A Fifty Years’ Crisis: The Collapse of the Westphalian Order and the Path to Total War

Abstract

During the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, there was a widespread opinion that humankind had progressed past the point where highly destructive wars took place among the major nations of the world. The case for optimism seemed fairly clear to someone living at that time. Europe had just completed its most peaceful century to date. The Concert of Europe had been punctuated by the Crimean War, but the three wars that followed it were each less than a year in length, and then peace broke out from 1871 through 1904. The Continent itself experienced over 40 years without a conflict if we put the war between Russia and Japan in 1904 to the side. Sir Norman Angell published a pamphlet in 1909 that ultimately became a popular book called The Great Illusion, which argued in essence that war was obsolete due to the interdependence of advanced economies.¹