|
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
Carnegie Council Podcast |
 |
Carnegie Council RSS |
|
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Home > Resources > Transcripts |
|
| |
|
|
| |
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
September 26, 2006
 |
|
| The War of the World |
Introduction
Remarks
Questions and Answers
Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs
programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to thank you all for
joining us this morning.
Historians have been writing about the great conflicts of the twentieth century
for some time now, but often with little imagination. Developments of the past
one hundred plus years are usually defined by the reigns of certain monarchs,
the administrations of specific politicians, and by the rule of a handful of
dictators. Additionally, this historical period can also be seen through the
lens of a number of major but time-limited wars: World Wars I and II, Korea,
and Vietnam.
But, as you will soon learn, this need not be so, for with the publication of
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West,
our speaker this morning provides an opportunity for us to view this historical
period in a fresh and fascinating new way. With incredible erudition and ingenuity,
Professor Ferguson forces us to see the full cycle of twentieth-century history
as, not two world wars and a Cold War, but rather as a single entity of a hundred
years of conflict that was interlaced with violent, frightening, and often genocidal
warfare. This led him to ask: How did this all come to pass?
Building upon his previously acclaimed volumes on empire, economics, and financial
history, Professor Ferguson argues that three things seem necessary to explain
the extreme violence of the twentieth century: ethnic conflict, economic volatility,
and the decline of empires. He argues that the confluence of these factors helps
us to understand why so much happened at certain times, especially between the
years 1904 and 1953, and why this savagery was so heavily concentrated in certain
places. Professor Ferguson uses these themes to reinterpret and resolve the
central paradox of why extraordinary progress in science and technology coincided
with unprecedented violence, and why the seeming triumph of the West in reality
planted the seeds for the decline of Western dominance over Asia, which he believes
is leading towards an inexorable shift in the global balance of power towards
the East.
Niall Ferguson is not your average historian. His books incorporate military,
political, and economic history, as well as biography. He is at once innovative,
provocative, prolific, and many would argue even brilliant, as he probes deeply
into the past and comes up with original, and sometimes even controversial,
conclusions, which in my opinion should only add to our interest and to his
overall appeal.
Our speaker has taught at some of the finest universities in the world. He was
trained at Oxford as an economist and supported himself as a journalist. He
lectured at Oxford for about a decade before moving to New York University,
where he was briefly professor of financial history. He is now at Harvard, where
he is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, as well as a Senior Research Fellow
of Jesus College Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.
His publications reflect his interest in politics, history, and economics, and
include the award-winning The
House of Rothschild, the widely acclaimed The
Pity of War, Empire,
and Colossus.
The latter two were discussed earlier at the Carnegie Council, and the transcripts
of these sessions can be found on our website.
I know that many of you in the room have had the opportunity to hear our speaker
on previous occasions, but for those of you who have never had that privilege,
you are in store for a very special morning.
Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to a man who has been cited by
Time magazine as one of the most influential people helping to shape
our view of the world today. By the end of the hour, he may have influenced
the way you view the past as well. Niall Ferguson.
Remarks
NIALL FERGUSON: One of the reasons I'm so prolific, ladies and gentlemen,
is that it gives me an excuse to have breakfast with Joanne. We've got to find
out some other way of meeting, though, because this is exhausting.
It's a huge pleasure to be here this morning. In a sense, Joanne has already
rather brilliantly sketched the argument of this book, leaving me with relatively
little to say. Let me try and explain a few things about it and set out what
I think its implications are for the present—and, indeed, the future. These,
I think, are the things probably most on your minds.
Why is it called The War of the World? Did I go and see Tommy Cruise
in a Steven Spielberg film? No. It was inspired by the original novel H.G. Wells
wrote in 1898, The
War of the Worlds, which, if you remember, describes the destruction
of London, rather than New York, in an alien invasion.
As I was reading Wells's extraordinary work of science fiction, it struck me
how prophetic it was, because, time and again, the scenes that Wells describes—of
a city thrown into turmoil by invaders using powerful technology to destroy
buildings and people alike—that vision came true. It happened in city after
city, from Louvain in 1914, to Seoul in the Korean War. Think of London in the
blitz. Think of Poland in 1939. Cities laid waste. It suddenly struck me that
this was the key leitmotif of twentieth-century conflict. And I hardly
need to suggest to an audience in New York that that theme is by no means played
out.
The irony is that it didn't need Martians to wreak havoc in so many cities in
the world. There was no need for Wells' alien invaders. We did it to ourselves.
It was human beings who, time and again, destroyed the cities inhabited by other
human beings. And what's fascinating is how often it was done as if the victims
were aliens. With terms like undermensch (subhuman) invented to describe
the opponents in conflicts, it is perhaps not surprising that twentieth-century
violence was so exceptionally destructive of human life.
So The War of the World, singular, is an attempt to explain why the twentieth
century was so astonishingly violent, not only in absolute terms—after
all, the world is more populous than ever—but also in relative terms. If
you work out how many people died violently in the course of the twentieth century,
it was of the order of 180 million. One estimate puts it at one in every twenty-two
deaths; that is to say, one in every twenty-two human deaths in the twentieth
century was violent, not natural.
If you take the most explosive of all the conflicts, the one which is right
at the heart of this book, World War II, roughly 60 million people died violently
in that war. If you work out what percentage of the population of the world
in 1939 that was, it's between 2 and 3 percent. None of the great wars of modern
history—I hesitate to go further back than 1600, for reasons I'll explain
in a second—had such a terrifyingly high mortality rate as that. So there
is a question here about why the twentieth century was so violent.
Now, experts on thirteenth-century Asia assure me that Genghis
Khan—who I used to call "Genghis" in my ignorance—killed
comparable proportions, if not higher proportions, of the world population in
his time. And it may even be that if we go back beyond the ancient world to
the prehistoric world, that primitive societies were still more violent. Some
primitive tribes have astonishingly high mortality rates, according to the anthropologists.
But that's not really the point. The twentieth century is astonishing because
that kind of violence coincided with unprecedented progress. So there is a paradox
here which makes the twentieth century really unique.
The average human being got maybe four times better off, possibly five times
better off, if you try to work out a figure for per-capita gross domestic product.
He or she was more likely to live in democracy at the end of the twentieth century
than at the beginning. In all kinds of ways, scientific and cultural, the twentieth
century was a time of astonishing progress.
So it is really very important for us to try to understand why progress coincided
with holocausts of violence, with some sixteen conflicts that claimed a million
or more deaths. Seen in these terms, the world wars become part of a continuum
of organized violence. The book is an attempt to explain why.
The best explanations are easy to remember. At least one person besides me in
this room will be jet-lagged, and that person will be glad of the fact that
my explanation is relatively easy to commit to memory. It has four parts, and
each of them begins with the letter "E," which I find always helps
under exam conditions.
1) The first is economic volatility. Now, why is economic volatility
important? I know we're uptown, we're not on Wall Street, but give me a couple
of minutes on this.
It's important because it helps you to identify the dangerous times. You see,
it's crucial that the twentieth century was not evenly violent. Not every year,
not every decade, was equally violent. There were huge spikes of organized violence,
particularly between 1914 and 1945. I try to show that one reason for this is
that the mid-twentieth century was by far the most volatile time.
If you look at fluctuations in growth, inflation, asset prices, the interwar
period stands out as being roughly seven times more volatile than our own time.
We have almost forgotten what volatility feels like these days. The last ten
years have seen almost unprecedented smoothness in the pattern of economic growth
in the world's developed economies. And yet, transport yourself back to the
1920s and 1930s, and you enter a time when economic activity went up and down
like some kind of fairground ride.
So economic volatility, the first of my E's, helps us narrow down the timeframe,
because we need to understand why, for example, the early 1940s were the most
dangerous time of all time.
2) My second E is ethnic disintegration. This is terribly important.
In many ways, it's the most important argument—and, I think, original argument—in
the book. It matters because it helps you identify where violence happened,
because, once again, it wasn't evenly geographically distributed. It was, in
fact, heavily concentrated in certain parts of the world.
In a fifty-year period I identify, from 1904-1953, violence in the world was
extraordinarily concentrated in two places: Central and Eastern Europe; and
at the other end of Eurasia, Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula. If you were
born in those parts of the world, your chances of dying violently were much,
much higher than if you were born in, say, Canada. That is extremely important.
Why? Because when you look at those places—look at an ethno-linguistic
map of, say, Central Europe in 1900—what leaps out is what patchworks they
were, ethno-linguistic patchworks, extraordinarily heterogeneous societies with
enormously interlocked minorities.
Now, the key to understanding what happened in the mid-twentieth century is
to realize that it was a process of disintegration. In 1900, these multiethnic
societies looked remarkably stable. Indeed, in some places, particularly in
the German-speaking cities of Central Europe, levels of intermarriage, coeducation,
or any of the measures you might take when you were looking for evidence of
assimilation and integration, suggested that problems of ethnic conflict were
diminishing fast.
In a city like Hamburg in the 1920s, one in every two marriages involving at
least one Jewish partner was to a non-Jewish partner. Half of these marriages
were mixed. Looking at the world in the 1920s, you would have said that Germany
was the place that had, in effect, solved what late-nineteenth century racists
had called "the Jewish question."
But that would be wrong, because what happened—and it wasn't only with
respect to Jews and Germans—what happened in Central and Eastern Europe
in the period after around 1929 was an astonishing ripping apart of multiethnic
societies.
I talk about the city of Chernovitz as just an example of what a multiethnic
city looked like. It is now Chernivtsi in Ukraine, and very little remains of
its identity as Chernovitz. But in 1900 Chernovitz was a great multiethnic Hapsburg
city inhabited by German bureaucrats, German-Jewish academics, but also by Ukranians,
Poles, Romanians. It was a kind of melting pot—and yet, it was a melting
pot that exploded, that blew up, as if something went wrong in the recipe.
So ethnic disintegration is the key to understanding the location, if you like,
of conflict, to understanding why Ukraine was a bad place to be born in and
Sweden much less so.
3) My third component in the great equation of disaster also begins with
E: it is empires in decline. Counterintuitively from some liberal perspectives,
I argue that it is when empires decline and fall that violence is most likely
to spike. It is at the moment of this dissolution that the stakes are suddenly
terribly high and local elites do battle for, as it were, the political succession.
Roughly, twelve empires declined and fell in the course of the twentieth century.
That's a very large number, indeed. In fact, I think I can safely say that in
no previous century had so many empires hit the deck. I think that helps explain
again why the middle of the twentieth century was so tremendously violent. These
great waves of imperial decline, which began with the collapse of the Qing
Dynasty in China, continued through the dissolution of the Romanov,
Ottoman,
Habsburg,
and Hohenzollern
empires in Central and Eastern Europe towards the end of the First World War,
experienced another great wave of crisis when the Japanese unleashed their extraordinary
assault on the European, and indeed American, empires in Asia. These times of
imperial crisis produced great spikes in the level of organized violence.
If you want to go beyond that timeframe, think only of 1947, a date much on
our minds. That, after all, saw in many ways the highest level of violence in
the history of British India, at its end, at its moment of dissolution. It illustrates
the key point. As the imperial authority wanes, those on the ground, in the
localities, suddenly have a lot to fight for, and particularly in multiethnic
societies. And, since most of the great empires were extraordinarily multiethnic,
it's not surprising that in the time of imperial dissolution minorities found
themselves vulnerable as never before to what was once called "the tyranny
of the majority."
4) The fourth, and final, of my E's - just to recap for those of you
revising: economic volatility was the first, ethnic disintegration was the second,
empires in decline was the third - the fourth is Eastern ascendancy.
You see, we often misunderstand the twentieth century. We think of it in terms
of the triumph of the West—or even the American century, although I think
that was supposed to begin after World War II. I argue that this is a misunderstanding
of the trajectory of modern history.
It was in 1900 that the West truly ruled the world. In 1900, 82 percent of the
world's population lived in empires, and most of those empires were controlled
by Western powers. By Western powers, I mean principally the European powers,
but also the United States. It is an astonishing statistic to my mind. It also
illustrates better than anything the sheer dominance of Western power.
When a relatively small percentage of mankind—and, after all, if you figure
out the West as I do in the book, it was never as much as 20 percent of the
world's population - such a small proportion was able to rule over the majority
of the world's population, because 50 percent of the world's population lived
in Asia in 1900, and only a very few (the Japanese) enjoyed anything resembling
political independence.
I think the descent of the West—and I use the term advisedly, not to invoke
the memory of Oswald
Spengler, a man of whom I disapprove; I use the term because I want to connote,
not only a crude decline from power, but also perhaps a descent in moral terms—the
descent of the West is the key to understanding the twentieth century.
It was a violent and painful process. It was never smooth. That is why the conflict
between Japan and the Western powers in Asia and the Pacific was so astonishingly
brutal. We should not think of the transfer of power from West to East as a
naturally smooth power. The twentieth century suggests that it has been punctuated
by violence. That's why 1904 is such an important date. That's the moment Japan
succeeds in beating a European empire for the first time, sinking the entire
Russian expeditionary force sent to fight over Korea/Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese
War.
I think I just have time to draw some conclusions from this argument for our
own time.
In some ways, the problems that bedeviled the first half of the twentieth century
were solved horribly; solved by ethnic cleansing, solved by genocide, solved
by partition. The killing fields at either end of Eurasia—Central and Eastern
Europe, Korea/Manchuria—ceased to be killing fields after 1953. And yet,
violence didn't stop.
I try to argue in the epilogue that in many ways the Cold War wasn't cold at
all; it was a third world war if you were in Guatemala or Cambodia or Angola.
In fact, I call it the "Third World's war," because all that had happened
was that violence was relocated to places that people in the dominant powers
during the Cold War seldom saw. So violence didn't stop during the Cold War,
and there is no reason to assume that it has stopped since the Cold War.
There is one part of the world today which already exhibits all the traits that
I see as having been explosive in the mid-twentieth century. Where economic
volatility, if you just look at growth rates in these countries for the past
twenty years, is roughly five times higher than in the United States; where
ethnic disintegration is already well underway, a region where a multiethnic
city is in the process of tearing itself apart as we speak; and a part of the
world where in my view—and those of you who know my last book, Colossus,
will see what I am driving at—where in my view an empire is manifestly
in decline. I am talking about the Middle East, and the empire I have in mind
is, of course, the American empire.
To me the most troubling thing about the Middle East today is this conjunction
of extraordinary economic volatility. Look at growth rates in Iraq and its neighbors
since 1986. You are looking at the kind of volatility Central Europe experienced
in the 1920s and 1930s.
Look at what is happening in Iraq. Against all expectations—and I include
myself in this—a war between insurgents and occupiers has morphed before
our very eyes into something very like a civil war between Sunni and Shiite
Muslims, not to forget Kurds. The process whereby a multiethnic society tears
itself apart is all too familiar to someone like me, who specializes in European
history. We have been here before, and we know how it starts, how society's
communities that have lived together relatively peacefully despite ethnic and
sectarian differences suddenly turn on one another, and neighbor kills neighbor.
In The Brookings Institute's recent surveys of Iraq, there are some astonishing
findings that leap off the page. Sectarian violence is an order of magnitude
higher this year than last year. Ninety-two percent of votes in Iraqi elections
were cast by sectarian parties. In surveys, enormous percentages of Sunni Iraqis
say that they have themselves experienced, or know people who have experienced,
ethnic cleansing. All of this is unfolding because it seems to me the dominant
empire in that region, which certainly exerted extraordinary informal power
in the 1970s, is waning, losing credibility, losing control.
In 1920, it was possible for an English-speaking empire to quell an insurgency
and stabilize multiethnic Iraq. But then the ratio of Iraqis to occupying forces
was something like 20:1. Today it is 210:1. In other words, the odds of success
were an order of magnitude that is smaller this time around.
That demographic transition is part of what I mean when I describe the descent
of the West. Today the powers that I call the Western powers account for barely
10 percent of the world's population. The populations of the East have grown
relatively. That means the prospect of Western power is, from the very word
go, significantly diminished.
If I am right and the stakes are right here, this is a somber subject. If I
am right, then the ingredients for a much higher level of conflict than we have
yet seen in the Middle East are in place. That may sound shocking to those of
you who think of the Middle East as a terribly violent place. But actually,
the amazing thing about the Middle East is how small its wars have generally
been, with the sole exception of the Iran-Iraq war.
We could see much more violence there. We could see violence of the sort we
saw in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1940s, because the ingredients
are all in place. In other words, ladies and gentlemen, The War of the World
implies, to my deep alarm, the possibility of a sequel—a sequel played
out, not in the killing fields of Poland/Ukraine, but in the killing fields
conceivably of Palestine, of Lebanon, of the Persian Gulf.
On that somber note, which will ensure that I never get asked back to breakfast
here—I promise light relief in my next book—I am going to thank you
very much for your attention and invite your questions.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: Thank you very much for what was a very impressive and, as
you've told us yourself, troubling analysis. I actually, I'm afraid, share your
worries of your conclusion.
But I'd like to explore a little further your premises. If you look at the twentieth
century as sort of this unbroken narrative of violence—and I agree totally
about the 1904-1953 period—it seems to me one could suggest a slightly
alternative narrative, with the founding of international institutions in 1945.
You had in the first half of the century two world wars, countless civil wars,
brutal dictatorships, mass expulsions of populations, genocide, the horrors
of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Then, you had the creation of international
institutions. Yes, the hiccup of the Korean war, which is why I agree with you
we go up to 1953, but thereafter a system of rules of the road which, by and
large, countries did follow, which facilitated small conflicts that in the past
might have drawn in superpowers and ignited a wider conflagration actually being
contained—the invention of UN peacekeeping, for example.
Yes, there were certainly horrors in the Third World. I'd be very curious—you
probably have done the numbers—how they stack up against the 1904-1953
period. My guess is, despite the almost a million killed in Rwanda, that if
you add up the numbers elsewhere, in these smaller conflicts you mentioned,
I suspect you come to a good deal less than a quarter—perhaps even a tenth—of
what the world suffered then.
So perhaps I'm being a bit provocative in suggesting that maybe there is an
alternative narrative. Fifty years of horror, violence, unmitigated misery,
fifty years thereafter of tempered violence—there has always been violence
in human history, but a good deal less—distinguished by the existence of
international institutions that made it possible to contain some of this.
Without in any way disagreeing with your worries about today and the identification
of the factors that you've mentioned, all of which I think are worthy of a separate
topic—but looking back at the past, is this not a sustainable argument?
Can you give us facts, figures, numbers, and points to suggest that I'm wrong?
NIALL FERGUSON: Well, there's one thing I can promise you about this book,
is that it has facts and figures aplenty.
It's interesting in many ways to see how very violent the "long peace"
was. That term, "the long peace," to describe the Cold War is one
of the great misnomers of modern historiography. It was only peaceful if you
were lucky enough to live within the borders of the superpowers or their close
allies. But if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the theaters of proxy
conflict—and I look closely at Guatemala and Indochina and central Africa—then
it was a distinctly unpeaceful peace and a very hot war indeed. The numbers
get very large, indeed, in Indochina. And one shouldn't forget that, even after
the end of the Cold War, there were deaths of the order of a million-plus in
central Africa's ongoing conflict.
So it is hard to buy the idea that a glorious new era of the brotherhood of
man came into being with the advent of the United Nations. I often think of
these peacekeeping forces as band-aids applied to a body suffering from an altogether
more serious affliction than minor cuts and grazes.
The other way of thinking about this is to remember that international institutions
were established after the First World War too, and weren't wholly unsuccessful.
People forget that the League of Nations didn't fail at everything. Harry
Hinsley showed that actually in a very substantial number of the conflicts
that it sought to arbitrate in there were peaceful outcomes. When international
orders fail, they tend to fail in the face of really big challenges. The question,
of course, is whether the UN has ever faced a really big challenge of the sort
that destroyed the League of Nations, when Italy and Japan, in particular, and
then Germany, ceased to regard it as having legitimacy.
The final point, which is really important when you measure conflict, is that
one characteristic feature of the post-1953 world was the shift from interstate
war to civil war. An enormous proportion of wars after 1953 happened within,
rather than between, states. That was an ironic consequence of one of the forces
of progress that we all, over breakfast in New York, unquestioningly approve
of: democratization.
Democratization, unfortunately, tends to have an unforeseen consequence when
it happens very suddenly in relatively poor multiethnic societies. It very often
leads to civil war, as minorities secede for fear of the tyranny of the majority.
This is a recurrent theme, it seems to me, not only of international relations,
but also of American foreign policy.
Woodrow Wilson believed as much in democracy as he believed in international
institutions, and both disappointed him in the end—well, I suppose, posthumously,
in the aftermath of his death—as the order failed and democratization produced
a series of terribly short-lived and unstable governments in Central and Eastern
Europe.
I do also do short answers to questions.
QUESTION: Many of the world's empires in the past were built on trading
and the search for raw materials. What you've described now as the rise of the
East leads me to the question of what do we do about China. How do you assess
China? It is now searching for raw materials to feed its own industrial growth.
It is establishing its own political power with nations in Africa and South
America and so on. So how do you see China in the rise of the East that you
described?
NIALL FERGUSON: In my sketch of the world in 1901, I sort of try to set
the scene on the 9/11 of a hundred years before 9/11. One of the points I make
is that it was a world of multiple empires and a world in which conflict over
natural resources was taken as a given, was taken as part of the natural order
of things. In many ways, we are back in that world today, with some imperial
powers disposing over vast quantities of natural resources and some not.
Remember, one of the implications of an argument about relative American decline
is that the beneficiaries will be historic imperial powers: Russia, Iran, Persia,
and of course China. We are seeing the empires striking back. And, of course,
they know how to behave as empires perhaps a little better than the United States
has done, at least since it went into imperial denial round about the time of
the Philippines war a hundred years ago.
So I think this is a huge issue, and I don't foresee an entirely harmonious
outcome to it, particularly because key players holding cards here can't be
seen as necessarily friends of the American vision of a world based on "freedom."
The interesting thing to me is, not so much that China needs natural resources,
as that Iran and Russia have them. That's as important, if one is trying to
understand the coming international order.
But I think one should watch—and I'm sure you are watching—very closely
the approach the Chinese take to this question, which is "no questions
asked about human rights; give us the oil/gas." Now, if you are in competition
with a power that is only really interested in resources and is not interested
in some kind of trading of values, you are into a very different game.
It comes back to a crucial argument I made in Empire and in Colossus.
Empires are not just about the acquisition of natural resources. They are as
much about the export of values, the export of their own civilization. That's
a powerful motivation for the transformation of international orders through
history.
I, rather boringly, take the view that empires are what historians should study
because most of what we call history consists of the doings of empires. The
nation-state is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it has achieved much less
historically than empires. And yet, we don't understand empires terribly well,
least of all in this country, which has a very strange attitude towards empire—a
desire to regard them in moral terms, as either all good or all bad; whereas,
empires are both, they are capable of being both good and bad.
I think the aspirations of American power have, by and large, been relatively
good—aspirations, not always results—but there are other imperial
powers that are much less interested in exporting the idea of individual liberty,
and China stands out as one of those.
QUESTION: First of all, thank you very much. When I listen to these four
E's, it all sounds very deterministic and very fatalistic. Is there any alternative
strategy—not necessarily the United States, but Europe, or people who would
like to see a circumstance other than horrible wars in the Middle East and so
on—that you can describe? Or is this simply a description of some sort
of inevitability, sort of like another version of Marxism or some other deterministic
theory?
NIALL FERGUSON: Thank you for that question. I'm happy to disavow determinism
and historical explanation.
A few years back— more than I care to remember— I published a book
called Virtual History. The introduction to that book was a kind of manifesto
for anti-determinist history, in which counterfactuals, contingencies, alternative
scenarios, play an absolutely huge part.
So no, this isn't a model that is deterministic at all. Right at the heart of
the book, which I should stress has more about World War II than any of the
other conflicts because it was the biggest, is an argument about how it might
have been avoided.
And it very nearly was avoided in 1938. There was tremendous opportunity to
stop Hitler in his tracks. I try to show, I hope in ways that haven't been done
before, how easy it would have been to call Hitler's bluff over Czechoslovakia.
Politically he was in a very weak position, economically he was in a terribly
weak position, and militarily he was completely screwed— excuse my language—if
he was confronted by a combination of the other European powers. That opportunity
was missed, for reasons that I try to explain—perhaps French pusillanimity;
perhaps British cowardice is putting it too strongly, a reluctance certainly
on the part of Neville Chamberlain to see that action now would be preferable
to action later.
So one always needs to remember when making arguments about foreign policy that
they are concerned with alternatives. But at the time, in 1938, no one really
knew what would happen if Britain played for time. A key argument, if you remember,
in 1938, which won the day and beat the Churchillians, was that Britain needed
another twelve months to be ready for the coming war with Germany. This was
a fatally flawed argument because Hitler had the twelve months too.
I've always marveled that these extraordinarily clever people who ran His Majesty's
Treasury, as it then was, didn't see this. And Hitler made much more use of
the twelve months than Britain did, not least because in that period he managed
to sign the Nazi-Soviet pact that secured his eastern frontier, completely transforming
the strategic situation.
No, this isn't a deterministic book. Right at its heart is a really agonized
counterfactual essay about how World War II could have been, if not avoided,
then reduced in size. It would have happened in Asia. I think that's clear.
I argue that it already had begun in Asia by 1937, if not earlier. But the war
in Europe didn't need to be the way it was. There didn't need to be Dunkirk,
that ultimate fiasco of British strategy.
And today I think the same applies. I do not think it is an absolute certainty
that we could put money on that the Middle East will blow up. I do think we
need to realize how it could blow up and how, as it were, a misdiagnosis of
the problems of the Middle East, which I believe is current in Washington today,
could accelerate this terrible process.
One of the arguments that I have made time and again is that there is no substitute
for historical knowledge in dealing with international problems. The tragedy
of 2003 was that key decision-makers had an almost complete lack of historical
knowledge with respect to the state of Iraq—not only in this country, but
also in my own country, where I'm afraid Mr. Blair, for all his rhetorical skills,
stands out as one of the least historically literate of all British prime ministers—and
the consequences have been very disastrous.
QUESTION: How do you see Latin America in your twenty-first century construct?
Do you see it as a vassal of American power; or does it have independence, particularly
if you look at east/west axis as opposed to north/south?
NIALL FERGUSON: This is a great question. Recently, I tried to understand
Latin America better. It is extremely important always to admit what you don't
know. I am not an expert on Latin America.
However, it's striking that Latin America had a kind of interwar experience
similar to that of Central and southern Europe: failures of democracy, transitions
to military dictatorship, and a kind of populism in politics, which in its rhetorical
forms are very similar to what you encountered in, say, Spain or Portugal, not
surprisingly.
So I started to ask myself whether we should be really worried about what was
happening, say, in Bolivia, whether there was some kind of second wave, third
wave, of Latin American populism that would destabilize the region. I also asked
myself if this was a consequence of a diminution of American power.
Now, in Colossus I argued that American power had not been a tremendously
benign force in the history of Latin America, and that in fact trying to treat
Latin America as an extended backyard had produced a good deal more misery than
it had produced happiness over a hundred years or so. In that sense, I rather
approved of the relative neglect which has characterized American policy towards
the region, at least since 9/11. It seems to have vanished off the White House
radar screen somewhere right about then. I'm not sure that has been a bad thing.
The trouble is that in Venezuela you have another of these powers that in natural
resource terms can punch well above its demographic—or, indeed, military—weight.
We saw some of those punches thrown last week, rhetorical punches primarily.
I don't think that Chavez
or Morales
are necessarily the future there, though.
There are some parts of Central and South America which have a potential for
what I would call the politics of ethnic mobilization. The critical thing is
whether there has been, and still is, a relatively disenfranchised indigenous
American population that can be mobilized. In countries where that is not the
case—and I think that is true in Argentina and in Brazil—these populist
strategies don't seem to me to have much chance, and I think we can look forward
to rather more moderate, if left-of-center, governments in that part of the
world, or rather in those countries.
So I walked away from this complex story realizing that there wasn't a mega-trend
at work, and that what was happening in Bolivia would probably not necessarily
even happen in Mexico. It came very close to happening, didn't it, but it didn't
happen. That has left me relatively cautiously optimistic about the future in
that part of the world. I don't think that is going to be a twenty-first century
conflict zone.
QUESTION: I'd like to draw you out a bit more on the previous question.
I literally just flew back from Iraq, got back on Friday night. While all the
ingredients you describe are certainly present, there are other things going
on. About ten of the provinces are relatively quiescent, though those are largely
the ethnic divides you described.
While I was there, twelve tribal sheiks at Al-Anbar, the most Sunni heartland,
announced that they were going to provide 20,000 of their tribesmen to put down
what they saw as violence that was getting out of control in Al-Anbar. Literally,
a week ago today, I was with an Iraqi brigade commander in Baghdad who had an
integrated unit, and in fact his personal security attachment included two Sunnis,
two Shias, and two Kurds. He was insistent that those guys be part and parcel.
But the ingredients you describe I would still say are present. So what are
the real implications then for policy? I mean you talked about Chamberlain in
1938 and the French perhaps confronting Adolph Hitler. Are you suggesting that
we have the same problem with Mr.
Ahmadinejad, as some people in Washington would describe him as the next
Adolph Hitler? Is that what is required in terms of policy implications from
your analysis, or are there other options?
And finally, a sort of secondary question, are we perhaps preparing for a different
kind of war? The wars you described in the twentieth century were wars of empires,
wars of nation-states. But now we are into this strange nether world of wars
of Hezbollah, or terrorist groups, or criminal games, narco-criminals in Afghanistan,
and the like, which really is a very different character of conflict.
NIALL FERGUSON: Gosh, what great questions. Welcome back, and I'm glad you
made it back safely.
I don't think one should fall into the trap of thinking that the whole of Iraq
is an enormous powder keg because, clearly, violence is very, very heavily concentrated
in the center of the country, particularly in Baghdad. It is almost the inverse
of Afghanistan, where the violence is in the periphery and the capital is safe.
So there is a sense in which this is a story about a city, again going back
to my earlier point.
It's not really Iraq that worries me. It's Baghdad that worries me, because
once you get a cycle of sectarian violence in an urban setting, where localities
have been "cleansed" of one particular group, then it is extremely
hard to stop that kind of thing. You, therefore, look with some optimism at
reports of statements like the one you mentioned by the tribal sheiks, because
that is a sign that those tribal loyalties could, in fact, transcend the sectarian
loyalties.
It's kind of funny, though, isn't it? We never heard anything about tribes in
2003 or 2004, or even 2005. If you did a search of The New York Times
for "Iraq and tribes," you'd get nothing until suddenly, literally
this year. That amused me, because I can remember arguing with American experts
on the Middle East—I'm not an expert—that there was something to be
learned from the British experience there.
"No, no, no, no. You don't understand how Saddam has transformed Iraq.
The British strategy, which was to do deals with the sheiks, to do deals with
tribal leaders, that's absolutely obsolete today. Now what we need to do is
to prepare Iraq to be the United States of Mesopotamia, with a federal constitution,
blah, blah, blah."
So the sheiks were there all long. They hadn't been obliterated by Saddam. The
loyalties that they command may still count for something. I really hope so,
because it turned out to be a pretty good way of doing business in that region
for the British. And I think it's critical to notice that some of these tribes
have mixed sectarian complexions; they are Sunnis and Shiites within a given
tribe. That's hopeful.
But it is bad for the future, isn't it, when American policy starts reaching
out to tribal leaders? It's very much in the manner of Gertrude
Bell. It's good to see Gertrude Bell's name occasionally mentioned. It has
taken a while for some of us to persuade the United States that she is relevant.
I saw her name in the paper just the other day in a lament about the museum
that she founded in Baghdad.
But coming back to your 1938 question, I'm reminded of the father of a friend
of mine, who whenever he reads a Hitler parallel in the media says, "Oh
no, it's the 1930s all over again, all over again." I think that's a really
great line, because there's a terrible danger—and we've known that certainly
since the 1950s in Britain with the Suez fiasco, since Vietnam in the United
States—the danger of bad analogies with the 1930s.
On the other hand, I take Mr. Ahmadinejad very seriously, and I have written
about this in the press a few times. It seems to me that the Iranian revolution,
thinking historically about this, has reached its Napoleonic stage, or possibly
its Stalin stage. We are into the second generation. The generation isn't composed
in this case of the clerics who made the revolution, but of the soldiers who
fought for it in the Iran-Iraq war.
He has all the hallmarks of a potentially very dangerous man. The fact that
he concludes his speeches in the United Nations with an imprecation that the
hidden imam should return, which of course implies the impending end of days,
fills me with terror. The thought that this man leads a country that aspires
to acquire nuclear weapons, and that he looks forward with enthusiasm to the
Apocalypse, is a truly terrifying thing. In that sense, he has the potential
to have a kind of Hitler-like destructiveness in the region, and indeed beyond
the region.
The trouble about preemption—and the 1930s makes this very clear—is
that you can't play the card more than once. The problem about preemption is
that we have played it against the wrong country. Once you have played the card
against the wrong country, you are a busted flush.
So the military options that periodically get floated and appear in Time
magazine don't have credibility. There is no, to my mind, credible scenario
in which the United States can unilaterally use military power to prevent Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons, because the international political fallout
would be so huge. And indeed, apart from everything else, it might well stabilize
a regime that we occasionally imagine liberalizing itself from within.
That brings us back to international institutions. There is no other option.
I make myself very unpopular in neo-conservative circles when I remind those
parties what the United Nations is, an institution with "Made in America"
stamped on its base, which is the best institution available, with all its flaws,
for addressing this kind of problem, and particularly the problems of international
nuclear proliferation.
Whenever I hear Americans criticize the UN Security Council, I scratch my head
in wonderment. What other institution in the world so over-represents Western
power as the UN Security Council? If you are really interested in preserving
it, don't change it. With all its flaws, it's our best hope.
Thanks very much.
JOANNE MYERS: We have time for one more question.
QUESTION: Ian [sic], when you were here last time with your book on empire,
I remember I in particular—and I think others—queried you because
you were, I wouldn't say an all-out, but a half-out supporter of the Iraq war.
Your tune has somewhat changed. Is it because you see the failure of the war,
or is it a larger context, that you see the failure of the American empirium,
as you described it last time—and that's one of your E's?
NIALL FERGUSON: I argued that Saddam should be overthrown quite a while
back, in a book called The
Cash Nexus, before George Bush came to power. But in the books that
I wrote after that, Empire and Colossus, and in my journalism—and
I went back and checked—my argument was very straightforward: The United
States is very unlikely to be as good at empire building as the United Kingdom
was, because of its three deficits. It has a financial deficit; whereas a hundred
years ago Britain was the world's banker. It has a manpower deficit, because
Americans don't really want to go to hot, poor countries and get shot at that
much; whereas the British, particularly the Scots, seem to love that. And, of
course, American politics is characterized by what I rather crudely describe
as the attention deficit disorder, where unless a policy delivers results within
a two-to-four-year electoral cycle, it is abandoned.
So my argument has been that if the United States is serious about Iraq it has
to address these deficits. It can't do it on the cheap, it needs a lot of boots
on the ground, and it is going to take more than four years. I consistently
argued that throughout the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and after.
It was convenient for liberal press, particularly in my own country, to misrepresent
that argument and to bracket me with the neo-conservatives, but actually I have
been a thorn in their side. My favorite line was to say, "You will need
to be in Iraq for forty years if you wish to make a difference." I said
that repeatedly. That's how long the British were in Iraq, and even that only
achieved a very partial stabilization and prosperity. So from that point of
view, I think I have been a fairly consistent skeptic about the likely chances
of success.
But I'm glad you called me Ian, because I was hoping to say, "Well, I know
Ian said all that, but I'm Niall. Ian couldn't make it. That notorious neo-con
hawk, imperialist running dog who supported the war doesn't dare show his face."
But actually, I do have one regret, and I have written about it, and I have
said it before and I'll say it again. I think if I had known how badly the occupation
of Iraq would be botched, if I had known how mismanaged the postwar period would
be, if I had realized how frivolous decision-makers in the Department of Defense
were about the number of troops that would be needed, about the economic resources
that would be needed, and about the timeframe that would be needed—if I
had known all those things in 2003, then I would have been an ardent opponent
of the invasion of Iraq, and I regret that I wasn't.
JOANNE MYERS: One last question.
QUESTION: You mentioned historical knowledge just a second ago. I want
to ask you a question, as an historian, about the role of memory in all of this.
It's one thing for administrations who barely can go back to learning the lessons
of forty years ago. It's another for people like the Northern Irish, the Bosnians,
the people in the Middle East particularly, who dwell on events that have happened
centuries earlier, and gnaw at the wound and keep festering the kind of violence
that emerges from those historical events so long ago. How do you deal with
that kind of mindset which dwells in memory and fosters this kind of violence
in so many of these areas where that violence pervades?
NIALL FERGUSON: That's a great question. If there's one thing worse than
ignorance of history, it's erroneous knowledge of it. That, again, is where
the historian has an extremely important role to play.
You mentioned Bosnia. How often in the 1990s did we hear the pat phrase "ancient
hatreds" used to justify a policy of inaction, a policy which London, above
all other capitals, led? And yet, when you look at the history of Bosnia, it
is extremely hard to characterize it as a history of ancient hatred, because
for long periods of time this extraordinarily complex, multiethnic border land
was not riven by hatred.
The subtitle of this book in the United Kingdom was "History's Age of Hatred."
Part of what I wanted to try and do was to make hatred a more intelligible historical
concept, because it is badly misunderstood.
What makes hatred happen? What makes neighbors kill neighbors? It's so hard
for us to imagine. I mean New York is a multiethnic society. Can you imagine
if people on the Upper East Side started to massacre one another on the grounds
of some ethnic or sectarian difference? You laugh. And yet, in Sarajevo people
once, not so very long ago, would have laughed at the same notion.
I hesitate to make light of this, because we need to make an enormous leap of
imagination, we who are accustomed to relatively smoothly functioning multicultural
and multiethnic societies, and that leap of imagining is to try to understand
how relatively sophisticated cities, not as rich perhaps as New York, but in
many ways as modern—go to Sarajevo; it is not the Dark Ages there; it was
a highly sophisticated society, secularized, in which religion played a relatively
minimal role. I looked in extreme detail at the levels of intermarriage that
characterized Bosnia. They were very high indeed; one in fourteen or fifteen
marriages was a mixed marriage, right up until the 1980s.
So hatred is not something that, I think, is naturally and spontaneously occurring.
Actually, I think fusion and integration and assimilation are the norm. People
aren't designed to engage in organized violence. That's why, even in the twentieth
century, the majority of people died peacefully.
We need to understand how it is that neighbors can be incited to slaughter their
neighbors, how families—and this happened on many occasions in the twentieth
century—can be torn apart by ethnic hatred, and mixed marriages can suddenly
become the pretext for murder. It has to do with a combination of demagogy—you
need political entrepreneurs willing to play the hatred card—and also a
kind of dormant primitive impulse, to take issue with and mistrust "the
other," that civilization exists to repress. That is the very essence of
hatred.
No one, least of all people in the Western world, should delude themselves that
their society is somehow completely immune, because it wasn't so very long ago
that these feelings of hatred activated us in the battles in the Pacific—and,
indeed, in Western Europe—that ended World War II.
On that note, I will thank you all very much, indeed, for your attention.
JOANNE MYERS: I want to thank Niall for an extraordinary morning. As
he said, there is no substitute for historical knowledge, so I suggest that
you buy his book. Thank you.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Transcripts have been edited for grammar and clarity, and are posted with permission from the speakers.
 Highlights from Carnegie Council events are now available on our YouTube channel.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
The Council's online magazine and blog featuring innovative ideas for a fairer globalization.
> More
|
|
|
|
Go to the Journal for articles on ethics and foreign policy.
> More
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
