Michael S. Swisher
Michael S. Swisher is the owner of Bayport Printing House in Bayport Minnesota, and Chairman of the Board of the St. Croix Review. He is the happy combination of a businessman and scholar.
Most Americans, if asked which were the more significant, World War I or World War II, would probably answer the Second. They would have some good reasons for so doing -- American involvement in that war was longer, American casualties were greater, and the war was fought in a vast Pacific theatre as well as on the Old World battlefields of the First World War. Above all, the cause of America's involvement in the Second World War, namely the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is clear and still well remembered. By contrast, probably not one in one hundred citizens could identify the reasons for the United States' declaration of war on the Central Powers in April of 1917. Indeed, the validity of those reasons was not widely agreed upon by many Americans at the time, and the sense that this country's prosecution of the war had been a waste of blood and treasure had a great deal to do with the development of isolationist sentiment in the following decades.
Nonetheless, as I hope to illustrate this evening, it was the First and not the Second World War that exerted more lasting influence on the character of the modern world. Although it seems a truism to note that there could not have been a Second World War had there not been a First, this is more than a mere question of ordinal numbering. The only sensible way to conceive of World War II, at least in its European aspects, is as arising from the results of World War I. The same may be said of the Cold War, which ensued after 1945, and (most importantly from our point of view today) the circumstances we now experience in the Middle East.
In order to understand how World War I changed the world -- perhaps more significantly than any European event since Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans on Christmas day in 800 A.D. -- it is necessary to look briefly at the political order of Europe as it existed on the eve of the war. The last major re-drawing of the European map took place after the Napoleonic wars, at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-5. The effort of European diplomacy at this time was to return, as closely as it was possible to do, to the arrangements that had existed before the French revolution. France and Spain were restored to their Bourbon monarchies; the Netherlands, Denmark, and Russia to their respective royal houses. Italy remained divided among the Neapolitan Bourbons, the Papal States, and its northern provinces between their Savoy or Habsburg rulers. The Holy Roman Empire, after a thousand years, tottered to its end in 1806, and was not revived; but the German principalities it had comprised remained under their respective kings and princes, while the considerable territories under the personal rule of the Habsburgs became a multi-ethnic state within which the monarch retained the title of emperor. As it had been since its emergence from the Dark Ages, Europe was ruled by crowned heads and governed by an aristocracy of blood, to which prosperous members of the professional and mercantile classes occasionally were able to elevate themselves given the necessary intelligence and drive.
Two important changes to the European map during the 19th century involved countries that were to play important parts during the 20th. The ambitions of Prussia to become a significant military power had arisen in the early 18th century, and that Hohenzollern kingdom moved from strength to strength until, at the Battle of Waterloo, its Field Marshal Gebhard von Blcher shared victory with the duke of Wellington. In the post-Napoleonic European political atmosphere, Prussia asserted itself repeatedly -- here against Austria-Hungary, there against Denmark, or its neighboring German principalities, and finally against France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. This deposed Napoleon III, ushering in the French Third Republic, and, most importantly for our narrative, established the German empire -- the Second Reich (replacing the first, the defunct Holy Roman Empire) -- under the Hohenzollern Kaiser Wilhelm I. Similarly, following the Risorgimento led by Garibaldi, the fragmented states of the Italian peninsula were united under the house of Savoy.
The 19th century was an age of imperial expansion. The British and the French had been colonial powers since the 17th century, and continued to expand their possessions -- Britain held India, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and its colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, settled by British immigrants, achieved self-governing status while retaining their ties to the Crown. France had African, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian colonies. Even smaller powers, like the Netherlands in the East Indies or Portugal in Africa, had significant overseas possessions.
To this competition for colonial dominion, the relatively new nation-states of Germany and Italy were latecomers. The rule of Wilhelm I, the first German emperor, had been sober and calculating; his great minister Otto von Bismarck knew when to be ruthless, and when to be cautious. Wilhelm's son Frederick III reigned for only 99 days, and was succeeded by his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, a man of very different character from his grandfather. Wilhelm II had been a sickly boy, the product of a breech birth, and had a withered left arm, the result of Erb's palsy. His parents, Frederick III and the princess Victoria (daughter of the British queen), had admired the way in which Queen Victoria and her prince-consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had reigned over Britain. They had hoped to emulate them, and to establish a British-style cabinet to replace the executive ministry that Bismarck had created for himself. Bismarck attempted to alienate their son to use as a political weapon against them; but this plan backfired when the headstrong prince succeeded as Wilhelm II, and his imperial ambitions conflicted with Bismarck's conservative advice. Bismarck was soon dismissed, and Wilhelm undertook personal rule as Louis XIV had done upon coming of age. Unfortunately, Bismarck was not as dispensable as was Mazarin, and Wilhelm was not as astute as Louis XIV.
Germany acquired some African colonies, Tanganyika and Southwest Africa; but the grand stratagem of Wilhelm's colonial policy was to compete with the jewel in Britain's crown, India. To this end, Wilhelm cultivated the friendship of the Turkish sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, execrated as a despot by all the other European powers. The Ottoman Empire was a decaying enterprise; heir to the Byzantines by conquest, it still exercised at least nominal sovereignty over vast parts of the Middle East, including all of what we now identify as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the modern state of Israel, Jordan, Mesopotamia, and the coasts of the Arabian peninsula along the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Wilhelm proclaimed himself a protector of Islam as early as 1898. One of the German projects of this period was to build a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad.
German militarism and expansionism created a volatility in Europe that was primed to explode at the slightest incident, and this found its release on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of the Austrian heir-apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary saw this as an act of war by Serbia. Serbia, in turn, brought into the war its Russian ally, and by the activation of a series of alliances, most of Europe, including England and France, was at war within a month. Imperial Germany, like Napoleonic France a century earlier, now found itself involved in a war on two European fronts. It is to this desperate circumstance that so many of its disastrous political and diplomatic initiatives in pursuit of the war originated, and their consequences continue to haunt us today.
Turkey joined the Central Powers in October 1914. The historian Peter Hopkirk, in his fascinating book Like Hidden Fire, points out that the first use in the 20th century of a word with which we have become depressingly familiar -- jihad -- occurred in November 1914, when a fatwa was read out in every mosque in the Ottoman Empire proclaiming it. The "infidels" at whom it was directed were carefully defined so as to exclude subjects of Germany and its allies -- the Kaiser's hope was that the large number of Muslims in British India, heeding the call of the Ottoman sultan in his role as Caliph, would rise against their colonial rulers, and at least would divert British resources from the war in Europe.
A similar German machination was the dispatch of V. I. Lenin on the so-called "sealed train" to Russia. The Russian war effort had caused enough distress in that country that a non-communist revolution had taken place there in February of 1917, bringing about the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. The German government hoped that the Bolsheviks under Lenin would cause such unrest that war on the eastern front would cease, allowing Germany to concentrate on fighting in the west. The use of political strategies of this kind, rather than purely military ones, was characteristic of the German approach. A comparable effort to light nearby fires to distract a potential enemy lay behind the so-called Zimmerman telegram, intercepted by British cryptanalysts, in which the German government proposed to induce Mexico to declare war against the United States, and to bring Japan into the fight, should America enter the war on the Allied side.
Unfortunately for Germany, while her efforts to incite turmoil around the world succeeded, they were not sufficient to help the German cause. The Bolshevik revolution prevailed, and the Russian war effort collapsed; it was still too late for the Central Powers. The Ottoman entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers did not bring about the hoped-for rising of Muslims in India. Instead it brought British and French armed forces into the Middle East in hopes of keeping the Turks out of Europe. It was in this connection that the Allies engaged in some dubious political strategies of their own, which backfired just as badly as those of the Germans. Three sets of political promises made at this time raised an imbroglio with which we are still contending.
Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire had long chafed under their Turkish masters. Their common Islamic faith was not enough to salve the ethnic antipathies that have long characterized the Middle East. The Allies hoped to enlist Arab support against the Turks, promising them self-government if they won. To this end they enlisted the Hashemite family, hereditary sharifs of Mecca, on their side. It was this campaign, under the command of the British General Sir Edmund Allenby, in which the exploits of T. E. Lawrence were so celebrated and prominent.
Another promise of this period was the Balfour declaration, which pledged to the international Zionist movement a homeland in Palestine, which is today the state of Israel. In looking at the circumstances surrounding this well-known event, it must be admitted that its motives were not at all altruistic. Though it had been secured in Britain, through the agency of British subjects of the Jewish faith, it was not primarily aimed at them. Its purpose was to arouse support for the Allied war effort amongst Jews in non-belligerent countries (as the United States was at the time); in Russia, where because of historical circumstances Jews understandably viewed their own government, one of the Allies, with little loyalty; and within the Central Powers themselves.
The final promise of this group was one the British and French made to each other, the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which their respective governments proposed to divide the Middle East between themselves into colonial protectorates, with France to receive Lebanon and Syria, Britain Mesopotamia, Palestine, and parts of Arabia.
The entry of the United States into the war was decisive in turning the tide for the Allies. The German plan to foment a backyard war in Mexico was thwarted by the disorder that country had fallen into during its long revolution. The European war ended in the autumn of 1918. First to collapse was the smallest of the Central Powers, Bulgaria, which signed an armistice on September 29 at Saloniki. The Ottoman Empire gave up on October 30. The battle of Vittorio Veneto ended in defeat for Austria-Hungary, which led to an armistice signed at Padua on November 3. The final armistice with Germany, which we commemorate as Veterans' Day, was signed on November 11 at Compiegne.
In surveying the wreckage we note the fall of four historic monarchical empires: the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman. What was to replace them?
The peace of Versailles was punitive to the Germans, requiring the payment of vast indemnities. The British economist John Maynard Keynes correctly foresaw the hyperinflation of the German currency to which this led. The destruction of economic value that followed completed the impoverishment of the German middle class that had begun with the privations of war. Popular discontent with the ineffectual Weimar republic set the stage for Hitler's rise. The fall of the Habsburg monarchy created a handful of small central European states organized primarily upon ethnic or linguistic identity, most of them incapable of sustained self-defense. The Bolsheviks consolidated power in Russia, as "Reds" mopped up the residue of "White" opposition. Out of the Italian victory over Austro-Hungary emerged an ex-soldier named Benito Mussolini, whose ambition it was to reclaim for Italy the Mediterranean littoral once ruled by the Romans.
Within a generation, Europe would again be at war. In the short term, it must be acknowledged that the Soviet Union, and not any of the Western Allies, was the real victor of World War II. It added to its territory the defenseless central European states that had previously been taken by Hitler, and held them for nearly fifty years, while manipulating politics in Western Europe through influential Communist parties, like those of Italy and France, which were in truth wholly owned Soviet subsidiaries. The United States was left only with responsibility of defending Western Europe against the Soviet threat, a net cost to the American taxpayer for which Europeans have rendered scant gratitude. Britain, which sacrificed two generations of the flower of her manhood in two world wars, was so weakened by its loss of blood and treasure that the British Empire was no longer sustainable.
In short, the after-effects of World War I changed the map of Europe, ended a thousand years of monarchical/aristocratic rule, ushered the present age of ideology, and led to ongoing turmoil there for seventy-five years. But this is far from being the end!
Let's turn now to the Middle East. I'm often reminded by that situation of Mel Brooks's movie (and now Broadway play) The Producers. Its plot, as you may recall, is that two dubious entrepreneurs sell half-shares in their musical to far more than two people. Their intention is that the show will flop, the investors will lose their money, and they will be left with the windfall. Instead the show succeeds and they face the dilemma of paying off their backers.
The denouement of World War I in the Middle East put France and Britain in the position of Bialystock and Bloom. How could the promises made to the Arabs by Lawrence and Allenby -- to the Zionists by the Balfour Declaration -- and by Sykes and Picot to their respective countries -- all be honored? It is hard to conceive that all these agreements could have been made in the realistic expectation that the Ottoman Empire, which had since the fall of the Abbasids maintained some sort of peace and order in the region, would collapse completely and leave the Allies in a position where they were expected to deliver. While Islamic militants are quite conscious of history, and point to all sorts of grievances including the mediaeval Crusades, or the loss of "al-Andalus" (Spain -- in 1492!), it is clearly to the aftermath of World War I that they owe their most recent and bitterest ones.
The United States had no direct involvement in the Middle East during World War I, but just as was the case with the war's consequences in Europe, it has been left in the unenviable position of dealing with them in this part of the world. The war's great significance as an historic turning point can be seen in that the world remains unsettled by its effects. It has not been made "safe for democracy," as Woodrow Wilson so naively hoped, and shows no sign of returning to its pre-1914 stability any time soon. *
"[T]here is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust." --James Madison
