THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (9 page)

It may take some time, and some disagreement, before a consensus among historians is reached on the war of the twentieth century. The term “Thirty Years' War” appeared in 1649 in the English weekly newspaper
The Moderate Intelligencer
, shortly after the end of that war in 1648.
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A journalist from that paper linked the various religious wars fought in Europe after the rebellion in 1618 of Protestant Bohemia against its Catholic ruler, Ferdinand of Habsburg, later the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. Other historians since have also tied these various wars together, though some begin somewhat earlier (1566) with the Dutch/ Calvinist revolt against the Spanish,
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which undoubtedly had a religious dimension. For these historians, the epochal war is the Ninety Years' War. Still others break up the struggle into two epochal wars: one beginning with the 1618 Bohemian revolt, and another commencing with the Swedish invasion of Bavaria in 1630, which was a more typical war among great powers. For historians of this perspective, such as Bishop Gepeckh of Freising, there were two separate wars: a Twelve Years' War and an Eighteen Years' War.
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All of these wars have in common that they end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Yet other historians, who emphasize the political and secular dimensions of the conflict, see it as continuing until the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 or the Peace of Copenhagen in 1660.
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And one is not necessarily more correct than another: if the historian views the war as having arisen from sectarian differences, it is nevertheless true that by the end of the war Europe had been politicized, secularized, and rationalized to a degree inconceivable at the beginning of the struggle, when theological convictions so preoccupied Europeans that national, social, and patriotic considerations were subordinated.
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Similarly, although the actual phrase “Hundred Years' War” apparently was not used until the nineteenth century, historians two centuries earlier saw the conflict as a single epochal war, even if they disagreed as to its precise dates. As with the Thirty Years' War, the disagreement turns on what the ultimate issues are taken to be. Francois de Mezeray in his
Histoire de France
in 1643 considered the Anglo-French struggles to constitute a single war beginning in 1337 and lasting one hundred sixty years.
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Most historians today start the war in 1328 (the date that Philip VI of France confiscated the French property of the English king Edward III and the year that Edward obtained a claim to the French throne) or 1340 (the year that Edward declared himself to be king of France), but some see the war between England and France as an Anglo-French civil war—because the kings of England were feudal lords of France—lasting from 1294 until 1558 (the date England lost her last holding in France and ninety-five
years after the usual date for the end of the war when the English were removed from all of France except Calais).
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The reasons given by the contending scholarly parties to this historical controversy assume the same fundamental premise: a single epochal war encompasses shorter wars, interposed with periods of little or no fighting, when a central issue links the constituent conflicts and remains unresolved until the ultimate settlement. Therefore, whether an epochal war can be said to encompass other particular wars depends on what issue the historian believes was central to all the linked conflicts, even if this issue only becomes clear in the course of the conflict itself. This is the lesson of Thucydides.
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Thucydides did not live to see his epochal war carried to its conclusion, when Macedon put an end to the constitutional order of Greek city-states and proved that only a larger empire could maintain itself and defend Greece. This event, like the war that preceded it, provides an overture to the narrative that follows.

W
E SHOULD REGARD
the conflicts now commonly called the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cold War as a single war because all were fought over a single set of constitutional issues that were strategically unresolved until the end of the Cold War and the Peace of Paris in 1990.

The Long War (as I shall call it) was fought to determine what kind of state would supersede the imperial states of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth century after the end of the wars of the French Revolution (a war that also appeared as a series of engagements and discrete wars until the Congress of Vienna resolved the fundamental questions at issue). These states dominated Europe and eventually the world until the collapse of the European system in 1914. The Long War was fought to determine which of three new constitutional forms would replace that system: parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism.

What propelled this cataclysm? What put these three particular alternatives in play? It was the instability of two states, Germany and Russia, within whose domestic societies these three options furiously contended. Once Germany and Russia were taken over by one of the radical alternatives to the parliamentary systems outside these states, Germany and the Soviet Union attempted to legitimate their regimes by making their systems the dominant arrangement in world affairs. As we shall see in Part I, the legitimacy of the constitutional order we call the nation-state depended upon its claim to better the well-being of the nation. Each of these three constitutional alternatives promised to do so best. Within every state, these alternatives contended, but it was the triumph of the radical alternatives in
two Great Powers that led to the Long War. To understand this it is necessary to begin with the German struggle to create a nation-state.

After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 full recognition was given to the sovereignty of both Catholic and Protestant German princes of the Holy Roman Empire—that, indeed, was the key solution to the conflict. Thus, despite paper provisions to the contrary, the Empire ceased to exist in practical terms. It had no common treasury, no authoritative common tribunals, and no means of coercing dissenting member states. In place of the Empire, there was only a collection of weak and disorganized states divided by religious affiliation.1 This collection of states faced the great continental powers of France, Russia, and Austria, and the great maritime powers of Holland and England, all of whom had consolidated themselves constitutionally in the seventeenth century. These Great Powers were thus not joined by a great German state.

Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did one German state, Prussia, impose its rule on the others and create the first European nation-state.
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From its beginning the German state was hostile to the prevailing international system and its creators, which had hitherto provided models for a German state. We owe to Bismarck the decisive strategy of separating German national aspirations from the liberal background that had formerly nurtured them. He accomplished this through the adroit use of war, defeating in turn both Austria-Hungary and France, the two states that had dominated German politics since Westphalia. This allowed him to place at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity. German nationalism
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—a program that held that a state was legitimated by its service to a pre-eminent ethnic nation—was the prototype for fascism, as its expression in the Constitution of 1871 confirms.
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Bismarck did not so much unify as conquer the other German states and then proceed to transform their politics by delivering German unity under
a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism. This put fascism on the table as a competitor to the parliamentary systems. But that would not necessarily have led to war had the question of constitutional legitimacy not arisen within the new German state. It is useful to remember that Bismarck's goal had been “to achieve German unity without revolution so as to fend off the social consequences of successful revolution,” as Geoffrey Barraclough has put it.
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When Bismark's successors were threatened by a Social Democratic electoral victory in 1912, they found the moment to attempt an ambitious strategic program of European conquest. Germany sought through an attack on the pre-existing empires of Europe a means of vindicating its claim to destiny that would, perforce, also vindicate its autocratic regime's claim to legitimacy. Indeed, we might think of the situation in Germany in 1914 as replicating that of Europe as a whole: within, as without, Berlin sought to defeat the movement for parliamentary self-government and the threat of revolution, the two other options contending for the future of Europe. This point is powerfully supported by the path-breaking work of the historian Fritz Fischer.
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Whatever may have been the case when Barbara Tuchman wrote her popular and influential
Guns of August
, or A.J.P. Taylor his
War by Timetable: How the First World War Began
, it is impossible to maintain today,
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in light of German archival research, that World War I was all a ghastly mistake, unintended by any of the parties, the result of complicated alliances and railroad timetables.
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In 1959, Fischer published an article in
Historische Zeitschrift
that would itself have considerable historical significance. Relying on archival materials from Wilhelmine Germany, including the September Program drafted by an assistant to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and initialed by Bethmann Hollweg, Fischer insisted that German war aims consistently pursued before and during the First World War were uncannily like those of the Nazis in the Second World War; that these war aims were the logical consequence of German political policy before the Sarajevo assassination in 1914;
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and that these policies could only be fully understood as the effort of the Prussian elite to secure its victory over domestic elements of both liberal parliamentarianism and socialist revolution by achieving a European hegemony and a world position of epic dimensions.
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Fischer showed further that the basic continuity in German history between 1871 and 1945 lay in its substantive goal:
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the defense of a fascist constitutional system against liberalism and socialism.
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This was the state that plotted the beginning of what became, after the miscarriage of its war plan in September
of 1914, the Long War. While the outbreak of war may have preceded the ideal German timetable by some months owing to the Serbian crisis in July 1914, the decision to go to war had already been taken by the only constitutional authority empowered to make that decision, as part of a program in which war was a necessary step. That this decision should come from Germany underscores the source of the question put to the world community by the Long War: for in Germany the choice among three constitutional options first flared into international violence. As we shall see, Russia somewhat later also resolved these historic constitutional options by violence. The United States, Britain, and France had already opted in favor of one of the critical paths, that of parliamentarianism, not without internal strife. Thus were the three principals of the Long War arrayed: Germany, Russia, and the three Atlantic states.

World War I did not solve the question of what sort of system would succeed to power; it only generalized that question to virtually all states. Thus one important political consequence of the war was the rise of a state embodying the ideal of socialism, bringing into the strategic and international sphere a third international ideology that arose in a domestic context. The Bolshevik Revolution may be seen, for our purposes, as bringing to the international level of conflict one of the domestic options in play in the collapsed states of post-1914 Europe.

During the course of 1917, following defeat on the Eastern Front, the authoritative capacity of the Russian state, its power to govern, ceased to exist. The Provisional Government that forced the tsar to abdicate adopted a parliamentary form, but, perhaps for this reason, it did not succeed to the authority of the tsarist state, nor was it able to establish legitimacy on its own. As Edward Acton described the situation: