The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Studies in Military History and International Affairs)

20th-century international relations

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British textiles , machinery, and shipping dominated the markets of Asia , South America , and much of Europe. But that hegemony very naturally impelled other nations somehow to catch up, in the short term by imposing protective tariffs to shield domestic industries and in the longer term by granting government subsidies for railroads and other national development work and the gradual replication of British techniques. France , Prussia , and other countries then reversed earlier policies and followed the British into free trade.

In the depression of —96 actually years of slower, uneven growth industrial and labour leaders formed cartels, unions, and lobbies to agitate for tariffs and other forms of state intervention to stabilize the economy. Bismarck resisted until European agriculture also suffered from falling prices and lost markets after owing to the arrival in European ports of North American cereals. In the so-called alliance of rye and steel voted a German tariff on foreign manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Free trade gave way to an era of neo- mercantilism.

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France, Austria, Italy, and Russia followed the new or revived trend toward tariff protection. After the volume of world trade rose sharply again, but the sense of heightened economic competition persisted in Europe. Social rifts also hardened during the period. Conservative circles, farmers as well as the wealthier classes, came gradually to distrust the loyalty of the urban working class, but industrialists shared few other interests with farmers. Other countries faced similar divisions between town and country, but urbanization was not advanced enough in Russia or France for socialism to acquire a mass following, while in Britain agriculture had long since lost out to the commercial and industrial classes, and working-class participation in democratic politics was on the rise male suffrage was still dependent upon property qualiifications, but the Second Reform Act [] had extended the vote to many workingmen in the towns and cities.

The social divisions attending industrialization were especially acute in Germany because of the rapidity of her development and the survival of powerful precapitalist elites. Moreover, the German working class, while increasingly unionized, had few legal means of affecting state policy. The foreign counterpart to this phenomenon was the New Imperialism.

The great powers of Europe suddenly shook off almost a century of apathy toward overseas colonies and, in the space of 20 years, partitioned almost the entire uncolonized portion of the globe. Only Britain and France were capital-exporting countries in , and in years to come their investors preferred to export capital to other European countries especially Russia or the Western Hemisphere rather than to their own colonies.

The British remained free-trade throughout the era of the New Imperialism, a booming home economy absorbed most German capital, and Italy and Russia were large net importers of capital. Once the scramble for colonies was complete, pressure groups did form in the various countries to argue the economic promise of imperialism, but just as often governments had to foster colonial development. In most cases, trade did not lead but followed the flag.

Why, then, was the flag planted in the first place? Sometimes it was to protect economic interests, as when the British occupied Egypt in , but more often it was for strategic reasons or in pursuit of national prestige. One necessary condition for the New Imperialism, often overlooked, is technological. Prior to the s Europeans could overawe native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia but lacked the firepower, mobility, and communications that would have been needed to pacify the interior. India was the exception, where the British East India Company exploited an anarchic situation and allied itself with selected native rulers against others.

The tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito —bearers of sleeping sickness and malaria —were the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles. The correlation of forces between Europe and the colonizable world shifted, however, with the invention of shallow-draft riverboats, the steamship and telegraph , the repeater rifle and Maxim gun , and the discovery in India that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria.

By small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons and exercising fire discipline , could overwhelm many times their number of native troops. The scramble for Africa should be dated not from , when the British occupied Egypt, but from the opening of the Suez Canal in The strategic importance of that waterway cannot be overstated. It was the gateway to India and East Asia and hence a vital interest nonpareil for the British Empire. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone , otherwise an adamant anticolonialist, then established a British protectorate in Egypt.

When the French reacted bitterly, Bismarck further encouraged French colonial expansion in hopes of distracting them from Europe, and he then took his own country into the fray by claiming four large segments of Africa for Germany in In that year the king of the Belgians cast his eye on the entire Congo basin. The Berlin West Africa Conference of —85 was called to settle a variety of disputes involved in European colonial occupation, and over the next 10 years all the great powers of Europe save Austria and Russia staked out colonies and protectorates on the African continent.

But whatever the ambitions and rivalries of military adventurers, explorers, and private empire builders on the scene, the cabinets of Europe came to agreements on colonial boundaries with surprising neighbourliness. Colonial wars did ensue after , but never between two European colonial powers.

It has been suggested that imperial rivalries were a long-range cause of World War I. It has also been said that they were a safety valve, drawing off European energies that might otherwise have erupted in war much sooner. But the links between imperialism and the war are more subtle.

The heyday of the New Imperialism, especially after , created a tacit understanding in the European elites and the broad literate classes that the days of the old European balance of power were over, that a new world order was dawning, and that any nation left behind in the pursuit of world power would sink into obscurity. This intuition must surely have fed a growing sense of desperation among Germans, and one of paranoia among Britons, about trends in global politics.

A second point, subtler still, is that the New Imperialism, while it did not directly provoke World War I, did occasion a transformation of alliances that proved dangerous beyond reckoning once the great powers turned their attention back to Europe. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in , and within a decade popularizers had applied—or misapplied—his theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest to contemporary politics and economics. This pseudoscientific social Darwinism appealed to educated Europeans already demoralized by a century of higher criticism of religious scripture and conscious of the competitiveness of their own daily lives in that age of freewheeling industrial capitalism.

Pan-Slavic literature extolled the youthful vigour of that race, of whom Russia was seen as the natural leader. By , therefore, the political and moral restraints on war that had arisen after — were significantly weakened. The old conservative notion that established governments had a heavy stake in peace lest revolution engulf them, and the old liberal notion that national unity, democracy , and free trade would spread harmony, were all but dead.

The historian cannot judge how much social Darwinism influenced specific policy decisions, but a mood of fatalism and bellicosity surely eroded the collective will to peace.

John Ferris

In the young kaiser William II dismissed the aged Bismarck and proclaimed a new course for Germany. Where Bismarck sought alliances to avoid the risk of war on two fronts, the kaiser and his chief foreign policy official, Baron von Holstein believed Germany should capitalize on the colonial quarrels among France, Britain, and Russia.

Where Bismarck had outlawed the socialists and feared for the old order in Germany, the kaiser permitted the antisocialist laws to lapse and believed he could win over the working class through prosperity, social policy, and national glory. The consequences of the new course were immediate and damaging.

Petersburg to overcome its antipathy to republican France and conclude a military alliance in The tie was sealed with a golden braid: Russia hoped mainly for French support in its colonial disputes with the British Empire and even went so far as to agree with Austria-Hungary in to hold the question of the Balkans in abeyance for 10 years, thereby freeing resources for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the penetration of northern China.

The German foreign office thus did not take alarm at the alliance Bismarck had struggled so long to prevent. The Sino-Japanese War of —95 signaled the arrival of Japan on the world stage. Having seen their nation forcibly opened to foreign influence by Commodore Matthew C. Once the Meiji Restoration established strong central government beginning in , Japan became the first non-Western state to launch a crash program of industrialization.

By the s its modern army and navy permitted Japan to take its place beside the Europeans as an imperial power. European intervention scaled back these gains, but a scramble for concessions in China eventuated. The loser in the scramble, besides China, was Britain, which had previously enjoyed a near monopoly in the China trade. British fortunes suffered elsewhere during this high tide of imperialism from to Germany abandoned her long apathy toward the Middle East and won a concession for Turkish railroads.

The kaiser, influenced by his envy of Britain, his own fondness for seafaring, and the worldwide impact of The Influence of Sea Power upon History by the American naval scholar Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan , determined that Weltpolitik was impossible without a great High Seas Fleet.

The prospect of a large German navy—next to the growing fleets of France, Russia, Japan, and the United States—meant that Britain would no longer rule the waves alone. The dawn of the 20th century was thus a time of anxiety for the British Empire as well. Challenged for the first time by the commercial, naval, and colonial might of many other industrializing nations, the British reconsidered the wisdom of splendid isolation.

To be sure, in the Fashoda Incident of Britain succeeded in forcing France to retreat from the upper reaches of the Nile. But how much longer could Britain defend her empire alone? Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain began at once to sound out Berlin on the prospect of global collaboration. A British demarche was precisely what the Germans had been expecting, but three attempts to reach an Anglo-German understanding, between and , led to naught. In retrospect, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. What Britain sought was German help in reducing Franco-Russian pressure on the British Empire and defending the balance of power.

What Germany sought was British neutrality or cooperation while Germany expanded its own power in the world. The failure of the Anglo-German talks condemned both powers to dangerous competition. The German navy could never hope to equal the British and would only ensure British hostility. But equality was not necessary, said Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

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In this way Germany could extract concessions from London without alliance or war. What the Germans failed to consider was that Britain might someday come to terms with its other antagonists. This was precisely what Britain did. The new German navy menaced Britain in her home waters.

Soon the Panama Canal would enable the United States to deploy a two-ocean navy. He then shocked the world by concluding a military alliance with Japan, thereby securing British interests in East Asia and allowing the empire to concentrate its regional forces on India. To prevent being dragged into the conflict, the French and British shucked off their ancient rivalry and concluded an Entente Cordiale whereby France gave up opposition to British rule in Egypt , and Britain recognized French rights in Morocco.

Though strictly a colonial arrangement, it marked another step away from isolation for both Britain and France and another step toward it for the restless and frustrated Germans. The Russo-Japanese War of —05 was an ominous turning point. Contrary to all expectations, Japan triumphed on land and sea, and Russia stumbled into the Revolution of President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war, and the tsar quelled the revolutionary flames with promises of parliamentary government, but the war resonated in world diplomacy. Japan established itself as the leading Asian power.

The example of an Oriental nation rising up to defeat a European great power emboldened Chinese, Indians, and Arabs to look forward to a day when they might expel the imperialists from their midst. And tsarist Russia, its Asian adventure a shambles, looked once again to the Balkans as a field for expansion, setting the stage for World War I. But at the Algeciras Conference in , called to settle the Morocco dispute, only Austria-Hungary supported the German position.

Far from breaking the Entente Cordiale, the affair prompted the British to begin secret staff talks with the French military. For some years Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean had been thwarted, and the attempt to conquer Abyssinia in had failed. So in Italy concluded a secret agreement pledging support for France in Morocco in return for French support of Italy in Libya. Finally, and most critically, the defeated Russians and worried British were now willing to put to rest their old rivalry in Central Asia. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey also hinted at the possibility of British support for Russian policy in the Balkans, reversing a century-old tradition.

The heyday of European imperialism thus called into existence a second alliance system, the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia. It was not originally conceived as a balance to German power, but that was its effect, especially in light of the escalating naval race. In the Royal Navy under the reformer Sir John Fisher launched HMS Dreadnought , a battleship whose size, armour, speed, and gunnery rendered all existing warships obsolete. The German government responded in kind, even enlarging the Kiel Canal at great expense to accommodate the larger ships. What were the British, dependent on imports by sea for seven-eighths of their raw materials and over half their foodstuffs, to make of German behaviour?

For France the Triple Entente was primarily a continental security apparatus. For Russia it was a means of reducing points of conflict so that the antiquated tsarist system could buy time to catch up technologically with the West. But to the Germans the Triple Entente looked suspiciously like encirclement designed to frustrate their rightful claims to world power and prestige.

German attempts to break the encirclement, however, would only alarm the entente powers and cause them to draw the loose strings into a knot. That in turn tempted German leaders, fearful that time was against them, to cut the Gordian knot with the sword. For after the focus of diplomacy shifted back to the Balkans, with European cabinets unaware, until it was too late, that alliances made with the wide world in mind had dangerously limited their freedom of action in Europe.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Europe before succumbed to hubris. Whether from ambition or insecurity, the great powers armed as never before in peacetime, with military expenditures reaching 5 to 6 percent of national income. Military conscription and reserve systems made available a significant percentage of the adult male population, and the impulse to create large standing armies was strengthened by the widespread belief that firepower and financial limitations would make the next war short and violent.

Simple reaction also played a large role. Only Britain did without a large conscripted army, but her naval needs were proportionally more expensive.

In an age of heavy, rapid-fire artillery, infantry rifles, and railroads, but not yet including motor transport, tanks, or airplanes, a premium was placed by military staffs on mass, supply, and prior planning. European commanders assumed that in a continental war the opening frontier battles would be decisive, hence the need to mobilize the maximum number of men and move them at maximum speed to the border.

The meticulous and rigid advance planning that this strategy required placed inordinate pressure on the diplomats in a crisis. Politicians might hold back their army in hopes of saving the peace only at the risk of losing the war should diplomacy fail. What was more, all the continental powers embraced offensive strategies.

Troops could then be transported east to meet the slower-moving Russian army. Worked out down to the last railroad switch and passenger car, the Schlieffen Plan was an apotheosis of the industrial age: None of the general staffs anticipated what the war would actually be like. Had they glimpsed the horrific stalemate in the trenches, surely neither they nor the politicians would have run the risks they did in Above the mass infantry armies of the early 20th century stood the officer corps, the general staffs, and at the pinnacle the supreme war lords: The army was a natural refuge for the central and eastern European aristocracies , the chivalric code of arms sustaining almost the only public service to which they could still reasonably lay claim.

Even in republican France a nationalist revival after excited public morale, inspired the military buildup, and both fueled and cloaked a revanche aimed at recovery of the provinces lost 40 years before. Popular European literature poured forth best sellers depicting the next war, and mass-circulation newspapers incited even the working classes with news of imperial adventures or the latest slight by the adversary.

Various peace movements sprang up to counter the spirit of militarism before Most numerous and disturbing to those responsible for national defense were the socialists. The Second International took the Marxist view of imperialism and militarism as creatures of capitalist competition and loudly warned that if the bosses provoked a war, the working classes would refuse to take part. A liberal peace movement with a middle-class constituency flourished around the turn of the century.

As many as peace organizations are estimated to have existed in , fully half of them in Scandinavia and most others in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Their greatest achievements were the Hague conferences of and , at which the powers agreed to ban certain inhumane weapons but made no progress toward general disarmament. The liberal peace movement also foundered on internal contradictions.

To outlaw war was to endorse the international status quo, yet liberals always stood ready to excuse wars that could claim progressive ends. They had tolerated the wars of Italian and German unification, and they would tolerate the Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire in —13 and the great war in Another solution for many peace advocates was to transcend the nation-state.

To Marxists this image of capitalism was ludicrous; to Weber or Joseph Schumpeter it was correct but beside the point. Blood was thicker than class, or money; politics dominated economics; and irrationality, reason. Citing the waste, social discord, and international tension caused by the naval arms race he made several overtures to Germany in hopes of ending it.

When these failed, Britain had little choice but to race more quickly than the Germans. Even radical Liberals like David Lloyd George had to admit that however much they might deplore arms races in the abstract, all that was liberal and good in the world depended on the security of Britain and its control of its seas. In the end, war did not come over the naval race or commercial competition or imperialism. Nor was it sparked by the institutional violence of the armed states, but by underground terrorism in the name of an oppressed people.

Nor did it come over the ambitions of great powers to become greater, but over the fear of one great power that unless it took vigorous action it might cease to exist altogether. It began in the Balkans. In Austria-Hungary and Russia had agreed to put their dispute over the Balkans on ice. But everything else had changed. Russia was looking again at the Balkans for foreign policy advantage and enjoying, for the first time, a measure of British tolerance.

In Serbia , the state most threatening to Vienna because of its ethnic tie to the Serbs and Croats inside the Dual Monarchy, a fundamental political shift had occurred. Finally, in , a cabal of officers known as the Young Turks staged the first modernizing revolution in the Muslim world and tried to force the sultan to adopt liberal reforms. In particular the Young Turks called for parliamentary elections, thereby placing in doubt the status of Bosnia and Hercegovina , provinces still under Ottoman sovereignty but administered by Austria-Hungary since The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Aloys Aehrenthal , proposed to settle the Bosnian issue and to crush Serbian ambitions once and for all by annexing the provinces.

To this purpose he teased the Russian foreign minister, Aleksandr Petrovich Izvolsky , with talk of a quid pro quo: Their response was to increase aid and comfort to their client Serbia and to determine never again to back down in the Balkans. German politics were also approaching a breaking point.

Agrarian interests continued to demand protection against foreign foodstuffs, but the tariffs imposed to that end harmed German industrial exports. A large armaments program, especially naval, compensated heavy industry for lost foreign markets. The losers in the tariffs-plus-navy-legislation arrangement were consumers, who were taxed for the defense program after they had paid higher prices for bread. Popular resentment tended to increase the socialist vote, and the other parties could command a majority only by banding together.

When in Lord Haldane was dispatched to Berlin to discuss a suspension of the naval arms race, the kaiser spoiled chances for an accord by introducing a new naval bill two days before his arrival. The British then accelerated their own dreadnought construction.

By now the failure of German policy was apparent. Clearly the British would not permit Germany to challenge their sea power , while the German army agreed in to tolerate further naval expansion only if the army were granted a sharp increase in funding as well. In the elections the Social Democrats won seats and became the largest party in the Reichstag. A bold stroke, even at the risk of war, seemed the only way out of the double impasse. In Britain, Winston Churchill , then first lord of the Admiralty, withdrew his fleet from the Mediterranean to home waters, making mandatory even closer military coordination with France.

The final prewar assault on the Ottoman empire also began in Italy cashed in her bargain with France over Libya by declaring war on Turkey and sending a naval squadron as far as the Dardanelles. Simultaneously, Russian ministers in the Balkans brought about an alliance between the bitter rivals Serbia and Bulgaria in preparation for a final strike against Ottoman-controlled Europe. The Young Turks ended the conflict with Italy, ceding Libya, but failed to contain the Balkan armies. In May the great powers imposed a settlement; Macedonia was partitioned among the Balkan states, Crete was granted to Greece, and Albania was given its independence.

Landlocked Serbia, however, bid for additional territory in Macedonia, and Bulgaria replied with an attack on Serbia and Greece, thus beginning the Second Balkan War in June In the peace that followed in August , Bulgaria lost most of her stake in the former Turkish lands plus much of the southern Dobruja region to Romania. Serbia, however, doubled its territory and, flushed with victory, turned its sights on the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina. How might the Habsburg empire survive the rise of particularist nationalism in eastern Europe? Austrian statesmen had debated the question for 50 years, and the best answer seemed to be some form of federalism permitting political autonomy to the nationalities.

Hence, the archduke was a marked man among the secret societies that sprang up to liberate Bosnia. Such is the logic of terrorism: The National Defense Narodna Odbrana was formed in Serbia in to carry on pro-Serbian and anti-Austrian agitation across the border. With his support, if not on his direct orders, a band of youthful romantics conspired to assassinate Franz Ferdinand during his state visit to Sarajevo. On June 28, , which happened to be the Serbian national holiday, the archduke and his wife rode in an open car through the streets of the Bosnian capital.

The age of total war, / Jeremy Black - Details - Trove

A bomb was thrown but missed. But the lead driver in the procession took a wrong turn, the cars stopped momentarily, and at that moment the year-old Gavrilo Princip fired his revolver, killing both royal passengers. Reaction in Vienna, and Europe generally, was surprisingly restrained. Bethmann was less so. A move against Serbia could lead to a world war, he warned on July 7. Yet Bethmann went along in the vain hope of localizing the conflict.

Austria must first present a list of demands for redress. In no case was Austria to annex any Serbian territory. On July 23, just after the French leaders left for home, Vienna presented its ultimatum to Belgrade , demanding dissolution of the secret societies, cessation of anti-Austrian propaganda, and Austrian participation in the investigation of the Sarajevo crime. Serbia was given 48 hours to respond. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Dmitriyevich Sazonov , erupted at news of the ultimatum and insisted on military measures. But now Germany was competing for influence over the Young Turks, courting Bulgaria, and plotting to smash Serbia.

However, analysts have particularly failed to differentiate the effect of intelligence on operations, from that on a key element of military power since In counter-insurgency, many types and levels of war and intelligence overlap, which include guerillas, conventional and strike forces, and politics in villages and capitals. Access to the complete content on Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

The age of total war, 1860-1945

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