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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Barbarism and Civilisation: A History of Europe in Our Time

Best or worst?

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century

If you blink, then a perfectly obvious case can be made that the 20th century was far and away the best in human history. Any horrors it endured came not from evolutionary change but from unnatural aberrations, in the form of what men did to one another in the name of ideologies. Bernard Wasserstein takes the title of his excellent new book from Walter Benjamin: ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.’ This is a nice line, but it deserves the examiner’s ‘Discuss’. For much of European history, the Whig view — onward and upward — did not seem absurd, and that was never less so than 100 years ago, in that golden age so memorably apostrophised by Keynes. What any historian thus has to address is why Europe relapsed so terrifyingly into catastrophic war, despotism and mass murder.

‘Europe at 1914,’ as Wasserstein’s first chapter is called, was still a largely agrarian continent despite rapid industrialisation, and for all that its tone was increasingly set by urban life and such institutions he dilates on as the café and the department store. Rich and poor were separated by a vast gulf: a very modest income tax was paid by the million British citizens with annual incomes of more than £160, which excluded the whole working class. In many countries the modern state still barely existed, and even the empires of eastern Europe were ruled, if not with a light hand then with much less force than one might suppose. Quite apart from ‘mildly tolerant . . . more or less free’ Austria-Hungary, order was kept throughout the whole Tsarist empire by fewer than 15,000 gendarmes (when Harrods already employed a staff of 6000).

What ruined old Europe wasn’t class conflict but what Wasserstein calls the canker of nationalism: in the Balkans it was the proximate cause of the 1914 war, but it spread like a virus everywhere. For all of later anguish about the ‘war guilt’ clause in the Versailles treaty, most historians now agree that Germany was indeed culpable: a belief that Germany would have to go to war to achieve her aims had, as Wasserstein says, ‘become deeply entrenched in the collective mentality of the German political elite by 1914’.

It wasn’t nationalism or capitalism which led to such unimaginable bloodshed so much as a fortuitous conjuncture of military factors, and one of the war’s gravest consequences, the Russian revolution, was really no less of an accident. The common factor by now was political violence, an infectious cycle destroying the foundations of legality and constitutional government. Dissolving the elected Constituent Assembly ‘means a complete and frank liquidation of the idea of democracy by the idea of dictatorship,’ Lenin said with his usual candour. ‘It will serve as a good lesson’: one learned by Mussolini and then Hitler.

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