I’ve been watching the excellent “The Great War” a series of weekly videos that show what happened in WW1 during that week 100 years ago.
I have to wonder, if you got all the war leaders on both sides in a room and showed them the videos how many would they need to see before they decided that a Serb killing an Austrian Arch-Duke was not worth what going to war was going to do to Europe. I wonder if some would actually still want to go to war even knowing what was going to happen.
There was quite a bit of nationalistic fervor in the pre-war period, so I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of people would still want a war even if it was long, costly and ugly. Letting Germany know that it would lose would be more effective, though. It hardly serves their national interest to lose a war and be crippled by reparations.
If they knew what was going to happen, of course not. But every country felt that a war was inevitable and that they would win it. When the Peace Movement in France collapsed with the assassination of Jaurès, the die was effectively cast.
That YouTube show is awesome BTW.
World War I was pretty much inevitable, like the American Revolution and, even more, The Civil War. It was the last gasp of European Empires combined with a sudden plethora of industrialized, mechanized, modern killing machines. Even without the assassination it was bound to break out somewhere in Europe in that era.
Germans might well have had serious second thoughts about going to war if they knew it would be a drawn-out affair. Leaders were well aware of the country’s vulnerability to blockade, but figured they’d win quickly before critical imports (including food and fertilizer) were cut.
Germany was not “crippled” by reparations.
*"The Allies made repeated concessions, reducing the amount of reparations owed and finally cancelling them altogether shortly before Hitler came to power and repudiated further reparations unilaterally. All told, Germany paid roughly 20 billion gold marks worth of reparations between 1921 and 1932, roughly 2.4 percent of Germany’s national income during that period. As Mantoux pointed out, immediately after repudiating the reparations, the new Nazi government began a re-armament program which consumed a significantly larger percentage of national income than reparations ever had.
Reparations did not cripple the German economy, nor did they directly lead to the ascendency of the Nazi Party." *
I’d caveat that last sentence to read “nor did the economic impact of reparations lead directly to the ascendancy of the Nazi party.” Because the political impact of the reparations was profound – the Nazis were able to fan resentment by exaggerating, harping upon, and lying about the reparations payments, and they got considerable mileage out of that tactic.
Russia might not have gone to war, considering what happened at home. (Although the Revolution might still have happened, I think it would have come later.)
I’ve seen this argument made before, and I don’t understand it.
Current economic thinking is that increased government spending helps the economy, and is to be encouraged whenever the economy isn’t doing well. But even if the benefits of government spending are being exaggerating by current thinkers, it’s certainly has some benefit and is therefore not as much of a drag on the economy as simply taking money out of the economy and giving it to other countries.
It follows, therefore, that it makes no sense to compare the scale of spending on armaments to reparations payments and to then declare the reparations to have been no big deal by virtue of their being smaller than the arms spending.
Everyone who lost would immediately think about what to change in order to win, and the fight would be on again. Maybe different countries WOULD win.
I’m not sure that anyone “won” the war.
England: Got crippling debt, with interest payments forming around 40% of all government spending, and high taxes that changed the English way of life forever. Not to mention losing most of Ireland.
France: A country devastated by the war, they got a little territory and promise of reparation payments from Germany that Germany couldn’t afford to pay
Russia: Millions dead, Bolsheviks in charge, plus they got Stalin
Austria-Hungary: Stopped being a country at all
Japan and China: Almost completely ignored during the peace process
Ottomans: Lost most of their empire, Arminian Genocide.
Arabs: Although they became free from the Turks they didn’t get the United Territory that England had promised them.
United States: I guess they came out on top since most of the debt was owed to American bankers.
Everyone: Death and destruction on a scale never imagined in history.
My point wasn’t about who won or lost, it was about how they would simply rationalize their way into fighting regardless.
It has been said that if an entrepreneur knew how much work and stress it would be to start a business they probably never would. I guess my thinking is along those lines that if they knew how much stress and work it would take they would never do it in the first place.
I can’t see how any country would have gone to war in 1914 if they had been able to see the outcome of the war. Pretty much every country, with the exceptions of the United States and Japan, came out of the war in a worst position than they were in in 1914.
The European powers had had no experience of widespread devastating warfare across the continent for a century, since the time of Napoleon. Every power had every reason to believe is a shorter, limited war that would end in a settlement sooner rather than later–a replay of the Franco-Prussion War. The system of alliances and the time it took to mobilize armies put a premium of swiftly moving to war, because lagging behind could guarantee defeat. And no one had any idea how the machine gun would impact warfare.
I suspect that if you sat down the leaders of the great powers in July 1914 and went through in detail what was about to happen, their response would be to modify their war plans, not mutually agree to avoid war altogether. Perhaps the Germans fully implement the Schlieffen/Moltke plan. Or initiate unrestricted submarine warfare from the start and keep it up. Or the British and the French rush tank production. No telling how this would work out, but I suspect there would still be a terrible war even with the advantage of some future knowledge.
Some of the future knowledge would be frankly unbelievable to the men of July 1914, like the notion that the British Empire would lose a million soldiers.
Agreed. *If *you could persuade the leaders that your movie show was not only what *will *happen, but what *must *happen, despite their best efforts to fight & maneuver politically better and smarter.
It’s also very hard to overestimate the power of people to believe what they want to believe in spite of rock solid evidence to the contrary. Salesmen are especially good at this mind-fuck. And top politicians are the Ubermensch* of salesmen.
The people who start wars don’t fight them.
This was particularly true in the European theater of WWI. The officer core and the conscripts were the modern equivalent of the aristocracy and the peasants…
It’s an old saying that hindsight is always 20/20 vision…
There was a John Wyndham story (A Stitch in Time?) that touched on this question.
If that were true, there wouldn’t be people who start multiple businesses through their lives. Sometimes they are related businesses which may complement each other (such as multiple clothing stores aiming at different target markets), sometimes the later ones are created and managed trying to avoid the mistakes of the first (Alberto Catalan’s NH hotels and later AC hotels), sometimes they are completely unrelated (the newest brand of fighter bulls in Spain was started by a guy who used to have a financial consulting firm).