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

earthquakes and forest fires are completely undiscriminating about the scale of the event. Most events will be on the smaller side, of course, but you don’t need special causes to get a huge one: an event of any size can happen literally at any time.
    A critical system is one that is inherently unstable, and locks in more and more instabilities as time goes by. Think of the accumulating stresses along a fault line between two continental plates, or the accumulation of inflammable debris on the forest floor. From time to time there will be earthquakes and forest fires, but most of them will be small. The Power Law says that any one of them could be the Big One.
    To know if a particular class of events is subject to the Power Law, you just graph the scale of the events against their frequency. If it turns out to be a straight relationship where doubling the size of the event decreases the frequency by half—or makes it four times less likely, or sixteen times, or any other power of two—then you are dealing with a critical system, and you can forget about seeking major causes for bigger events. A random pebble is sixteen times less likely to cause a huge avalanche than a little one, but it
can
cause either.
    British physicist Lewis Richardson was the first to notice that wars are subject to the Power Law, and it was confirmed in 1983 by Jack Levy, currently Board of Governors’ Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, in a massive study entitled
War in the Modern Great Power
System
, which spanned the entire period 1495–1975. If you measure the size of every war by its casualties, then doubling the size exactly halves the frequency. This means that great wars do not need great causes. Once sufficient strains have accumulated in a critical system, a world war can strike out of a clear blue sky, as it did in the summer of 1914.
    All that stuff you read in conventional accounts of 1914 about the interlocking military alliances and the even more intricately interlinked railway timetables that delivered millions of mobilized troops to the frontiers of the great powers is perfectly true: the great powers really had built a system that was bound to fail catastrophically sooner or later. But those were precisely the instabilities and strains that made international politics into a critical system in the early twentieth century. The question of whether we still live in a critical system today will have to wait until later.

CHAPTER 2
A LONG WAY FROM HOME
    P ARIS , O NTARIO WAS, IN 1914, A S TEPHEN L EACOCK SORT OF TOWN: credulous, not too wise in the ways of the world, but enthusiastic and eager to please. It would be wrong to say that the news of the outbreak of war that August struck Paris like a bolt from the blue. That would imply threat. Rather the war in Europe (not yet the Great War, let alone the First World War) came as a welcome diversion at the end of the summer.
    A crowd began to mill around Grand River Street. Prominent citizens trumpeted their considered opinions. One said: “The war will be over within three months. The Russians will roll in from the east and the British and French from the west, and they’ll meet in Berlin before Christmas.” The crowd vigorously cheered his perspicacity.
    Then the Citizens’ Band formed up in front of the fire hall and began to play martial music. The crowd grew larger. It sang “The Maple Leaf Forever,” “Rule Britannia,” and “God Save the King.” Members of the Scout Bugle Band ran home for their bugles. As Bugler Grenville Whitby rushed from the house, his father said: “War’s a serious thing. You shouldn’t be out tonight making a noise.” Grenville heedlessly ran down the street, blowingshrill blasts. The crowd formed itself into a procession, and led by blaring bugles and thumping drums, paraded along William, Willow and Dundas Streets. Torches smoked and flared, and in their light, eyes gleamed with exultation.
    Donald A. Smith,
At the Forks