Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. He has written or co-written a dozen books, including Rene Cassin et les droits de l’homme, co-authored with Antoine Prost, and The Great War in European Cultural History; he co-produced, co-wrote, and was the chief historian for the PBS Series, “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.” His interests include the remembrance of the Great War in the 20th century, the Armenian genocide, and British popular culture during the era of the Great War. On September 29, 2014, The Atlantic published a piece written by Winter, “How the Great War Shaped the World.” To celebrate Remembrance Day, The Politic sat down with Professor Winter to ask some follow-up questions to his Atlantic piece.
The Politic: Why do you think it’s important to commemorate this war around the world, and why does commemoration not feature prominently in American culture?
The commemoration of the First World War is the moment when the shock of mass death arrived to most, if not all, of the combatant countries. America didn’t suffer the mass death that was visited upon Britain or France or Germany or Russia or Turkey or Serbia or Austria-Hungary. The U.S. suffered a bloody nose, whereas these countries suffered a deep wound that has, to a degree, never healed.
Hence in all countries, including this one, the absence of ten million men is the centerpiece of commemoration. It’s about the lost generation. The American lost generation was small, and therefore not inscribed in family history in the same way as it was elsewhere – so commemoration is less central a social ritual of national identity than it is in Britain, for instance, or in France. And now even in Germany, now that the shadow of World War II has been lifted.
I don’t know where the threshold where death reaches a certain level where it becomes a ubiquitous part of family history, but whatever that level is – U.S. didn’t reach it, and almost all the other combatant countries did. It is the first time that conscript armies or volunteer armies had faced industrialized warfare – therefore the death toll is enormous. And what made it different is that half of those who died have no known graves. So the rituals are a way of finding sites to which people can go in towns, villages, and even with the Cenotaph here at Yale, when what could be called ‘traditional’ sites of remembrance aren’t there. There’s also the important note that deaths occurred abroad – those who were killed in combat. About half of men who were killed in American military service uniforms were killed by the Spanish flu. And lot of them died here – they never got over.
The combat fatalities in the U.S. – 50,000 – which is, you know, on edges of the war in Vietnam – represented the death toll of the French army simply for the month of August 1914. It’s enormously overshadowed, and I think that’s why. If it isn’t a wound in the national body politic, then it won’t be a moment that demands commemoration. There are people who do it, but it’s a marginal cultural phenomenon here, whereas it’s an absolutely central phenomenon in Europe, and in Australia and New Zealand and Canada, and to a degree, in South Africa, too.
The reason why it is necessary to commemorate is because the First World War opened the 20th century and we still live in its violent aftermath. But is also important to recognize that the key function of commemoration is to remember the dead and to remember those families who are defined by who wasn’t there.
The Politic: In your piece in The Atlantic, you write, “The contrast between American and European perceptions of the world order in the 20th and 21st centuries is incomprehensible without considering the catastrophe of 1914-18. Ever since, Europe has felt an underlying pessimism, a sense of danger and disorder that the United States hasn’t shared. Americans have continued to believe that progress is built into history. Most Europeans, other than Marxists, dropped this notion once the Great War began.”
Do you think that this collective pessimism has been counteracted by the reunification of Germany and the creation of the European Union?
Yes, there is a distinction between the American obsession with redemption – with good coming out of evil – and a European deep consciousness of the brutality of war. This European idea is something different; redemption is not what commemoration is about in Europe. But it is a moment today when we can see the substance of the European experiment to be a turn away from war, which I would call pacifist. And in the U.S., pacifism is a position that is both long-lived in the Protestant conscience – Quakers, and so on – and marginal politically.
It has a much deeper pull in Europe because of the loss of life in the two world wars. And the creation of the European Union was a direct response to that sentiment. The people who created it were veterans of the two world wars, and they were well aware of the fact that the First World War was a war to make it possible not to have the bloodshed recur. And unfortunately, the notion of ‘never again’ – that’s the commemorative message of the First World War – lasted for just 17 years. Hitler made it impossible for that project to continue.
So instead, in the Second World War and its aftermath, a series of institutions were constructed to allow for the notion of collective security to be located in an economic project. Basically, the European Union is a French idea of how to control German power. And when you put the two together, and disarm Germany, which is what happened, the European economies provide the substance of the European political terms. And that’s why I really don’t believe that the Euro is the representation of the European project. The cemeteries in France and Belgium and all over Italy – they’re the symbols of the European project.
The Politic: Do you think the U.S. still values redemption?
There’s a sanctity surrounding Abraham Lincoln, who said in the Gettysburg’s Address, “these dead shall not have died in vain” – that’s the redemptive mindset, that there must be something higher, which is, you know, the turning of these United States into the United States. The notion of a ‘more perfect union’ is the uplift that comes after the slaughter. My guess is that it’s still around. I noticed yesterday, while watching television that the tributes to serving soldiers were, to a degree, completely without irony or criticism. They were straight – that because of the men in uniforms, we have our freedoms, and so on. That kind of direct correlation between soldiers and freedom is not an European idea. The intermediary is the people, not the people in arms. There’s something different about the way that veterans are treated here rhetorically – not their treatment in hospitals, where they have valid grievances – than elsewhere. The language of admiration for the men in uniform is much, much deeper here than anywhere else I’ve ever been.
The Politic: In his speech at the 25th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev warned, “instead of becoming a leader of change in a global world, Europe has turned into an arena of political upheaval, of competition for spheres of influence, and finally of military conflict.” Do you think that conflicts, such as that in Ukraine, signal a return to a Great War mindset?
Gorbachev was describing a real possibility, but I don’t think it’s comparable at all to the First World War. And the reason is that the Warsaw Pact [a Cold War collective defense treaty among eight communist states in Eastern and Central Europe] doesn’t exist anymore. We’re seeing the resurgence of Russian nationalism in the aftermath of the enormous loss of power in the fall of Soviet Union and the ongoing Russian tradition of suspicion of Western invasion of its sphere of influence. So if the Ukraine is part of NATO, and NATO arms are located in Ukraine, you start to get very old memories of Russian suffering in prior invasions get transmuted into something that is more of a paranoia rather than a reality. But that paranoia is based on the reality, which was that the Soviet Union lost 20 million people in the Second World War. Any sense of encirclement is based upon a real story. Politicians can make mistakes and project the past onto the future, but the past is real, and it’s how you interpret the past that matters. One way to interpret this it is that the Soviet Union fought alongside Britain and the United States, so there should be a positive remembrance of the destruction of Nazi army, and without the Soviet Union, that couldn’t have happened.
I do agree that the break-up of Soviet bloc has created a capitalist success story in many parts of Eastern Europe, where the standard of living of the population is much higher than it used to be, and where traditional hostility to Russia, in Poland, for example, has a serious political meaning.The same true in the Baltic States, which were dominated for a century by Soviet power.And there’s a real problem of how to assuage the fears of Russian encirclement and humiliation – which may be much more outcomes of the Second World War than the First, because the invasion of Russia in the Second World War was so terrifying and so real. The fighting in Yalta went on long after Stalingrad. And we see stories of terrifying combat and partisan warfare that occurred in Odessa [site of a mass murder of Jews in the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1942] and Babi Yar [a ravine in Kiev, which was the site of massacres of Jews in, most notoriously in 1941] are other stories… It’s clear that the Second World War is alive there. So when people of my age, born during the Second World War or just after, see NATO coming to Ukraine, they begin to project their past onto the future
And that’s the difference between the Cold War, which was a real, potentially nuclear conflict – and this one, which is about restoring the pride of Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The Politic: You discuss that the First World War “changed the nature of war itself,” in part by “obliterating the distinction between civilian and military targets,” which can be seen in civilian bombings, the continuation of the naval blockade of Germany after the armistice, the Armenian genocide and internment camps.
But why do you think that this break is this in the ‘rules of war’ was so accepted by both sides? What was it about the war that legitimized this?
I think it was the scale of it…the near equivalent scale is the U.S. Civil War. If you can imagine the stories that came out of, and the real suffering they reflected, of Sherman’s march to the sea, that was cutting a swath through the civilian population, you can imagine the same notion that the army is just the cutting edge of a nation at war and the nation is the target. Then you can see that a person in factory, or even in the fields, is providing hardware, or something else, to soldiers, which makes them as central to the context of military conflict as the men in uniform.
The sheer scale of war and lethality of weapons – especially artillery – made it impossible to separate civilian and military targets. It was just too big to be contained in a war zone. The war zone became everywhere. Once that happens, then nobody is safe.
The Politic: How do you think the legacy of that legitimization of violence against civilians is playing out in modern warfare and conflicts?
Every time that Gaza is bombed or someone is killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict, or someone drives car onto a sidewalk and kills pedestrians, there is an echo of the First World War. Secondly, the use of poison gas in the Syrian war strikes me as the quintessential legacy of the First World War – using high-tech weaponry to destroy the base out of which political and military power comes. The notion that civilians are in the war is a function of the guerrilla wars that took place from, let’s say, 1945-on in Vietnam. Decolonization lasted until the 1960s, but they were very nasty conflicts that were embedded in civilian life.
When the Algerian uprising (1958-62), this was war in the casbah – right in the middle of Algiers, and there was no distinction whatsoever between killing French colonists and killing French soldiers on the National Liberation Front side – the de-colonizers. And there was no difference in the attitude of the French army towards the population of Muslims who were the sea through which the guerrillas swam.
There are so many instances now today where I think the damage done by the First World War was catastrophic for the limitation of the destruction that war now brings to very large parts of Africa that we don’t even talk about, and virtually all the time in the Middle East.
It is a function of the weaponry of war and of the high casualty rates that the possibility of controlling armed conflict through compromise diminishes. Once you get a million people killed on your side, you can’t accept anything other than total victory. Two million Germans died during the First World War; it’s not surprising that Adolf Hitler picked that up as his life’s work to revenge them.
The Politic: Looking at the effects of the First World War on the Middle East – do you think that the region has ever recovered from the way that imperial powers divided up the Middle East based on their own interests?
In the aftermath of the First World War, we see that the failure of the Ottoman Empire is amplified by the creation of failed states. And to a degree, I’m cynical enough to say that the British and French imperial powers wanted them to be failed states – they wanted them to be dependencies that would be unable to defend themselves without British and French military presence, which would enable British and French businessmen to exploit the oil-rich Middle East, and so on. And that worked for quite a while.So the notion of a failed empire producing failed states that follow it is a function of the fact that there was still an imperial presence after the First World War in those areas that previously had the influence of the Ottoman Empire. And when you take that away, you don’t stop imperialism; you just reconfigure it. And after 1956, the United States took the place as the imperial protector of American interests, or Western interests, leading directly to al-Qaeda.
The Politic: Overall, do you think that the global balance of power is any more equal today than it was at the Treaty of Versailles or in 1914?
Well, there are a hell of a lot more states, for one thing. But if you see 1914 as a moment where British dominance, because of its naval power and its early industrialization, was being challenged by Germany, in particular, and ultimately Russia, too, and then the United States, then I think the answer is that the multipolar world of 1914 probably has a greater distribution of power – there’s no one hegemon in 1914, although Britain is probably the primus inter pares – the first among the others. It’s worse now, in one respect, because the U.S. is only superpower – it has eight naval fleets; no other country even has two – so there’s a multiplication of the hegemonic power that Britain used to have in American domination.
The Politic: You’ve discussed the way that the First World War impacted the minds of the thousands who fought it. But do you think WWI changed the world’s conception of a soldier?
I don’t think that the notion of military force or military life changed because of the First World War; what I think changed is the expression of admiration for the military in toxic ideological form. That’s what the fascist idea is by and large about – it’s a reworking of nationalism where an army defends the nation, into a condition where the army is the vital element in a war of survival or annihilation. And that’s very different from the pre-Nazi period.The institutions of war were damaged – I call them degenerate – they were worse than they were before 1914, but it took the revolution within the Nazi army to turn the German army under the Kaiser into the genocidal instrument of the Second World War. The German army of the First World War wasn’t like that.And the difference is probably not the weapons – they had chemical warfare in the first place – but the willingness of middle management – from captains, up – to see Hitler’s plan as somehow divinely inspired and therefore open to no objection, even when it means rounding up children and women into a barn in Belorussia and burning it down – that happened 15,000 times. And how do you explain how those soldiers did it? It’s not the same army and it’s not the same ideology. So something happened between World War I and World War II to change the German army into an instrument of extermination.
The Politic: You’ve written extensively about how one positive product of the First World War was the veterans’ rights campaign, and you contend that it was out of this campaign, and the work begun by one French veteran, René Cassin, that the modern human rights movement was born.
Yes – the movement came from the idea that veterans have human rights. That is to say, it’s not their nationality or even their uniform that mattered – it’s that they were soldiers, who were injured in the service of their country, who have the right to reparation and extended care. He extended that beyond national borders so that veterans became a kind of international NGO for peace. And that was located within the League of Nations, which meant that it would fail, because of the rest of the League did. But it’s the language not of charity, but of rights, which is the critical point. When soldiers are injured, there’s a contract to uphold; they gave their whole bodies to the state, and if the state couldn’t give their whole bodies back, they needed to provide some degree of financial support so that these men, who upheld their side of the bargain, could, as it were, be put back together again and act as useful citizens of society. And that meant money: it meant not just prostheses – arms and legs; it meant cash. And the French way of doing it was very remarkable.
And the people who used this argument – that veterans were owed human rights – were there in the 1930s and 40s when the whole issue of human rights became part and parcel of the war aims of the Allies.
The Politic: And did that international movement include the U.S. as well?
While the U.S. was not part of the League of Nations, it was part of the international veterans’ movement, although the American Legion was more conservative than most. But I think that the intriguing difference is insurmountable is that we Americans have civil rights; the rest of the world has human rights. And the distinction is that there is no possibility within the terms of the U.S. Constitution for a higher review, a higher court above that of the Supreme Court. Civil rights is located within a country that believes in absolute sovereignty – it’s only the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, that has war powers; whereas the concept of human rights is that there are international courts, the decisions of which are written into national constitutions. And it’s extremely difficult to see how human rights can come out of the U.S. Constitution. Civil rights do – right to vote, the Bill of Rights – but that’s within the structure of the American state, which has entirely autonomous sovereignty.
What happened in Europe after the war is that states gave up a little sovereignty for security.
But the U.S. was not ally in the First World War – it was an associated power – after the two votes that Wilson lost in the Senate on the Treaty of Versailles, that dream of joining the League failed. And until this day, the concept of absolute state sovereignty is part of American exceptionalism – that it’s different from other countries and therefore doesn’t have the same structure of rights.