Investigations of a Dog

Brett Holman at Airminded started a discussion about when the Second World War started (discussion of the question is also taking place at Revise and Dissent and the Rhine River). The many interesting points raised by various people show that there isn’t a simple answer because it depends on definitions and points of view. This reminded me of a post by Mark Grimsley at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age on the military metanarrative.

The word “metanarrative” can be confusing because it has very different meanings in different branches of literary theory. The narratologist Gerard Genette defined a meta-narrative as an embedded narrative within a framing narrative. Put simply it’s a story within a story, such as Marlowe’s story in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Since Jean-Francois Lyotard identified the postmodern condition, postmodernists have taken the hyphen out of the word and given it a new meaning. In postmodernism metanarratives (also known as grand narratives or master narratives) are overarching narratives of history which not only frame smaller narratives but obscure them. The metanarrative is usually seen as serving the interests of the state or the elite by legitimating authority, silencing dissent, and hiding diversity. Postmodernists reject the metanarratives of progress associated with Marxism and enlightenment liberalism. To the non-postmodernist this can seem counter-intuitive to say the least, but the idea is worth considering. It can even be relevant to military history, believe it or not. States promote their own interests by constructing metanarratives of war in which wars have neat, well-defined beginnings and ends, as Mark Grimsley pointed out when he wrote:

In the mind of most Americans, the Civil War ends with a stacking of guns and a Grand Review and the restoration of lasting peace. The metanarrative of military history demands that it be so. And it’s not just that the requirements of good drama demand it. Arguably it’s because those in power need a metanarrative which confirms the belief that the use of lethal force solves problems, period, rather than the more accurate and far less satisfying view that the use of violence solves one problem at the cost of generating new ones.

The discussions at Airminded and elsewhere are a reminder that a single metanarrative of the Second World War is inadequate and probably unattainable. Different states have different dates for the start of the war. In effect, each state has its own metanarrative. Each of those metanarratives privileges the state which created it, and none of them covers every aspect of the war satisfactorily. This has come out very clearly in the blog discussions, which have moved on to consider how to define a global or world war, and at what point the Second World War met the criteria. This is a good way to get away from a point of view centred on one particular state or continent, but it brings its own problems.

A metanarrative of global war risks excluding those parts of the war which happened before it qualified as global. Jonathan Dresner’s comment which sparked off the whole debate pointed out that the traditional British metanarrative in which war begins on 3 September 1939 excludes the war between Japan and China which had been going on since 1937. A more rigorous definition of global war might just make this worse, potentially excluding the invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. It might be that the category of global war is itself a metanarrative which privileges some states, continents, and periods, while excluding others. It has often been pointed out that the Seven Years War was just as global as the First World War, but the metanarrative of global war places the phenomenon in the 20th century and not the 18th century. The story of the Second World War as a global war tends to focus on the great powers, obscuring the rest of the world while claiming, through use of the words “global” and “world”, to include it.

Can we improve the metanarrative by broadening it and including smaller and/or non-European states, and more obscure campaigns? A broader view of the Second World War, less focused on the Western great powers might be interesting and valuable, but on the other hand it might only compound the problems of the grand narrative. The discussions have also raised the problem of which wars get included as part of the Second World War, and which don’t. Once we start thinking outside the traditional metanarrative of the state we happen to come from, this starts to look quite arbitrary. Why should the Second World War include Poland in 1939 but not Manchuria in 1937? The civil war in Yugoslavia is often conflated with the Second World War, but the Spanish Civil War isn’t. Should the Winter War be included? And what about the Italian invasion of Abyssinia?

The solution is not necessarily to include everything, because that might just be giving more power to the metanarrative and making it more effective at denying diversity. For example, China, Taiwan, and Korea don’t see their wars against Japan as part of a global war. Did Serbs, Croats, or Finns see their own struggles in the 1940s only as part of the Second World War? If they did, would that make the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s a continuation of the Second World War? Then there’s the much bigger question of whether or not the holocaust should be considered part of the war.

This brings us round in a circle by suggesting that each country having its own story is not such a bad thing, or at least that a single global metanarrative might be even worse. However, even at the level of one country’s experience, the dominant metanarrative is likely to obscure and exclude more than it reveals and includes. Some campaigns and theatres are more famous than others. For example, British veterans of Burma or the Arctic convoys have often complained about being forgotten. A single grand narrative can’t ever include the experiences of every group or individual. Every person who lived through the war has their own story, and the stories of their lives include many other things beside the Second World War. In addition, every military unit (battalion, regiment, division, squadron, ship etc) has its own story. For these groups and individuals the war didn’t necessarily come to a neat end on VE Day or VJ Day. Demobilisation was a long and complicated process, and even when they were back home living ostensibly normal lives, many men still had to live with the psychological consequences of the horrors of war.

If we can demolish simple metanarratives and recognise the bewildering number and diversity of narratives which intersected through wars in the 1930s and 1940s, that would be a good start. That still leaves the question of what counts as war and what doesn’t. Mark Grimsley raises the problem that a rigid division between war and peace is a fiction created by the military metanarrative. Annexations of territory which were carried out with no fighting might still be seen as a form of war. Comments at Airminded and elsewhere have considered preparations for combat as well as combat itself. Dan Todman makes a case for an earlier start date for a number of reasons, including the diversion of British government resources from social welfare to rearmament. Even when governments were officially neutral they might be secretly supporting unofficial armed intervention in a conflict, such as the Flying Tigers in China, or the Condor Legion in Spain. Making plans for war takes on greater significance in the light of the Nuremburg indictment of conspiracy to wage aggressive war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is the most obvious example of this, but only Germans were tried for their part in it, not Russians. The metanarrative of the Second World War as a global war between Axis and Allies obscures many things. One of those is that in September 1939, the Soviet Union was on the wrong side.

Where does this leave the concept of the Second World War? Like many things in history, it turns out to be an arbitrary division of time and space. For some purposes it’s still a useful one, but for other purposes it isn’t, and defining it gets more problematic the more you think about it. It would be difficult (and pointless) to argue that D-Day, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, and El-Alamein weren’t part of the Second World War, but, as every pub liberal says, where do you draw the line? Similar questions in other periods have been settled by pluralisations which recognise diversity and complexity. For example, we now talk about “Renaissances” rather than “the Renaissance”. That isn’t going to work here. The word “World” is difficult to separate from the concept of a single grand narrative, and anyway “Second World Wars” would just sound stupid. Since we can’t dispense with the Second World War but can’t define it very easily, we might just have to accept that it’s fuzzy around the edges. History is full of uncertainty.