You have heard about all of these issues. You might even think that you have heard too much about some of them. So consider this: because you have heard about these problems, you can be sure that there are lots of other clever and important people who have also heard about them and who are desperately thinking up solutions. That means - surely - that there's a decent chance that these issues will join the Schleswig-Holstein Question, anarchist terrorism and the hole in the ozone layer in the ranks of difficult problems that have been solved. Not necessarily easily or cheaply, but solved all the same.
Take, for example, the threat of a return to the politics of the 1930s: extremism, fascism, racism, lack of faith in democracy, succour for the (nearly as bad) enemies of fascism, such as communism. We can all agree that this would be awful. Indeed, we pretty much all do agree about this, from the most ardent Remoaner to Dominic Cummings. So if that is indeed what is happening, despite the united views of anyone who is anyone that it should not happen, then it's not exactly creeping up on our blindside: you can hardly move without bumping into someone who has detected real-life fascists or is busily comparing some political nobody to Hitler.
So I don't think you need to worry about this problem. There are lots of clever and important people out there who are on the look-out for a return to the 1930s: if someone suggests building concentration camps or uniformed parades of party members or a dictatorship of the proletariat or special clothing for Jewish people, you can be sure that those clever and important people will spot the parallels and put a stop to it.
So those are the known unknowns. But what are the unknown unknowns? While our guns are pointing out to sea to ward off the fascists arriving by boat, what dangers are creeping through the jungle behind us?
Here's one thought.
The 1930s led to World War II. There are lots of bad things about the politics of the 1930s quite apart from the War, but the War was very bad.
There was also another very bad war - World War I. And just as WWII resulted from the world and politics of the years that preceded it, so WWI resulted from what came before it.
When we look back at the 1930s, we see the terrible harbingers of doom: economic hardship, the gathering storm clouds, rearmament campaigns, militarism, revanchism, people in uniforms with funny salutes. So when we look back at the 1900s and 1910s, we should also be seeing the harbingers of WWI. But we don't. We see the wonderful Edwardian summer of the world, the sophistication of fin de siècle society, the culmination of the long period of peace, the first era of globalisation, the developments of modern thought and technology, female emancipation, psychiatry, etc, etc. The Vienna of Wittgenstein and Freud! The Paris of Picasso and Apollinaire! Doesn't your heart swell to think of it?
When someone tells you that they see parallels between today's world and the world before WWI, especially anyone who writes for The Economist, they are normally telling you that they are seeing something nice, particularly about global free trade. But surely seeing such a parallel should be every bit as worrying as someone seeing a parallel between the world of today and the world of the 1930s?
Let's talk about probably the single most successful political actor of 1914: Gavrilo Princip. He assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne because, as he said during his trial, "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be freed from Austria." Sure enough, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was set up in 1918 and became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. The pomp of the Austro-Hungarian Empire became one with Nineveh and Tyre, thanks to a short guy who was born a serf. Princip - 1; crowned heads of continental Europe - 0.
What Princip perhaps saw was that a terrorist act could trigger a massive over-reaction from a large, multi-ethnic polity, governed by nervous leaders worried that their regime that did not enjoy the complete support of their population, and that such an over-reaction could cause a massive crisis and the overthrow of that regime. That's not a unique insight: terrorists always seek an over-reaction from their opponents - that's the only way they win. But some regimes are particularly prone to it: the paradigm case is the colonial regime garrisoned by a few soldiers far from home and outnumbered by the local population, reliant on their acquiescence and fearful that that acquiescence will quickly turn to hostility.
Note that Princip's story is not the story of the 1930s. The story of the 1930s concerns what were recognisable nation states based on broadly ethnic lines (Japan, Germany, Italy), with irredentist/expansionist ambitions, being taken over by very unpleasant but not altogether unpopular regimes that were (wrongly) confident of their prospects in a war.
The story of the 1910s, by contrast, is of multi-national empires (Austria, Russia, Germany) that were governed by broadly pleasant but not so popular regimes that were (rightly) not confident of their ability to survive domestic turmoil. The result of World War II was regime change - Italy, Japan, Austria and Germany are still with us (albeit Germany spent some time in 2 parts), but with nicer people in charge; the result of World War I was redrawing the map: Poland! Czechoslovakia! The Baltic States! A bigger Romania! Yugoslavia - still ruled by a royal family - but a new royal family!
This story of the 1910s was not one that only took place on the continent: WWI ended with the multi-ethnic United Kingdom, again ruled by pretty decent people, also divided into something more closely resembling British and Irish nation states based on ethnic lines. And you don't need to know much Irish history to know that it also involves terrorism being used to generate over-reaction by the British authorities.
(You could say that both WWI and WWII were about the triumph of the single-ethnicity nation state over the multi-ethnic empire: WWI was about dismantling the old empires, benign though they were in many ways; while WWII was about preventing Japan and Germany from creating unpleasant multi-ethnic empires. The next set of wars to be fought in Europe also fits the pattern: it was about dismantling the multi-ethnic state that was Yugoslavia. All credit to the Scots, Balts, Czechs and Slovaks for going about it peacefully.)
We have terrorists today. Those terrorists, both in their white supremacist and Islamist flavours, seek the same thing, namely over-reaction from a nervous liberal elite, unsure that it really commands the support of the population it rules, triggering a crisis from which their favoured reforms might emerge.
We also have multi-ethnic states today, governed by cultivated, educated and reasonably decent people - the equivalents of the rulers of Europe in the 1910s. Even leaving aside the multi-ethnic nature of the EU, it is not news that the individual big member states, Germany, France and the UK, are themselves becoming multi-ethnic in the manner of old European Empires (or Yugoslavia) and less like the (broadly) single-ethnicity nation states who were the problems in the 1930s.
History does not repeat itself. But that does not stop us learning from it. And the learning is not just that there are bad people out there, fascists and so on, who might take over your country and lead it astray. It is also that the problem might be the good people who are already running your country: good people who might over-react to the actions of people they see as bad (terrorists, certainly, but also "extremists"? "populists"? people who say nasty things on the internet?) in order to send a message to dissatisfied, restless, divided or unconvinced populations. There's more to avoiding war than stopping bad people from taking power.
Of course, WWI also involved a rising continental power, a declining English-speaking power, a weak/powerful Russia and some alliances that were meant to create stability. So no worries there. But I seem to recall that train timetables came into as well ...
What Princip perhaps saw was that a terrorist act could trigger a massive over-reaction from a large, multi-ethnic polity, governed by nervous leaders worried that their regime that did not enjoy the complete support of their population, and that such an over-reaction could cause a massive crisis and the overthrow of that regime. That's not a unique insight: terrorists always seek an over-reaction from their opponents - that's the only way they win. But some regimes are particularly prone to it: the paradigm case is the colonial regime garrisoned by a few soldiers far from home and outnumbered by the local population, reliant on their acquiescence and fearful that that acquiescence will quickly turn to hostility.
Note that Princip's story is not the story of the 1930s. The story of the 1930s concerns what were recognisable nation states based on broadly ethnic lines (Japan, Germany, Italy), with irredentist/expansionist ambitions, being taken over by very unpleasant but not altogether unpopular regimes that were (wrongly) confident of their prospects in a war.
The story of the 1910s, by contrast, is of multi-national empires (Austria, Russia, Germany) that were governed by broadly pleasant but not so popular regimes that were (rightly) not confident of their ability to survive domestic turmoil. The result of World War II was regime change - Italy, Japan, Austria and Germany are still with us (albeit Germany spent some time in 2 parts), but with nicer people in charge; the result of World War I was redrawing the map: Poland! Czechoslovakia! The Baltic States! A bigger Romania! Yugoslavia - still ruled by a royal family - but a new royal family!
This story of the 1910s was not one that only took place on the continent: WWI ended with the multi-ethnic United Kingdom, again ruled by pretty decent people, also divided into something more closely resembling British and Irish nation states based on ethnic lines. And you don't need to know much Irish history to know that it also involves terrorism being used to generate over-reaction by the British authorities.
(You could say that both WWI and WWII were about the triumph of the single-ethnicity nation state over the multi-ethnic empire: WWI was about dismantling the old empires, benign though they were in many ways; while WWII was about preventing Japan and Germany from creating unpleasant multi-ethnic empires. The next set of wars to be fought in Europe also fits the pattern: it was about dismantling the multi-ethnic state that was Yugoslavia. All credit to the Scots, Balts, Czechs and Slovaks for going about it peacefully.)
We have terrorists today. Those terrorists, both in their white supremacist and Islamist flavours, seek the same thing, namely over-reaction from a nervous liberal elite, unsure that it really commands the support of the population it rules, triggering a crisis from which their favoured reforms might emerge.
We also have multi-ethnic states today, governed by cultivated, educated and reasonably decent people - the equivalents of the rulers of Europe in the 1910s. Even leaving aside the multi-ethnic nature of the EU, it is not news that the individual big member states, Germany, France and the UK, are themselves becoming multi-ethnic in the manner of old European Empires (or Yugoslavia) and less like the (broadly) single-ethnicity nation states who were the problems in the 1930s.
History does not repeat itself. But that does not stop us learning from it. And the learning is not just that there are bad people out there, fascists and so on, who might take over your country and lead it astray. It is also that the problem might be the good people who are already running your country: good people who might over-react to the actions of people they see as bad (terrorists, certainly, but also "extremists"? "populists"? people who say nasty things on the internet?) in order to send a message to dissatisfied, restless, divided or unconvinced populations. There's more to avoiding war than stopping bad people from taking power.
Of course, WWI also involved a rising continental power, a declining English-speaking power, a weak/powerful Russia and some alliances that were meant to create stability. So no worries there. But I seem to recall that train timetables came into as well ...
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