Asteion´s special report for this edition looks back at World War I in terms of international relations, Europe, the Middle East, women, and Japan, as 2014 marks the 100th year since the start of the war. The war was significant not only for Europe, but for Japan and the entire world as well. Our writers all share the view of our editor-in-chief, Masayuki Tadokoro, as mentioned in his foreword to this edition, that "the war may still be a major part of our lives."

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Hiroshi Nakanishi, a specialist in international politics, looks first at the history of international relations from the late nineteenth century to the present day in the form of a single saga. He says that on the eve of the war, new trends with both positive and negative aspects arose in various fields. But when World War I ultimately broke out, these trends did not end up changing international politics or national societies. Nakanishi concludes his argument by hinting disturbingly that the state of the world today is somewhat similar to the way it was before World War I.

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Foreign policy historian Eric Goldstein, on the other hand, offers a bird´s-eye view of the history of European foreign policy regarding World War I, and recognizes the efforts made by officials handling foreign policy to fill in the gaps in understanding in the 100 years from the war to the present day. Looking back at the summer of 1914 when the war broke out, he points out that diplomatic communication techniques have not undergone significant improvements compared with military or industrial technology.

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What if the superpowers of the day were connected by hotlines and didn´t have to issue ultimatums or blank checks so carelessly? This notion is not inconsequential by any means. The empires of Habsburg, Germany and Russia may not have disappeared. That would obviously mean that the Ottoman Empire may have survived as well.

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The Ottoman Empire? While the collapse of this empire is relatively important when looking at the situation in the Middle East today, its significance is often overlooked when we talk about World War I. Historian Nobuyoshi Fujinami warns us against describing the history of the Ottoman Empire according to the Western European preconception that a single nation must constitute a single state. Educated people under the pre-war Ottoman Empire acknowledged the vastness of the territory of the empire and sought numerous ways for the multitude of ethnicities and religions to coexist. But once the empire broke apart after the war, all the pre-war efforts were ignored and the Ottoman Empire was merely considered the "dark" ages.

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The lives of women during World War I is another topic that tends to be overlooked. Toyoko Yamada, who studies French literature, states that the war made women stronger. She means that women were able to have a greater impact on society. And it was Coco Chanel who suggested fashion for working women and succeeded herself. Japan, during the same period, saw working women that people referred to as "Modern Girls" proudly walking the streets of Tokyo. Yamada puts forward the unique poet Akiko Yosano as the Coco Chanel of Japan.

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How did the Japanese people of the time perceive World War I? According to foreign policy historian Ryoichi Tobe, many military officials and educated people in Japan assessed the new age of Total War and New Diplomacy accurately and proactively. Some of the military officials who prepared for Total War recognized that they had to have public support to execute military policies. The educated people who welcomed New Diplomacy displayed their efforts to improve the still-discriminatory international order created primarily by the United Kingdom and the United States by achieving democracy in their politics. But these diverse seeds of possibility were crushed under the strengthening of Japan´s militaristic operations abroad in the 1930s.

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As we can see from the above views, World War I was hardly someone else´s business for Japan. Jan Schmidt, a historian of modern Japan, also suggests after analyzing media reports made during the war that the new middle class of the cities and rural villages clearly understood that a new age of Total War had arrived. And in analyzing discourses related to the topic of postwar Japan, we observe the broad public awareness to prepare for the Total War that may come in the future.

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Viewing World War I from the perspectives of international relations, Europe, the Middle East, women and Japan, we gradually develop a clear picture of the war, which had always been a vague memory. Knowing how people thought and behaved at the time, what do we think? I think that World War I is not just something that "may still be a major part of our lives"; it is undoubtedly connected to today!

What does war mean to women? Imagining women merely as supportive figures in a society lacking in men is not enough to answer this question. Toyoko Yamada, who studies French literature, provides a fresh portrayal of the development of Japanese and French women during World War I.

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The years from 1912 to 1926 in Japan were called the Taisho period, which saw the development of modern life and mass consumption. The women of Tokyo in this period were dubbed "Modern Girls" who idolized Europe, cut their hair short in bob cuts and carried stylish Western books as they strolled the streets of Ginza. A modern Japanese department store installed one of the first elevators in 1914 to attract more customers. It was the same year that a Japan-made car was exhibited at an exposition, surprising visitors.

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Meanwhile, in wartime Europe, when the men departed for the battlefields, women made their presence felt in jobs that had formerly been men´s roles, such as bus drivers or conductors, or as typists, for which there was new and increasing demand. One woman who found a business opportunity in this era and succeeded was Coco Chanel of France. Europe had sufficient demand to welcome Chanel´s new experiment of creating fashion for working women. And after the war, the French equivalent of the Japanese Modern Girls, called garçonnes, began strolling through Paris. As Yamada says, "The war made women stronger."

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The debate on liberating women grew in Taisho-period Japan as well. One figure who, like Coco Chanel, advocated the independence of working women, was the poet Akiko Yosano. Yosano´s arguments were directed against college-graduate, intellectual women such as Raicho Hiratsuka and Kikue Yamakawa, who argued that child rearing required government aid. Yosano, who spent her childhood helping out with household work, argued that the nation essentially needed to prioritize the financial independence of women over government aid. She also claimed that Western clothing was more functional for working women than traditional attire. Speaking for working women, and pursuing fashion that suited them – in a way, Yosano was the Coco Chanel of Japan. Even in the Japan of this period, where there was no war, women were "made stronger."

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Women today have become much stronger. They delay marriage, and many now choose not to marry. "What history tells us is that when women are strong, it is a peaceful era. We should be happy that there are so many smart, strong women today." We are happy to accept Yamada´s convincing argument for now.

Reviewed by Seiichi Hayashi

1920s Japan was often believed to be the period when the nation was preparing for its foreign expansion during and after the 1930s. In 1918, for example, Fumimaro Konoe, who would become its prime minister in the 1930s, strongly criticized the self-opinionated international order centered on the United Kingdom and the United States. He claimed that since the existing international order was already biased, Japan should, like Germany, aim to break it down. This suggests that as of the late 1910s, Japan was prepared to reject the international order of the period between the two world wars.

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But Ryoichi Tobe, one of Japan´s leading foreign policy historians, questions whether or not the 1930s were truly a continuation of the 1920s. World War I was not war with which the Japanese were familiar, but Tobe points out that the Japanese learned a lot from it. Military officials accurately evaluated the war as a Total War in terms of quantity and quality, and it was completely different from any other wars in history. In the words of an army colonel of the time, if World War I was the "sumo" that uses the entire physical body, the Sino-Japanese war was merely a "thumb fight," and the Russo-Japanese war was "arm wrestling."

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These officials also argued that the non-military fields of economics, education and speech needed to support the military. This notion was based on the conviction that an all-out war could only be won with the support and cooperation of the people. This conviction was a response to the democratic movement of the 1920s called the Taisho Democracy. A decent number of military officials correctly understood that the military could no longer execute military policy on its own, ignoring the people and the parties representing them.

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How did the educated people evaluate the international order after the war? Indeed, the widespread view was that the Paris Peace Treaties and the League of Nations were unfairly centered on the United Kingdom and the United States, and were far from achieving justice. But Tobe notes that there were, in fact, many positive arguments that aimed to reform ("kaizo," as favorably used by educated people of the time) Japan and promote democratization in order to make this unfair international order more democratic. In other words, they "weren´t trying to deny or ignore the postwar (biased) international order due to how disillusioning and disappointing it was." The 1930s were more a discontinuation of the 1920s than a continuity.

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Reading Tobe´s arguments, we realize the mistake in attempting to understand the Japan of the 1920s based on its actions during and after the 1930s to strengthen its military expansion overseas. We can see that 1920s Japan, in fact, offered a variety of appealing possibilities.

Reviewed by Seiichi Hayashi

Following World War I, Europe survived, but the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and disappeared without a trace. We should therefore not consider this war from the conventional West European notion that a state must be comprised of a single nation. Historian Nobuyoshi Fujinami discusses the significance of history before and after World War I from the perspective of the Ottoman Empire.

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The rulers of the Ottoman Empire essentially declared that they were a dynasty that had inherited the traditions of Greece and Rome, as well as being the orthodox monarchy of the Islam region, and also the one that bonded the Turkish-Mongolian race. The Greek Orthodox Church had also expanded its power within the empire as the empire expanded the areas of its rule.

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Europe, as well, had a strong awareness that it was the only successor to the Greece/Rome tradition. Accordingly, it didn´t appreciate the very existence of the Ottoman Empire. From the eighteenth century, European nations had increasingly advanced into Ottoman territory. Fujinami says that Europe had developed the selfish excuse that it was "freeing" Greece and the other Christian regions from the "barbarous" Ottoman Empire rule.

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Educated people of the Ottoman Empire, who were faced with this European aggression, made efforts to undertake European studies and learn about Europe´s view of the international world order. But according to Fujinami, many of them supported the Ottoman Empire order to a certain extent as the "lesser evil" and did not espouse the idea of breaking up the Empire. (i.e. Helleno-Ottomanism, which was widely supported in nineteenth century Greece.) The Ottoman Empire had, in fact, recognized a certain level of autonomy in the interests of its diverse ethnicity, religions and political power throughout its region.

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Yet the territories of the Empire were consequently taken over by European powers, one after the other. And after World War I, the Empire collapsed. Europe, as well as the Arab nations that would fall under its power, and even Greece would thereafter view their history under the Ottoman Empire unjustly as their "dark" ages. This stemmed from their determined efforts to legitimize their ethnic independence by denying the past. Fujinami points out the irony that even the new Republic of Turkey, which had gained independence, began describing its Ottoman Empire history as the "dark" ages when the inherently superior Turks were forced into the "less advanced" Arab race.

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The issue raised by Fujinami is very clear. From the viewpoint of historical research, which assumes a state must be organized by a single nation, the history of the Ottoman Empire would ultimately receive a negative evaluation. When we free the history of the Ottoman Empire from such abusive preconceptions, we will probably see new light shine onto the history of mankind. Japan´s research on the history of the Ottoman Empire bears quite a heavy responsibility.

Reviewed by Seiichi Hayashi

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919.)

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Hiroshi Nakanishi, who studies international politics, offers a dynamic view of the post-World War I history of international relations, which reads almost like a saga. Whenever we try to explain this era, we tend to place too much emphasis on the war itself, which cuts out many other events as mere "noise." For example, Ireland´s struggle for independence, which was heightened before and after the war, was taking place in a completely different context from the war.

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Nakanishi believes that "What was merely one of the numerous (international and internal) conflicts taking place" in the early twentieth century "just happened to develop into a world war." We all know that the assassination of the Austrian prince in Sarajevo was accidental.

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If the outbreak of World War I was primarily accidental, we want to know what the world was like on its eve, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. According to Nakanishi, the hierarchical international order centered on Europe had already broken apart prior to World War I. For one, the world was seeing the expansion of a much more exhaustive form of economic globalization than what we see today. Two, the rise of the United States and Japan was slowly shaking the absolute dominance of European nations. Three, serious political and social changes were occurring in the Ottoman Empire, British India and the Qing dynasty, which were the most important non-European worlds. And lastly, ideas and art questioning nineteenth century rationalistic thinking were flourishing (i.e. Cubism; Stravinsky´s ballet The Rite of Spring, etc.). Nakanishi considers that these movements consisted of elements that both create and destroy, and that they were an accumulation of wild energy about which nobody would know where it would lead.

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With World War I occurring as a result, this early twentieth century world, which offered a variety of possibilities, seemed once again clad by the power games of the imperialist nations. But it is rarely possible to anticipate how the dice of history will roll. According to Nakanishi, the trends of international politics first changed when the ideals of self-determination spread worldwide from 1917 onward. The United States and the U.S.S.R., with their universal ideologies (liberalism and communism), began getting the entire world involved in their conflict after World War I. And with these changes, national governments began gaining extraordinary power, including the authority to mobilize people, and pushed nations toward centralization.

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Today, centralization and the big government model are considered to lack efficiency. Behind this trend, economic globalization is gradually expanding. And as people are starting to see the limits of nationalism based on the framework of nations supported by the ideals of self-determination, numerous movements seeking ethnic identity on the backbones of religion and culture are rising in various parts of the world.

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This situation resembles the era prior to World War I, which was alive with wild energy in numerous areas. Of course, we should never resort to simple analogies. But Nakanishi is sure of one thing: No one knows whether the "rough beast" that has been resurrected in this contemporary age represents hope or fear. We only wish that mankind could tame this beast!

Reviewed by Seiichi Hayashi

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War later this year is attracting much popular, governmental, and scholarly attention. Bookshops are already seeing their shelves groan under new books on the subject. Various commemorations are planned surrounding the events of August 1914, what the historian Barbara Tuchman famously referred to as ‘The Guns of August´ in her book of that title. It was the same book that President John Kennedy was reading in 1962 when the Cuban Missile crisis occurred, and from which he drew important lessons that hlped prevent that crisis ending in war, unlike that of 1914. The First World War is a complex event with many aspects worthy of ongoing study, but the greatest significance of 1914 was that it marked the sudden and violent end of an international system that had largely maintained the peace for a century. The vast number of books and articles that have appeared over the ensuing decades, attempting to understand just how such a cataclysm could occur, are themselves evidence of the still baffling nature of the events surrounding what in the twentieth century came eventually to be called simply a ‘World War.´ In retrospect, of the many powerful memories of that war, one question of enduring concern is how such a seemingly stable international system could implode, and do so with such devastating consequences.

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The Collapse of the Concert of Europe
Europe has been the test bed for a number of developments in international relations, largely because, historically, within a relatively small geographical area it had so many states. In the eighteenth century Europe consisted of almost 300 separate state entities. As a result this region developed numerous mechanisms which would later help shape a global environment of multiple states. One of these mechanisms was the grouping together of states with the object of maintaining international peace – or to use their favoured word – equilibrium.
The end of massive wars witness efforts to prevent their recurrence. Before 1914 the last great multi-state conflict had been the twenty plus years of the French and Napoleonic Wars, 1792-1814. After the exhaustion of the countries and peoples of Europe in that conflict the representatives of the key powers met in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna to fashion a new and stable international order. This was the subject of Henry Kissinger´s first book, A World Restored, and the Vienna system would deeply influence his thinking about international relations. Out of this gathering emerged the Concert of Europe -- a general understanding that stability was best assured by a rough equilibrium between the great powers, at that time five in number. It was these states that in the ensuing years resolved major disputes, and in many ways resembled a proto-UN Security Council. It was the gradual erosion of the Concert that opened the door to the First World War.
During the years of the Concert of Europe the conferences of the Great Powers on critical issues had normally taken place in one of their capitals where their resident ambassadors could quickly assemble under the local foreign minister. Given the technology of the age it was the fastest was to arrange a meeting. By 1906, when dealing with relatively straightforward questions concerning Morocco, it proved necessary to meet instead in the relatively remote Spanish port of Algeciras, as the Great Powers could not even agree on one of their capitals as a venue. This was a signal that established methods were beginning to fail due to the mounting tensions between Europe´s great powers. It was notable, however, as marking the first participation of the United States in such a conference, a useful introduction for the Americans into such diplomacy.
In retrospect, the chief issues often ascribed to Great Powers tensions leading to war in 1914 had been resolved by that summer. What was left though was the powerful legacy of the tensions these issues had caused, and though the issues themselves might have been reaching resolution the mutual suspicions they had engendered remained together with the assumption that in all likelihood they would simply be replaced by new ones. One of the most dangerous periods for international security is when major issues have been resolved but the fact that this has been accomplished not yet firmly accepted by both policy makers and the wider populations.
Another reason why the world was unprepared for the scale of the cataclysm that was about to descend upon them was the rational assumption that modern technology had now made war so destructive that states would not risk large scale war. In many ways the mechanisms of diplomacy had not been keeping up with the speed of the technological revolution. In 1898 a Polish banker, I.S. Bloch, published a brilliant six volume work entitled Is War Now Impossible?, which outlined with great foresight the vast destruction that the First World War would in reality witness. He suggested that a modern war would be one of stagnation based on trench warfare, that therefore it would be a prolonged conflict and not the type of more historically common short campaigns. This long duration would therefore become a trial of economic strength, and as a result eventually the strains of the conflict would convulse societies. This led him to the conclusion that states, knowing the consequences, would no longer resort to war. His predictions were remarkably accurate, except for his ultimate and sadly optimistic conclusion.
Similar analyses had also influenced some military thinkers. The architect of German naval expansion, Admiral von Tirpitz, argued the case of a German navy on the basis of the ‘Risk Theory´, which was predicated on the potential damage of future war. His theory propounded that Germany did not need to outbuild the great British Royal Navy, it just had to build one large enough to pose such a threat that Britain would not risk war with Germany because of the damage the Royal Navy would sustain, and in turn make it more vulnerable to other adversaries. This, it was argued, would cause Britain to seek an alliance with Germany which would now have become ‘alliance worthy´. Tirpitz, like Bloch, was correct in his underlying analysis, but unduly optimistic in his suggested result. Instead of seeking to befriend Germany Britain made alliances with the countries which also viewed Germany as a threat, France and Russia. Germany had therefore needlessly helped to propel Britain into exactly the situation Germany had sought to prevent – that of an adversary rather than an ally. History is replete with military theories to explain building programs that had very different consequences from those portrayed by its proponents. The Anglo-German naval arms race is the proto-typical arms race, the first in which the number of these technologically advanced weapons systems each country possessed became the object of competition, a counting game. They presaged the nuclear arms races of the cold war.
The collapse of the concert was due to many factors, but unquestionably one was a loss of that rough equilibrium between the key powers. The 1871 unification of Germany had come about for largely domestic reasons, but that event inadvertently distorted the balance. The new Germany rapidly became the economic and industrial giant of Europe, at a time when Europe dominated much of the world. That growing strength both fuelled exaggerated ambitions on the part of some Germans, while it also increased the threat perception of Germany on the part of other European powers. From 1890 Germany began to base its foreign policy on the concept of weltpolitik, that is not a European focused external policy but one of global involvement. As German power increased so did the willingness of key policy makers to at risk the possibility of war, and to risk tension with other major powers over issues that in essence were of no immediate security concern for Germany. As a result many of the other key international actors came increasingly to see Germany as the primary threat to that international equilibrium on which peace had been based for many decades.

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Why did war come?
For a conflict to occur it would then need both a willingness of the other powers to respond to Germany´s sabre-rattling, and an incident to ignite the crisis. A hundred years ago that confluence of events occurred. Aristotle once observed, for him of revolutions but it applies equally well to wars, – that while the occasion may be trivial the causes are always important. In the world of 1914 the incident came over ethno-national tensions in the volatile Balkans – the south-eastern corner of Europe. While the issues at stake were no doubt of great local importance, it involved issues of which the wider world were largely ignorant. The architect of German unification, Otto von Bismarck, once famously predicted that if war ever came to Europe it would be because ‘Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off´. As usual he was right, but his successors had come largely to ignore the wisdom of Germany´s most notable statesman. The years 1912-13 had already witnessed two Balkan Wars, with the Great Powers barely able to restore peace. The on 28 June 1914 the heir of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian empire was murdered by a teenage Serbian nationalist at Sarajevo, the chief city of Austrian controlled Bosnia. This event fit into the context of the current Balkan tensions.
The events of that day in June 1914, tragic as they were, should have leant themselves to easy resolution by a functional Concert. The Austrian government initially took the assassination calmly, there were afterall other heirs, and the next in line was better liked by the long reigning emperor, Francis Joseph. Emperor since 1848 his longevity seemed a metaphor for the stability and permanency of his empire. It was almost a month after the assassination that the politicians in his government decided to make use of the assassination to deal with longstanding problems with Serbia. Austria sent an ultimatum to the Serbian government, seeing an opportunity to utilize the incident to crush an irritating small neighbour. The ultimatum, however, set off an almost mechanical chain of security agreements between European states. Before taking this action Austria had checked with it powerful ally, Germany, which gave it in the words of later historians ‘a blank cheque´ to take whatever action necessary to deal with Serbia. There was not thought that this could ignite a world war.
Technology now had fully moved beyond the mechanisms of the Concert of Europe, the speed of events going far beyond its capacity to respond, not helped by it being summer when many key official were away from their desks. When Serbia rejected Austria´s ultimatum, while still holding a door open for compromise which was unfortunately ignored, war between the two states commenced. But Serbia had a defence relationship with Russia, which began to mobilize in a show of support of Serbia, this in turn triggered German mobilization in support of Austria, and French mobilization in support of Russia. Germany was now confronted with what had long been its worst security nightmare – being confronted by a war on two fronts, an almost unwinnable scenario.
Weltpolitik had distracted Germany away from its central security reality. Now faced by its worse case scenario the German leadership concluded that if Germany were to have any chance of survival and success it had to seize the initiative and act immediately and pre-emptively. The situation left almost no time for diplomatic options, and Germany decided to attack before it was attacked. On 1 August 1914 Germany began the series of Great Power declarations of war upon one another, which was the death certificate of the 100 year old Concert of Europe. During the first two weeks of August 1914 most of the European great powers declared war, dividing Europe into two vast camps. And it was not just Europe, Britain would call on the resources of its empire raising armies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and its other territories. France too harnessed the resources of its empire. Japan, an ally of Britain´s since 1902, joined the fray in August. The war by its end involved twenty-nine countries, in a contest between two opposing camps. The Allies, led by France, Britain, Italy, and Japan, together with Russia until it withdrew from the war after the communist seizure of power in 1917, and joined by the United States in April 1917, fought the Central Powers comprising Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. By the end of that summer of 1914 much of the world was at war. As the scale of conflict grew one Austrian diplomat exclaimed, ‘Why couldn´t we have been left to fight our own little war on our own´.
While I.S. Bloch had accurately predicted that such a war would be a prolonged one, the leaders at the time still assumed it would be of short duration. Many spoke of the war being over by Christmas (European wars had often ended when winter set in). As a result the war aims of the powers in the summer of 1914 were not those with which they ended the war in 1918. When the conflict began France had hoped to regain the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany by war in 1871, yet by 1918 France had suffered more dead than the entire population of Alsace-Lorraine. Austria-Hungary had hoped to crush neighbouring Serbia, which it viewed as no more than a nest of terrorists, but by the war´s end the Austro-Hungarian empire was no more, its last emperor an exile. Germany had hoped to establish its ascendancy over the middle of Europe and to have broken the danger of enemies on both its flanks, instead the country was convulsed by revolution and its last emperor too had fled. Russia had hoped to establish its ascendancy in the Balkans against the aspirations of Austria-Hungary. By 1918 its imperial family had been murdered and the country had endured two revolutions that had culminated in the seizure of power by Lenin and the communist party. Britain had sought to prevent Germany from dominating the shore opposite it, thereby posing a risk of invasion, though by the war´s end this had resulted in over 3,000,000 British casualties. To justify such vast casualties, the mobilization of societies for total war, and the call for endless personal sacrifice the governments had to articulate grander war aims, as well as escalating the demonization of their opponents.

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The War
Virtually all military planners expected a quick war, but it soon settled down to one of attrition. On the Western front by November 1914 a line of trenches stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier. One of the new realities of war soon became apparent -- the high casualty figures, exceeding all previous experience. In one of the most destructive military efforts the British attempted was an offensive in the First Battle of the Somme (24 June-13 Nov. 1916), in which they advanced eight miles at the cost of over half a million men, with the Germans suffering somewhat higher casualties. In the east of Europe at the Battle of Tannenberg (26-31 Aug. 1914) the German commander, Hindenburg, defeated the Russians. The Russians lost 125,000 men to the Germans 10,000, and the Russian commander committed suicide during the retreat. The Russians though had forced Germany to commit more troops to the east, thereby lessening Germany's ability to deploy soldiers against France. The war continued in a series of ineffective failed offensives. It was a war fought initially using the ideas of nineteenth century warfare just as the technological advances of that century were having their full impact on military capabilities. The war saw significant technical innovations, with the use of airplanes, the invention of the tank, and the deployment of poison gas, all increasing general destructiveness to a level unlike previous wars.
As the war dragged on the belligerents moved to a state of 'total war' with the full mobilization of national resources, including mass conscription and the introduction of government planned economies, which would become a characteristic of the 20th century.
As Bloch had predicted the social upheaval of the war caused political unrest, Ireland revolted against British rule (1916), Russian and French soldiers mutinied, and two Russian revolutions overthrew the Tsar and brought the Communists to power (1917). The war of stalemate finally ended after the American entry in April 1917, which tipped the scales in favour of the Allies.

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Arrival of the United States as a World Actor
A turning point in the war came with the entry of the United States in 1917, not just because of the military impact this would have but because the American President Woodrow Wilson was motivated by the opportunity that had arisen to structure a new, and more stable, international system. To have any say in a post war order the United States would have to be a wartime participant. and so in April 1917 the United States joined the fray, declaring war on Germany. This came after a series of provocations by Germany. In retrospect German diplomacy was remarkably clumsy, as rather than working to influence the United States, which had a large ethnic German population and a significant German language media, and many other strong non-ethnic links, it had instead seen the United States as either a marginal state or Allied inclined. Britain on the other hand conducted a sophisticated and extensive propaganda effort in the United States. This episode is noteworthy as it was the beginning of what is now termed ‘public diplomacy´.
Wilson, a university professor and university president before entering politics, was an expert on constitutional practice. A fervent believer in democracy, he sought to extend to the international system the stability that constitutional mechanisms provided to the domestic affairs of democratic states. A child of the American Civil War, the world´s most destructive war prior to the one then in progress, he had witnessed at first hand what happened when structural systems failed. His Ph.D. thesis had largely focused on how the American constitution had adapted after the Civil War. As the war reached its end his pronouncements on the objects of the war and general ideas on the post-war order led him to be revered as few leaders in history have been. Eventually his picture began appearing in European churches next to those of the saints. When he arrived in Europe for the postwar peace talks people knelt by the tracks as his train passed.
Wilson advocated a new approach to the handling of international affairs - the New Diplomacy. His plans for the post-war settlement spoke of an end of secret treaties, national and minority rights, and the creation of an international organization to assure international stability, an organization in which all states both great and small would be represented. None of the other leaders had such a clearly articulated view of a new world order or one with such broad popular appeal.
Wilson, whose ideas were very much in the liberal tradition, argued that the war was being fought for the ideals of liberal democracy. The reality was that the other belligerents had not joined the conflict for that objective, even if the United States had. But to a war weary world it gave a sense of purpose to what was by then otherwise beginning to look like wanton and meaningless destruction. Wilson took the view that nation-based states provided the best chance for stability, having concluded that the volatility of previous decades had been due to attempts by various national groups to assert their independent identities from other controlling groups. Given the collapse of the old multi-ethnic eastern European empires, Wilson saw such a solution as the most likely to provide a stable structure for that region in particular.
In order for Wilson´s plan to succeed, he did pragmatically take into account the fundamental concerns of the other Allied states. For Wilson, though, it was clear that the key element of any post-war settlement was the creation of an international organization, the League of Nations, intended to provide the basis for a stable post-war order. The rationale behind such a development was not just an awareness of the crises which had led to this war, but also a concern about threats to international stability already looming in the immediate future. Wilson´s plans had a twofold aim: first, to produce the basis for a peace settlement and second, to provide an ideological alternative to Lenin and the Communist regime in Russia. The old European powers eventually turned to Wilson´s proposals both as a way to end the war and as a reason to stave off the communist threat to their own governments. It was on the understanding that the final peace would follow Wilson´s ideas that the German government agreed to an armistice in November 1918.
America´s European partners, however, were not enthusiastic about all of Wilson´s plans. Neither France nor Britain, which both possessed vast polyglot empires, were excited about national self-determination. Indeed Britain was facing immediate problems in Ireland, which had been in a state of simmering rebellion since 1916. Likewise, Wilson´s denunciation of secret diplomacy and secret treaties was extremely awkward because the European Allies had, in a series of such secret wartime agreements, agreed in advance to the division between themselves of much of the German and Ottoman colonial empires.
But there were problems of the period. Wilson was looking beyond the issues of the moment and his great insight was to go back to an understanding of how such a crisis could have occurred. The international system had slowly, and often awkwardly, been evolving the mechanisms of international governance. These had failed spectacularly in the summer of 1914. Wilson, and the many who shared his vision, sought to salvage what they could from the wreckage of the old machinery, and to create a better mechanism to prevent such catastrophic breakdowns in the future.
What ultimately emerged as a new structure was a very imperfect League of Nations, and after a second world conflict, a revised effort in the form of the United Nations. Central to both, and other evolving mechanisms of international relations was the awareness of the need never again to have happen what did occur in 1914. So, to return to Barbara Tuchman, the international system has stayed alert to the need to maintain structures that can provide opportunities to deal with sudden crises. John Kennedy understood during the Cuban Missile Crisis not to make ultimatums, to be firm while retaining flexibility, and not to make Moscow feel it was about to be attacked. Given that small breathing space Moscow began to reply in kind and so the crisis began to diffuse. On lesson of the Cuban crisis was the need to have even speedier communication vehicles than those used during the crisis and one outcome of the missile crisis was the establishment of a ‘hotline´ between Moscow and Washington, utilizing the latest advances in communications.
The summer of 1914 was one of those times when the synchronization of technological capabilities in communication had not kept pace with the technologies of warfare or the needs of diplomacy. Without good communication what had been a good vehicle for international relations crashed, and crashed badly. Much of the work of international relations, in the century that has followed the First World War, has as its focus how to maintain effective international machinery for maintaining stability and hopefully peace. How different the twentieth century might have been if only there had been a hotline in 1914.