Banyan: The centenary delusion

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

ANNIVERSARIES may be no more than chronological accidents, but they can be hard to ignore. That 2014 marked 100 years since the start of the first world war provoked sombre commemorations in the countries that lost millions of lives in the conflict. It also caused some to compare its causes to worrisome strategic tensions today, especially in Asia. The parallels between Europe in the early years of the 20th century and Asia a hundred years on were too many to ignore; haunting enough, indeed, to prompt worries about the possibility of another global confrontation. The turn of the year will not end this vogue for historical analogy, though attention may turn as much to the differences as to the similarities. As Joseph Nye, a political scientist at Harvard University has pointed out, “war is never inevitable, though the belief that it is can become one of its causes.”

Of statesmen who have made the comparison in their public pronouncements, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, probably carried the most weight. Talking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2014, Mr Abe said that China and Japan were in “a similar situation” to that of Germany and Britain a century ago. Since his country was (and is) engaged in a tense stand-off with China over the Senkaku or Diaoyu islands, this was an alarming remark. It suggested that a minor territorial squabble in 2014, like an act of terrorism in the Balkans in 1914, might spark a global conflict. America, after all, has repeatedly affirmed that its security guarantee to Japan extends to these uninhabited islets.

In fact, the point Mr Abe seemed to be making was not so much about growing military rivalry in the region. Rather he was proposing a commonly made salutary argument: that those who think war is impossible between China and Japan because they are so intertwined economically overlook the way a previous wave of fast-growing trade and globalisation ended. Before the first world war, Britain and Germany were each other’s biggest single trading partners.

Mr Abe, however, must also have had in mind the comparison often drawn between the emergence of China as a global power in this century and the rise of Germany (and indeed Japan) a century ago. Just as Germany bridled at Britain’s global pre-eminence, so China no longer seems content to follow the rules of a world order set and enforced, in its view, by America. Like Germany, it knows it must bide its time as it is militarily no match for the superpower. Deng Xiaoping’s doctrine of strategic patience echoed that of Wilhelmine Germany. In her enthralling account of the causes of the first world war (“The War that Ended Peace”) Margaret MacMillan quotes a German chancellor: “in view of our naval inferiority, we must operate so carefully, like the caterpillar before it has grown into a butterfly.”

Germany then, like China now, saw itself as in danger of strategic encirclement by countries resentful of its economic and military prowess. What it portrayed as a defensive naval build-up appeared aggressive to other countries, and it was suspicious of its international rivals. Similarly, Americans think of their strategic “pivot” to Asia as stability-enhancing reassurance to their allies in the face of growing Chinese power—nothing more than a shoring-up of America’s existing position in the region. But it smacks to China of hostile “containment”. The climate of strategic uncertainty is manifest across Asia in increased defence outlays. Military spending is rising fast and now exceeds Europe’s. But the region suffers the sort of complacency many in Europe felt in 1914: large-scale war is simply unthinkable.

The early 1900s, like now, were a period of fast-expanding communications and mass media. Public opinion began to play an important part in forming foreign policy in many European countries. Politicians would try to manipulate it to score diplomatic points; and then find themselves hostage to it. In the smartphone era, those pressures have increased enormously.

Today has no equivalent of the rival system of alliances that led so swiftly to escalation in July 1914, as countries marched towards the edge of the cliff like “The Sleepwalkers” (the title of another fine book about the period, by Christopher Clark). But America now, in backing Japan and the Philippines over their disputes with China, is facing a dilemma that confronted big powers then: stand by smaller allies and risk encouraging reckless behaviour, as Russia felt it had to in Serbia; or abandon them and lose credibility and prestige? Nor, these days, are armies afforded as much power as they once had over essentially political decisions. But it is still true that military strategies have their own momentum and that in war, as in business, there can be a first-mover advantage; it may be better to take the offensive.

Never say never again

For all these similarities, two striking differences distinguish the present day from the pre-war era. The first is the knowledge of just how destructive and catastrophic war can be. That is a consequence in part of the nightmares the world endured in two world wars. In 1914 few imagined how long war would last, how much property it would destroy and how many millions would die. It is also a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction. The cold war may be over but the world knows it has the capacity to annihilate itself many times over.

Second, in 1914, although peace movements were active, many thought a big war, after several near-misses over crises in the Balkans and Morocco, was inevitable. Some even welcomed this. Ms MacMillan quotes Hilaire Belloc, a jolly British poet: “How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom.” In Asia today, however, nobody seriously argues the benefits of large-scale conflict. That is partly why so many are sanguine about the chances of China’s rise being a peaceful one. But, to adapt Mr Nye, peace is not inevitable, and if historical analogies serve any purpose, it is to remind us how fragile it can be.

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