MysteriousFaith

Can It Ever Happen Again?

Edmund Burke said “great empires and small minds go ill together.” America now stands at a moment in time when the lessons of the past are crying out for application to today. Will the minds of our great empire be able to reflect on history, learning that defensive aggression rarely accomplishes its goal?

Can It Ever Happen Again? Book Review - Europe’s Last Summer

We employ different euphemisms in an attempt to wrap our minds around complex issues. On the rare occasions many dust off a history book, our minds race to the old metaphor that “those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” Historians who stand the test of time are those that rise above a reductionist regurgitation of the events of which they write, in order to discuss the immutable human characteristics and predilections that color humanity. It is these timeless qualities we seek to recognize in the past, with the hope that we can change our future from the lessons learned in the past. David Fromkin’s book Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? is a prescient book. It needs to be read, studied and discussed amongst those who seek to understand the past in the hopes of correcting mistakes of the present.

For me this book underscored two crucial axioms of the human condition: first, institutions of power are prone to a particular logic and pathology all their own and second, that the average man does not understand institutions of power seek to maintain said power - often times regardless the cost.

The Disconnect to the Common Man

The title of Dr. Fromkin’s book is a haunting one - for me it brings to mind those summers we all remember from our childhood; many summers were stepping stones from one phase of our lives to another. For Europeans in the summer of 1914, no such blissful transition was in store. Rather, the summer of 1914 would see the European continent transformed from supposed peace to very real war.

Dr. Fromkin suggests that it is unlikely a conflict of this nature could again catch the common man unprepared due to the access the common man has to the media. It is here that I would take a different position. What has changed is the amount of information available to us all - with this I agree. However, such a question does not address whether or not the information being fed to us is accurate. Is the information propaganda? Is it engineered to, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman suggest, manufacture consent? The plethora of current-day media options is often times held up by those who, rather than defend the validity of their argument, instead point to the preponderance of media stories reinforcing a common theme. In the absence of dissent and in the duplication of commonly held opinions, it is very easy to misconstrue complex issues and marginalize opposing perspectives. It would be my contention that today’s media culture creates uninformed opinion due in large part to the amount of content it must create. Yes, the average person today has more information about the world, but because the outlets themselves are not selective, the information itself is highly engineered. Where such explicit engineering of content takes place it is unlikely that balance can exist.

In fairness, Dr. Fromkin does highlight the impact the media institutions of the early 20th century had on the common man: “The rise of independent mass-circulation newspapers … appealing to the popular fears and prejudices in order to win circulation, the press seems to have exacerbated hatred and divisions among Europeans.” (page 27) This again reinforces the perspective that the media is a two edged sword: it can cut to hurt and it can cut to heal. Have our media institutions become any more balanced, any more insightful, any more effective? If not, we run the very real risk of allowing an uneducated, propagandized electorate to get behind ill-formed policies that do little to make the world a safer place.

Pre-Texts of War - The Ill-Logic of Nationalism

My heart is heavy, several weeks after having finished this book, upon thinking further about the pre-texts of World War I. To me, the similarities between the pre-texts this war was initiated under and the current Iraq war are ominous. Where powerful nations (in the case of World War I Germany and Austria and in the case of the Iraqi War America) believe their interests are being threatened, it makes “sense” for them to initiate a pre-emptive war to ensure the stability of their way of life. To the citizens of the country initiating the war, the war is couched within terms like “defense” and “pre-emptive.” These terms are used to willfully spin the nature of the conflict from being an offensive war - something most people would recognize as wrong and ill-minded

Dr. Fromkin’s comment in one place in the book is worth committing to memory: “Germany could not afford to lose Austria either as an ally or as a Great Power; Britain could not afford to lose France either as an ally or as a Great Power. Germany fought to save Austria; Britain fought to save France. In the first instance, both sides went to war to retain what they had: their closest ally. In that sense it was - at the outset, though only at the outset - a defensive conflict on both sides.” (page 280 - emphasis mine)

Pathologies of Power

As Austria engineered a conflict with Serbia, Austria’s ally Germany sought to use the pretext of an Austria-Serb conflict to go to war preemptively with Russia and France. As Dr. Fromkin says, “The common assumption today is that everybody wants peace if it can be had on acceptable terms. What Europe did not understand at the time was that, exceptionally, it was not true of two governments in 1914. Vienna did not merely want to get its way with Serbia; it wanted to provoke a war with Serbia. Berlin did not want to get its way with Russia; it wanted to provoke a war with Russia. In each case it was war itself that the government wanted - or, put more precisely, it wanted to crush its adversary to an extent that only a successful war makes possible.” (page 282)

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of attempting to understand the current Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emption. Taken for good or for bad, this doctrine bears important similarities to the rationale of the German government in 1914. This analysis loses some of its value in that Germany feared Russia would become more powerful and displace them economically and potentially militarily. This is not a comparable fear for the US today given our very unique position within the world’s power structure. However, what is comparable is the role fear itself is playing in the development of our country’s foreign policy.

Germany’s fear in 1914 and the US’ fear in 2004 are both valid: it would be dereliction of duty for either government to not protect its populace. At face value, employing the doctrine of pre-emption is a very assertive way of using conflict to remove threats. What is lost in the easy spin of our media culture is that not all conflict is between good and evil; at times conflict is the product of states whose needs are at odds with one another. At their core, states are vehicles of power whose responsibility is to get, maintain and project power. Politicians enjoy using hyperbole to polarize policy decisions between the extremes of right and wrong, good and evil. The world would be a better place if we could remove ourselves from nationalism and ideology and instead recognize that much social, political and cultural conflict comes from nothing more than one person being worried he is going to get the short end of the stick.

Edmund Burke said “great empires and small minds go ill together.” America now stands at a moment in time when the lessons of the past are crying out for application to today. Will the minds of our great empire be able to reflect on history, learning that defensive aggression rarely accomplishes its goal? I fear no such introspection exists within America today.

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• May 18, 2004

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