Authors: Henry Kissinger
Diplomacy, which still worked by traditional—somewhat leisurely—methods, lost touch with the emerging technology and its corollary warfare. Europe’s diplomats continued to assume that they were engaged in a common enterprise. They were reinforced in that approach because none of the many previous diplomatic crises of the new century had brought matters to the breaking point. In two crises over Morocco and one over Bosnia, the mobilization schedules had no operational impact because, however intense the posturing, events never escalated to the point of imminent confrontation. Paradoxically, the very success in resolving these crises bred a myopic form of risk-taking unmoored from any of the interests actually at stake. It came to be taken for granted that maneuvering for tactical victories to be cheered in the nationalist press was a normal method of conducting policy—that major powers could dare each other to back down in a succession of standoffs over tangential disputes without ever producing a showdown.
But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later.
World War I broke out
because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades. Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum. Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July 1914, its deadline imposed a great urgency on decision making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war from which it never recovered.
All these decisions were made when the differences between the
major powers were in inverse proportion to their posturing. A new concept of legitimacy—a meld of state and empire—had emerged so that none of the powers considered the institutions of the others a basic threat to their existence. The balance of power as it existed was rigid but not oppressive. Relations between the crowned heads were cordial, even social and familial. Except for France’s commitment to regain Alsace-Lorraine, no major country had claims against the territory of its neighbor. Legitimacy and power were in substantial balance. But in the Balkans among the remnants of the Ottoman possessions, there were countries, Serbia in the forefront, threatening Austria with unsatisfied claims of national self-determination. If any major country supported such a claim, a general war was probable because Austria was linked by alliance to Germany as Russia was to France. A war whose consequences had not been considered descended on Western civilization over the essentially parochial issue of the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Serb nationalist, giving Europe a blow that obliterated a century of peace and order.
In the forty years following the Vienna settlement, the European order buffered conflicts. In the forty years following the unification of Germany, the system aggravated all disputes. None of the leaders foresaw the scope of the looming catastrophe that their system of routinized confrontation backed by modern military machines was making almost certain sooner or later. And they all contributed to it, oblivious to the fact that they were dismantling an international order: France by its implacable commitment to regain Alsace-Lorraine, requiring war; Austria by its ambivalence between its national and its Central European responsibilities; Germany by attempting to overcome its fear of encirclement by serially staring down France and Russia side by side with a buildup of naval forces, seemingly blind to the lessons of history that Britain would surely oppose the largest land power on the Continent if it simultaneously acted as if it meant to threaten Britain’s naval preeminence. Russia, by its constant probing in all directions,
threatened Austria and the remnants of the Ottoman Empire simultaneously. And Britain, by its ambiguity obscuring the degree of its growing commitment to the Allied side, combined the disadvantage of every course. Its support made France and Russia adamant; its aloof posture confused some German leaders into believing that Britain might remain neutral in a European war.
Reflecting on what might have occurred in alternative historical scenarios is usually a futile exercise. But the war that overturned Western civilization had no inevitable necessity. It arose from a series of miscalculations made by serious leaders who did not understand the consequences of their planning, and a final maelstrom triggered by a terrorist attack occurring in a year generally believed to be a tranquil period. In the end, the military planning ran away with diplomacy. It is a lesson subsequent generations must not forget.
World War I was welcomed by enthusiastic publics and euphoric leaders who envisioned a short, glorious war for limited aims. In the event, it killed more than twenty-five million and shipwrecked the prevailing international order. The European balance’s subtle calculus of shifting interests had been abandoned for the confrontational diplomacy of two rigid alliances and was then consumed by trench warfare, producing heretofore-inconceivable casualties. In the ordeal, the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires perished entirely. In Russia, a popular uprising on behalf of modernization and liberal reform was seized by an armed elite proclaiming a universal revolutionary doctrine. After a descent into famine and civil war, Russia and its possessions emerged as the Soviet Union, and Dostoevsky’s yearning for “a great universal church on earth” transmogrified into a Moscow-directed world Communist movement rejecting all existing concepts of order. “Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war
are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning,” Bismarck had cautioned. None of the leaders who drifted into war in August 1914 would have done so could they have foreseen the world of 1918.
Stunned by the carnage, Europe’s statesmen tried to forge a postwar period that would be as different as possible from the crisis that they thought had produced the Great War, as it was then called. They blotted from their minds nearly every lesson of previous attempts to forge an international order, especially of the Congress of Vienna. It was not a happy decision. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 refused to accept Germany back into the European order as the Congress of Vienna had included acceptance of a defeated France. The new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist government of the Soviet Union declared itself not bound by the concepts or restraints of an international order whose overthrow it prophesied; participating at the fringes of European diplomacy, it was recognized only slowly and reluctantly by the Western powers. Of the five states that had constituted the European balance, the Austrian Empire had disappeared; Russia and Germany were excluded, or had excluded themselves; and Britain was beginning to return to its historical attitude of involving itself in European affairs primarily to resist an actual threat to the balance of power rather than to preempt a potential threat.
Traditional diplomacy had brought about a century of peace in Europe by an international order subtly balancing elements of power and of legitimacy. In the last quarter of that century, the balance had shifted to relying on the power element. The drafters of the Versailles settlement veered back to the legitimacy component by creating an international order that could be maintained, if at all, only by appeals to shared principles—because the elements of power were ignored or left in disarray. The belt of states emerging from the principle of self-determination located between Germany and the Soviet Union proved too weak to resist either, inviting collusion between them. Britain was
increasingly withdrawn. The United States, having entered the war decisively in 1917 despite initial public reluctance, had grown disillusioned by the outcome and withdrawn into relative isolation. The responsibility for supplying the elements of power therefore fell largely on France, which was exhausted by the war, drained by it of human resources and psychological stamina, and increasingly aware that the disparity in strength between it and Germany threatened to become congenital.
Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.
With Germany neither morally invested in the Versailles settlement nor confronted with a clear balance of forces preventing its challenges, the Versailles order all but dared German revisionism. Germany could be prevented from asserting its potential strategic superiority only by discriminatory clauses, which challenged the moral convictions of the United States and, to an increasing degree, Great Britain. And once Germany began to challenge the settlement, its terms were maintainable only by the ruthless application of French arms or a permanent American involvement in continental affairs. Neither was forthcoming.
France had spent three centuries keeping Central Europe at first divided and then contained—at first by itself, then in alliance with Russia. But after Versailles, it lost this option. France was too drained by the war to play the role of Europe’s policeman, and Central and Eastern Europe were seized by political currents beyond France’s capacity to manipulate. Left alone to balance a unified Germany, it made halting efforts to guard the settlement by force but became demoralized when its historical nightmare reappeared with the advent of Hitler.
The major powers attempted to institutionalize their revulsion to war into a new form of peaceful international order. A vague formula for international disarmament was put forward, though the implementation was deferred for later negotiations. The League of Nations and a series of arbitration treaties set out to replace power contests with legal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. Yet while membership in these new structures was nearly universal and every form of violation of the peace formally banned, no country proved willing to enforce the terms. Powers with grievances or expansionist goals—Germany, imperial Japan, Mussolini’s Italy—soon learned that there were no serious consequences for violating the terms of membership of the League of Nations or for simply withdrawing. Two overlapping and contradictory postwar orders were coming into being: the world of rules and international law, inhabited primarily by the Western democracies in their interactions with each other; and an unconstrained zone appropriated by the powers that had withdrawn from this system of limits to achieve greater freedom of action. Looming beyond both and opportunistically maneuvering between them lay the Soviet Union—with its own revolutionary concept of world order threatening to submerge them all.
In the end the Versailles order achieved neither legitimacy nor equilibrium. Its almost pathetic frailty was demonstrated by the Locarno Pact of 1925, in which Germany “accepted” the western frontiers and the demilitarization of the Rhineland to which it had already agreed at Versailles but explicitly refused to extend the same assurance to its borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia—making explicit its ambitions and underlying resentments. Amazingly, France completed the Locarno agreement even though it left France’s allies in Eastern Europe formally exposed to eventual German revanchism—a hint of what it would do a decade later in the face of an actual challenge.
In the 1920s, the Germany of the Weimar Republic
appealed to Western consciences by contrasting the inconsistencies and punitiveness
of the Versailles settlement with the League of Nations’ more idealistic principles of international order. Hitler, who came to power in 1933 by the popular vote of a resentful German people, abandoned all restraints. He rearmed in violation of the Versailles peace terms and overthrew the Locarno settlement by reoccupying the Rhineland. When his challenges failed to encounter a significant response, Hitler began to dismantle the states of Central and Eastern Europe one by one: Austria first, followed by Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland.
The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.
Europe had constructed an international order from three hundred years of conflict. It threw it away because its leaders did not understand the consequences when they entered World War I—and though they did understand the consequences of another conflagration, they recoiled before the implications of acting on their foresight. The collapse of international order was essentially a tale of abdication, even suicide. Having abandoned the principles of the Westphalian settlement and reluctant to exercise the force required to vindicate its proclaimed moral alternative, Europe was now consumed by another war that, at its end, brought with it once more the need to recast the European order.
As a result of two world wars, the concept of Westphalian sovereignty and the principles of the balance of power were greatly diminished in the contemporary order of the Continent that spawned
them.
Their residue would continue
, perhaps most consequentially in some of the countries to which they were brought in the age of discovery and expansion.
By the end of World War II, Europe’s world-ordering material and psychological capacity had all but vanished. Every continental European country with the exception of Switzerland and Sweden had been occupied by foreign troops at one time or another. Every country’s economy was in shambles. It became obvious that no European country (including Switzerland and Sweden) was able any longer to shape its own future by itself.
That Western Europe found the moral strength to launch itself on the road to a new approach to order was the work of three great men: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy. Born and educated before World War I, they retained some of an older Europe’s philosophical certitudes about the conditions for human betterment, and this endowed them with the vision and fortitude to overcome the causes of Europe’s tragedies. At a moment of greatest weakness, they preserved some of the concepts of order of their youth. Their most important conviction was that if they were to bring succor to their people and prevent a recurrence of Europe’s tragedies, they needed to overcome Europe’s historical divisions and on that basis create a new European order.