[The World at War by Ralph Raico. Transcribed and annotated by Edward W, Fuller. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2024, 198pp.]
We owe Edward W. Fuller—who is himself an outstanding historian—a debt of gratitude for his immense labor in giving us The World at War: a transcription of a three-hour speech delivered by Ralph Raico—the greatest twentieth-century historian of classical liberalism—at the Cato Institute Summer Seminar, June 1, 1983, which covered the two world wars. Raico has written about the wars on other occasions, but never in a single essay with the comprehensive scope here on display, and there are insights in the speech not available elsewhere in his work. Fuller has done us an additional great service: he has provided footnoted sources for Raico’s comments and supplemented this with additional material from his own research.
The lecture sets forward the fundamental political problem of the twentieth century, which remains our fundamental political problem today: How can war—given its appalling destruction—be avoided? The answer, Raico makes clear, lies in promoting free economic relations between nations and shunning power politics and the pursuit of empire.
This was the policy of nineteenth-century classical liberalism. Under a system of universal free trade, it does not matter whether goods are produced at home or abroad: consumers can seek the lowest price, wherever it is to be found. Investors are also free to export capital as seems best to them. But this changes if nations seek to carve out protected markets for themselves, excluding other nations. This will lead to international strife, as efforts are made by the leading powers to carve up the world.
Under a system of free trade, economics thus displaces power politics, but once free trade is abandoned, power politics becomes paramount. As Raico notes, nations seeking world primacy want foreign territory primarily for strategic purposes. As an example, Britain took over Egypt as a protectorate to ensure unimpeded access to the Suez Canal, needed to transport the British Indian Army to Europe, should the political situation make this necessary.
If this fact is kept in mind, it becomes ironic that Marxists and others claim that capitalism seeks to conquer foreign countries in order to secure an outlet for investment capital. Raico suggests that the reason Marxists make this charge is to divert attention from the falsity of their earlier denunciations of capitalism. They had claimed that capitalism immiserates workers, that it is prone to economic crises that would get worse and worse, and that it would lead to an economic system dominated by a few large conglomerates. These claims having failed, a new charge must be brought against capitalism, and Raico cites Joseph Schumpeter in criticizing “judges [of capitalism] who already have the sentence of death in their pockets.”
To understand the world wars, we must then look to power politics, and accordingly, Raico sketches out the rival coalitions, the Triple Alliance, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, and the Triple Entente, consisting of France, Britain, and Russia. The great danger of these coalitions was that they would lead to an escalation of a local dispute, and this is exactly what happened after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife during their visit to Bosnia on June 28, 1914 by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip.
Austria, with good reason, suspected that the Serbian government was complicit in the assassination and decided to settle accounts with Serbia by presenting it with an ultimatum that it expected Serbia to refuse, clearing the way for an Austrian attack. Russia supported Serbia, and Germany supported Austria. Matters spiraled out of control, and a general European war was at hand.
Raico adopts the moderate revisionist position of Sidney Bradshaw Fay in his classic The Origins of the World War (1928) that none of the Great Powers desired a general European war and rejects the argument of Fritz Fischer in his 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht that Germany deliberately used the conflict between Austria and Serbia as an excuse to start a war that would lead to German dominance of Europe. Raico acknowledges that Germany had ambitious war aims, but so did the other Great Powers, and Germany was by no means the worst offender. In particular, Raico places great stress on Russia’s plan to use a European conflagration as a means to seize control of Constantinople. He focuses attention on Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazanov, who influenced the weak and ineffectual Czar Nicholas II to order general Russian mobilization, though fully aware that this would, unless rescinded, inevitably lead to general war.
Why did Britain enter the war? It is often claimed that Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality—required by the German army’s Schlieffen plan to knock France out of the war before Russia could complete its general mobilization—gave Britain no choice but to declare war. Belgian neutrality was guaranteed by the Treaty of 1839, to which the North German Confederation, and hence its successor the German Empire, was a signatory. This may indeed be so, but the treaty did not require coming to Belgium’s aid in the event its neutrality was violated. British Foreign Secretary Edward Gray, eager to enter the war on the side of France and Russia, used the violation of Belgian neutrality as an excuse to do so.
In the space remaining to me, I shall deal with only one more of Raico’s miscreants, along with Sazanov and Grey, and this is Woodrow Wilson, who was reelected in 1916 using the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” but then did his best to get us into the war. He rigidly insisted that Germany promise to refrain from attacking any ship with Americans on board, even if the ship carried weapons intended for use against Germany. Wilson argued that America as a neutral power had the right to demand this, but this was a misinterpretation of international law. By contrast, the Anglophile president excused manifest British violations of international law, with its countenancing of Britain’s illegal hunger blockade as a prime example.
Raico has little regard for Wilson’s self-righteousness, by which he attempted to disguise his ambitions to join Britain in destroying the German and Austrian Empires in mellifluous prose that averred “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Raico cites in this connection H. L. Mencken’s mordant observation that Wilson believed he was the obvious candidate for “the first vacancy in the Trinity.”
I have been able in this review to cover only World War I, but I hope to discuss the remainder of the book in another review. I shall close with one final point, brought out by Edward Fuller. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles notoriously held Germany responsible for the outbreak of war, to the exclusion of any blame accruing to the Entente powers. The most famous criticism of the treaty is J. M. Keynes’s excellent book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, but it transpires that Keynes and Allen W. Dulles were the drafters of Article 231.
