The Great War

2014 marks 100 years since the start of the First World War, a war whose sole aim was mastery over the planet. India, being... a British colony, became a part of the war and got sucked into what was essentially a European war, born out of European rivalries. However, the world we live in today is in many ways a legacy of that same war, writes Salil Misra.

Twentieth century was a century of unresolvable contradictions. At one level, it brought an era of hope and optimism. The modern science and technology brought limitless possibilities of growth and progress.

New sources of energy, electrification, journey into the air bode well for the future. It appeared that happiness and prosperity were no longer distant dreams but perfectly realisable goals, well within human grasp.

A new and hopeful era seemed to be dawning for all of humanity. It was quite natural for any perceptive observer at the beginning of the century to feel very optimistic about the future.

Curiously enough, it was also a century of unprecedented destruction and horror. More people were killed in the 20th century through human design than ever before. It is estimated that the 20th century experienced around 250 wars and 110 million deaths in wars, genocides and other ethnic conflicts.

This was over one-fifth of the entire population of the world at the beginning of the 19th century. People died not because of hunger and deprivation, as was the case in previous centuries, but because of hatred, both ethnic and ideological.

The World War I actually epitomises this contradiction. It happened in Europe, the most prosperous zone of the world, and between countries that considered themselves to be the harbingers of modernity and civilisation. The countries that promised to emancipate humanity from medieval barbarism indulged in the most heinous and barbaric acts of violence against each other. Is there an explanation for this anomaly?

The 18th and 19th centuries altered the profile of the world in fundamental, profound and irreversible ways. A few small countries of Europe acquired unprecedented wealth and prosperity. The process started in England from the last quarter of the 18th century and soon spread to other parts of Europe.

Curiously enough, the new affluence, acquired through industrialisation, also necessitated conquests and domination over the rest of the world. It appeared that the rapid pace of industrialisation could be sustained only if the rest of the world was brought under European control. Thus began a process, generically called imperialism and colonialism, in which countries of Asia and Africa were brought under the political control of European countries.

It was, therefore, no surprise that the leading industrial countries were also the leading imperialist powers, intoxicated by a great desire for more and more expansion. Each power wanted to expand but the earth was not big enough to accommodate all their expansionist ambitions. This inevitably brought them to the brink of conflict with each other. Each superpower feared the other, and was feared by the other. Each threatened the other, and was threatened by the other.

These mutual threats also increased the insecurities among the European superpowers. The world witnessed the curious feature of the richest and the most powerful countries also being the most insecure. More wealth and power only brought more insecurity for Europe.


Interestingly, these insecurities did not come from outside Europe, but from each other. Imperialist powers clashed with each other primarily over colonies — Russia and Japan over China, France and Germany over Morocco, all the superpowers over the Balkans. Each power wanted to protect its colonial possessions and encroach on the colonies of others. Such was the greed for colonies that, by the end of the 19th century, hardly any country remained independent outside Europe and Americas.

Struggle for supremacy

This rivalry for a mastery over the planet created new fears, threats and mistrust. All the superpowers coped with the new challenge in exactly identical ways. Each one piled up weapons and created alliances. One inevitable consequence was the growth of a mammoth armament industry.

All European countries accumulated tanks, submarines, aircrafts. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in a letter to his daughter Indira, written from jail in 1933: “What a terrible thing is this armament industry which lives by the death of others, and which does not hesitate to encourage and bring about the horrors of war so that it may make profit out of it! This industry helped to some extent to hasten the war of 1914. Even today, it is playing the same game.” A large number of war industries developed in European countries. Quite rightly, these corporate houses were called the “merchants of death”.


The other natural thing to be done in a climate of insecurity was to forge alliances against one’s rivals and enemies. Japan feared Russia; Germany felt hemmed in by Russia in the East and France in the West; both England and France felt threatened by Germany’s expansionist drives. As a result of these mutual fears and suspicions, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan and Turkey formed a big alliance. Predictably enough, France, Russia and England formed another alliance against the German alliance.

The beginning of the 20th century thus saw Europe divided into two camps, with plenty of arms and ammunition with each camp. This was a situation tailor-made for a war. All it needed was a spark. That spark was provided in July 1914, exactly a hundred years ago, when the prince of Austria paid an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, under Austrian control, and was killed by a nationalist from nearby Serbia, who wanted to drive out the Austrians from the region.

The subsequent events followed a Domino effect. Austria declared war on Serbia; Russia felt a threat to its position from Austria and declared war on Austria; Germany lived up to its alliance with Austria and declared war on Russia; France felt threatened by Germany and wanted to prevent it from defeating Russia and becoming all powerful; England lived up to its alliance with France and declared war on Germany. Europe was at war.

Costly conflict

This was the most unusual and remarkable war, different from any other war fought till then. It was the first war fought on land, water and air. Along with the army, navy and air force were also put into operation. This was also not a war fought among soldiers, but the entire populations were mobilised into it.

All the wars fought earlier used to be ‘limited wars’ fought between two countries for limited ends. The First World War, by contrast, was a ‘Total War’ in which the rival country, its economy and people, all became the targets. The aim of Total War was not just the defeat of the rival army, but the economic and political destruction of the rival country. Massacre of civilian populations and annihilation of the rival country became a part of this warfare. This eventually culminated in the creation of nuclear weapons with a capacity for infinite destruction.

This was primarily a European war fought on the Eastern and the Western front. But it became a world war because of the occupation of the world by Europe. India, being a British colony, became a part of the war. And so India got sucked into what was essentially a European war, born out of European rivalries. Indian men and resources were mobilised. All the essential commodities, from food to other items, were channelised for the requirements of the War.

This created food scarcity and a steep rise in prices. The peasants, workers and middle classes all suffered by it. Large numbers of people were forced to put up with deprivations and hardships on account of a war which was not theirs. Discontent grew. This discontent against the British fed into Indian nationalism. An extremely active and surcharged Indian nationalism became a major political force in subsequent decades and eventually culminated in Indian freedom in 1947.

When the War ended in 1918, after killing 10 million soldiers and roughly the same number of civilian population, the world had changed irreversibly in many ways. Without solving any of the old problems for which it was fought, the War created some new ones. The 20th century prior to War had inherited six major superpowers, each with a similar agenda of global domination. Four European powers — England, France, Russia and Germany, and two non-European ones — USA and Japan nursed the ambition of global domination.


The War, without changing this basic scenario, reconfigured these six powers into three. Prior to the War, there were six major superpowers divided into two blocks. After the War, however, Europe got divided into three major blocs based on different conceptions of politics, economy, statehood and ideology.

There was the liberal-democratic bloc, led by USA, England and France, committed to democracy in politics, capitalism in economy and liberalism in statehood. As against this there was the Socialist bloc, created by the Socialist Revolution in Russia in 1917. A 19th century Socialist vision of human emancipation was now backed up by State power.

It combined a Socialist economy based on planning, with an authoritarian polity. Then there was the Fascist bloc, represented by Germany, Italy and in some ways Japan, committed to capitalism, but fiercely totalitarian in politics and bent upon subordinating all the institutions of society to a single point of authority. For the first time in human history, the entire world came under the threat of a Fascist takeover.

Domination matters

All the three powers, equidistant from each other, had a very similar agenda of bringing the whole world within their own political-ideological domination. In some ways, it was a situation very similar to the pre-War one. The mutual suspicion and a passion for global domination remained as before. What, however, changed was the internal configuration of the major actors. Even the strategies of coping with the situation remained the same.

All the three powers prepared for the war by piling up stock of weapons of war, deadlier than before, and looked for possible allies for guarantee of support in the eventuality of war. To settle the issue, two of the three — liberal-democratic and the Socialist blocs — got into an alliance against the Fascist bloc.

This led to the Second World War (1938-45). This war was even more horrific and destructive than the first. It killed around 40 to 55 million people, both soldiers and civilians. Another 35 million were wounded and three million remained missing. This was the price paid for saving the world from the horrors of Fascism.

The War ended in 1945, resulting in the decimation of the Fascist bloc and its elimination as a serious contender for global domination. With the elimination of the Fascist bloc, the alliance of the liberal-democratic and the Socialist blocs also came to an end. Evidently, the alliance, like all the others in the 20th century, was not based on any programmatic unity, but was created mainly because of the threatening presence of the common enemy. With the elimination of the Fascist bloc, the alliance of the other two also broke down.

So the net result of the Second World War was a continuation of the agenda of the 1st war with a reduction in the number of stakeholders for global domination from three to two. The heightened suspicion of each other and the agenda of global domination remained as before.

It was nothing short of an irony that in the most civilised and developed pockets of the world, war was seen as the only way in which major disputes could be settled. Equally strangely, the two wars had failed in settling the dispute; they had only succeeded in reducing the number of stakeholders from six to three to finally two. Happily for humanity and for the world, the two remaining superpowers — USA and the USSR — woke up to the untold miseries and horrors of the war.

This time they decided to settle the issue of global domination, not through a hot war but a Cold War based on international diplomacy, proxy war, manoeuvres and ideological rivalry. Direct warfare between the combatants was avoided. The Cold War was all about a clash of rival ideologies, worldviews, and blueprints of how to organise and run human societies. The main combatants in the Cold War — USA and USSR — represented alternative and rival ways of organising political and economic life in modern world.

The Cold War ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, leaving no doubt about the identity of the winner in the century-long race for global domination. The post-1991 world came to be called the uni-polar world with USA as its leader. The First World War had inherited a multi-polar world with many actors vying for domination. The long chain of events initiated in 1914 kept converting the world from multi-polar to tri-polar to bi-polar to eventually a uni-polar world. That is the world we live in today.

It is a product of the long chain of events initiated at the beginning of the century by the First World War. Strangely enough, the elimination of all rivals has still not removed the insecurity that plagued all the contestants in the race for global domination. USA, the sole superpower — also called the hyper power — is as insecure now as it was in the past. The combination of a sole superpower, without any recognised rivals, but with all the fears and insecurities, cannot possibly be good news for peace in the world. 

Grappling with reality

The great race for global domination took its toll on the world and brought it to the edge of total destruction many times. Even though the race is over and the identity of the winner is well established, it has not brought peace to the world and the dreadful possibility of total destruction still looms large.

The world we live in today is in many ways a legacy of the Fist World War. It is much more affluent and integrated compared to the previous centuries. It also has a well-defined, undisputed domination profile. It is dominated by the USA. The 20th century has been rightly called an American century. By most yardsticks, the new world would appear superior to the old world.

There is, however, one way in which the old world would look cosier and more comforting. The possibility of the arrival of doomsday, or a total annihilation of the planet, was only a collective nightmare expressed often in religions and in literature.
Everybody knew that this total annihilation was ‘fiction’ and that mankind was not powerful enough to completely destroy itself and the planet. That great fiction or the ‘myth’ has now become a concrete possibility. The man-made total destruction is an eminent possibility. We do possess the will and the technology to annihilate ourselves.

Hence our optimism about our collective future should at best remain muted and guarded. There is little evidence to suggest that the human species will be guided by the instinct of collective survival and will not destroy themselves. The greatest threat to the world is not from any natural disasters, but from man-made ones.

The arrival of doomsday, or maha pralay or qayamat is not just a mythical construction, but a very real possibility. What is possible can always happen or be carried out deliberately. The First World War needs to be remembered, above all, for being the carrier of this bad news for all of humankind.

(The writer teaches history at Ambedkar University Delhi, and is thankful to Ananya Vidyarthi for many useful suggestions)