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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Thanks to the whims of the Youtube algorithm, I just had the pleasure of listening to an exhilarating British public debate from 2014 on the motion "Britain Should Not Have Fought in the First World War", featuring several eminent historians, primus inter pares Max Hastings. If anyone has a free 90 minutes, I recommend it, both because the object-level question is an interesting one, and also because of its relevance to contemporary culture war issues. I have thoughts on both myself, but I'll put under spoiler tags below. I will say that while my opinion on the issue didn't flip on a dime, it made me more sympathetic to the case that Britain shouldn't have intervened.

OBJECT-LEVEL ISSUES

  1. I was very grateful for the question towards the end addressed to Max Hastings about whether Britain should still have gone to war with Germany had Belgium not been invaded. His answer involved some prevarication, amounting to the claim that right or wrong it would have been politically impossible to intervene without the invasion of Belgium. However, I think it cuts to some quite central moral issues in the debate. As much as all speakers attempted to couch things in terms of realpolitik, most of us believe, I think, that sometimes it's important to go to war for principles and reputation even to the detriments of one's interests. This question loomed especially large at the very end of the debate when John Charmley made clear that he thought Britain should have stayed out of the Second World War as well, even going so far as to say words to the effect that while Hitler would have killed a lots of Poles and Jews, that wasn't a reason for us to spill our own blood and treasure. That was already a risque claim in 2014, I think, but is now wholly outside of the Overton Window (more on that below).

  2. It took a surprisingly long time for anyone to raise Germany's explicit aims for the war, summarised later in the Septemberprogramm, and the practical realisability of these are key, to my mind, in assessing whether the war was in Britain's interests. It was clear already in 1914 that Germany did not merely seek to extract an extra province or two from France and liberate Poland from Russia, but to decisively settle the European balance of power. Without Britain's intervention at the Battle of the Marne, I think it likely they would have succeeded, and the European continent may have settled into German hegemony. History would not have ended, of course, but it would have led to several very fraught decades for Britain, perhaps forcing a war on much worse terms.

  3. I was surprised that the role of the United States was not discussed at all. In any counterfactual scenario where Germany defeats France and remains hostile to Britain, the only plausible way Britain could have hoped to win a cold war against it would have been via explicit or implicit alliance with the United States. But how likely would this have been? On the one hand, the United States would not have had the direct provocations of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram. However, I imagine that a Continental Europe unified under a single power would also be a source of concern to the US. I would have appreciated some more evaluation of this question.

META-LEVEL ISSUES

4. It was remarkable to hear people talking about the value of Britain preserving its Empire and speaking of its loss as a kind of national catastrophe (which of course it was) without any of the anticolonialist sound and fury you'd expect in a contemporary re-run of this debate. While it was acknowledged at various points that the Empire was perhaps not an ideal arrangement for all its subjects, no-one felt particular need to offer caveats and apologia when claiming that involvement in the war either benefited or harmed Britain's imperial hegemony. Similarly, I was pleased at the total absence of race and gender politics from the debate; I suspect that re-running it now would be impossible.

5. Another reason the debate would look very different if held today is of course the War in Ukraine. While I think the West has largely avoided the mistakes of the Great Powers in the run-up to the First World War in its policy towards Ukraine, a powerful rhetorical axis now connects appeasement of Hitler in the Sudetenland and Putin in Crimea. Likewise, the idea that countries should not act on moral concerns but purely national self-interest is one that is politically harder to sell in the wake of Russia's invasion.

6. Finally, I'd note that there seemed to be a rather problematic confusion running through much of the debate (especially the second half) concerning the exact content of the motion: was the motion that British leadership shouldn't have gone to war *knowing what they knew in August 1914*, or the claim that with the benefit of hindsight Britain would likely have been better off not getting involved? These strike me as very different propositions susceptible to overlapping but distinct kinds of support and refutation, and the failure of anyone to properly disentangle them affirmed for me the importance of having a philosopher around now and then.

Last week I started Massie’s Castles of Steel. To hear him tell it, neutrality was seriously on the table until hours before the declaration of war.

I think the popular narrative of WWI as a series of wasteful, idiotic trenches buries one key point. The major players went in expecting to win. They had mobilization plans and contingencies and logistics ready to go. It’s just that their plans, and the natural counters to such plans, converged on a bloody clusterfuck. The Franco-Prussian War saw 10% casualties on the winning side. The Western Front, more like 40%. That’s a huge gulf between the two prongs of issue #6!

Also, the Kaiser was a huge seaboo. I don’t know how much that actually mattered, other than to scupper any idea of Germany relinquishing its fleet to appease Britain, but I just can’t get over it.

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