Reading Niall Ferguson’s “The War of the World” is like sitting in on a history seminar. Everyone already knows that poison gas and trench warfare, extermination camps and the firebombing of cities made the 20th century the bloodiest in modern history. What you hope for in this huge book is an interpretive clue: Why did men rain death down on fellow beings as if they were aliens?
The professor’s reputation has you primed to savor his trenchant insights. After all this is his show, literally so, as Ferguson has become an impresario historian. This latest book, like two previous dealing with the subject of empire, accompanied a British TV series. Thus you expect opinions honed into sound bites. Arguing would be like talking back to your TV. So sit back and enjoy the show, even if it is a horror story.
Ferguson wastes no time introducing his basic set of interpretive tools: perceptions of race, measures of economic volatility and the earthquake zone of empire-states overlaying multi-ethnic populations. While this tri-fold model is stylized economic abstraction, he applies it concretely.
Since Ferguson has already written an enormous history of the First World War, he focuses here on contrasting the high rates of ethnic intermingling in Germany with expressions of “scientific” racism, revealing revulsion and resentment at economic success. He also argues that the financial markets were surprised by the war, expecting the highly intertwined Saxe-Coburg royalty would somehow find a diplomatic way out. Instead, global prosperity collapsed as old empires that had held together multi-ethnic societies were carved up by new boundaries.
Foreshadowings of horror
Given the economic upheaval following the war, it is no surprise that dominant majorities exercised their advantage against vulnerable minorities: The Turks massacred Armenians while the Bolsheviks starved Ukrainians in the name of rapid industrialization. (“What do per capita figures mean when the number of people is being drastically reduced by political violence?”) Thus the aftermath of the First World War foreshadowed the horrors of the Second.
To place the economic dilemma of the ’30s in contemporary perspective, Ferguson plays a sly trick. He begins a chapter with quotes from Hitler followed by excerpts from an inaugural speech rallying the nation to economic revival. It turns out that the speech was Roosevelt’s first inaugural. Hitler made his very similar inaugural pitch a few weeks later. The juxtaposition highlights a central fact: All nations in the end responded to the economic crisis by arming for war.
Both Germany and Japan’s opting for an imperial solution made sense when free trade had all but disappeared under protectionist tariffs. But faced with aggressive imperial expansion, why did the West do so little to stop the run-up to war? Here Ferguson unleashes his most scathing criticism of Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement and contends that there was an economic case for pre-emptive war. While this sounds like the wisdom of hindsight, or the grinding of an axe, it does expose the tragic negligence in readiness that nearly resulted in a debacle.
Obviously, this is not a history by an American heir to the greatest generation. Ferguson tweaks Americans as “far from being the greatest warriors,” who instead “were the masters of overkill, whose first principle was: ‘Always have on hand more of everything than you can ever conceivably need.”‘ American corporations had willingly signed up to their own version of a command economy and the use of firebombing and nuclear weapons did not require “a revolution in the political economy of total war. Rather it was the logical culmination of the Allied way of war.”
A rushed epilogue
By comparison with the first 50 years, the epilogue for the rest of the century is much too hasty. There are quick sketches of Korea and the Cuban Missile Crisis, of Kissinger and Nixon playing China off Russia. Typically, American diplomacy tainted itself with repressive proxies and came up short. But the collapse of Soviet Russia offers no fairy tale ending as the Balkan crisis brought the world back full circle to ethnic cleansing. The prospect for the future frightens Ferguson, given the demographic differentials between a “senescent and secularized continent” grown dependent on immigrant labor from a youthful society beyond the Mediterranean.
At the end of the show Ferguson trots out a quote from a weary Freud describing humanity’s perennial instinct to destroy and kill. He even resurrects Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic prediction for the decline of the West.
Wait. Has Ferguson the showman played a shell game, swapping “what happened is inevitable” for the answer to why? Was all the groundwork exposing the chronic misuse of the race “meme” a wasted investment? If Ferguson’s history teaches anything, it is that ethnic diffusion and assimilation are biologically inevitable. Racist resistance is futile.
David J. Poundstone is a freelance writer.
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The War of the World
Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Decline of the West
By Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 808 pages, $35
