Kenan Malik
The forgotten roots of World War I
Published 27 May 2014
Original in English
First published in New Humanist 2/2014 / Pandaemonium
Downloaded from eurozine.com (http://www.eurozine.com/the-forgotten-roots-of-world-war-i/)
© Kenan Malik / New Humanist Eurozine
Those who wish to pass off World War I as a just war against German
militarism should remember that at the heart of the global imperialist
network stood not Germany but Britain, writes Kenan Malik. And that behind
imperialist expansion lay venomous racism.
The nations of the world, claimed Lord Salisbury in a speech to the Primrose
League at the Albert Hall in 1898, were divided into the “living” and the
“dying”. The “living” were the “white” nations – the European powers,
America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The “dying” comprised the
rest of the world. “The living nations”, Salisbury claimed, “will gradually
encroach on the territory of the dying” and from this “the seeds and causes
of conflict among civilized nations will speedily appear”. The partition of the
globe “may introduce causes of fatal difference between the great nations
whose mighty armies stand opposed threatening each other”.
Less than twenty years after Salisbury gave his speech, the mighty armies of
the great nations did indeed stand opposed threatening each other, and
bringing calamity upon a generation. Virtually from the moment that the
“lamps went out all over Europe”, in Sir Edward Grey’s evocative phrase,
there has been much debate – too much debate – about why they did so and
who snuffed them out, not least in this, the centenary year of World War I.
Yet in the midst of the often fractious claim and counter-claim, surprisingly
little attention has been paid to the issue raised by Salisbury – how the
encroachment of the “living nations” upon “the territory of the dying”
created “the seeds and causes of conflict”. There has been, particularly this
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year, much discussion about the role of German militarism. Many who want
to make a case for World War I as a good, or at least as a necessary,
conflict, have argued for the importance of Britain having stood up to
German aggression. Germany’s expansionist tendencies and virulent racism
only make sense, however, against the background of late nineteenthcentury imperialism, of the carving up of the globe between the Great
Powers, as the “living nations” encroached unremittingly upon “the territory
of the dying”. Imperialist expansion and Great Power rivalry were, as
Salisbury understood, intimately linked. Rivalries helped promote imperialist
expansion, while imperialist expansion helped foster rivalries.
At the heart of the global imperialist network stood not Germany but Britain.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the dominant
world power, already with an unmatched empire, a powerhouse of an
economy, unparalleled naval power and unsurpassed political influence.
Britain’s pre-eminence in all these areas was, however, also being
challenged in an unprecedented fashion, by the old powers, such as France,
Belgium and Russia, by the new power of the USA, and, most ominously, by
the newest power of all in Germany.
The rivalries first manifested themselves outside Europe, as the newer
powers tried to create their own empires and Britain sought to maintain its
supremacy. There was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from
Africa to the Pacific, a frenzy of land-grabbing. “Towards the end of the
nineteenth century”, the historian Ronald Hyam observes in his book
Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914, “European politicians felt themselves
living in an era of world delimitation, ‘a partition of the world’ as Rosebery
called it, from which, as Elgin (when viceroy of India) agreed, Britain could
not stand aside because of her ‘mission as pioneers of civilization.'”
Between 1874 and 1902, Britain alone added 4,750,000 square miles and 90
million people to her Empire, ranging from numerous little Pacific Islands to
Baluchistan, from Upper Burma to vast swathes of Africa. Britain, the Times
declared, must continue expanding her empire because she could not afford
“to allow any section even of the Dark Continent to believe that our imperial
prestige is on the wane”.
Behind imperialist expansion lay venomous racism. “What signify these dark
races to us?”, asked Robert Knox, Britain’s leading racial scientist, in his
1850 book The Races of Men. “Destined by the nature of their race to run,
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like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence, it matters little
how their extinction is brought about.” Half a century later, the future
American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his four-volume tome The
Winning of the West that all must appreciate the “race importance” of the
struggle between whites and the “scattered savage tribes, whose life was
but a degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of wild
beasts”. The elimination of the inferior races would, he insisted, be “for the
benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind”, adding that it was
“idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality that apply
between stable and cultured communities”. Here was the grim, genocidal
reality of Salisbury’s distinction between “living” and “dead” nations and the
true meaning of the “encroachment” of the one upon the other.
If racial ideology justified imperialist expansion and, indeed, genocide, the
very fact of empire seemed to confirm the reality of race. “What is Empire
but the preponderance of race”, as the Liberal imperialist and prime minister
Lord Roseberry asked. Even the anti-imperialist Gilbert Murray accepted that
“There is in this world a hierarchy of races”, those that will “direct and rule
the world” and the “lower breeds of men” who will have to perform “the
lower work of the world”. “The brown, black and yellow races of the world”,
the Times insisted in 1910, “had to accept that “inequality is inevitable”
because of “the facts of race”.
Many politicians and intellectuals feared that the very existence of the
“dead” nations created the conditions for conflict between the “living”.
“Experience has already shown”, the distinguished Victorian historian WEH
Lecky worried in his 1899 book Democracy and Liberty, “how easily these
vague and ill-defined boundaries may become a new cause of European
quarrels, and how often, in remote African jungles or forests, negroes armed
with European guns may inflict defeats on European soldiers which will
become the cause of costly and difficult wars.” Unless the world was carved
up and parcelled out by the “white” nations, then the very weakness of the
rest of the world would create a power vacuum that could, many feared,
lead to conflicts between Great Powers.
Here were expressed the complex fears that emerged in the collision
between racism and Great Power rivalry. (The US army recruitment poster
above expresses even more clearly the entanglement of racism and
imperialist fears.) In reality, while racial ideology provided the grounding for
imperialist expansion, the real driver was economic and political necessity.
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For a burgeoning power, overseas colonies helped provide raw materials,
cheap labour and new markets. They also helped impose political and
military control. Britain, for instance, worried that French and German
expansion in East Africa would undermine its sea routes to southern Africa
and to India. “Its annexation by France or Germany and a seizure of a port
would be ruinous” to Britain, wrote the Foreign secretary Lord Granville in
1884. “The proceedings of the French in Madagascar”, he added, “make it
all the more necessary to guard […] our sea route to India.” What
particularly worried British policy makers was the fear that the Suez Canal –
so central to maintaining Britain’s trade routes and naval prowess across the
globe – may be closed down in the event of war. It is “of supreme
importance”, observed the colonial administrator Lord Lugard, who was to
be Governor General of Nigeria during World War I, “that we should retain
complete command of the only alternative and only feasible route in case of
war.” Similar fears were expressed about German activity in southern Africa.
“It seems that wherever there is a dark corner in South African politics”,
Gladstone sardonically observed in 1884, “there is a German spectre to be
the tenant of it”.
As the dominant global power, and as the nation with the largest empire,
Britain was anxious to defend the status quo. Germany, as the rising power,
and with only tattered shreds of an empire, was desperate to challenge the
existing state of affairs. At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, Britain’s
navy was as large as all the other navies put together. That exceptional
power allowed Britain to control the world’s oceans and sea-lanes to
establish “Pax Britannica”. By the end of the century, that supremacy was
under threat as America and Germany, in particular, built up their naval
prowess. In the half-century leading up to World War I, British naval
spending doubled. Germany’s quadrupled, as it sought to play catch-up.
In attempting to displace British power and influence, and to create its own
empire, Germany often adopted the more aggressive posture. In reality,
however, Britain was no less militaristic or aggressive. Indeed, there was
widespread concern within the political elite around the turn of the century
that Britain was insufficiently militaristic to meet the new challenges. War,
declared General Worsley, commander in chief of the army, in 1897, was a
necessary remedy for social decadence; it was “the greatest purifier to the
race or nation that has reached the verge of over-refinement”, an
“invigorating antidote against that luxury and effeminacy which destroys
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nations as well as individuals.”
Britain had achieved its position of prominence only through deploying the
kind of aggressive militarism, the prevention of which many today insist
makes World War I a just conflict. Consider for instance the Opium Wars. In
June 1840 a British expeditionary force sailed into China’s Pearl River and
unleashed a barrage of cannon fire on coastal defences that barely existed.
The battle lasted six hours. So began the First Opium War, a series of
unequal military encounters lasting until 1842. A second Opium War
culminated in 1860 with the looting and burning of the imperial pleasure
grounds, the Yuan Ming Yuan, in the northwest suburbs of Beijing by British
and French troops.
The Opium Wars were the nadir of British nineteenth-century gunboat
diplomacy. Britain had built up a huge trade deficit with China, largely
because of its insatiable thirst for tea. The East India Company began to fill
that deficit by supplying opium grown in British Bengal. Opium had been
consumed in China since the eighth century. But it was banned. In 1839 the
Emperor cracked down on the trade, seizing the opium stock of British
traders, and ordering them to bring no more into China. Four months later,
the gunboats arrived. Britain launched a war in effect to enforce its right to
be China’s pusher of choice.
The treaties that ended the wars were as scandalous than the war itself.
China lost the right set protective tariffs or to collect custom duties on trade
goods. Five “treaty ports” were established, in each of which parts of the
city were set aside for foreigners to live and trade. Britain insisted on the
right of extraterritoriality for all Western nations: each could run its own
police force and court system, enforce its own laws and deal with any crimes
committed on Chinese soil by its nationals under its laws, rather than those
of China. Foreigners won the right to travel anywhere they wished to in
China and to set up Christian missions without restrictions. Western navies
won the right to sail at will on any Chinese waterway. Foreigners could
import and sell opium. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain. And Britain
extracted from the Emperor a large indemnity for all trouble that he had
caused by standing up for his rights in the first place.
Today the Opium Wars are barely remembered in Britain. And when they
are, they are seen only as an embarrassment, an exception to the true
nature of Pax Britannica. In fact it was the kind of gunboat diplomacy that
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underpinned British imperialism throughout the nineteenth century.
Without understanding the background of nineteenth-century imperialism, it
is difficult to make sense either of German militarism or World War I itself.
Equally, understanding this background shows why there is little sense in
treating the war in black and white terms of “good” and “bad” participants,
or as a war against militarism or aggression. As historian Christopher Clark
put it at the end of Sleepwalkers, his outstanding study of How Europe Went
to War, “The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the
end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the
conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or,
rather, there is one in the hands of every major character.”
None of the European powers wanted war. All had, over the previous half
century, struggled immensely hard to prevent conflict, particularly in
Europe. This was one of the reasons that war, when it did arrive, came as
such a shock.
Equally, however, all recognized, with Salisbury, that the “seeds of conflict
among civilized nations” had already been sown. The growing discord over
the partitioning of the world led to the forging of new alliances between the
Great Powers. At the time that Salisbury gave his speech, there was in place
a multipolar system in which the Great Powers’ interests and rivalries were
in precarious balance but which allowed for a large degree of give and take.
By the eve of war, this had transformed into a bipolar system as Europe
cleaved into two blocs. Britain established alliances with its traditional foes,
France and Russia. Germany created the Triple Alliance with Austria and
Italy. The new system was both more rigid and more unstable than the
previous framework of informal checks and balances.
At the same time, the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the
resulting scramble to assert influence in the Balkans over which the
Ottomans had lost control, brought imperialist frictions into the heart of
Europe. Russia and Austria both looked upon the Balkans as its own sphere
of influence. In the background stood Britain and Germany, neither of whom
wanted the other to profit from any Balkan fallout. The kind of tensions that
had previous rent southern Africa or the Middle East now expressed
themselves within Europe itself.
Traditionally historians have divided between those who regarded World War
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I as the inevitable outcome of long-term structural factors, such as
imperialist rivalries, the growth of nationalism and the ossified system of
alliances, and those who viewed it as the result of immediate or contingent
causes, and of individual mendacity or foolishness. More recently, there has
been a recognition that both long-term and contingent factors played a role
in fomenting war.
But however we understand the causes of the war, the fact remains that
aggressive militarism was not confined to one side. Certainly, Germany had
expansionist aims and a toxically racist culture. Britain, however, was not
much different. We can only rewrite the conflict as a just war against
German militarism by airbrushing out the reality of nineteenth and earlytwentieth century imperialism.
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