Investigations of a Dog

Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).

Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.

Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.

Liberation Or Catastrophe? is a collection of 18 essays which were originally given as lectures at various times from 1992 to 2003, covering war and diplomacy from the First World War to the War On Terror. While there are inevitable inconsistencies in such a collection, the overall theme which ties it together is a consideration of the big strategic and political problems of modernity, which Howard sees as consequences of, and reactions against, the Enlightenment. He places both liberals and Marxists on the side of the rational enlightenment, while Fascists and Islamic fundamentalists are presented as the irrational enemies of Enlightenment (the focus on realpolitik means that he has nothing to say about Lyotardian postmodernism). The story is not a metanarrative of inevitable progress, and Howard was pouring well deserved scorn on Fukuyama’s assertion that history had ended long before 11/9. Howard sees history as a Hegelian dialectic in which solutions create new problems of their own. He warns against assuming that the Third World will experience the same kind of progress that has happened in Europe and North America, and concludes that different cultures will have to find their own solutions to the problems created by social, economic, and cultural change.

Rather than putting individual wars into discrete compartments, Howard takes a perspective which stresses long term continuity, particularly between the First and Second World Wars. He concurs with revisionists that far from being a tragic accident, the First World War was an unavoidable consequence of Germany’s increasing power and increasing willingness to use it, pointing out that many previous Balkan crises had not led to world war. Like Gary Sheffield he stresses the clash of culture and ideology between Britain and Germany: this was a war that Britain had to fight and had to win. The Treaty of Versailles failed to solve the underlying problem of German power and the war broke out again in 1939. Howard sees the watershed between the First and Second World Wars as the German invasion of Russia in 1941. He argues that Hitler might have maintained his 1940 conquests indefinitely if he hadn’t gone any further, and that the genocidal motives behind eastward expansion marked a major break with previous German policy. For the allies, the only solution to this problem was the complete destruction of the German state, but this created problems of its own, and Howard suggests that the issues at stake in the Second World War were not really settled until 1990.

While the essays help to make sense of very big and complicated problems, the resort to generalisation can sometimes be a weakness. Almost everything Howard says about the pre-Enlightenment world seems designed to annoy medieval and early-modern historians. For example, the link between early-modern Protestantism and modern Euro-scepticism seems dubious at best. The likes of David Trim and Steve Murdoch might not know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestion that Protestantism led to isolationism, and assuming continuity between English non-conformists and Euro-sceptics wilfully ignores the dominant and very conformist Church of England. I also suspect that Africanists would take issue with the assertion that most post-colonial African governments have failed. Maybe they have, but surely to different extents, in different ways, and for different reasons. The suggestion that perhaps all men are natural born fascists but that women aren’t will probably annoy almost everyone! Most of these slips occur when Howard steps out of his own territory. He is on much safer ground when he writes about what he knows, although his emphasis on strategy sometimes obscures tactical and operational contingency. For example, he implies that the balance of forces made German victory in May 1940 almost inevitable, something that many military historians would dispute.

Because of these limitations, I found that the best essays are the most specific. A comparison of how Angell’s The Great Illusion and Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War were received in Britain and Germany illustrates how the very different cultures of the two countries made war more likely, and also suggests the difficulty of artificially influencing cultural beliefs. Another essay explores relations between the British government and German opponents of Hitler before and during the Second World War, concluding that it was not necessary, desirable or practical for Britain to help the German opposition. Howard suggests that it was for the best that Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators failed. Their suffering created an ideal that post-war Germany could aspire to, whereas if they had succeeded they might have turned out to be not much better than the Nazis. My favourite chapter is the most personal, in which Howard reminisces about his own experiences of the Cold War. His recollections bring out the importance of perceptions and show that things look very different without the benefit of hindsight. Like most people in the west, Howard admired the Red Army in 1945 and did not see Stalin as an enemy (although his unit had a tense stand-off with Tito’s partisans near Trieste in 1945). His descriptions of devastation and deprivation in the aftermath of the war emphasise that no-one was willing or able to fight another war to liberate Eastern Europe. With both East and West exhausted and prepared to accept the status quo, the Cold War only emerged slowly. Howard remembers how the horror of what was happening dawned on him in meetings with Soviet apparatchiks who “included some of the nastiest, most ruthless and intellectually dishonest men that I have ever met” (p. 102), and Dr. Strangelove-like American analysts: “At the Stanford Research Institute I sat in on a seminar on ‘Soviet Intentions’ in which the speaker gave an expert analysis first, of the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and then of nuclear weapons technology. From these premises he derived the apparently incontrovertible conclusion that Soviet nuclear surprise-attack was inevitable within the next few months, if not indeed the next few weeks. When I suggested that some knowledge of Russian history might also be relevant, not least of their experiences during the past forty years, I was wondered at like a man from the moon” (pp. 100-1). Howard vividly remembers his own dread of nuclear war, although he accepts that this threat, and the suffering of Eastern Europe, were necessary to maintain stability (at least once the Cuban missile crisis showed that sane people were in charge) and could not have been avoided.

The last three chapters look at America’s War on Terror. Howard’s level headed and realistic assessment is welcome, but it’s perhaps depressing that the Bush administration has gone against all of his advice. As early as October 2001 Howard could write:

To declare that one is ‘at war’ is immediately to create a war psychosis that may be totally counter-productive for the objective that we seek. It will arouse an immediate expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably a hostile state; action leading to decisive results. The use of force is no longer seen as a last resort, to be avoided if humanly possible, but as the first, and the sooner it is used the better. The press demands immediate stories of derring-do, filling their pages with pictures of weapons, ingenious graphics, and contributions from service officers long, and probably deservedly, retired. Any suggestion that the best strategy is not to use military fore at all, but more subtle if less heroic means of destroying the adversary are dismissed as ‘appeasement’ by ministers whose knowledge of history is about on a par with their skill at political management. Figures on the Right, seeing themselves cheated of… a short jolly war in Afghanistan, demand one against a more satisfying adversary, Iraq; which is rather like the drunk who lost his watch in a dark alley but looked for it under a lamp post because there was more light there. As for their counterparts on the Left, the very word ‘war’ brings them out on the streets to protest as a matter of principle. The qualities needed in a serious campaign against terrorists - secrecy, intelligence, political sagacity, quiet ruthlessness, covert actions that remain covert, above all infinite patience - all these are forgotten or overridden in a media-stoked frenzy for immediate results, and nagging complaints if they do not get them. (pp. 175-6)

The book’s title Liberation Or Catastrophe? is taken from chapter 2, a general overview of the 20th century, but it might be even more appropriate for the final chapter, a critique of the US invasion of Iraq, written in June 2003. Howard recognised that this was a no-win situation: either American forces would have to stay in Iraq for years to maintain order while breeding resentment among Islamic terrorists, or rapid withdrawal would lead to civil war. Either would be bad enough, but it turned out to be the worst of both worlds: US occupation and civil war are now going on at the same time. However, he urges that Europe should help mend the fences rather than indulge in Schadenfreude. Everyone needs to accept that US power is necessary for global stability, while the US needs to accept that it cannot act alone.

Overall this is an interesting and engaging collection, written in a very readable style, which is highly relevant to both history and current affairs. If you’re a follower of Lyotard on the one hand, or if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of weapons and tactics on the other, then it isn’t for you, but anyone with an interest in international politics will find it worth reading.

1. Michael Howard, Liberation or Catastrophe (Hambledon Continuum, September 2007).
2. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline Review, June 2002).