INTERVIEW
JANUARY 25, 2014
Will the Next World War Start in the Middle East?
Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, is the author of many books about Europe (including a trilogy about the Third Reich), and is one of the most prominent intellectuals in the United Kingdom. This week, he has a cover story in the New Statesman looking back at the war, and comparing 1914 to today. We spoke over the phone about who caused the disaster, the best books to read on it, and whether the modern Middle East will spark the next World War.
Isaac Chotiner: What is the major difference between 1914 and 2014? Are you worried about another major conflict breaking out anytime soon?
Richard Evans:
I think we have to recognize that the instability and violence of the
Balkan states in 1914 was the trigger for the war. It was not an excuse
used by the Germans or anybody else. The region was pretty much
out-of-control. I think the obvious parallel here is with the Middle
East today, where again you have a number of smallish states, heavily
armed, with religious differences, political differences, and
instability. The situation is very difficult for the major powers to
control.
IC: You say that it was not just an excuse to start the war, but don’t you think other events, like the crisis in Morocco in 1911, or something else, could have been the spark to start the war?
RE:
Well, the Moroccan issue was settled, the Middle East was more or less
settled by 1914, and the naval arms race was settled because Britain had
won and everyone recognized that, including the Germans. So I think it
really had to be the Balkans.
It was a multipolar world in the
late 19th century, which then became a bipolar world, split between two
camps in Europe itself. That mirrors the cold war, but the cold war is
over, and we now have once more the multipolar world that you had in
Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. And also, you have institutions of
collective security now, just as you had then—the United Nations may not
be all that effective but it is better than nothing.I think the major difference now is that we’ve had two World Wars, and we’ve had the nuclear age. Whereas in 1914, states, and for that matter most of the public in most nations, had what we now think of as a very irresponsible attitude toward war. They went into it in a gung-ho way. Now I think we are much more afraid of a major war, and we are much more cautious about it. I think the attitude of politicians today is very different from what it was in 1914.
IC:
There’s been a huge scholarly debate about the degree to which the
Germans were to blame for the First World War. This has been going on
for decades, all the way back to the historian Fritz Fischer, who in 1961 essentially blamed Germany.
RE: The debate has actually been going on since the War itself.
IC: Fair enough. What do you think the state of that debate is right now?
RE:
I think that the state of debate, interestingly, is different in
different countries. I think there’s enormous reluctance in the United
Kingdom, particularly amongst military historians, to accept that the
distribution of responsibility was quite wide over Austria-Hungary,
Serbia, Britain, France, Russia, and Germany. In Germany, however,
Christopher Clark’s book is number one on the bestseller lists—it’s an
enormous hit and it’s made him into a media star. And he argues for this
diffuse responsibility.
IC: Where do you fall on that spectrum?
RE:
Well, I would incline towards Christopher Clark’s view. I think you
have to start with the breakdown of the nineteenth-century Concert of
Europe, the end of the multipolar world, and the splitting of Europe
into two armed camps by about 1906. That made the danger of a small war
leading to a bigger one much more serious. You also had the French
desire for revenge for Alsace-Lorraine,
and Russia turning away from the Far East after its defeat by Japan in
1905 and looking towards Europe with a forward policy. Austria-Hungary
was absolutely paranoid about the Serbs, because there were many Serbs
within its borders, and insisted on a hard-line course toward them, and
you had Serbia wanting to expand in the Balkans. You had Germany afraid
that if Russia beat Austria-Hungary, it would be greatly weakened. So
you had a lot of fear coupled with a general willingness to go to war.
Britain was very confused and the government was deeply divided. Edward
Grey, the Foreign Secretary, vacillated this way and that. But he moved
toward an anti-German course. I think his views were influenced by the
naval arms race, which had come to a stop but had strongly stoked his
suspicions of Germany.
IC:
It seems like you think responsibility should be divided, but let me
just ask you about a line in your piece. You write, “For all the
Marxists’ convoluted attempts to prove that the driving forces behind
the First World War were economic, the logic of capitalism told against
war rather than for it.” The Leninist interpretation of the war was that
basically it was a stupid war about imperialism. I realize that at some
level that’s too simplistic, but it also seems to me that it was
fundamentally an imperial war, and that if these countries were not
interested in overseas possessions, then the war never occurs.
RE:
Yes, I mean, these are wars not between individual countries, they are
wars between empires. So it’s the British Empire, the French Empire and
the German Empire, then the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, which did not have overseas possessions, but had many
nationalities within their borders. I don’t think that the economic
explanations work at all, however. Nearly every part of the globe that
was going to be annexed by European powers was already annexed. There
were parts that were too difficult to annex, like China, because the
resistance was too great there, essentially, or a few places like
Ethiopia, which proved too hard to conquer.
IC: But if you define imperialism as about more than economics….
RE:
Exactly, it’s an ideology. It’s an ideology of power. And the more
precise arguments put forward by Lenin or by Rosa Luxemburg arguing that
economic factors, the profit motive or the need to export surplus
capital, were crucial, simply don’t work. The colonies cost the European
powers money, they did not bring in money, they had no discernible
function in terms of the capitalist economy, and there were many close
financial and business links between the rival European powers in 1914.
IC:
WWI is always interesting to me because—and correct me if you think
this is wrong—it seems like one of these events that basically went as
horrifically wrong as it possibly could have. The war itself was
horrible, and the way in which the Allies won was horrible, because you
end up with Stalinism and Nazism. What could have possibly gone worse?
Give me a counterfactual.
RE: Well, as it happens, on February 4 my book on counterfactuals will be published in the United States. It’s called Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History and it’s published by Brandeis University Press.
IC: We’ll include a link.
RE:
Of course the First World War is generally recognized as the seminal
catastrophe of 20th century Europe and the 20th century world. But I
don’t think historians can or should say what would have happened had it
been avoided, because that eliminates contingency altogether. If you
look at the arguments about what would have happened had there been no
first World War, or had Britain not entered the First World War, you
simply cannot say that there would have been no Holocaust, or no second
world war, because you can’t account for chance happenings along the
alternative timeline you’re constructing.
IC:
There’s been a push in the United Kingdom to celebrate the war a little
bit more. Lord Kitchener, the famous imperialist and war supporter is
on some new bill, correct?
RE:
It’s a commemorative coin worth two pounds sterling. I and others are
arguing that it should be Nurse Edith Cavell who should be on it, and
not Lord Kitchener. She was a British nurse who was executed by the
Germans for helping wounded British soldiers escape back to the front
line. But she nursed both German and British soldiers in hospital, and
nursed them in Belgium. She thought she had a general duty to care for
the sick. ‘Patriotism is not enough’ was her best-known statement. And
that is the sort of spirit I think we should commemorate, and not the
militarism of someone like Kitchener.
IC:
You have also gotten into a skirmish with Michael Gove, the Education
Secretary, about whether World War I was a war for the Brits to be proud
of.
RE: There are those
who think it was basically a war between Britain and Germany, and
Germany was an evil dictatorship run by the Kaiser. People who read back
Hitler into the Kaiser, the Third Reich into the Kaiserreich—those
people argue it should be celebrated by Britain as wonderful triumph for
British values.
IC:
Gove is conservative, but A.J.P. Taylor famously wrote something
similar, and he was a leftist historian. Didn’t he essentially argue
that you can read Hitler as sort of a traditional German leader?
RE:
He did say that, but he also said that the First World War wasn’t
anybody’s responsibility; he said it was war by timetable, by railway
timetable; once the powers began to mobilise, there was no stopping it.
IC: Right, that it was almost an accident…
RE: As you say, however, it is not left vs. right. I pointed out in a piece I did for The Guardian
that it was Niall Ferguson, who describes himself as right-wing, who
said that Britain should not have entered the first World War. As for
Michael Gove, this goes back to the fact that last year I was very
prominent in the public criticism of his draft of a new school history
curriculum in this country, and he was forced to withdraw it, and I
don’t think he’s forgiven me for that. We can surely salute the courage
of the soldiers who fought while criticizing the view that they were
fighting for British democracy, liberal values and so on: they thought
above all they were fighting for the Empire.
IC:
There has been a ton of books on the origins of the war in the last
year, and there are going to be many more. What is the best one?
RE:
I still think Christopher Clark’s book is the one to beat on the
origins of the war, though I think Margaret Macmillan comes fairly close
to it—she is better on the longer-term origins, he has broader and
deeper research on the immediate origins. I don’t think we yet have a
very good book on the war itself.
IC: And overall, what is the greatest book written on the war?
RE: Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. That is the best book I’ve read.
IC: It’s interesting you say that because I just finished rereading Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which talks a lot about Graves. Fussell’s is an amazing and beautiful book.
RE: That’s excellent as well. But these are not of course, conventional academic history books.
IC: So what’s the best conventional history?
RE: David Stephenson’s 1914-1918 is the best.
(This interview has been edited and condensed)
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