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'What if' is a waste of time

Counterfactual history is misguided and outdated, as the first world war debate shows
Richard J Evans The Guardian, Thursday 13 March 2014 10.30 GMT

Detail of a magazine cover illustration of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images

Too much of the current debate about 1914 and the outbreak of the first world war focuses not on why it happened, but how things might have been if Britain hadn't entered it. On recent TV documentaries, Max Hastings speculated that the Germans would have crushed Europe under the iron heel of a proto-Nazi dictatorship, while Niall Ferguson argued that the British empire would have been safe for another century, as the Germans settled down to creating something rather like the European Union of the
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present day. Such speculations are of course unprovable. Hastings's simple-minded equation of the kaiser's Germany with Hitler's Third Reich (the only difference, he says, is that the kaiser's regime wasn't nearly as antisemitic as Hitler's) ignores the fact that before 1914 Germany had a thriving, multi-party political system in which the government could not do without the national legislature, the Reichstag. The largest grouping in the Reichstag, the Social Democratic party, was committed to the full democratisation of the country (which indeed it eventually pushed through in the revolution of 1918). True, its deputies voted for war credits in August 1914, but they did so only in the belief that Germany was defending itself against the despotism of tsarist Russia; they steadfastly argued for a peace without annexations, and by the middle of the war were co-operating with other major parties for a reform of the political system, to which the kaiser was obliged to agree. Simply to say that a German victory would have plunged Europe into an authoritarian regime like that imposed on it by the Nazis has no basis. After all, virtually the first thing the Nazis did when they came to power was arrest the leading Social Democrats and put them into the camps, ban their party, and create a one-party state. Fersuson's speculations are even less persuasive. One might just as easily argue that had Germany won a war fought only against Russia and France, it would have turned its attention to the British empire, on which it had already cast envious eyes before 1914. Or that the growth of anti-colonial movements doomed the British empire anyway. And a German victory might have sparked radical demands for reform by the left, which after all represented millions of the German troops who fought at the front and, like their counterparts in other countries, now wanted their reward. Again, we can never know. It's speculation, not history. Yet this kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong. For that way, of course, leads not to historical understanding but to all kinds of wishful thinking, every hypothesis political in motivation. "We" the identification is telling were right to fight the continental despot; "we" were wrong to involve ourselves in the continent's conflicts; you pays your money and you makes your Eurosceptic choice. "Counterfactuals", as such "what-if" speculations are generally termed by the aficionados, are often claimed to open up the past by demonstrating the myriad
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possibilities, thus freeing history from the straitjacket of determinism and restoring agency to the people. But in fact they imprison the past in an even tighter web: one tiny change in the timeline Archduke Franz Ferdinand escapes assassination in Sarajevo, the British cabinet decides not to enter the war leads inevitably to a whole series of much larger changes, sometimes stretching over decades almost up to the present day. Yet this ignores, of course, an infinite number of chances that might have deflected the predicted course of events along the way Franz Ferdinand might have fallen victim to another assassin's bullet, or died in a hunting accident; Britain might have entered the war later on; the US might have come into the conflict on the side of the French; Austria-Hungary might have collapsed in the face of nationalist revolts; and so on. If counterfactuals really did restore chance and contingency to history, then we wouldn't actually be able to extrapolate any consequences at all from changes in the timeline such as a British decision not to enter the war in 1914. In practice, of course, every historian tries to balance out the elements of chance on the one hand, and larger historical forces (economic, cultural, social, international) on the other, and come to some kind of explanation that makes sense. The problem with counterfactuals is that they almost always treat individual human actors generals or politicians, in the main as completely unfettered by these larger forces, able to make decisions without regard to them in any way. And yet this simply isn't the case, as many a tyrant in history, from Napoleon to Hitler, has found to his cost. To suppose otherwise is to regress into a "great man" view of history that the historical profession abandoned decades ago. It's also a form of intellectual atavism in another sense: "what-ifs" are almost invariably applied to political, military and diplomatic history: they represent a "kings-and-battles" view of the past that the education secretary Michael Gove and his friends might want to shove down schoolchildren's throats, but which historians know is thoroughly outdated outdated because it is crudely simplistic and desperately unsophisticated. That's not to say we shouldn't study these things, but it's also important to recognise that they form only a tiny part of the past (I almost said "the rich tapestry" of the past, but I remember that someone recently said anyone who used that particular cliche should be shot). You seldom find counterfactuals about topics such as the transition from the classical sensibility to the Romantic at the end of the 18th century, or the emergence of modern industry, or the French revolution, because they're just too obviously complicated to be susceptible of simplistic "what-if" speculation. Why are we so prone in the early 21st century to approaching history in this way? The fashion for counterfactuals, after all, only began around the mid 90s: before that, they were few and far between, and seldom taken seriously even by those who indulged in
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them. Now you find them everywhere. No sooner has the New Statesman brought a 40part series of them to an end than Prospect begins another. Books pour off the presses imagining what Britain might have been like under Prime Minister Heseltine or Portillo. Armchair generals refight hundreds of battles to show they could have done better than Napoleon or Montgomery. Perhaps it's because we're living in a postmodern age where the idea of progress has largely disappeared, to be replaced by uncertainty and doubt, and where linear notions of time have become blurred; or because truth and fiction no longer seem such polar opposites as they once did; or because historians now have more licence to be subjective than they used to. But it's time to be sceptical about this trend. We need, in this year especially, to start to try to understand why the first world war happened, not to wish that it hadn't, or argue about whether it was "right" or "wrong". In the effort to understand, counterfactuals aren't any real use at all. Richard J Evans's Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History is due from Little, Brown. Get the Guardian book club email
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