August, 1914

People sometimes give centuries thematic rather than literal beginning and ending points in order to emphasize a dominant or unifying aspect of an era. Thus they may date the 19th Century from 1815 to 1914 to fit the period of Pax Britannica and the Victorian world. In a similar way people speak of a 20th Century running from 1914 to 1991 and covering the time when great wars and terrible tyrannies tore at the life of European civilization. That 20th Century was a grim and tragic time for Europe. Besides wars on scales unprecedented in human history, it brought a return to savagery and barbarism unknown since the Middle Ages. Of all the disasters that befell Europe in those years, the most poignant is the tragedy of August, 1914 - because it was the first and in many ways the cause of most of the others, because it was so unnecessary, and because of the world it destroyed. It is commonplace and obvious that the Great War was a needless, avoidable disaster and that we are still trying to cope with its consequences. With time and subsequent events, the magnitude of that disaster has become clearer. The Great War began chains of events that led to all the major horrors of the Twentieth Century and finally seem to have wrung the very life out of a civilization. Now in August is a good time to look back with sadness and ruth to the lost, liberal world of July 1914.
The decades before 1914 had seen a series of triumphs of science, liberalism, and technology. The industrial age had begun, as had the age of modern medicine. Sanitation, freer trade, electric lighting, anesthesia, the telegraph, telephone and post office, vaccination, railroads, iron steamships, mass production of consumer goods, and other innovations had made the people of Europe healthier and more prosperous than at any time in history. Slavery and serfdom had been abolished in all of the civilized world, as had torture. The powers and privileges of monarchs, clerics, and aristocrats had declined as recognition of the rights of common people had increased. The ideas of progress and universal human rights were on the march, stronger in some places than others, but on the march. There was also, according to many who lived through and wrote about the period before 1914, a general sense of optimism, hope, and security (again more so in some places than others) that would be almost unimaginable to a European of the 20th Century.
The world’s dominant power in 1914 was the British Empire. It contained India (including what are now Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma), much of Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, parts of the Middle East, and most of the world’s islands. The Royal Navy controlled the seas, and London was the financial capital of the world. The Victorian British Empire was by and large a force for peace, free trade, liberalism, and progress in the world. It is politically incorrect but nonetheless true that almost every British colony had better, freer, more humane, and more liberal government under the Empire than it has had since. What was true of the colonies of the British Empire was also true to a somewhat lesser degree for French colonies. French colonial administration was generally more benign than the things that replaced it during the 20th Century, as were the administrations of the Italians, Dutch, and most of the smaller colonial powers. At home most of the people of Europe in 1914 had governments less harmful than those they would endure in the 20th Century. While Imperial Germany was far from a liberal state, it was far superior to what came after it. The Hapsburg Empire also was much better than what would follow it in central Europe and the Balkans. Even the backward Czarist Russia of the early 1900’s was far less vile than the Communist tyranny that came after it and, we now know, also a better environment for economic and human progress. In Asia, the situation in China was bad, but less so than it would be under either Mao or the Japanese occupation. Ottoman rule in the Middle East was cruel and corrupt but at least usually capable of maintaining a general stability. The Old World as a whole was a better governed and safer place during the Pax Britannica than it would be afterward.
In the summer of 1914 European artistic and intellectual life was still in its flowering glory. The great burst of creativity in almost every area of art and knowledge that had begun with the Renaissance seemed to continue almost unabated. Einstein, Kipling, Curie, Conrad, Rachmaninoff, Freud, Russell, Hilbert, Ehrlich, Debussy, Planck, Cantor, Rilke, Renoir, Ravel, Ortega y Gasset, von Mises, Yeats, and Rutherford were alive and (mainly) active in their various fields.
Yet for all of its greatness and accomplishment, in August 1914 that European Civilization began a multi-decade descent into self destruction. Why Europe made its decisive turn toward war, tyranny, and decay is probably the 20th Century’s greatest historical question. Whether and to what degree some of the damage can be repaired is among the 21st Century’s most important open ones. It would be nice to find reasons to be optimistic.