Musing about The Proud Tower

I have been reading The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman. The author does an interesting job of showing how an economic and technological revolution was creating pressures that would lead to the world wars that would bring down the ruling classes in a European catastrophe.

The British government was run by a landed aristocracy, the German and Russian monarchies also by ancient aristocracies, and the French government led by people who felt that embarrassing the Army by reversing its gross injustice to Dreyfus would be bad policy were it to diminish the prestige of the military. In all cases there were oppositions and indeed peaceniks, but their power was contained. The United States also was extending its power with the Spanish American War, holding Caribbean and Phillipines Islands, and under the sway of Mahen beginning to build an imperial navy.

It is not surprising that there were people in all these countries who felt that military aggression was a useful policy for their nation; we have plenty of those blockheads even now in the United States. It does seem surprising that people in so many countries felt that their nation could maintain or achieve military superiority. But even more surprising is the fact that in so many countries the pro-war factions held dominant national power.

I suppose that is the real lesson that Tuchman is teaching. The ruling classes were still acultured to a militarism that had once brought their ancestors to power, and had not yet been disastrously destructive for many of their countries. The militarism was increasingly dangerous in a world in which military technology had advanced greatly, and nation states had developed the institutional power to wage wars of unprecedented destructiveness. The result would be the catastrophe of World War I, followed by the even more catastrophic World War II.

It seems likely that it has not escaped Tuchman's notice that our military technology has advanced greatly in the last century, our economic power and governmental institutions are capable of conducting even more destructive wars, and our political leadership continues to exhibit a worrisome tendency to live by old and outmoded cultural ideals.