Opinion of US Entry into WWI

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, the only way that the Central Powers were worse is if you only care about white people.

Do Armenians classify as white?

Do the Circassians classify as white?  As is often the case, we decry our enemies for doing what our side already did earlier.

Grade A Whataboutery from Ernest!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Imperial Germany had a parliament and a free press and would likely have developed into a full fledged democracy in time.

It did indeed have a parliament, but that parliament (as you well know) was almost entirely toothless. The votes cast by the people (on an ironically broad franchise) had no influence over government policy. The military, the state bureaucracy, and the country's social and economic elites were opposed to democracy on principle. The excessively elevated status of the military in particular was a massive barrier to democratisation (as leading Social Democrats knew only too well). The development of anything that can be meaningfully described as a democracy could only have happened after a revolution.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've recently been pondering the morality of the US entry into WWI.

I suppose because the anniversary of the war is coming up? But it's the wrong question to ask. The trouble with asking 'was this the right decision' is that you end up getting stuck in counter-factual fantasy, rather than addressing the actually interesting questions.

One of which, for example, would be why did the United States enter the war at all? Never assume that this kind of thing is obvious. Another would be - and you can argue that it might actually be a more important question - why did the United States adopt a position of sham 'neutrality' (in reality very much favouring and supporting the economically very overstretched Allied Powers) rather than actual neutrality?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There were great tension between modernising and reactionarian tendencies in Wilhelminian Germany and in the long run the modernising forces in German society would have prevailed.

I think that's a bit of an oversimplification (the short-term stability, prestige and military prowess of the regime was greatly bolstered by industrialisation), but let's run with it anyway. Why would the 'modernising' forces have inevitably prevailed? We know now that the entire Modernisation Thesis is basically just teleological wishful thinking, don't we? And why would they have necessarily prevailed peacefully? Or prevailed over the longer term? It's one thing to sweep away Kaisers and Generals, perhaps quite another to eradicate völkisch tendencies and related nasties.

Mind you, I happen to think that the First World War was a) unavoidable and b) changed 'everything', so this is at a very abstract level of idle speculation.
 

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It's true that it was hardly irrelevant, but it was not even close to being a democratic legislature. We then need to consider all of the other legislatures in Germany, many of which had significantly more direct political power...

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Sure, it was a society with a lot of tensions. No doubt about it. And one in which there was a massive groundswell for change: no doubt about that either. But that wouldn't have made gradual democratisation of the sort seen in Britain or Denmark inevitable or even all that likely.

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But the state parliaments and many city councils were systematically rigged in favour of the regime. And, yes, the new industrial elite was powerful but it was also frequently politically reactionary.

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I don't buy into the Sonderweg thesis (which is reliant to an embarrassing extent on a complete misinterpretation of 19th century British history, as well as the always dubious idea that there is a 'normal' path for anything), but all history is seen through the rear mirror. Including (and especially) counter-factual history.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, there are some odd misconceptions lurking around this thread that probably could do with some dealing with. I'll make a vague attempt to deal with one now and another one later...

The first is the old hard left myth that the First World War was an 'imperialist war'; that it was principally the result of the various belligerents acting out of a desire to protect (and/or expand) their colonial possessions. As comforting as this idea obviously is, it is completely untenable. The imperial interests of Britain (for example) clashed with those of France and Russia (it's allies by 1914) far more than with those of Germany. The war was also not triggered by conflicting imperial claims: the international system of diplomacy that so spectacularly failed in 1914 had actually done a decent job of resolving potential flashpoints created that way. But it could not cope with a crisis on the home continent itself: this is not insignificant. And it is undeniably true that none of the belligerent nations joined in the bloodbath to protect their overseas Empires, however important they were in other respects. They would all have been much better protected by neutrality.

Of course it is obviously true that tensions caused by imperialism played a part in what happened (viz. the Kaiser's wish for Germany to find it's 'place in the sun'), but a comparatively minor one. The mentality that led to High Imperialism on the other hand...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Note that popular opinion in Ireland towards its colonial masters only turned truly septic after the bungled response to the Easter Rising and the whole conscription fiasco.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

AH buff(oons) need to be banned from talking about actual history. Banned, I say.