On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month
I commemorate the end of the Great War every year. I do so because it was prologue to our history since 1914. With no World War I, there would have been no Adolf Hitler. Fascism may have been a fringe movement which never achieved power. There would have been no Russian Revolution, most likely. The Middle East would not have been carved up by the victorious powers, with no concern for realities on the ground, leading to the eternal War on Terror. And, six million European Jews wouldn't have been slaughtered.
The day on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the teetering Austro-Hungarian Empire, is one of those fulcrums on which history turns. Because of the maelstrom of the Balkans, some incident would have lit the fire. But imagine if, after the first assassination attempt, which he and his wife survived, Franz Ferdinand, instead of insisting on continuing his progress, had allowed discretion to be the better part of valor? At least that casus belli would have been removed.
Europe in 1914 had been at peace since 1871. There had been close calls, but there had been no wars between the major powers. However, the warning signs were there, with nationalism rampant among the various subject peoples of the continent. The Balkan Wars were prologue to the conflagration. Did Europe have a death wish, bored by peace and prosperity and power? Perhaps. Most people saw war as inconceivable, with all the trade and cultural links obtaining in the West. And yet war came. High European civilization descended into the grossest barbarity. All the links which European culture had built up in the years of peace were severed like spiders' webs. It was a catastrophe from which we, more than a century later, are still suffering. Any idea of the superiority of Western civilization were put to the sword by the fact of 1914-1918.
Years ago, my dear friend the Gaybrarian expressed incredulousness that World War I was still a thing of concern. But of course, we are the children of the Great War. Everything which has occured in the past century is due to that calamity. The Middle East is still operating under the unfinished business of World War I. Promises and deals made, winners and mostly losers. We can't escape that history any more than we can escape our own DNA. The double helixes of our civilization are fully formed by the War.
Until we deal with that unfinished business, the war will keep slashing away at our peace. All of our foreign policy is informed by that war. Islamists in the Near East still use Sykes-Picot as immediate history, not something long ago and far away, of no further importance. The Yugoslav Wars had their genesis in World War I. Fascism, both old and new, suckled at the teat of the War. The War is such an overweening presence, that imagining the world without it is nearly impossible. For both good and ill, it created the modern world. It set in motion the fall of Europe and the rise of America. Revolutions followed in its wake. Colonial empires which in their hubris assumed they would be eternal had their end-dates assured.
And the War destroyed the romance of war. Cavalry charges became the death-land of the trenches. Death and bitterness and recrimination followed in its wake. The stab in the back, the traitors within. The Lost Generation. Europeans went to war like children, thinking it a game which would be over by Christmas. They came out of it old and bitter, knowing that God was dead.
Now, in 2020, we are in a situation much like that of Europe in that last summer before the conflagration began. Decades of a Pax Americana, under which many are chafing. They want their place in the sun. China, a superpower for millennia, wants to reclaim its natural position. The dark specter of nationalism haunts the West. Among the many tasks which face him, Joe Biden will have to work to avoid repeating history. Of course, we have advantages which our ancestors in 1914 didn't. We truly are a global culture. The existential crises which face us are global, not local. No one nation can order the world to its will. Perhaps now, finally, we realize our interconnectedness. The people of 1914 thought they lived in a global community. But that community reserved membership only to the Great Powers. Being able to converse with someone from Nigeria upends things. It expands your horizons.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was not an end, but a beginning. We are still working through its effects. May we learn and grow from it.