What have we learned from World War I?

World War I has an important and complex relationship with international relations (IR) theory. The War was the catalyst for the emergence of IR as a discipline and helped to shape the liberal and realist paradigms. The War was also a principal focus of many IR theories. Realists and liberals based theories on it or justified them by arguing that they could account for its origins. Finally, the War influenced theory development in these and other paradigms through new understandings of it developed by historians. These interpretations in turn were often driven by contemporary political problems and projects. Theory, World War I, and the contemporary world are accordingly linked in direct and indirect ways. I cannot possibly unpack this relationship in a short essay. Rather, I want to illustrate with a few examples of the way in which contemporary political events and intellectual developments have encouraged new understandings of World War I. That conflict emerges as a resource, but one used in so many ways that it increasingly comes to resemble a Rorschach Test.

Historians of World War I initially focused on the relative responsibility of the great powers for the War. The Cold War provided a different lens for the study of World War I and its origins. A key text was Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, published in 1962. She made the case for accidental war arising from the rigid nature of mobilization plans and their failure to recognize that mobilization meant war – a claim later shown to be incorrect. President Kennedy was riveted by her book and later revealed that it was very much in his mind during the Cuban missile crisis. ¹ IR scholars moved in the same direction, inspired by the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, in which accidental war seemed a real possibility. They revisited World War I for lessons about crisis management. Interesting research emerged on offensive versus defensive dominance, political-military communication, how expectations of war can be made self-fulfilling, and various decision-making pathologies. Some IR scholars looked outside of political science to organizational theory and psychology to address these questions.

The focus of crisis management generated its own controversies. There has been a long-running dispute about the efficacy of deterrence and compellence. Thomas Schelling developed the logic for coercive strategies, and Alexander George and Bruce Russett found support for them in case and statistical studies. ² Janice Stein and I were their principal critics, using multiple case studies of conventional deterrence to show the frequency of failure and the principal reasons why. ³ The dispute over deterrence prompted different interpretations of the July crisis. Realists and deterrence supporters argued that deterrence failed in 1914, not because it was a flawed strategy, but because it had not been practiced effectively. ⁴ Critics of deterrence countered that German leaders, although not the German ambassador in London, were blind to British interests and signals because they were highly motivated to believe that Austria could attack Serbia without provoking a European war. ⁵ This latter reading is now widely accepted by historians. ⁶

Concern for crisis management encouraged interest in decision making. Alexander George and Irving Janis argued that better decision making would produce better crisis outcomes; they developed procedures, including the inclusion of a devil’s advocate in policy deliberations. ⁷ Critics, including the author, maintain that what really counts is the assumptions leaders bring to the table. When these are shared, they are unlikely to be articulated, let alone examined critically. If they are inappropriate, bad policy decisions will follow regardless of the procedures leading to them.

In the 1960s, a rift emerged between scholars who studied IR at the system level and those who focused on agents and bureaucracies. In part, this development was an intellectual one; systems theory was making inroads in many fields. It was also political in that these respective positions were motivated by desires to reduce the prospect of nuclear war. Kenneth Waltz, who emerged as the leading structuralist at the system level, based his theory on Morgenthau’s contention that bipolar world had the potential to be more stable than a multipolar one. Scholars sensitive to agency followed Morgenthau’s contention that the effects of bipolarity would depend entirely on the ‘moral strength’ of leaders. ⁸ Proponents of these different positions invoked World War I in support of their respective positions. Structuralists described multi-polarity as the key underlying cause, and those who emphasized agency stressed the unwillingness of almost all policy makers to take any risks to preserve the peace.

Realists invoke the balance of power to explain war and peace. Power transition theory attributes systemic wars to conflicts between rising and dominant powers. Rising powers attack dominant powers when they feel strong enough to win and reorder the international system to their advantage. ⁹ Alternatively, dominant powers initiate preventive wars against rising powers to forestall this outcome. ¹⁰ Power transition advocates offer World War I as evidence of their claims. Critics contend that transitions are the result of wars, not causes of them, that dominant powers are more inclined to incorporate rising powers into the system that to make war against them, and that orders are not imposed by dominant powers but the result of negotiated compromises. ¹¹ Other critics emphasize context, confluence, and accident, and here too, World War I is mobilized for historical evidence. ¹²

Rationalist models became prominent in the 1980s, and their focus was war initiation. ¹³ Many start from the premise that war is the result of incomplete information: opposing sides cannot find an agreement for which they would both settle or cannot know in advance the outcome of a war between them. Once again, World War I is offered as an example. Uncertainty was undeniably high in 1914, but there is little evidence that leaders among the leading protagonists engaged in the kind of cost-calculus that rationalist models expect. The most striking feature about decision making in 1914 was the ill-considered, emotional, and even irrational nature of decisions for mobilization and war in Austria–Hungary, Germany, and Russia.

Realist theories assume that fear is the principal motive of leaders and security their primary concern. Power transition theories and rationalist models also consider material gain. I highlight a third motive: standing. ¹⁴ It is an end in its own right, often at odds with imperatives of security or well-being, and the major cause of war in the modern world. I have documented my claim through case studies, including World War I and quantitative research based on an original data set. ¹⁵ Like other theorists, I turned to World War I because, rightly or wrongly, it is considered the most important case for IR theory. Over the course of the last 100 years, it has been used so often to build, justify, and critique propositions and theories that it has assumed an extraordinary status. Nobody questions whether this exalted status is justified? IR theorists appear to have made the mistake of assuming that a catastrophic general war somehow reveals more about the nature of war and causes than other conflicts. This supposition rests on the questionable assumptions that big wars have big causes that are more generalizable than those of other wars, and that IR theories rest on valid understandings of the origins of World War I.

Theorists treat World War I as a ‘case’. Such classification is always problematic because it takes events out of the contexts that give them meaning. Putting events into categories entails emphasizing some of their attributes in lieu of others. ‘Outcome’ is equally social in construction and all too often framed as a binary (e.g. war or peace, victory or defeat). These problems are endemic to the comparative study of wars that rely on data sets that span centuries. More limited comparisons (e.g. World Wars I and II, and the Cold War) can still conflate radically different political and military contexts.

Cases must not only be comparable but independent. In IR, this latter condition is rarely met. Leaders, journalists, and scholars draw lessons from past events they consider relevant. Learning can result in policies diametrically opposed to those that would have prevailed in the absence of the prior lesson-generating event. Consider how the Clinton administration might have responded to the civil war in Yugoslavia if its limited intervention in Somalia had not ended in disaster, or the goals South Korea and India now pursue to North Korea and Pakistan, respectively, in the aftermath of German unification and the extraordinary cost of its integration in the Federal Republic.

Even historically defensible lessons may not be applicable to new situations. Research in cognitive psychology suggests that people often mistake the most superficial characteristics of a situation for their most significant. They then espouse policies they believe would have alleviated a similar problem in the past. Revisionists argued that World War I had been provoked by military buildups, alliances, and threatening rhetoric. Their interpretation contributed to and offered a justification for appeasement of Hitler. The failure of appeasement of Hitler made deterrence appear the appropriate response to Stalin, especially as his Soviet Union was perceived by many influential people in the West as the linear descendant of Nazi Germany.

The World War I ‘case’ raises the possibility that IR theories may be part of the problem of conflict management, not the solution to them. Theorists have sometimes learned superficial lessons from events and connect these events to others by describing them as cases on the basis of superficial characteristics (e.g. crises that resulted in war). Their theories have influenced or justified foreign policies, therefore linking past to present events and undercutting in the process the independence of cases on which comparative generalizations must rest. The effects of this process are unpredictable. They can encourage policy makers to adopt inappropriate strategies that fail or make their so-called lessons self-fulfilling. This happened with deterrence during the Cold War. ¹⁶ Consider too present American policy toward China. It is based on the assumption of power transition theory that rising powers are never satisfied with the existing status quo and willing to go to war to change it. There is no historical evidence for this claim. Rising powers do not attack dominant powers, and dominant powers do not attack rising powers. Dominant powers start wars to gain hegemony, while rising powers do so to demonstrate their bonafides for entry into the ‘club’ of great powers. Each is far more likely to make war against less powerful states, and especially once great but currently declining great powers. ¹⁷ American alliance building, military buildups, and forward deployment – and adoption of the power transition discourse – could strengthen Chinese hardliners and lead to policies on both sides that prompt worst case analysis and spiraling tensions.

We need not give up comparative analysis, but scholars should devote much more attention to their theoretical categories, selection, and coding of cases. They should also be careful about giving ontological priority to a particular case or cases without offering a clear justification for this move. We need to exercise caution in our inferences, and all the more so when we offer them as policy guidance. Both World Wars offer an important lesson in this regard. Their most fundamental cause might be considered to be modernity and its two principal constituents: individual autonomy and economic development. They destabilized social, economic, and political relationships. This was most evident in Central Europe and most likely to prompt aggressive foreign policies because in Germany and Austria, there was a sizeable middle-class and a land-based aristocracy unreconciled to the middle class and in control of military and foreign policy. ¹⁸

Since 1945, Western Europe has learned to live with the consequences of modernization, and leaders and publics alike are committed to peaceful foreign policies. The Middle East is arguably the least stable region of the world, in large part because the problems and tensions of modernization have not been effectively addressed. The Pacific Rim is in between. This simple comparison indicates considerable variation, longitudinally and horizontally, in international conflict and the possibility of war across countries and regions. Realist, power transition, and rationalist theories are ahistorical, and liberal theories, while historical and teleological, ignore context. Processes like economic development, the rise to power of a new unit, or a mechanism like the balance of power have different consequences depending on their context. The same is true of attitudes toward peace and war and assessments of the relative advantages and costs of a possible military victory. Hans Morgenthau understood this variation. Following Hume, he contends that the balance of power can be stabilizing or destabilizing, and usually the latter. It can be an organizing principle for preventing a powerful state from gaining hegemony, but also an ideology mobilized by great powers to mask their pursuit of dominance. ¹⁹

These limitations suggest that we recognize that any ‘lessons’ we learn from the case are only in part generalizable. Offensive dominance, to cite one example, certainly played a role in 1914, although not as great as some realists supposed. Its effect depended on rigid war plans and belief in the positive value of war by political and military leaders, and intelligence reports that exaggerated adversary military preparations. Absent those conditions, offensive dominance would have less effect, as it did throughout the Cold War. The same is true for the balance of power and perceptions of likely future changes in the balance.

The most important lesson of World War I may be that any generalization is only a starting point for a retrospective narrative (explanation) or forward looking one (forecast). The advantage of such an approach is that we can start with any seeming lesson of the origins of World War I – even highly controversial ones – and ask ourselves how applicable it is to another situation and whether it is a useful starting point for a future narrative. Theories of any kind when applied to the social world are never more than starting points for narratives given the overriding importance of agency and context.