The Wall Street Journal-20080117-A Battlefield Goes Quiet
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A Battlefield Goes Quiet
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?
By James J. Sheehan
(Houghton Mifflin, 284 pages, $26)
It is strange to think that Europe, after so many centuries of war, is now cast in the role of sweet Venus across from America's bellicose Mars. The gradual demilitarization of European society since 1945 has amounted to an almost invisible revolution. Why did it happen and what does it mean for the rest of the West? In "Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?" James Sheehan, a distinguished historian of modern Germany, reaches beyond cliche to explore the rise and fall of militarism in Europe.
War has obviously had a long history in Europe, but militarism originated only in the 1790s as an outgrowth of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's regime. With Napoleon's defeat in 1815, armies naturally demobilized and, for a time, war became again a tool for statesmen, conducted within traditional limits. But attitudes toward war had changed in Europe by the 1870s, along with the size of armies and their connection with the wider society. Canned food and improved transportation, especially railroads, made it possible to supply larger armies and keep them in the field longer. Whereas armies had once ended the campaign season to shelter in winter quarters, they could now stay in the field and keep fighting.
Just as important, military service instilled habits newly transferable to the civilian workplace. Factory work demanded punctuality and a regimented discipline that differed from the exigencies of rural life. Industrial society needed a workforce trained in taking orders, following rules and operating as a team. A British exponent of military service, Col. F.N. Maude, described army discipline as a "school room for the factory." By inculcating a sense of duty, it set "the very cornerstone of modern industrial efficiency."
In a less strictly utilitarian sense, Europeans saw military service as a school for citizenship, forging distinct loyalties among contesting national traditions. In the 19th century, conscription was even viewed as a form of emancipation: It gave soldier-citizens and their families a claim on the state. Armies themselves changed character as well: Officers recognized that citizens serving for a brief time could not be treated as brutally as career soldiers drawn from the margins of society. Conscription blurred the lines between the military and civilian worlds.
Cultural trends fed the new militarism. Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96), a German nationalist, notoriously insisted that "every state was created by war" and, more strongly still, that "without war there would be no state." Such views were common outside Germany as well: Romantic nationalism gave bellicosity a moral purpose (the destiny of a people), and social Darwinism gave it a sharper edge (the fitness needed to compete among nations). Even pacifists came to see in conflict a means of regeneration. William James called war "the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesion." In the decades before World War I, war became more than a political tool to be wielded with caution. It became a force that conferred meaning.
Mr. Sheehan notes the heightened perceptions of threat during those decades. International politics became a ruthlessly competitive game in which defeat could bring downfall. Conflicts easily escalated into crises. (Confrontations between Germany and France over Morocco, for example, sparked wider crises in 1905-6 and 1911. Austria's annexation of Bosnia in 1908 brought about a crisis with Russia.) Leaders struggling with mass democracy employed war threats to overcome internal divisions. German leaders cited the threat of encirclement by France and Russia to counter the Social Democrats' disruptive appeals to the working class. Nationalism, in short, trumped socialism, and war was nationalism's most powerful expression.
World War I was the culmination of such trends -- and, in its devastation, a kind of end point. Once the hopes of quick victory collapsed, a war of full mobilization ground societies (and armies) down. Governments demanded ever more sacrifice of their citizens and committed themselves to victory with ever more vehemence. Militarism, in short, consumed everything, occupying a space that civil society had hitherto kept closed.
World War II devoured even more blood and treasure, and no conflict since the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) inflicted misery on civilians to the same degree. But something had changed. Patriotic enthusiasm had greeted the news of war in 1914; resignation was closer to the spirit of the age when the struggle was renewed in 1939. Defeating Germany and its allies became a job rather than a crusade; total war brought a backlash against militarism that played out in Europe over the postwar decades.
Postwar geopolitics played a key role, of course. The stalemate of the Cold War ended a militant struggle for the mastery of Europe, and welfare replaced warfare as the primary function of European governments. The Western powers solved the problem of Germany by institutionally limiting its scope for action. A similar pattern of careful integration followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe. War for Europeans once again became something to be thought of as a limited activity, not a defining one.
The contrast between Mars and Venus after 9/11 -- in which popular European sentiment resisted America's policy toward Iraq -- may be too simple. The militarism that Mr. Sheehan describes -- no less than the civilian state that succeeded it -- was a response to the ambitions and concerns of a particular time. The challenge is very different now. Instead of withdrawing into a pacifist idyll, as its critics claim, Europe is in the process of refitting its armed forces for tasks that mass armies cannot perform. Just how it will respond at the next time of crisis is uncertain. But it is clear that the greatest threat to peace arises no longer from the nations within Europe but from the barbarians without.
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Mr. Hay is a historian at Mississippi State University and the author of "The Whig Revival: 1808-1830."
