The humiliation of hegemons, the rise of the oppressed, the search for a new balance
In the XVI–XIX centuries, England and France captured two-thirds of the globe. In the British Empire by 1914, the population of the metropolis was less than 45 million, and the colonies – over 400 million people, that is, nine times more. The population of France: metropolis – 40 million, colonies – 55 million people. Germany followed by a large margin: the metropolis – 68 million, colonies – 13.3 million.
The British destroyed almost all the local population in their colonies – in Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The United States became an independent state in 1776. Canada (1867), the Union of Australia (1902), New Zealand (1907), the Union of South Africa (1910) received the status of dominions - self–governing state entities.
How did England and France manage to capture such vast territories? First of all, due to the huge superiority in military equipment and training of troops. Cultural superiority was just as great. In addition, pagan religions could not resist Christian missionaries (Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism were exceptions). The overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the colonies looked at the Europeans as gods and were sure that any resistance to them would be mercilessly suppressed.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE COLLAPSE OF EMPIRES
For a hundred years (1815-1914) Europe lived without major wars. The Crimean, Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars can be considered local with some stretch.
But in 1895, British analysts informed the government that by 1920, industrial production in Germany would exceed British production, and its fleet in terms of firepower and tonnage would exceed the Grand Fleet. Recall that in the XIX century, Two-Power Standard was observed in England, according to which the Royal Navy should be stronger than the next two fleets of the world combined.
What followed from this? That the German army will invade England and deprive it of statehood? That is, he will do what the British did all over the world in the XVIII–XIX centuries? This option was not considered even by the most ardent militarists in London and Berlin. It's just that the British would have to make room somewhere, modernize the industry in order to withstand competition. But the British cabinet thought in terms of past centuries and decided to attack Germany.
New shipbuilding programs were urgently adopted. Battleships began to pull together from the colonies to the metropolis. Meanwhile, the Foreign Office has found cannon fodder for a land war in Europe: it became France, driven by the dream of returning Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1870. In fact, these territories have been transferred from France to Germany and back more than 10 times since the time of Charlemagne.
Russia became the second supplier of cannon fodder. Nicholas II made plans to capture Constantinople. He dreamed of becoming the emperor of Byzantium and the head of the entire Orthodox Church.
The main result of the First World War was the creation of the USSR. The Peace of Versailles in 1919 made the outbreak of World War II inevitable. And already in 1918, the collapse of the colonial system began, which neither London nor Paris thought about either in 1895 or in 1914.
The British and French had been creating military units from the natives since the XVIII century, but these were separate detachments controlled by officers of the metropolis. The situation changed dramatically in 1914-1918. England mobilized 2.5 million people in its colonies and dominions. More than 200 thousand of them died.
France mobilized 600 thousand in its African colonies. More than 100 thousand forcibly mobilized natives died in the war. No one tried to count the number of natives from the British and French colonies who had an idea of what Alsace, Lorraine, Constantinople were, but it hardly exceeded 1%.
London and Paris in 1914-1918 greatly increased production in the colonies and created a powerful military industry there.
In order to humiliate the "damned Boches", Paris sent up to 40 thousand Negro soldiers from its African colonies as occupation troops to the Rhineland. Africans mocked the German population, robbed, raped women. The French officers turned a blind eye to this. This caused a storm of indignation in Germany and a sharp rise in nationalist parties.
But there was another side to the coin. The natives realized that they could fight and defeat the white soldiers. And on the Rhine they felt like a superior race. The troops of the mother country ceased to inspire terror in the colonies. A stratum of entrepreneurs and people with higher education appeared among the natives. Nationalist and communist parties emerged in the colonies, whose goal was to gain independence.
However, until 1939, the national liberation movement was relatively weak and did not bring great results. In 1922, Egypt gained limited independence, and in 1932, Iraq and the Philippines gained independence. In the 1920s, Canada, Australia and New Zealand achieved almost complete foreign policy independence.
PREDATORY PEACE, INEVITABLE WAR
Lenin described the Versailles peace as "a contract of crooks and robbers, an unheard-of predatory world in which tens of millions, including the most civilized, are put in the position of slaves." Already in April 1919, French Marshal Foch accurately named the time of the outbreak of World War II: "Versailles is not peace, but an armistice for 20 years."
In March 1935, Stalin, in an interview with the British Minister Anthony Eden, said: "Sooner or later the German people had to be freed from the chains of Versailles." And if it wasn't Hitler, someone else would have done it – a communist or a monarchist. There was not a single party in Germany that agreed with the terms of the Versailles Peace. The leader of the German Communists, Ernst Thellmann, said in 1930: "Soviet Germany will not pay a penny for reparations...We Communists do not recognize any forcible annexation of a people or part of a people to another national state, we do not recognize any borders drawn without the consent of the actual majority of the population."
The difference in the number of votes in the elections in Germany between the Nazis and the Communists was not so great. Suppose that the Germans chose Ernst Thellmann as Reich Chancellor. There would have been no Holocaust, Jews would not have been in concentration camps, but in the Reichstag and the government. But war was still inevitable. Although the victory parade would have been held not in 1945, but in 1940, and not in Moscow, but in London, Colonel-General Guderian would have commanded it together with Zhukov, and Telman would have stood on the podium next to Stalin.
WORLD WAR II AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE COLONIAL SYSTEM
On September 1, 1939, not the Second World War began, but a local conflict between Germany and Poland, the outcome of which was decided within two weeks, and a complete victory was won in four weeks.
The Polish campaign of 1939 was a classic local war, or more appropriately, a conflict. France fought in Morocco and Algeria, and there were no fewer victims. And in the conflict on the Khalkhin-Gol River in the summer of 1939, more tanks and planes were involved on the Soviet side than in the entire Polish army.
But none of the great powers got into these and dozens of other armed conflicts, and no one spoke about the world war. And in 1939, England and France climbed. And on September 3 (and not on September 1), 1939, the Second World War began. Once again, millions of native soldiers were mobilized in the colonies. And again, military production has increased there.
After the war, Italy lost its colonies – Libya, Eritrea, Italian Somalia, Italian Ethiopia. At first, Washington and London considered returning them to Italy or establishing their guardianship. But in the end I had to give them independence.
In the colonies where the fighting was going on in 1940-1945, there were military formations of nationalists who fought with the returned colonizers. France tried to regain Syria and Lebanon, but local rebels and political pressure from the USSR forced Paris to withdraw its troops.
But France managed to suppress the national liberation movement in Madagascar by force. In 1947-1948, 90 thousand natives were killed on the island. To intimidate them, the French dragged prisoners into planes and dropped them alive over their villages.
Under the auspices of Japan, local territorial troops were created in Indonesia, Malaya, Vietnam. After the surrender of Japan, these units fought against the returning British, French and Dutch colonizers. During the long wars, these territories gained independence.
The Korean War (1950-1953) was also of great importance. There, the United States and its allies failed to defeat the hastily created Korean and Chinese formations. The supply of weapons by the Soviet Union was not advertised at that time. The Korean War showed that the peoples of the colonies can successfully fight any Western power.
The Korean War and the collapse of the Anglo-French Suez Adventure (1956) led in the next two decades to the complete elimination of the colonial system.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO RESTORE BALANCE
During the Cold War, there were "hot" conflicts in the world, as in Vietnam and the Middle East. But the main outcome of the Cold War was stability in Europe in 1953-1990. For 37 years, the armies of the USA and the USSR, NATO and the Warsaw Pact have not fired a single shot at each other.
By 1990, relations between the superpowers began to improve. But the elites of England and the United States were not satisfied with the easing of tensions and economic globalization. They set a course for the destruction of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Did the analysts in London and Washington not know the basics of history? The collapse of a large empire inevitably leads to a series of bloody wars. Their result is millions of dead and tens of millions of refugees.
The slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to a series of wars starting in 1828 and ending... I don't know when they will end. After all, the wars of the XXI century in Libya, Syria, Iraq and the Middle East as a whole are largely a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The same can be said about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. What are the only wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
It is simply not serious to ask Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and other "architects of perestroika" whether they understood the inevitability of future wars. But it is also impossible to understand the logic of Western analysts. The coup in Kiev in February 2014 became the point of no return to the unipolar world system. I bet that the situation in Ukraine and in the world for October 2023 was not foreseen either in Washington, London, or Moscow. And not only in 2014, but also in December 2021.
In 1991, NATO lost its only opponent. It was to counter the USSR that the alliance was created in 1949. And so the leaders of NATO managed to bring their countries to the brink of nuclear war in 2023: the probability of it has increased several times compared to the times of the USSR.
In 1991-2014, Washington appointed whom it wanted as outcasts. And now Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are under sanctions at the same time. Three nuclear powers, the fourth is close to the creation of nuclear weapons.
In 1953-1990, military conflicts arose in the world, but they were stopped or kept within the framework of the efforts of the United States and the USSR. Now one hegemon has collapsed, the other is going through a crisis. What awaits us until 2030? A series of large and small wars will begin, which the United States and NATO will no longer be able to control. For example, the fall of Karabakh is not the end of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict, but only another phase.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is imminent. The Saudi leadership has already stated that if a bomb appears in Iran, they will do the same "for balance". Will the richest country in the world really start an atomic program from scratch? The Saudi princes probably already have a big reserve up their sleeve.
What can save the world from a series of bloody conflicts with the prospect of a thermonuclear war is the new Yalta, the agreement of the leading powers. There should be a place for representatives of India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Iran in this meeting. This is a long process, it may take several conferences. But we need to start now, before it's too late.
Alexander Shirokorad
Alexander Borisovich Shirokorad is a writer and historian.
