Musing: How Can Democracies Choose to Go to War Against Each Other?

I was watching a presentation by Hew Strachan, the historian best known for his work on World War I, who suggested that that war, which killed more English, more French, and more Italian soldiers than World War II did not seem to him to have been avoidable. In each of the major powers there was a sufficiently developed democracy that the war had to be sold to the population, not simply ordered by a ruling elite. Strachan felt that in each country, even when the full horror of the war was recognized, the majority of the population believed that war had to be prosecuted to its ultimate conclusion. President Wilson's offer to broker a peace agreement was refused because the major participants felt that they were fighting for fundamental principles. Strachan also feels that many of the participants felt that the war had indeed achieved their objectives when it was finished, making the efforts of the leaders of the winning powers to achieve a lasting peace ultimately unsuccessful. It was only after the butchery of World War II that the nations were able to work out a longer lasting liberal system to promote peace.

In retrospect it seems hard to understand how educated populations would fail to recognize that the current situation was attainable and better than the pre war situation, and not only fail in that realization but feel that millions of deaths and the destruction of economies was justified to protect the ex anti situation. I think Strachan was arguing that different nations felt that they had irreconcilable differences not because they reasoned differently from the same basic postulates, but rather that they reasoned similarly from different basic values.

Perhaps it would have been better had the nations been willing to challenge their various basic values. Strachan points out that we can barely understand why these countries felt they had to go to war ninety years later, because our values are so different than those at the end of the Victorian era.