100 years after the war to end all war and the peace to end all peace

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Kierkegaard

I feel guilty about not making the long journey to the British (Commonwealth) war graves at Tâncăbești to mark one hundred years since the end of the Great War. Instead I write this.

The First World War almost destroyed Western civilization, which has never fully recovered from that war. You only have to walk around the cities of the former Austria Hungary, their historic centres exuding 19th century serene confidence, scattered now among numerous impoverished countries, think how the Nazis and Communists ruled over the former Hapsburg and Czarist empires or look at the modern Middle East to see the harm that the 1914-1918 war did. 

To say nothing of the huge left-wing, collectivist and nihilistic shift it created in culture and thinking, connected to the Bolshevik revolution.  

With the benefit of hindsight it would clearly have been better, as Bertrand Russell said, had Germany and the Central Powers won (as they might easily have done, despite being much smaller and poorer than the Allies). Why? Not because they were not to blame for starting the war - they were completely to blame. Not because they were benign - they invaded countries without any justification and committed numerous war crimes. Simply because, in this way, the world would almost certainly have escaped Lenin, Hitler, Communism and Nazism.

But this sort of thinking is not very useful. Events that happened long ago were once things in the future and therefore unknowable.

Robert Tombs in his magisterial The English and Their History makes a convincing case that German victory in the First World War would have left the German forces in control of Normandy and Belgium and a grave military and economic threat to Britain.  

This is the doctrine that guided British foreign policy since the reign of King William III, that it is necessary that Britain intervene in Europe to preserve the balance of power and prevent the continent being united against us. Anthony Jay’s Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister famously said that it was for this reason, to prevent a united Europe, that Britain joined the E.E.C in 1973. 

Has the balance of power doctrine served our interests? I am not as sure as Dr. Tombs,  even though he voted Leave in the EU referendum, that we should not have kept well out of European entanglements.

A German victory would have meant splitting off from Tsarist Russia the Ukraine, the Baltic States (including Finland), Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. This would have destroyed Russia as a great power or a threat to Germany, but would it not have been a good thing? 

Self determination for the suppressed peoples of the Russian empire probably would not have led to further war, unlike the creation of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

The First World War’s four great legacies, all baleful, were: the end of the hierarchical, monarchical, conservative states that had kept order in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East; the Bolshevik revolution, which threatened the whole world; dictators who used nationalism to achieve power and who to varying extents modelled their regimes on Lenin’s one-party state (Jozef Pilsudski, Kemal Ataturk, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, etc); and the 1919 peace settlement (‘the peace to end all peace’) that inevitably could not have lasted.

It could not have lasted because Woodrow Wilson’s liberal idea of national “self-determination” (think George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq) created numerous beds of Procrustes, but mostly because Tsarist Russia, Austria Hungary and Ottoman Turkey no longer existed to balance the power of Germany. 

Hitler, with his plans to eliminate the Slavs and replace them on the Russian steppe with Germans or his systematic massacre of millions of Jews, was unforeseeable, but a revanchist German right-wing government enlarging her borders at the expense of her neighbours was very foreseeable and very probable. 

The alternative, much less likely, would have been a Communist Germany. In the end, Germany got both.

The case for Britain not going to war against Germany in 1939 is unlike the case for not going to war in 1914, because it does not rely on our knowledge of what subsequently happened. It simply relies on what was known in the summer of 1939. The historian Maurice Cowling said accurately in Mill and Liberalism:

‘From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.’

A.J.P. Taylor thought Maurice Cowling possessed the second greatest mind of the age, second only to Taylor’s, and this may have been true.

The second world war cost 70 million lives and left half of Europe ruled by Bolsheviks. The settlement of 1945-46 was much harsher than that of 1919, of course, and was accompanied by ruthless ethnic cleansing, which is why it has lasted.

The period 1918-1939 was only a truce. By 1946 it seemed as though a second world war had also ended in a truce and Stalin was viewed as a threat to the world order comparable with that posed by Hitler. This was an understandable misconception.

The whole of history since 1945 in the Western world is a meditation on Hitler and the Nazis. 

The alarm that Stalin had Hitlerian ambitions to conquer Western Europe (Hitler's ‘Napoleonic ambitions’ were the reason British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax decided that war in 1939 was necessary) led to the Cold War and the European Union. Fear of resembling the Nazis' ideas or racial superiority led to decolonisation (though the fall of France had in any case fatally weakened European prestige in Asia and Africa), mass immigration, even the 1960s social revolution, even single sex marriage and transgender rights. 

Accusations of resembling Hitler are used with accelerating frequency as the years since his death grow more. 

The Nazis and the Holocaust made conservative ideas like patriotism, heroism, hierarchy and the masculine virtues suspect. 

The fascists also undercut the Whig theory of history (history as continual progress) and liberal belief in the essential goodness of human beings, though these always spring back. But this existential challenge to liberal theories is the reason why Nazis continue to be a huge bugbear for high-minded, soft-hearted people, even though nowadays only a miniscule and negligible number of eccentrics are either fascists or Nazis. 

Douglas Murray put it well in his The Strange Death of Europe: 

"When it comes to anti-fascism in most of Western Europe, there would appear to be a supply-and-demand problem: the demand for fascists vastly outstrips the actual supply."

In 1945 and 1946 an ethnic war was fought between Ukrainians and Poles which the world ignored. Ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians were expelled from the places across Central and Eastern Europe in which their families had lived for many centuries. The whole story of the displaced persons - the so-called DPs - is calamitous. Coming after the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, by 1950 a terrible simplicity had been imposed on Eastern European countries which had hitherto been Macedonian salads. 
(Macedonian salads, which I have eaten in Skopje, do not come from Macedonia but are named after the higgledy-piggledy mixture of many ethnic groups in pre-1912 Macedonia.)

Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered the vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939, stipulating that they should be "humane and orderly". They were, of course, neither. 

At almost the same time that Eastern Europe ceased to be an ethnic mosaic, Western Europe began to receive waves of immigrants from outside Europe, unprecedented since the Muslim invasions of the Dark and Middle Ages, and quickly became one. 

As always, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, people learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new mistakes in the future.