The invention of peace

There had been 40 years of peace before the First World War -- why did it happen then?

There had been overall peace for 100 years, since 1815. What was distinctive about that period was that the European powers had emerged from the Napoleonic wars with a kind of balance between them. There was an international -- or, rather, supranational -- class of aristocrats who no longer were warriors, who had become wealthy and prosperous. Through diplomacy and family contacts, they were able to preserve a kind of order -- the Concert of Europe -- which combined and cooperated in solving crises and avoiding war. At this time, there was a desire to avoid war not because people liked peace but because if there was going to be another major war, it was likely there was going to be another major revolution. Peace was in the interests of the ruling classes of all the European states.

How was this balance disturbed?

With the unification of Germany. The pattern was disrupted at the same time as major changes in society took effect: The agrarian society dominated by great landowners of the 18th century was being transformed into the industrial global bourgeois society of the 20th century. It made the development of this kind of ferocious, competitive nationalism much easier to establish and made these uprooted peoples more willing to follow new nationalistic concepts and leadership.

Fascism seems to be the extreme case of the idea that the state cannot exist without domination and war. Was it inevitable that totalitarianism would come about, or do you think Germany was a special situation?

As a historian, I have to say that nothing is inevitable. The Germans were fighting the British for world dominance. There was a degree of demand on the British and German populations to be loyal, to obey what the state was asking for and not to dissent from what was happening. In Britain, there was a strong democratic counterpressure which prevented that ever from developing. But in Germany, there was not that democratic counterpressure. The pressure for national loyalty and subordination to a state fitted in very much with the pattern of German historical development.

What makes the Balkans unique and how does that relate to the trend toward national self-determination?

With self-determination, you first have to ask the question, Who is the self which is determining itself? Over a long period of time in Western Europe, by the beginning of the 20th century, there had been a gradual development of national self-consciousness. The Brits knew who they were and the French knew who they were and the Germans knew who they were and the Italians knew who they were and the Spanish knew who they were -- though there were complications with the Irish and the Basques and others.

In Eastern Europe, however, ever since the 14th century, for 500 years, there had been a Turkish hegemony where everybody was equally ruled by these foreign conquerors. They had no opportunity to develop a concept of national self-consciousness. What did develop, however, was a concept of religious self-consciousness -- Christians protesting and rising up against the Muslim dominator. At the beginning of the 19th century, you saw three different focuses of religious resistance developing: one in Greece, one in Serbia and one in Bulgaria. Around these nuclei, national consciousness begins to develop.

When the Serbs and the Bulgarians begin to develop national self-consciousness, then their neighbors begin to realize they're not the same as those people, they speak a different language, they dress rather differently. They begin to think, "We're not Serbs, we're Croats" or "We're not Croats, we're Slovenes" or "We're not Slovenes, we're Albanians" or "We're not Albanians, we're Macedonians" and so on. The greater the degree of self-consciousness that develops, the greater the degree of consciousness of separation and distinction and difference.

Then, for various reasons, the great powers outside choose their clients and each becomes a protector of one of these groups. Therefore, the internecine quarrels in the Balkans spread to the major conflicts between the great powers. We have still not reached the stage when any overall consciousness of community has developed among the Balkan peoples. They're still much more conscious of their separation than they are of any kind of common interest, let alone common identity or common nationality.

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