The War of the World
Introduction
This is an edited and shortened version of the introduction to Niall Ferguson’s book War of the World: History’s age of hatred.
The lethal century
The 100 years after the year 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.
Unparalleled severity
Significantly larger percentages of the world’s population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude. Although wars between ‘great powers’ were more frequent in earlier centuries, the world wars were unparalleled in their severity and concentration. By any measure, the Second World War was the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time.
And yet, for all the attention they have attracted from historians, the world wars were only two of many 20th-century conflicts. Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in at least a dozen others. Comparable fatalities were caused by the genocidal or ‘politicidal’ wars waged against civilian populations by the ‘Young Turk’ regime during the First World War, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say nothing of the tyrannies of Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Pol Pot in Cambodia. There was not a single year before, between or after the world wars that did not see large-scale organised violence in one part of the world or another.
Progress, people and weapons
Why? What made the 20th century, and particularly the 50 years from 1904 until 1953, so bloody? That this era was exceptionally violent may seem paradoxical. After all, the 100 years after 1900 was a time of unparalleled progress: by the end, thanks to myriad technological advances and improvements in knowledge, human beings on average lived longer and better lives than at any time in history.
To explain the extraordinary violence of the 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 mobilisation 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).
Explanations of violence
When I was a schoolboy, the history textbooks offered a variety of explanations for 20th-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 destabilising 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 20th 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 apparently non-political ideas and assumptions that nevertheless had political implications?
Who fought and why?
And just who was fighting the 20th 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 countries were actually multinational rather than national – were, indeed, empires rather than states?
Above all, the old history books told the story of the 20th 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 100 years’ war that was the 20th 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 20th century are necessary but not sufficient.
The extreme violence of the century was highly variegated. It was not all a matter of armed men clashing. Of the total deaths attributed to the Second World War, two-thirds were 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 victims of indiscriminate violence, as when the British and American 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.
Ethnicity, economics and empires
Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the 20th 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 summarised as:
- ethnic conflict
- economic volatility
- 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 was greatly stimulated in the 20th 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 20th 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 45 years before.
