The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (6 page)

Given such power and such prosperity, given the evidence of so many advances in so many fields in the past century, why would Europe want to throw it all away? There were many Europeans, like Stefan Zweig’s parents, who thought that such recklessness and folly was simply impossible. Europe was too interdependent, its economies too intertwined, to break apart into war. It would not be rational, a quality greatly admired at the time.

The march of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, in so many fields from geology to politics, had, it was widely assumed, brought much greater rationality in human affairs. The more humans knew, whether about themselves, society, or the natural world, the more they would make decisions based on the facts rather than on emotion. In time, science – including the new social sciences of sociology and politics – would uncover everything we needed to know. ‘The history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature,’ wrote Edward Tylor, who was one of the fathers of modern anthropology, ‘and our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motions of the waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.’
¹¹
Tied to this faith in science – or positivism, as it was usually referred to at the time – was an equal
faith in progress, or, as Europeans often wrote, Progress. Human development was, so it was assumed, linear, even if not all societies had reached the same stage. Herbert Spencer, in his time the most widely read British philosopher, argued that the laws of evolution applied as much to human societies as they did to species. Moreover, progress was generally seen to be across the board: advanced societies were better in all respects from the arts to political and social institutions to philosophy and religion. European nations were manifestly in the lead (although there was room for disagreement about rankings among them). Other nations, the old, white dominions of the British Empire being promising examples, would eventually follow along. At the Exposition there was considerable interest in the Japanese exhibits since, said the guide, Japan had adapted with marvellous rapidity to the modern world. And Japan was now a player in international relations, if not globally then certainly in Asia.

The other challenge that was unfolding to Europe’s dominance came to its west, from the New World. When the United States was left out initially from the row of important foreign pavilions along the Seine, its chief representative to the Exposition, a rich Chicago businessman, explained why this would not do: ‘The United States have so developed as to entitle them not only to an exalted place among the nations of the earth, but to the foremost rank of all in advanced civilization.’
¹²
By 1900 the United States had recovered from the Civil War. Its government had crushed the last Indian resistance and American domination of its land mass was complete. Immigrants were pouring to work in its farms, its factories and its mines and the American economy was expanding rapidly. Where Britain had led the first industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century based on coal, steam power and iron, the United States with its grid of electricity and its seemingly limitless ability for technological innovation was in the forefront of the second at the end of the century. By 1902, American plants produced more iron and steel than Germany and Great Britain together. American exports, from cigarettes to machinery, tripled between 1860 and 1900. By 1913 the United States had 11 per cent of the world’s trade and that share was increasing annually.

At the Exposition, the American pavilion, which did end up in a prime location by the river, was a model of the Capitol in Washington,
with, on its dome, a giant sculpture showing Liberty drawn by four horses in the Chariot of Progress. The correspondent for the
New York Observer
described the American exhibits for his readers: the superb works by American sculptors such Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the magnificent displays of jewels from Tiffany and Company, or the watches and clocks which were the equal of any from Switzerland. Only a couple of displays from London and Paris, he said dismissively, ‘approached the perfection of the gold and silver work which was displayed by the United States’. And there were samples of American technology – Singer sewing machines, typewriters, vast electrical dynamos – and of the raw materials – copper, wheat, gold – which were pouring out on to the world’s markets. ‘Enough was done’, he reported complacently, ‘to make a profound impression upon the millions of visitors, of the power, wealth, resources and ambition of the United States.’
¹³
And in his view the Paris Exposition paled by comparison with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.
¹⁴
His was the voice of a new American self-confidence and a growing American nationalism with ambitions to play a greater part in the world.

The time had now come, so historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner argued, to move beyond American shores and spread American influence to nearby islands and to other countries. Talk of the United States’ manifest destiny in the world found many eager listeners, from businessmen searching for new markets to evangelicals looking for souls to save. While Americans did not see their expansion as imperialist – unlike that of the European powers – the United States did somehow still acquire both territory and spheres of influence. In the Pacific it established a presence in both Japan and China and gathered up a series of tiny islands whose names – Guam, Midway, Wake – were going to become famous in the Second World War. In 1889 the United States got involved in a complicated dispute with Germany and Britain over the sharing out of the Samoan islands and in 1898 annexed the Hawaiian islands. As a result of the Spanish–American War in the same year, the United States found itself in control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Central America and the Caribbean became an increasingly important backyard as American investment flowed southwards. By 1910 Americans owned more of Mexico than the Mexicans themselves. To the north, Canada remained a temptation to annexationists.

The growing American world presence brought what was at first the unwelcome realisation that the United States was going to have to spend money on a modern navy and one, moreover, which could operate in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1890, at a time when even little Chile had a stronger navy than the United States, Congress reluctantly approved the first three modern American battleships. The gradual building of American military power was accompanied by an increasing willingness on the part of the United States to assert its rights against other powers. In 1895 the new Secretary of State, Richard Olney, raised the rank of American representatives abroad to that of ambassador so that they could talk as equals with their fellow diplomats. The same year the headstrong and pugnacious Olney intervened in Britain’s dispute with Venezuela over its borders with the British colony of Guiana (today Guyana) to warn off Salisbury, the British Prime Minister. ‘Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition,’ wrote Olney, adding that ‘its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers’. Salisbury was annoyed but Britain had enough troubles elsewhere and so he was content to let the dispute go to arbitration. When the United States seized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in the war of 1898, Britain again did nothing. In the succeeding years, the British renounced any interest in building a canal across the isthmus of Panama and moved their Caribbean Fleet back into home waters, thus effectively conceding dominance in the region to the United States.

The man who best exemplified the new mood in the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, whose first and most successful project was himself. A sickly, unprepossessing child from an old Establishment family, he made himself through sheer will into a bold swashbuckling cowboy, explorer, outdoorsman and hunter (the Teddy bear was named after him). He was also a hero of the Spanish–American War for the charge at San Juan Hill, although his many critics noted that his memoirs gave the impression that he had won the war single-handed. Henry James talked about ‘the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and monstrous noise’ and nicknamed him Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter
famously remarked: ‘My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.’ In September 1900, he became President when an anarchist shot President William McKinley. Roosevelt loved the office – ‘the bully pulpit’ – and took particular pleasure in managing American foreign policy.
¹⁵

Like many of his compatriots he believed that the United States ought to be a force for good in the world, promoting the spread of democracy, free trade and peace, which he saw as intertwined. In his first message to Congress in 1901 he said, ‘Whether we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize that we have international duties no less than international rights.’ He also made it clear that, under his leadership, the United States would back up its good intentions with muscle and that meant having a strong navy. ‘No one point of our policy, foreign or domestic, is more important than this to the honor and material welfare, and above all to the peace, of our nation in the future.’ Roosevelt had always been fascinated by ships and the sea (not unlike his contemporary Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany) and he made good his word. The American navy, which had eleven battleships in 1898, when Roosevelt became Vice-President, had thirty-six by 1913 and was the third largest in the world after those of Germany and Great Britain. The economic growth of the United States and its growing military power worried the Europeans. While the British chose accommodation, Kaiser Wilhelm talked from time to time of the need to bring the European powers together to face the challenges he saw coming from Japan and the United States, perhaps separately or perhaps together. Since the Kaiser was notably inconsistent, he also talked on other occasions of working with the United States against Japan. The prospect that the United States itself might increasingly intervene in Europe’s affairs in the coming century and, moreover, not once but twice take part in Europe’s great wars would have seemed fantastical to the Kaiser, as it would to most Europeans, and to the Americans themselves.

Surely the evidence of the century that had just passed showed that the world, especially the European world, was moving away from war. With a few exceptions the great powers had come together since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the Concert of Europe to manage Europe’s international affairs. The leading statesmen of the powers had
got into the habit of consulting each other and committees made up of their ambassadors had met frequently to deal with pressing issues, such as the debts owed by the Ottoman government to outside interests. The Concert had worked with success to sustain Europe’s long peace since 1815, guaranteeing treaties, insisting on respect for the rights of nations, encouraging the peaceful resolution of disputes, and, where necessary, calling smaller powers to order. The Concert of Europe was not a formal institution but it was a well-established way of dealing with international relations which served several generations of Europeans well.

Progress had gone hand in hand with peace so that the Europe of 1900 was a different one from that of a century before, infinitely more prosperous and apparently much more stable. The meetings which took place in the Congress Palace during the Paris Exposition reflected widespread hopes that the future would be even brighter. There were over 130 different events including discussions on the condition and rights of women, socialism, fire-fighting, vegetarianism, and philosophy.
¹⁶
The 9th Universal Peace Congress which was held there won the Exposition’s Grand Prize for its work. ‘There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world,’ wrote Zweig, ‘for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future …’
¹⁷

We now know, of course, that such faith in progress and reason was sadly misplaced, that the Europeans of 1900 were heading towards a crisis in 1914 that they failed to manage, with dreadful consequences: two world wars and a host of smaller ones, the rise of totalitarian movements on both the right and the left, savage conflicts between different nationalities, and atrocities on an unimaginable scale. It was the triumph not of reason but of its opposite. Most of them, though, did not know they were playing with fire. We must try to separate that knowledge of what was to come and remember that the Europeans of the time did not, for the most part, realise that they and their leaders were making decisions and taking steps which narrowed their options and which in the end destroyed their peace. We must attempt to understand those people of a century ago. We need to get at, as much as we can, what was in their minds: what they were remembering, fearing, or hoping. And what were their unspoken
assumptions, the beliefs and values they did not bother to talk about because everyone shared them? Why did they not see the dangers which were gathering about them in the years leading up to 1914?

To be fair to that lost world of 1900, not all Europeans shared the general confidence about either the future of humanity or its rationality. The Paris Exposition may have celebrated those two pillars of late nineteenth-century thought, the belief in progress and positivism with its faith that science could solve all problems, but such assumptions were under attack. Increasingly the claims of science to lay bare a universe in which everything worked according to orderly laws were being undermined. The work of Albert Einstein and his fellow physicists into atomic and sub-atomic particles suggested that unpredictability and random occurrences lay beneath the visible material world. Reality was not the only thing being called into question. So too was rationality. Psychologists and the new sociologists were showing that humans were more influenced by unconscious forces than had been assumed. In Vienna, the young Sigmund Freud was inventing the new practice of psychoanalysis to delve into the human unconscious and in same year as the Exposition he published
The Interpretation of Dreams
. Gustave Le Bon’s work on how people can behave in unexpected and irrational ways when they are in groups made a deep impression at the time and is still being used today by, among others, the American military. His book on the psychology of the crowd, which came out in 1895, was a popular success and was almost immediately translated into English.