Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As a consequence of situations such as this, some of the traits which arose in Western Europe in the nineteenth century moved outward to more peripheral areas of Europe and Asia with great difficulty and for only a brief period. Among these less sturdy traits of Western Europe’s great century we might mention liberalism, democracy, the parliamentary system, optimism, and the belief in inevitable progress. These were, we might say, flowers of such delicate nature that they could not survive any extended period of stormy weather. That the twentieth century subjected them to long periods of very stormy weather is clear when we consider that it brought a world economic depression sandwiched between two world wars.

II WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914

The Pattern of Change

European Economic Developments

COMMERCIAL CAPITALISM

INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM, 1770-185O

FINANCIAL CAPITALISM, 185O-I93I

Domestic Financial Practices

International Financial Practices

THE SITUATION BEFORE I914

The United States to 1917

The Pattern of Change

In order to obtain perspective we sometimes divide the culture of a society, in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, into several different aspects. For example, we can divide a society into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual. Naturally there are very close connections between these various aspects; and in each aspect there are very close connections between what exists today and what existed in an earlier day. For example, we might want to talk about democracy as a fact on the political level (or aspect). In order to talk about it in an intelligent way we would not only have to know what it is today we would also have to see what relationship it has to earlier facts on the political level as well as its relationship to various facts on the other five levels of the society. Naturally we cannot talk intelligently unless we have a fairly clear idea of what we mean by the words we use. For that reason we shall frequently define the terms we use in discussing this subject.

The military level is concerned with the organization of force, the political level with the organization of power, and the economic level with the organization of wealth. By the “organization of power” in a society we mean the ways in which obedience and consent (or acquiescence) are obtained. The close relationships between levels can be seen from the fact that there are three basic ways to win obedience: by force, by buying consent with wealth, and by persuasion. Each of these three leads us to another level (military, economic, or intellectual) outside the political level. At the same time, the organization of power today (that is, of the methods for obtaining obedience in the society) is a development of the methods used to obtain obedience in the society in an earlier period.

These relationships are important because in the twentieth century in Western Civilization all six levels are changing with amazing rapidity, and the relationships between levels are also shifting with great speed. When we add to this confusing picture of Western Civilization the fact that other societies are influencing it or being influenced by it, it would seem that the world in the twentieth century is almost too complicated to understand. This is indeed true, and we shall have to simplify (perhaps even oversimplify) these complexities in order to reach a low level of understanding. When we have reached such a low level perhaps we shall be able to raise the level of our understanding by bringing into our minds, little by little, some of the complexities which do exist in the world itself.

On the military level in Western Civilization in the twentieth century the chief development has been a steady increase in the complexity and the cost of weapons. When weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost anyone can use them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up of large masses of amateur soldiers. Such weapons we call “amateur weapons,” and such armies we might call “mass armies of citizen-soldiers.” The Age of Pericles in Classical Greece and the nineteenth century in Western Civilization were periods of amateur weapons and citizen-soldiers. But the nineteenth century was preceded (as was the Age of Pericles also) by a period in which weapons were expensive and required long training in their use. Such weapons we call “specialist” weapons. Periods of specialist weapons are generally periods of small armies of professional soldiers (usually mercenaries). In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus a period of specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. But a period of amateur weapons is a period in which all men are roughly equal in military power, a majority can compel a minority to yield, and majority rule or even democratic government tends to rise. The medieval period in which the best weapon was usually a mounted knight on horseback (clearly a specialist weapon) was a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. Even when the medieval knight was made obsolete (along with his stone castle) by the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of firearms, these new weapons were so expensive and so difficult to use (until 1800) that minority rule and authoritarian government continued even though that government sought to enforce its rule by shifting from mounted knights to professional pikemen and musketeers. But after 1800, guns became cheaper to obtain and easier to use. By 1840 a Colt revolver sold for $27 and a Springfield musket for not much more, and these were about as good weapons as anyone could get at that time. Thus, mass armies of citizens, equipped with these cheap and easily used weapons, began to replace armies of professional soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe and even earlier in America. At the same time, democratic government began to replace authoritarian governments (but chiefly in those areas where the cheap new weapons were available and local standards of living were high enough to allow people to obtain them).

The arrival of the mass army of citizen-soldiers in the nineteenth century created a difficult problem of control, because techniques of transportation and of communications had not reached a high-enough level to allow any flexibility of control in a mass army. Such an army could be moved on its own feet or by railroad; the government could communicate with its various units only by letter post or by telegram. The problem of handling a mass army by such techniques was solved partially in the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and completely by Helmuth von Moltke for the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The solution was a rigid one: a plan of campaign was prepared beforehand against a specific opponent, with an established timetable and detailed instructions for each military unit; communications were prepared and even issued beforehand, to be used according to the timetable. This plan was so inflexible that the signal to mobilize was practically a signal to attack a specified neighboring state because the plan, once initiated, could not be changed and could hardly even be slowed up. With this rigid method Prussia created the German Empire by smashing Austria in 1866 and France in 1871. By 1900 all the states of Europe had adopted the same method and had fixed plans in which the signal for mobilization constituted an attack on some neighbor—a neighbor, in some cases (as in the German invasion of Belgium), with whom the attacker had no real quarrel. Thus, when the signal for mobilization was given in 1914 the states of Europe leaped at each other.

In the twentieth century the military situation was drastically changed in two ways. On the one hand, communications and transportation were so improved by the invention of the radio and the internal-combustion engine that control and movement of troops and even of individual soldiers became very flexible; mobilization ceased to be equivalent to attack, and attack ceased to be equivalent to total war. On the other hand, beginning with the first use of tanks, gas, high-explosive shells, and tactical bombing from the air in 1915-1918, and continuing with all the innovations in weapons leading up to the first atomic bomb in 1945, specialist weapons became superior to amateur weapons. This had a double result which was still working itself out at mid-century: the drafted army of citizen-soldiers began to be replaced by a smaller army of professional specialist soldiers, and authoritarian government began to replace democratic government.