Learning from Contingency

Abstract

World War I was the dominant event of the 20th century. It hastened the ascendancy of the United States as the world's leading economic power, led to the breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, and set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the end of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. It nearly wiped out a generation of young men and killed millions of civilians made vulnerable to influenza and other pathogens by the ravages of war, dislocation, ethnic cleansing, and the allied blockade. It triggered a revolution in Russia that echoed in eastern and central Europe with a lasting resonance in China and southeast Asia. Collectively, these developments made it almost impossible to restore political and economic stability to Europe, paving the way for Hitler's rise to power, the Holocaust, and a second and far deadlier bid for hegemony by Germany, Italy, and Japan. World War II in turn gave rise to a Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the west that kept Europe divided for 50 years and the target of thousands of nuclear weapons that, at the push of a button, could have turned the continent into a desolate, uninhabitable wasteland.World War I and the events that followed in its wake had equally profound cultural and intellectual consequences. Europe's self-confidence disappeared with its leading role in the giving rise or prominence to forms of artistic expression that communicated defiance, doubt, confusion, and alienation, and many artists and intellectuals sought refuge in a highly idealized image of Soviet-style socialism. Europe's internecine struggles and exhaustion after World War II accelerated the hegemonic rise of the United States. It became the leader of the self-proclaimed free world, helped finance the reconstruction of western Europe and Japan, imposed its political and economic institutions and practices wherever it could, and gained influence in a wider circle of states through aid, trade, and investment. Investment at home in education and research, private support for the arts, and enrichment by thousands of Europe's leading scientists, artists, and intellectuals made the US the world's leader in medicine, science, space exploration, and the performing arts. American popular culture became global in its appeal, leading some intellectuals to worry about Hollywood's hegemony and debasement of real culture and others to celebrate it as a soft resource.1Many historians and international relations scholars accept these outcomes as determined. The conventional wisdom among historians is that Europe in 1914 was like dry kindling waiting for a match, and international relations scholars have developed theories about power transition and offensive dominance to explain why this was so. World War II appears at least as inevitable to many scholars, given German dissatisfaction with the treaty of Versailles and the risk-taking propensity of Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese leaders. Equally inevitable was the Cold War, considering the power vacuum in the heart of Europe at the end of World War 11 and the antagonistic social systems of the two victorious superpowers. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence ofthe US as a unipole appear just as inevitable to some observers. Students of the former Soviet Union, liberal theorists, and proponents of globalization provide numerous reasons why Soviet-style communism was doomed and American-style capitalist democracy the wave of the future.The view that our world is the world that had to be, or at least the most likely of worlds, has multiple and reinforcing causes. There is the hindsight bias, by which we upgrade the probability of events once they have occurred and generally tend to regard the past as overdetermined but the future as much more contingent.2 The hindsight bias is reinforced by the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. Historians and social scientists make reputations for themselves by proposing new explanations or theories to account for major events like the fall of the Roman empire, the industrial and French revolutions, the World Wars and the Cold War. …