We’re Reliving The Beginnings Of WWI And Just Don’t Realize It Yet
Great changes in science and technology, globalization, and a belief the world is too economically linked to go to war
“Now, as then, the march of globalization has lulled us into a false sense of safety. Countries that have McDonald’s, we are told, will never fight each other.”
— The Rhyme of History: Lessons From The Great War, Margaret McMillan
History doesn’t exactly repeat. It’s more like one of those songs you sort of know the words to and flub the lyrics while you sing along. Hence the chorus and beat stay the same, but with random surprises.
I thought of this as I read Margaret McMillan’s work above, which compares the years before World War I with modern times. While not an exact repeat, the chorus and beat come damn close.
For instance, before The Great War she notes it was a time of globalization with tight economic ties and trade. Not to mention mass migration, along with great improvements to tech, communication, and transportation.
Einstein was formulating his theory of general relativity.
Steamships, trains, telegraphs, and the first airplanes appeared.
Many parts of the “separate” world were now connected.
McMillan notes one of the most popular books of 1909–10 was The Great Illusion by Norman Angell.
In it, he said global war was impossible. The world’s economy was too tightly linked by trade and commerce, so it would be against everyone’s national interest. Plus, even if war broke out, it would be short, because a long-scale war couldn’t be funded.
Don’t snicker just yet. According to McMillan there were recent disarmament conferences at the Hague, and more than three hundred arbitrations occurred between nations through 1794 and 1914. Moreover, the last major conflict was the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
Humanity evolved away from mass conflict, or so they believed. About seventy years after The Great Illusion, Francis Fukuyama penned the essay, then book The End of History and the Last Man. Here he mimics Angell’s 1909 optimism.
1989–1992 marked the end of Communism. Liberal-Western democracies were the standard now, and all would copy them. War may come. But it wouldn’t be among the enlightened. Everything was marching to a global order: free markets and democracy.
And many instinctively echoed Angell or Fukuyama, until tanks rolled over Ukraine’s border. But McMillan says this isn’t the only similarity.
United States And China Compared To Britain And Germany
“As early as 1896, a best-selling British pamphlet, Made in Germany, painted an ominous picture: ‘A gigantic commercial State is arising to menace our prosperity, and contend with us for the trade of the world.’ Many Germans held reciprocal views. Germany, they said, was due its place in the sun — and an empire on which the sun would never set — but Britain and the British navy were standing in its way.”
— The Rhyme of History: Lessons From The Great War, Margaret McMillan
Before World War I started, the United Kingdom and Germany were both titanic military powers, along with each other’s largest trading partners. Their monarchs were even related. But these ties didn’t settle animosity between the rivals.
Many British leaders saw Germany as an upstart power cutting into their profits and prestige. Where the latter saw the British Empire blocking its rightful position. Eventually Germany created a navy to challenge their adversary, and their trading status didn’t stop a costly war.
Today the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China — while not top trading partners — have a tight economic relationship. Although this hardly eases relations. Like Germany, the U.S. sees China as an economic threat (trade-wise or by theft) and a military challenger. Whereas China feels treated as a second-rate power.
You can watch this in real-time in the undersea cable industry. According to Joe Brock at Reuters, these lines carry almost all internet traffic. Recently a U.S. “interagency task force informally known as Team Telecom,” managed to bounce a Chinese cable firm from winning a major contract.
The Singapore-to-France cable will now be laid by Subcom, headquartered in New Jersey. Team Telecom also pushed Meta (Facebook), Alphabet, and Amazon to reroute lines away from Chinese territory.
These cables are susceptible to spying, which makes these contracts closer to warfare. Brock says, “The U.S.-China backroom brawling over undersea cables is threatening to overwhelm the subsea cable industry, which has always relied on careful diplomatic collaboration to survive.”
On the Chinese side, it appears they’ve set up clandestine police stations around the world to threaten dissidents, and operators within their New York base just got arrested.
Furthermore, Marije Vlaskamp a reporter in the Netherlands also tells an account of Chinese nationals trying to frame her for a bomb threat after interviewing an activist. It was an attempt to silence them both. But China also uses soft power.
Their belt and road initiative offers infrastructure investment with trade partners in exchange for cooperation. Plus, the People’s Bank of China is attempting to replace the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. The geopolitical situation also sounds alike too.
Armed Camps, Alliances, And Powder Kegs
McMillan explains before WWI, the globe settled into armed camps: Britain, France, and Russia, versus Germany, Austria-Hungry, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire. Now, it’s the U.S. and Western Europe against, Russia, China, and Iran.
Serbia was the powder keg in the Great War, but today there’s more than one. We have Ukraine and Taiwan. While the first appears to be an endless people-grinding stasis, which can possibly tilt out of control into a larger war. Taiwan could easily set off a global conflict too.
Clients can also lead their patrons into trouble. Russia’s client Serbia overstepped its bounds, causing Austria-Hungary to declare war. This brought all the global powers into the conflict. One could see this easily happening with a border NATO state if hostilities spill out of Ukraine.
Not to mention if a Chinese muscle-flexing exercise pushes Taiwan's defense forces to flinch and fire a misplaced missile. There’s also a similar chorus of change.
Changes To The Nature Of Life And War
“Like the world of 1914, we are living through changes in the nature of war whose significance we are only starting to grasp…The great advances of Europe’s science and technology and the increasing output of its factories during its long period of peace had made going on the attack much more costly to human life.”
— The Rhyme of History: Lessons From The Great War, Margaret McMillan
McMillan mentions the leadership directing the war on both sides tragically miscalculated new military firepower. The “kill zone,” or area forces had to cross under fire, expanded from a hundred to a thousand yards from the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
But the generals had learned in school one must attack. So, they charged soldiers in waves through machine guns and artillery, which resulted in carnage. Right now, we’ll have another rude awakening.
We’re already seeing in Ukraine how drones can shift tactics, not to mention how tanks don’t guarantee victory. And this is just the beginning. What happens when AI, hypersonic missiles, and cyberwarfare are added to the arsenal? Likely some WWI carnage until proper tactics come about.
There’s also the fast pace of changes in the tech we use every day and culture, like those who lived around 1914 experienced. Then, that whole “end of history thing.” Right now, it appears many sections of the world are moving away from Western-style democracies.
China, Authoritarian Russia, and Monarchist Saudi Arabia to name a few. Moreover, they’re not weak nations. They’re global powers.
A Strangely Similar Chorus And Beat
Just about every day in the news you’ll read about some amazing technological change, or some new and odd social phenomenon. The mixed bits of movement and tech advancement cover our eyes. Certain things still lay under the surface.
We’re often told by those with credibility that a world war could never happen due to our globalized supply chains. Plus, our new world order can fix disputes among nations. While others say the dollar could never be dethroned as the world’s reserve currency.
The same stories echoed before the Great War. The great illusion turned out to be the belief economic links could stop a war, and artificial world organizations could forever hold back animosity between nations. Also, the reserve currency of the day, the Pound, was replaced.
Hopefully, the song we’re singing today isn’t the beginning of World War III.
-Originally posted on Medium 4/22/23