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By Steven
Hayward,
Humans
are a sentimental species, making much of anniversaries and reunions.
We’re probably not far from extending our sentimental capacities to observing
anniversaries of anniversaries, like aging baby boomers who argue over which
Woodstock reunion was the best because their memory of the original is fading
into the mists.
Already we are seeing the first trickle of
articles and books that will reach a flood by summer noting the 100thanniversary
of the outbreak of World War I. These retrospectives come in two
types. The first is the never-ending historical argument over causation
of the catastrophe whose derangements of the European equilibrium have not
completely subsided today. The various diagnostic camps formed into fixed
positions decades ago: “miscalculation” (Barbara Tuchman) economic and
demographic asymmetries (Marxists and other varieties of material
determinists), or fear of rising rival power that spurs preemption (the various descendents of
Thucydides).
The second retrospective mode comes from
those who wish to dilate the famous remark that Mark Twain probably never said:
“History doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.”
Given that World War I was
a surprise, a war that was thought to be impossible right up to the moment it
wasn’t, could we wander into the same kind of conflagration today? There
are lots of plausible candidates for the locus of a world-splitting cataclysm,
ranging from a rising China or that crucible of conflict since the beginning of
recorded history—instability and ambition for conquest (or revenge) in south
central Asia. Certainly the rise of radical Islam in recent decades has
taken the place of revolutionary Communist, socialist, and fascist ideologies
that did so much to disrupt the 20th century in the aftermath of World War
I.
Perhaps this retrospection on causal
catastrophism will represent the much wished-for inversion of Santayana’s
injunction to recall history so as not to repeat it. As was the case
before World War I, there are many secular reasons for optimism beyond the
fine-toothed combing and re-telling of the political mistakes of 1914.
China is probably just too large and unwieldy to become a genuine threat of
global war. North Korea would be rolled up quickly if it ever acted
seriously on its belligerent rhetoric. India and Pakistan—or Iran and
everyone in its neighborhood—may come to open war at some point (or the Syrian
and Libyan civil wars may spread), and bad as that prospect is it would not
likely spill over beyond the region or draw in the remaining world
powers. European disarmament—the great windmill of the 1930s—is coming to
pass by degrees, the result of welfare-statism more than authentic Kantian
pacifism. Before long most of Europe won’t be able to fight each other
even if they wanted to. (Better watch out for those old Russians,
though. They didn’t get the memo from Brussels.) The terror threat
will be with us for a while, but can’t by itself plunge the world into a total
war.
Beyond the geopolitical hypotheticals, Steven Pinker and
others have noted that violence in the world, as measured in open conflicts and
deaths, has been declining significantly for the last several decades.
The warfare that leading nations engage in today, such as the U.S. campaigns in
Iraq and Afghanistan, resemble the pre-1914 world of professional armies and
remote battle plains, with conflicts that did not involve whole populations
like World Wars I & II. Perhaps the promise of modernity, which was
at the root of Progressive optimism a century ago, has belatedly come to
fruition?
One aspect of the Great War story of a
century ago seems to be missing from the growing inventory: the changes to the
idea of Progress itself, and the rise of the administrative state in its
wake. The conventional wisdom for many years in U.S. historiography is
that the coming of World War I entailed the end of the Progressive Era and its
momentum for reform. It is certainly true that World War I put paid to
the easygoing faith in inevitable progress that prevailed everywhere in the
advanced industrial nations before the war, and gave way to the existential
pessimism of the interwar period that in turn brought us fully to today’s
“postmodernism” that openly disdains progress in just about every form.
But it is quite wrong to suppose that
World War I ended Progressivism. To the contrary, it accelerated the rise
of the modern administrative state that is the defining feature of what goes by
the label of “Progressivism” today. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor
made this point inadvertently at the time of the 50thanniversary of
World War I: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass
through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post
office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he
liked. He had no official number or identity card.”
The same was true of the United States,
where the brand new income tax barely reached 10 percent on a small handful of
the highest incomes, and regulation was confined to a few well-defined agencies
overseeing a small number of national industries and markets. But as Taylor
correctly notes, “All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.”
Far from ending “Progressivism,” World War I provided the launchpad for a
century of wholesale expansion of administrative government in the United
States, starting with jacking up the income tax to over 90 percent and then, in
World War II, extending its reach to the lowest rungs of the middle
class. Coupled with the crisis of the Great Depression, “Progressive”
government hasn’t looked back. In other words, if you’d described to Progressive
reformers in 1910 the course of American government over the next century, they
wouldn’t have regarded World War I as the end of their dreams, but rather as
the turning point. Not for nothing did Randolph Bourne say that “War is
the health of the State.”
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