The Long Fuse [Second Edition, Paperback] 0397472420, 9780397472420

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THE LONG FUSE

Critical Periods of History ROBERT D. CROSS, GENERAL EDITOR

Books now in print: LINCOLN AND THE FIRST SHOT BY RICHARD N. CURRENT

THE ELECTION OF ANDRE\V JACKSON BY ROBERT V. REMlNI

McKINLEY, BRYAN, AND THE PEOPLE BY PAUL W. GLAD

WHY LENIN? WHY STALIN? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900-1930 BY THEODORE H. VON LAUE

LABOR IN CRISIS: THE STEEL STRIKE OF 1919 BY DAVID BRODY

IRISH-AMERICAN NATIONALISM BY THOMAS BROWN

RACE AND POLITICS "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil \Var BY JAMES A. RAWLEY EDITED BY ROBERT F. BYRNES:

THE END OF GLORY An Interpretation of the Origins of World \Var II BY LAURENCE LAPORE

THE LONG FUSE AN INTERPRETATION OF THE ORIGINS OF WoRLD WAR

SECOND EDITION

LAURENCE LAFORE University of Iowa

CRITICAL PERIODS OF HISTORY /. B. Lippincott Company Philadelphia New York Toronto

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COPYRIGHT

@ 1971, 1965

BY LAURENCE LAFORE.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ELEVENTH PRINTING

With the exception of brief excerpts for review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any farm or by any means without written permission from the publisher. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:

77-127734

ISBN-0-397-4 7242-0 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To the Memory of Troyer Steele Anderson

Contents

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TRUTH AND THE HIS To RIAN ..••• I.

THE Losr UTOPIA ................

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2.

THE AUSTRIAN ANOMALY ........•

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3.

THE EUROPE OF THE ARMED CAMPS

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THE "ENCIRCLEMENT,, OF GERMANY

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THE BONES OF A POMERANIAN

GRENADIER

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THE THIRD MAN FALLS SICK .....•

186

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THE BREAKDOWN OF EUROPE ......

225

A NOTE ON THE BIBLIOGRAPHY ...•.

269

INDEX

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Mapr Austria-Hungary, 1871-1908 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64-65 Ethnic Groups in Austria-Hungary, 187 l • 1908

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66-67

Bismarck's Europe, about 1890 . . . . . . . . . . . 84-85 Germany Encircled, in 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . 138-39 Southeastern Europe, 191 r . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Southeastern Europe, 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

THE LONG FUSE

TRUTH AND THE HISTORIAN

WORLD War I has become a fashion and a fad. Musical comedies are written about it, and high school students collect old helmets and anecdotes about the strange behavior of generals. What was once called The Great War has retreated far enough into the past to seem an oddity and to lose its force, in our consciousness, as a living memory or an enduring influence on our lives. It is being interred in the same moldering but monumental tomb as the Napoleonic and Civil Wars, a subject for amateur autopsies, a passionate hobby among buffs who collect its relics with the same degree of zeal that philatelists apply to the early stamps of British Guiana. Such souvenir-hunting has nothing to do with the work of historians, whose professional purposes may be said to be approximate! y the opposite of those of the curio collector: the reconstruction of events past with a systematic effort to divest it of the picturesque and to see it with fidelity as contemporaries saw it in order to understand their motives and purposes. But to see it, too, with wider vision and greater accuracy, since the historian enjoys the broader view of retrospect and a larger abundance of documents. Retrospect, to be sure, produces narrowness as well as breadth. It has been repeatedly observed ( and indeed has become a creed with

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THE LONG FUSE

some historians) that historians can see the past only through the distorting lenses of the present and therefore can never see it true, and this is, of course, correct. But if he is at all competent the historian is aware of this, and he is also aware of the comparable, but very different, ophthamological limitations of other historians in the intervening seasons. Each age contributes a different set of defects of vision, but it also, by that very fact, contributes new perceptions as well. Historians are always, as it were, using telephoto and wide angle lenses simultaneously as they focus on their subjects, and it is possible to argue that each sees a little more, and a little more accurately, than his predecessor. The assertion may be optimistic. Myopia is often aggravated by fashion or circumstance so that the historian of a given age may be so preoccupied with the issues of his own world that he tries to see the past as an explanation for them. During and immediately after the second world war, for example, there was an understandable impulse to explain the first in terms of the historical forces that seemed to have climaxed in the awful anti-hero, Hitler. Distinguished English-speaking historians viewed practically all the events of Germany's past as a sort of preparation for the ferocious aggressiveness of Germany's present. Such recurrent short-sightedness has afflicted the viewers of all past events, and in a larger way has prevented, and always will prevent, lasting agreement on such problems as the cause and nature of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire ( if indeed it did decline and fall), or the War of the Roses, whose rights and wrongs are still, five hundred years after the event, ardently and sometimes hysterically argued between adherents of the Houses of Lancaster and York. But varieties of interpretation, at any given time misleading, still may contribute to enlightenment, as surely as the accumulation of objective facts. The vocation of professional historians is precisely this: to revise past views in the knowledge that they will never win but that, with each new monograph or essay they move further from defeat in the game of discovering truth. Since no historical analysis is final, reappraisal is a duty. Since 14

TRUTH AND THE HISTORIAN

"relativism", the notion that the past can be seen only from the distorted standpoint of the present, may lead toward illumination of a true state of things as well as its concealment, it is useful that each generation see how the new developments of its time may adjust the focus of the instrument through which past events are seen. What follows is an essay in such an adjustment. One of the great developments of our day has been the epic, if still very incomplet~, emancipation of the African and Asian lands from colonial tutelage of European powers. A leading element in this has been the complicated interplay of nationalisms, the tired nationalism of the Europeans retreating, gracefully or sullenly, before the comparable but more vigorous emotions which the Europeans inadvertently but inevitably exported to their colonies. Before 194 5 it was very rare for anyone to see in World War I an episode, or a cause, of this vast remodeling of the world. But what has happened since 194 5 undoubtedly lights new aspects of the intricate events that happened before 1914. Colonial empires played relatively little part in determining the suicidal decisions that led to the devastating events of 1914 to 1918. But a generation that has observed the ways in which elementary economies and politically inexperienced societies can contort the destinies of what used to be called the "civilized" nations run by Europeans and their descendants, may in retrospect now discern a set of historical phenomena, perhaps materials for a new theory of history. The effects of nascent nationalism, still unresolved, in areas recently emancipated politically, may properly be projected into our view of Europe in the early twentieth century. We know now that such relationships can shake the world; and it is the purpose of this book to suggest that one set of such relationships shook, and in the end destroyed, the world of European Powers in 1914. The peoples and places that caused the explosion in that year were located not overseas but within the boundaries of what geographers had rather arbitrarily named Europe. But they were nonetheless colonial in their situation, and their struggle for independence was the model and antecedent of the world struggle

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THE LONG FUSE that has developed since 194 5. World \Var I is the name given to a very complicated series of events. They were, considered together, the most important events of the past hundred and fifty years, and along with those of the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation the most important of the last millennium. The war destroyed men, treasure, and empires and contorted those that survived; it gave birth to new and unexpected forces; and it greatly speeded the development of many tendencies already in course. It demolished institutions and ideas that in 1914 had been, although already weakening, still strong, such as the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires, and monarchy and aristocracy. It demolished equally institutions like the German Empire and ideas like anarchism, which had seemed imposingly vigorous. It gave impetus to forces already born whose destiny had been still uncertain and whose reputation still doubtful: democracy, the self-determination of nations, the rights of women. It enormously speeded secular shifts of power already in the making, most notably the rise of the United States of America to economic and military pre-eminence, and the correspondlng decline of the capacity of the Great Powers of Europe to control their own destinies. It decimated a generation of future leaders and producers, and for thiry years shook the political poise and interrupted the economic growth of Europe. It inaugurated an era in which colonial empires, which seemed powerful and permanent in 1914, were to disintegrate. It precipitated the Russian revolution and released communism as a world force led by the Soviet Union. Far from removing the causes of future war-the Allies proclaimed that as their aim-it wrecked the insufficient but not ineffective systems and habits that had provided peace in Europe for forty-five years before its outbreak. And it did all these things in four years; its most spectacular consequence was the effect it had upon the timing of history. It reduced Great Po~ers, unprepared in psychology or in policy, to permanent weakness, and it thrust the United States, also unprepared, into a position of world responsibility.

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\X'hat caused it? The question is unanswerable, for the war was many things, not one, and the meanings of the word "cause" are also many. To discern the cause of any event, even a single and simple event, is to advance a definition of the word. To discuss causes at all is to move from the historian's world of concrete things, statutes, treaties, battles, and mobs, to the shado-wy and metaphysical landscape of the philosophers. The essay that follows singles out for emphasis a particular group of circumstances and chains of events that preceded the outbreak of the first World War, the effects of the emerging nations of central and southeastern Europe upon the established Great Powers. To argue that they form the cause is to gamble with semantics and with the philosophy of history. Other causes-the changing balance of military power in Europe, the growing social tensions within European nations, the shrillness of chauvinists and the stridency of a semiliterate press and public, Anglo-German rivalry, Franco-German hostility, Russian expansionism, colonial conflicts, commercial competition-all these have been studied and restudied. All of them were causes of what became the first World War. But the war, that vast phenomenon, grew out of a single international event, which was the conflict between the Habsburg Monarchy and the kingdom of Serbia. Had Austria-Hungary been differently constituted, had Serbia posed a less lethal threat to it, there would have been no Austro-Serbian war in 1914; and if a general war had come later, it would have been fought on different terms and taken different forms. It was the system of alliances and the changing balance of military power in Europe that converted a Balkan dispute into a world war, but it did not cause the particular war that happened to be fought. For a hundred years and more, Europe, the prosperous and stable Europe of the west and the north, had suffered from the complexities of the lands and peoples of the east and the southeast, whose difficulties have intruded themselves on Great Powers and have, by magnetic attraction, drawn Great Powers into conflict. Here are illuminated, in a sort of gigantic microcosm, the problems of

THE LONG FUSE conflicting and emerging nationalisms, the problems of economic and political immaturity, the problems of attempting solutions by means that worked in the \Y/est and which were the only means that anyone knew to apply to new nations. There were deep and abiding sources of conflict in the rest of Europe. But to a surprising degree they were intertwined with the turmoil of the nationalities in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. If the Germans pushed Austria into war in 1914-and there is much evidence that they did something of the sort-they did it largely because they apprehended that a general war was someday inevitable and that, if it had to be fought, this was the most favorable time to fight it. But the thing that made general war seem inevitable to the Germans was the existence of the Franco-Russian alliance, which they viewed as a form of encirclement ultimately directed against them; and the Franco-Russia alliance was, indirectly anyway, the product of Austrian and Balkan developments a generation before. In tracing almost any of the circumstances that were most critical in 1914, one is led back to the national conflicts of Central and Southeastern Europe. It is perhaps artificial so to make selections and emphases. But the study of history is always a study of patterns, of sorting out different hypotheses, of imposing different sorts of order on the confusion of raw facts, of finding in the present new clues to the past. The history of the history of the causes of World War I demonstrates these propositions. Until the moment when German troops crossed the Belgian border and entered the frontier villages on the early morning of August 4, 1914, the conduct of the affairs of state that led to the invasion had been in he hands of diplomats, politicians, and military advisers. At that moment the events of the recent past were transferred to the hands of others, of publicists and propagandists. For four years an unconscionable volume of self-defense and corresponding vilification was poured forth. None of it was accurate, let alone complete. Official publications-the British Blue Boo,e, the French Yellow Book, the German White Book, the 18

TRUTH AND THE HISTORIAN

Austrian Red Book, the R11ssian Orange Book-sou,