7 minute read
PROBING PRE-MODERNITY
FOR someone with a penchant for, and proven pedigree in, unpicking the past, Peter Wilson – the Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford – has a surprising knack for finding his finger pressed firmly to the pulse of the present. That was certainly the case when the author of Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-speaking People since 1500, which was released to widespread acclaim late last year, sat down for an interview with The British Army Review.
At the time, Germany, the principal subject of his academic toils, stood firmly in the international spotlight as it hosted crunch talks between more than 50 countries about coordinating efforts to increase weapons supplies to Ukraine and its Chancellor Olaf Scholz – undoubtedly labouring over many of the themes featured in Professor Wilson’s book – was facing mounting pressure to permit exports of Leopard 2 tanks to the front-lines.
Similarly serendipitous was the historian’s answer to the question of ‘what’s next on your agenda?’, which was posed as the issue of mobilisation monopolised military minds across the West.
“I am currently coordinating a project that examines resource mobilisation by looking at examples across Europe from the early 16th century through to the late 19th century. We’re looking at what you do if you can’t obtain what you need for defence or for war-making from your own population – so if you can’t conscript it, tax it, or requisition it. This is informing my thinking on how, what I would term pre-modernity, can provide insights on the present, not least as a significant proportion of armed forces in Europe during that time were composed of foreigners, there was the hire of auxiliaries, arrangements for the transfer of warmaking resources and things like transit across neutral territory were handled in a certain way.
“Britain was extraordinarily successful at doing this [mobilisation] during the 18th century. For example, the Royal Navy had a relatively small manpower and most of its ships were mothballed, but it could mobilise quickly because it could take sailors from the Merchant Navy and, as the country depended on trade, the Merchant Navy then recruited Dutch and Scandinavian sailors to sustain its own ability to operate.
“Likewise, the Army was relatively small but could increase its size by about 50 per cent through the hiring of foreign troops or subsiding allies and partners to provide manpower where needed on the Continent. This enabled highly successful interventions, neutralised countries like France and enabled Britain to conquer Canada for instance. Britain has quite a good history from which it could draw on for insights and inspiration for how it might deal with some of the problems it faces today.
“My broader perspective is that the age of what me might call national war-making is historically relatively brief – it emerged around 1870 and disappeared sometime during the last decades of the Cold War. We are now into, and I hate to use the term, a kind of postmodern and certainly post-sovereign world where states do not have the kind of effective capacity that one might associate with the ideas of sovereignty in its classic sense. We don’t really control economic trends, we are constantly compelled to compromise to secure trade deals, we don’t have effective control over our frontiers and ‘cyber’ has made things extraordinarily complicated. To some extent the vision of military and security services has been privatised and states have shifted toward attempting to regulate public goods and the provision of public goods rather than providing them directly.
Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-speaking People since 1500 Published by Allen Lane, October 2022, Hardback, £40
“I’m not saying we’ve gone back to the past, but I do think the pre-modernity, which I see as being prior to the middle of the 19th century, can offer us a lot more insight into understanding today’s problems and it gets us away from the idea of national war-making – citizens in arms, state control and state delivery – being a Humpty Dumpty that we have to put back together again. We can’t – we are not going to go back to that type of warfighting, that type of diplomacy and that type of international order; we are into something different and therefore our solutions have got to be different.
“There are some aspects of the conflict [in Ukraine] which many analysts thought had disappeared – the tank-heavy armies, significance of large numbers of infantry and so forth – but as is becoming clearer, Ukraine isn’t the Russian front of the 1940s; it is really very different for a whole host of complicated reasons. This isn’t the past, we are in a different kind of present and we must think deeply and effectively about how to respond to it; to not just see the surface but to try to understand the longer-term trends. We need to understand the disappearance or the temporary absence of this type of conflict in the last 20 to 30 years and understand why it has returned and why it has returned in a format that is different than it was before.
“One of the characteristics in the way in which defence has been organised in Central Europe, and one that is often overshadowed by a focus on the highly-centralised state of Prussia, is that it has primarily been a form of collective security and that is a tradition better suited to the realities of the present. Yes, collective security is always messy, it always has deficiencies and there is always the lowest common denominator problem, but it has potential, it offers the ability to pool resources, avoid duplication and increase legitimacy of action. It offers some way forward that a unilateral response doesn’t; no country is strong enough alone as the situation in Ukraine reveals.
“The complexities of the current situation have reminded Germany of the importance of having its own military strength. Where there had been a reluctance to engage fully with out of area operations and a desire to shelter behind an alliance system, there is a growing understanding that the country will have to pay more, and potentially more will have to serve, but in no way do the headlines of massive military spending mean we are going to see a new Wehrmacht or Kaiserheer returning. If party politics do not intervene, there is a good opportunity here. Germany is not alone in having had a wake-up call.
“The danger all Western democracies face if their societies do not have direct contact with soldiers and soldiers become a small minority in a population is that people become casualty averse and find it very difficult to accept the need for defence is serious. We have to invest, and we have to accept that investments are costly in blood and treasure."
Professor Wilson’s previous published works include Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (2009) and The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (2016). The author who was a Visiting Fellow at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster in 2011and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, can count spells at High Point University and the National War College in Washington, D.C among his teaching assignments. The University of Liverpool and University of Cambridge alumnus also been a lecturer at the University of Sunderland and Newcastle University.
