The First Total War
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The war on terror is part of a pattern that begins, unexpectedly, with the French revolution.
By David A Bell
January 16, 2007 08:47 PM
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree
Does this sound familiar? The years '89 and '90 were years of elation and hope. A powerful and much-loathed regime not only collapsed unexpectedly, but did so with surprisingly little violence. Amid the ruins, a new international order seemed to be taking shape, built on a respect for peace, democracy, and human rights.
So transformative did the moment appear that many advanced thinkers predicted nothing less than the end of warfare. But disillusion followed with cruel speed. The years that followed brought not peace but unremitting violence, which the dominant powers found frustratingly difficult to contain. Soon, the widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures once condemned as barbaric.
For most us, these words will recall the years 1989 and 1990, when the end of the cold war led to optimisitic speculations about the coming end of warfare - even "the end of history". What followed, instead, were the wars in the Gulf and the Balkans, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the current conflict in Iraq, which American neoconservatives have justified as the newest front in a fourth world war (the third being the cold war).
Yet the description applies equally well to the years 1789-1790, when the collapse of the old regime and the beginning of the French revolution untethered hopeful imaginations around the world. Even before these events, elite opinion in the west was starting to think of war as a rapidly vanishing anachronism. In 1790, France's new revolutionary government went so far as to issue what has been called a "Declaration of Peace to the World". But soon afterwards, France declared war on Austria, starting a conflict that would drag in all of Europe's major powers and continue, with only short interruptions, until France's final defeat in 1815. These wars quickly surpassed earlier conflicts in scope and intensity. Up to five million people died across the continent, both in regular campaigns and in vicious bouts of insurgent warfare.
The parallels here are not coincidental, and can help illuminate the current, dismal international situation. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw fundamental changes in western attitudes towards war, as well as the start of a recurrent historical pattern, of which events since the cold war provide a recent and particularly clear example. In this pattern, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other. Opinion-makers have repeatedly discerned the coming end of war: The big international best-seller of the years before the first world was was Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which made precisely this prediction. And these hopes have been repeatedly shattered by horrific new hostilities.
To understand the pattern, we need to return to the years in which it started, and recognize that it marked a decisive break from earlier attitudes. Before the late eighteenth century, most Europeans accepted war as an inevitable and ordinary facet of human existence. European rulers saw war as their principal purpose, and waged it constantly. Once the terrible religious conflicts of the Reformation had passed, moreover, warfare became, by historical standards, remarkably moderate and restrained. Armies were small, major battles infrequent (though devastating when they occurred), and civilians relatively well-treated. Most aristocratic military leaders viewed their adversaries as honorable equals.
In the eighteenth century, however, these attitudes were decisively challenged. During the great moment of intellectual ferment we now call the Enlightenment, many thinkers began to argue that human society was steadily evolving towards ever greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness, and commercial exchange. As an optimistic English clergyman wrote in 1784: "The time is approaching, when the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, will be heard no more throughout the earth." By 1789, these ideas had practically become European conventional wisdom.
Yet paradoxically, when war actually broke out in 1792, these same ideas led directly to the abandonment of the earlier restraints on those that waged it. If warfare was intrinsically barbaric, then one's enemies (on whom the conflict, naturally, was to be blamed) were barbarians, and deserved to be treated as such. Furthermore, if war really was disappearing, then perhaps this one would be, in the words of the commanding French general, "the last war" - the war to end all wars, so to speak. And if that were the case, what means were not justified in order to achieve victory?
Guided by these arguments, the leaders of revolutionary France willingly leapt into the abyss of total war. And ever since, western leaders from Bonaparte to Bush have found it all too easy to present wars of conquest as apocalyptic contests between civilization and darkness. Meanwhile, the earlier regime of restraints has proven difficult to resurrect. It is enough to make us ask if we are really quite as enlightened as we like to think, and if we might not have something to learn from the aristocratic warriors whom the philosophes derided as walking anachronisms.
**********************
The war on terror is part of a pattern that begins, unexpectedly, with the French revolution.
By David A Bell
January 16, 2007 08:47 PM
guardian.co.uk/commentisfree
Does this sound familiar? The years '89 and '90 were years of elation and hope. A powerful and much-loathed regime not only collapsed unexpectedly, but did so with surprisingly little violence. Amid the ruins, a new international order seemed to be taking shape, built on a respect for peace, democracy, and human rights.
So transformative did the moment appear that many advanced thinkers predicted nothing less than the end of warfare. But disillusion followed with cruel speed. The years that followed brought not peace but unremitting violence, which the dominant powers found frustratingly difficult to contain. Soon, the widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures once condemned as barbaric.
For most us, these words will recall the years 1989 and 1990, when the end of the cold war led to optimisitic speculations about the coming end of warfare - even "the end of history". What followed, instead, were the wars in the Gulf and the Balkans, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the current conflict in Iraq, which American neoconservatives have justified as the newest front in a fourth world war (the third being the cold war).
Yet the description applies equally well to the years 1789-1790, when the collapse of the old regime and the beginning of the French revolution untethered hopeful imaginations around the world. Even before these events, elite opinion in the west was starting to think of war as a rapidly vanishing anachronism. In 1790, France's new revolutionary government went so far as to issue what has been called a "Declaration of Peace to the World". But soon afterwards, France declared war on Austria, starting a conflict that would drag in all of Europe's major powers and continue, with only short interruptions, until France's final defeat in 1815. These wars quickly surpassed earlier conflicts in scope and intensity. Up to five million people died across the continent, both in regular campaigns and in vicious bouts of insurgent warfare.
The parallels here are not coincidental, and can help illuminate the current, dismal international situation. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw fundamental changes in western attitudes towards war, as well as the start of a recurrent historical pattern, of which events since the cold war provide a recent and particularly clear example. In this pattern, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other. Opinion-makers have repeatedly discerned the coming end of war: The big international best-seller of the years before the first world was was Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which made precisely this prediction. And these hopes have been repeatedly shattered by horrific new hostilities.
To understand the pattern, we need to return to the years in which it started, and recognize that it marked a decisive break from earlier attitudes. Before the late eighteenth century, most Europeans accepted war as an inevitable and ordinary facet of human existence. European rulers saw war as their principal purpose, and waged it constantly. Once the terrible religious conflicts of the Reformation had passed, moreover, warfare became, by historical standards, remarkably moderate and restrained. Armies were small, major battles infrequent (though devastating when they occurred), and civilians relatively well-treated. Most aristocratic military leaders viewed their adversaries as honorable equals.
In the eighteenth century, however, these attitudes were decisively challenged. During the great moment of intellectual ferment we now call the Enlightenment, many thinkers began to argue that human society was steadily evolving towards ever greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness, and commercial exchange. As an optimistic English clergyman wrote in 1784: "The time is approaching, when the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, will be heard no more throughout the earth." By 1789, these ideas had practically become European conventional wisdom.
Yet paradoxically, when war actually broke out in 1792, these same ideas led directly to the abandonment of the earlier restraints on those that waged it. If warfare was intrinsically barbaric, then one's enemies (on whom the conflict, naturally, was to be blamed) were barbarians, and deserved to be treated as such. Furthermore, if war really was disappearing, then perhaps this one would be, in the words of the commanding French general, "the last war" - the war to end all wars, so to speak. And if that were the case, what means were not justified in order to achieve victory?
Guided by these arguments, the leaders of revolutionary France willingly leapt into the abyss of total war. And ever since, western leaders from Bonaparte to Bush have found it all too easy to present wars of conquest as apocalyptic contests between civilization and darkness. Meanwhile, the earlier regime of restraints has proven difficult to resurrect. It is enough to make us ask if we are really quite as enlightened as we like to think, and if we might not have something to learn from the aristocratic warriors whom the philosophes derided as walking anachronisms.
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