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The War of the World
Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
By Niall Ferguson
The world does not lack for books on the theme: “Wasn't the twentieth century awful?” Among the most interesting is Paul Johnson's great jeremiad on the folly of political utopianism, Modern Times. That book in its first edition has the defect that it ends in the mid-1980s, when the story it told clearly had not yet reached its conclusion; the attempt in later editions to cover the end of the Cold War were not satisfactory. This book by Niall Ferguson, the noted economic historian with a taste for alternative history, does cover the whole period, and provides an integrated theory for the collapse of both the Soviet Block and of the West. The question the book tries to answer is how the globe got in three generations from a situation in which most of the planet was ruled from a few rooms in Europe to a condition where almost all the world's economic and demographic dynamism is located east of Suez, while Europe is starting to look like a theme park for an increasingly downscale immigrant clientele, and America's eccentric monopolar position by no means matches the former eminence of the whole West. The book's title and subtitle, of course, allude to two famous books with some claim to prescience, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. Concerning the latter we may briefly note here that the author makes kind, brief remarks about Spengler's foresight, but Ferguson does not engage The Decline's model of history. We will see below that Spengler's later, detailed view of the perils of the 20th (and 21st) centuries actually chime with Ferguson's almost point-for-point. The Wells book remains familiar to popular culture, perhaps because filmmakers persist in adapting it into ever more horrifying movies. Ferguson will have it that Europe and Asia blew up in the first half of the 20th century in a way that reveals The War of the Worlds as a not unintended allegory of what happens when technology beyond the human scale is brought to bear against established societies by compassionless intelligences that do not regard their victims as fellow creatures. The short formula for what happened after 1900 was that ethnic cleansing occurred on a huge scale when the great multiethnic empires collapsed, a list of polities that included all the European colonial empires, plus the Dual Monarchy, Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qing Dynasty. The process was particularly brutal before 1950 in Eastern Europe and East Asia. The agreements that ended the First World War only set the terms for the further declension of civilized life. In Northeast Asia, the Japanese project of settler-imperialism segued directly into the Second World War. Japans imperial designs for the whole of East and Southeast Asia miscarried, but their effect was to make the existing European empires no longer credible or sustainable. In the West, the second round of world war was justified by a panoply of scientifically dubious racial theory deployed to expand the German biological space, but whose result was the de-Germanization of regions that had been in part culturally German for more than a millennium. The 20th century, is short, was about race war. Race is not a particularly coherent concept, the author reminds us, but then neither was the warfare it engendered. Ferguson's enthusiasm for counterfactual analysis remains undimmed. In this book, he uses the device to ascertain whether certain historical outcomes were very likely to happen as they did or were simply accidents caused by a few faulty decisions. Economic data are often brought to bear on these questions. The author uses the book to continue his argument that the First World War was a mere error; hardly anyone expected war, he tells us, and that was for the excellent reason that there was very little chance of such a thing occurring. He notes that the risk premium on certain kinds of debt was remarkably low in Edwardian times, and indeed into the summer of 1914. (Whatever else this proves, it does suggest that the First World War is hard to explain as a conspiracy of financiers; the financiers were as flummoxed as the tabloid newspapers by the outbreak of war.) The author contrasts this optimism with the financial history of Europe in the 1930s, where apparently pretty much all the decision-makers were checking their watches after 1933 as they waited for the war to start and priced long-term debt accordingly. (As an aside, we may note that Europe detonated in a remarkably rapid and comprehensive fashion in 1914 as the alliances and strategic plans clicked into place. From1939 to 1941, in contrast, Europe took a long time to find the road to damnation. If 1914 was the Accidental Catastrophe, then it's like one of those Darwinian accidents that seem to cry out for Intelligent Design.) The author has a useful discussion about whether the Western powers were right to buy another year of peace at Munich by selling out Czechoslovakia. Consulting his statistical oracle, he finds that the French and British would have been better advised to have sought an early war. Their defensive preparations were further advanced in 1939, it is true, but Germany did not have the offensive capability in 1938 to do what Hitler would have asked of it if the Munich Conference had failed. In 1939, in contrast, there was a window in the correlation of available forces in which it was possible for Hitler to make a serious play for the conquest of Europe, a gamble that almost succeeded. (Harry Turtledove, predictably, has had some thoughts along these lines.) To some extent, the outcome of the Munich Conference can be explained by the fact the two sides had different ideas about what constitutes an acceptable risk. Ferguson makes the same point about Japan and the United States. When the United States tightened the strategic-materials embargo against Japan in 1941, the US government understood that the cutoff of strategic imports meant that Japan would either have to back down in China or launch an open-ended war in the Pacific. Given these choices, both sides saw that there was only one tolerable option. They just did not see the same one as tolerable. Though the bulk of the book deals with the World Wars and their conduct, the author reminds us that the subsequent Cold War was by no means a Long Peace, except in Europe, where there was a peace of glaciation. Ferguson calls these decades the Third World's War. This was largely a matter of civil war fought around the globe with the different sides in ideological and logistical communion with the United States or the Soviet Union. Ferguson surmises that a Soviet victory in this conflict was quite possible, even likely from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Ferguson is a free-market economist for most purposes, but he observes that Soviet-style central planning does some things remarkably well, particularly post-war reconstruction. More important, the United States was at a fundamental disadvantage. America's democratic liberalism was popular and practical in Europe and Japan because there was already a substantial middle class in those places to embrace it. There was no such social base in most of the rest of the world. The United States was therefore reduced to allying with one or another group of local warlords, and the ones interested in working with the United States were not necessarily the smart ones. As readers of this website will know, this was very much the future that Oswald Spengler had forecast, not in The Decline of the West in 1918, but in The Hour of Decision in the 1930s. In that tract, the world of late modernity becomes a conflict of the Rest against the West, with the external and internal enemies of Western tradition united by some variant of revolutionary socialism. Spengler, never a cheerful fellow even at the best of times, did not quite see how the West could win. If I understand Ferguson correctly, the decisive point was the defection of China from the Soviet Block. But even with victory in the Cold War, history declined to crystallize into a perpetual celebration of free-market democratic transnationalism. The civil wars and the ethnic cleansing continued and even accelerated. Now they were just devoid of ideological content, except to the extent they became theological. There are lots (lots and lots) of statistics in this book. They are of various levels of utility and comprehensibility. In an appendix, the author even equivocates his opening assertion that the 20th century saw the highest percentage of violence-related deaths relative to world population since the beginning of civilization. It might be possible to question other statistical points, too, but the fact is that Ferguson will often set out a statistical argument where another writer might make a character sketch; both are heuristic devices that need not be taken literally. And in fact the author does provide many character sketches and much contemporary testimony; he is particularly good with diaries. Ferguson is not one of those economists who think that economics explain everything. He shows through personal testimony that at least some of the British forces in World War II thought, in effect, they were defending the Shire against Mordor, a sentiment that Tolkien memorialized but did not invent. He also loses no opportunity to detail how their treatment of prisoners and attitude toward civilian casualties was not always distinguishable from that of their enemies at their worst. That tells you something about the 20th century, too.
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