Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 by Gwynne Dyer Read Free Book Online

that point it took a deliberate decision by only one country to attack a neighbour, or even just a bluff that misfired, to start the slide into another general war. It would end in another treaty that readjusted everybody’s “prestige” (in plain English, the ability to frighten their rivals) and changed a good many borders.
    This system was well understood and generally accepted by educated Europeans down to the early nineteenth century. They lived, as Walpole said in 1745, amid “the fluctuations of perpetual contest.” Yet by 1914 almost everybody had forgotten how the system worked. There had not been another world war on schedule in the mid-nineteenth century, so they saw themselves as the heirs of the “long peace” that had lasted, by then, just one year short of a century.
    History does not run on rails. The mid-nineteenth-century world war almost happened several times, but it never quite got going. Instead, there was a series of smaller wars in which the great powers fought each other not all at once, but in rotation: Britain, France and Turkey against Russia in 1854, France and Italy against Austria in 1859, Austria against Germany in 1866, and Germany against France in 1870. They were quite big wars, but mostly quite short—which may partly explain whythey didn’t expand into a general war: there just wasn’t enough time. It may also have helped that Britain was so powerful compared to all the others (at mid-century half the industrial capacity of the entire world was in the United Kingdom), and so safe from its rivals because of its complete domination of the seas, that it simply didn’t feel the need to become involved in most of these wars. Whatever their outcomes, Britain would remain the undisputed superpower.
    This series of short European wars, a string of firecrackers rather than a single great explosion, nevertheless had the cumulative political effect of a world war. It was in these wars that the Austrian empire ceased to be a power of the first rank, and the newly united German empire became one. Italy emerged as a power (albeit a minor one), and France dropped down a peg. Various territories changed hands: Venetia, Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Romania, among others. Political realities having been adjusted to conform to the actual strength of the various great powers, stability then returned to the system for around another half century. But not forever, of course.
    In the last decades of the nineteenth century Germany grew very fast, Russia grew even faster (although from a lower starting point) and British power went into relative decline. By the beginning of the twentieth century, world war was in the air again, and the alliances that would fight it were solidifying fast. Between 1898 and 1914, a crisis that brought Europe to the brink occurred almost every other year.
    If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damn silly thing in the Balkans.
    Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1898
    There is a grand old tradition, when writing about the outbreak of the First World War, to start with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a nineteen-year-old Serbian called Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in June 1914, and follow the escalating diplomaticcrisis of the following month in simulated astonishment at how such a huge event could have grown from such a little cause. The writer can then, according to taste, castigate the statesmen and generals of the time impartially for letting this needless calamity happen, or try to fasten the blame on some specific player (usually Germany, if you’re writing in English or French) who allegedly
wanted
the war and made it happen. People want a big disaster to have a big cause and a recognizable villain. But if you really want to understand how such a great war grew out of such petty events, you would do better to consider the Power Law.
    The Power Law describes how so-called critical systems like those that produce