Margaret MacMillan (ed.),
The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914,

Allen Lane, 2013, pp. 645

The last line of Margaret MacMillan’s substantive and ground-breaking book, “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914”, both concludes the book and circles back to its beginning. As is typical of MacMillan’s writing, she brings an extraordinary amount of vivid detail to her recitation and analysis of history and the figures and characters that inhabited it. Her knowledge of the facts, dates and geographical and human detail is unparalleled. What MacMillan also does in this book, however, is challenge some conventional narrative and analysis. She both begins and concludes by refuting the belief that WWI was somehow inevitable; that the arms race, politics and alliances of the time meant that the move towards the war was unstoppable. That was certainly the conventional wisdom that formed the early years of this reviewer’s study of the history of the period. What MacMillan says is that while there were certainly corporate forces that moved countries towards war, there was also much individual decision-making and that those decisions could have been different, the outcome could have been different.

MacMillan also concludes her book with an anecdote that speaks to her thesis that individual decisions mattered in the move to WWI and could matter in the prevention of all conflicts, an anecdote that resonates with and strengthens federalist theories, beliefs and actions. In speaking about decisions by Europe’s leaders to opt for war in 1914 or their lack of resolution in opposing it, MacMillan states, “Over half a century later a young and inexperienced American President faced his own crisis and his own choices. In 1962 when the Soviet Union placed military forces on Cuba, including missiles capable of striking the eastern seaboard of the United States with nuclear warheads, John F. Kennedy was under intense pressure from his own military to take action even at the risk of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. He resisted, partly because he had learned from the previous year’s fiasco of the Bay of Pigs that the military were not always right, but also because he had just read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s extraordinary account of how Europe blundered into the Great War. He chose to open negotiations with the Soviet Union and the world backed away from the brink.” (p.630) Clearly, a reflective, expert book that challenged conventional wisdom made a difference in the prevention of conflict. Margaret MacMillan’s book will do the same.

In detailing and challenging the history and analysis of the build up to WWI and doing so through a template that is thoughtful and unique, one of the points of particular relevance to federalists and to all people in our current context is MacMillan’s critique of the thinking that capitalism could prevent war. She points out that one of the factors that actually led to war was a certain complacency of thinking. There was a belief held by many at the time that if countries were trading partners as the European countries were, war would be less likely. It was thought that since capitalism knitted the world together, it would lessen the chances of war. Countries would not want to disrupt their trade. Apparently, however, this belief proved not to be true and is thus a cautionary tale for us in our time and place.

MacMillan also references the impact of the complacency created by various pre-war crises. She writes a number of chapters about the national and international crises that preceded WWI and is very clear in her thinking that the fact that these crises were all eventually settled peacefully led to a sense of complacency on the part of some European leadership. There was what she calls a false sense that actual conflict could be avoided again even as events mounted to and through the assassination and the weeks that followed. This too is a cautionary tale for our time and place that the peaceful resolution to threats of conflict could actually lead to a complacency that then contributes to a future conflict.

Very much related to this complacency was a hard to define combination of carelessness and intractability and one might say, a carelessness about intractability. As events unfolded and increased in intensity the belief that conflict might or could be avoided caused many leaders to remain out of their offices or countries or easy communication in the summer season. At the same time there was a rigidity of plans for military mobilization. It might be defined as a kind of complacency that plans set in place in some earlier time could not be changed and need not be changed. There was limited ability to see the need to adapt to a developing situation.

MacMillan also makes the point throughout her book that another very strong contributing factor to the outbreak of WWI was the degree to which the countries portrayed themselves as innocent victims in the tension. All of the countries involved in the complex series of alliances that were a factor in WWI had a way of articulating their own narrative so as to present themselves as the victim in whatever conflict might be coming. This served, among other things, to rally morale in their country. It also serves as a helpful way into a more in depth analysis of MacMillan’s book from a federalist perspective. A federalist belief in global governance and subsidiarity necessitates having a broad perspective on the interplay between countries and regions. It necessitates a rational analysis of one’s own country and a resistance to any move on the part of that country to either overstate or minimize its role in regional or global tension or conflict.

The book also deals in some detail not only with the factors, conventionally understood or in MacMillan’s opinion, that drove Europe and ultimately other countries towards war, but it also deals with the factors that might have driven the countries involved to peace, and yet, ultimately, did not prevail in doing so. A world federalist perspective also believes in actions of subsidiarity and global governance that ultimately lead to a more peaceful world. Along with classic world federalist beliefs, Margaret MacMillan’s book challenges a federalist perspective to find creative ways of resisting any thinking that any conflict is inevitable. It also challenges a federalist perspective to find creative ways of resisting the kind of complacent thinking that sees the peaceful resolution of a single or multiple possible conflicts as a sign that some other brooding conflict can be avoided. How does world federalism help determine the point at which classical or conventional peace strategies are no longer working and new strategies, perhaps ones not even yet conceived, need to be attempted? How do world federalists acting corporately or individually move to create a world in which states do not need to position themselves as the innocent victims of any conflict with other states? Most profoundly, most importantly, how does world federalism, noting that this review is written in the midst of the backlash towards the influx of Syrian refugees into Canada and the west, create a world in which the diversity of the ‘other’ is not a source of fear but rather a source of interest and celebration?

MacMillan reminds us of the dire consequences of both a failure of imagination and a lack of courage, and she reminds us that there are always choices.

Populism in Europe and America

Rene Wadlow

John Abromeit, Bridget M. Chesterton, Gary Marotta, York Norman (eds.)
Transformation of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies

London,  Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 354 pp.

On 12 December 2015, Benedict Anderson, the British historian, author of the widely cited 1983 book Imagined Communities, died. In this influential study of nationalism, he saw nationalism as a possible imaginative process that allows to feel solidarity for strangers. He wrote “In an age when it is so common for progressives, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, of its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love and often profoundly self-sacrificing love...The cultural products of nationalism − poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts − show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles.”

As a cosmopolitan intellectual looking at the reactions to the flow of migrants and refugees to Europe and to the results of some recent elections with a sharp rise in populist nationalism, I am among those who stress the near-pathological character of nationalism. The editors share my fears. The longest section of the book is devoted to the way scholars analyze the rise of Hitler and the Nazis during the Weimar Republic. While nationalist sentiments and the Stahlhelm predated Hitler, Hitler and the small group around him were able to mobilize the periphery against the center, even the conservative center and thus to give voice to those who found themselves excluded from a meaningful role in German political life. Yet, as Larry Jones notes in his contribution, one must not lose sight of the fact that “the Nazi assault against the Weimar Republic was not a movement that somehow arose spontaneously out of the frustration, hardship, and suffering of those in German society who had been marginalized by the course of German political and economic development since the beginning of the First World War, but a highly centralized and carefully controlled campaign that relied upon a party organization”... with an iron discipline that left little autonomy or capacity for spontaneity.

Only Juan Peron, who came to power in a military coup in 1943 in Argentina, consciously incorporated many of the Nazi techniques and symbols. However, as Mathew Karush stresses in his chapter “Populism as an Identity: Four Propositions on Peronism”, Peron drew support from a fairly wide group of people which made his populism lack a specific and consistent ideology. While Peron and similar Latin American leaders were not democrats, they did not have the ability to kill those with different ideas on the scale of the Nazi.

As Cas Mudde in his analysis of “Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe Today” notes, “Today populist radical right parties share a core ideology that combines (at least) three features: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism”. Nativism entails a combination of nationalism and xenophobia − an ideology that holds that a state should be inhabited exclusively by members of ‘the nation’ and that ‘alien’ elements, whether persons or ideas, are fundamentally threatening the homogeneous ‘nation-state’.

Populist radical-right parties are experiencing their biggest electoral and political success in post-war Europe, but, fortunately, neither Marine Le Pen nor Geert Wilders are Adolf Hitler. Therefore, there is a crucial role for us ‘cosmopolitan intellectuals’. The populist right parties play on a loss of confidence in the major political parties as well as in the civil servants of the European Union. We have little influence on the ways the major political parties operate and even less influence on the European Union secretariat. Thus, our role is to develop a strong civil society – non-governmental organization walls by protecting human rights and by dealing creatively with migrants and refugees. Our role is not only to defend but also to counter-attack. We need to develop more strongly our cosmopolitan ethos. We need to develop counter-myth figures to the ‘national heroes’. We need to stress the unity of humanity as opposed to national-ethnic identities. We must take the current populist-nationalist efforts seriously and to develop an organized response.