Tag: History

1914 Revisited?

Photo: greatwar.nl/Wikimedia Commons

CAMBRIDGE – This year marks the hundredth anniversary of a transformative event of modern history. World War I killed some 20 million people and ground up a generation of Europe’s youth. It also fundamentally changed the international order in Europe and beyond.

Indeed, WWI destroyed not only lives, but also three empires in Europe – those of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia – and, with the collapse of Ottoman rule, a fourth on its fringe. Until the Great War, the global balance of power was centered in Europe; after it, the United States and Japan emerged as great powers. The war also ushered in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, prepared the way for fascism, and intensified and broadened the ideological battles that wracked the twentieth century.

How could such a catastrophe happen? Shortly after the war broke out, when German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was asked to explain what happened, he answered, “Oh, if I only knew!” Perhaps in the interest of self-exoneration, he came to regard the war as inevitable. Similarly, the British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, argued that he had “come to think that no human individual could have prevented it.”

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Serbia: Controversy Over Draža Mihailović’s Rehabilitation

Serbian officers in the company of a British nurse on the Salonika front. Lieutenant Draza Mihailovic (kneeling). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Dragoljub Draža Mihailović was a commander of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, also known as the Chetnik movement, during World War II. In 1946, he was captured by the communist Yugoslav authorities, convicted of high treason and war crimes, sentenced to death and executed.

The tribunal for his rehabilitation, which began in June 2010 on the request by Draža’s grandson Vojislav Mihailović, is nearing the end now. Although the request has been supported by some academicians, professors and politicians, the public in Serbia is divided. For some, Draža Mihailović is an innocent victim, for others, he is a justly convicted collaborator of the occupiers, who committed crimes not only in Serbia, but in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia as well.

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‘Comfort Women’ Haunt Japan-Korea Relations

Former ‘comfort women’ protesting in Seoul. Image: bittermelon/flickr

While long denying having subjected Korean women to forced prostitution during Japan’s 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean Peninsula, in 1992 the Japanese government officially recognized its involvement in the ‘comfort women’ issue and apologized for having committed war crimes. Since then, every Japanese prime minister has further reaffirmed and expressed Japan’s official apologies to South Korea.

The issue remains however far from being resolved and continues to damage Japanese relations with the Republic of South Korea and other countries in the region. The dispute became more visible in December 2011 when the South Korean government established a monument for ‘comfort women’ directly adjacent to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.  In addition, South Korea now uses the question time of the Human Rights Council meeting as a venue to force Japan to provide answers to this painful chapter of the two countries’ shared history. In what follows, we will further explore the issue and place the ‘comfort women’ within the broader context of ongoing tensions between Japan and South Korea.

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The Era of “Debt Capitalism” Has Come to an End

Private debt, public debt and inflation: the drivers of economic growth for the last 40 years. Image: Mikko Saari/flickr

After 40 years of economic growth based on debt, the era of  “debt capitalism” has come to an end, says Wolfgang Streeck. The Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne gave a remarkable interview (in German) last week that I would like to share with you, in advance of the World Economic Forum‘s meeting in Davos starting today.

Economies must grow in order to increase welfare. This has been the basic requirement for capitalist societies since the industrial revolution. Yet the last time Western societies experienced real economic growth was in the decades following WWII, says Streeck, in his account of recent economic history. Since the 1970s, when this period ended and economic growth slowed, governments started to print money in order to create the illusion of increasing salaries and greater welfare. In reality, however, income stagnated.

When decision-makers realized that high inflation rates could no longer be sustained, they looked for new recipes to keep the economy growing. In the 1980s, they found a solution in increased government spending based on public debt. Ronald Reagan was the unlikely representative of this policy.

Streeck argues that when government debt reached unsustainable levels, the third and final phase of “debt capitalism” (he uses the term Pumpkapitalismus in German) began. From the 1990s on, economic welfare was no longer based on inflation or on public debt but on private debt. Financial markets were liberalized and consumers, especially in the US, were convinced to take out loans in order to pay for their expenses.

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Hard Power and the “Irrational” Approach of Clausewitz and the Germans (Part 3/8)

Photo: drakegoodman/flickr

The tidy, war-can-be-domesticated rationalists we looked at yesterday inevitably provoked a reaction. That it coincided with the great Romantic Rebellion in early 19th century Europe was no accident. That the reaction was largely German was no accident either, as the formidable (and seminal) Prussian general, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, clearly illustrated.

Out went geometry, out went science, and out went firm rules. Prussia’s antidote to Napoleon first repudiated the neoclassical characterization of war as a comprehensible part of a clockwork universe. Instead, Scharnhorst believed war was a blind, demonic force. It was changeable, imponderable and immeasurable. It roiled with brutal and spiritual energy, and therefore involved a free play of opaque spiritual forces that defied rigid, one-sided tick boxes. And since no abstract formula could capture war’s sheer diversity, one could not delimit it in exclusively mathematical (i.e., mechanical) terms.

If that wasn’t enough, Scharnhorst then dismissed the history-has-continuities arguments of the rationalists. He thought that Machiavelli and his disciples were wrong – the history of war was not homogenous and the past did not necessarily repeat itself. Instead, each epoch of armed violence was unique. It involved, as Clausewitz would note, an interplay of “possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad” that worked against historical cycles or patterns. Therefore, those who tried to foist personal or absolute templates on the past were doomed to defeat. (It was futile, Clausewitz argued in the late 1820s, for 19th century warriors to examine prior wars for hoary lessons learned. The similarities between past and present, he continued, did not extend beyond the War of the Austrian Succession [1740-1748]. Prior to that historical point, there were no fixed military dictums that one could identify, catalog, and adapt to the present or future, or so Scharnhorst’s disciple argued.)

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