Chapter Content
Okay, so let's dive into, uh, what happened leading up to World War I. And, you know, there's this book I always think about, Norman Angell's "The Great Illusion." It's, like, the perfect example of "they didn't see it coming." It's actually kind of heartbreaking because we *know* what happened, right? And you just wish people had listened to him back then.
Basically, his big point was that war and, like, grabbing land weren't the best way to get ahead, morally or economically. He was saying, look, if a country could just take another country's stuff, smaller countries would be totally screwed. But, you know, he pointed out that Belgian government bonds were actually worth more than German ones, even though Belgium was way smaller and less powerful. His point was, like, you could make more money and stuff by trading than by, you know, going to war and spilling blood. So, using war and taking over land for a king wasn't a good plan, especially, he thought, in this new age of, like, super-destructive industrial war. Trying to make people believe in the right way wasn't something people should be focused on either.
And he was *right* that war didn't make economic sense anymore. But he was *dead wrong* that humanity had, like, moved past it.
So, anyway, the history of the early 20th century is kind of a battle between two ideas, right? There's the idea of Friedrich August von Hayek that the market is always right, and then there's Karl Polanyi’s idea that the market should be made to help people. And pretty much all the big players in this story were shaped by one or both of those ideas. What they did with Hayek and Polanyi’s ideas, how they twisted them, that's what mattered.
Most of the time, history feels inevitable, like individual choices don't really matter. Or, you know, you think things could have gone differently, but you can't point to, like, a single moment where someone made a different choice. But then there are times when individuals *do* matter.
So, a couple of chapters ago, we started looking at political economy, and then last time we looked at imperial politics. Now, we're getting even more focused. We're moving into war and high-level politics, where, like, individual people make a difference.
The world in 1914 was growing crazy fast, it was pretty peaceful, and it was richer than ever before. It wasn't crazy to be optimistic. But after World War I, things were totally different, especially in Europe. I mean, a lot of it was just, you know, destroyed. And you can't say that was just the natural way things were going.
So, how do we understand this, like, upsetting of progress? Well, let's start a little earlier. In 1899, Britain started the Boer War in South Africa. It was a war they didn't really *need* to fight.
For decades, Britain had been expanding its empire, but also giving power to local people, at least to white people, like in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And they would do that with South Africa later, in 1910. But in 1900, they made a different choice. They sent, like, over a quarter of a million soldiers to South Africa to make the Boers, who were descendants of Dutch colonizers, understand that they wanted to be ruled from London.
The Boers had their own republics, but Britain wanted to take them over. Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, basically demanded equal rights for British citizens in the Boer areas, which, you know, had to do with resources. The Boers were attacked, and the British had a hard time.
So, Chamberlain's war wasn't quick or easy. A smart person would have said, "Okay, let's talk peace, get some promises to treat British people okay."
But no. They sent all those soldiers. It was a *lot* of soldiers, like the equivalent of two million US soldiers today. And they sent a good general. They took the Boer capitals.
But the war wasn't over. The Boers started fighting as guerrillas.
And what does a big army do when it faces guerrillas? Well, the British invented the modern concentration camp. They rounded up everyone, men, women, and kids, stuck them behind barbed wire. And they didn't feed them that well, and they didn't worry too much about keeping things clean.
Around 30,000 Boers died in those camps, most of them kids. Almost 100,000 people died in the whole war. And, you know, maybe 30,000 Africans died, but nobody bothered counting them.
Britain used up, like, 2.5% of its adult male population for the war, and one in ten of those guys died.
Wouldn't it have been better to avoid all that? Yeah, you might think so. But most people in Britain didn't.
The election in Britain was a huge win for the Conservatives, the warmongering party. People called it the "khaki election," because of the army uniforms. A peace treaty was signed, and the Boers lost their republics. But in 1910, when South Africa became a white-run country, the people there were about as happy with the British as people in Ireland were.
So, why did the British vote for war? Well, because they were nationalists.
What's a nationalist? Well, Max Weber, a German sociologist, summed it up in a speech. He said, "We all consider the German character as something that should be protected.…" And he was worried about, like, Polish people taking over the land from German peasants. He thought that a German state should only have a German policy.
So, basically, Weber, a German guy, was worried about other people who looked like him and spoke a different language. In the code of nationalism, that's how he felt.
And this kind of thinking, you know, it leads to bad things. People don't make decisions in a vacuum. And ideas matter. Weber said, you know, "Material interests may drive the trains down the tracks, but ideas are the switchmen." And when people are all caught up in nationalism, it can take over and ruin everything.
We see this on an individual level, right? Like, years later, the biggest German army group fighting in Ukraine, Army Group South, was led by a guy who had been named Fritz Erich Georg Eduard von Lewinski at birth. “Von” meant he was a noble, but Lewinski isn't a German name. It's a Polish name. And then, what's in between? Levi. The most Jewish surname in the world!
But Fritz Erich Georg Eduard worked for Hitler, leading soldiers to fight for a guy who wanted to kill Jews and Poles, and other Slavic people. But he later became known as von Manstein, because his aunt and uncle adopted him, and that's the name he used.
Fritz Erich Georg Eduard von Manstein, born von Lewinski, he was a nationalist. He thought that the mixed borderlands, where some people spoke German and some spoke Polish, was unacceptable. And he and millions of others believed that so much that the ideas of, like, a peaceful market path towards utopia just disappeared. You know, his path to being a soldier was easy: his family had five Prussian generals in it. His aunt married Paul von Hindenberg, the president.
In German cities, industrialists wanted workers, and they found that a lot of potential workers were working on farms in Pomerania and Prussia. So the industrialists offered them better wages and a better life if they moved to the cities. And many did.
So, everybody was happy, right? The Polish people who stayed had bigger farms, the Polish people who moved got better jobs. The German landlords could sell their grain for more money. The German workers who moved got better jobs. The German iron lords had more workers. The aristocrats who ran Germany had a stronger economy, more taxes, less poverty, and less socialist talk.
So who was unhappy? Max Weber, and all the other German nationalists.
And the thing is, Weber was, like, a centrist, or even center-left, in Germany at the time. He wasn't a socialist, but he liked democracy, education, and economic growth. And he was against aristocrats and stuffy social rules.
And German nationalism wasn't unusual in Europe before World War I. It was the norm. People thought of war as a chance for national glory and to get stuff.
But if you don't fall for nationalism, you see that all the politicians and generals were either wrong or crazy. Because it all ended so badly. The kings on the Anglo-French side kept their jobs, but all the emperors on the other side lost theirs. But, you know, those quotation marks around "winning" are important. Almost ten million people died in World War I. And if you think the Spanish flu was made worse by the war, then the death toll is closer to fifty million.
The rulers of Austria-Hungary were worried about Serbian nationalism. They were worried about the idea that Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, and Slovenes were really one nation, "Yugoslavs," and that only the Turks and Germans were keeping them from being glorious.
Think about it: eighty years separate 1914, when Serbs and Croats were blood brothers, from 1994, when they couldn't live in the same place without one side calling for the other to be killed. And what the leaders called for, their followers did.
So, this Austria-Hungary, which respected local customs and kept the peace and allowed free trade, belief, and speech, seems pretty good, right? But not to the ancestors of the Serb and Croat who committed genocide.
In the summer of 1914, a Bosnian terrorist who wanted Bosnia to be independent from Austria-Hungary killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was going to be in charge, and his wife, Sophie. The terrorist got help from the Serbian secret police.
So, the old emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna thought he had to do something. He wanted to punish Serbia and show that Austria was in charge in the Balkans. And it seemed worth a little risk of a big war. The wars before had all been short. The Crimean War was longer, but it was limited. And the American Civil War, which killed a lot of people, well, they didn't see that as relevant.
And they missed other important facts too.
The czar, Nicholas II, in St. Petersburg, wanted to show that Russia was in charge in the Balkans. And he wanted the Slavic-speaking nations to know that they could count on Russia to protect them from Austria.
The German emperor, Wilhelm II, in Berlin, thought that a quick win over France and Russia would give Germany a dominant place in Europe. So they decided to back Austria all the way, whatever they did. They thought of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who had said, "It is not by speeches and debates that the great issues of the day will be decided, but by Blood and Iron."
The politicians in France wanted to fight Germany to get back Alsace and Lorraine, which Germany had taken in 1870. And they thought it was worth killing a lot of people to make sure that the city of Strasbourg was called "Strasbourg," and that the mayor spoke French, not German.
The British politicians in London thought war was worth the risk to show that Britain couldn't be pushed around. And Germany had built a fleet that Britain saw as a huge threat, so Britain had to spend a lot of money to keep up.
They all thought war would be good, even if just for them. But they were wrong. Franz Joseph lost his throne and his empire. The French lost a generation of young men. The British also lost a generation on their way to having a much weaker empire. The Russian czar lost his throne, his life, and his country. Russia also lost a generation and a chance at a happy 20th century.
World War I didn't give Germany a dominant place in Europe. Wilhelm lost his throne. His country lost its power and a generation of young men. And Germany took the first steps toward Hitler's Third Reich. It took more than thirty years before French politicians realized that fighting Germany didn't work, and that maybe a better way to contain them would be to bring them into a wider Europe.
So, why did they do it? First, nationalism. Also, the idea that winning this war would make you less likely to lose a future one.
But there was more. There was aristocracy. The governments of Europe were full of aristocrats, ex-aristocrats, and wannabe aristocrats. That meant that the aristocrats, landlords, and military elites controlled a lot of the power. And the aristocrats had help from industrialists and entrepreneurs who wanted to make money, like with the German "marriage of iron and rye."
Before World War I, these elites were losing their power and status. They could either watch their influence disappear, or they could lead their nations into war.
Power and propaganda were backed up by ideology. Each nation thought that it had a strong interest in making sure that its people left the biggest mark on the future. And values like peace, brotherhood, and charity fell out of favor.
The aristocrats of Europe didn't really know how much they had to lose when they started World War I. But they did it anyway. They created a powerful echo chamber, where propaganda and ideology reinforced each other. And the people of the West, who were smarter, better fed, and better clothed than ever before, enthusiastically supported them.
Causation and metaphors matter. It's one way to say the nations of Europe fell like dominoes. Or it’s one way to say that the zeitgeist, the dialectic unfolding of History, or Providence set one domino in motion and the rest fell.
The archduke had been killed. Serbia had rejected Austria's demands. Austria had declared war on Serbia. Germany wanted Austria to show it was serious. Russia started to mobilize. Germany attacked Belgium. It was stupid.
The war started with Germany attacking an uninvolved, neutral power, which might bring in the world's strongest power as an enemy, even if they were already outnumbered.
I think a big reason for this was Prussia. Germany was run by Prussia. Prussia had a tradition of attacking first, by surprise, from an unexpected direction. Why? Because it was in a dangerous area and surrounded by stronger enemies. Any state like that would probably lose any war it didn't win quickly. So, Prussia had to be one that won quickly. And then, by accident, Prussia became the center of the German nation around 1900.
And it almost worked. If Britain had stayed out of the war, the Germans probably would have taken Paris in the summer of 1914, and then they could have made peace. But Britain joined the war, first because of its treaty with Belgium, but probably more important, to stop Germany from taking over Europe and building a fleet that would threaten Britain.
And so the trigger was pulled. The war was fought by young men from all over Europe, and they all thought it would be a short, easy win.
World War I would have been bad, but not a total disaster if it had been a short war. But the sides were so evenly matched that there was no quick win. So, it became a long war. British help kept France from being taken in the fall of 1914. German help kept Austria from being taken in the fall of 1914. And then they all dug trenches. It became a total war, where everyone threw everything they had into it for more than four years.
The generals asked for more and more stuff for the front. They thought that if strategy didn't work, they could just win with more men, metal, and explosives. Britain, which mobilized the most, was spending over a third of its national product on the war by 1916.
Nobody had planned to mobilize the economy for a total war. The plans had all assumed a short war, won in a few months. When that didn't happen, the governments and armies tried everything they could to get more supplies and make more weapons. Production was controlled by the military, not by the market. But the army couldn't just pay whatever the industrialists wanted to charge. So, the market was replaced by rationing and control.
Was that possible? Yes. The people who ran the industrial materials allocation did a good job. It was surprisingly easy, even though doing it *efficiently* would have been very difficult. But the example of the German war economy made people, like Vladimir Lenin, believe that a "command economy" was possible. You could run a socialist economy not through the market but by using the government as a command-and-control bureaucracy, not just during a crisis, but all the time. The evidence was there in the war.
But there were other, better lessons to be learned. For example, the importance of military research and a bureaucracy that could use it. As the United States showed, the winners of wars tend to be those with the biggest factories.
Once Germany realized it couldn't win quickly and everyone went to their trenches, the idea of attacking quickly and then suing for peace fell out of favor. The German officers were willing to die for their orders, so they just carried out senseless orders as best they could.
But even then, it wouldn't have worked without the genius of German scientists and administrators. Scientists like Fritz Haber, who won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to get nitrogen compounds out of the air. (Carl Bosch got his prize later for scaling up Haber’s process) This was a huge deal for making fertilizer. It also let Germany fight a long war, because without nitrogen, they would have run out of explosives in six months, and almost ten million people wouldn't have died. On the one hand, Haber-Bosch stopped people from starving, on the other hand, Fritz Haber is sometimes called the father of chemical weapons. He even went to the front to watch his chlorine gas used for the first time.
Haber was a German Jew. He fled Germany when Hitler took over in 1933. And he died in Switzerland in 1934.
The administrators were people like Walther Rathenau, who created the system that Germany used to keep its industries running, at least for making war stuff, after the British blocked trade. Rathenau wrote, "I am a German of Jewish origin. My people are the German people, my home is Germany, my faith is German faith, which stands above all denominations."
He was killed by right-wing, anti-Semitic German terrorists in 1922.
And then there's the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). It was founded in 1875, and outlawed by Bismarck, but by 1914, it had a million members. It was the biggest party in the world and had 34% of the seats in the German Reichstag. It was founded to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist society. They were going to bring about the international brotherhood of workers, and oppose militarism in all its forms.
So what did the SPD do when Emperor Wilhelm II's ministers asked for money to fight World War I? Well, when the SPD met, the leader of the pacifist faction, Hugo Haase, asked "You want to approve war credits for the Germany of the Hohenzollern [Emperor] and the Prussian [landlord-aristocrat-officer-bureaucrat] Junkers?" Haase asked. And Friedrich Ebert said, "Not for that Germany, but for the Germany of productive labor, the Germany of the social and cultural ascent of the masses. It is a matter of saving that Germany! We cannot abandon the fatherland in its moment of need. It is a matter of protecting women and children." Only 13 of the 110 SPD Reichstag deputies agreed with Haase.
What were they protecting women and children from? In that month, it was from the czarist tyranny that would follow a Russian victory in the war that Germany had started.
The efficiency of the innovative industrial research lab paired to modern corporations grasping for economies of scale and to well-ordered administration was immense. But that could be thrown away when principles and ideals told you that survival, or at least identity, was at risk. Economic growth is a measurable metric. Nationalism, not so much. Confronted by the powers of nationalist wars of choice, ideals such as utopia and principles of market over man, or vice versa, bend if they do not break. Yet, do the nationalist replacements truly have efficacy, utility, or value?
It would have been better for the German people if the SPD had stuck to its prewar pacifist guns and then been successful in hobbling the imperial German war effort, leading to an early peace. Because Germany lost. In the end, the weight of men and metal arranged against Germany and its allies did tell. It was France, Belgium, Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Romania, and the United States against the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires and Bulgaria, and at the end of 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s army collapsed. The generals announced that the German army in France was facing defeat. With foodstuffs stopped by British blockade, the German population at home was over the edge of starvation. And Germany sought an armistice.
If you want to know more about what happened during the war—about the battles and leaders and campaigns and casualties—you’d do well to read another book. I don’t have the heart to write it down.
There were ten million dead, ten million maimed, and ten million lightly injured out of a population of some one hundred million adult men from the major belligerents. The overwhelming share of war casualties were soldiers, not civilians. A full year’s worth of the full production powers of every belligerent power was wasted. The imperial-authoritarian political orders in the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires had collapsed. The political order in Italy was at the point of collapse. Confidence that the world was run by farsighted statesmen in a way that supported progress was gone.
From 1870 to 1914, we can see global economic history as following a logic that was, if not inevitable, at least probable, or at least explicable after the fact. Luck and probability gave humanity an opening around 1870 in the form of a quintuple breakthrough: the ideology and policy of an open world, new forms of transportation, faster communications, and—most important—the beginnings of the research laboratory and the large corporation, which together would more than double the pace of invention and greatly speed the deployment of new technologies. From 1870 to 1914, the economic logic rolled forward: inventors became more specialized and prolific, corporations deployed more technology. An international division of labor developed, and global growth continued apace, while also spurring the creation of a low-wage periphery, as well as the concentration of industrialization and wealth in what is still the global north. Humanity, meanwhile, began to escape from the Malthusian dilemma, as the tendency for technological progress gained ground on ever-greater population numbers, and work shifted increasingly from farm to factory. All in all, the period saw the coming of sufficient (if ill-distributed) prosperity—and with it, the possibility that someday, not that far away, humanity, in the rich economies of the global north, at least, might attain something that previous eras would have judged to be a genuine utopia.
From 1870 to 1914 we can see global political-economic history as by and large following a possible, if not an overwhelmingly likely or near-necessary, path. We see the threading of the needle in the creation and maintenance of an increasingly liberal order within the economies and polities of the global north. We see expanding suffrage, growing rights, increasing prosperity, increasing inequality (accompanied by political movements to curb such inequalities), and an absence of large-scale revolution. We see the conquest of the rest of the world into formal and informal empires as the difference in power between the North Atlantic and the rest became overwhelmingly huge.
All of this could have been otherwise. But that events from 1870 to 1914 followed the course that they did is not surprising given where the world was in 1870.
This sense of history having a broad and nearly irresistible structural logic vanishes with World War I. It did not have to happen—the 1914 Bosnian crisis might have been finessed, or the war might have ended with a quick, decisive victory for one side or the other, or governments and elites might have come to their senses. Was some such catastrophe like World War I probable? Was humanity just unlucky?
History did not, after 1918, return to its structural pattern of broad forces and tides in which individual quirks and choices averaged out. History was still one damned thing after another. Individuals’ visions, choices, and actions continued to matter. And not just the individuals who became dictators of great powers.
John Maynard Keynes saw the war as a previously unimaginable horror. He saw his own participation in its planning, from his desk at the British Treasury, as contemptible. Keynes, retrospectively, scorned the naïveté of the upper-middle-class pre–World War I inhabitants of London “for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.” These Londoners had seen “this state of affairs,” he said, “as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement,” and they had seen “any deviation from it… as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.”
He was, of course, speaking of himself. As I already quoted some time ago, Keynes and his had seen “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise,” as “little more than the amusements of [the] daily newspaper.” And “they appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of economic and social life.”
They had been wrong, with awful consequences for the world. Keynes saw that he was one of the ones who had been so blind and so wrong. And so, for the rest of his life, he took on responsibility. Responsibility for what? For—don’t laugh—saving the world. The curious thing is the extent to which he succeeded, especially for someone who was only a pitiful, isolated individual, and who never held any high political office.