The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Read online

  When I was a schoolboy, the history textbooks offered a variety of explanations for twentieth-century violence. Sometimes they related it to economic crisis, as if depressions and recessions could explain political conflict. A favourite device was to relate the rise of unemployment in Weimar Germany to the rise of the Nazi vote and Adolf Hitler’s ‘seizure’ of power, which in turn was supposed to explain the Second World War. But, I came to wonder, might not rapid economic growth sometimes have been just as destabilizing as economic crisis? Then there was the theory that the century was all about class conflict – that revolutions were one of the main causes of violence. But were not ethnic divisions actually more important than the supposed struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie? Another argument was that the twentieth century’s problems were the consequences of extreme versions of political ideologies, notably communism (extreme socialism) and fascism (extreme nationalism), as well as earlier evil ‘isms’, notably imperialism. But what about the role of traditional systems like religions, or of other apparently non-political ideas and assumptions that nevertheless had violent implications? And just who was fighting the twentieth century’s wars? In the books I read as a boy, the leading roles were always played by nation states: Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the United States and so on. But was it not the case that some or all of these polities were in some measure multinational rather than national – were, indeed, empires rather than states? Above all, the old history books told the story of the twentieth century as a kind of protracted, painful but ultimately pleasing triumph of the West. The heroes (Western democracies) were confronted by a succession of villains (the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians) but ultimately good always triumphed over evil. The world wars and the Cold War were thus morality plays on a global stage. But were they? And did the West really win the hundred years war that was the twentieth century?

  Let me now reformulate those preliminary schoolboy thoughts in rather more rigorous terms. In what follows, I shall argue that historians’ traditional explanations for the violence of the twentieth century are necessary but not sufficient. Changes in technology, in particular the increased destructiveness of modern weaponry, were important, no doubt, but they were merely responses to more deep-seated desires to kill more efficiently. There is in fact no correlation over the century between the destructiveness of weaponry and the incidence of violence.

  Nor can economic crises explain all the violent upheavals of the century. As noted already, perhaps the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography leads from the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of war. Yet on closer inspection this pleasing story falls apart. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression became fascist regimes; nor did all the fascist regimes engage in wars of aggression. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe, but only after its economy had recovered from the Depression. The Soviet Union, which started the war on Hitler’s side, was cut off from the world economic crisis, yet ended up mobilizing and losing more soldiers than any other combatant. For the century as a whole, no general rule is discernible. Some wars came after periods of growth; others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic crises. And some severe economic crises did not lead to wars. Certainly, it is now impossible to argue (though Marxists long tried to) that the First World War was the result of a crisis of capitalism; on the contrary, it abruptly terminated a period of extraordinary global economic integration with relatively high growth and low inflation.

  It can of course be argued that wars happen for reasons that have nothing to do with economics. Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the Short Twentieth Century’ (1914–91) ‘an era of religious wars, though the most militant and bloodthirsty religions were secular ideologies of nineteenth-century vintage’. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Paul Johnson blamed the century’s violence on ‘the rise of moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility [and] the repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values’. Yet the rise of new ideologies or the decline of old values cannot be regarded as causes of violence in their own right, important though it is to understand the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. There have been extreme belief-systems on offer for most of modern history, but only at certain times and in certain places have they been widely embraced and acted upon. Anti-Semitism is a good example in this regard. Likewise, to attribute responsibility for wars to a few mad or bad men is to repeat the error upon which Tolstoy heaped scorn in War and Peace. Megalomaniacs may order men to invade Russia, but why do the men obey?

  Nor is it convincing to attribute the violence of the century primarily to the emergence of the modern nation state. Although twentieth-century polities developed unprecedented capabilities for mobilizing masses of people, these could be, and were, as easily harnessed to peaceful as to violent ends. States could certainly wield more ‘social control’ in the 1930s than ever before. They employed legions of civil servants, tax collectors and policemen. They provided education, pensions and in some cases subsidized insurance against ill health and unemployment. They regulated if they did not actually own the railways and roads. If they wanted to conscript every able-bodied adult male citizen, they could. Yet all of these capabilities developed even further in the decades after 1945, while the frequency of large-scale war declined. Indeed, it was generally the states with the most all-embracing welfare states that were the least likely to be involved in war in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Just as it was an earlier revolution in warfare that had transformed the early modern state, it may well have been total war that made the welfare state, creating that capacity for planning, direction and regulation without which the Beveridge Report or Johnson’s Great Society would have been inconceivable. It was surely not the welfare state that made total war.

  Did it matter how states were governed? It has become fashionable among political scientists to posit a correlation between democracy and peace, on the ground that democracies tend not to go to war with one another. On that basis, of course, the long-run rise of democracy during the twentieth century should have reduced the incidence of war. It may have reduced the incidence of war between states; there is, however, at least some evidence that waves of democratization in the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s were followed by increases in the number of civil wars and wars of secession. This brings us to a central point. To consider twentieth-century conflict purely in terms of warfare between states is to overlook the importance of organized violence within states. The most notorious example is, of course, the war waged by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews, nearly six million of whom perished. The Nazis simultaneously sought to annihilate a variety of other social groups deemed to be ‘unworthy of life’, notably mentally ill and homosexual Germans, the social elite of occupied Poland and the Sinti and Roma peoples. In all, more than three million people from these other groups were murdered. Prior to these events, Stalin had perpetrated comparable acts of violence against national minorities within the Soviet Union as well as executing or incarcerating millions of Russians guilty or merely suspected of political dissidence. Of around four million non-Russians who were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, at least 1.6 million are estimated to have died as a result of the hardships inflicted on them. A minimum estimate for the total victims of all political violence in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1953 is twenty-one million. Yet genocide* predated totalitarianism. As we shall see, the policies of forced resettlement and deliberate murder directed against Christian minorities in the last years of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide according to the 1948 definition of the term.

  In short, the extreme violence of the twentieth century was highly variegated. It was not all a matter of armed men clashing. Of the total deaths attributed to the Second World War, half at least were of civilians. Sometimes they were the victims of discrimination, as when people were selected for murder on the basis of their race or class. Sometimes they were the victims of indiscriminate violence, as when the British and American air fo
rces bombed whole cities to rubble. Sometimes they were murdered by foreign invaders; sometimes by their own neighbours. Clearly, then, any explanation for the sheer scale of the carnage needs to go beyond the realm of conventional military analysis.

  Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence of the twentieth century, and in particular why so much of it happened at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea. These may be summarized as ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. By ethnic conflict, I mean major discontinuities in the social relations between certain ethnic groups, specifically the breakdown of sometimes quite far-advanced processes of assimilation. This process was greatly stimulated in the twentieth century by the dissemination of the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference (even as that principle was waning in the realm of politics) and by the political fragmentation of ‘borderland’ regions of ethnically mixed settlement. By economic volatility I mean the frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment, with all the associated social stresses and strains. And by empires in decline I mean the decomposition of the multinational European empires that had dominated the world at the beginning of the century and the challenge posed to them by the emergence of new ‘empire-states’ in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany. This is also what I have in mind when I identify ‘the descent of the West’ as the most important development of the twentieth century. Powerful though the United States was at the end of the Second World War – the apogee of its unspoken empire – it was still much less powerful than the European empires had been forty-five years before.

  GENE POOLS

  Not without reason, Hermann Göring explicitly called the Second World War ‘the great racial war’. That was indeed how many contemporaries experienced it. The importance then attached to notions of racial difference now seems rather strange. The science of modern genetics has revealed that human beings are remarkably alike. In terms of our DNA we are, without a shadow of a doubt, one species, whose origins can be traced back to Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, and who began to spread into new continents only as recently as 60,000 years ago – in evolutionary terms, the proverbial blink of an eye. The differences we associate with racial identities are superficial: pigmentation (which is darker in the melanocytes of peoples whose ancestors lived close to the equator), physiognomy (which makes eyes narrower and noses shorter at the eastern end of the great Eurasian landmass) and hair type. Beneath the skin, we are all quite similar. That is a reflection of our shared origins.* To be sure, geographical dispersion meant that humans formed groups which became physically quite distinct over time. That explains why the Chinese look quite different from, say, the Scots. However, outright ‘speciation’ – to be precise, the development of ‘isolating barriers’ that would have made interbreeding impossible – did not have time to subdivide the species Homo sapiens. Indeed, the genetic record makes it clear that, despite their outward differences and despite the obstacles of distance and mutual incomprehension, the different ‘races’ have been interbreeding since the very earliest times. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his collaborators have shown that most Europeans are descended from farmers who migrated northwards and westwards from the Middle East. The DNA record suggests that there were successive waves of such migration, attended always by some mingling of the incomers with indigenous nomads. The great Völkerwanderung (‘wandering of the peoples’) of the late Roman Empire left a similar genetic legacy. Most striking of all have been the consequences of the modern migrations associated with the European discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the subsequent era of conquest, colonization and concubinage. Biologists today call the process ‘demic diffusion’. Nineteenth-century racists spoke of ‘miscegenation’; Noël Coward simply called it ‘the urge to merge’. But the phenomenon was already a familiar one when Shakespeare wrote Othello (whose mixed marriage is doomed more by his credulity than his colour) and The Merchant of Venice (which also touches on the issue, notably when Portia tests her suitors).

  The results are plainly legible to those who study the human genome today. Between a fifth and a quarter of the DNA of most African-Americans can be traced back to Europeans. At least half of the inhabitants of Hawaii are of ‘mixed’ ancestry. Likewise, the DNA of today’s Japanese population indicates that there was intermarriage between early settlers from Korea and the indigenous Jomonese people. Most of the Y chromosomes found in Jewish males are the same as those found among other Middle Eastern men; for all their bitter enmity, Palestinians and Israelis are genetically not so very different. The evolutionist Richard Lewontin famously calculated that around 85 per cent of the total amount of genetic variation in humans occurs among individuals in an average population; only 6 per cent occurs among races. The genetic variants that affect skin colour, hair type and facial features involve an insignificant amount of the billions of nucleotides in an individual’s DNA. To some biologists, this means that, strictly speaking, human races do not exist.

  Others might prefer to say that they are in the process of ceasing to exist. A generation of American social scientists working during and after the 1960s documented the rise of interracial marriage in the post-war United States, portraying it as the most important measure of assimilation in American life. Though ‘multi-culturalism’ has done much to challenge the idea that assimilation should always and everywhere be the goal of ethnic minorities, a rising rate of intermarriage is still widely regarded as a key indicator of diminishing racial prejudice or conflict. In the words of two leading American sociologists, ‘rates of intermarriage… are particularly good indications of the acceptability of different groups and of social integration’. The US census currently distinguishes between four ‘racial’ categories: ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Native American’ and ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’. On this basis, one in twenty children in the United States is of mixed origin, in that their parents do not both belong to the same racial category. The number of such mixed-race couples quadrupled between 1990 and 2000, to roughly 1.5 million.

  And yet throughout the twentieth century men repeatedly thought and acted as if the physically distinctive ‘races’ were separate species, categorizing this group or that group as somehow ‘subhuman’. While ‘demic diffusion’ has occurred peacefully and even imperceptibly in some settings, in others interracial relationships have been viewed as deeply dangerous. How, then, are we to explain this central puzzle: the willingness of groups of men to identify one another as aliens when they are all biologically so very similar? For it was this willingness that lay at the root of much of the twentieth century’s worst violence. How could Göring’s ‘great racial war’ happen if there were no races?

  Two evolutionary constraints help to explain the shallowness but also the persistence of racial differences. The first is that when men were few and far between – when life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, as it was for 99 per cent of the time our species has existed – the overriding imperatives were to hunt or gather sufficient food and to reproduce. Men formed small groups because cooperation improved the individual’s chances of doing both. However, tribes that came into contact with one another were inevitably in competition for scarce resources. Hence, conflict could take the form of plunder – the seizure by violence of another tribe’s means of subsistence – and downright murder of unrelated strangers to get rid of potential sexual rivals. Man, so some neo-Darwinians argue, is programmed by his genes to protect his kin and to fight ‘the Other’. To be sure, a warrior tribe that succeeded in defeating a rival tribe would not necessarily act rationally if it killed all its members. Given the importance of reproduction, it would make more sense to appropriate the rival tribe’s fertile females as well as its food. In that sense, even the evolutionary logic that produces tribal violence also promotes interbreeding, as captured womenfolk becom
e the victors’ sexual partners.

  Nevertheless, there may be a biological check on this impulse to rape alien females. For there is evidence from the behaviour of both humans and other species that nature does not necessarily favour breeding between genetically very different members of the same species. No doubt there are sound biological reasons for the more or less universal taboos on incest in human societies, since inbreeding with siblings increases the risk that a genetic abnormality may manifest itself in offspring. On the other hand, a preference for distant relatives or complete strangers as mates would have been a handicap in prehistoric times. A species of hunter-gatherers that could only reproduce successfully with genetically (and geographically) distant individuals would not have lasted long. Sure enough, there is strong empirical evidence to suggest that ‘optimal outbreeding’ is achieved with a surprisingly small degree of genealogical separation. A first cousin may actually be biologically preferable as a mate to a wholly unrelated stranger. The very high levels of cousin-marriage that used to be common among Jews and still prevail among the highly endoga-mous Samaritans have resulted in remarkably few genetic abnormalities. Conversely, when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high that their blood groups may be incompatible, so that only the first child they conceive will be viable. Finally, it must be significant in its own right that separate human populations so quickly developed such distinctive facial characteristics. Some evolutionary biologists argue that this was a result not just of ‘genetic drift’ but of ‘sexual selection’ – in other words, a culturally triggered and somewhat arbitrary preference for eye-folds in Asia or long noses in Europe quite rapidly accentuated precisely those characteristics in populations that were isolated from one another. Like attracted and continues to attract like; those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may in fact be atypical in their sexual predilections.