The War of the World

Once again I encounter Prof. Ferguson, who has now written a fascinating book about a desperately sordid subject: war. I found myself unable to leave the book until I had read it cover to cover. Perhaps the reason for my attraction to the book is my feelings of involvement in the story he's told. For me, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the various horrible events of the last century are close to home. Uncles served in the Pacific war, in places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. My ex-wife fled the 1956 Hungarian revolution. I've known former inmates of Auschwitz. I have Jewish relatives and friends. And, I've spent a life pleading with Americans to give up the folly of war and Imperialism. Somehow, the war of the world is the enduring net in which my life was caught.

Prof. Ferguson, sometimes ensconced in Harvard Yard, comes to America from Great Britain. He certainly has made a fortune in this land of opportunity, but he has not given up his distinctly British and Tory perspectives. The pot hasn't melted him. Thus we find his unbounded admiration for Margaret Thatcher who not only saved England from the Labour-inspired Welfare State, but was also responsible for the demise of the Soviet Union. (So much for Reagan's famous demand: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") Moreover, it seems to have been Winston Churchill who won World War II, with occasional assistance from the likes of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Josef Stalin and Harry Truman. What preserves the book from his distinctly British point of view is that Ferguson holds back most of it until the end, the Epilogue.

The Twentieth Century was plagued by wars rooted in economics, ethnicity and empire; according to Ferguson, the three Es. A century ago, the human world was largely at peace because it was ruled by a few far-flung empires, notably the British Empire. The major empires were globally multi-cultural. They promoted trade and economic growth. They brooked no resistance, so most people went about their business, accepting the established order. Then, in 1914, the whole thing exploded, much like pre-stressed safety glass when struck hard enough. The crackling and popping went on and on, reaching a peak in World War II, but generally subsiding thereafter. Despite major disturbances such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the bloody wars in Africa, today's world is far more peaceful than it was a few generations ago.

Prof. Ferguson focuses on Europe, not Asia, in this work, and seems to put Jews at the center of much that happened. I am not sure why he does that, but I think his argument is convincing that anti-Semitism was an important motivation in the cracking and popping. I take the pogroms and Holocaust as examples of similar waves of genocidal tribal warfare that occurred elsewhere; e.g., Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Manchuria. When the empires were in control, ethnic groups lived together in relative peace, usually trading and frequently intermarrying. The sorts of genocidal wars that happened in Armenia and Chechnya are unleashed by the decline of empires such as the Ottoman and Soviet Union, not by their rise.

Economic volatility is also associated with the decline of empire, because decline disrupts trade. All economic endeavors and understandings depend on a stable currency, commonly accepted laws about income, property, and wealth and secure routes between producers and consumers. When that sort of global framework is removed, trade rapidly becomes localized, which is experienced as a depression. Ferguson's model seems to explain the Great Depression as the consequence of the collapse of  the German and Ottoman empires in World War I, because the British Empire was left standing until after World War II.

If the Three Es are inter-related, is there a more fundamental cause? I did not find it in this book. I take Ferguson's account of the Twentieth Century to support my view of History as chaotic. For example, he shows that World War I was a surprise, not expected. The usual account of late Victorian and Edwardian Europe is that of a tinder box waiting for the match lit by Princips in Sarajevo. That is not at all Ferguson's telling: he explicitly rejects that standard model of events. While he does emphasize the latent conflicts between ethnic groups prior to World War I, he does not attribute the war to those conflicts or rising nationalist urges. He points out that ethnic conflict was suppressed by the global empires of that time. Moreover, those empires succeeded in producing wealth and improving conditions for millions of people. Even the much hated Jews were better off before the Great War. So, that war represented a sudden and unexpected collapse of  the old order which had prevailed in Europe since Napoleon's Waterloo and Metternich's Congress of Vienna.

Prof. Ferguson points out that the unraveling of Europe was not connected in some mechanical way to events elsewhere. He claims there were many wars which happened at the same time. The implication is that those wars were coincidental, thus it is an over determination of the facts to align them with European circumstances. The various players in all these wars had their own scores to settle, not just the grievances of the European powers. To the extent that there was any causal connection between them, it was the loosening of Imperial chains which allowed the dogs to fight. At least, all of that seems to have been the case with World War I.

On the other hand, Ferguson seems more definite in assigning the beginning and ending of World War II. It began in 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge with the Japanese invasion of China, and it ended in Korea in 1953. Between those dates, the empires remaining from World War I were destroyed (Japan and Britain), the resurgent Germans and latter day Romans were removed from the world stage, leaving the Soviet Union, China and the United States masters of a share of the Universe. Prof. Ferguson seems to agree with the conventional wisdom that World War II was a continuation of World War I. Taken together, all of that violent History constitutes his title, "The War of the World."

The peak of the violence occurred during World War II, which is the focus of the book. That focus may also be a hidden consequence of  Ferguson's British upbringing, for the story of World War II is the undoing of the British Empire. Ferguson's hero, Winston Churchill, painted in muted tones, vainly strained to prevent its demise, but he barely mentions that fact. Perhaps I am mistaken in this opinion, but the Professor makes it plain in his two previous books about Empire (British and American) that, in his early years, he thrilled to brass bands and glories of Britannia. Thus, I believe the subtitle "Descent of the West" is not just a reference to Spengler, but his dirge for the Empire.

This book is not written in the style of a military history. It is not an account of strategies played out in the battles fought. Rather, Ferguson suggests the extreme violence of World War II in the testimony of selected people, and in his recitation of certain facts and statistics. He pays the most attention to the ethnic cleansing that happened in World War II, as the logical continuation of ethnic and nationalist strife that exploded in World War I. The same sort of wars continue to this day all over the world. Ferguson points out that the usual histories, comfortable to First Worlders, are distorted by their Western preceptors, which prefer to attend to such notions as "the American Century" and ignore the massive killings going on in places like Africa.

In the Epilogue, we discover the world-wide level of violence has decreasing since the Korean War. Europe has been relatively peaceful since World War II because of ethnic cleansing: old scores have been lethally settled. Some of the continuing violence in the Middle East results from the export of ethnic hatreds from Europe, as in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Palestine. The violence in the Sudan and elsewhere in Africa is the on-going result of tribal (ethnic) warfare now unrepressed by European Empires. Ferguson's description suggests to me that the old Empires were a good thing, in so far as they repressed and prevented the sort of genocidal wars that go on in their absence. But, he also explicitly suggests things might get better in those unsettled places as the various ethnic groups sort things out to their own satisfaction.

Operating in historian mode, Ferguson's book is more and more sketchy the nearer we come to our present time, the early Twenty-First Century. He ventures no prediction as to whether the world will again become (relatively) peaceful, as it supposedly was in the Nineteenth Century,  or more violent, as it certainly was in the first two-thirds of the Twentieth.

I recommend this book for several reasons. Young people, especially, need to read this tale of horror that was. Twentieth Century wars were the major fact of life for the so-called Greatest Generation, and for those, including myself, who were directly and indirectly involved at the time. Those who have forgotten or repressed memories of those times need to be reminded, particularly now that a generation of Neo-conservatives - latter day Fascists and Imperialists - are wantonly recreating those circumstances.

The most important reason to read this book, carefully I hope, is to understand Prof. Ferguson's challenge to the Western "Standard Model" of World History. His is not just another exercise in Conservative revisionism, but a revisionist shock to our thinking about history just beginning to settle into its own geological layer. Niall Ferguson provides the useful service of stirring up the dust before it becomes a concretion.