Neither War Nor Peace: A New Look at the Aftermath of World War I
By MARGARET MacMILLAN
Robert Gerwarth's "The Vanquished" is about the continuing conflict in the years following the end of World War I.
BOOK REVIEW
Neither War Nor Peace: A New Look at the Aftermath of World War I
THE VANQUISHED
Why the First World
War Failed to End
By Robert Gerwarth
Illustrated. 446 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
“This war is not the end but the beginning of violence,” the
German war hero Ernst Junger wrote in 1928. And many of his contemporaries,
including Junger himself, did not shrink from that. A significant minority of
Europeans welcomed violence as ennobling, and as a way to degrade their enemies
while creating new types of societies. Robert Gerwarth, a professor of modern
history at University College Dublin, looks at the turbulent five-or-so years
especially in the center of Europe, between 1918, when World War I ended, and
1923, when peace seemed to come to the Middle East. His account is both
important and timely, and obliges us to reconsider a period and a battle front
that has too often been neglected by historians.
The standard view of the 1920s has been that they were merely
the brief pause before the 1930s and the inevitable slide into a second world
war. The peace settlements made in Paris in 1919, in this telling, were so
vindictive and so flawed that they drove Germans toward the Nazis and left even
victorious nations like Italy and Japan deeply dissatisfied. Historians have
recently been suggesting a more nuanced version, with economic production
reaching prewar levels and a sort of normality returning. That hopeful moment
came to an abrupt end with the Great Depression, which destroyed the faith of
millions in capitalism and democracy and made the alternatives of Communism and
fascism seem attractive. And, as Gerwarth’s well-researched and engrossing book
makes clear, there was already plenty of flammable material lying about.
The pressures of the war led to the disintegration of empires —
the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman — that had endured for centuries,
setting off a scramble for territory and control. Even stable societies
buckled. Gerwarth counts 27 violent conflicts in Europe, from civil wars to
coups, between 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, and 1920 alone. The
breakdown of society and the ensuing conflicts may have been worse in the
center of Europe and the Middle East, but even relatively stable Britain
experienced the bitter Irish war of independence and then civil war.
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Three types of conflict overlapped. States like Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Greece and Turkey fought over land and resources; peoples
turned on each other in civil wars as in Finland or Russia; and national groups
or social classes struggled for dominance.
Increasingly the distinction so painfully established in the
18th and 19th centuries between combatants and noncombatants was breaking down.
War was becoming total, seen as an existential struggle of one people or
civilization against another. Attacks on civilians became acceptable.
In Russia, Lenin urged his Bolsheviks to hang rich peasants as
an example to others. To force the villages to give up their food, his
government bombed them and used poison gas. German paramilitaries — the
Freikorps — rampaged through the Baltic States under the pretext of fighting
Bolshevism. The Freikorps were motivated by a passionate German nationalism as
well as the excitement of conflict. They found enemies everywhere and killed
and raped with abandon. “We chased the Latvians like rabbits over the fields,”
a volunteer proudly recalled. “We slaughtered whoever fell into our hands.”
Nationalists demanded nation-states with as much territory as
possible. Yet the mix of ethnicities meant it was impossible to draw borders
that brought all the Poles into one state, for example, or all Europe’s Germans
into another. Even the small states that succeeded the empires were themselves,
as Gerwarth points out, mini-empires, with a majority of one people ruling over
substantial minorities.
Abstract nouns — the “revolution” or the “nation” — too often
became justifications for treating whole categories of human beings as though
they didn’t matter. Put them into the dustbin of history, said the Bolsheviks.
On the right, prewar ideas like social Darwinism and the racialist theories it
spawned remained influential. (The young Adolf Hitler had eagerly absorbed them
in prewar Vienna.) Struggle, so Darwin could be twisted to say, was a natural
part of human existence.
From the Baltic to the Black Sea a dreadful cycle of reprisal
and counterreprisal left millions of dead. How many we will never know for
sure, but some three million people probably died in the Russian Civil War
alone. Anti-Semitic pogroms had long been known in Russia, but now they spread
into the former Austria-Hungary as Jews were blamed, inconsistently, for being
capitalists and Bolsheviks, or, in an ancient charge, for killing Christ. In
Western Russia and Ukraine alone, 100,000 Jews were murdered in the second half
of 1918.
What we now call ethnic cleansing became acceptable. The Turkish
government had already connived at the Armenian genocide during the war. In the
early 1920s, as Greece tried to seize a huge piece of Anatolia, it became the
turn of the Turks to suffer attacks for who they were. The Greek prime minister
Eleftherios Venizelos, in the grip of his dream of reconstituting the Greek
empire of the classical world, sent his troops to land in Asia Minor. The
atrocities started almost at once. The Turks responded in kind. Under Mustafa
Kemal (Ataturk) they rallied their forces and drove the Greeks back to the sea.
In the Treaty of Lausanne the new republic of Turkey and the Allies agreed to a
population exchange. Some 1.2 million nominal Greeks (distinguished by religion
and not by language or culture) left Turkey while 400,000 equally nominal Turks
went the other way, accompanied by scenes of people drowning and starving that
are reminiscent of Europe’s southern edges today.
Historians have tended to blame these and other such horrors on
the brutalizing effects of World War I, but Gerwarth argues convincingly that
it is not as easy as that. Finland, which had been neutral, had one of the
bloodiest civil wars of all. The dispiriting conclusion to draw from “The
Vanquished” is how easily what we think of as the restraints of civilization
can break down.
Even when peace of a sort was re-established, the fires of
extreme nationalism died down but did not go away, and the language of
political leaders in certain countries continued to resonate with talk of
enemies and metaphors of war. Mussolini called Bolshevism a “gangrene” or
“cancer” that had to be excised. Fears of disorder, civil war and Bolshevism
remained and fueled the rise of fascism. Constitutional and democratic
governments, especially in Germany and the newly emerged states in the center
of Europe, never quite managed to shake off the charge that they were weak and,
perhaps worse, boring.
Defeat proved to have what Gerwarth calls a dangerous “mobilizing
power.” Right-wing nationalist leaders promised to undo this shame and recover
“lost” territories and peoples. Hitler vowed to break the “chains” of the
Treaty of Versailles. No matter that Germany was not that badly treated — and
certainly not as badly as German leaders had treated Russia in the 1918 Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk. The myth of the “stab in the back” — that traitors at home,
whether left-wingers, liberals or Jews had prevented German forces from
fighting on to victory — helped undermine the German republic and fostered
dreams of vengeance. On the winning side, both Japan and Italy believed that
they had not gained enough. Japanese increasingly felt humiliated. Mussolini
excoriated the “mutilated victory” that had not given Italy everything it
wanted.
It is too easy to blame the peace settlements, however. What
happened to Europe had deeper causes. Without that war, existing structures
would not have crumbled as they did. Indeed, the empires might have survived.
(In retrospect that might not have been such a bad thing, especially if they
had continued to reform themselves as they were already doing before 1914.)
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we have learned again that
winding down empires is not easy.
There are other tantalizing questions as well. What if the
United States as the new power on the international scene had joined the League
of Nations and used its great economic and political influence to rebuild
Europe, as it did after World War II? “The Vanquished” is an excellent guide to
help us think again about such issues.
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