The War of the World
Introduction
Empires in decline
Twentieth-century violence is unintelligible if it is not seen in its imperial context, for it was in large measure a consequence of the decline and fall of the large multi-ethnic empires that had dominated the world in 1900.
Becoming empires
What nearly all the principal combatants in the world wars had in common was that they either were empires or sought to become empires. Moreover, many large polities of the period that claimed to be nation-states or federations turn out, on close inspection, to have been empires too.
That was certainly true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; it remains true of today’s Russian Federation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (after 1922 only Northern Ireland) was and is to all intents and purposes an English empire. The Italy created in the 1850s and 1860s was a Piedmontese empire, the German Reich of 1871 in large measure a Prussian one. The two most populous nation-states in the world today – India and China – are both the results of imperial integration. Arguably even the United States is an ‘imperial republic’; some would say it always has been.
Why empires matter
Empires matter, first, because of the economies of scale that they make possible. There is a demographic limit to the number of people most nation-states can put under arms. An empire, however, is far less constrained; among its core functions are the mobilisation and equipping of large military forces recruited from multiple peoples and the levying of taxes or raising of loans to pay for them, again drawing on the resources of more than one nationality. Thus, many of the greatest battles of the 20th century were fought by multi-ethnic forces under imperial banners; Stalingrad and El Alamein are only two of many examples.
Second, the points of contact between empires – the borderlands and buffer zones between them, or the zones of strategic rivalry they compete to control – are likely to witness more violence than the imperial heartlands. The fatal triangle of territory between the Baltic, the Balkans and the Black Sea was a zone of conflict not just because it was ethnically mixed, but also because it was the junction where the realms of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans met, the fault line between the tectonic plates of four great empires. Manchuria and Korea occupied a similar position in the Far East. With the rise of oil as the 20th century’s principal fuel, so too did the Gulf in the Near East.
Third, because empires are often associated with the creation of economic order, the ebbs and flows of international commercial integration are closely associated with their rise and fall. Economic constraints and opportunities may also determine the timing and direction of imperial expansion, as well as the duration of an empire’s existence and the nature of post-colonial development.
Finally, the widely varying life expectancies of empires may offer a clue as to the timing of violence, since warfare would appear to be more prevalent at the beginning and, especially, at the end of an empire’s existence.
Longevity
It is an error to suppose that the rise and fall of empires or great powers have a predictable regularity. On the contrary, the most striking thing about the 70 or so empires historians have identified is the extraordinary variability in the chronological as well as the spatial extent of their dominion. The longest-lived empire of the second millennium was the Holy Roman Empire, which may be dated from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 until the empire’s dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. The continental empires of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs each existed for more than three centuries, expiring in rapid succession at the end of the First World War.
The empires created in the 20th century, by contrast, were all of comparatively short duration. The Bolsheviks’ Soviet Union (1922–91) lasted less than 70 years, the German Reich founded by Bismarck in 1871 lasted 47 and Japan’s colonial empire lasted just 40. Most ephemeral of all was the so-called Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, which did not extend beyond its predecessor’s borders before 1938 and had retreated within them by the end of 1944. Technically the Third Reich lasted 12 years; as an empire in the true sense of the word, it lasted barely half that time.
Ruthlessness
Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their lack of longevity, the 20th-century empires proved to be exceptional in their capacity for dealing out death and destruction. Why was this? The answer lies in the unprecedented degrees of centralised power, economic control and social homogeneity to which they aspired.
The new empires of the 20th century were not content with the somewhat haphazard administrative arrangements that had characterised the old – the messy mixtures of imperial and local law, the delegation of powers as well as status to certain indigenous groups. They inherited from the 19th-century nation-builders an insatiable appetite for uniformity; in that sense, they were more like empire-states than empires in the old sense.
The new empires repudiated traditional religious and legal constraints on the use of force. They insisted on the creation of new hierarchies in place of existing social structures. They delighted in sweeping away old political institutions. Above all, they made a virtue of ruthlessness. In pursuit of their objectives, they were willing to make war on whole categories of people, at home and abroad, rather than on merely the armed and trained representatives of an identified enemy state.
