From «East to West», the «world crisis» of 1905-1920: a re-reading of Elie Halévy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Lectures The World Crisis of 1914–1918, delivered by the French historian Élie Halévy in Oxford in May 1929, represent «a model of explanation which in its profundity and suggestiveness has never been rivaled» (F. Stern). Surprisingly, however, they have been mostly neglected by the huge bibliography on the Great War. This article will thus analyze the development of Halévy’s conception of the «world crisis of 1914–1918» against his own biographical and intellectual backdrop; then it will try to rethink Halévy’s contribution in the light of the most recent historiography on the topic. Why did he choose to engage with such a topic as the origins of the Great War, which was still at the core of a highly politicized debate in the late 1920s? How does his interpretation fit with those of his contemporaries and of the following historiographical controversies?Since the Great War, Halévy, serving as a volunteer, tried to understand the tragic meanings and the lasting implications of that catastrophic event. Well-known for his work on 19th-century British history, Halévy also became in the 1920s an historian of the Great War. After publishing, between 1912 and 1923, the first three volumes of his Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, dedicated to the period 1815–1841, he decided to move forward, taking a closer look at the period of political and social crisis between 1895 and 1914.In the Lectures, irrespective of the search for the «war guilt», Halévy proposed a dynamic explanation of the processes leading to the war of 1914 and to the revolution of 1917. He outlined a global pattern of the world crisis, shifting his perspective from West to East and Far East and calling attention to the Balkan setting of the origins of the Great War. His attention to the Young Turks’ Revolution and to the subsequent Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as to the first and the second Balkan war in 1912–13, accounted for the Great War as the «third Balkan war». Halévy then traced the origins of the world crisis of 1914–1918 to the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905, focusing on the subsequent revolution in the Russian Empire, the fall of the Chinese Empire, and the deep constitutional and political transformations in India and Persia. However, his reflection on the «world crisis of 1914–1918» was deeply connected to his interest in Great Britain as a global power.In spite of the periodization suggested by the title of the Lectures («the world crisis of 1914–1918»), the shifting of his historical perspective eastwards induced Halévy to contrast with the conventional periodization of the war, which was the product of a «Western» perception of the World War. In his opinion, the crisis had begun in October 1912, with the First Balkan War, and it had come to an end only in August 1920, with the end of the Soviet-Polish war and the ascent of Fascism in Italy.