of mere professional soldiers), eventually sent Hughes home, but that rebuff simply confirmed Hughes in his lifelong belief that the only thing wrong with the British empire was the fact that it was run by the English. It was, nevertheless, the best game in town for a militarist, and in 1913 Hughes told an audience in Napanee, Ontario, why Canada needed a strong militia and an unconditional commitment to take part in the wars of the empire:

In 1913 an unprecedented three-quarters of the 74,000 men enrolled in Canadian militia regiments actually received a couple of weeks’ training in camp—and Sam Hughes (who had recently promoted himself to major-general) was not in the least ambivalent about the fact that they would almost certainly be sent to fight overseas if war came. He delighted in sub-Nietzschean formulas that exalted mass action and war: “The old Saxon days have returned,” he was wont to exult, “when the whole nation must be armed.” And his audiences lapped it up; English Canada was ready to “fight the good fight.” Like the hymn, however, that was an English, Protestant view of things—and the larger forces in the world were moving strongly against England.

M
OST OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE LIVES WERE CHANGED OR ENDED BY
what we now call the First World War believed they were taking part in a unique event of great moral importance, and the name we subsequently gave it strengthens that impression. Indeed, they were soon calling it “the war to end all wars.” But the First World War was not an unusual political event, nor did it have any moral significance. It was just another turn in the cycle of “world wars” that stretched back to the beginning of the modern international system in seventeenth-century Europe. The list of principal players had changed over the centuries, but the basic rules of the alliance game had not.

During the 1400s and 1500s, powerful centralized governments began to extend their control over large parts of Europe. At the same time, rising wealth and better communications made it easier for large armies to operate far from home. Local wars had been constant in medieval Europe, but now a new pattern was superimposed on the old: the entire continent was transformed into a unified political and military arena.

Governments have always sought allies in their quarrels—it is an obvious way of increasing your own side’s power—but they could now make useful alliances with distant states. The ideal allies were countries
that also had a quarrel with your own enemy, but it was almost as good if they had a quarrel with one of your enemy’s allies. So gradually, all the local rivalries coalesced into an interlocking political and strategic system that incorporated every great power in Europe—which soon came to mean, in practice, every great power in the world, since by the seventeenth century Europe already effectively dominated the entire globe. The modern international system was born, and in 1618 it produced the first “world war”: the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).

If you find the phrase jarring in this context, it’s because the images we normally associate with a “world war” are trenches, tanks, bomber fleets and nuclear explosions. Those are the things that make the world wars of the twentieth century different
technologically
. But as a
political
phenomenon such wars have a much longer history. In political terms, a world war is a war in which every recognized great power of the time is simultaneously involved, and in that very important sense the Thirty Years’ War was indeed the first world war. By the 1630s Swedish troops were fighting Spaniards in the centre of Germany, and Catholic France was allied to Muslim Turkey.

The alliances that organized the great powers into a system were generally governed by the principle known as the “balance of power,” a dynamic process in which coalitions were created against whichever state was seen as the most dangerous (the most powerful, or the most rapidly growing) in the system. In the early centuries of the system, alliances
often had no formal existence in peacetime, although most states had a clear idea of whom they would be allied to when the next war came. But the absence of formal alliance structures meant that the “world wars” generally got off to a ragged start, with the various great powers joining in over a period of a number of years. Indeed, in the Thirty Years’ War, there was no single year when
all
the European powers were involved, although all of them were active in the war for substantial periods of time.

In the next three world wars, the aspirant superpower was France, which had become by far the richest and most populous of the European states. The Thirty Years’ War was followed at intervals of about half a century by the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13); the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); and finally by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). France was ultimately thwarted by alliances between all the states it threatened to dominate, but the game did not stop; after 1815 Britain emerged as the dominant power in the system. As an island country with no significant possessions on the European continent, Britain was considerably less threatening to the other great powers, but eventually, inevitably, a new challenger emerged: Germany. The result was the fifth world war—or, as it is more familiarly known, the First World War.

None of these transient superpowers and would-be superpowers was out to conquer the world, or even to rule all of Europe. They usually had specific, limited territorial goals, plus a general desire to become so powerful that they would be invulnerable to any challenge. But invulnerability for one state meant an unacceptable degree of vulnerability for everybody else in the game, so the alliance-forming process never lacked fuel. Nor were the world wars necessarily fought all over the world (though most of them affected several continents). The key criterion is simply that all the great powers are involved. And that being the case, world wars are unlike wars between two individual countries in the sense that they are not really about anything in particular. They are about everything in general.

As soon as continent-spanning alliances became the European norm, the possibility existed for wars in which there would be a general settlement
of accounts. In theory, all the members of the winning alliance would achieve their particular national objectives, while all the members of the losing alliance would have to grant the victors’ demands. It was never quite that simple in practice, but these wars invariably brought about a general reshuffle of the cards—and even in the long intervals of relative peace, the next general war became the implicit focus of the great-power competition. International politics became and remained a zero-sum game in which any gain in power by one state is automatically a loss for all the others in the system. As to why these “world wars” recurred with an interval of about half a century—that had to do, curiously enough, with the peace treaties.

Once upon a time, schools taught European history as a succession of peace treaties at which everything was settled: the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the Treaty of Paris (1763), the Congress of Vienna (1815), and so on. Fashions in teaching history have changed now, but as far as the causes of world wars are concerned, the old-fashioned history teachers were right—peace treaties did matter. They were the indisputable record of what territories the victorious side had won and what the defeated alliance had lost. Equally important, they were an implicit statement of each state’s power, and therefore its position in the international pecking order. However, there was always the prospect of a rematch.

At the end of each world war the relative rank of the great powers, together with all the borders that depended on that, were defined and frozen. But afterward, as the years passed, some countries would grow more quickly than others, and some would change sides. At first the winners of the most recent world war would still be powerful enough to enforce the peace treaty, but gradually the chance would grow for another roll of the dice. The interval of around fifty years between world wars was simply the average time it took for enough changes to take place that the most recent peace treaty was no longer enforceable.

By then, some countries would reckon that their strength entitled them to more status, influence and territory than they were allocated in the last treaty, and others no longer had the strength needed to defend their gains under that treaty. The international system would become increasingly unstable, and at that point it took a deliberate decision by only one country to attack a neighbour, or even just a bluff that misfired, to start the slide into another general war. It would end in another treaty that readjusted everybody’s “prestige” (in plain English, the ability to frighten their rivals) and changed a good many borders.

This system was well understood and generally accepted by educated Europeans down to the early nineteenth century. They lived, as Walpole said in 1745, amid “the fluctuations of perpetual contest.” Yet by 1914 almost everybody had forgotten how the system worked. There had not been another world war on schedule in the mid-nineteenth century, so they saw themselves as the heirs of the “long peace” that had lasted, by then, just one year short of a century.

History does not run on rails. The mid-nineteenth-century world war almost happened several times, but it never quite got going. Instead, there was a series of smaller wars in which the great powers fought each other not all at once, but in rotation: Britain, France and Turkey against Russia in 1854, France and Italy against Austria in 1859, Austria against Germany in 1866, and Germany against France in 1870. They were quite big wars, but mostly quite short—which may partly explain why
they didn’t expand into a general war: there just wasn’t enough time. It may also have helped that Britain was so powerful compared to all the others (at mid-century half the industrial capacity of the entire world was in the United Kingdom), and so safe from its rivals because of its complete domination of the seas, that it simply didn’t feel the need to become involved in most of these wars. Whatever their outcomes, Britain would remain the undisputed superpower.

This series of short European wars, a string of firecrackers rather than a single great explosion, nevertheless had the cumulative political effect of a world war. It was in these wars that the Austrian empire ceased to be a power of the first rank, and the newly united German empire became one. Italy emerged as a power (albeit a minor one), and France dropped down a peg. Various territories changed hands: Venetia, Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Romania, among others. Political realities having been adjusted to conform to the actual strength of the various great powers, stability then returned to the system for around another half century. But not forever, of course.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Germany grew very fast, Russia grew even faster (although from a lower starting point) and British power went into relative decline. By the beginning of the twentieth century, world war was in the air again, and the alliances that would fight it were solidifying fast. Between 1898 and 1914, a crisis that brought Europe to the brink occurred almost every other year.

There is a grand old tradition, when writing about the outbreak of the First World War, to start with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a nineteen-year-old Serbian called Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in June 1914, and follow the escalating diplomatic
crisis of the following month in simulated astonishment at how such a huge event could have grown from such a little cause. The writer can then, according to taste, castigate the statesmen and generals of the time impartially for letting this needless calamity happen, or try to fasten the blame on some specific player (usually Germany, if you’re writing in English or French) who allegedly
wanted
the war and made it happen. People want a big disaster to have a big cause and a recognizable villain. But if you really want to understand how such a great war grew out of such petty events, you would do better to consider the Power Law.