To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The second source of surprise was that the populations of Europe embraced the war as they did. The picture of widespread enthusiasm does stand in need of modification and of amplification. But its fundamental message remains unequivocal. The belligerent peoples of Europe accepted the onset of war; they did not reject it. And yet the anticipation that there could be opposition, that mobilization could be sabotaged, that the workers in key war industries would strike, that reservists would not report for duty, was widely held. Part of the apocalyptic vision of war entertained by Bethmann Hollweg, by the Tsar, and by Grey rested on the assumption that war would not be accepted by the working class.

  SOCIALISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL

  The strength of socialism provided good grounds for their fears. After 1912 the German socialists, the SPD, constituted the largest single party in the Reichstag; the 1914 French elections gave the socialists almost thirty more seats than they had held in 1910, and their gains represented an increase of half a million votes since 1906. The rate of growth outstripped the pace of the economic and social change which underpinned it. In 1910, the socialist parties of the world claimed 2.4 million party members; by 1914 this figure had swollen to 4.2 million33.

  A major plank of socialism for many, but not all, of its adherents was pacifism. In 1889, to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, the Second International was formed to link the socialist parties of the world. But the first Moroccan crisis revealed how little had been done by 1905 to co-ordinate the responses of its members in the face of war. The German trade unions, asked by the French syndicalist organization the Confedération Générale du Travail (CGT) to co-operate in anti-war demonstrations, responded that such an initiative should come not from them but from the SPD, as it was the German workers’ political organization. The SPD was of the view that the French socialist party should take the lead, and the latter consequently accused the former of interfering in France’s domestic arrangements.34 Prompted by this fiasco, the International debated its response to war at its 1907 conference in Stuttgart. The French socialists Jean Jaurès and Edouard Vaillant proposed that war should be hindered by measures ranging from parliamentary intervention through mass strikes to revolution. But others feared that strikes and revolutions, particularly at times of national danger, were calculated to invite governmental repression and so threaten rather than advance the cause of socialism. August Bebel, the leader of the German socialists, proposed a formula that was less precise and consequently less provocative: workers and their parliamentary representatives should hinder the outbreak of war by the most effective means available; if war broke out nonetheless, they should work for its rapid conclusion. Although Bebel’s resolution was adopted, it was given a revolutionary rider by three more-radical figures, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Y. O. Martov: in the event of war socialists were to use the opportunity to hasten the demise of class rule.35

  Thus, the Stuttgart resolution was a compromise, long on strategy and short on tactics. In 1910, at Copenhagen, Vaillant, this time in conjunction with a Briton, Keir Hardie, tried to give it precision. They proposed a general strike as the means to avert war. The German socialists opposed, and rather than split over the issue the congress agreed that further consideration should be postponed until its next meeting, due to be held in Vienna in 1913. In the event, however, the outbreak of the first Balkan war disrupted the timings. An emergency meeting was held in Basle at the end of 1912. Rather than debate the Vaillant-Hardie proposal, the Basle meeting opted for a more general appeal to all pacifist elements, including the middle class. Convening in Basle cathedral, the Second International clothed its pacifism with a moral and even religious fervour which still lacked precision but now seemed to be effective. Anti-war demonstrations coincided with the conference, and the pressure for restraint put on governments was apparently reflected in their pursuit of peaceful solutions in 1913. The congress due to be held that year was postponed until September 1914, when a definitive decision on whether or not socialists would counter war with a general strike would be taken.

  Governmental fears of socialist strength, and specifically of the International’s pursuit of pacifism, were reflected in the optimism which overtook socialists themselves in 1913. The fact that the principal European crises of the previous decade had been settled without a major war confirmed their belief in the effectiveness of their own influence and in the argument, espoused especially by the German socialists, that premature alarm in the event of a crisis would only bring discredit on the International. Even Jean Jaurès, the great French socialist, whose primary goal became the pursuit of peace and who urged the International into a more active and interventionist policy, succumbed to the general euphoria. In July 1914, therefore, socialists everywhere were slow to respond. Their ignorance of secret diplomatic exchanges ensured that they could do no more than follow events, until—like everybody else— they were overtaken by the speed of developments in the last few days.

  On 29 July 1914 the committee of the International Socialist Bureau, the permanent secretariat of the International, convened in Brussels to discuss the timing and location of the congress scheduled to be held in Vienna that autumn. First to speak was the leader of the Austrian socialists, Viktor Adler. His mood was despondent. He saw war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia as unavoidable, and regarded his most important task as the preservation of his party and its institutions: he told his international colleagues that ‘the ideas of a strike and so on are only fantasies’.36 Adler’s defeatism was roundly criticized by Hugo Haase, Bebel’s successor as leader of the SPD in the Reichstag. Haase called for action to uphold the peace, and was supported by the two other Germans present, Karl Kautsky (the party’s principal Marxist theoretician) and Rosa Luxemburg (who represented Poland). But Haase himself was labouring under an illusion. He thought that one of the principal upholders of European peace was the German government. Misled, the mood of the meeting recovered its optimism. On Jaurès’s suggestion the committee decided that the best approach would be for the national parties not to approve war credits; it did not, however, regard the situation as sufficiently urgent for it to pre-empt the deliberations of the congress itself, which were to be brought forward to 9 August and held in Paris. ‘It will be like Agadir,’ Jaurès remarked, to Vandervelde, the Belgian socialist, on 30 July. ‘There will be ups and downs. But it is impossible that things won’t turn out all right.’37 On the same day Jaurès found time to visit the Flemish primitives at the Musée des Beaux Arts before he returned to France. The following evening he was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet.

  There is no reason to believe that, even had the International been made aware of the implications of the July crisis, it could have mounted a more effective response to the danger which confronted it. Its view of war was conditioned by its view of imperialism: its stock image was a war of territorial acquisitiveness generated by economic competition, not a war of self-defence. By concentrating on the abstract, by treating peacetime militarism as the immediate danger, and by construing the threat of war within Europe itself as remote, it avoided exposing latent splits in its own body.

  Within the International the revolutionary left did not share the majority’s abhorrence of war. They argued that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, that the arms race which colonial rivalry generated increased the exploitation and consequently the class-consciousness of the workers, and that the result of war would be the opportunity to create class revolution. Some rigid theorists contended that, far from moderating militarism and imperialism, and their accompanying threat of war, true revolutionaries should be fostering them. The rhetoric of Internationalism continued to give expression to at least some of these ideas. But the success in averting war shown by capitalist society led many German socialists, including Bebel, Haase, and Kautsky, to reckon that capitalism recognized the dangers attendant on war for itself and would moderate its behaviour accordingly. Such thinking acted as a bridge to the majority
of socialists, who were increasingly of a reformist rather than a revolutionary disposition. The pre-war expansion of socialism owed much to its fusion with the trades-union movement, whose objectives were less theoretical and political, more pragmatic and economic. Rosa Luxemburg’s conviction in January 1913 that capitalism was breaking down, that imperialism was in its last stages, and that the moment was ripe for a socialist offensive did not reflect the dominant view. Co-operation and collaboration with capitalism at home went hand in hand with moderation in Internationalism, an emphasis on arbitration, and a call for arms reductions. Even if the 1914 International congress had debated the Vaillant-Hardie proposal, the majority would have rejected the use of a general strike to counter war, and the only outcome would have been a bitter split.

  Not the least of the difficulties that would have confronted the International if it had embraced the idea of a general strike was its uneasy relationship with trade unionism. The International was an organization of socialist parties. Anxious in its early days to exclude anarchists, it had focused on the primacy of political action and rejected the weaponry of mass strikes. Such an approach made life uncomfortable for trade unionism, but found its rationalization in a division of labour. The economic problems of the working class were taken up internationally by the International Secretariat of Trade Unions, formally established in 1901. Dominated by the German Free Trade Unions, in the hands of Carl Legien, its focus was practical and its priority to support the development of strong national organizations rather than to promote international activity per se. French syndicalists were unhappy with this approach: they were at once both more international and more anarchist, but they found that none of abstention, confrontation, or co-operation could make the Germans change their position. France was far from being alone in its stance, but Geman trades unions had their way by dint of superior organization and superior numbers. In 1909 the entry of the United States to the International Secretariat of Trade Unions consolidated its approach. By 1913, when the International Secretariat changed its name to the International Federation and elected Legien its president, revolutionary syndicalism was on the defensive and the division between German and French trade unionism even more evident than that between German and French socialism. When, at the Belgian national congress of trades unions in Brussels on 27 July 1914, Léon Jouhaux, the general secretary of the CGT, asked Legien for a meeting, he was reluctantly accorded a five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee on the afternoon of the final session.38

  Legien’s pragmatism was realistic. Trade unionism had to be stronger nationally before it could exercise international influence. In France only 9 per cent of workers were members of trades unions in 1914. Even in Germany, as Haase pointed out in 1912, the two industrial sectors most vital to the conduct of the war, the railway and munitions workers, were not unionized. The country with a well-organized proletariat, where the trades unions could call an effective general strike, would be overrun by the country that was less well-developed in socialist terms. In the latter nascent trades unionism, if the workers opposed war, would be crushed by a state rendered more powerful by its need to respond to the onset of hostilities.

  The solution which Haase therefore advocated in 1912 was for each country to follow its own course. Thus the International showed itself to be no more than a federation of national bodies, within which the idea of Internationalism itself retreated as socialism within individual states advanced. In particular, the pacifist impetus in 1913 itself came not from the International but from joint Franco-German collaboration. It was left to the initiative of the socialist parties of each of these countries, and particularly of France, to fill the gap left by the inability of the International to agree on the means with which it would oppose war. And yet, although putting itself in the hands of national forces, socialism’s view of nationalism remained too ambivalent for it to be able to harness its appeal to the ends of internationalism. Rosa Luxemburg saw the class struggle as an international undertaking which national self-determination could only undermine; Marx and Engels had been more pragmatic, recognizing that nationalism might be a means to the revolutionary end, but confining their support of it to the so-called ‘historic’ nations, and thus excluding many of the ethnic groups within the Austrian and Russian empires. In 1912 the Balkan socialists were amazed to discover that Jaurès’s enthusiasm for peace extended to support for Turkey rather than his accepting the justice of a war of national liberation. Thus, by 1914 socialist theory remained undecided about the role of nationalism, while socialist practice was determined by national circumstances.

  An additional paradox was that the success of socialism in each country increased its adaptation to national circumstances, and so weakened its internationalism. Thus, in those countries where internationalism remained strongest in the face of war, socialism as a whole was weak and the protest therefore relatively ineffectual. Both socialist members of parliament in Serbia opposed the approval of war credits. In Russia on 8 August all three socialist groupings in the Duma, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Trudoviks, proved sufficiently loyal to principles of the Second International to abstain from the approval of war credits. But the Russian socialists had no effective organizations at the local level. In Moscow there were neither Social Democrat nor Socialist Revolutionary committees functioning. In St Petersburg the socialist underground networks had been smashed by the secret police, and control of the legal organizations was the subject of fierce competition between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Furthermore, the parties of the left were divided not only against each other, but also internally, those in exile tending to be more dirigiste and less pragmatic than those still in Russia.39

  Responses to the war did not resolve the differences of Russian socialism. At both the Stuttgart and the Copenhagen congresses the Socialist Revolutionaries had been amongst the foremost supporters of resolutions against war. But the imprecision of the Stuttgart resolution—as revolutionary leaders found out when they tried to implement it at the end of July in Vyborg40—made it an inadequate guide. Arguably Lenin remained truest to the fundamental principles of the International, even if in practice he rejected its authority. In the ‘seven theses’, written at the end of August 1914, he described the war as a consequence of a crisis in capitalism, and concluded that ‘the correct slogan is the conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war’.

  If Germany won, the Russian people would be handed over to the exploitation of a foreign ruling class; if Germany was defeated, Russia could help activate a revolution within Germany itself. These arguments meant that the appeal made to the Russian socialists by Vandervelde, that they support the Entente, had some unlikely supporters, including the exiled anarchist Kropotkin, and Georgii Plekhanov, Russian social democracy’s leading theorist.

  Lenin’s fiercely independent line from abroad was moderated by the Bolsheviks still in St Petersburg. In the Duma they joined with the Mensheviks to declare that ‘the proletariat . . . will at all times defend the cultural wealth of the nation against any attack from whatever quarter’, and their reply to Vandervelde—although it rejected defencism per se—accepted the possibility of their defending a new democratic Russia.41 Kerensky, the Trudovik leader, revealed how very similar considerations, especially when conditioned by pragmatism, could produce a radically different outcome. He declared that the war would not have happened if the governments of Russia and of the other belligerents had been democratic. But now that it had begun, the threat to the people of Russia—as opposed to their rulers—required that they be defended: ‘Peasants and workers, all who desire the happiness and welfare of Russia . . . harden your spirits, collect all forces, and when you have defended the country, liberate it.’42 Here was a statement that was at once both defencist and revolutionary—a paradoxical realism which left open the path to inter-socialist party co-operation within Russia but which could only undermine the immediate effectiveness of its wider appeal. Thus, to equate ‘defencism’ wi
th reformism does not do justice to the revolutionary ambitions of many, if not most, of its advocates. Whereas the ‘defeatists’ saw the war as the opportunity for revolution, the ‘defencists’ saw it as the precursor to revolution: the former stood for action as soon as possible, the latter for preparation for action later.

  Even if the socialists within Russia were more united than Lenin’s rhetoric suggested, and even if they were collectively more loyal to the spirit of the International than socialists elsewhere, the fact remains that they lacked the power to influence their country’s policies. The strongest and most successful socialist party in the world was that of Germany. Its ability to moderate the behaviour of its government promised not merely domestic repercussions but also direct benefits to Internationalism. The argument voiced by Kerensky and others—that the Russian people had to defend themselves—would cease to operate if Germany was not, or did not appear to be, the aggressor. Socialists in France and Russia looked to Germany for a lead, but it was in Austria above all that the SPD could have exercised a direct effect. Austrian social democracy was reconstituted in 1897 in six autonomous national groupings. In 1910 the Czechs broke away completely, and in 1912 they were prepared to reject the war service law which made every citizen liable for war-related service and suspended the rights of workers’ organizations. The Austro-German socialists, on the other hand, accepted the primacy of national defence. Viktor Adler, the leader of the Austrian party, had been virtually alone in his pessimism about the prospects for Internationalism both at Basle in 1912 and in Brussels on 29 July 1914. When war came he embodied his decision to support his country’s actions with a statement of the dilemma: ‘An incomprehensible German to have done anything else. An incomprehensible Social Democrat to have done it without being racked with pain.’43 He then resigned his party responsibilities. If Germany’s socialists had been able to take a strong stand against the war those of Austria might well have followed their lead. In the event the socialist party of neither of the Central Powers opposed the war: thus was Internationalism forfeit to national priorities.