Remembering World War I

This talk was given in the fall of 2018, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, at a conference put on by the History and Political Science department (Dr. Joshua Meeks and me). The conference’s question was, “How does your discipline remember World War I?”

How does the discipline of international relations (a subdiscipline of political science) remember World War I? Well, it depends on whom you ask. International relations has within its purview several grand theories of explaining the world. Two in particular stand out among the rest: realism and liberal idealism. Realism is the view that the world can be understood as anarchy, where individual states do what they have to do to do survive. This typically involves an effort to make one’s country more secure through the development of economic and military power. By contrast, liberal idealism recognizes the anarchy of the world, but proposes that individual states can choose to cooperate and live in peace with one another according to an established and binding set of rules. Realism believes that conflict or the potential for conflict is inevitable, while liberal idealism believes that international cooperation is possible if we establish the right kind of domestic and international institutions and engage in mutually beneficial relationships of hospitality and trade.

What does this have to do with World War I? Well, the short answer is that both realists and liberals feel vindicated by the Great War. For realists, the causes of the war followed the playbook of the founding document of the realist school, given to us by ancient Greek historian Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In his account, Thucydides describes the cause of the great war between Athens and Sparta in the following way: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Harvard professor Graham Allison refers to this as the Thucydides trap, in which a rising power (Athens) creates fear in an already established power (Sparta), which then gives rise to the inevitable war. Power and fear work together with human choice to create conflict and war.

World War I, it turns out, fits this to a tee. Allison argues that the trap can be seen in two ways. First, between Britain (playing the role of established power Sparta) and Germany (the rising power). Britain was a naval power with a huge empire. Germany wanted to be a world power, and through growth in empire and steel manufacturing, it was becoming such a power. A naval arms race ensued, Brtain was afraid of Germany, and war broke out. But there’s a second trap — that between Germany and Russia. This time Germany was the established power, and Russia was the rising power destined to outstrip Germany in the size of its army, assisted by France in its development of strategic railways. All of this created in Germany a sense of fear, thus leading to inevitable conflict. World War I then becomes another data point in service of the view that great powers will go to war when one of the powers feels threatened by the rise of another power, a view, by the way, used to explain the causes of many wars in world history, including the Thirty Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession, and even the American Civil War.

Add to this one small but important point. Ever since Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace,” which founded, like Thucydides for realism, the school of liberal idealism, there has been the view that economic interdependence would reduce the likelihood of war. A contemporary popularization of this view comes from Thomas Friedman, who says that if two countries both have a McDonalds in them, then it is very unlikely they will engage in conflict — since after all, why would anyone want to have their McDonalds blown up? Realists say — a ha — look at Britain and Germany and the Western world before the Great War. Economic interdependence! Trade! Exchange! And yet, they still went to war — because power and fear matter more than international economic activity. (I should add, as an aside, that liberals dispute this argument by the realists, and note that it is not surprising that war was sparked by the non-interdependent states in Eastern Europe who had less reason than their stronger allies to not engage in war.)

At the very same time, liberals remember World War I as exhibit A in the evidence that what we need, is not just economic exchange, but political institutions — if we are ever going to have a chance for peace. Perhaps, if Germany had been a real democracy, perhaps if Germany had been an important member of some international body, a forum where disputes could be resolved and problems could be solved cooperatively — then perhaps the horrors of World War I could have been prevented. Thinkers like Norman Angell, Alfred Zimmen, and of course, Woodrow Wilson, all shared the belief that if we build the right institutions — both at home and abroad — we could collectively overcome our inner demons — and peace, almost like a contagion, would spread throughout the world. If our natural instincts are to engage in conflict, we need to use our reason to overcome those instincts, rationally building democracies at home and international institutions that would encourage self-determination of states, open diplomacy, disarmament, and peaceful resolutions to differences. Certainly economic and cultural exchange would still be encouraged, but now that would be combined with the political solutions that were absent before and during the Great War.

And so, the League of Nations was born out of World War I, the first and failed attempt to do what Wilson and the liberals wanted. It was not enough to prevent World War II, which would be the subject of another talk altogether. But World War II gave rise to the United Nations, a take two of sorts, an attempt to do the things that liberals since Kant have wanted to do — build political institutions for the sake of world peace.

So, today, who is Athens, who is Sparta, who is Britain, Germany, and Russia? Is it perhaps the United States and China? Will we fall into Thucydides’ trap? China the rising power, America the fearful power. Will realists be confirmed in their view if the US and China go to war? Or will economic and cultural interdependence between the U.S. and china, in addition to the strength of the international institutions that have been built since World War I and II — will they maintain peace between the two countries, within Asia itself, and in the whole world? Will liberals be validated in their view? Or perhaps, a third, stranger option — if the US and China go to war, will liberals be vindicated since again, just like in World War I, liberals will claim that the world is not yet fully integrated — not politically, not economically, not culturally — as least not enough to prevent war.

Of course I don’t know the answers to these questions, and nobody does. But World War I has in part given us the language to think about these things. And, our memory of World War I and the way we engage the world today, depends to a great extent on whether we embrace the point of view of realism, liberal idealism, or some grander alternative.