Oct 3, 2006
Dennis Showalter: Review of Niall Ferguson's The War of the World
[Mr. Showalter has taught history at Colorado College since 1969.]
Niall Ferguson is unrivaled in the English-speaking academic world for his willingness to address complex subjects with insight, scholarship, and flair. He surpasses himself in this fundamental reinterpretation of the twentieth century. For awhile it seemed to inaugurate the triumph of the democratic/capitalist West—perhaps even “the end of history.” For Ferguson the events in the Balkans and the Middle East which made a mockery of that optimism were no historical accident. A hundred years ago the West ruled the world, and its overlordship was accepted as a given. Now conflicts that were remote and seemed vestigial have taken center stage. Now the frontier between West and East “seems to run through every European city.” Ferguson describes these developments as a consequence of the twentieth century’s defining characteristic: violence.
Violence spared no one and left no one untouched. Two-thirds of the victims of World War II were civilians. The percentage increased as putative noncombatants became primary targets. Ferguson offers three taproots. First, the ethnic conflict. Ferguson argues provocatively that discrediting “race” as a biologically meaningful concept has had little to do with the survival and flourishing of the idea of race. In fact, racial identity replaced the hereditary principle as signifier and justifier of power, privilege, and property. Ferguson describes German anti-Semitism as an extreme case of a general phenomenon producing a spectrum of behaviors from casual discrimination to attempted annihilation. Strongest in areas like Eastern Europe, anywhere that nation-states challenged ethnic heterogeneity, multi-ethnicity developed into a global matrix for violence.
Ferguson’s expertise as an economic historian informs his second source of violence: economic volatility. Not change as such, but the frequency and extent of change in economic patterns and cycles, fostered violence by exacerbating social conflict. Ferguson asserts that people feeling trapped in stagnating sectors like crafts or small scale agriculture, are likely to resent the burgeoning prosperity of those profiting from short-term innovation. The issue of luck versus merit, argued on both sides, is frequently a precursor of violence.
Finally, according to Ferguson, twentieth century violence depends on an imperial context. In 1900 the world was dominated by large, multi-ethnic empires, including Britain and arguably the US as well. Such empires facilitated economics of scale—in particular they could raise and support relatively large armies. Points of contact between them, like the “fatal triangle” of the Baltic, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, were natural foci of the kind of conflict which began the First World War. The Nazi and Soviet successors of those empires correspondingly disregarded historic and pragmatic restraints, and exponentially increased external and internal violence in search of enhanced power. Frustrating their ambitions exhausted the West materially and morally. In turn Asian societies, Japan then China, modernized and occidentalized—not as replicas of Western nation-states and liberal democracies, but on imperial lines. The whole process amounted to a global, multi-polar Hundred Years War.
No summary can do justice to this richly-textured work, the best of its kind since Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Club members are best advised to view Ferguson’s “lethal century” through their own eyes and minds. 624 pages •?6 1/8" x 9¼"
Niall Ferguson is unrivaled in the English-speaking academic world for his willingness to address complex subjects with insight, scholarship, and flair. He surpasses himself in this fundamental reinterpretation of the twentieth century. For awhile it seemed to inaugurate the triumph of the democratic/capitalist West—perhaps even “the end of history.” For Ferguson the events in the Balkans and the Middle East which made a mockery of that optimism were no historical accident. A hundred years ago the West ruled the world, and its overlordship was accepted as a given. Now conflicts that were remote and seemed vestigial have taken center stage. Now the frontier between West and East “seems to run through every European city.” Ferguson describes these developments as a consequence of the twentieth century’s defining characteristic: violence.
Violence spared no one and left no one untouched. Two-thirds of the victims of World War II were civilians. The percentage increased as putative noncombatants became primary targets. Ferguson offers three taproots. First, the ethnic conflict. Ferguson argues provocatively that discrediting “race” as a biologically meaningful concept has had little to do with the survival and flourishing of the idea of race. In fact, racial identity replaced the hereditary principle as signifier and justifier of power, privilege, and property. Ferguson describes German anti-Semitism as an extreme case of a general phenomenon producing a spectrum of behaviors from casual discrimination to attempted annihilation. Strongest in areas like Eastern Europe, anywhere that nation-states challenged ethnic heterogeneity, multi-ethnicity developed into a global matrix for violence.
Ferguson’s expertise as an economic historian informs his second source of violence: economic volatility. Not change as such, but the frequency and extent of change in economic patterns and cycles, fostered violence by exacerbating social conflict. Ferguson asserts that people feeling trapped in stagnating sectors like crafts or small scale agriculture, are likely to resent the burgeoning prosperity of those profiting from short-term innovation. The issue of luck versus merit, argued on both sides, is frequently a precursor of violence.
Finally, according to Ferguson, twentieth century violence depends on an imperial context. In 1900 the world was dominated by large, multi-ethnic empires, including Britain and arguably the US as well. Such empires facilitated economics of scale—in particular they could raise and support relatively large armies. Points of contact between them, like the “fatal triangle” of the Baltic, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, were natural foci of the kind of conflict which began the First World War. The Nazi and Soviet successors of those empires correspondingly disregarded historic and pragmatic restraints, and exponentially increased external and internal violence in search of enhanced power. Frustrating their ambitions exhausted the West materially and morally. In turn Asian societies, Japan then China, modernized and occidentalized—not as replicas of Western nation-states and liberal democracies, but on imperial lines. The whole process amounted to a global, multi-polar Hundred Years War.
No summary can do justice to this richly-textured work, the best of its kind since Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Club members are best advised to view Ferguson’s “lethal century” through their own eyes and minds. 624 pages •?6 1/8" x 9¼"