In a recent review of Christopher Clark’s work on the origins of WWI (The Sleepwalkers), Perry Anderson addresses the issue of historical necessity versus the freedom of existential contingency[i]. He points out that that Clark’s approach concentrates on the issue of how the war began, and in this endeavour the historian has provided an excellent account of the thinking, decisions, and actions of all the key participants that led to the war. The scope and detail of Clark’s analysis is truly impressive. On the other hand, one should always be wary of any exorbitant praise by Anderson, as the trenchant critique often follows quickly.
Anderson’s critique is that the concentration on the how issue is at the cost of the why, that is the actual origins of the war. In particular, he suggests that Clark has come under “the illusion of immediacy”. Decisions may look contingent but still be influenced by the general environment that is beyond the control (even awareness) of the actors involved. The balance between contingency and necessity is an open question depending on the particular historical event under consideration. But for Anderson, Clark’s work overstates the extent of contingency. And in this respect Anderson sets out a number of pertinent questions: could the social order of Europe have shed their elites, their habits, their outlook? The Great Powers have renounced their imperial objectives? Diplomats forsworn military alliances? Economic development become more even? Overseas possessions more equally distributed?
These are telling questions with respect to the origins of WW1. Does this entail, Anderson goes on to ask, that war could not have been avoided? His answer is that a war was likely sooner or later because of three considerations: the failure of various peace initiatives (The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907), the conviction of many politicians, and I would add army chief of staffs) that war was inevitably, and, finally, the escalating tempo and sequences of international crises.
What is worrying about these arguments are how closely they resemble present events. Over the last few years, we have witnessed not only a myriad of economic and social crises, but and increasing number of armed conflicts. Various attempts to address the latter, especially with respect to the Ukraine and Palestine but in many other conflicts around the world, notwithstanding Trump’s claim at the U.N. assembly to have solved seven wars, have failed to bring about peaceful and acceptable outcomes. Within Europe we have seen the strategy of ReArm Europe, and an increasing number of political leaders, as well as policy strategists, contemplating the likelihood of a wider war.
What will prevail this time, contingency or necessity? One of the worrying factors is the lack of a world hegemon. According to analysts like Giovanni Arrighi, Richard Beck and John Meisheimer, the existence of a hegemon relies to some extent on their ability to convince that power is in some sense working for the common good, that it has some kind of a moral core. Not all will accept this basis, but it must have some credence for enough actors to be viable. The US has, probably since the Iraq war (people will probably differ on the origins of this process), lost its status of a hegemon. In the Middle East, for instance, Meisheimer argues that the strategy of the US, together with Israel, seems to be to have economically dependent states, such as Egypt and Jordan, on the one hand and on the other hand, make sure that other states, such as Syria, Lebanon and Libya are unable to function as states. But if we ignore European leaders, who seem to accept more or less anything from the US – including dismantling their welfare states in favour of “security”, the rest of the word is under no illusion that this consists of hegemony rather than pure coercion.
The origins of WWI were fermented at a time when Britain’s role as a hegemon was being questioned, and before the establishment of the role of the US in the post WWII economic and political order. Nobody on the Left is likely to support the existence of a hegemon as indispensable for world peace. But the lack of one, without the existence of alternative powerful international bodies for issues of international security, but also economic, environmental, and social wellbeing, is a matter for concern. In this context new wars are not necessary but become increasingly likely.
The more so since, as I have argued over the past few years, there is a lack of hegemony with respect to appropriate social and economic models. More specifically, from the far right to the centre-left there does not seem to be a model that combines the status quo of economic and political power with addressing the key issues such as inequalities and the climate crisis. The political instability that has resulted in Biden leading to Trump, and now Starmer leading to Farage, or the failure of Macron to establish a stable government is evidence that we are very far from the type of two-thirds society that was promised in earlier times. It is indicative that not only has Macron’s more “business-friendly” approach failed to deliver the goods in terms of growth, but he was unwilling to accept a compromise that would have entailed the imposition of a 2% tax on these with wealth above 100 million euros. Underlying these phenomena is the fact that neoliberalism has been met with a near fatal ideological blow as profits no longer lead to increasing investment, and what increases in productivity there are do not lead to any substantial increase in real wages.
Nor will ReArm Europe change these relationships. In part, because it will be at the cost of spending on social and environmental needs. And in part because military spending will have little diffusion with respect to technology and skills in sectors such as green technology and the economics of care which are crucial to the lives of ordinary Europeans but are of low profitability and interest to the private sector. Trump’s strategy, and others of the far right are unlikely to fair any better. I don’t think that tariffs, on their own, can reindustrialize the US economy and are likely to increase only marginally the share of workers in full time manufacturing jobs. Nor will the tariff revenues be enough to compensate his political base – indeed the cuts to health spending are going in the opposite direction. The rise of authoritarianism, which is, of course not a Trump monopoly, is in part a response to the lack of progress on the social front. But whether in the long run this leads to a stable -if autocratic – settlement must remain in doubt.
For the Left, as I have argued in my recent book, there remains a window of opportunity exactly because its political rivals do not have an answer to why governments of all stripes keep failing. The climate crisis opens up the potential for a left response to the issues of production/consumption, redistribution and democracy. But there is one caveat. Policies on all three fronts need to be presented in a clear and coherent manner. But since many of the problems that any alternative seeks to address – inequality, ecological degradation, poor public services etc. – are the result of an extraordinary shift of power over the last few decades from working people to capital, from the public to the private sector, the dominance of finance, fossil fuel firms and now Big Tech, it seems unlikely that a programme to deal with the underlying problems is viable without a reverse, and of similar size, shift in power.
[i] ‘Pathbreakers High and Low’, New Left Review, 146, Mar-April 2024