Memorial Day (7): Patriotism and the Great War

One of the genuinely tragic features of the First World War was the failure of the European social-democratic parties to prevent it.  International congresses of the Second International, the umbrella organization for socialist parties, had agreed that they would all oppose an "imperialist war" waged by the ruling classes of their respective countries.  If the social democrats had actually implemented such a policy, they certainly could have made the war mobilizations in the summer of 1914 more difficult to carry out.

But when war came, that resolve gave way to the tribal drums of patriotic fervor and the deadly romance of war.

German historian Golo Mann describes the failure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), at the time the largest single party in the German Parliament.  It could hardly be said to be a genuine democratic parliament; it functioned under the Imperial system devised by Otto von Bismarck in the previous century.  But the Emperor (Kaiser) had to go to the parliament for war credits to conduct the war.  And the capitulation of the SPD on the war credits in August 1914 was the decisive vote.  Mann writes in Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1958) (my translation):

Critics later held up to the German Social Democrats their decision of August 1914 as betrayal.  That is easy to say in hindsight.  At the time, even the later Communist Karl Liebknecht cast his vote for the war credits.  He didn't like it; but he did it.  That was the situation, in Germany as in France.  The war could have been prevented through diplomacy, and that the German diplomacy was the worst that it could have been, we have seen.  It was the fault of German history and all that had a part in it, that a few little bunglers should have decided German foreign policy according to the own descretion.    One could no longer resist the storm of August 1914.  It went through the entire people, and the German workers who voted socialist also belonged to the people; they belonged to the people and to the state much more strongly than the old Marxist theory would have it.  That became clear now.  Fortune unites.  The war was certainly an emergency, but above all such an emergency that all of those affected happily supported.  The sorrow came  later; and only then did parties and classes again set themselves against one another.

Chris Hedges describes the powerful emotional appeal of nationalist enthusiasm in moments such as that, in his War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002).  The socialist parties before the First World War were by no means the first or the last to succumb to it while knowing better:

There is a frightening indifference and willful blindness, a desire to believe the nationalist myth because it brands those outside a nation or ethnic group with traits and vices that cannot be eradicated. Because they are the other, because they are not us, they are guilty. Such indifference, such acceptance of nationalist self-glorification, turns many into silent accomplices.

To those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed. The collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life. They can abandon even self-preservation in the desire to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted even at the expense of self-annihilation. Life in wartime becomes theater. All are actors. Leaders, against the backdrop of war, look heroic, noble. Pilots who bail out of planes shot down by the enemy and who make their way back home play cameo roles. The state, as we saw in the Persian Gulf War or Afghanistan, transforms war into a nightly television show. The generals, who are no more interested in candor than they were in Vietnam, have at least perfected the appearance of candor. And the press has usually been more than willing to play the dupe as long as the ratings are good.

... The world, as we see it in wartime, becomes high drama. It is romanticized. A moral purpose is infused into the trivial and the commonplace. And we, who yesterday felt maligned, alienated, and ignored, are part of a nation of self-appointed agents of the divine will. We await our chance to walk on stage.

Golo Mann may have overstated the case somewhat.  As he indicated with his comment on Karl Liebknecht, there was considerable resistance within the SPD to that course of action.  And the First World War was by no means supported on all sides with unwavering patriotic passions.  Including in the United States.

Conventional histories of Germany's entry into the First World War depict the early response of the general public as being a massive wave of national unity and soldarity.  But the actual historical record doesn't necessarily support that picture.  The 2000 collection of essays edited by hHistorian Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914 : Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany is one work challenging the legendary picture of the general popular enthusiasm for the war in Germany at the beginning.  There is considerable evidence that the great enthusiasm for the war was mainly among the wealthy, among middle-class students and among intellectuals, many of whom were notoriously eager to sign on to the Emperor's war.

But, as in all wars, there were plenty who were enthusiastic, including among the young who would bear the brunt of the actual combat.  As Hedges writes:

The prospect of war is exciting. Many young men, schooled in the notion that war is the ultimate definition of manhood, that only in war will they be tested and proven, that they can discover their worth as human beings in batde, willingly join the great enterprise. The admiration of the crowd, the high-blown rhetoric, the chance to achieve the glory of the previous generation, the ideal of nobility beckon us forward. And people, ironically, enjoy righteous indignation and an object upon which to unleash their anger. War usually starts with collective euphoria.

A euphoria that the warring governments are only too happy to promote.