"The lessons learned are there to see."
"The lessons learned are there to see."
It has become traditional for the leaders of the Group of 7 (G-7) countries to pose for a “graduation” picture at the close of their annual two-day summit meeting. Looking at the most recent graduation picture—taken in the 2021 host country, United Kingdom—it occurred to me that the countries represented in the picture (UK, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada) comprised the majority of the principal participants in the three biggest international conflicts between 1870 and 1945, viz., the France-Prussian War (1970), World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). The other major participants in those cataclysmic geopolitical happenings were Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire—mainly the separate states of Austria and Hungary—and the Ottoman Empire (since reduced to today’s Turkey).
The 1870 conflict was called the Franco-Prussian War but in reality it was a war between France and Germany, which had become a united country under the leadership of the powerful north German state of Prussia. With its powerful army, France was not expected to lose the war, but it did. The Franco-Prussian War turned out to be the first of three successive wars that France and Germany would fight between 1870 and 1939. Today, with the close ties that have developed between them, the possibility of France and Germany again going to war against one another is very remote.
A representative of the once-great Austro-Hungarian Empire was not present at this year’s G-7 summit meeting because that empire no longer exists. History has recorded that World War I was caused by the assassination by a Sebian nationalist of Archduke Ferdinand, the future Emperor, in 1914. By August of that year Europe was embroiled in what became the first world war. Because of its historic ties to and ethnic kinship with its southern neighbor, Germany sided with Austria. The Serbians were slaves, so Russia had to side with Serbia.
A rival of Russia for dominance of southeastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire cast its lot with the German-Austro-Hungarian side. With Great Britain, France and Italy unwilling to punish little Serbia, the battle lines were drawn: Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire versus Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia.
The 1914-1918 war came to be known as the Great War. But as anyone who has read accounts of that conflict—four years of trench warfare and use of mustard gas on both combatants and civilians—there was absolutely nothing great about it.
When it broke out in September 1939, World War II involved only Great Britain and France on one side and Germany and Italy on the other. Things changed —and the entire world became engulfed in flames—in 1945 when Adolf Hitler broke his non-aggression pact with Joseph Stalin and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded the East Asian colonies of Great Britain, France and The Netherlands.
Now all the big powers were at war: The great democracies and Russia against the Axis countries. The Anschluss had united Germany and Austria, Germany subjugated Hungary and Turkey—the former center of the Ottoman Empire—decided to stay neutral.
Learning the lessons of World War I, the victors of World War II conducted themselves differently from the victors of the Great War. The losers were neither humiliated nor punished. On the contrary, they were treated with magnanimity and given assistance toward the reconstruction of their economies and the redirection of their societies.
Today, the results of the lesson-learning are there to see in the close relations and tight alliance between the protagonists in the major international conflicts of the last 150 years, especially between the French, the Germans and the British and between the Americans and the Japanese. The exceptions here relate to Russia and the People’s Republic of China, which have remained undemocratic, untransparent and aggressive.
In the same manner that their predecessors decided the fate of the world from 1870 to 1945, so the leaders of the countries represented at this year’s G-7 summit meeting very probably will decide the world’s fate in the next 150 years.
