In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman wrote that prior to the war’s outbreak, “Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws; one could not be pulled out without moving the others.” The delicate pile was created by a series of alliances that preceded the war and shattered what George Kennan called “Bismarck’s European order.”
As Niall Ferguson and others have pointed out, contrary to conventional wisdom, Germany’s initial war aims in the First World War were limited.
Germany was allied to Austria-Hungary, Russia considered itself the protector of Serbia and the “South Slavs” in the Balkans, and France and Russia had signed what Kennan called the “fateful alliance” in 1892. Great Britain was not formally committed to come to the aid of any country, but she feared the naval challenge of Germany and the potential of a hostile power in control of Belgium and France.
Tuchman noted that the system of alliances led to mobilization and war plans. In Germany, the Schlieffen Plan called for German armed forces to first attack its old foe France through Belgium, then shift its army to the east to fight Russia before the Russian army could be fully mobilized. Great Britain, meanwhile, would use sea power to transport armies to France to stop the Hun from dominating Western Europe. France secured an alliance with Russia and sought one with the British; if war came, it hoped to avenge the loss to Germany in 1871 and recapture Alsace-Lorraine.
When Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia in late July 1914 after Germany provided it with the infamous “blank check,” Russia mobilized its army. On August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia, and two days later it declared war on France. On August 4th, German forces invaded Belgium causing Great Britain to declare war on Germany. The “guns of August” set Europe aflame and that fire wouldn’t be extinguished until November 11, 1918, by which time much of the world was at war, more than 10 million soldiers were dead and 23 million wounded, with civilian casualties exceeding six million.
But the guns didn’t go silent everywhere. In Russia, civil war raged for five more years as the Bolsheviks consolidated their control over the country. The rise to power of communism in Russia, fascism in Italy and Germany, and extreme militarism in Japan were consequences of the First World War.
The guns of August, as Raymond Aron noted in The Century of Total War, eventually substituted ideology for limited war aims and set the course for the bloodiest century in human history. “It was no longer a question of shifting frontier posts a few miles,” Aron explained. “Only sublime — and vague — principles, such as the right of peoples to self-determination or ‘the war to end war’ seemed commensurate with such violence, sacrifice, and heroism.” For Aron, the guns of August “introduced ideologies in place of war aims”—a legacy of the First World War that is still with us.
As Niall Ferguson and others have pointed out, contrary to conventional wisdom, Germany’s initial war aims in the First World War were limited. So, too, were the war aims of Austria-Hungary, Russia, France, and Britain. But as the bodies piled up and the propaganda machines of the great powers revved up, the war was transformed into what Aron called a “war of peoples and of ideas.” And President Woodrow Wilson made sure that America’s entry into the war was justified on ideological grounds instead of U.S. national interest. It was a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” Restoring a balance of power — as the Congress of Vienna had done after the Napoleonic Wars, and as Bismarck had done after the wars of German unification — wasn’t satisfying enough for the ideologues of the 20th century.
World War II was also an ideological war — fought, according to Churchill and Roosevelt, for the principles of the Atlantic Charter. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were also justified on ideological grounds instead of limited national interests. The wars of the 21st century have followed suit — the Bush 43 administration transformed the Afghan and Iraq wars into wars of regime change and democratization, while the Ukraine War is supposedly about the survival of democracy in Ukraine instead of which country (Ukraine or Russia) will control Crimea and Ukraine’s eastern provinces.
Meanwhile, neoconservative voices call for regime change in Iran, and France’s president recognizes Palestine as a state in obeisance to the self-determination of peoples — an idea born in the First World War.
The First World War should have taught us how small events — like the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist — can lead to global cataclysms if the countries involved substitute ideologies for interests. One-hundred and eleven years ago, the guns of August shattered the Old World and ushered in a century of ideological conflicts that claimed hundreds of millions of lives. The statesmen of today would be well advised to read Tuchman and Aron so that the 21st century does not also become a century of total war.
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