The Rhyme of History by Margaret MacMillan

Author:Margaret MacMillan [MacMillan, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Complacencies of Peace

Like our predecessors a century ago, we assume that large-scale, all-out war is something we no longer do. To be sure, we are aware that people are still being killed in conflicts around the world, many of them civil, ethnic, or religious, as in Syria and Iraq today. But since 1945 the world has seen far fewer wars between states and it has survived dozens of relatively minor conflicts, from Korea to the Congo, with the number of casualties dwarfed by those sustained in the two world wars. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, with perhaps as many as 500,000 dead, and the protracted war in the Great Lakes region of Africa stand out as the main exceptions in recent years.

In short, we have grown accustomed to peace as the normal state of affairs. We expect that the international community will deal with conflicts when they arise, and that they will be short-lived and easily containable. But this is not necessarily true. The Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, a man of great wisdom who tried unsuccessfully to staunch the rise of militarism in France in the early years of the 20th century, understood this very well. “Europe has been afflicted by so many crises for so many years,” he said on the eve of World War I, and “it has been put dangerously to the test so many times without war breaking out, that it has almost ceased to believe in the threat and is watching the further development of the interminable Balkan conflict with decreased attention and reduced disquiet.”

The international community as a whole has created institutions dedicated to defusing conflict and forcing aggressors to back down—and they can be effective for long periods of time. The Concert of Europe, that collection of the Great Powers, kept the peace for much of the century after 1815. Yet we should keep in mind that it did not last forever. Institutions as much as people get old and tired. Although they gave it lip service, the Great Powers eventually ceased to believe in the idea of effective and concerted action to avoid conflict, and the world order began to break down—with disastrous consequences.

In 1908, when Austria-Hungary enraged Serbia by annexing Bosnia, where some 44 percent of the population were Serbs, Germany forced Russia, Serbia's protector, to back down. Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his mother: “It is quite true that the form and method of Germany's action—I mean towards us—has simply been brutal and we won't forget it.” He didn't. And when the crisis of 1914 erupted, Tsar Nicholas, a weak man who had until then preferred peace to war, was determined, like most of his ministers, that this time Russia would not give in to pressure from Germany or its ally Austria-Hungary. In 1911 Italy defied an unwritten agreement among the powers to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and seized Tripoli and Cyrenaica, the two North African provinces which later became Libya. The Powers made disapproving noises but did nothing.

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