There’s no shortage of discussion in counter-factual history circles around whether Britain should have stayed neutral in the First World War, but surprisingly little around a similar question – having got involved, were we on the wrong side? Before I go any further I think I’ll just make it as clear as possible that I am only talking about the First World War here, not the Second – that one seems a bit more cut and dried(!).
So why would I think this? Didn’t we have obligations towards France and Russia? We did, but before we look at the nature of these these we should surely ask how we found ourselves on the side of France, our oldest enemy, and Russia, a Tsarist autocracy, against Germany, a natural ally (we already had a German Royal Family in place) and a fledgling democracy with the early signs of a welfare state and a far superior economy.
We tend to over-estimate the importance of our role in the war, which is entirely understandable. However, once you fully take on board that the real war, just in the case of WW2, was between Germany and Russia, the bigger picture starts to emerge. Germany saw France as an obstacle to quickly overcome, to avoid the obvious risks of a two-front war. German dominance over France may seem unpalatable, but do we feel it was worth close to a million British lives? Events since then, have shown that the French people are not necessarily entirely averse to this idea. If you doubt this, have a think about what the EU is and why it was set up after WW2. In any case, I don’t see a justification for the unimaginable bloodletting of young British lives. Or, for that matter, French. Read about the losses at Verdun (in fact, France lost about twice(!) as many men as we did in total), and tell me France wouldn’t have been better off living with the humiliation of a quick defeat. They lived pretty comfortably with it in 1941, don’t forget, against an incomparably more evil enemy.
Given the knife-edge that the Western front was on in 1914, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that France would have fallen with British involvement on the German side (although of course it’s by no means certain), so we’d have been left with a France allowed a certain pretence of independence, with Germany and Russia slugging it out interminably in the East. I can’t possibly say who would have won that, but either way it really wouldn’t have been our concern. But think about a fairly quick German victory – given that they ended up winning there anyway with drastically reduced troop numbers thanks to the stalemate on the Western front, hardly an unreasonable suggestion. Now this really is a cynical suggestion, but the chances are that even a German victory would have led to years of endless guerilla warfare throughout Eastern Europe (Robert Harris described this in Fatherland, although of course in the aftermath of an alternative WW2). Seeing out major industrial competitor tied down like this would by no means have been a bad thing for Britain. Would this also have meant…no Russian revolution? Almost certainly, at least in the way it really did pan out. Don’t forget that (speaking of outrageous cynicism) Germany gave free passage to Lenin to get to Russia in 1917 because they knew that, in the even of a Bolshevik coup, Russia would almost certainly have surrendered. Remember too, that no German defeat in 1918 means no Nazis, no WW2 and no holocaust.
Now, of course,we have to try to separate out what people knew then with what we know now. What was known, and quite widely so, was that Britain was under no real obligation to go to war with Germany over Belgian independence. You can certainly make the argument that we should have stuck to our agreement no matter what, but you may have a difficult time arguing that this really was worth a million of our men. Belgium is an entirely artificial country anyway, and likely to split into two in the near future. The real reason we fought was to stop German dominance of continental Europe. Again, this may well be a laudable aim (although this is at least debatable), but was it worth the sacrifice? Anyone with half a brain would have been able to see, even at the time, that at the very least this would be a major war, lasting years, and costing millions of lives. People really did see this at the time, and did speak out about it. The American Civil War, on a considerably smaller scale of course, had already shown what can happen when industrial-scale warfare runs headlong into deeply old-fashioned tactics. And again, if German dominance of Europe is intrinsically such a bad thing, why the huge support for the EU? It’s probably not the case that Imperial Germany would have put into place a system entirely like the EU but again, was opposing it worth the sacrifice?
Germany’s ambitions have always been around expansion in the East, whereas Britain’s have traditionally been in the overseas empire. Little did anyone suspect in 1914, however, that within a few short decades we’d have given it all away anyway. But deep down, are we honestly bothered whether Polish and Ukrainian towns have German names or not? The German army was by no means some kind of Peace Corps, but the Russian army (our allies!) were almost certainly worse. It’s no secret that they engaged in any number of murderous pogroms against Jewish communities during the war German ambitions were simply no threat to British interests at this point. They had built up their navy to try to scare us, this is true, but this programme had run out of steam long before WW1.
So I do leave myself open to charges of cynicism and opportunism with this theory, but I have to say, my real motives are the idea of saving so many millions of lives. Not just British ones, of course, but countless others from so many other countries. And let’s not fool ourselves that out involvement was motivated by altruism in the first place. It was no less cynically an attempt to stop Germany from overtaking us industrially, which I suggest was a folly as it was always going to happen. To try to stop this we lost nearly a million men and found ourselves on the side of, in the main, our greatest historical enemy with a moribund economy and flat/declining birthrate on one side, and a backwards autocracy on the other. Why not ally ourselves with a dynamic, growing economy that by nature of its size and place was always going to dominate Europe anyway? I just don’t see how it’s entirely acceptable for us to lose so many men in defence of France, but so utterly unthinkable for us to lose far fewer men by just being on the other side.
So to summarise – if we had been on the German side, there would have been no Somme, no Verdun, no Bolshevik coup, uncountably fewer people dead, no Nazis and no WW2. In return, we’d have defeated out traditional foe and allied ourselves with the inevitable major power in continental Europe. We wouldn’t have ruined our economy to the extent that we’d have to renege on our war debt to America soon afterwards. Speaking of which, we’d also have managed to at least try to counter American dominance of the world economy and political landscape. On the minus side, Belgium’s neutrality would have been violated. It’s easier to make the case that we should have stayed neutral (I’ll admit this is closer to my own opinion), but the case for us being on the German side really does seem to have few downsides.
Wilson Picked It 