The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (3 page)

Figure I.1
Battlefield deaths as percentages of world population

Why? What made the twentieth century, and particularly the fifty years from 1904 until 1953, so bloody? That this era was exceptionally violent may seem paradoxical. After all, the hundred years after 1900 were a time of unparalleled progress. In real terms, it has been estimated, average per capita global domestic product – an approximate measure of the average individual’s income, allowing for fluctuations in the value of money – increased by little more than 50 per cent between 1500 and 1870. Between 1870 and 1998, however, it increased by a factor of more than six and a half. Expressed differently, the compound annual growth rate was nearly thirteen times higher between 1870 and 1998 than it was between 1500 and 1870. By the end of the twentieth century, thanks to myriad technological advances and improvements in knowledge, human beings on average lived longer and better lives than at any time in history. In a substantial proportion of the world, men succeeded in avoiding premature death, thanks to improved nutrition and the conquest of infectious diseases.
Life expectancy in the United Kingdom in 1990 was seventy-six years, compared with forty-eight in 1900. Infant mortality was one twenty-fifth of what it had been. Men not only lived longer; they grew bigger and taller. Old age was less miserable; the rate of chronic illness among American men in their sixties in the 1990s was roughly a third of what it had been at the start of the century. More and more people were able to flee what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had called ‘the idiocy of rural life’, so that between 1900 and 1980 the percentage of the world’s population living in large cities more than doubled. By working more efficiently, people had more than treble the amount of time available for leisure. Those who spent their free time campaigning for political representation and the redistribution of income achieved considerable success. Barely a fifth of countries could be regarded as democratic in 1900; in the 1990s the proportion rose above half. Governments ceased to provide merely the fundamental public goods of defence and justice; new welfare states evolved that were pledged to eliminate ‘Want… Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’, as the 1944 Beveridge Report put it.

To explain, in the context of all these advances, the extraordinary violence of the twentieth century, it is not enough simply to say that there were more people living closer together, or more destructive weapons. No doubt it was easier to perpetrate mass murder by dropping high explosives on crowded cities than it had once been to put dispersed rural populations to the sword. But if those were sufficient explanations, the end of the century would have been more violent than the beginning and the middle. In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out. But there was actually a marked decline in the amount of armed conflict in the last decade of the century. The highest recorded rates of military mobilization and mortality in relation to total population were clearly in the first half of the century, during and immediately after the world wars. Moreover, weaponry today is clearly much more destructive than it was in 1900. But some of the worst violence of the century was perpetrated with the crudest of weapons: rifles, axes, knives and machetes (most obviously in Central Africa in the 1990s, but also in Cambodia in the 1970s). Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world
in which ‘all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed’. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world? To understand why the last hundred years were so destructive of human life, we therefore need to look for the motives behind the murders.

When I was a schoolboy, the history textbooks offered a variety of explanations for twentieth-century violence. Sometimes they related it to economic crisis, as if depressions and recessions could explain political conflict. A favourite device was to relate the rise of unemployment in Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazi vote and Adolf Hitler’s ‘seizure’ of power, which in turn was supposed to explain the Second World War. But, I came to wonder, might not rapid economic growth sometimes have been just as destabilizing as economic crisis? Then there was the theory that the century was all about class conflict – that revolutions were one of the main causes of violence. But were not ethnic divisions actually more important than the supposed struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie? Another argument was that the twentieth century’s problems were the consequences of extreme versions of political ideologies, notably communism (extreme socialism) and fascism (extreme nationalism), as well as earlier evil ‘isms’, notably imperialism. But what about the role of traditional systems like religions, or of other apparently non-political ideas and assumptions that nevertheless had violent implications? And just who was fighting the twentieth century’s wars? In the books I read as a boy, the leading roles were always played by nation states: Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the United States and so on. But was it not the case that some or all of these polities were in some measure multinational rather than national – were, indeed, empires rather than states? Above all, the old history books told the story of the twentieth century as a kind of protracted, painful but ultimately pleasing triumph of the West. The heroes (Western democracies) were confronted by a succession of villains (the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians) but ultimately good always triumphed over evil. The world wars and the Cold War were thus morality plays on a global stage. But were they? And did the West really win the hundred years war that was the twentieth century?

Let me now reformulate those preliminary schoolboy thoughts in
rather more rigorous terms. In what follows, I shall argue that historians’ traditional explanations for the violence of the twentieth century are necessary but not sufficient. Changes in technology, in particular the increased destructiveness of modern weaponry, were important, no doubt, but they were merely responses to more deep-seated desires to kill more efficiently. There is in fact no correlation over the century between the destructiveness of weaponry and the incidence of violence.

Nor can economic crises explain all the violent upheavals of the century. As noted already, perhaps the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography leads from the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of war. Yet on closer inspection this pleasing story falls apart. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression became fascist regimes; nor did all the fascist regimes engage in wars of aggression. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe, but only after its economy had recovered from the Depression. The Soviet Union, which started the war on Hitler’s side, was cut off from the world economic crisis, yet ended up mobilizing and losing more soldiers than any other combatant. For the century as a whole, no general rule is discernible. Some wars came after periods of growth; others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic crises. And some severe economic crises did not lead to wars. Certainly, it is now impossible to argue (though Marxists long tried to) that the First World War was the result of a crisis of capitalism; on the contrary, it abruptly terminated a period of extraordinary global economic integration with relatively high growth and low inflation.

It can of course be argued that wars happen for reasons that have nothing to do with economics. Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the Short Twentieth Century’ (1914–91) ‘an era of religious wars, though the most militant and bloodthirsty religions were secular ideologies of nineteenth-century vintage’. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Paul Johnson blamed the century’s violence on ‘the rise of moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility [and] the repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values’. Yet the rise of new ideologies or the decline of old values cannot be regarded as causes of violence in their own right, important though it is to understand the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. There have been extreme belief-systems on offer
for most of modern history, but only at certain times and in certain places have they been widely embraced and acted upon. Anti-Semitism is a good example in this regard. Likewise, to attribute responsibility for wars to a few mad or bad men is to repeat the error upon which Tolstoy heaped scorn in
War and Peace
. Megalomaniacs may order men to invade Russia, but why do the men obey?

Nor is it convincing to attribute the violence of the century primarily to the emergence of the modern nation state. Although twentieth-century polities developed unprecedented capabilities for mobilizing masses of people, these could be, and were, as easily harnessed to peaceful as to violent ends. States could certainly wield more ‘social control’ in the 1930s than ever before. They employed legions of civil servants, tax collectors and policemen. They provided education, pensions and in some cases subsidized insurance against ill health and unemployment. They regulated if they did not actually own the railways and roads. If they wanted to conscript every able-bodied adult male citizen, they could. Yet all of these capabilities developed even further in the decades after 1945, while the frequency of large-scale war declined. Indeed, it was generally the states with the most all-embracing welfare states that were the least likely to be involved in war in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Just as it was an earlier revolution in warfare that had transformed the early modern state, it may well have been total war that made the welfare state, creating that capacity for planning, direction and regulation without which the Beveridge Report or Johnson’s Great Society would have been inconceivable. It was surely not the welfare state that made total war.

Did it matter how states were governed? It has become fashionable among political scientists to posit a correlation between democracy and peace, on the ground that democracies tend not to go to war with one another. On that basis, of course, the long-run rise of democracy during the twentieth century should have reduced the incidence of war. It may have reduced the incidence of war between states; there is, however, at least some evidence that waves of democratization in the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s were followed by increases in the number of civil wars and wars of secession. This brings us to a central point. To consider twentieth-century conflict purely in terms of warfare
between states is to overlook the importance of organized violence within states. The most notorious example is, of course, the war waged by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews, nearly six million of whom perished. The Nazis simultaneously sought to annihilate a variety of other social groups deemed to be ‘unworthy of life’, notably mentally ill and homosexual Germans, the social elite of occupied Poland and the Sinti and Roma peoples. In all, more than three million people from these other groups were murdered. Prior to these events, Stalin had perpetrated comparable acts of violence against national minorities within the Soviet Union as well as executing or incarcerating millions of Russians guilty or merely suspected of political dissidence. Of around four million non-Russians who were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, at least 1.6 million are estimated to have died as a result of the hardships inflicted on them. A minimum estimate for the total victims of all political violence in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1953 is twenty-one million. Yet genocide
*
predated totalitarianism. As we shall see, the policies of forced resettlement and deliberate murder directed against Christian minorities in the last years of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide according to the 1948 definition of the term.

In short, the extreme violence of the twentieth century was highly variegated. It was not all a matter of armed men clashing. Of the total deaths attributed to the Second World War, half at least were of civilians. Sometimes they were the victims of discrimination, as when
people were selected for murder on the basis of their race or class. Sometimes they were the victims of indiscriminate violence, as when the British and American air forces bombed whole cities to rubble. Sometimes they were murdered by foreign invaders; sometimes by their own neighbours. Clearly, then, any explanation for the sheer scale of the carnage needs to go beyond the realm of conventional military analysis.

Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the twentieth century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea. These may be summarized as ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. By ethnic conflict, I mean major discontinuities in the social relations between certain ethnic groups, specifically the breakdown of sometimes quite far-advanced processes of assimilation. This process was greatly stimulated in the twentieth century by the dissemination of the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference (even as that principle was waning in the realm of politics) and by the political fragmentation of ‘borderland’ regions of ethnically mixed settlement. By economic volatility I mean the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment, with all the associated social stresses and strains. And by empires in decline I mean the decomposition of the multinational European empires that had dominated the world at the beginning of the century and the challenge posed to them by the emergence of new ‘empire-states’ in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany. This is also what I have in mind when I identify ‘the descent of the West’ as the most important development of the twentieth century. Powerful though the United States was at the end of the Second World War – the apogee of its unspoken empire – it was still much less powerful than the European empires had been forty-five years before.