Download PDF | Geoffrey Wawro - Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914 (Warfare and History)-Routledge (2000).
257 Pages
Preface
As a historian, I have been fortunate to come of age in the time of the ‘new military history’, a genre that does not skimp on technology, generalship or battles, but takes care to place war in its larger social, political, economic and cultural context. This has been an important evolution, for wars have decisively shaped the history, borders and culture of Europe and the world, and warfare itself is never the product of military planning and technology alone; it is the reflection of society.
Thus this book inclines to the conclusion that rational, rich, unified and technologically adept states have generally succeeded at war. Mar or subtract any one of these variables and the trouble begins: Napoleonic or Wilhelmine irrationality, Austro-Hungarian disunity, Italian poverty, Russian backwardness, and so on. It is, in short, impossible to understand the waning of France, the convulsions of Germany, the decline and fall of AustriaHungary, the growing pains of Italy, or the smash-up of the Russian Empire – all functions of war – without probing the society and politics of each of these creatures.
A book on this scale naturally limits the enterprise, but I have probed as deeply as 100,000 words permit. In military and political terms, the period covered by this book was Europe’s finest hour. The entire century between the French Revolution and the outbreak of World War I witnessed a steady growth in European wealth, population, power and influence. When the Great War broke out in 1914, there were more Europeans (460 million) as a percentage of the world’s population (20 per cent) than ever before or since. Europeans drove the ‘second industrial revolution’ in steel, chemicals, electrical machinery and automobiles, and controlled 84 per cent of the earth’s surface through their overseas empires. In retrospect, it is dismaying to see how little the Europeans made of this dominance; indeed, they frittered it away in a sequence of wars, some described in this volume, some in volumes to come. Perhaps this is the real impetus for European union today: the realization that inter-state conflict destroyed Europe’s preeminence. The structure of this book is largely chronological.
There are a number of recurrent themes, including the interconnection of war and politics, the social dimensions of strategy, civil– military relations, and the power and lethality ofmilitary technology intelligently applied. One important lesson obtrudes: revolutions in military affairs like those launched by the French in the 1790s and the Prussians in the 1860s lose their punch once other states adopt them. Napoleon ran roughshod over his adversaries only until they copied the French style of war. Once the Prussians, Austrians and Russians recast themselves as French model armies, Napoleon lost his key advantage and was beaten. Similiarly, Moltke’s military revolution flattened the Austrians in 1866 and the French in 1870, permitting Prussia to annex Germany and make itself the first power of Europe. Moltke’s successors foolishly believed that the master’s key innovations – rapid movement and fire-intensive tactics – could be made to work again and again. Hence the Schlieffen Plan and the desperate German invasion of France and Russia in 1914. What Schlieffen and his acolytes failed to grasp was that the French, Russians and British had effectively ‘Prussianized’ their armies in the decades after 1870, making the German struggle for control of Europe in 1914 as ultimately futile as Napoleon’s 100 years earlier. My wife Cecilia and I had two sons during the writing of this book, lusty, happy boys whose beaming contrast with the horrors recounted in these pages has continually reminded me of the human cost of war.
That is not the least of their contributions; Cecilia – to whom this book is dedicated – has juggled career and family to facilitate my work; my boys – Winslow and Matías – have been a ready source of love and amusement. I have other debts: to Paul Kennedy, my doctoral advisor at Yale University, whose ecumenical method infuses this analysis; to Ronald Finucane, chairman of the History Department at Oakland University, who has supported my research and writing in all manner of ways; to George Baer, chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the US Naval War College, who engaged me as a visiting professor for two halcyon years. At Newport I read the naval theorists for the first time, lived and worked among professional soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, and absorbed exciting new ways to analyse and interpret war. Thanks are also due to the series editor, Jeremy Black, who kindly invited me to write this book and gave it a close, critical reading. Finally, my thanks to the history editor at Routledge, Heather McCallum, who has pushed the book through all of the usual bottlenecks with efficiency and vim.
Rochester Hills, Michigan June 1999
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