DemocracyThe God That Failed (11 page)

In fact, writes Guglielmo Ferrero of the eighteenth century,

war became limited and circumscribed by a system of precise rules. It was definitely regarded as a kind of single combat between the two armies, the civil population being merely spectators. Pillage, requisitions, and acts of violence against the population were forbidden in the home country as well as in the enemy country. Each army established depots in its rear in carefully chosen towns, shifting them as it moved about; . . . Conscription existed only in a rudimentary and sporadic form,... Soldiers being scarce and hard to find, everything was done to ensure their quality by a long, patient and meticulous training, but as this was costly, it rendered them very valuable, and it was necessary to let as few be killed as possible. Having to economize their men, generals tried to avoid fighting battles. The object of warfare was the execution of skillful maneuvers and not the annihilation of the adversary; a campaign without battles and without loss of life, a victory obtained by a clever combination of movements, was considered the crowning achievement of this art, the ideal pattern of perfection.
³⁵
... It was avarice and calculation that made war more humane.... [W]ar became a kind of game between sovereigns. A war was a game with its rules and its stakes—a territory, an inheritance, a throne, a treaty. The loser
paid, but a just proportion was always kept between the value of the stake and the risks to be taken, and the parties were always on guard against the kind of obstinacy which makes a player lose his head. They tried to keep the game in hand and to know when to stop.
³⁶

³⁴
Howard,
War
in
European
History,
p. 73. For a similar assessment see Fuller,
The
Conduct
of
War:

So completely was civil life divorced from war that, in his
A
Sentimental
Journey
through
France
and
Italy,
Laurence Sterne relates that during the Seven Years' War [1756-1763] he left London for Paris with so much precipitation that "it never entered my mind that we were at war with France," and that on his arrival in Dover it suddenly occurred to him he was without a passport. However, this did not impede his journey, and when he arrived at Versailles, the Duke of Choiseul, French Foreign Minister, had one sent to him. In Pans he was cheered by his French admirers, and in Frontignac was invited to theatricals by the English colony, (pp. 22-23)

³⁵
See on this also Fuller,
The
Conduct
of
War,
chap. 1. Fuller here (p. 23) quotes Daniel Defoe to the effect that often "armies of fifty thousand men of a side stand at bay within view of one another, and spend a whole campaign in dodging, or, as it is genteely called, observing one another, and then march off into winter quarters"; and similarly, Sir John Fontescue is quoted with the observation that

To force an enemy to consume his own supply was much, to compel him to supply his opponents was more, to take up winter-quarters in his territory was very much more. Thus to enter an enemy's borders and keep him marching backwards and forwards for weeks without giving him a chance of striking a blow, was in itself no small success, (p. 25)

In contrast, democratic wars tend to be total wars. In blurring the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, a democratic republic strengthens the identification of the public with a particular state. Indeed, while dynastic rule promotes the identification with one's own family and community and the development of a "cosmopolitan" outlook and attitude,
³⁷
democratic republicanism inevitably leads to

³⁶
Guglielmo Ferrero,
Peace
and
War
(Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 5-7. See also Fuller,
The
Conduct
of
War,
pp. 20-25; idem,
War
and
Western
Civilization,
pp. 26-29; Howard,
War
in
European
History,
chap. 4; Palmer and Colton,
A
History
of
the
Western
World,
pp. 274-75. In the eighteenth century, they note,

never had war been so harmless,... This was one reason why governments went to war so lightly. On the other hand governments also withdrew from war much more easily than in later times. Their treasuries might be exhausted, their trained soldiers used up; only practical and rational questions were at stake; there was no war hysteria or pressure of mass opinion; the enemy of today might be the ally of tomorrow. Peace was almost as easy to make as war. Peace treaties were negotiated, not imposed. So the eighteenth century saw a series of wars and treaties, more wars, treaties, and rearrangements of alliances, all arising over much the same issues, and with exactly the same powers present at the end as at the beginning. (Ibid.)

³⁷
As the result of marriages, bequests, inheritances, etc., royal territories were often discontiguous, and kings frequently came to rule linguistically and culturally distinct populations. Accordingly, they found it in their interest to speak several languages: universal ones such as Latin, and then French, as well as local ones such as English, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Czech, etc. (See Malcolm Vale, "Civilization of Courts and Cities in the North, 1200-1500," in
Oxford
History
of
Medieval
Europe,
George Holmes, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], pp. 322-23.) Likewise the small social and intellectual elites were usually proficient in several languages and thereby demonstrated their simultaneously local and supra-local, or cosmopolitan-intellectual orientation. This cosmopolitan outlook came to bear in the fact that throughout the monarchical age until 1914, Europe was characterized by a nearly complete freedom of migration. "A man could travel across the length and breadth of the Continent without a passport until he reached the frontiers of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He could settle in a foreign country for work or leisure without formalities except, occasionally, some health requirements. Every currency was as good as gold" (A.J.P. Taylor,
From
Sarajevo
to
Potsdam
[New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966], p. 7). In contrast, today in the age of democratic republicanism, it has become unthinkable that one might be ruled by a "foreigner," or that states could be anything but contiguously extended territories. States are defined by their citizens, and citizens in turn are defined by their state passports. International migration is strictly regulated and controlled. Political rulers and the intellectual elite, far more numerous now, are increasingly ignorant of foreign
languages. It is no coincidence that of all the members of the European Parliament, only Otto von Habsburg, the current family head of the former Habsburg rulers, speaks all of the parliament's official business languages.

nationalism, i.e., the emotional identification of the public with large, anonymous groups of people, characterized in terms of a common language, history, religion and /or culture and in contradistinction to other, foreign nations. Interstate wars are thus transformed into national wars. Rather than representing "merely" violent dynastic property disputes, which may be "resolved" through acts of territorial occupation, they become battles between different ways of life, which can only be "resolved" through cultural, linguistic, or religious domination and subjugation (or extermination). It becomes more and more difficult for members of the public to remain neutral or to extricate themselves from all personal involvement. Resistance against higher taxes to fund a war is increasingly considered treachery or treason. Conscription becomes the rule, rather than the exception. And with mass armies of cheap and hence easily disposable conscripts fighting for national supremacy (or against national suppression) backed by the economic resources of the entire nation, all distinctions between combatants and noncombatants fall by the wayside, and wars become increasingly brutal. "Once the state ceased to be regarded as 'property' of dynastic princes," notes Michael Howard,

and became instead the instrument of powerful forces dedicated to such abstract concepts as Liberty, or Nationality, or Revolution, which enabled large numbers of the population to see in that state the embodiment of some absolute Good for which no price was too high, no sacrifice too great to pay; then the "temperate and indecisive contests" of the rococo age appeared as absurd anachronisms.
³⁸

For a prominent, highly apologetic historical treatment of the transition from cosmopolitanism to nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany, see Friedrich Meinecke,
Cosmopolitanism
and
the
National
State
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).

³⁸
Howard,
War
in
European
Civilization,
pp. 75-76. See also Marshal Ferdinand Foch,
The
Principles
of
War
(Chapham and Hall, 1918):

A new era had begun, the era of national wars, of wars which were to assume a maddening pace; for those wars were destined to throw into the fight all the resources of the nation; they were to set themselves the goal, not of a dynastic interest, not the conquest or possession of a province, but the defense or propagation of philosophical ideas in the first place, next of principles of independence, of unity, of nonmaterial advantages of various kinds. Lastly, they staked upon the issue the interests and fortune of every individual private. Hence the rise of passions, that is elements of force, hitherto in the main unused, (p. 30)

In distinct contrast to the limited warfare of the
ancien
regime,
then, the new era of democratic-republican warfare, which began with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which is further exhibited during the nineteenth century by the American War of Southern Independence, and which reaches its apex during the twentieth century with World War I and World War II and continues to the present, is the era of total war. As William A. Orton has summarized it:

Nineteenth-century wars were kept within bounds by the tradition, well recognized in international law, that civilian property and business were ou
tside the sphere of combat. Civilian assets were not exposed to arbitrary distraint or permanent seizure, and apart from such territorial and financial stipulations as one state might impos
e on another, the economic and cultural life of the belligerents was generally allowed to continue pretty much as it had been. Twentieth-century practice has changed al
l that. During both World Wars limitless lists of contraband coupled with unilateral declarations of maritime law put every sort of commerce in jeopardy, and made waste
paper of all
precedents. The close of the first war was marked by a determined and successful effort to impair the economic recovery of the principal losers, and to retain certain civilian properties. The second war has seen the extension of that policy to a point at which international law in war has ceased to exist. For years the Government of Germany, so far as its arm could reach, had based a policy of confiscation on a racial theory that had no standing in civil law, international law, nor Christian ethics; and when the war began, that violation of the comity of nations proved contagious. Anglo-American leadership, in both speech and action, launched a crusade that admitted of neither legal nor territorial limits to the exercise of coercion. The concept of neutrality was denounced in both theory and practice. Not only enemy assets and interests, but the assets and interests of any parties whatsoever, even in neutral countries, were exposed to every constraint the belligerent powers could make effective; and the assets and interests of neutral states and their civilians, lodged in belligerent territories or under belligerent control, were subjected to practically the same sort of coercion as those of enemy nationals. Thus "total war" became a sort of war that no civilian community could hope to escape; and "peace loving nations" will draw the obvious inference.
³⁹

Similarly concludes Fuller
(War
and
Western
Civilization,
pp. 26-27): The influence of the spirit of nationality, that is of democracy, on war was profound,... [it] emotionalized war and, consequently, brutalized it;... In the eighteenth century wars were largely the occupation of kings, courtiers and gentlemen. Armies lived on their depots, they interfered as little as possible with the people, and as soldiers were paid out of the king's privy purse they were too costly to be thrown away lightly on massed attacks. The change came about with the French Revolution, sansculottism replaced courtiership, and as armies became more and more the instruments of the people, not only did they grow in size but in ferocity. National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob—always demented, the second a king—generally sane All this developed out of the

French Revolution, which also gave to the world conscription—herd warfare, and the herd coupling with finance and commerce has begotten new realms of war. For when once the whole nation fights, then is the whole national credit available for the purposes of war.

And on the effects of conscription in particular, Fuller notes
(Conduct
of
War,
pp. 33 and 35):

Conscription changed the basis of warfare. Hitherto soldiers had been costly, now they were cheap; battles had been avoided, now they were sought, and however heavy were the losses, they could rapidly be made good by the muster-roll.... From August [of 1793, when the parliament of the French republic decreed universal compulsory military service] onward, not only was war to become more and more unlimited, but finally total. In the fourth decade of the twentieth century life was held so cheaply that the massacre of civilian populations on wholesale lines became as accepted a strategic aim as battles were in previous wars. In 150 years conscription had led the world back to tribal barbarism.