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The Great War Revisited


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First Things

George Weigel

May 2014

 

In 1936, the British writer Rebecca West stood on the balcony of Sarajevos town hall and said to her husband, I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It was World War I: the civilizational cataclysm that began, according to conventional chronology, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated in the Bosnian capital on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a twenty-year-old Bosnian Serb.

 

World War I was known for decades as the Great War. It seems an apt title. For if we think of a century not as an aggregation of one hundred years but as an epoch, what we know as the twentieth century began with the guns of August 1914 and ended when one of the Great Wars more consequential by-products, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in August 1991. World War I set in motion virtually all the dynamics that were responsible for shaping world history and culture in those seventy-seven years: the collapse of dynastic power in the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires; the end of the Caliphate; new nation-states, new tensions in colonial competition, and new passions for decolonization; the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianisms; efforts to achieve global governance; the next two world wars (World War II and the Cold War); the emergence of the United States as leader of the West; serious alterations in the basic structures of domestic and international finance; and throughout Western culture, a vast jettisoning of traditional restraints in virtually every field, from personal and social behavior to womens roles to the arts.

 

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A century into the debate over causation, one suspects that the question Why did the Great War happen? will never be finally settled. Perhaps, though, it is time to consider a different question, rarely explored but no less urgent: Why did the Great War continue? Why, at the end of 1914, when the military situation had ossified on both the western and eastern fronts, did Europe find it impossible to call a halt? As the train of European civilization careened toward the edge of a cliff, why was Europe unable to recognize impending disaster and find a different path toward the future? Why, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in his 1983 Templeton Prize lecture, did Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fall into a rage of self-mutilation that could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever?

 

Thinking about these questions may shed more light on the crises of our civilization and the challenges of statecraft in the twenty-first century than would devising an all-purpose explanation for how the war began in the first place. Even so, there are lessons to be learned from recent attempts to deal with that question, so a centennial reflection on the Great War rightly begins there.

 

(Snip)

 

 

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A Very Good Question, and One I have never considered.

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