The simplest and most persuasive argument that can be used against the view that human beings are naturally predisposed to war and violence is the fact that most violent actions require intricate and sophisticated processes of col-lective motivation. As Andreski (1968: 187) puts it: ‘In every warlike polity (which means in an overwhelming majority of political formations of any kind) there are elaborate social arrangements which stimulate martial ardour by playing upon vanity, fear of contempt, sexual desire, filial and fraternal attachment, loyalty to the group and other sentiments. It seems reasonable to suppose that if there was an innate propensity to war-making, such stimu-lation would be unnecessary. If human beings were in fact endowed with an innate proclivity for war, it would not be necessary to indoctrinate them with warlike virtues; and the mere fact that in so many societies past and present so much time has been devoted to such an indoctrination proves that there is no instinct for war.’
In addition to this essential prerequisite of motivation, without which individuals and groups are unlikely to participate in collective violence, what is an even more important prerequisite of nearly all violent actions is the need for justification. As killing of other human beings goes so much against the grain of moral universes in the great majority of social orders, it neces-sitates potent and believable social mechanisms of justification. While, as discussed in the previous chapters, the pre-modern world found these justi-ficatory mechanisms in proto-ideologies, that is in religious doctrines, myth-ology or imperial ideals, modernity has given birth to more powerful devices of social validation – the secular and secularising ideologies. As explained in the introductory chapter, ideology is understood here in wider terms as a universal social process through which individual and collective agents articulate their beliefs, values, ideas and actions. Since the contents of ideo-logical messages, for the most part, transcend human experience, as they
invoke grand vistas of collective authority, they are difficult if not impossible to test. Ideologies act as powerful mobilisers and legitimisers of social action since they are able to appeal effectively to superior moral norms, group inter-ests and affects or advanced knowledge claims. With the Enlightenment, Romanticism and other intellectual and social movements on the one hand, and the French and American Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars on the other, shaking the foundations of religious authority in Europe, a space was created for the proliferation of new secular doctrines. As religiously under-pinned principles of the divine origins of rulers were evaporating so were the institutional and doctrinal bases of the religions themselves. Having now to compete with alternative systems of meaning that were gaining signifi-cant popular support and to legitimise their teachings and practice, religions were forced to re-articulate their doctrines in the new ideological, and inev-itably secularising, discourses. The new post-Enlightenment and post-revo-lutionary age created an environment of intensive proliferation of ideologies with an abundance of novel doctrines struggling for the hearts and minds of citizens: from Jacobinism, socialism, Josephism, mercantilism, Jansenism, liberalism, to conservatism and many others. The key ideological transform-ation happened on the popular level where, for the first time, state authority was not perceived as the property of dynastic rulers, but gained legitimacy through dedication to abstract principles such as liberty, justice, equality, fra-ternity or nationhood. Once peasants and the urban poor started conceiving of themselves as being of equal moral worth to their former superiors – bish-ops, aristocrats and bourgeoisie – the age of ideology was truly born. In this context I introduce the concept of centrifugal (mass-scale) ideologisation;
that is, a significantly wider proliferation of ideological discourses that radi-ate from the centre of a particular social organisation (e.g. the stradi-ate, social movement, religious institution, the military etc.) but also have strong popu-lar resonances.
The immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, the early 1790s, was particularly characterised by the ideological zeal of both officers and ordinary soldiers who responded to the battle-cry of patrie en danger. Revolutionary élan and the belief that one is fighting for the utter survival of the only just and therefore rational and morally superior state in the world against the forces of darkness spurred thousands of recruits to take up arms. The importance of ideology was evident in the fact that soldiers regularly sang political anthems that glorified the revolution, with three thousand revolutionary songs written between 1789 and 1799 (Taylor 2003: 152), wore explicitly republican uniforms, hyped the leaders of the revolution and enthusiastically cheered anti-royalist
rallying calls. More vitally, the military was well aware of the significance of ideological commitments. The Committee of Public Safety launched and dis-tributed 29,000 copies of its own journal to military units in one day (Taylor 2003: 152) while ‘Minister of War, Bouchotte encouraged the troops to read the most radical political opinions of the day, distributing newspapers to the armies at public expense. Even the newspapers of Marat and Hebert were sent out to the garrisons in the north and the east; all in all, some 1,800,000 copies of Hebert’s Rere Duchesne were purchased by the War Ministry for the education of the troops’ (Forrest 2005: 61).6 Furthermore, as the ideals of the French Revolution spread throughout Europe many ordinary soldiers sym-pathised with these ideas and were reluctant to fight the republican armies.
For example, many recruits in the Netherlands and northern Italy quickly switched sides for ideological reasons (Keegan 1994: 352). On the other side, monarchist and clerical anti-revolutionary forces relied on the peasantry in the Vendée and Brittany to fight the republican armies. This ideological dissent quickly demonstrated the actual limits of the Enlightenment’s high principles of toleration, as the rebels were ruthlessly crushed with 160,000 out of 800,000 inhabitants killed (Townshend 2005: 179).
The context of protracted and vicious warfare with huge human casualties, underpinned by an uncompromising conflict of values, created a Manichean ideological environment where war had to be won regardless of the num-ber of dead. This adamant zeal is perfectly illustrated by Saint-Just’s call to annihilate everything that opposed the Republic and Carnot’s proclamation that: ‘War is a violent condition: one should make it á l’outrance or go home.
We must exterminate, exterminate to the bitter end!’ (Howard 1976: 81). This unprecedented extremism was not an aberration of revolutionary ideals, but directly stemmed from the core principles of the ideological doctrine that was perceived as an absolute truth. As the Enlightenment’s central goal was the establishment of a better, more rational and more just society, any opposition to this project could only be interpreted as irrational, deliberately unjust and ultimately evil and there could never be a dialogue or compromise with evil;
evil must be crushed. As Bauman (1987, 1991) argues, this was an engineering aspiration bent on creating an orderly totality. The key idea was to articulate a blueprint of an ideal social order and then implement this perfect design regardless of the human costs. Revolutionaries were driven by belief in the existence of a universal, singular truth which, once found, would guarantee
6 The American Revolution also stimulated dissemination of the new republican vision of social order.
For example Richard Price’s book On Civil Liberty sold 200,000 copies (Taylor 2003: 138).
the road to happiness for all. In their view the Enlightenment intellectu-als were in possession of the cognitive, ethical and esthetical powers which could finally distinguish knowledge from superstition, ethical principles from unethical ones, or beauty from kitsch, and they saw themselves as the ultim-ate guardians of these fundamental certainties. Anybody who obstructed the implementation of these rationally conceived grand vistas of perfect social order had simply to be removed as obstacles. In this sense, guardians of the Enlightenment acted as diligent gardeners focused on eradicating all the
‘mucky weeds’ that might ruin the perfect image of a new social order (Gellner 1983; Bauman 1989). As modernity has no patience with ambiguities of any kind the secular progressive Republic could not tolerate the existence of the monarchist and priestly peasants in the Vendée.
With the further rise of science and new social and political theories, the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury saw an increased impact of ideology on warfare. Although the period between 1870 and 1914 was often referred as the long peace, this hides the fact that European powers were waging imperial wars on other continents and crushing class and regional rebellions at home. As Halperin (2004: 120) documents, in this period European states fought thirty-four wars outside Europe, twelve within European borders and were involved in extremely vio-lent domestic ‘class warfare’: ‘Viovio-lent conflict was a fundamental dimension of Europe’s industrial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies: interstate and cross-border wars; ethnic and nationalist; religious and ideological conflicts; riots, insurrections, rebellions, revolutions, uprisings, violent strikes, and demonstrations; coups, assassinations, brutal repression, and terrorism were characteristic of European societies until 1945’.
Although traditional interpretations of colonialism from J.A. Hobson and Lenin to the world system model of Wallerstein overwhelmingly focused on the economic benefits of imperial powers, it seems that in many respects late nineteenth century European imperialism was more of a political, ideological and military, than economic, phenomenon. As Porch (2005: 94) argues and documents well: ‘imperialism moved forward, not as a result of commerce or political pressure from London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or even Washington, but mainly because men on the periphery, many of whom were soldiers, pressed to expand the boundaries of empire, often without orders, even against orders’.
The ever-increasing popularity of Darwinist interpretations of social life combined with the imperial doctrine of mission civilisatrice provided the key ideological glue for imperial expansion. Both of these value systems were
grounded deeply in the Enlightenment heritage: while the civilising mission was all about transforming primitive and uncivilised indigenous rustics into proper civilised human beings on the model of their colonial masters, social Darwinism emphasised the inevitability and the violent character of this process, as those who do not adapt were destined to perish. As the extremely popular British social Darwinist, Benjamin Kidd whose book Social Evolution (1894: 46) was published in numerous editions, puts it: ‘the winning soci-eties gradually extinguish their competitors, the weaker peoples disappear before the stronger, and the subordination or exclusion of the least efficient is still the prevailing feature of advancing humanity’. Whereas early imperial conquests required little explanation and no justification, the second half of the nineteenth century was different in the sense that colonial occupation required an ideological legitimisation. The universally shared assumption of the cultural superiority of the European colonisers was now reinforced by the scientific/biological discourses that validated this unequal relationship and by the imperial ethics of obligation towards the inferior subjects of their rule (aptly summarised in Kipling’s White Man’s Burden). The imperial rule was perceived as the only rational and just policy ‘to open up the dark places of the world, as they were seen, to the light … while conservatives justified the imperial mission in terms of upholding law and order, the liberals saw it as preparing peoples who were still in statu pupillari for eventual self-rule’
(Howard 1991: 26–7). Most of all, imperialism remained a military project, as empires were won, extended and defended through warfare and in this sense
‘the military virtues were thus considered part of the essence of an Imperial Race’ (Howard 1991: 63).
As mutinies, rebellions and wars spread throughout the colonies, the imperial powers were forced to switch from indirect rule through the trad-ing companies to direct administrative rule backed up by a stronger military presence that extensively relied on indigenous recruitment. For example, in this period the British Empire was involved in conflicts in India (1857 Mutiny), South Africa (Boer and Zulu Wars), Egypt and the Ashanti region of Ghana. Many rebellions were mercilessly crushed, with the German mas-sacre of Hereros and Namaqua (South West Africa) in 1904–7 qualifying as the first ideologically driven genocide of the modern era.
The successes and failures of imperial militarism and geopolitical compe-tition had direct implications at home in Europe as well. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the urban middle classes, as well as the cultural and political elites of the major imperial powers, disenchanted with liberal and pacifist ideas and openly supporting the idea of war. Although in Germany
militarism had a longer (Prussian) tradition and wider following among the middle classes and intellectuals; Britain, France and other states were also heavily infused with similar ideas that glorified war. While German writers and generals such as Bernhardi, Moltke and Goltz saw war as a Christian virtue that develops nobility of spirit, courage and self-sacrifice or as a means through which nations transact their business, British intellectuals such as Kidd, Low and Pearson among others argued that war is a precondition of progress and as such is righteous, necessary and inevitable. As J. A. Cramb put it: ‘War is the supreme act in the life of the State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act’ (quoted by Howard 1991: 75; French 2005: 83).
However, it is important to emphasise that militarism was a phenomenon associated largely with some social groups and classes rather than involving all. As Mann (1993) demonstrates, since the peasantry and manual workers of most European states had not achieved full citizenship rights by 1914 they did not perceive the nation-states as ‘theirs’ in the same way the middle classes, intellectuals or state bureaucrats did, and were either indifferent or passively opposed to the increasing glorification of warfare. This was more the case in the eastern half of the continent where the peasantry dominated numerically without having any proper civil rights and the middle classes were tiny and, for the most part, politically insignificant. In contrast, the political and mili-tary establishments, state careerists, cultural elites and much of the middle classes in the western half of the continent conceptualised the world in hard geopolitical terms and strongly identified with their nation-states. In other words, although it was a very powerful new ideology, nationalism, and par-ticularly aggressive, jingoistic nationalism, was still confined to the minority of European populations, nevertheless, as the key institutional mechanisms for dissemination of nationalist messages, such as the state administration, educational institutions, publishing presses and mass media, were mostly in the hands of militarists, the veneration of the nation-state as a sacred object of self-sacrifice became the principal social value. The study of the classics, the cult of heroism and manliness, and an absence of the horrors of warfare in Europe for more than forty years, were all instrumental in forging the sense that the nation-state is a divine and eternal entity whose honour and prestige are unquestioned and if attacked requires the ultimate heroic sacri-fice. To a large extent this view was shared also by many leading politicians and guided policy recommendations; as Stone (1983) shows, the correspond-ence and the diplomatic and private documentation of ‘high politics’, were preoccupied with the issues of state prestige, national strategy and status.
In the early twentieth century, as the geopolitical balance of power drastically changed with the creation and expansion of the new German Empire, which had the most vibrant economy in Europe and was swiftly catching up with Britain, tensions, mutual fears and conflicting aspirations among European powers were emerging to the point of no return. WWI was in part fuelled by objective geopolitical, military and ideological differ-ences and in part by subjective perceptions of the other side’s true intentions.
As with all large-scale historical events, it was a result of many unintended consequences and contingently provoked chain reactions. There was a clear discrepancy between an autocratic Germany ruled by a militarist dynasty and dominated by the landed aristocracy (Junkers) at the top of a largely agrarian society, and an economically and politically liberal, industrialised and urbanised Britain that ultimately relied on its naval supremacy and the benefits of free trade for its position as the centre of the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. For stagnant semi-feudal Austro-Hungary beset by rising inter-ethnic conflicts, absolutist, impoverished, highly con-servative and undeveloped Russia and economically and imperially fading France whose peasant smallholders prevented proper reform, the war meant a postponement of the inevitable social transformation.
Although everybody expected a short, intense conflict with a clear and decisive outcome, the result was a long, protracted, inconclusive war, by far the bloodiest Europe had yet witnessed. Despite the speedy mobilisation and advancement that modern technology afforded to the German troops, the fact that the French armies managed to hold their ground in the first two years of war in the face of enormous losses meant that the conflict degenerated into a horrific war of attrition with huge human casualties and little military success. Although ordinary soldiers became quickly disenchanted with war, often empathising with the soldiers in the enemy trenches and finding ways to avoid shooting directly at each other (Ashworth 1968; 1980), the military organisation made certain that the killing ratios remained high.7 The scale of military mobilisation was historically unparalleled, with Germany and France having 4 million men by 1914, of which 2 million French and 1.7 million German soldiers fought each other on the Western Front (Howard 2002: 20). In addition Austro-Hungary had 1.3 million soldiers at its disposal whereas Russia mobilised 3.4 million. Since Britain had no conscription
7 Ashworth (1968: 411) points out: ‘The Live and Let Live principle was an informal and collective agreement between front-line soldiers of opposing armies to inhibit offensive activity to a level mutu-ally defined as tolerable. This understanding was tacit and covert; it was expressed in activity or non-activity rather than in verbal terms. The norm was supported by the system of sanctions.’
until 1916 it had to rely on volunteers; Lord Kitchener’s campaign managed to recruit 2.5 million volunteers (Herwig et al. 2003: 484). As such a huge number of men were sent to the fronts it was necessary for the rest of society to undergo a similar process of re-organisation and mobilisation for the war cause. The mass production of arms and military supplies required mass fac-tories and mass labour, continuous technological developments and efficient mass transport which all depended on the productive apparatus of industri-alism. This also included reliance on the mass communication systems, mass propaganda and centralised organisation able to co-ordinate these complex and large social systems.
WWI was an industrial war but it was also the first total war involving and demanding the vast mobilisation of entire societies for the war cause. This
WWI was an industrial war but it was also the first total war involving and demanding the vast mobilisation of entire societies for the war cause. This