Is Tony Blair Labour's greatest ever leader? John McTernan certainly thinks so. He lays out Blair's stall and talks up the nice things he achieved in office. It begs the question, what is wrong with those people who grumble about him? Rising employment, stable public finances, the minimum wage - Gordon Brown couldn't have inherited a better set of policy achievements. It must be that Blair refused to nationalise the top 100 monopolies, and didn't squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked. Or perhaps it's because he won three consecutive elections by sticking dead centre and ignoring the advice/demands of the left. Only the embittered argue with success. But is that it, really?
Disclaimer time. As Blair took the reins of the Labour Party I was being radicalised. Apart from a very, very brief moment in 1996 when I thought about joining the party, I always had Blair down as a wrong 'un. The smooth patter and coiffured sincerity never chimed with me. Then again, teenage Trotskyists were not the priority swing voters Millbank wanted to win over. Wind history forward to now and as a relatively dull and sensible socialist Blair strikes me still as less charm, more smarm.
None of this would matter if his achievements were legacy-defining. But to describe them that way is to throw a sack over the historical record and give it a good thumping. For me, Attlee was. Thatcher was. But Blair? It all depends on how you look at him and what angles matter to you and your politics. On John's part, it's public services, rights at work and, of course, winning elections. Funnily enough, these things matter to most Labour Party people too, so that's where I'll drop a few words.
On public services, yes, lots of nice new hospitals were built. Building Schools for the Future - before it was cancelled by the Tories - ensured hundreds of thousands of children won't be sitting in cold Victorian buildings and rain-stained portakabins. Add community centres and fancy buildings for the government bureaucracy in old London town to the pot too. All good stuff, I'm sure you'd agree. But what's that oil in the lemonade? Oh my, the slick has a distinctive shape. It's almost as if it's spelling out three letters: PFI.
Yes, the Private Finance Initiative. The process by which a hospital worth, say £500m, ends up costing the public purse double or triple that amount. A scheme that was cooked up while John Major was still haunting Number 10, Blair and Brown made it very much their own. Basically you get a private contractor, such as Balfour Beatty, to build you your school, hospital or whatever and then over a period of time (usually 25-30 years) the public sector organisation that inhabits it pays off a mortgage. Services are also usually locked into expensive maintenance contracts too. As per the decadent character of our ruling circles, it was designed to reap short-term political capital by keeping new infrastructure costs off public spending figures. The pain, however, is long-term liability. It will cost the taxpayer many more billions in the long-run than if the government had simply paid out for the buildings. George Osborne has occasionally singled out PFI as proof of the last government's profligacy (curiously, he didn't raise his voice in opposition at the time). So concerned about the great PFI rip-off is he that the government are committed to a PFI wave of their own. Osborne and friends have never had a problem with socialism when it's for the rich and sadly, neither did Blair.
How about the workplace, the labour movement's front line. Did things get better under Blair? Setting aside the minimum wage, I'm interested in the balance between capital and labour. The "new rights" granted trade unions were mandatory recognition in workplaces of 20 or more workers if half of employees voted for it - a vital "in" after a period where unions more or less operated underground in many an office and factory. At the same time, New Labour strengthened maternity leave and introduced two weeks paid paternity leave and can lay claim to piloting equal rights at work through the Commons. Again, why grumble? The bulk of the achievements here - welcome as they were - are individual rights, not collective rights. Does this matter? Of course it does. Stronger unions mean fairer workplaces and less inequality in wider society. Time after time employers and employees skirmish over pay, holidays, pensions, the work process, managerial authority, and so on. Blair's reforms, ultimately, did not enhance the capacity of working people to press for greater freedoms in the job. In fact, the number of workers covered by collective bargaining fell.
You see, it is impossible to to assess Blair's record on workers rights without looking at his wider policy agenda. Across the public services - local government, the NHS, education, the law, the post office - New Labour strengthened internal markets where they existed, introduced them where they did not. Public institutions were obligated to contract out certain services to the private sector. For workers, this meant pay cuts, a worsening of conditions, the closure of final salary pension schemes, and an upsurge in part-time, insecure working. In short, the technocratic fantasy that markets deliver greater efficiencies was then and remains article of faith, but Blair's commitment to it severely undermined Labour's base. The Tories never make the mistake of hammering their constituency, and neither should we.
Lastly, those general elections. I've come across many otherwise sensible Labour people who have allowed three election victories under Blair crowd out their critical faculties. Of course, yes. It is a superficially impressive achievement. But Blair's victories were hardly alchemical. It's a truism that governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them. And in 1997 Labour was blessed to be facing an exhausted, scandal-ridden and divided Tory administration. Had John Smith not died prematurely Labour were still on course for power - returning Major for a second full term just would not have happened, period. Just look at the votes. 14.1m votes for the Tories in 1992 - the highest popular vote ever - and Labour's 13.5m votes in 1997, two million more than Kinnock's outing five years earlier and accounting for less than half of the voters who deserted the Tories. Turn out was down six per cent.
Come 2001 Labour lost three million votes but only five seats, thanks to first past the post. Turn out collapsed by 12%. And in 2005 another 1.2m votes vanished while turn out went up two per cent. Was Blair an electoral genius, or - like Thatcher - lucky in that his opponents were in disarray and were unable to substantially capitalise on the Iraq debacle. What is annoying is not that Blair won three elections. It's that Labour's support was gradually dispersed through the pursuit of policies antithetical to the interests of our key supporters.
To be fair to Blair, his record is more complex than one-sided hack jobs from either the left or right suggest. The SureStart centres, improvements in NHS care, the minimum wage, LGBT advances, these are real, tangible positives that made big differences to people's lives. That campaign groups, the unions and the far left have worked to protect the public services Labour renovated under Blair and Brown is enough to show a substantive difference existed between Blair and the Tories in those years. But being economic with the truth, of overlooking the inconveniences, all that John's article establishes is his unwillingness to look at Blair's record as it really was. Nostalgia, of seeing 1994-2007 bouncing to endless replays of Things Can Only Get Better has its uses, but drawing conclusions on the basis of analysing facts is not among them.
East confronts West. Idle talk of a new Cold War is in the air. For some, including me, the nostalgic pull has proven too difficult to resist - musically speaking. Thankfully, German skies in the 1980s weren't lit up by shell fire and the exhaust trails of tactical nukes. Instead, galloping basslines, hairspray and concrete-hard shoulder pads cavorted under the shadow of the bomb. To recall that apposite time, for your aural delectation here is a battle hymn from the front.
For seven-and-one-third years this blog has weighed on my brain like a digital nightmare. Apart from a six month break in 2007 and 18 months 2011-12, I've been writing or thinking about writing content. Even when I took a leave of absence words, phrases, screeds of 500 words or more often tangoed across my eyeballs when the shutters came down at night. As our minds have allowed social media technologies to colonise and structure our perceptions - how many times have you thought of a real-life in terms of an instagram snap or a sharply-observed tweet? - so mine finds half-digested ideas immediately suited to bloggable form.
Okay, I confess. It is tempting to answer 'why I blog' with some pretentious twaddle about the technology using me instead of me using it. Or by way of physiological compulsion, "I think therefore I blog" or some such. Truth is, yes. I do feel the need. But I could quite easily stop and do something else. After all, there are more books than I'll ever read. Upstairs a stack of old MegaDrive and Super Nintendo titles are begging for hours to be sunk into them. I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, why don't you bugger off and do that instead". Sorry, no can do.
When I started this way back I thought the blog might act as some kind of scribble pad for my PhD. But polly-ticks. Sad to say, prod me with a finger and you'll find there's nothing but politics on the end of the tip. And it's been that way for a very long time - since I was ten. There was no way it would stay strictly academic.
In 2006 I'd not long joined the Socialist Party (née Militant) and like any good Trotskyist I wanted to talk my outfit up. The internet was another arena of class struggle, so it was less about vanity publishing and more battling with petit-bourgeois rascals, liquidationist renegades and those ever-dangerous sectarians on the fringes of the labour movement.
And then, come 2010 I was in the sell-out swamp as well. The Persil-spotless banner of the SP got traded in for Gordon Brown's Labour Party. And yet, surprisingly, the reach of this blog and my Twitter feed was not enough to stop the Tories from getting back in. I soldiered on and then made the proper leap into the mainstream/renegacy by taking the coin of a Member of Parliament. Shortly after came the break and since October 2012, the resumption of normal service. The fare, as before, takes in establishment and radical politics, social and cultural issues, media and social media, books, video games and music, philosophy and sociology, sectariana and sexuality. Somewhat immodestly - reticence is a bourgeois affectation anyway - I've swaggered around the blogging block long enough to know you will find few politics bloggers who range across as many issues.
None of this answers "why". The truth is, justifications change like the weather. Vanity. Making the case for critical loyalty to Labour and the labour movement. Promoting the sociological imagination. Challenging misconceptions, misrecognition and stupidity wherever it is. Offering original takes you won't find elsewhere. All good reasons. But the real reason, ultimately, is I enjoy it.
So have a poke around with the subject cloud. At the very least you'll come away from this blog with a decent music taste.
Who actually wants a war in Ukraine? Despite sending the troops in in the first place, I'm not convinced Putin does. The Russian and blockaded Ukrainian troops in Crimea don't - as these remarkable scenes from earlier show. Russians and Ukrainians East and West don't. The new government, excepting Svoboda (Freedom) and the fascist street militias, don't. And neither does the State Department, Downing Street and Berlin. As no one wants war, and no one has an interest in one, you might naively ask how we ended up here and why negotiations with a view to a settlement aren't taking place?
I want to back peddle a bit. The US, Britain and Russia are party to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity. Now, those are two words that have been bandied about a lot in recent days. What is 'territorial integrity'? Is it just about lines on a map staying once and forever inviolable? It all depends, really. For example, before it occupied land taken from Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War did Israel have "territorial integrity" when Jerusalem was split between two states and was only nine miles wide at its narrowest point? Does present day Germany and Poland, despite having different borders than was the case 80 years ago?
This implies there's something more to the idea of this concept merely than an irregularly shaped and coloured blot of land in an atlas. In his discussion of what constitutes a state, the classical German sociologist Max Weber noted that a state was an organisation that exercised a legitimate monopoly of violence over a given territory. But this is too neat. Every nation recognises the Mexican government, for example. It is the legitimate, sovereign body for that country. Yet can it be described as having territorial integrity when whole Mexican states are blighted by a vicious drugs war that has killed thousands? Similarly, can a state have true territorial integrity when large numbers of its citizens - especially those from minority nationalities and ethnicities - might not recognise it as legitimate, as per the situation in Ukraine?
For all the Western powers' waxing over territorial integrity, that was fatally undermined when the revolution took place. Revolutions are rarely respecters of constitutional niceties (take note, Vladimir), but in this case Ukraine's uprising was essentially a national-popular uprising by the western Ukrainian majority. As this was and is opposed by large numbers in the east, evidenced by large-scale demonstrations and take overs of state buildings any talk of territorial integrity is a fiction. The presence of Russian troops in Crimea merely underline what was already accomplished.
What now, then? As the earthquake of revolution has shaken open nationalist fissures, a deep and lasting settlement has to begin with those nationalities, not cartographic scribbles. That other Vladimir, Vladimir Lenin has something to commend him here. In a different time and for very different reasons, he grappled with the problem of minority nationalities of Imperial Russia. Sometimes known as the prison house of nations, how was it possible to reconcile the masses of the subject nations to socialist politics when nationalism deeply conditioned political opposition to Tsarism? Lenin's argument was simple: grant subject nationalities the right to self-determination, up to and including separation. The logic was two-fold. By incorporating national rights into the Bolshevik's programme, revolutionary socialists could appear to be the most consistent champions for small nations groaning under the weight of Great Russian chauvinism. This would give them the masses' ear - after all, Lenin did note that nationalism was the outer shell of an immature Bolshevism. The second fiddle to the Bolshevik bow was the belief that granting nations their independence, if the so chose, sooner rather than later drew the sting out of nationalism. The reality of life under the local elites would be no better than life under the Tsar. But without nationalism for those elites to hide behind, the antagonisms proper to capitalism would come more to the fore and make the rapid development of socialist consciousness more likely.
I'm no revolutionary, and a retro replay of the Red October is not lurking around the corner. But when you start thinking through 'what is to be done?' Lenin's position has something to recommend it. Flecked with the blood of pogrom and genocide Ukrainian nationalism might be, its frame is supported by an historic antipathy to Russian domination. Russian speakers, on the other hand, can certainly find no accommodation with a "national" government that embraces the record of Ukrainian nationalism under the Nazis, revokes their language rights, tears down monuments to the war's Soviet fallen and talks about 'one nation' Ukraine. Enforcing "territorial integrity" under present circumstances is a recipe, at best, for persistent social divisions.
Could giving not just Crimea but the whole of East Ukraine the right to determine its future as per Lenin dampen down nationalism and with it the risk of war? Unfortunately, no. Ukraine is caught in a game between the great powers. In the first place separation along national lines is, in reality, the carving up of Ukraine into spheres of influence. Secondly, uncoupling east from west would strengthen the perception of Russian dominance. Separation would be a constant source of nationalist grievance. If anything, Ukrainian politics could get uglier.
Starting from great power machinations tramples on the rights and security of the people caught between them. But proceeding from national rights under these circumstances is a non-starter too. Perhaps, weirdly, Putin's proposal of new elections might diffuse the situation somewhat. After all, the revolutionary government in Kiev are committed to them too. So hey, we have a point of agreement already! Or guarantees to national minorities that they will be protected - if they feel threatened - by replacing Russian with non-EU, non-US UN troops. Unfortunately, an equitable solution for all Ukrainians is highly unlikely because a permanent peace requires removing the US, EU and Russia from the equation. But let's be realistic here. That's not going to happen any time soon. Any agreement is going to be a shoddy compromise, a piece of paper off which hypocrisy drips like wet ink as the great power tussle continues in the background.
End game? I'm afraid it's hardly started.
When I heard Molly Smitten-Downes is to be our sacrificial victim entrant for Eurovision this year, I was hoping for something a bit poppy. Nay, dancey. After all, when she was one half of Stunt our Molly was party to a few bouncy numbers that did okay with the music-buying public, not least the execrable reworking of Encore Une Fois. But no, sod what I think. And forget about the kind of musics our Eurovision partners like and vote for, which also tends to be poppy and dancey. Auntie, as always, knows best.
So, what do you think? Nil points?
In his polemic against "anti-authoritarian" socialists, Engels said this of revolution.
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.
Engels goes on to note that the problem with the 1871 Paris Commune was not so much its authoritarian tendencies. Rather that it was not authoritarian enough. But as Engels was talking about the passing of power from one class to another, what relevance does his observations have to 21st century Ukraine where the situation, it appears, was characterised by tension and potential conflict between nationalities even before Putin sent the troops in?
Grasping the character of Ukrainian nationalism means recognising how it sucks nutrients from the devastating memory of the 1918-21 civil war and Stalin's artificial famine. It remembers the deportation of "disloyal" nationalities during and after the war, and had a slow burning resentment toward the USSR's post-war settlement of the east and south by Russians - a feature common to all the subaltern Soviet republics. This sense of grievance, however, is darkened by the browns and blacks of fascism. Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazis when the Wehrmacht invaded in 1941 and some were enthusiastic participants in the extermination of the Jews. Hence Ukrainian nationalism is more than David-vs-Goliath-style nationalism common to small nations who've long been under the yoke. There is a virulent component locked in its historical DNA that could provide cover for pogroms - and worse.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to dismiss the ousting of Yanukovych and his clique simply as a US/EU-backed fascist putsch, as many here have done. The crowds who camped out and fought in Kiev's Independence Square found their grievances in a number of things - the economic situation, cronyism, heavy-handed policing. The nationalist dynamic was fueled by Yanukovych's government cuddling up with and acquiescing to another period of Russian domination of Ukraine. It was basically a populist uprising wrapped in the national colours, and it was one that was never going to be derailed by warm whispers down the phone from London or Washington.
The far right - the Right Sector and Svoboda-aligned militias - were always a very small but highly visible component of the crowds that defied riot police. Nevertheless concentrating their meagre fighting forces from across Ukraine in Kiev and inserting themselves into the most dangerous pitched battles was, politically speaking, an astute move. The fascists have attracted greater numbers of (primarily) young men on the basis of being the revolution's "best builders"; strengthened their hand vis a vis the other centre-right opposition parties with whom they had been in a formal coalition - namely St Tymoshenko's Fatherland party and Klitschko's Democratic Alliance for Reform; and set about inflaming nationalist tensions further. Have no doubts about it, there are plenty of people in the far right who fantasise of making Ukraine this decade's Bosnia. The fascists then, the would-be pogromists are a tendency within the revolution, one whose gains were not inevitable at the outset but are now busily consolidating their position. As the section of the government calling loudest for firm action to be taken in Crimea, they are now seeking to position themselves as Ukraine's only consistent champions.
As a populist uprising asserting itself against Russia, its purchase was always going to be limited among Russian-speaking Ukrainians and other minorities. The revolution dismissed the government by imposing the popular will of west Ukraine on the national state, but it is fantastical to imagine this can be carried through where the rest of the country is concerned. And it is that febrile, incomplete and regionalised character of the revolution that has generated a discernible impulse toward civil war. Engels was right that revolutions are among the most authoritarian social phenomena going. He might have added there can be no half-measures either, but that is what Ukraine is stuck with - a revolution that has changed a government, yes, but risks pouring petrol on smouldering national tensions. Small wonder that the West and now Russia are working to de-escalate the crisis.
Of all the available options to mark the outbreak of the First World War in its centennial year, starting another is the least appropriate way I can think of. But the dogs of war are straining at the leash, and the drums are loudly echoing across the Black Sea's northern shores. The decision of Vladimir Putin to send Russian troops into Crimea is the by far the most serious international incident this decade.
First things first, let's clear out the nonsense. It says something about the poverty of this country's politics when a government minister uses the occasion of crisis for desperate point-scoring. But Javid is not alone. Plenty are the armchair brigade who urged war on Syria from Tweetdeck (as opposed to carrier decks) and are making broadly similar claims. The argument goes something like this. Because the US and its allies didn't rain cruise missiles down on Damascus, its opponents in Moscow and Beijing will conclude that the West have lost its nerve, more or less giving them a free hand.
It doesn't stand up to argument. Exhibit one: Afghanistan and Iraq. The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of these unhappy lands didn't clip Moscow's wings. It allowed Putin and Medvedev to crack down on Chechen and Ingush separatism in the name of the War on Terror. Exhibit two: Russia's brief conflict with Georgia and subsequent establishment of puppet states in Abkhazia and South Ossetia proceeded while the West was still bullish and with the neocons in the White House. Now, of course, Putin and his circle of advisors would have weighed up the reaction of "world opinion". But considering the actions of the US is a matter of routine. Russia knows the Americans are not going to intervene militarily in support of the new Ukrainian government, and it has never been a realistic proposition. Hence the "weak West" thesis is a complete red herring. We'd be here whether we'd flung cruise missiles into Syria or not.
The second point is the hypocrisy or select blindness of Western commentators, paid-for or unsolicited. I think it was Thatcher who said that there are no principles in international relations, only interests. Yes, "defence of Russian speakers" and such like is a flimsy pretext for Russia's military interventions. The good reason seeks to mask the real reason, and no one would doubt that Putin is motivated by what he understands as Russia's interests - of which more in a moment. But come on, let's bin the cringing naivete for once. The West in the shape of the US and European Union have as surely pursued their sometimes complementary, sometimes divergent interests as their Russian opponent. NATO and the EU have expanded eastwards consistently since the soviet collapse, and the US has military bases dotted about the USSR's former central Asian republics. You don't need to be an apologist for Putin - and I'm definitely not - to note that the Kremlin might feel a process of encirclement is in motion, and that it will be a long-term concern in its foreign policy deliberations. Russia's military incursion is conditioned by its perception of creeping threat - if you can grasp that then Putin's behaviour becomes understandable.
Understanding, however, does not excuse Russia's behaviour. There is absolutely no reason to whitewash Putin. His regime is a grotesquery as vicious and criminal as its democratic legitimacy is thin. To cosy up to it out of "anti-imperialism" or some residual Sovietist nostalgia is morally vacant and politically stupid. And to have Lenin's self-described disciples doing so would have that waxen figure back-flipping in his mausoleum. But condemnation and moral opprobrium is no substitute for analysing and dissecting, and Putin is pursuing a consistent strategy. As the New Atlanticist's Damon Wilson argues, Russia's strategy is about destabilising its former possessions and as a kind of ring of instability that would prevent their being turned against Moscow. The FSB and the Russian foreign office observed how the Baltic States were removed entirely from Russia's orbit and integrated into the EU and NATO. Acquiescing to that elsewhere could have relegated it from great power status to a "Saudi Arabia with trees".
But why? It's not just a matter of fear. The problem Russia has is three-fold. As Putin's administration becomes more authoritarian, the more brittle it becomes. If you cultivate the image as a strongman, you need to do the heavy lifting. Presently Putin does enjoy a large measure of popular support, largely because he is perceived as standing up for Russia in the world. Allowing the Ukraine to slip away and theoretically putting the large Russian-speaking minority in harms way would be political suicide. It's a good job for Putin that his natural political instincts keep this option off the table. Second, Russia's ruling clique of oligarchs and bureaucrats could teach the British bourgeoisie and its hangers on a thing-or-two about decadence. They represent the most parasitic forms of capital, forged by Yeltsin's sweeping privatisation of the economy and, since, have done little but gorged themselves on Russia's vast energy and mineral reserves. That money is funneled into prestige office blocks in Moscow but precious little is getting reinvested in the "real" economy. There's also the small matter of a flatlining population after nearly two decades of absolute reductions. Despite the BRIC hype, Russia is in a spiral of long-term decline.
Unfortunately for us in the West, the money markets of London, New York and Frankfurt are lubricated by cash looted from Russia's oil fields and mines. Neoliberalism has reversed the economics of 1914. Whereas then British and French capital was doing quite nicely under the Tsar, today it is Russian capital making cash in London from financial alchemy, property and football. An unstated and underestimated risk for Britain and the US is economic blowback.
Which brings us back to the West. Notwithstanding NATO's condemnation, the US and EU are urging restraint on the new Ukrainian government because they have no short, medium or long-term interest in action against Russia, be it open conflict, a ruinous proxy war ostensibly between West and East Ukraine, or sanctions. It is also wary of further cementing a de facto alliance between Russia and China. However, despite warning the new government against taking action, Yatsenyuk's ad hoc administration also have limited choices. For Ukrainians who fought Yanukovich's stooge regime this is another phase of Russian bullying. The political clamour to do something might be too great to resist, especially when you have open fascists in your cabinet.
This week will be crucial. Let's hope the outcome will be something other than 'nothing good'.
It's time. Time for the new blogs.
1. A Left Leaning Look (Unaligned) (Twitter)
2. BAME Labour (Labour) (Twitter)
3. Classroom Truths (Labour/Education) (Twitter)
4. English Revolution! (Unaligned/Anarchist) (Twitter)
5. MarxistWorld.net (Socialist Party/CWI)
6. Merseyside Federation of Anti-Bedroom Tax Groups (Unaligned)
7. Natasha Millward (Labour) (Twitter)
8. Not Alone - Fighting 'Corrective' Rape (Unaligned/Feminist) (Twitter)
9. Organising My Thoughts (Unaligned)
10. WomanTheory (Unaligned/Feminist) (Twitter)
Only a small number of new offerings for February/March - other things have got in the way of trawling the interwebs. If you know of any new blogs that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for blogs that have started within the last 12 months. The new blog round up appears on the first Sunday of every month, and is also cross-posted to Socialist Unity.
This last week has seen two interesting programmes about the First World War broadcast. On Tuesday we had conservative journalist and historian Max Hastings making the case for Britain's entry into the conflict in The Necessary War and Niall Ferguson fielding the argument against in The Pity of War last night. Both are well worth watching.
As we approach the centenary of the 20th century's calamitous pivot, the struggle to impose dominant, commonsensical frame on the conflict and the part played by Britain is sure to intensify. Which, in a way, is why the BBC's choice to bookend a week with what is essentially a debate between conservative views of the Great War is an interesting one. While not naive apologists for the British Empire, Hastings and Ferguson would certainly count themselves among its critical friends. Hence both approach the question of war in 1914 from the point of view of Imperial realpolitik.
Ferguson's position is that Britain's entry that August was a catastrophic mistake. By declaring war on Wilhelmine Germany it was responsible for the abomination of trench warfare that dragged the struggle on for four bloody years, fatally weakening the Empire to the extent it had barely recovered in time for round two in 1939. Honouring its treaty obligation to defend Belgium's neutrality was so much a piece of paper that should have been cast aside by harder heads. Instead, if Britain was to wage war it should have waited for a time of its choosing. Last of all, had Britain stayed out the overall outcome would have been very similar - a continent dominated by German economic power and, perhaps, the avoidance of Hitler and Stalin. The world would have been different, but in all likelihood more benign.
Hastings, in my opinion, put a more convincing case. His presented an informed, and carefully reasoned appraisal of the government's motives and imperial interests. He argued that a war avoided by Britain in 1914 would have been a war delayed. Had Germany and Austria defeated France and Russia, which was likely in the UK's absence, it was inevitable that the Central Powers' domination of European markets and - who knows - redrawing of colonial frontiers at France's expense - would have posed the Empire a continued security risk. Plus Britain would be facing Germany without the benefit of a continental alliance, making the prospects of winning such a conflict more remote than the one that actually took place. Hastings was also concerned about the moral dimension. Despite Germany possessing universal suffrage and parliamentary formalities, this masked an absolute monarchy that paid the comings and goings in the Reichstag little mind and which, by 1916, had effectively become a military dictatorship under Hindenburg and Ludendorff. If that wasn't bad enough the atrocities carried out by the German army in occupied Belgium and France towards civilians were a deliberate weapon of war, part and parcel of official doctrine. It was nowhere near the barbarism of their Nazi successors, but represented a regime qualitatively worse than the British and French both (unsurprisingly, Hastings overlooks the far worse situation pertaining in Tsarist Russia - an accidental omission, I'm sure). For all these reasons, Britain could not remain neutral. To do so was fundamentally against its interests.
Historians claim not to like counterfactuals because it involves extrapolation in the absence of facts. But it's a fun parlour game, and can draw attention to indeterminacy and contingency in history. Like Ferguson and Hastings, it's difficult to see how the Central Powers would have been defeated without Britain - especially when Germany forced an armistice on Russia despite concentrating its resources on the Western front. Likewise, once the combined French and British army forced a severe reversal on the German armies at the Battle of the Marne it's hard to see how Germany would have won. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the only opportunity it had of winning in the West was not the great spring offensives of 1918 but the initial phase of the slaughter at Verdun. Set up as a limited operation that would "bleed the French army white" over a protracted period, the initial attacks were so successful that had the Germans massed reserves for it in the way the British had for the Somme a real breakthrough could have happened, affecting the war's outcome.
The problem with Ferguson's counterfactual is its deficiency. Ferguson writes as if only state interests matter, that they and the man/men at the top have agency. Incredibly, for a historian who has spent a career examining political and economic systems, systems of international relations, and picking at chains of causation his notion of imperial interests are not backed up with a sociological imagination. For instance, Ferguson notes that the British cabinet in July 1914 were more worried about possible civil war in Ireland than a continental conflict. But that was not all. Like the rest of Europe, Britain's working class movement was militantly intruding onto the political stage. Before the outbreak of war, those seven month saw approximately 40 million working days lost to strikes - the third highest annual total in the 20th century, and more intense than the struggles of the 1980s. This isn't to say Britain was staring revolution in the face, but labour unrest inevitably has political consequences.
The war derailed that. But once it was over the strike wave resumed - even the police went on strike in 1919 - and Britain was forced to concede independence for Catholic Ireland. What would have happened had the empire kept out? Class war at home and national liberation in the near abroad would have played themselves out with who knows what consequences. Ferguson assumes everything would have been fine if Britain had remained aloof. Clearly not.
Then there's the small matter of a German victory over Russia and France. The Russia of 1917 was exhausted by the war and coming apart at the seams. Had Germany and Austria-Hungary forced a decision earlier, how would that have affected the unfolding revolutionary dynamics that brought down Tsarism? Revolution was still likely, but without a continued war bearing down on a new bourgeois-republican regime as was the case, would it have passed over into its second more radical phase? There is France too. Defeated Germany underwent revolutionary upheavals, so what is to say France wouldn't have? The victorious French emerged from the war with a mass communist party and a radicalised working class, intelligentsia and peasantry. If that was in victory, it's reasonable to assume the short-lived soviets, the soldiers' mutinies and councils, militias of the extreme left and right, all this would have been played out on a French canvas with much deeper revolutionary traditions than Germany. I doubt Ferguson would have appreciated having the danger - to him and his like - of a socialist revolution happening right across the channel. Especially when Britain's domestic situation could hardly be described in terms of class peace.
What of a victorious Germany? Undoubtedly, the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies would have had a boost. German militarism would likely be strengthened too. But if things returned to 'business as usual' in Britain after the war, the same tendency would be present in Germany too. The social democrats - the party of the working class - would unlikely have split during a shorter war and be in a position to demand a 'land fit for heroes'. Quite possibly, as Wilhelm II's autocracy was enjoying unrivalled popularity and prestige processes were in train to wrest significant political and economic concessions from German capital and its semi-feudal junker class.
That much we can discern on the basis of social trends and analogies from our own historical experiences. Beyond that we cannot know whether a defeated France would have embraced revolutionary socialism, succumbed to fascism, be consumed by civil war. Nor can it be answered whether the alternative European war Ferguson pines for prefaced a second, larger and immeasurably more destructive conflict - just as our Great War did. A different First World War may have been better in the long run, but we're still dealing with the ramifications of the one that did happen. And with the worrying gathering of war clouds over Ukraine, a lot of work still has to be done to bend history consistently toward justice and happiness.
