The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (8 page)

It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated that the true narrative arc of the twentieth century reveals itself. This was not ‘the triumph of the West’, but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the inexorable revival of Asian power and the descent of the West. Gradually, beginning in Japan, Asian societies modernized themselves or were modernized by European rule. As this happened, the gap between European and Asian incomes began to narrow. And with that narrowing, the relative decline of the West became unstoppable. This was nothing less than the reorientation of the world, redressing a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500. No historian of the twentieth century can afford to overlook this huge – and ongoing – secular shift.

If the Orient had simply ‘occidentalized’ itself, of course, we might still salvage the idea of an ultimate Western triumph. Yet no Asian country – not even Japan in the Meiji era – transformed itself into a replica of a European nation state. On the contrary, most Asian nationalists insisted that their countries must modernize à la carte, embracing only those aspects of the Western model that suited their purposes, and retaining important components of their traditional cultures. This was hardly surprising. Much of what they saw of Western culture – in its imperialist incarnation – did not invite imitation. The crucial point, of course, is that the reorientation of the world could not have been, and was not, achieved without conflict. For the Western powers had no desire to relinquish their mastery over Asia’s peoples and resources. Even when they were comprehensively beaten by Japanese forces in 1942, the Europeans and Americans alike fought back with the aim of restoring the old Western dominance, though with distinctly mixed results. In many ways, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the last European empire in Asia could be said to have fallen. In that sense it seems justifiable to interpret the twentieth century not as the triumph but as the descent of the West, with the Second World War as the decisive turning point. For the death throes of the Occident’s empire in the Orient were as bloody as anything that happened in Central and Eastern Europe, not least because of the extreme reactions against Western models of development that they inspired in countries such as Japan, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. It was a descent, in the sense that the West could never again wield the power it had enjoyed in 1900. It was also a descent, however, in that much of what arose in the East to challenge that power was recognizably descended from Western ideas and institutions, albeit through a process of cultural miscegenation.

The potential instability of assimilation and integration; the insidious spread of the meme that identifies some human beings as aliens; the combustible character of ethnically mixed borderlands; the chronic volatility of mid-twentieth-century economic life; the bitter struggles
between old multi-ethnic empires and short-lived empire-states; the convulsions that marked the decline of Western dominance – these, then, are the principal themes that will be explored and elaborated on below.

At the centre of the story, as may already be clear, are the events we know as the Second World War. But only as I tried to write an adequate sequel to my earlier book about the First World War did I come to appreciate just how un-illuminating it would be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to 1945 – yet another book focused on the now familiar collisions of armies, navies and air forces. Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple regional conflicts? After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the underdog more in word than deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe. In 1941, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans. All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 1931; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable. Meanwhile, civil wars raged before, during and after these interstate wars, notably in China, Spain, the Balkans, the Ukraine and Poland. And no sooner had this supposedly homogeneous Second World War ended, than a new wave of violence swept the Middle East and Asia, which historians refer to somewhat euphemistically as decolonization. Civil wars and partitions scarred India, Indo-China, China and Korea; in the last case, internecine war escalated into interstate war with the interventions of an American-led coalition and Communist China. Thereafter the two superpowers made war by proxy. The theatres of global conflict changed, from Central and Eastern Europe and Manchuria-Korea to Latin America, Indo-China and sub-Saharan Africa.

It might therefore be said that the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the crescendo of an entire century of organized violence – a global Hundred Years War. Even to speak of ‘a second Thirty Years War’ is to understate the scale of the upheaval, for in truth the era of truly global conflict began ten years before 1914 and ended eight years after 1945. Nor will Hobsbawm’s attractive idea of a ‘short twentieth century’ from 1914 to 1991 quite do. There were discontinuities just as important as that of 1989 – perhaps more so – in 1979. On the other hand, the collapse of the Soviet empire saw the revival of ethnic conflicts that had been dormant during the Cold War, not least in the Balkans – a resumption rather than the end of history. In the end, I have elected to locate the war of the world between two dates: 1904, when the Japanese struck the first effective blow against European dominance of the Orient; and 1953, when the end of the Korean War drew a line through the Korean peninsula, matching the Iron Curtain that had already been drawn through Central Europe. But what followed this Fifty Years War was not a ‘long peace’ but what I have called the Third World’s War.

Historians always yearn for closure, for a date when their narratives can end. But in writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the war of the world described here can genuinely be regarded as over even now. Rather like Wells’s science-fiction
War of the Worlds
, which has been reincarnated as an artefact of popular culture at more or less regular intervals,
*
the War of the World chronicled here stubbornly refuses to die. As long, it seems, as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men – as long as we dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste – this war will recur, defying the frontiers of chronology.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914!

John Maynard Keynes

Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the two last decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, throughout Europe, there rose a kindling fever… people were enthusiastic hero-worshippers and enthusiastic adherents of the social creed of the Man in the Street; one had faith and was sceptical… one dreamt of ancient castles and shady avenues… but also of prairies, vast horizons, forges and rolling-mills… Some [people] hurl[ed] themselves… upon the new, as yet untrodden century, while others were having a last fling in the old one
.

Robert Musil

The world on September 11, 1901, was not a bad place for a healthy white man with a decent education and some money in the bank. Writing eighteen years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes could look back, with a mixture of nostalgia and irony, to the days when the class to which he belonged had enjoyed ‘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’:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

Not only could Keynes’s inhabitant of London buy the world’s wares and invest his capital in a wide range of global securities; he could also travel the earth’s surface with unprecedented freedom and ease:

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But the crucial point, as Keynes saw it, was that the man of 1901 ‘regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.’ This first age of globalization was an idyll, indeed:

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, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.

It is worth turning back to
The Times
of that golden age to verify Keynes’s justly famous recollection. Exactly a century before two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade
Center, ‘globalization’ was indeed a reality, even if that clumsy word was as yet unknown. On that day – which was a sunny Wednesday – Keynes’s inhabitant of London could, as he sipped his breakfast tea, have ordered a sack of coal from Cardiff, a pair of kid gloves from Paris or a box of cigars from Havana. He might also, if anticipating a visit to the grouse moors of Scotland, have purchased a ‘Breadalbane Waterproof and self-ventilating Shooting Costume (cape and kilt)’; or he might, if his interests lay in a different direction, have ordered a copy of Maurice C. Hime’s book entitled
Schoolboy’s Special Immorality
. He could have invested his money in any one of nearly fifty US companies quoted in London – most of them railroads like the Denver and Rio Grande (whose latest results were reported that day) – or, if he preferred, in one of the seven other stock markets also covered regularly by
The Times
. He might, if he felt the urge to travel, have booked himself passage on the P&O liner
Peninsular
, which was due to sail for Bombay and Karachi the next day, or on one of the twenty-three other P&O ships scheduled to sail for Eastern destinations over the next ten weeks – to say nothing of the thirty-six other shipping lines offering services from England to all the corners of the globe. Did New York seem to beckon? The
Manitou
sailed tomorrow, or he could wait for the Hamburg-America Line’s more luxurious
Fürst Bismarck
, which sailed from Southampton on the 13th. Did Buenos Aires appeal to him more? Did he perhaps wish to see for himself how the city’s Grand National Tramway Company was using – or rather, losing – his money? Very well; the
Danube
, departing for Argentina on Friday, still had some cabins free.

The world, in short, was his oyster. And yet, as Keynes understood, this oyster was not without its toxic impurities. The lead story in
The Times
that September 11 was a ‘hopeful’ report – vainly hopeful, as it turned out – that the American President William McKinley was showing signs of recovering from the attempt on his life five days earlier by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. (‘The President is in great order,’ his physician was quoted as saying. In fact, McKinley died on September 14.) This attack had awakened the American public to a hitherto neglected threat from within. The paper’s New York correspondent reported that the police were engaged in rounding up all the known anarchists in the city, though the plot to kill the President was
believed to have been hatched in Chicago, where two anarchist leaders, Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, had already been arrested. ‘I only done my duty,’ Czolgosz explained, by which he meant the anarchist’s duty to kill rulers and wage war on established governments. ‘I thought’, he added as he was led to the electric chair, ‘it would help the working people.’ The news that the President’s condition was improving and that the perpetrator’s associates were being rounded up might have reassured our breakfasting reader, as it had reassured the stock market the previous day. He would nevertheless have been aware that assassinations of heads of state were becoming disturbingly frequent.
*
The ideology of anarchism and the practice of terrorism were just two of the ‘serpents’ in the garden of globalization that Keynes had forgotten about by 1919.

What of the ‘projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries’? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast,
The Times
listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though
The Times
made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers’ lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike
The Times
’s editorial writers as sufficient to end the war: