Comments on The War that Will End War

At the dawn of the First World War, H. G. Wells wrote this fascinating little work. The work is in some ways meant to be a description of the way in which the Great War would bring about an end to human desire for war. However, as political theory from James Burnham will tell us, we must never mistake the formal meaning of a text for its real meaning. The real meaning of The War That Will End War is a plea from Wells to Woodrow Wilson.

Wells begins by summarising the reasons Britain has gone to war. Wells states that the cause and object of the war are not necessarily the same; he asserts the cause is the invasion of Luxemburg and Belgium, countries to which Britain had a treaty to defend. Perhaps this is far too simple an analysis of the causes of the Great War. Wells leaves out details of the Triple Entent and the Triple Alliance, the situations in the Balkans (including, of course, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), the Scramble for Africa and a general arms race. Nevertheless, written from a purely Anglo perspective, one could argue the invasion of the Low Countries was perhaps the only strictly relevant immediate factor for Britain entering the war.

Wells turns his attention to the object of the war, that is, its overall goal. He says Britain can not simply send Germany back over the border and tell them to not do it again. The concept of Pax Britannica becomes relevant to Wells’ argument – he declares that this grand, global empire must be involved in bringing about peace. In fact, he pulls no punches here with his desire to see the war through – "There can be no diplomatic settlement that will leave German Imperialism free to explain away its failure to its people and start new preparations. We have to go on until we are absolutely done for, or until the Germans as a people know that they are beaten, and are convinced that they have had enough of war".

Perhaps most distinctly, Wells wanted all nations, even those that did not fire a single shot during the war to involved in the peace process: especially the United States. Wells believed that under Woodrow Wilson the United States could become a global arbiter of peace, and called for the founding of an international peace league to manage these goals of his.

Wells wishes for several things that seem almost out of line. For one, he wishes for England to redraw the map of Europe following their victory of the Great War. Wells has no doubt that England would eventually win the war. In this centralised redesign of the continental map, Wells wanted many changes to the map of Europe. For a start, he wished for Lorraine to rejoin France, and for Luxembourg to be "linked in a closer union with Belgium". Alsace a choice between entering France or Switzerland. Denmark to regain its lost provinces. Trieste, Trent and Pola to Italy. These, however, are minor developments. Eastern Europe is where the maps will be radically redrawn.

First, Wells wishes for the breakup of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, which has hung over Europe for forty years. From this, the three fragments of Poland reunited to give the Poles a homeland. The Tsar of Russia would be crowned the King of Poland. He also proposed a larger Romania including the provinces from Transylvania, in a Swiss federation style. He also wishes to bring the Bulgarian speaking peoples under one flag and create some Swiss style federations in the Balkans.

One can not help but notice immediately that the plans of Wells for the map of Europe benefits larger and larger states, and creates more states that attempt to integrate several nationalities into one. The only nations it does not benefit are Germany and Austria-Hungary Empire (which he wants to see the total end of). Indeed, a common theme seen among the English liberals of Wells’ type is not liberty as one might understand being left alone but liberty through the mechanisms of ever larger states. Indeed, his desires for ever more powerful super-national powers such as a League of Nations hints for a desire for a one world nation. Such concepts will always fail to bring about a more peaceful and free world – as Rothbard commentates on states and power in Anatomy of the State that states (and this, of course, extends to state like institutions) have a tendency to expand in power and transcend the limits of their own power.

The opportunity of Liberalism has come at last, an overwhelming opportunity. The age of militarism has rushed to its inevitable and yet surprising climax. The great soldier empire, made for war, which has dominated Europe for forty years has pulled itself up by the roots and flung itself into the struggle for which it was made. Whether it win or lose, it will never put itself back again

In some ways, Wells reminds me of Plato. He has been surrounded by instability and war for so long he sees a “liberation” from all this in the face of super powerful states. Plato wished for what can only be called a police state, a very illiberal nation, but a nation of security. Why was Plato so concerned with security? He had witnessed the Peloponnesian wars and the brutality that Sparta committed on Athens. Bertrand Russel rips apart these political ideas of Plato in A History of Western Philosophy. Russel says

Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages, which admired the Republic without ever becoming aware of what was involved in its proposals. It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.

At any rate, the trust Wells places in organisations seems to me to not be the mark of a liberal per se, but either a totalitarian or someone so naive they should not be trusted.

Wells not only has suggestions for the future but critiques of the present, specifically of the capitalist system in Britain.

And next, as to social reconstruction. Do Liberals realise that the individualist capitalist system is helpless now? It may be picked up unresistingly. It is stunned. A new economic order may be improvised and probably will in some manner be improvised in the next two or three years

Wells does not approve of the capitalist system that is currently present in Britain. What this has to do with the Great War is unclear. He was not the only one, and following the Great War came the rise of Keynesian economics. The strange distaste that English Liberals had at the time for capitalism lead them to ally loosely enough with socialists, and eventually this unholy alliance lead to the Post-War Consensus following the Second World War. This Post-War Consensus must have been seen as worse in every way to what came before – not only did it choke the economy of Britain and reduce her power over the world but it also was a great blow for liberalism in general; the individual was ever more under the thumb of the British state. Corelli Barnette argues strongly that the post-war policies of Britain, especially the welfare state, lead to a general collapse of British power.

It is, I believe, an exaggerated dread arising out of our extreme ignorance of Russian realities. English people imagine Russia to be more purposeful than she is, more concentrated, more inimical to Western civilisation. They think of Russian policy as if it were a diabolically clever spider in a dark place. They imagine that the tremendous unification of State and national pride and ambition which has made the German Empire at last insupportable, may presently be repeated upon an altogether more gigantic scale, that Pan-Slavism will take the place of Pan-Germanism, as the ruling aggression of the world.

This is a dread due, I am convinced, to fundamental misconceptions and hasty parallelisms. Russia is not only the vastest country in the world, but the laxest; she is incapable of that tremendous unification. Not for two centuries yet, if ever, will it be necessary for a reasonably united Western Europe to trouble itself, once Prussianism has been disposed of, about the risk of definite aggression from the East. I do not think it will ever have to trouble itself.

Wells could have not been more wrong about Russia it seems. Although that is a little unfair – it would have seemed unlikely that Russia could have so radically transformed from an ancient, imperial and traditional nation to a "progressive" and communist nation in such a short space of time. Nevertheless, it seems that English Liberals did have something to fear from Russia but not Tsarist Russia but a Red Russia.

Let me set out the suggestion very plainly. All the plant for the making of war material throughout the world must be taken over by the Government of the State in which it exists; every gun factory, every rifle factory, every dockyard for the building of warships. It may be necessary to compensate the shareholders more or less completely; there may have to be a war indemnity to provide for that, but that is a question of detail. The thing is the conversion everywhere of arms-making into a State monopoly, so that nowhere shall there be a ha’porth of avoidable private gain in it. Then, and then only, will it become possible to arrange for the gradual dismantling of this industry which is destroying humanity, and the reduction of the armed forces of the world to reasonable dimensions. I would carry this suppression down even to the restriction of the manufacture and sale of every sort of gun, pistol, and explosive. They should be made only in Government workshops and sold only in Government shops; there should not be a single rifle, not a Browning pistol, unregistered, unrecorded, and untraceable in the world. But that may be a counsel of perfection. The essential thing is the world suppression of this abominable traffic in the big gear of war, in warships and great guns.

Wells also wished for a general end to armaments. He calls for the nationalisation of all munitions factories and the slow disbanding of these factories. Wells also wishes for all oceans and seas to become international waters, such that launching a battleship becomes an act of war against all nations. This is perhaps the greatest failure of Wells. The idea that nationalising all munitions production would bring about any semblance of peace is simply a farce. Perhaps Wells would be pleased by the actions of the Soviet Union some years later in their great nationalisation of Russia’s weapons industries, never-mind their invasions. Seemingly, the English Liberal of the time had no concern of what would happen if one was to place so much power into the hands of a single entity. Without any forms of check or balance from opposing powers, there is seemingly no end to the lengths to which it can go. Machiavelli had already completed a similar analysis some 400 years prior, when he concluded that liberty for the masses came only from conflict of several power centres.

We can only imaging that Woodrow Wilson was either directly influenced by the work, or these two spheres of influence overlapped. Woodrow Wilson did become very involved in the peace treaty of WWI, Wilson did found a League of Nations, Wilson did begin some map redrawing in Europe. I think it is also not controversial to say that the actions of Woodrow Wilson in particular directly created the conditions necessary for the rise of Hitler in Germany and the almost inevitability of WWII. None, it seems, are more guilty than Woodrow Wilson and the English Liberals for the events of the interwar period. Most of these actions were based on shoddy liberal assumptions; namely, that merely creating large international organisations and signing pieces of paper would fundamentally change the nature of power.

Later, in the 1941 edition of The War in the Air Wells writes "I told you so. You damned fools". What did Wells tell us, exactly? Woodrow Wilson founding the League of Nations and the map of Europe was redrawn more or less to his standards, he seemingly got everything he wished for. The only thing he did not get was the nationalisation of all arms manufactories across the world, but this is a moot point he can not hide behind, for the most aggressive nations of the inter-war period were the states that took the most power away from the private individual (that being, Germany, Italy and Russia. Russia, of course, outright nationalised them, while Germany and Italy became fascist, and as Benito Mussolini says, fascism is "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state"). With Russia in fact become a state for Liberals to fear, it seems Wells was wrong about almost everything. Certainly, it should be us who says to Wells "why didn't you think you damned fool".

References

H. G. Wells The War that Will End War, 1914

Murray N. Rothbard Anatomy of the State, 1974

Correlli Barnett The Pride and Fall Sequence (including The Collapse of British Power 1972, The Audit of War 1986, The Lost Victory 1995, The Verdict of Peace 2001)

Bertrand Russel A History of Western Philosophy, 1945

Plato The Republic

James Burnham The Machiavellians, 1943