The First World War: The Debate

hello good evening thank you very much indeed for coming it's a pleasure to see so many people here I'm Roli Keating I'm chief executive here at the British Library and tonight we have the First World War the debate and I think the fact that this is a sold-out event gives a sense of just how much energy curiosity passion and and just desire really to think and reflect there is in the air particularly I think in the last month or so I think ever since this this historical debate found its way deep into the political consciousness into the to the public life of the nation Michael goes intervention the response from Sir Richard Evans something happened that made us want to take this further and I hope one of the things the British Library can do as an institution is provide if you like a safe space for Big Ideas to be thought through and for people to understand and question and maybe question themselves and I'm sure that's what's going to happen over the next hour and a half we try to do other things here as well particularly in commemoration of the 1914-18 conflict we are a research library we're very proud of course to be able to put primary research materials out there onto the web increasingly for everyone to have access to and explore some of you may be familiar with the European a 1914-18 project where collections all over Europe are being published online together at some 400,000 items never before available not just from the traditional archival collections but also materials from from personal collections there have been road shows all over Europe where private papers have been brought out and we participated in that from that material we've also published very recently our website for an educational purpose primarily with its it's a it's focused on what can be done for young people in classrooms but I hope you will all find our world Ward 1 website because there's material of great interest for anyone interested in the period and beyond that as the Year unfolds there'll be events conferences Kate ad will be here talking about women and the war and June the 19th will see the opening of a free exhibition in our main public space here at the library called enduring war grief grit and humor about the personal experience homefront and on the front how people coped and of course that's what journals and poems and manuscripts can can reveal so clearly we're also an active research institution and I'm delighted to say it is one of our active researchers one of the collaborative doctoral students we have working here Vincent trot and if he's working with Annika on the panel who suggested that we do this that the moment had come and we should seize the moment to have the debate and thank you ventus wherever you are but it still I'm delighted that from a spark like that we can assemble such a distinguished panel I'm not going to do those that introduction however I'm gonna hand to our chair for the evening historian and journalist Paul a former editor founding editor in fact a BBC history magazine a senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham is on the advisory board of the Institute of historical research but you may well know him as the editor of history today Paul please introduce the panel thank you Roley we've got a very distinguished panel here I should say something about the way this came about it was a great initiative by the British Library because it actually came about from a Twitter conversation that was born of the debate that well we'll call it a controversy between Gove and Richard Evans and Tristram Hunter was there and people like Simon Schama became involved in Gary Sheffield I think was the the main agent there and Gary's one of our guests today and the BBL responded tremendously quickly and put together this debate didn't even feature in the what's on listings so and I think that the number of people who've turn up here is practically a sold-out event two hundred and eighty people shows that great war fatigue is not setting yet and it looks as though it won't at all and so anyway I will introduce you to the panel on my far left is Gary Sheffield who is professor of war studies at the University of Wolverhampton where he's a recent appointment he was formerly at Birmingham University and he's written mainly I suppose he's most famous for his work on Douglas Haig or just of course revisionism he's associated with Psalm The Forgotten victory the first world war myths and realities or fantastic books that have reassessed entirely our understanding of the First World War my left is dr. Anna camembert who is senior lecturer in modern European history at the Open University and I think that anyone who wants to engage with the First World War and really wants to go back to the sources should get a copy of origins of the First World War controversies and consensus and a recent publication rocks at university - that looks at the sources there you can actually look the and will hear the words from the horse's mouth there and it's very very valuable to go back to those sources and to see an escaped anachronism and hear the voices of the period am i right is doctor Dan Todman whose senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London who engages with the social military and cultural history of the Great War looking at its course and its legacy in particular and he's the author of dog the Great War myth and memory and on my far right they're not necessarily politically they stock to Neil Faulkner who is a research fellow at Bristol University and interests me a First World War archaeologist a high-profile Marxist historian it says here and he is a politically engaged one too he wrote the Stop the War Coalition pamphlet no glory the real history of the First World War so we have a wide range of opinions here but we also have serious academic engagement with the subject I think that's very important because no subject is quite as riddled with myth as the First World War and I think what we want to do today is to do what Hugh strong has asked us to do and that is engaging controversy that controversies the means by which we will best understand this war but controversy contention that is informed by the tremendous amount of academic history that's been produced in recent times meets do arise very quickly I was thinking of Michael Gove intervention I'm not one of those people who just has a knee-jerk negative reaction to go some things he says are interesting some things aren't and some things are frankly ridiculous and what was ridiculous was the point about the arguments over the origins of First World War of the apportioning of guilt and blame being a left-right split it's certainly anything but that if one considers that John Charlie Neil Ferguson Dominic Sam Brooke John redwood and of course originally Alan Clark or of the left then one is confused but those are all people who have argued that Britain did not benefit or Britain should not have taken part in the first world war so I want to start this debate by going in at the deep end and by asking each of the speakers to mark out their positions as to the origins of the First World War where guilt where blame is manifested indeed it is at all so I start with Dan damn Tom it's interesting to be asked to place yourself in that position as a result of a debate initiated by Michael Gove to promote his own position as scourge of the left violent to make any kind of contribution to the history of the First World War but along with Paul I think sometimes there's a there's a function for people driving debates even if that's not actually their you know their intention it is different from that of historians um for me what's interesting about that more the manufacture debate was how much it focused on Britain's participation rather than the mechanics of Europe going to war so I mean and as ever these discussions were built who as if they were sort of ab initio that if maybe you'd fought about these issues before whereas actually it's a kind of tribute to 100 years of Britain's debating is this a war that was worth it was it worth while should Britain enter so I think we need to recognize this is something which was controversial at the time and which has continued to be controversial since and in a way that's a distinctly British argument in the sense that it's because Britain has a choice about whether it takes part in 1914 the way that other countries I don't think feel they have the same way it's not invaded so I think identifying this is a distinctly British argument is what we said not and I'm most interested that's a way of avoiding taking a position did they make the right decision by taking part okay well I see depends what you go right that's the goodness story in science hasn't it because what is it it seems to me that if we make an argue accept an argument that Britain needs to take part for geopolitical reasons you know which which might be an argument for example that we might make now will cast him into a political position but then we have to accept there's a particular value to to the nation that exists in 1914 and perhaps we have to draw linkages to the one that exists now I think that's why I'm anxious about saying this is something that it's right for Britain to do because it was it may be it may have been right for the Britons of 1914 and many of them certainly thought they were engaged in a righteous conflict I I think that the Britain of 2014 is so different from the Britain of 1914 that it would be very dangerous to say this is a just war for example because to me that's to draw on the metric of the time to you know in a sort of false way and does it matter to Britain that it ends up on the winning side if there's a water B well you know if there's what if they're always going to be false written it's an important facet of British history in the 20th century that it's on the winning side I don't think you can understand what happens in Britain in the 20s and 30s it's reaction to the course of the rest of 20th century history without saying victory matters but that's not the reason that it enters battle in the summer of 1914 and of course even victory in terms of someone like Ferguson would be Pyrrhic will probably deal with those issues later I'm Anika I completely agree with you that you know this focus on Britain is important and also somewhat curious we we talk of the First World War but actually what are we looking at we're always just looking at Britain's were always looking at the Western Front and and all the associations we have with the war so it's quite important to think of the origins internationally but also to think of this debate internationally and while we've been debating in this country in Germany a parallel debate has been going on which is very interesting and at the moment I think it's no longer parallel but the two have crossed so here we've debated I'd say until about six weeks ago the main debate was about how to commemorate the war there wasn't really much debate that it should be commemorated and I'm sure all of us would agree that something should happen to commemorate the war but how do you commemorate it and and historians have been quite worried about the fact that the government seemed to only want to commemorate defeats rather than perhaps also the fact that some battles were actually won and that in the end Britain was as we just said on the winning side that debate hasn't taken place at all in Germany where the government doesn't want to commemorate the war at all there are local regional initiatives but there is no concern by the German government to commemorate the war in international way so the debate while we've now been debating what would go than others have said in this brief fascinating debate and I love the fact that what we all do for a day job has suddenly just become what everybody's interested in and that's just really wonderful but while we've been debating whether or not the war was futile for Britain in Germany they've been debating whether not Germany actually calls the war because they've in a way got their get out of jail card I'm in the form of a couple of publications that have made a huge splash in Germany one of which is Chris Clarke's sleepwalkers which has been available in German translation since September and is an absolute bomb storming success last I heard it sold a hundred and sixty thousand copies I mean that's something I'm sure we can all just dream about and I would say until quite recently I don't know I want to talk to you but I dream about that but until quite recently I'd say unless it was a book about the Second World War you had no chance of ever topping the bestseller lists but suddenly at the first world voice very present in Germany and the debate there is about whether or not Germany calls that under current consensus well actually no Germany didn't cause it it was everyone and where the two debates now merge is that some German historians have picked up on this futility argument and they are quite certain that Britain could have stayed out of the war and it's quite astonishing and to read that they say that Britain was pretty much the only country who had no actual reason to go to war in 1914 and that it was the entry of Britain into the war that turned that European war into a global war so they completely turned it on its head which is really quite astonishing and worrying to read but in terms of declaring a position after a hundred years I'd still say that essentially the Allies got it right in 1919 and that Germany is more to blame than anyone else and that Britain should not have stayed out of the war I think we're approaching this with hindsight but what we need to do is look at what were the options for Sir Edward grey in 1914 and I just can't see how he could possibly have decided for Britain to stay neutrally it wasn't possible because it's not just Germany that's threatening Britain is also Russia in the in the understanding of the Foreign Office Russia will be by 1916-17 everybody in Europe things Russia will be an invincible power so what can what conservative grade do he can stay neutral then he's let down France and Russia he's no longer got a credible ally on the continent there is really actually no choice that I can see for a different decision so it's it's not really a very an apt question to ask could they have stayed up because in that in that constellation in 1914 and given the values that people had I mean James Joel speaks of unspoken assumptions there are actually lots of spoken assumptions there about honor there about prestige these are things that today we can't really quite understand anymore but at the time austria-hungary did go to war partly because of prestige and honor those were the reasons and Britain and Germany and France and Russia all thought in those terms so I think they needed that their hand was forced they needed to enter this war but their hand was forced primarily by Germany I'm sure we'll discuss Christopher Clark sleepwalkers later I mean do you think just a quick question as part of the appeal of that in Germany because I was astonished by the number of copies it sold I found out last week is that because it presents there I say too flattering picture of it's it's it's yes it is a fine piece of scholarship it is also extremely well-written and it was published and marketed at just the right moment in time so he's lucky in that his book was the first now there is an absolute avalanche of books on the first world war also in Germany and it's I think much harder now to stake that claim most people who bought the book would probably only buy one whopper of a book you know they're not gonna they're not gonna go and read everything that there is so it was partly timing it's partly that it's very readable but it is also that a lot of people in the media and in the German public where this has been debated in an unprecedented way it really reminds me of the controversy of the 1960s where there was a similar interest and a similar public debate that you don't normally get in this way and it is if you get for example one thing that you can do is look on Amazon and other search sites for the comments that people leave and it is absolutely astonishing how many comments how long how knowledgeable people are but also how they even if they do say well finally somebody says it wasn't us we can't have been you know the baddies in everything and the fact that he's not German is particularly significant and often pointed out he's an Australian scholar working in Cambridge he's got no you know ulterior motives he's got no axe to grind if he says it wasn't asked then I guess it wasn't us okay Neil what's your position well you see it's very interesting that Anika refers to Sir Edward grey and poses the question what should Edward grey Sir Edward grey do and there's a tendency I think among academic historians to assume that if they were to be transported back to the period that they study 50 years ago or a hundred years ago or 200 years ago they would be reincarnated as a great statesman or General or senator if they study the ancient world or whatever and I want to suggest that we really need to think about the first world war in a different way because there are two ways of looking at history there have been two ways of looking at history actually for about five thousand years since the world was divided into rich and poor and in 1914 there were two Europe's not just to Europe's in the sense that there was a non-count alliance and a central powers alliance there was another sense a more important sense in which there were two Europe's there was a Europe of rulers of industrialists of bankers and of generals and if you view history from above that's what you see and you see one group of bankers and industrialists and generals gathered around a Union Jack in one place and as you pan across you see another group of bankers and industrialists and generals gathered around a French tricolor and then you pan around a little further and you see another group of them gathered around a German cross and they're competing with each other they're competing for Empire they're competing for markets they're competing for raw materials they've got up the rest of the planet among themselves and now that war for Empire and profit has rebounded into Europe created an arms race and that plunges Europe into war a war of the great powers a war of the great empires in 1914 that's that that's what you see if you look at the top if you take the perspective of Sir Edward grey there's another way of looking at 1914 you can look from below you can look at the experience of the mine worker on strike against poverty pay in South Wales and compare him with the mine worker on strike against poverty pay in the Rhineland or the Czech mine worker in Bohemia or the Russian mine worker in the dawn Basin and their enemy isn't other mine workers have been put into uniform and sent by their rulers to kill foreign line workers their enemy as the mine boss you can look at history that way you can look at history from the perspective of the suffragettes fighting for the right to vote who have no say in whether or not the British ruling class decides to go to war in 1914 you can look at the war from the perspective of the Irish nationalist for whom the enemy is the British Empire not Germany you can look at it from the perspective of the Indian nationalists let's remind ourselves that the British who in 1914 adopt a holier-than-thou attitude to Germany arguing that Germany is the aggressor Germany is autocratic Germany is threatening the Peace of Europe it was the British who controlled 1/5 of the world's land mass and a quarter of the world's population hundreds of millions of people living under British imperial rule in order to enrich a tiny minority of bankers and industrialists at the top of British society and the British ruling class in defense of that Empire and in defense of that wealth were willing to plunge Britain into a war that cost 15 million lives look at history from below and it's not a question about what Sir Edward grey should have done but a question about what ordinary people should have done when their rulers made the decision to plunge Europe into four years of modern industrialized slaughter if what happened between 1914 and 1918 isn't madness isn't a world gone mad isn't the proof that this system was a dysfunctional system I don't know what is I'm just interested to know whether you so are you saying are you talking about what the European working-class should have done or what they did so I guess I mean I because I'd take a lot of your points about we have written you know the British Empire is not something wrong would now wish to vote for it and being a war of empires it's an important way to think about it but it strikes me that has an awful lot of South Wales miners who end up joining the armed forces there's a lots of people of course you have and one of the great factors of explaining that outbreak of war is the failure of European socialism to prevent it yeah no I mean that is absolutely right and it seems to me that the leaders of the mainstream socialist parties and the trade unions in 1914 across Europe with some noble exceptions but there they were a minority betrayed the interests of their own supporters I would put it as strongly as that because the socialist parties organized together in a second international and many of the trade unions had passed resolutions year after year after year at their conferences in their in the run-up to war saying we will take mass action against war if it's declared I mean many of them were committed to calling general strike action to stop the war my view is they should have acted on that and then we would have avoided the 10 at the for the four years of war between 1914 and 1918 we wouldn't have had to wait for that eruption of anti-war opinion from below that finally does bring the war to an end in 1917 and 1918 but only after 15 million people have been killed and with very poor terms but beyond that do you not think just one question that rises out of that I very much agree about the importance of understanding history from below as well as above but the way it's understood now there could be an argument that the social history the way we understand what has become social history at least so far as public history goes has become divorced from the politics and the diplomacy so that we see very much as solipsistic kind of who do we think we are culture where we trace our family we trace I couldn't we no longer perhaps it's due to the decline of Marxism one of one of the one of the the sad parts of the decline of Marxism is that we no longer think of those social structures in terms of at least the way public history is presented and so the kind of arguments that you're making which perfectly valid arguments and not ones that are really getting through to the wider public because we tend to concentrate on the individual and then we can tend to concentrate on the high politics and don't merge the two anymore but anyway let's let's move to Gary Sheffield who I think would have probably different take on this Gary well I was rather embarrassed by Michael Gove comments because he sort of fingered me implicitly as a right-wing historian I'm a soft squishy Guardian reader and I had a series of texts from various friends of mine who work in the state school system saying do you have any any influence over your new best friends policies are so sadly no I might believe for those I must say I have been very influenced by reading Anika's work and and work of many other historians is that war was caused in 1914 by the deliberate and conscious decision of the ruling elite of two states of austria-hungary and of Germany Austria clearly used the assassination of the Archduke as a pretext to go to war with Serbia they wanted to crush Serbia for a matter of prestige if the last the Balkans was the last place in Europe that the Austrians could still throw their weight around and it seems very clear to me that they were determined to go to war no matter what what I think is the crucial activity of the Germans and I certainly would agree with with Annika that the Germans very largely to blame was the issue of so-called blank check the the blanket guarantee of support for Austria no matter what they were going to do and both Austria and Germany the other leaders were to have very small groups of very cliques in both cases took those decisions in the full knowledge of the likely outcome which would be that a war would not be confined to the Balkans that it would bring in Russia which in which run the hugely strong risk of converting into a general European war now some historians Fritz fish has already been mentioned John roll whose Magisterial third volume of his biography of the Kaiser was just appeared would argue that there is conscious intent by the Germans to seek to carve out an empire in Europe others would say okay maybe that's not precisely what they're aiming to do but at the very least the German elite are prepared to run the risk of bringing about a war like that in order to achieve at the bare minimum breaking up the on taunt of Auster's of France and Russia with written on the sidelines peacefully okay but if it comes to war so be it so the very best thing you can say about the leaders of Germany austria-hungary they were prepared to take criminal risks I use the word advisedly with the Peace of Europe it strikes me that the sleepwalkers thesis very much speaks to our time to a time in which we don't want to allocate blame Chris Clark and Richard Evans actually got on record as saying that could get away from the blame game this strikes me as being frankly a historical that the evidence to me is absolutely clear whatever their motivations those two states bear the war guilt the birth a huge bird of the war guilt whatever you might say about the leaders of Britain France Italy Russia their actions I think were largely defensive and reactive could Britain stay out of the war no it couldn't the geopolitical reasons which down is already referred to I think are desperately important if we see the British decision to go to war in 1914 as part of a continuum that goes back at least to the age of Queen Elizabeth that's to keep the Low Countries the Netherlands and Belgium out of the hands of a hostile power particularly a hostile naval power is you know one of the the primary principles upon which which British security and foreign policy are constructed the wider issue of course is the balance of power the Britain has historically sought to prevent the domination of Europe by any one power and thus allied with Germany or at least German States against France under Napoleon and allied with France against Germany 100 years later Britain basically went into the Second World War in 1939 for the same reason join NATO in 1949 for essentially the same reason the other thing the other issue which I must say that he loomed much i I've come to believe was much more important I did in right when I did some writing on this about a decade ago is the moral case it's clear to me that people in Britain particularly nonconformist conscience was so outraged by the invasion of Belgium Germany ripping up a treaty that it certainly brought I think a Swiss government into the war more or less United it brought Lloyd George on board certainly we've got so used to politicians lying we think nothing of it anymore but in 1914 they thought differently so the moral case as well as a strategic case I think is absolutely critical the final thing I'll say actually is even if we could sort of you know some held may wave a magic wand and discover that Chris Clark slit sleepwalkers thesis is in fact correct the way that Germany then proceeds to behave once war had bro come out with the September program the not only the policy but actually the plans were actual policy of annexations in eastern West the treatment of occupied States and the threat the absolute dire threat that this posed to the very existence of Britain's a sovereign state makes the first world war for all the factors a terrible absolutely ghastly experience or war which had to be fought in had to be won nobody in Britain really wanted war in 1914 there's a very I think if Germany had avoided going through Belgium I think it's an extremely good chance of Britain would have stayed out of the world together or possibly have not come in until several weeks or even months later because they asked worth government had fallen apart which I think probably would have meant that Germany would have won and France and Russia would have lost it's a little war anybody in Britain really wanted in 1914 it's a war that people at the time from the very top of society the very bottom recognized the threat and recognizes a foot war that had to be fought and had to be endured I put my hands on my wife by Carlton table I'm for one and profoundly glad that our ancestors took that decision fought the war and ended up on the winning side make one point I've got a I've got a quote here it's very interesting what you say about the reluctance that there was in Britain and to fight I'm sure that's true I've got a quote here from a leftish academic journalist Gilbert Murray who very much opposed the wardroom wrote in 1915 I've never told this year seriously believed in the unalterably aggressive designs of Germany now I see that on a large part of this question I was wrong and a large number of people whom I honor most were wrong one is vividly reminded of Lord Melbourne dictum all the sensible men were on one side and all the damn fools on the other and egad sir the damn fools were right now the diamond Falls he's talking about with people like Lord Roberts Lord Kitchener Lord Milner people who wanted to create in the years running up to the war a much stronger army the British Army was very very small it relied on its naval power for its strength he said any sense of the wall could have been avoided had Britain been more militaristic that if Britain had interview introduced conscription had effectively had a continental army to back up its quasi alliance with Britain as I say with France and Russia before 1914 that's that's a possibility but but of course it was never going to happen because Britain before 1914 was simply never going to allow conscription to come in so yes might be but really not I think worth debating because it was never going to happen ever practical politics if we're talking national interests I can't say that it's in Britain's national interests to fight like France and Germany or Russia when it's not France or Germany or Russia it's the world it's the workshop of the world he doesn't have an agricultural peasant class you know what he's very good at he's making stuff and so it should fight a war based yield and high technology which is what he does and and and of course you're sort of in you if you say that Britain should have had a big army well that's kind of missing out the role of the British Navy plays in eventually winning the war yeah so I think I'm not sure that just because good movie thought the damn fool survived that the Kitchener was right to say we would have a bigger army it's interesting because it doesn't end up being deployed in the way he wanted it deployed anyway which is led everybody else in Europe fight themselves to a standstill and then disappear serving the peace you know so walls don't end up how people think they're going to be at the start was there any means historians refer to the Court of Arbitration at The Hague for example will say any peaceful means by which it could have been resolved through such methods as arbitration deal I mean are you aware of any such methods no not really because you see if you have a world which is divided as the world of 1914 was between rival European nation-states creating empires and spheres of influence in America Asia and Africa and building great armies to back their position both in Europe and and and in the wider world you don't have the material basis for International Cooperation to resolve conflicts of this nature you have to overturn what was a profoundly and still is a profoundly dysfunctional global system where instead of having a world in which there is international unity and solidarity and a resolution of human problems collectively and democratically in a rational way by agreement of us all as a species if you have a world that is divided in this way into nation states and corporations that are competing with each other if that's the dynamic of the system it doesn't matter what international institutions you set up it doesn't matter if you set up a League of Nations it doesn't matter if you set up the United Nations it doesn't matter what kind of international organization you set up you are not going to be able to prevent war which is intrinsic to a system which is divided and competitive in the way the modern capitalist world is the world that has given us a century of war it's a pipe dream to come back yes that could have been the war could have been stopped by international mediation Sir Edward grey on I think on six or six separate occasions proposed either an international conference or mediation now in the past two years that is 1912-1913 the Balkan wars had seen a revival of the old concert of Europe actually the great power see round round the table both to prevent the war from spreading and actually to decide in some cases on put it crudely which which state was in the gate which chunk chunk of territory and all the indications from 1912-1913 was that gray actually was quite sympathetic perhaps bird case Vernon Bogdan are a very important lecture some time last year and I think it's coming out and it's the it's the core of a book that's coming out late later this year has made the point I thought very very very forcefully that it is entirely possible had the Austrians and Germans been serious about peace which of course they were not that had they been serious about it there could have been an international conference ending with Serbia being punished isolated although not justice destroyed so Walker have been avoided the Austrians could have got some sort of revenge for their for the assassination the Russians won't have been drawn in but such things only act such peace processes only actually work if the principal parties are serious about it Russia was serious France was serious Britain was serious Serbia remember a choice and suspect that serious Germany and Austria were not they actually say in Vienna after the assassination that a diplomatic victory would be odious we do not want a diplomatic victory this time particularly the chief of staff in Vienna France conrad von hotzendorf who's been absolutely gagging for a war with Serbia for some time every kind of crisis he wants to have a war with Serbia this is his moment the last thing he wants is arbitration or mediation and as you say there are all these offers on the table they get dismissed out of hand in Berlin and in Vienna and what Berlin what the leaders in Berlin do is they say we will pretend to pass on your mediation proposal but please don't be fooled by this we don't want you in Vienna to mediate but we can't lose face so we have to appear to be in support of the offers that are coming from from Sir Edward grey and as you say there's this tradition of solving crises around the conference table and I can't see why this couldn't have worked again if that being the desire I'd would grace come on for an awful lot of criticism from the whole series of historians normally for not being tough enough I think that completely misunderstands politically how weak he is within the Liberal government anything else I for me his biggest mistake is actually believing the International processes would have worked as recently as six months before will work in the summer of 1916 alighted at 14:00 I'm sorry his mistake is believing the Germans the Austrians are serious about peace when they are not I mean it seems to me that you one of the problems with trying to stop the war once it's on you know two or three years in is the level of popular commitment throughout Europe to it but actually you know these these wars can't just before by great statesmen they can only be full with popular consent and actually because they because there isn't that that kind of Universal enthusiasm that I think people used to believe in in 1914 actually you would have had popular support for a peace settlement you know a peaceful resolution in 1914 it would have been politically possible domestically as well as internationally but of course once the war is underway by the time you get to 1916 1917 that's much harder to achieve because these new politically much more difficult I'm from different I don't think we can underestimate that probably the mentality of people there if you're thinking of the Russian soldier fighting the church and fatherland you know Christian patriotic duties in for all the time Rupert Brooke writes of being you know now god be thanked who has watched us with with with this hour I mean these are sentiments that are unimaginable to us but in terms of the mentality of that period they are they are very real and that is what people believe and it's very difficult but I want to try and move on cuz I realize we were really racing through time here and I want to look at the legacy of the ward and the way we understood it and why Britons are so fascinated by it and I want to look at the idea of a good war versus bad war when Britain's look back at the Second World War it's almost universally accepted as the right thing to do it's almost manichaean in the way of good versus evil there is little regret despite the suffering that send you were there it was the right thing to do that is not the way on the whole the First World War is thought of anymore and perhaps hasn't been thought over the last 50 years and Dan I wonder if you could talk about the way in which that's changed because you do get criticism of strategy for example even with people at Churchill or George as a little heart right from the beginning but nevertheless they sense that the war is still the right thing to afford if it's all right to go to war even if the strategy is wrong we think of books like by Frank Richards Frederick Manning JC dumb that are ambivalent I suppose ambiguous about war but still relatively positive about the legacy of it that changes I wonder if you could sort of chart that change ascribing a single view to Britain's in that interwar period because actually the thing that was very controversial whilst it's being fought and it remains very controversial afterwards but certainly I think there's a there's both a much broader range of opinion which says the conflict was worth fighting and it was for something and of course it's much harder to say it was worth nothing whilst so many people have lost loved ones so this was a kind of structural factor and what exactly what can actually be said and of course yeah that's idea one of the ways that society deals with that idea of this kind of controversy but simultaneously this great tragedy of so much loss of life is to try and come to a kind of mutually acceptable meaning a and I think you see that transition from the 1920s getting into the 1930s and so you get this idea that this was a war it's justified by the achievement of peace which i think is a very important way actually i've looked then looking at Britain's involvement with Europe in the 1930s and how uncontroversial the start of the Second World War is using it causes much less debate popularly politically going to war in September 1939 not it's because it's seen as a war for peace so the sacrifice of 1914-18 will only be justified if Britain stands up for peace you know and redeems those those dead soldiers but it's really only I think in the the post Second World War era that you have a rewriting of that the experience of the first world war in more purely negative terms so Oh important that's because you have a comparison so you can have a good war and a bad war Britain's second world war is better in the sense that it loses fewer people whether it's I mean I think one of the other aspects of goodness that we associate with the Second World War is the achievement of sort of social welfare reform at the in debates of course you again what's often forgotten is how important for in terms of improving the conditions of an awful lot of working-class Britons the experience of the First World War is the you know the fact that trade unions take advantage of water and maybe shortage destroyed can get better way to pay and well but more particularly I think in terms of working family incomes just the sheer level of employment you know this that makes the first world a transformative moment as well and then of course you know wars are always repurposed to be visited over time in history I don't think that there's always been an undercurrent of questioning even when the first of all probably seen any more negative terms baddies is it really about war so I mean it's distinctive that we're having a debate today I think one of the things that actually happens with the the remembrance of the first of all always it becomes remembered in terms of debates and those those debates can be used to they were key part people's political and personal identities so actually one of the things that even people who might not know very much about the First World War they know about there were some debates there were some things that people argue about and I know where I stand on those debates and that's part of what makes me who I am the reasons Britain went to war in both the first and the Second World War are actually quite similar and when you talk about the the effects in terms of labor in terms of welfare they are again strikingly similar you know we did not go to war in the Second World War however much we like to think that to save the Jews we did not do we did not know about Auschwitz we went for remarkably similar reasons for the reasons we fought the first of all if you want to say there's more the mixture of morality and geopolitics why British statesman and population are persuaded to fight twice over but we do seem to have a turning a turning point round about the 60s everyone remembers the BBC's great series the Great War which is still striking now when you see people in their 60s and 70s who fought on the psalm and EEP and you also get the first real public airing of Wilfred Owen's poems in the War Requiem oh what a lovely war of course comes through that what's that turning point about what does it represent well place the turning point little later which I don't agree with him on but I think we've had many organs about this I think the 1960s it's it is I think the the generation actually now reviewing the First World War through the prism of the second world that could the good war refracts the bad war front foot like that lot of other things going on as well JB Priestley for example who writes very movingly in the late 1950s of his experiences of the First World War but he sees this as through through the eyes of the other I think I found a member of CND that's oh oh what a lovely war.the background to it is the cold here and this idea the first world war is this tragic mistake and we've been going down that slippery slide again I can't know exactly when I was lovely war as premise yes I know 63 but within six months or so the Cuban Missile Crisis it's very close okay but but we're talking about that sort of sort of reaction I think the other thing is that there is this more general the whole overcook this the whole idea of the 1960s people being you know if isn't dropping out the rest of it but there is I think undoubtedly a backlash against the if you like Edwardian conformist conformism personified by Harold Macmillan and I think the First World War is caught up with that whole sort of gain oh don't make too much of it but countercultural idea the Beatles the Rolling Stones the peel and all the rest of it and he is of course Macmillan you know as a Grenadier officer in the war and I think the first world war becomes involved in these sort of wider societal changes and I copy the way the weather Dan made this point if he's right or it's somewhere else but it's also the fact you know you do have at this stage grand grandfathers who fought in the war sitting down with their grandchildren and talking about it their discussions being prompted by watching the Great War TV series and various other things that are going on it looks very strange of Alan Clark and but of course the I think what links that is Clark is writing as a sort of this is about a different sort of class struggle this is the up-and-coming technocrats versus the old aristocratic elite so the the the the lesson the own part of the point of writing the donkeys is just to Pat the bourgeoisie or make a kind of name for himself because he each felt that being a novelist he wanted to try something new and I'd say the first of all Falls always gonna be ya know of course but but that new the standpoint Navis of you know there it's a it's it's the middle class who are technically adept take you know wanting to to sweep away an older system so I don't think that's that's a bit different from hippies and you know tuning in and dropping out which i think is much more 1970s this is a debate that's going on in Britain from the 1930s onwards and you see it there at the end of the 1930s this idea of the generals in the last war didn't know what they were doing they didn't deal with technology well and it's significantly its focus so much on technology it's not an accurate reflection of them but if that thing of all Britain needs to be make itself by being really good at using these new weapons of war here's something that you see time and time again sort of parallel debates that I just sketched out that are happening for the centenary that also happened for the 50th anniversary that while in this country these debates were going on in Germany the debate was again about more guilt this time around the argument that it had been Germany's fault was debated in in the media because that had been really very much better by the late 1930s everybody had agreed that it was kind of nobody's fault in particular the system had broken down and that was very comfortable for Germans so and and the and the contemporary background to that debate again is significant when you mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis but obviously also in in the 1960s you have the Berlin Wall you have the fact that Germany is at the very forefront of the Cold War and now you get a German historian not an Australian historian teaching in Cambridge and a German historian saying it was us and so that's that's very uncomfortable so the debates that the Germans have about the war are completely different and I think apart from the the issue of the origins the First World War itself has never been in any way problematized in in Germany it's never actually been debated the war itself is just a complete non topic it's obviously an on topic in in in the immediate years after the war because you know well the Germans lost the war and you know not only do they feel they didn't start it they also feel they didn't really lose it but there they are and so you know that that's a you have a different relationship with with that war because of because of its outcome and then after the Second World War well it was just so much more gruesome for Germans and then even the First World War although startlingly the the civilian deaths are similar as I hadn't really clocked but was pointed out to me just earlier 700,000 German civilians if you include the influence are dead but that is completely overlooked in Germany and and really to this day it is I'd say in the last two years maybe that there's this sudden interest in in the first world war which suddenly in German is called the great war I'm not quite sure why that's significant I think it is significant I don't quite know what it means but suddenly it has just completely changed that the way Germans see the war has completely changed shadowing the kind of Gove argument really which which in in its essence is saying that the way we view the First World War is based upon trendy views that were developed in the nineteen sixties it's reflected in things like oh what a lovely war it's reflected a little bit later in Black Adder and so on that it's an in a sense that traditional view of the First World War as a construct of relatively recent times now that only works if you can't see what is happening inside European society and inside the European armed forces that are engaged at the time of the first world war it is absolutely right that a very large proportion of those who were conscripted to fight or volunteered to fight when it broke out in 1914 were gulled by the dominant ideas of the time the nationalism the imperialism the racism all of the other ideas that were used to mobilize people and get them into the trenches and get them killing workers in uniform and peasants in uniform on the other side but there was a minority a significant minority that opposed it from the very very beginning and that minority got bigger and bigger and bigger until across Europe across the fighting France there was a wave of mutinies and mass desertion and revolutionary movements among the soldiers which shut down the war on the Eastern Front in 1917 and then shut down the war on the Western Front in nineteen and on the homefront a wave of strikes that culminated in a tidal wave of revolution that swept across Europe between 1917 and 1923 and actually brought the entire system the entire European state system the entire European capitalist system close to collapse we got closer then that I think than at any other time in human history that creates the legacy that creates a mass opinion that says this was an appalling slaughter and why is it so different the reaction to what is going on in 1918 than it has been before it because war has changed it's because they have turned war into an industrial process up until this point armies were relatively small they tended to fight discrete campaigns in particular places in distant places what's happening now from 1914 onwards is that entire societies are completely engulfed by industrialized slaughter and the products of human ingenuity human engineering human labor are turned into a vast mechanism for the destruction of life that's why the slaughter is so massive that's why the reaction is so huge and that's why we have today a mass anti-war movement that is the real legacy of the first world war the size of the anti-war movement in Britain today and I and I in a way I too wish that was a legacy I'd be much more pessimistic than you are I think the really awful lesson of the first of all is actually this isn't something that creates a mass anti-war movement in many of the participant countries the appalling lesson that we have to learn from this conflict is the ability of human societies which in many ways bring a great deal of goods to their members to self-deluded into fighting these appalling lis these grotesque complex which kill millions of people which in greatest damage but that's not something which is just inflicted on people from above sadly this is something which is driven by popular emotion from below as well and you know okay the German army on the Eastern Front doesn't break down in 1917 yeah that's quite significant for what happens on the Eastern Front in 1917 the the Allied armies don't break down on the Western Front in 1918 again that's quite significant for the outcome of the war so I think the really interesting point that you raised and the thing which is significantly absent from all the discussions about collaboration is how do we commemorate 1917 he has been very little thought about that but that's actually once you get into that from that period of great upheaval that lasts long after 1918 these are actually much more difficult things for national governments to commemorate yeah and I think one of the things that we'll agree on is Michael Gove if he's still in office is going to have a terrible difficulty trying to work out well how do you cast a conservative narrative around 1917 it strikes me that the purchase of the First World War on Britain's is as strong as it's ever been perhaps stronger and I'm thinking in particular of poppy wearing which is far greater and seems much more ubiquitous than it was when I was a child even though there were people from from the First World War there then newsreaders stopped putting them on about late September these days but there was a very interesting part I want to open this up to the audience next but there was just one interesting point by an Irish historian Oh him Edward Madigan who had an interesting point about why the British and I think he specifically said the English we're so obsessed by the first world war and he said it was the only opportunity perhaps he was just some izing but he said perhaps it was the only opportunity the English had to present themselves as victims and I think that's quite quite an interest important but on just on that we can open it up to the user Frank Jackson world disarmament campaign the bizarre thing the thing that seems to me to be bizarre about this excuse that can we just have questions not statements questions only please I thought we should have a debate yeah we can have a debugger we need questions to have a debate and by that you mean the Boer War in general as well presumably yeah yeah to what extent did the Jameson raid affect the First World War Gary okay I've already said it my opening statement I think that war was caused by the individual decisions of particular leaders in Austria and and Germany that's not to deny of course that there are long-term factors like imperialism like the arms race like capitalism like various other isms which are important they're important I think in making war not inevitable but probably more likely however I immediately caveat that by saying that the arms race there is no real evidence that arms race is ultimately lead to war the French British naval arms race late 19th century didn't thankfully the american-soviet arms race nuclear arms race of the seventies and eighties didn't and by 1914 even the Anglo German arms race had had really led with that with the Germans being defeated in the sense the British had out built them and so the German plan for Arthur undermining the Royal Navy's Marshall security had failed well it had done of course was to poison relations between Britain and Germany in actually completes stroke of genius for Britain to get into bed not only with France traditional enemy but Russia it's great imperial rival over India I guess that course that's what happened between ISO 4 and 1907 so your point I think you know imperialism helped create preconditions in which war might occurred but to quote David Stevenson who I think is probably I in my view one of the shrewdest historians writing on the first world war at the moment he said Europe might have been a house of cards in 1914 but it still took somebody to top off the cards I just wanted to ask a couple of questions the first is I'd like to know what the panel thinks about the whole period from the Scramble for Africa to 1914 because it seems to me this is absolutely central to the building up of different rivalries to the way in which you have competition between the big empires and that this has an effect on the kind of rivalry which then leads with the arms race and if you remember those dreadnaughts that Lloyd George built they what they doubled the amount of spending on dreadnaughts in the years before the First World War what impact does that have and second I'd like to ask particularly to Anika but I find it almost unbelievable that people can say that after the first world war Germany didn't talk about the war the whole of the process up to 1933 and the rise of Hitler was precisely about what the war had caused the outcome of the war the Versailles Treaty all of those things people and people came out of the war hating the war they didn't want another war and that it seems to me is very very important in the 20s and 30s people knew the consequences of the war and actually the the the picture we get of the war today comes from the witnesses to the war it comes from Robert Graves it comes from Wilfredo and it comes from the people who lived through it and it comes from All Quiet on the Western Front it comes from all of those things and it seems to me we have to actually understand that and not allow the kind of Michael Gove view of the 60s which made this all soft and we should get back to militarism again in that way but I don't think it is the same as it is in this country it is a different relationship because the the attitude towards the first world war in Germany is is one of anger it's it's a country that does not make its peace with the end of the war in the way that I think Britain does make is be thinking the idea is that at least the the sacrifices were worth it because this was the war to end all wars and you can believe that until another war breaks out well in Germany that's not really the attitude you're completely that Versailles and the outcome of the war is a huge topic in Germany and it is it is a topic that unites practically every German regardless of their their position the very left and very right agree on on the fact that Versailles that that the more guild ruling in particular has to be undone that this was this was a Victor's piece that this was just the absolute the most shameful thing and that is one of the reasons why Hitler comes to power because he can harness this anger but he's a completely different attitude to the first world war in Germany to in Britain so if I said that nobody thinks about the war that's clearly not the case but but they they think of it differently partly because they lost it and partly because they cannot make their peace with the peace and so when you then get hit Lane in 1937 when he says in the in the rice sack you know I finally rubbed out that signature from the treaty that was forced out of us and I finally returned Germany back from being like a leper among the nations back to its former glory then that sort of ends ends this this young nearly 20 year struggle which is all about undoing the outcome of the war so it's a very different way of relating to the war than there is in this country and and if you're mentioning remark of course it's very controversial it's not like here when most people seem to share this notion that the war was was a terrible experience you mean they Mark's book is one of the ones that gets burnt by the Nazis precisely because that's not what they want to hear they want to hear that it's it's going to be okay to fight another one this time we're going to win yeah my the first thing I mean I was worrying about is the idea of popular consent which I really just don't buy I mean if you once you were in the trenches if you didn't go over the top in the trenches you did face getting shot so I don't see how I don't see how you can argue that it is popular consent when it's either going you know go and kill those Germans or kill those British people or or get shot yourself and then the second thing is just really on the idea of sort of Britain good Germany bad I mean would you really argue that that is the case when would you really try and put that argument in somewhere like India you know where you know or other British colonies where there was no democracy I just don't buy the idea of Britain as some kind of beacon of democracy in civility I don't think anyone is suggesting that in fairness I don't think anyone has ever said to Germany bad britain good on this panel well that's what I think we're dealing with good shades of grey there well well the the gentleman on the end said I'm very glad that my country went to what my ancestors went to war and we came out on the winning side eating but I think you owe that's that was my question i mean i don't i think it's more complex okay well let him answer that Gary well if I take the first what about consent and you're actually wrong about what kept British troops in the in the in the trenches it was very largely a combination of comradeship belief in cause really basic things like having the rations arriving on time mail arriving from home that sort of thing 350 ish British soldiers were executed for military crimes during the Great War out of an army of 5.4 million the Vark 5 - 4 million also served in the Army at some point during the war a large number of the people who were executed were repeat offenders British army discipline could be pretty harsh could be pretty brutal but the idea of people you know stirred a really good chance of being shot if they deserve to know when absent without leave is simply untrue and a really key reason why people stayed in the trenches was excellent leadership at junior officer level ah to put it very crudely once the public school boys had had been killed off at beginning of the war they replaced from people from all parts of society about 40% of all officers in 1918 were from a from a lower class or lower middle class background and live paternal they looked after their men the soldiers were perfectly capable of telling them where to get off if their side of the bargain was broken there were a few isolated mutinies they tended to be very much against local local conditions and that's the Solidarity which saw the forces the British Empire through to conclusion in 1918 1918 that's what era tea broke down in the French army United 72 though it was rebuilt it certainly broke down in the German army in the hundred days victorious offenses of 1918 and it's Hallion and the austro-hungarians went much the same way British really were the only major force whose armies were in the field for any length of time which did not undergo a serious mutiny while the war was going on afterwards different matter people joined up to beat the Kaiser they don't the ones to go home they did all sorts of things including burning down Luton Town Hall but there was a basic commitment to the calls to their officers which kept the the soldiers going throughout throughout the the very grim conditions in the trenches because I feature things in a much less cozy way than Gabby does you know not in the not just in the Armed Forces but nationally but I think that question of popular consent is when we were actually the best research historically is now being done but it's an area where there is more research that's needed but it seems to me that an awful lot of what that is pointing to is the extent to which the war is experienced a very very local level so not as not just as Britons or Germans of it but inhabitants of of counties of particular towns particular villages and I think there is a very interesting question about how the dynamics of consent work at that level so how is it that these at this kind of micro level societies across Europe depending on your perspective are persuaded are gold or persuade themselves to fight but I don't for me there can't be much argument that the only way in which these societies can sustain this war for so is because they have the consent of their populations hmm so that's that's not to say this is something which everybody is willingly serving in because that's obviously not the case but the majority of the population in all of those combatant countries supports the war for quite a long time and again I think that's that's a question for me that's a much more interesting question actually then whose fault is it that the war starts it's why does so many people across Europe keep fighting it even when it's obvious it's not going to be over quickly it's going to keep going and it's going to be horrible hmm but I think that's one is a excellent book by Katrina panel called the Kingdom United which looks at responses is very very local archival level and that's I think if you want to know more about how people respond to the war that's where you've got to go back to is there's little local archives and find out what are people doing how do they respond to this news of the war of I think hi I have a question which I'd like each of the panel members to try and have a stab at as we've been talking about British libraries your piano project next Monday BBC will announce the first I think it's 200 episodes of 1400 of World War one at home we are in this situation where we're really kind of contemplating the relationship of the local to the global what are your kind of hopes and fears and aspirations for what we might achieve through this talking through this debate within Britain and Britain's place within the world over the next four to five years well let me say that I'm not terribly interested in Britain's place in the world because I don't see Britain as a unified entity I see Britain as a class Society and what I'm interested in is the well-being of the great majority of ordinary British people who are at the moment are under massive attack by a neoliberal elite and we talked a little bit about the Second World War and the legacy of the Second World War a neoliberal elite that is determined to destroy the greatest achievement of the British people in the 20th century which is the construction of the welfare state in the 25 years or so after the Second World War and when you look at who is doing that and who supports that project it is the neoliberal elite of bankers and industrialists and millionaire politicians it's the same sort of people actually has made the decision to go to war in 1914 so it's not really a question of Britain's position in the world it's much more a question of how are working people in Britain going to organize themselves along with working people in other countries to resist what is coming down the road that's partly neoliberal cuts austerity cuts which will return us to the kind of position that we were in in in the interwar bit with interwar period but it's also about this it's also about support for new military interventions in other parts of the world designed to shore up the big corporations that are based in in in in the Western world and we have no interest in those Wars as ordinary people any more than we have any interest in the austerity cuts but our rulers do the main enemy is at home not abroad so I think I'll fine answer the question so my my view is said it it if there's two if there's two things I'd like to come out of the set the next four years one is that some people who don't know anything about the war and think think they're not interested in it let's find out a bit more about it and find actually they are interested and the people who already think they know about the war have cause to think about why they know what they know and they can stick with their opinions or they can change them but they at least reflect on why do they know what they already know and if we can manage that I think there would have been been some success so you know fortunately there's a solution finial there because hopefully what happens is that the process of talking about wider societies consent to fight this war hundred years ago is a way of getting people to think about why do they not conduct greater disruption to stop wars being fought today someone involved in public history to emphasize the global aspect of the war and to get away from his rather parochial obsession with the Western Front you know this this this took place elsewhere countries as Brazil was involved turkey the aspect their whole theater of the Middle East is important I think one of the reasons why Christopher Clark's book The sleepwalkers has been a success not just in Germany but here as well is because he offers its focus is essentially on Central Europe about which many of us including myself are very very ignorant so far as the first world war goes so I think what we should do over the next series is to try and open up those vistas and and brings one thing that worries me about the local is the fact that we become obsessed by the local and forget the bigger picture and forget the high politics forget the diplomacy they all matter and they all have to be connected and I think what has happened with the First World War in particular but a lot of history lately is it's become focused on the individual and tracing the individual and it's some kind of sort search for authenticity and I don't think that's a good thing you have to paint the whole picture and okay you ask what are we worried about it goes I think a long way towards what you're saying but I I'm worried about a development of different national stories about the war and I think that is what's happening not just with regard to the causes but with regard to the the whole history of the war that we're not integrating these stories and that we're in danger of having conflicting views of the war and I don't think that's very helpful and I'm also a bit worried that we are gonna see World War one fatigue setting in before we've got to 2018 in the red tie I'm in the right time following the fall of the Soviet Union has there been a reassessment to Google one from a Russian perspective I was giving a paper in in Cambridge about sort of public history in the war last week and I was I was talking to a Russian historian there who said what's striking is how little have the how little they were interested is in preserving any any bit of football or history that's left how little knowledge Davies of what at all there is that remains that there is a there's still a very heavy archival presence in all sorts of archives but that access interesting accessing it or doing anything with it is it's it's not part of the story that the Russian regime at the moment wants to wants to tell I don't know I mean again 90 2017 is going to be really interesting because very hot see how you could avoid doing something with 2017 but quite how you construct out into a Putin is narrative I I have no idea but I think that's the great I mean that that's the good I mean the the remembrance in in the UK for all that we debated is very easy if you end up on you know if the country ends up on the winning side in two wars it there's not actually that much that's controversial both though I mean there's still a lot we can fight about Empire and those other things but remembrance for countries that are torn aside by population movements by genocide knew several times over the course of the the 20th century is much much more difficult now how do you seem to be the tragedy that we ought to be talking about is not really focusing on Britain at all but it's it's what happens on the Eastern Front and and again maybe that should be our third aim is if if people in Britain at the end of 2018 are cognizant that the war isn't just fought by some car key figures in a trench somewhere in Belgium with it maybe if you feel very Germans on the far side but that Said's which it really is some the perspective that some of our soldiers have at the time but there's something else going on on the other side of Europe I think that would be really really useful development how the big question were one of the big questions is how likely would the Second World War have been if the First World War had never somehow been allayed or had been a minor conflict you know personally I think it there's a good chance it may not have happened but obviously today with Hitler's sense of revenge about Versailles and everything so what you know how likely is it that Second World War wouldn't have happened Gary I one of the myths of the First World War is that the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War you know Sarah do not pass go do not collect 200 pounds actually there's all sorts of reasons why Versailles might actually have worked there's a separate argument which is that the real problem with Versailles when it says two things first of all that Versailles having been imposed on the Germans in 1919 the Allies then simply did not enforce it the French were very keen on enforcing that the the terms the British and Americans much less so and so the Germans spotted weaknesses which they could exploit the second argument is that in the Treaty of Versailles brought about at the worst of all worlds that actually it enraged the Germans without taking away Germany's ability to resort to arms at some point in the future Versailles is has has this reputation as a very harsh a Carthaginian peace it wasn't something like brest-litovsk imposed on Bolshevik Russia by the Germans in 1917 1918 was it was a Carthaginian peace what happens to Germany 1945 is boosted there's no formal priest peace process at all but it is the destruction of an existing social system and being rebuilt the Versailles actually is a very traditional form of peace settlement albeit quite a harsh one but not harsh enough or not mild enough in my personal view the best way to treated Germany in 1919 would have been to regard the new Republican democratic state as a successor state and actually blame the ills of the recent pass on the on the now departed imperial government and basically give Germany a clean a clean slate that was never going to work in a febrile atmosphere of 1919 it was it was a non-starter but there's a very strong argument put forward by Philip Bell and Sir Michael Howard among other people that actually what causes the Second World War in the form that we know it is not Versailles but the Great Depression because Germany is becoming reconciled if not to defeat so it's been brought back into the family or the the wider international community at the end of the twenties the wall street depression followed by at most Wall Street crash followed by the depression smashes that it wrecks what is left of political stability in Germany eventually of course brings Hitler to power even though his daddy's not necessarily a given once Hitler is in power he a completely different sort of politician that anybody's seen before he's determined a war from the very beginning and he wants a major war I can well imagine that without without the great depression without Hitler coming to power there's further revision of the Versailles Treaty which is being revised anyway in the 20s and possibly a small localized border war between Germany and Poland at some stay at some state in which some state in which the front is are amended but not the Cataclysm we actually get in 1939 so the Second World War is a product of the First World War that's certainly true but I don't think there's necessarily a direct line between Versailles and what happens in September 1939 thanks Gary I'm afraid we've reached the end of the of the line here thankfully we're not even at August 1914 yet the anniversary of that we've got nineteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen even nineteen to come so I've no doubt we'll have many many more debates and it's we can see just how much interest there is in this topic from all of you who've come this evening at such short notice I'm sure we'll have more of these debates because this is a massive complex and challenging topic but thank you for coming and thank you for the British Library as well for organizing this and thank you to our family

Channel: British Library

Views: 39,651

Keywords: World War I (Event), WWI, World War One, Historian (Occupation), History (Literary School Or Movement), First World War Centenary, British Library (Building), Gary Sheffield, Debate, Historiography, Lecture, Europeana (Database)

Id: jvr7UJI47UM

Length: 85min 16sec (5116 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2014