In the late nineteenth century, the sociologist Herbert Spencer came to the conclusion that war “had given all it had to give”. Unfortunately, this logic was not self-evident to all, especially in Germany – which reminds us that even the most intelligent observers can be misled by their own logic. Inter-State war was becoming more complex, more indecisive and far less “reasonable” than in the past. But history is not teleological; it doesn’t necessarily lead to its own abolition. There is no master plan, or even hidden hand that we can observe at work. History is not intelligently designed.

In this collection of recent lectures and essays, Professor Sir Michael Howard reminds us of the part played by war in the developing story of the twentieth century. In many respects, to the great disappointment of those who shared Spencer’s belief, the century was defined largely by war. Philip Windsor, as distinguished a student of International Relations as Howard is of Military History, once divided the twentieth century into three visions. The twentieth century, he wrote, was born of two hopes, and one overwhelming fear. The first hope was that it would be continuous with the nineteenth century, that it would be the first century without war.

Howard’s first essay examines the antecedents of such hopes. He discusses the European Enlightenment, and reflects on what makes our age “modern”. The word, Howard insists, only makes sense if we begin with Kant and other contemporary thinkers who trusted in human reason to unlock the secrets of the universe and teach people how to do things, and above all how to behave. In a brilliant essay, he unpacks the ideas of that great optimist Sir Norman Angell that any reasonable individual would conclude that war was an imperfect instrument for enriching a country. Angell transmitted this wisdom to a later generation of radical pamphleteers such as Bertrand Russell and E. P. Thompson. The problem with this view is that nations didn’t go to war to enrich themselves. They fought about power and ideology. And the great creation of the modern age – the nation state – was able to apply reason with disastrous results to the prosecution of war. The popular appeal of Nationalism is one of the principal themes of Liberation or Catastrophe?

The second of Windsor’s hopes which enthused the generation that went to war in 1914 was that the twentieth century would mark a break with the nineteenth century – that humanity would forge a utopian world, one finally at peace with itself. The problem was that peace had to be fought for. Marx taught that progress was made through conflict. Hegel, whom he embraced, only to turn him on his head, had called the years of happiness, “the blank pages of history”. Hegel also formulated the finest sentiment ever expressed about history, that it was the story of freedom becoming conscious of itself. But freedom, like progress, was not without a price. “Making the world safe for democracy” demanded its own sacrifices, and liberal societies were just as willing as their enemies to demonize those they fought.

Unlike some younger historians, however, who blame Britain for turning a European war in 1914 into a Weltkrieg, or later for sacrificing the Empire in the Second World War in order to enjoy a “finest hour”, Howard has no doubt that if the two wars had not been fought, the world would be a much nastier place than it is today. In a well-deserved sideswipe at A. J. P. Taylor, who blamed Britain, in part, for provoking Hitler’s war, he writes that, in his baffled and insular incomprehension of Hitler’s ultimate objectives, Taylor, like Neville Chamberlain, was probably typical of the bulk of his fellow countrymen. The problem is not that liberal societies don’t go in search of monsters to destroy, it’s that they sometimes don’t believe the monsters are out there.

The most revealing of Howard’s essays is his personal reflection on the Cold War. The fifty years of his adult life, he tells us, coincided almost exactly with its onset, course and immediate aftermath. This brought him into contact with the great fear that the twentieth century would be neither continuous nor discontinuous with the nineteenth century, but that it would be discontinuous with itself. For it threatened to end in a nuclear apocalypse. It was to prevent this nightmare that Howard helped to found the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and it was on behalf of the Institute that he paid his first visit to the United States in the spring of 1960. He provides a vivid snapshot of what he found. Washington was a military capital. There were almost more uniforms on the streets than he remembered in wartime London. The mood was defiantly militaristic. On his first night in the dining room of his hotel a male-voice choir gave a spirited rendering of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and when they belted out the lines: “As He died, to make men holy / Let us live to make men free” there was an electric excitement in the air that he found terrifying. This, he thought, was what Europe must have been like before 1914.

We now know, of course, that we escaped the twentieth century only, alas, to enter a second nuclear age, in which H. G. Wells’s nightmare vision of the bomb in a suitcase may well be realized. At the end of his book, Howard strikes an elegiac note. The optimism he felt in the 1990s has gone. The war on terror conjures up new monsters and new missions. He watched in alarm as the neoconservatives in the US – cheated of a satisfactory outcome to the war in Afghanistan – demanded another against a more satisfying adversary, Iraq. He cannot see the Anglo-American intervention in 2003 as anything other than a massive political misjudgement whose consequences may be as catastrophic as was the Austrian invasion of Serbia in 1914. Howard’s is a deeply humane voice of wisdom, that of a humanist in an age of ideology, warning us that history is there to teach us by example. We ignore those examples at our peril.

I ended the book reminded of André Malraux’s telling observation in the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat. It was fitting, if ironic, he wrote, that the countries that didn’t like war, such as Britain and the United States, should have been better at it than the Nazis. Michael Howard may not quote Malraux in his essays, but the sentiment could well be his. It is one of the prevailing if unstated themes of his book.

Michael Howard
LIBERATION OR CATASTROPHE?
Reflections on the history of the twentieth century
213pp. Continuum. £25 (US $34.95).
978 1 847251596

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Future of War: The re-enchantment of war in the twenty-first century, 2004.

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