The British education minister, Michael Gove, in a robust defence of Britain’s participation in World War One, argued it was, amongst other things, a fight to defend the liberal order against its autocratic and authoritarian enemies; namely Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As critics quickly pointed out, a key ally of Britain and France was Czarist Russia, the most autocratic of regimes that was notorious for its anti-semitism. In truth the liberal order extended over little of Europe.
In Britain democracy did not extend to women or a fifth of working class men, and was entirely absent in the colonies. In August 1914 King George V simply declared India was at war from London with no Indian asked their view on the matter. Gove also failed to point out that the liberal order, as today more liberal in economic matters rather than political ones, was in trouble.
A Growing Shadow
The summer of 1914 is usually portrayed in documentaries, films and books as an idyllic one of sunshine and merriment, the last one of peace and harmony, blown apart by war. Yet the truth was that liberalism was in serious trouble even before the guns opened fire.
The ruling Liberal government in London was confronted with a three fold challenge. First, and most serious, was the widespread anxiety that Britain in 1914 was tottering on the verge of civil war over the issue of Irish home rule.
Prime minister Herbert Asquith depended for his majority on the support of Irish nationalist MPs, and the price they demanded was a devolved parliament in Dublin. The shipyard and engineering magnates of Belfast, whose prosperity depended on British markets, capital and coal, feared any weakening of the Union and responded by raising a paramilitary force. The Tories in London backed them up, viewing home rule as a weakening of British imperial might, and helped fund the purchase of German rifles. When the British military command in Ireland were ordered to disarm the unionists they refused. The government backed down. When nationalists imported far fewer rifles British troops were ordered to open fire on celebrating crowds in Dublin.
Civil war might not have been on the cards but the British elite was bitterly divided, probably to the greatest extent it ever has been. On top of that it faced two other challenges. One was the sufragette revolt in demand of votes for women which brought direct action onto the streets of Britain. Another was the Great Unrest, the largely unofficial strike wave of 1910-1914 which drew in unorganised workers, many of them women. All of this against a growing concern in ruling circles that British power was in decline on the international stage.
Rail workers on strike in Llanelli, South Wales, in 1911
Across the Channel French employers faced growing workplace militancy, spearheaded by the syndicalists: advocates of direct action culminating in a revolutionary general strike. France was also divided by the Dreyfus Affair, the attempt by the military command to persecute a Jewish officer, claiming he was a German spy. A vicious, anti-semitic far right emerged, championing the generals, who would much later in 1940 support the pro-German regime of Marshal Petain.
Moving east, Germany had universal male suffrage, unlike Britain or France, and the beneficiary was the Social Democrats (SPD), the biggest working class party in the world, allied to the strongest trade union movement on earth. Despite the evident moderation of their leaders, the German elite persisted in viewing them as dangerous subversives and shunned them.
Fear of the working class was combined with the belief Russia was industrialising so fast it could soom match German might. By 1914, elite opinion was that if war came much later Germany would be outgunned.
Germany is usually demonised as a militarist and expansionist state ruled over by the autocratic Kaiser, who along with the generals, could ignore parliament. In reality it existed in a Europe of militarist and expansionist states. Once war began Kaiser Wilhelm had less influence on events than his counterparts in London and Rome. The absolutist facade of imperial Germany concealed the most successful capitalist economy in Europe and a vibrant labour movement. In 1914 the SPD and union leaders backed the war and the working class was left stunned, but three years later it would re-emerge as a key player.
Germany’s ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in an advanced state of decay. It had survived revolution in 1848 because it could mobilise its Slavic subjects to crush rebellion in Austria, Hungary and Italy. But by the beginning of the 20th century Slavic nationalism was on the rise, something Vienna blamed on Russia. Powerful working class movements had also emerged in Vienna, Budapest and the Czech lands.
Russia had been humiliated by the Japanese in the war of 1904-1905 which had then been followed by revolution. Its defeat had led to a lull in class struggle but by 1912 it was raging again.
The least of the great powers was Italy, nominally allied to Germany and Austria. It was an industrialising state with a weak and divided ruling class which faced an insurgent working class and a section of the upper classes, young and impatient, which wanted imperial conquest and a crack down on the left. Events were to prove Italy’s territorial ambitions outmatched its ability to wage war.
Between these powers there was no shortage of potential disputes and the creation of treaties uniting two blocs meant any minor conflict could quickly assume the character of a Europe wide war.
The Actuality of Revolution
Revolution had burst back onto the centre stage in 1905 in Russia, where the working class employed its industrial power and created new forms of direct democracy, the soviets. But the same year also saw revolution in Persia (today’s Iran) as a mass movement erupted fighting for a constitutional monarchy and challenging Britain’s indirect control of the country through its ally the Shah.
Russia saw the first modern working class revolution, Iran the first mass national liberation movement. In 1911 revolution in China ended imperial rule and created a democratic republic, albeit one all too weak in the face of rival imperialisms. Two years later a group of Turkish nationalist officers took effective control of the Ottoman Empire and would set in train the creation of an effective Turkish state in the following decade, itself a major defeat for British and French imperialism.
Demonstrators in St. Petersburg during the 1905 Revolution
The example of Russia had already impacted on the working class elsewhere in Europe. In the colonial world the beginnings of what we might term national liberation movements posed a threat to imperialism of all shades.
A Century of Peace?
Associated with the sepia tinted nostalgia for those halycon days prior to 1914 is the quaint idea that Europe had been at peace since Waterloo in 1815. It was true Britain had avoided involvement in any Eurpean war, with the exception of a rather brutal conflict in Crimea. That’s because Whitehall relied on naval power and in playing off the European powers so that none became too powerful. But there was never a year Britain was at peace as it forged its worldwide empire. Many of its colonial wars were fought by the Indian Army, ensuring minimum British losses and letting India pick up the tab.
A united Germany had been declared in the Palace of Versailles after Prussia had defeated France in 1870, stripping it of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. From then until the summer of 1914 war was always a possibility between Germany and France. Republican France maintained just as high military expenditure as its rival across the Rhine.
In 1858 France had gone to war with Austria to help the kingdom of Piedmont take control of northern and central Italy as part of the Italian wars of unification. Piedmont soon took control of the south but harboured a desire to take further Italian territories still ruled by Austria. When Prussia went to war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy joined it but suffered a humiliating defeat on land and sea. Nevertheless it got Venice and its hinterlands courtesy of the Prussian victory.
At the beginning of the last century war returned to Europe well before the Great Powers declared hostilities on each other in July and August 1914. The eyes of various European powers and their allied states had fallen on the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, which was clearly in decay.
In 1908 the Austro-Hungarian Empire formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, formally under the rule of Istanbul, and in 1911 an Italian government invaded the Ottoman province of Libya in an attempt to appease nationalists at home demanding a more vigorous Italian foreign policy.
What followed was a feeding frenzy in which the various European powers encouraged the states which had emerged from Ottoman rule in the region to conquer the European territory remaining to their former master. In 1912 Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro united, encouraged by Russia, to conquer all of Turkish controlled Europe virtually to the gates of Istanbul. The following year Bulgaria, dissatisfied with the new partition, went to war with the other three and was defeated. Turkey joined in to win back lost ground.
Bulgarian heavy artillery during the Balkans wars during the so called ‘century of peace’.
For the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire the rise of Serbia, which promoted the creation of a pan-Slavic state in the Balkans and was allied to Vienna’s main enemy, Russia, was bad news. By 1914 the Austrian authorities and generals were looking for an opportunity to cut Serbia down to size amidst fear that their sprawling autocratic Empire was doomed by the rise of nationalism.
It was not the case that the prime concern of the European powers in the rush to war was to divert growing unrest at home, but Austria was the exception to that. A “flight into war” might be the only way of uniting the Empire and saving imperial rule.
Russia had promoted war on the Ottoman Empire, hoping it could gain access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. Britain, Germany, France and the United States were less concerned with the Balkans than with carving out control and influence in the Ottoman controlled Middle East and in what is today Turkey. Germany entered into alliance with Istanbul and Britain and France began planning land grabs in event of war. The American company Standard Oil was already prospecting for oil in the Ottoman lands, hoping it could gain the rights to exploit any finds.
Britain’s ambitions explode another myth pedalled by British political leaders, then and now, that in 1914 Britain had no territorial ambitions, unlike the aggressor state Germany. Britain may have had the biggest Empire but it was not satisfied with what it had, it wanted more. A European wide and potentially global war was on the near horizon as the bells welcomed in 1914 and Britain was committed to joining it.
