World War One - a Geopolitical Turning Point

World War One changed the world. Not every war changes the geopolitical landscape. Border wars between Mexico and the United States during the 1800s and into the early 1900s didn’t change the way nations around the world related to each other.

The French and Indian War (1754 to 1763) didn’t change the way power was distributed among the major European powers, and it didn’t change the way they interacted with each other. But WWI did change the concepts which nations used to view themselves and to view other nations.

It seemed, perhaps, that the First World War exposed, or caused, the collapse of a centuries-old monarchical system in a number of European nations, and brought about “democracy” in many of them, as well as a new self-concept of what it means to be a nation.

Different parties use the word ‘democracy’ in various ways and with divergent definitions, so it is worth asking exactly what is meant by that word in various times and places.

Certainly, at the end of hostilities in November 1918, and at the treaty signing in 1919, and into the early 1920s, it seemed that democracy was taking root and blooming in Europe.

Quickly, however, this hoped-for freedom seemed to exhibit a fragility: Russia’s first free government under Kerensky lasted less than a year before falling to Lenin’s socialist thugs; Italy fell to Mussolini’s Fascists; several years later, Hitler’s national socialists grabbed power in Germany.

As energetically as it had begun, the movement toward democracy seemed to collapse in numerous places. Yet Europe did not resume the old monarchies. Instead a nightmarish series of totalitarian dictatorships would dominate the next few decades. One historian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, writes:

The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First off, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch — Emperor Franz Joseph — and America by a democratically elected President — Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.

Why did, in certain countries, the move to democracy get derailed and redesigned into dictatorship? Was there some germ of totalitarianism in this movement?

Given that Woodrow Wilson has a figurehead status, as Hoppe mentions above, it may well be that his schemes included a tragic flaw which would ultimately yield the bitter fruit of political oppression instead of the anticipated liberty.

Wilson had been reelected to the presidency in 1916 under the slogan, “he kept us out of the war.” The voters wanted either peace or isolationism, but they did not want to be part of WWI. Yet, as federal judge Andrew Napolitano writes, that would change quickly:

In April 1917, only a few months after Wilson’s election, however, America had declared its entry into the war. What had happened so that America’s peace candidate and the people who elected him were suddenly mobilizing for war, in one of the greatest historical turnarounds of all time?

Wilson’s reelection slogan would manifest itself to be utterly insincere. His clear goal was to bring the United States into the war. Wilson was not interested in the war itself, but in the powers which would be granted to him as a wartime leader. He imagined that he’d use those extra powers to reshape American society, so that at war’s end, a different nation would emerge.

Not content with redesigning the United States, Wilson also planned to redesign the world. Only by being a part of the war could he have a hand, he thought, in shaping the postwar world.

The truth is, Wilson was never the pacifist he had portrayed himself to be. Rather, his peace platform was a well-devised strategy to get himself elected president. In reality, he had goals on an international scale, which were his top priority, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish them, even if that meant lying about war and then conniving to enter it.

Events conspired against Wilson. In Europe, he was not able to shape the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and several other postwar treaties, to his liking. While he did have a chance to engage in some nation-building, the international framework remained largely the product of the European negotiators.

Inside the United State, the voters were quick to reject both Wilson’s “League of Nations” and his heavy-handed regulation: the election of Warren Harding was a rejection of Wilson. Harding’s major goals were deregulation and returning maximal liberty to the ordinary citizen.

Wilson was a major force behind introducing modern democracy into Europe. His version of democracy, however, was actually driven by his anti-democratic desire to give the government ever increasing control over ordinary citizens, and to have the “League of Nations” take control away from a nation’s voters.

In sum, the version of democracy which Wilson sought to institute in Europe contained inside itself the seeds of a very anti-democratic movement. Thus young democracies soon fell in Italy, Russia, and Germany.

Wilson and WWI: Making the World Dangerous for Democracy

When historians say that the first World War marks a turning-point in history, which they predictably do, what do they mean? In a trivial sense, of course, any event is a turning-point in history.

World War One was and is significant. What makes it significant? It marked a change in governmental structures, and in the worldviews and ideologies which supported those structures, in many nations around the world.

Prior to the war, monarchs controlled most of Europe. After the war, republics structured around freely-elected representatives filled the continent, and the few monarchs who remained were largely symbolic.

Suddenly, almost everyone was eligible to vote. Suddenly, almost everyone discussed politics. As Woodrow Wilson had said, it seemed that

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

This explosion of suffrage must have been heartwarming, and its confusion amusing, to supporters of freedom in the early 1920s as Europe seemed to finally emerge into its political adulthood. It seemed as if the era of liberty had finally arrived. One scholar, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, summarizes those years this way:

In Europe, the militarily defeated Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs had to abdicate or resign, and Russia, Germany, and Austria became democratic republics with universal — male and female — suffrage and parliamentary governments. Likewise, all of the newly created successor states with the sole exception of Yugoslavia adopted democratic republican constitutions. In Turkey and Greece, the monarchies were overthrown. And even where monarchies remained nominally in existence, as in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, monarchs no longer exercised any governing power. Universal adult suffrage was introduced, and all government power was vested in parliaments and "public" officials.

The apparent flowering of liberty would be, however, short lived. Russia’s one chance at freedom, the Kerensky government, lasted less than a year before it was brutally crushed by Lenin’s socialist communist Bolsheviks.

Likewise, Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism both ended freely elected representative governments. The world was not safe for democracy. Dictatorships and various forms of totalitarianism were on the rise. Why? What happened to the noble-sounding rhetoric with which Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into World War I?

There was, perhaps, a flaw in the effort from the very beginning. President Wilson’s thinking had been shaped by individuals like the German Chancellor Bismarck and the American writer Herbert Croly. Their commitment to the causes of personal liberty and individual freedom were, mildly put, not strong.

Croly in particular had already been an influence on one other U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt abandoned his “trust busting” image and reshaped his political thinking, Croly was there, helping Roosevelt formulate a “New Nationalism” - behind that slogan lay the concept that the government would regulate large parts of the economy as well as large parts of private life.

Instead of directly opposing privately-owned business, as Roosevelt had done during his “trust busting” days, he would now envision a synergistic relationship between corporations and government, in which powerful business leaders would join forces with federal officials to control the nation’s activities. Instead of free market capitalism, Croly nudged Roosevelt toward crony capitalism.

Croly and Roosevelt abandoned personal liberty and individual freedom, and sought to place control in the hands of an oligarchic group of federal bureaucrats and corporate executives. When Roosevelt’s political career began to wane, and Wilson’s began to wax, Croly joined Wilson. Wilson’s enterprise to make the world safe for democracy was infested by a very anti-democratic ideologue, Herbert Croly. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The most influential thinker along these lines — and another great admirer of Bismarck’s — was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

So it was, then, that America’s entry into WWI was driven by an anti-democratic desire on the part of Herbert Croly to exploit the wartime economy to advance his own agenda of oligarchic control. Despite Wilson’s rhetoric, Croly explicitly opposed the usual American notions of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Echoing some aspects of the French Revolution, which used some of the same words, and harbored the same desire to undermine those very words, writers like Croly ensured that America’s efforts in WWI contained the seeds, not of freedom, but of an elitist government which would seek to manage the personal affairs of citizens. Jonah Goldberg continues:

Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine’s very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war “should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.” Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America’s entry into the war would provide “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche’s call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protégé of William James’s, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist’s trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations “as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century.”

Far from seeking to export the spirit of liberty as the United States had fostered it, Croly steered Wilson’s diplomatic efforts into shaping a government which would seek to gain more, not less, control over its citizens. Wilson’s effort to make the world safe for democracy contained the seed of a movement to erase democracy.

Thus the rise of dictatorships in Europe, and the rise of the Soviets in Russia, were an organic extension of Wilson’s policy.