Recently (051024), I wrote about WWII’s Battle of Stalingrad and hinted at a broader interest in the “cultural and epistemological effects” of the three world wars of the 20C. By request (JSS), here’s an expansion in that direction.
As a preliminary matter, the conception of the 20C being dominated by the struggle between communism, fascism, and liberal democratic capitalism as manifested in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, I take from Phillip Bobbit’s “Shield of Achilles.” The upshot was the demise of the former two and the “triumph” of the latter.
The First War was an overdetermined grasping at survival on the part of four empires (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey) whose post-war dismemberment demonstrated the failure of their attempts to hold off various aspects of modernity. The Versailles Settlement showed that the Allies didn’t really understand modernity very well either which, in combination with an antiquated and self-serving view of economics (i.e., the Great Depression), cleared the way for Hitler/Mussolini/Tojo to again overreach themselves and be crushed in WWII by the US and the Soviets with redoubtable support from the fading British Empire. Then, as Toqueville predicted in 1835, the globe became dominated by the US and the Soviet Union who kept global “hot” wars to a minimum for 45 years until the contradictions of capitalism (which Marx described) proved much less problematic than the contradictions of communism, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of what Hobsbawm called the “short 20th century.” [Whew! Catch your breath.]
Of the myriad riffs I could take from this abruptly condensed history, I will focus on two points here.
First, WWI drove Europe off the cliff. Europeans (especially elites) were exhausted (fiscally, physically, and emotionally) by the War and their robust formal global empires became increasingly creaky. More fundamentally, their worldview of progress disintegrated. The romance of technology and power and culture and their sense of embodying the pinnacle of human “civilization” was eviscerated by the brutality of the War, the pointless deaths and dismemberments, and the realization of the fragility of what they had wrought.
The term “shell-shocked” (what we now refer to as PTSD) arose in WWI to describe the psychological impact of the noise and physical brutality of the war on ordinary soldiers. But it also applies at the societal level and its effects can be seen as late as the 1930s where British and French political leaders rationalized their way to accommodation with Herr Hitler since the prospect of another war—with all its resonances and fear echoing from the trenches in Flanders twenty years earlier—was, in an important sense, not comprehensible. Hitler manipulated their desperation for peace to his (temporary) advantage.
The undermining of European self-confidence also echoed globally. Britain and France in particular, leveraged their empires for manpower, commodities, and financial support in defense of freedom.” But the War laid bare the drain (financial and psychological) on imperial governments and heightened colonial awareness of being used for imperial purposes. The Allies propaganda about fighting for “freedom” rang especially hollow for the many millions who had little prospect of political self-determination themselves. Finally, the barbarity of the War in Europe (there was little fighting elsewhere despite the “World” War moniker) wholly eviscerated European claims to cultural superiority as the basis for their “civilizing mission” to uplift the benighted peoples of Asia/Africa. This same trope was essentially reiterated after WWII, this time to effect as first, India, then the rest of the British, French, Dutch, etc. empires were rolled back.
Second, WWII itself was a rare to unique situation in that it was easily cast in stark Manichean terms: evil fascist bad guys vs. resolute forces of liberty. This was due to the manifest crimes in which all of the Axis powers engaged compounded by a propaganda effort by the “good guys” that was much more effective and widespread than previous efforts. Prior wars (other than the European wars of religion (16-17C)) were not so much put into a good/evil context (however much the Brits liked to denounce “Boney” (as Napoleon was called) in the early 19C). Dynastic wars, imperial wars, civil wars were usually seen as power struggles, without much ideological or moral baggage; WW I & II were different.
In the First War, there were a fair number of efforts to paint a picture of the evil “Hun,” and the attack on Belgium was regularly described as a “rape,” but for all that Kaiser Bill was portrayed as a “bad guy,” he wasn’t in the same league evil-wise as his German successor. Wilsonian invocations of the War as a crusade for democracy were another means of modernizing the overall characterization of the War. All of which was ‘doubled-down’ in WWII, with the additional angle of racist stereotypes vis-à-vis the Japanese. A variety of Axis crimes—war crimes, crimes against humanity—made it easy for us to dichotomize the world (our own war crimes (esp. by the USSR)), notwithstanding.
This frame of reference was easily adapted to the “Cold War,” which was drenched in ideology and existential animosity and carried through the bulk of the 20C, amplified by the brooding omnipresence of nuclear annihilation. Even Nixon/Kissinger, practitioners of realpolitik, were only running the show because RMN had spent decades honing an anti-communist stance. The collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated our designated target and the US was left without a convenient bogeyman until 9/11.
Looking across the 20C, we can see the rise of democracies and the concomitant need to mobilize popular support amid “total” war, changed the language, methods, and purpose of portraying one’s opponent. Diplomatic subtleties and shadings (and opportunities for future reconciliations) couldn’t cut it in the noise of popular discourse. In a democratic world, war had to be characterized as being about freedom, regardless of the interests/benefits to elites and the deep national interests that underlay statesmen’s assessments of international relations.
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