Carroll Quigley - The Evolution of Civilizations

It is not necessary to point out that the general characteristics we have posited for an Age of Expansion were in full flower during the nineteenth century. Geographic expansion was resumed so that Africa, the polar regions, the Matto Grosso, and New Guinea became familiar areas; population soared; production increased, even in periods of falling prices; knowledge expanded beyond any one person's comprehension; even democracy and science reached their greatest victories. Indeed, the nineteenth century in terms of our description of an Age of Expansion could be the Age of Expansion par excellence.

In the military and political levels, the third Age of Expansion was associated with such familiar historical developments as the mass citizen army, the national state, and democracy. The shift to these from the older stages of these levels generally occurred during the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The reasons for these changes should be examined because, while often mentioned, they are rarely analyzed.

The second Age of Conflict had been associated with the professional mercenary army, the dynastic monarchy, and authoritarian government. On the economic and social levels, it had been associated with mercantilism and the supremacy of the bureaucracy. As is well known, these last two stages were replaced, on their respective levels, by laissez-faire and the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Any analysis of the process that gave rise to these extensive changes on all levels of culture might well begin with the military situation.

In the second Age of Conflict the best available weapons in Western civilization were artillery, muskets, and pikes (or bayonets). These were difficult to use and usually expensive to obtain. As a result, they could be used only by trained men and could be bought only by a relatively well-to-do entity. Such trained men had to be professional users of weapons, and the weapons had to be provided by the state or by the wealthy. All of this taken together meant that weapons were available only to a small minority of the population and that the majority must expect, as a general rule, to yield to the authority of the minority that controlled these weapons. Thus it followed, almost as a matter of course, that the political level had to be authoritarian. The organization of that authority into a dynastic monarchy was a consequence of the governmental traditions of Europe. As the system operated, it was expected that allegiance and loyalty would be given to the family of the ruling monarch, in order to assure succession to his heir. This loyalty was not really expected from all persons, but only from the significant ones —the clergy, the nobility, the chief bourgeoisie, and all guild members and possibly from well-to-do independent peasantry, but the ordinary peasantry and the guild apprentices, as persons of little significance, were not subjects of much concern about their allegiance of loyalty. The operation of mercantilism and the social superiority of the royal bureaucracy were also dependent, if less directly, on the organization and control of the military level. Thus the structure of all four levels (military, political, economic control, and social) was based on the military organization of professional mercenary soldiers.

In the age of Napoleon and just after it, this military organization was modified greatly into a quite new system that survived for over a century. This innovation was the mass citizen army fighting for patriotism rather than for pay. The new organization was made possible by a series of innovations in weapons and tactics, and in military, as well as political, organization. In weapons the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and of mass-produced firearms based on interchangeable parts lowered the cost of weapons at the same time that the general economic expansion was raising standards of living. These two intersecting factors made it possible for the average man, in areas where these factors were operating, to obtain guns at a cost that he could afford to pay (that is, no more than his earning power over a few weeks). These guns were becoming easier to use by the shift from spark ignition to percussion ignition and breechloading. All these innovations made it possible to arm large masses of men at relatively low cost. At the same time the shift to such a mass army was made possible by changes in political organization.

The political organization that we have called dynastic monarchy could continue only so long as the best weapon available in the society could be obtained only by a minority. As soon as a majority could obtain the best available weapon and use it with little training, it became impossible for any minority to enforce obedience on a majority and, accordingly, the authoritarian structure of political life began to crumble. A reorganization of political life became necessary. This reorganization of the political structure had a double aspect. On the one hand it became necessary to shift from minority rule to majority rule, and on the other hand it became necessary to find a new political organization that could place its appeal to allegiance on a basis that could be used for the majority of the society. This new basis was nationalism, and the new organization, which succeeded the dynastic state in the early nineteenth century, is known as the national state (prevalent from about 1800 to about 1950).

The political shift from dynastic monarchy to national state and the shift in weapons from a professional mercenary army to a mass army of citizens allowed the cost of a man's service to be reduced (since he fought for patriotism instead of for money) and permitted a great change in military tactics (since patriotic men were more willing to die than were mercenary soldiers). The older tactics of the dynastic monarchs had favored wars of maneuver with limited forces for limited aims. By "wars of maneuver" we mean tactics in which enemy forces were dislodged from their positions by cutting their communications and supplies rather than by assault, with battles occurring only rarely and chiefly from accidental collisions during shifts of position. Such wars were long drawn out, with few battles, and could be ended at any time by negotiation because of the possibility of compromising the combatants' limited and concrete goals.

The advent of patriotic mass armies made it possible to force the enemy from his position by assault rather than by maneuver. The new tactics, worked out by Napoleon in the period 1795-1815, organized this assault in three steps: artillery barrage, bayonet attack by infantry, and cavalry pursuit. All three steps were innovations, but the greatest change was in the second where the bayonet was entirely transformed from its earlier role as a defensive weapon against cavalry to an offensive weapon against opposing infantry. It was the nature of this second, and central, step in the new tactics that made necessary the innovations in the use of artillery and cavalry in the two other steps.

The possibility of heavy casualties in the second step of the new tactics, in which bayonets were sent against firepower, made it necessary to obtain very high morale from citizen soldiers. This high morale could not be obtained so long as the aims of war remained, as in the earlier period, limited and concrete; they had to be made unlimited and idealistic ("saving the revolution" or "civilization," "making the world safe for democracy," "freedom of the seas," "rights of small nations," and similar unobtainable abstractions). Such goals could not be compromised, and, accordingly, battles had to become conflicts of annihilation in which the survival of the contending regimes was at stake.

Such battles of annihilation led to a series of brief "one battle" wars such as the French-Austrian War of 1859, the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and the Spanish-American War of 1899. Even as this pattern was being established, however, new forces were arising that laid the basis for quite a different pattern in the twentieth century. These new forces were (1) the growing importance of ideological forces, which made it less likely that a people would accept the consequences of death in a single battle, and (2) the growing strength of the tactical defensive, which made it less necessary to yield to such a defeat in one battle. The growing ideological influence was clearly evident in the American Civil War, the struggle with the French guerrillas, and the Paris Commune after Sedan in 1871, the Boer War of 1899-1902 and, above all, World War I. The growing importance of the defensive made the second step of a Napoleonic battle, the bayonet offensive, less and less likely to be decisive and made it less and less possible that the outcome of the battle itself could be decisive. The growing strength of the defensive rested on the rapid growth of firepower after the invention of the machine gun about 1862 (this made both bayonet and cavalry obsolete), the increasing use of field fortifications (this reduced the effectiveness of both artillery barrage and of offensive firepower), the invention of barbed wire about 1879 (this hampered the infantry charge of the second step and the cavalry pursuit of the third), and of the airplane in 1903 (this took from the cavalry its only surviving role as reconnaissance). The tactical changes made necessary by these innovations were not recognized by military men until after they had inflicted the almost unbearable casualties of 1916-17, but these changes (such as use of tanks, infiltration, aerial bombardment, and the like) made weapons once again so expensive and so difficult to use that it became increasingly needful to replace the mass citizen army by an army of specialists. Such a change, by reserving instruments of force to a minority, reversed the trend on the political level to a new development from democracy toward authoritarian government. The date of this reversal might be fixed in 1934, the year that the German general Guderian read de Gaulle's book Army of Specialists. At the same time, it became clear that rapid improvements in weapons, communications (radio), transportation (trucks), and organization made it possible to enforce obedience to orders over geographic distances far greater than those covered by any national groups. Accordingly, appeal to political allegiance on nationality grounds became obsolete and it became necessary to make such an appeal on some much wider basis. The new basis, now in process of being discovered was common ideological outlook. Accordingly, the stage of the national state began to be replaced by the stage of the ideological state (or bloc) on the level of political organization, and the area covered by a single political unit widened from the nation to the Continental bloc. The inability of Hitler to make such a shift from a nationalist to an ideological (or other wider) basis at a time when his factual power was so much wider geographically than the area of Germanism was but one of his fatal errors.