The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

Prefixed by a strange rant about race but from then on it's completely engrossing. Seamlessly covers the wars and their aftermath. Nothing is sanitised, unless you're a psychopath, this will be a hard and depressing read.

This is a big book! Essentially a history of WW2, but looking more at the big picture, at patterns. Some concrete details to make the pattern clear, but then lots of statistics too. There's a grand theory here to provide a thread... empires just coming off their peak, economic instability, and ethnic diversity at the block by block level, turning into neighbor against neighbor, families against themselves. But really the thread of theory is not enough to carry the weight of the facts, or I couldn't fit it all together anyway. But the theory does give a perspective, a way to organize the facts. It works well enough for that.

People treating other people as sub-human. That seems like the new feature of 20th Century brutality. Hmmm. That'd show more be another angle that would be useful here, that Ferguson doesn't bring in, not that I recall. Philosophers have remarked on Mass Man... Dostoevsky and the existentialists... how ideology somehow aligns people in any crazy direction... perhaps it's mass media, radio, TV...

The Epilog discusses events since WW2. Yeah Western Europe has been pretty peaceful, but the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia... crazy ideological ethnic slaughter has hardly slowed. Strange, the book was published in 2006, but there is no mention of bin Laden and al Qaeda.... but the book must have been pretty far along by then...

This book doesn't really answer anything. The explanatory framework really just makes more coherent the real questions. Yeah another monster here... one statistic, in the WW2 timeframe, the USA produced 75% of world petroleum. Ferguson does not look at the big picture of resource depletion. We have moved largely from empires to a global society. As this whole network crumbles... it is sure hard to be optimistic... if this kind of mechanized slaughter is the wave we are caught up in... it has yet to crest... show less

The First World War was sudden and a surprise, the Second World war started not in 1939 in Poland but in 1937 by Japan in China, even during their pinnacle of power in 1942 Germany and Japan were doomed.

While there are many unexpected revelations in "War of the World", Ferguson didn't set out on a mission to overturn what we know about the events of the 20th century, his plan was to deliver deeper understanding of the forces that propelled the civilization. The book stays away from chronicling battle maneuvers or military tactics, instead it delves into the forces behind the moving parts.

= First World War, the beginning =

The First World War was so atrocious that when it ended the natural desire was for historians to search for one grand show more explanation of it, yet, in fact, the war had an apparently low probability in the eyes of the contemporaries. Financial data in the prices of government bonds give the impression that the war was a surprise to the people who had the biggest incentive to anticipate it -- the financiers in the City of London. Until early July 1914, bond prices indicated decline in risk for investors, volatility was also low. These levels held until the last week of July.

The Times, July 22 (3 weeks after the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo) was concerned with the Ulster crisis, same from The Economist from its July 24th edition. Only on August 1st, after Austria's declaration of war in July 28th, did The Economist write about the "collapse of prices, produced […] by the fear of a war between some of the great powers of Europe".

On July 30th, consol (perpetual bond) prices fell 7%, French debt by 6%, and German bonds by 4%, Russia and Austria by about 8%. These were by no means unprecedented market movements. After that events developed swiftly, after the weekend the markets were already closed. On July 31, The Economist wrote that the City only "saw the meaning of war in a flash".

= Fault Lines =

The ethnically pure nation state was a novelty, people of the continent lived in heterogeneous empires. In the eyes of political nationalists these dinosaurs had to be consigned to past.

France provided the model of nation-building that Italy and Germany followed in the 1860s. Albeit these were imperfect nation states: to Sicilians the north felt foreign, and many Germans lived outside Bismarck's new Reich.

Ottoman Empire was retreating from the Balkans. Russia's pan-slavists were incensed by the Austrian's annexation of Bosnia. For the local nationalists, it no longer sufficed to acquire foreign territory, now people also had to move. It was in some cases spontaneous -- in the case of Macedonia, Muslims, Bulgarians, and Greeks fled in opposing directions. Sometimes populations were deliberately expelled -- after Turkey's defeat it was agreed that 48000 Turks would move one way and 46000 Bulgarians the other across the new border. This example was ominous for the many multi-enthnic communities of Western and Central Europe.

Similarly to the glacial grind of tectonic fault lines Ferguson finds the European empires of early 20th century to be a kind of geopolitical tectonic plates.

= Interwar period =

The events between the two wars were shaped mainly by two factors.

First were the ethnic tensions brought up by the clash of the newly established nation state's borders and the ethnic realities on the ground. Diverse and mixed settlements, result of centuries of loose empire structures, didn't easily fit into clear-cut nation state territories.

For example, "...prior Bukovina's incorporation in Romania, Germans and Jews attended the same schools and been members of the same cultural associations. Few towns in Eastern Europe had seen a more advanced German-Jewish symbiosis. Between the wars this harmony gradually vanished."

The second factor was the forming of fascist regimes.

At first, nearly all twenty-eight European countries established some form of representative government. By 1925 eight were dictatorships, by 1933 the number went up to thirteen, by 1938 their number increased to eighteen.

In many of these countries dictatorships transformed, to varying degrees, into fascist regimes. The reactionary conservative movements, supported by monarchy, the aristocracy, and the officer corps, united by the fear of socialism, had as their main objective the crushing the Left.

Only in Germany did fascism achieve the electoral success of the National Socialists. The statistics show that of all votes cast to extreme nationalist parties on the continent, 96 percent were German.

Other fascist movements depended on the ruling elites for support, the German Nazis didn't need that. They exhibited genuine dynamism by appealing to the intellectual elite, to the man with university degree, who signed with enthusiasm in the building of the Third Reich.

= The Second World War =

The biggest surprise was the fall of France. To prevent anything of the kind of the First World War from repeating France built the fortified Maginot Line. It had enormous impact on the French psyche, "a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence". But it didn't hold! And the French fighting spirit crumbled, but there was more to French defeatism than this, "to many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for".

For Britain the Second World War was one of miscalculated timing. Had Britain attacked Germany in 1938 it would have overwhelmed the underdeveloped, albeit feverishly expanding, German army. But it didn't, it tried appeasement instead.

Nazi Germany was building the thousand year Reich, with the Germanic race destined to be the top dog. The Slavic nations of the east were to be completely annihilated, to free needed living space for the future rulers of the world. But for the nations of the west different policy was meted. For example, the Dutch were judged to be essentially Germanic. The French people were regarded as "worthy of life", there was no thought that France should cease to be France. Occupied Paris became the preferred destination for Wehrmacht and SS officers on leave.

= The Axis powers were doomed from the start =

A Second offensive in late 1941 brought the German army to the outskirts of Moscow. So hopeless was the Soviet position that the majority of the government was moved 500 miles East. A refrigerated railway car moved the embalmed body of Lenin to safety. On November 1st the front line was 40 miles away from the Red Square.

By the summer of 1942 the Germans took Crimea, they reached the banks of River Don and were pressing toward Volga. The swastika flew on the peak of Mount Elbruz. On the Balkans Greece fell. In Africa General Romel thrust into Egypt to reach 50 miles west of Alexandria. As one Russian official put it: "Paris, Vienna, Prague and Brussels had become provincial German cities."

By the middle of 1942 the Axis powers dominated so convincingly that to a casual observer the war was all but won. How on earth did they end up losing?!

Many historians explore "what if-s", mostly what if Hitler had focused to do things one by one instead of simultaneously -- take over the Mediterranean, focus the invasion of the Soviet Union into taking Moscow first, etc. All these alternatives are based on expert military opinion and none of them suggest a way in which the Axis powers could have overcome the economic odds of fighting the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union at the same time.

It is important to take into account that Germany, by taking over much of Europe's industrial base, narrowed the gap. In 1943, for example, transfers from France amounted to 8% of German GDP. Significant contributor was Czechoslovakia, Operation Barbarossa and the subsequent offensive captured more than half of the Soviet economic capacity. Captive labor accounted for 20% of the civilian force. Between 1941 and 1943 weapons production was tripled.

Yet it was nowhere near enough.

The Allies had vastly superior material resources. In 1940, combined GDP of Germany and Italy was 70% of that of Britain and France had together. With the entering of the United States the scales all but toppled over. Combined Allies GDP was twice that of the principal Axis powers in 1942. It was roughly three time as large in 1943, and the ratio continued to rise as the war went on. Between 1942 and 1944 the military spending of America alone was twice the size of Germany and Japan combined.

It is difficult to see how any strategic military decisions could have altered the odds.

And so much of the material and production lay beyond the reach of the Axis powers in the United States and East of the Urals in the Soviet Union.

One example of "had Hitler been fighting the war differently" is the possible success of the strategic objective of capturing Mesopotamian oil fields from the British. In August 5th, 1942, Hitler declared that "If we succeed there, the whole war will come to an end." But 70% of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, combined with just 7% from the whole of North Africa and the Gulf.

By April 1944 there were only 500 single-engine fighters left on the Eastern Front, facing around 13,000 Soviet aircraft.

At the time of D-Day, the Germans had barely 300 serviceable planes available to repel the invaders, against 12,000 on the British and American side.

In 1942 the era of the Blitzkrieg was over.

While the Axis powers might have been able to defeat Britain alone or even Britain and the Soviet Union combined, that is not the war they choose to fight. They challenged the combined forces of all three empires: the British, the Russian, and the American. It was an overwhelming combination.

Again, interesting indicator for the mood of the world present the prices of German debt that was traded in Switzerland. They plunged 39% when the war started, rallied during 1940, and stayed elevated until the end of Operation Barbarossa.

By the end the war had cost the lives of at least 5.2 million German soldiers -- 30% of all that were mobilized -- and more than 2.4 German civilians. More German soldiers lost their lives in the last twelve months of fighting than in the whole of the rest of the war.

= But there is more =

The book doesn't end with the Second World War, its chronicle continues until 1989. While the Great Powers didn't fight any more direct wars they waged many proxy wars in the decades between 1950 and 1990. Ferguson considers the entire time from 1914 to 1989 one uninterrupted continuum where unsolved problems from the first war were carried in the second and into all the other wars. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

=
I immensely enjoyed reading this book, enthusiastic 5 stars. show less

For many, World War II is the ultimate story of the West and its triumph over evil; however, Ferguson rather incongruously at first glance postulates the bloody 20th Century as the decline of the West. This is not an easy thesis to digest but Ferguson attempts to prove his point by examining the racial theories of the 20th Century. He seeks to avoid common explanations that have arisen from Marxism, economic determinism, and popular histories of the period. Accumulating a massive amount of data, Ferguson notes that the period fostered better health, longevity, but also created a world where business interests and bloated, powerful governments were needed to manage their globe-encircling economies. The upshot of all this development is show more volatility. Volatility engenders conflict.

Ferguson has a detailed and involved thesis that may get buried in the mass of detail he has accumulated. It is however worth a serious read since he is offering an opposing and stimulating alternative to the ordinary understanding that the West progressively dominated the world increasingly throughout the 20th Century. show less

This is a very good book indeed. I like the way that he writes, and clearly builds up the entire momentum of events leading up to World War I and World War II. The book has clearly been researched very well indeed, and there are new perspectives to be found almost at every turn of the book.

This is a book that clearly has to be digested well, and has to be read slowly. It is heavy going, and you cannot decide to charge through the book in one week. It took me some time to get through it, and I will probably come back to the book again.

I cannot, however, agree with the blurb that it is a history of mankind's century of hate. While the last century may well be one that has seen the most hatred in all of man's history, the book focusses on show more the two major events - the world wars. It does not cover India's Partition, or the period of Hindu-Muslim strife that has followed, or other such events that have criss-crossed the world.

The end, where he draws inspiration from HG Wells book "The War of the Worlds", is masterful. It is a reminder to me, to buy that book as well.. show less

Wanna bring someone down—give them this big guy. A two-day read chronicling last century’s continuous violence; on big and small scales; from bayonets and billy-clubs to ten-ton, air-dropped terror; with a viciousness that overwhelms all other sentiments; lead by neighbors turned thug and condoned by others with eyes shut and pretending they are keeping their noses clean.

Ferguson blames the 20th century killing spree on three things (see intro, page xli) driven by change from multi-ethnic empires into attempts for race-pure nation states. If you think we live in happy la-la land read this and think about how to keep century 21 from taking the same route.

The War of the World is a massive undertaking, Ferguson's attempt to determine why the twentieth century was both the world's bloodiest even though it fostered the most advances in quality of life. In an enormous synthesis of hundreds of scholarly works and primary sources, Ferguson takes his reader on a grand tour of the earth from before the First World War and takes it to 9/11. The themes he deduces from his analysis of all this material can be simmered down to two. (1) The amazing, breakneck-paced advances in the technological and business world, the market, which fostered better health, longevity, and the like also created a world where business interests and bloated, powerful governments were needed to manage the globe-encircling show more economies - in short, technology and bureaucracy engendered the rise of totalitarianism, sort of a mechanized absolutism that Louis XIV or Catherine the Great could only dream of. (2) The breakdown of multi-ethnic empires, which, Ferguson contends, tended to promote peace between ethnic minorities, coupled with the concomitant economic disruptions during their break-ups led to ethnic violence and genocide. Usually this was preceded by significant intermarriage between members of ethnic groups (often majority-minority pairings) and social integration into the larger society.

You put these two things together and you get volatility - to say the least. What is the result of this? The West is losing to the East - and by East he means specifically China, Japan, and the Middle East, but mainly China. The subtitle to the American edition is "Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West." He gets the point across that the West ain't what it used to be, but not as clear in proving, to me at least, that this means the East will win. Ferguson, who could be called a historian of empires, if anything, I'm sure sees similarities between nineteenth-century British subsidization of the US economy and twentieth-century subsidization of China's. This is a cause for concern. The decline of Western birthrates, the economic problems that will come upon an aging, declining Europe full of lazy socialists will lead to economic and then social anarchy. Ethnic violence (Europe is still fractured by ethnicity and now full of Muslims of all races and cultures) will likely ensue. What does this all mean? Who knows. Ferguson sees the twentieth-century as one big ongoing war, at least until 1953 and the end of the Korean Conflict (saying this wasn't really like the Cold War conflicts that followed). His assessment that the West really didn't win the Second World War is convincing - it's hard to say the good guys won and the bad guys lost when one of the "good guys" was Stalin. That and even the UK and US, in my opinion the two greatest and most benevolent nations (empires) in the history of the world, resorted to what could be called war crimes (Dresden, Tokyo, etc. - ask Curtis LeMay).

But perhaps I am saying too much about this book. More generally: the content is wonderful; Ferguson's writing is clear, lucid, and engaging; new ways to look at things and intriguing bits of trivia pop up left and right. I recommend this book for any historian, especially those interested in the two named world wars. Some problems. Ferguson's thesis is a bit lost in all the fun, and perhaps unproven by the end of it all. His epilogue does not reiterate his introduction, but gives an incomplete history of the Cold War. Naturally, though he begrudgingly (and perhaps insultingly) mentions Thatcher (Ferguson is a Scot), he fails to mention Reagan and his impact on ending the Cold War. No biggie. He contends that the so-called Cold War was, in fact, nothing but inter-ethnic conflict under a different rubric as the European empires withdrew from their colonies. Unfortunately, he doesn't dwell on this enough to prove his point. His post-1989 examples too are given short shrift, and, lastly, he can't really place Islamic terrorism in his mold.

To finish, the content footnotes (using *, †, and ‡) are neat and informative but the small-print, back of the book, "354 'marriage...' This Book" style endnotes is annoying. I hate this new-fangled style of notes that popular presses seem to be adopting. But what can I do, being a lowly history Ph.D. student? show less