Anxiety and the arms race

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Europe before 1914 succumbed to hubris. The conventional images of “armed camps,” “a powder keg,” or “saber rattling” almost trivialize a civilization that combined within itself immense pride in its newly expanding power and almost apocalyptic insecurity about the future. Europe bestrode the world, and yet Lord Curzon could remark, “We can hardly take up our morning newspaper without reading of the physical and moral decline of the race,” and the German chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, could say that if Germany backed down again on Morocco, “I shall despair of the future of the German Empire.” France’s stagnant population and weak industry made her statesmen frantic for security, Austrian leaders were filled with foreboding about their increasingly disaffected nationalities, and the tsarist regime, with the most justification, sensed doom.

Whether from ambition or insecurity, the great powers armed as never before in peacetime, with military expenditures reaching 5 to 6 percent of national income. Military conscription and reserve systems made available a significant percentage of the adult male population, and the impulse to create large standing armies was strengthened by the widespread belief that firepower and financial limitations would make the next war short and violent. Simple reaction also played a large role. Fear of the “Russian steamroller” was sufficient to expand Germany’s service law; a larger German army provoked the outmanned French into an extension of national service to three years. Only Britain did without a large conscripted army, but her naval needs were proportionally more expensive.

In an age of heavy, rapid-fire artillery, infantry rifles, and railroads, but not yet including motor transport, tanks, or airplanes, a premium was placed by military staffs on mass, supply, and prior planning. European commanders assumed that in a continental war the opening frontier battles would be decisive, hence the need to mobilize the maximum number of men and move them at maximum speed to the border. The meticulous and rigid advance planning that this strategy required placed inordinate pressure on the diplomats in a crisis. Politicians might hold back their army in hopes of saving the peace only at the risk of losing the war should diplomacy fail. What was more, all the continental powers embraced offensive strategies. The French general staff’s “cult of attack” assumed that élan could carry the day against superior German numbers. Its Plan XVII called for an immediate assault on Lorraine. The Germans’ Schlieffen Plan addressed the problem of war on two fronts by throwing almost the entire German army into a sweeping offensive through neutral Belgium to capture Paris and the French army in a gigantic envelope. Troops could then be transported east to meet the slower-moving Russian army. Worked out down to the last railroad switch and passenger car, the Schlieffen Plan was an apotheosis of the industrial age: a mechanical, almost mathematical perfection that wholly ignored political factors. None of the general staffs anticipated what the war would actually be like. Had they glimpsed the horrific stalemate in the trenches, surely neither they nor the politicians would have run the risks they did in 1914.

Above the mass infantry armies of the early 20th century stood the officer corps, the general staffs, and at the pinnacle the supreme war lords: kaiser, emperor, tsar, and king, all of whom adopted military uniforms as their standard dress in these years. The army was a natural refuge for the central and eastern European aristocracies, the chivalric code of arms sustaining almost the only public service to which they could still reasonably lay claim. Even in republican France a nationalist revival after 1912 excited public morale, inspired the military buildup, and both fueled and cloaked a revanche aimed at recovery of the provinces lost 40 years before. Popular European literature poured forth best sellers depicting the next war, and mass-circulation newspapers incited even the working classes with news of imperial adventures or the latest slight by the adversary.

The peace movements

Various peace movements sprang up to counter the spirit of militarism before 1914. Most numerous and disturbing to those responsible for national defense were the socialists. The Second International took the Marxist view of imperialism and militarism as creatures of capitalist competition and loudly warned that if the bosses provoked a war, the working classes would refuse to take part. Jean Jaurès defined the proletariat as “masses of men who collectively love peace and hate war.” The 1912 Basel Conference declared the proletariat “the herald of world peace” and proclaimed “war on war.” Sober observers like George Bernard Shaw and Max Weber doubted that any putative sense of solidarity among workers would outweigh their nationalism, but the French government kept a blacklist of agitators who might try to subvert mobilization. Some of Germany’s leaders imagined that war might provide the opportunity to crush socialism by appeals to patriotism or martial law.

A liberal peace movement with a middle-class constituency flourished around the turn of the century. As many as 425 peace organizations are estimated to have existed in 1900, fully half of them in Scandinavia and most others in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Their greatest achievements were the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907, at which the powers agreed to ban certain inhumane weapons but made no progress toward general disarmament. The liberal peace movement also foundered on internal contradictions. To outlaw war was to endorse the international status quo, yet liberals always stood ready to excuse wars that could claim progressive ends. They had tolerated the wars of Italian and German unification, and they would tolerate the Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1912–13 and the great war in 1914. Another solution for many peace advocates was to transcend the nation-state. Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1910) argued that it already had been transcended: that interdependence among nations made war illogical and counterproductive. To Marxists this image of capitalism was ludicrous; to Weber or Joseph Schumpeter it was correct but beside the point. Blood was thicker than class, or money; politics dominated economics; and irrationality, reason.

The one European statesman most sympathetic to the peace movements was, not surprisingly, Britain’s Liberal foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Citing the waste, social discord, and international tension caused by the naval arms race he made several overtures to Germany in hopes of ending it. When these failed, Britain had little choice but to race more quickly than the Germans. Even radical Liberals like David Lloyd George had to admit that however much they might deplore arms races in the abstract, all that was liberal and good in the world depended on the security of Britain and its control of its seas.