by Gwynne Dyer
In 1913 an unprecedented three-quarters of the 74,000 men enrolled in Canadian militia regiments actually received a couple of weeks’ training in camp—and Sam Hughes (who had recently promoted himself to major-general) was not in the least ambivalent about the fact that they would almost certainly be sent to fight overseas if war came. He delighted in sub-Nietzschean formulas that exalted mass action and war: “The old Saxon days have returned,” he was wont to exult, “when the whole nation must be armed.” And his audiences lapped it up; English Canada was ready to “fight the good fight.” Like the hymn, however, that was an English, Protestant view of things—and the larger forces in the world were moving strongly against England.
EXCURSION 1
THE ALLIANCE SYSTEM
MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE LIVES WERE CHANGED OR ENDED BY what we now call the First World War believed they were taking part in a unique event of great moral importance, and the name we subsequently gave it strengthens that impression. Indeed, they were soon calling it “the war to end all wars.” But the First World War was not an unusual political event, nor did it have any moral significance. It was just another turn in the cycle of “world wars” that stretched back to the beginning of the modern international system in seventeenth-century Europe. The list of principal players had changed over the centuries, but the basic rules of the alliance game had not.
During the 1400s and 1500s, powerful centralized governments began to extend their control over large parts of Europe. At the same time, rising wealth and better communications made it easier for large armies to operate far from home. Local wars had been constant in medieval Europe, but now a new pattern was superimposed on the old: the entire continent was transformed into a unified political and military arena.
Governments have always sought allies in their quarrels—it is an obvious way of increasing your own side’s power—but they could now make useful alliances with distant states. The ideal allies were countries that also had a quarrel with your own enemy, but it was almost as good if they had a quarrel with one of your enemy’s allies. So gradually, all the local rivalries coalesced into an interlocking political and strategic system that incorporated every great power in Europe—which soon came to mean, in practice, every great power in the world, since by the seventeenth century Europe already effectively dominated the entire globe. The modern international system was born, and in 1618 it produced the first “world war”: the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).
If you find the phrase jarring in this context, it’s because the images we normally associate with a “world war” are trenches, tanks, bomber fleets and nuclear explosions. Those are the things that make the world wars of the twentieth century different technologically. But as a political phenomenon such wars have a much longer history. In political terms, a world war is a war in which every recognized great power of the time is simultaneously involved, and in that very important sense the Thirty Years’ War was indeed the first world war. By the 1630s Swedish troops were fighting Spaniards in the centre of Germany, and Catholic France was allied to Muslim Turkey.
The use of alliances, Sir, has in the last age been too much experienced to be contested.… By alliances, Sir, the equipoise of power is maintained, and those alarms and apprehensions avoided, which must arise from daily vicissitudes of empire, and the fluctuations of perpetual contest.
Sir Robert Walpole, House of Commons, London, 1741
The alliances that organized the great powers into a system were generally governed by the principle known as the “balance of power,” a dynamic process in which coalitions were created against whichever state was seen as the most dangerous (the most powerful, or the most rapidly growing) in the system. In the early centuries of the system, alliances often had no formal existence in peacetime, although most states had a clear idea of whom they would be allied to when the next war came. But the absence of formal alliance structures meant that the “world wars” generally got off to a ragged start, with the various great powers joining in over a period of a number of years. Indeed, in the Thirty Years’ War, there was no single year when all the European powers were involved, although all of them were active in the war for substantial periods of time.
In the next three world wars, the aspirant superpower was France, which had become by far the richest and most populous of the European states. The Thirty Years’ War was followed at intervals of about half a century by the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13); the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); and finally by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). France was ultimately thwarted by alliances between all the states it threatened to dominate, but the game did not stop; after 1815 Britain emerged as the dominant power in the system. As an island country with no significant possessions on the European continent, Britain was considerably less threatening to the other great powers, but eventually, inevitably, a new challenger emerged: Germany. The result was the fifth world war—or, as it is more familiarly known, the First World War.
None of these transient superpowers and would-be superpowers was out to conquer the world, or even to rule all of Europe. They usually had specific, limited territorial goals, plus a general desire to become so powerful that they would be invulnerable to any challenge. But invulnerability for one state meant an unacceptable degree of vulnerability for everybody else in the game, so the alliance-forming process never lacked fuel. Nor were the world wars necessarily fought all over the world (though most of them affected several continents). The key criterion is simply that all the great powers are involved. And that being the case, world wars are unlike wars between two individual countries in the sense that they are not really about anything in particular. They are about everything in general.
As soon as continent-spanning alliances became the European norm, the possibility existed for wars in which there would be a general settlement of accounts. In theory, all the members of the winning alliance would achieve their particular national objectives, while all the members of the losing alliance would have to grant the victors’ demands. It was never quite that simple in practice, but these wars invariably brought about a general reshuffle of the cards—and even in the long intervals of relative peace, the next general war became the implicit focus of the great-power competition. International politics became and remained a zero-sum game in which any gain in power by one state is automatically a loss for all the others in the system. As to why these “world wars” recurred with an interval of about half a century—that had to do, curiously enough, with the peace treaties.
Utrecht, Peace of: a series of treaties (1713) concluding the war of the Spanish Succession. Philip V kept Spain … and Charles VI obtained Milan, Naples, Sardinia and the Spanish Netherlands. Britain gained Gibraltar, Minorca, Newfoundland and Acadia.… French expansion was halted.
Longman’s Modern English Dictionary
Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.
Charles de Gaulle, 1962
Once upon a time, schools taught European history as a succession of peace treaties at which everything was settled: the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the Treaty of Paris (1763), the Congress of Vienna (1815), and so on. Fashions in teaching history have changed now, but as far as the causes of world wars are concerned, the old-fashioned history teachers were right—peace treaties did matter. They were the indisputable record of what territories the victorious side had won and what the defeated alliance had lost. Equally important, they were an implicit statement of each state’s power, and therefore its position in the international pecking order. However, there was always the prospect of a rematch.
At the end of each world war the relative rank of the great powers, together with all the borders that depended on that, were defined and frozen. But afterward, as the years passed, some countries would grow more quickly than others, and some would change sides. At first the winners of the most recent world war would still be powerful enough to enforce the peace treaty, b
ut gradually the chance would grow for another roll of the dice. The interval of around fifty years between world wars was simply the average time it took for enough changes to take place that the most recent peace treaty was no longer enforceable.
By then, some countries would reckon that their strength entitled them to more status, influence and territory than they were allocated in the last treaty, and others no longer had the strength needed to defend their gains under that treaty. The international system would become increasingly unstable, and at that point it took a deliberate decision by only one country to attack a neighbour, or even just a bluff that misfired, to start the slide into another general war. It would end in another treaty that readjusted everybody’s “prestige” (in plain English, the ability to frighten their rivals) and changed a good many borders.
This system was well understood and generally accepted by educated Europeans down to the early nineteenth century. They lived, as Walpole said in 1745, amid “the fluctuations of perpetual contest.” Yet by 1914 almost everybody had forgotten how the system worked. There had not been another world war on schedule in the mid-nineteenth century, so they saw themselves as the heirs of the “long peace” that had lasted, by then, just one year short of a century.
History does not run on rails. The mid-nineteenth-century world war almost happened several times, but it never quite got going. Instead, there was a series of smaller wars in which the great powers fought each other not all at once, but in rotation: Britain, France and Turkey against Russia in 1854, France and Italy against Austria in 1859, Austria against Germany in 1866, and Germany against France in 1870. They were quite big wars, but mostly quite short—which may partly explain why they didn’t expand into a general war: there just wasn’t enough time. It may also have helped that Britain was so powerful compared to all the others (at mid-century half the industrial capacity of the entire world was in the United Kingdom), and so safe from its rivals because of its complete domination of the seas, that it simply didn’t feel the need to become involved in most of these wars. Whatever their outcomes, Britain would remain the undisputed superpower.
This series of short European wars, a string of firecrackers rather than a single great explosion, nevertheless had the cumulative political effect of a world war. It was in these wars that the Austrian empire ceased to be a power of the first rank, and the newly united German empire became one. Italy emerged as a power (albeit a minor one), and France dropped down a peg. Various territories changed hands: Venetia, Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Romania, among others. Political realities having been adjusted to conform to the actual strength of the various great powers, stability then returned to the system for around another half century. But not forever, of course.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Germany grew very fast, Russia grew even faster (although from a lower starting point) and British power went into relative decline. By the beginning of the twentieth century, world war was in the air again, and the alliances that would fight it were solidifying fast. Between 1898 and 1914, a crisis that brought Europe to the brink occurred almost every other year.
If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damn silly thing in the Balkans.
Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1898
There is a grand old tradition, when writing about the outbreak of the First World War, to start with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a nineteen-year-old Serbian called Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in June 1914, and follow the escalating diplomatic crisis of the following month in simulated astonishment at how such a huge event could have grown from such a little cause. The writer can then, according to taste, castigate the statesmen and generals of the time impartially for letting this needless calamity happen, or try to fasten the blame on some specific player (usually Germany, if you’re writing in English or French) who allegedly wanted the war and made it happen. People want a big disaster to have a big cause and a recognizable villain. But if you really want to understand how such a great war grew out of such petty events, you would do better to consider the Power Law.
The Power Law describes how so-called critical systems like those that produce earthquakes and forest fires are completely undiscriminating about the scale of the event. Most events will be on the smaller side, of course, but you don’t need special causes to get a huge one: an event of any size can happen literally at any time.
A critical system is one that is inherently unstable, and locks in more and more instabilities as time goes by. Think of the accumulating stresses along a fault line between two continental plates, or the accumulation of inflammable debris on the forest floor. From time to time there will be earthquakes and forest fires, but most of them will be small. The Power Law says that any one of them could be the Big One.
To know if a particular class of events is subject to the Power Law, you just graph the scale of the events against their frequency. If it turns out to be a straight relationship where doubling the size of the event decreases the frequency by half—or makes it four times less likely, or sixteen times, or any other power of two—then you are dealing with a critical system, and you can forget about seeking major causes for bigger events. A random pebble is sixteen times less likely to cause a huge avalanche than a little one, but it can cause either.
British physicist Lewis Richardson was the first to notice that wars are subject to the Power Law, and it was confirmed in 1983 by Jack Levy, currently Board of Governors’ Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, in a massive study entitled War in the Modern Great Power System, which spanned the entire period 1495–1975. If you measure the size of every war by its casualties, then doubling the size exactly halves the frequency. This means that great wars do not need great causes. Once sufficient strains have accumulated in a critical system, a world war can strike out of a clear blue sky, as it did in the summer of 1914.
All that stuff you read in conventional accounts of 1914 about the interlocking military alliances and the even more intricately interlinked railway timetables that delivered millions of mobilized troops to the frontiers of the great powers is perfectly true: the great powers really had built a system that was bound to fail catastrophically sooner or later. But those were precisely the instabilities and strains that made international politics into a critical system in the early twentieth century. The question of whether we still live in a critical system today will have to wait until later.
CHAPTER 2
A LONG WAY FROM HOME
PARIS, ONTARIO WAS, IN 1914, A STEPHEN LEACOCK SORT OF TOWN: credulous, not too wise in the ways of the world, but enthusiastic and eager to please. It would be wrong to say that the news of the outbreak of war that August struck Paris like a bolt from the blue. That would imply threat. Rather the war in Europe (not yet the Great War, let alone the First World War) came as a welcome diversion at the end of the summer.
A crowd began to mill around Grand River Street. Prominent citizens trumpeted their considered opinions. One said: “The war will be over within three months. The Russians will roll in from the east and the British and French from the west, and they’ll meet in Berlin before Christmas.” The crowd vigorously cheered his perspicacity.
Then the Citizens’ Band formed up in front of the fire hall and began to play martial music. The crowd grew larger. It sang “The Maple Leaf Forever,” “Rule Britannia,” and “God Save the King.” Members of the Scout Bugle Band ran home for their bugles. As Bugler Grenville Whitby rushed from the house, his father said: “War’s a serious thing. You shouldn’t be out tonight making a noise.” Grenville heedlessly ran down the street, blowing shrill blasts. The crowd formed itself into a procession, and led by blaring bugles and thumping drums, paraded along William, Willow and Dundas Streets. Torches smoked and flared, and in their light, eyes gleamed with exultation.
Donald A. Smith, At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2
In Montreal on 1 and 3 August, when it was already clear that Fr
ance, at least, was going to be fighting Germany, huge crowds paraded in the streets waving British and French flags and singing “La Marsellaise” and “Rule Britannia.” When Britain formally declared war on Germany on 4 August (automatically taking Canada with it), thousands of people came out to cheer in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria. In the other Paris, in France, the newspaper Le Temps saw something deeply poetic in the fact that English Canadian blood would now be shed for France, while French Canadians bled for England.
Two weeks later in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the former prime minister, stood up and declared: “We are British subjects, and today we are face to face with the consequences which are involved in that proud fact.” By then the Conservative government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden had already offered to send one division (22,500 men) to Europe. It had secretly bought two submarines that had just been built for the Chilean navy, and had placed Canada’s two decrepit training cruisers at the disposal of Britain’s Royal Navy. Maybe Borden’s government could have responded a little less eagerly, but it could not really have stayed out of the war unless it had decided to declare Canada independent then and there. Nobody had that in mind, not even the most ardent of Quebec Nationalists.
Canada, an Anglo-French nation, tied to England and France by a thousand ethnic, social, intellectual and economic threads, has a vital interest in the maintenance of the prestige, power and world action of France and England.
Henri Bourassa, Le Devoir, September 8, 1914
Canada was a very different country a century ago: the great majority of its eight million people were actually of British or French descent, and few English Canadian families had been in the country for more than two or three generations. Nevertheless, sentimental ties are not the same as “vital interests,” and there were no practical reasons why Canada’s long-term interests depended on the maintenance of British power and prestige (except for the old but fading concern about American expansionism). However, plenty of short-term interests were in play—many Canadian and British business interests were linked, for example—and in any case Canada was not a fully independent nation in 1914. Henri Bourassa, whose newspaper was the strongest public voice of French Canadian nationalism, would probably have preferred to copy the policy of the United States and declare Canada neutral in the war, but he understood that emotional, commercial and legal factors meant that Canada had to support the Entente powers (Britain, France and Russia). However, he stressed that it should do so “to the measure of its strength, and by appropriate means”—which did not, in his opinion, include sending Canadian troops to Europe.
