The Short War That Might Have Been

“Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder,” wrote Arnold Toynbee. So do empires, and so do nations.

Once again, Western civilisation is under mortal threat. This comes from a deepening schism between the rank-and-file and a cosmopolitan urban elite who have turned away from the source of all their wealth: free enterprise and private property under a constitutional, sovereign state, grounded on traditional civil society.

Identifying this threat in his recently-published tour de force, Sovereignty in the 21st Century: And the Crisis for Identity, Cultures, Nation-States, and Civilizations, Gregory Copley, the prolific Washington-based strategist who has advised leaders around the world for almost half a century, and prominent constitutional monarchist, sounds a warning. This is that rather than the nation-state, today’s elites endorse a world without borders, governed by an unelected international bureaucracy which enforces laws that overturn traditional society, undermine the free enterprise system and diminish the living standards of an increasingly rebellious rank-and-file.

It is one hundred years since Western civilisation was under another threat, a threat from within, which almost led to its overthrow. This began, almost inexplicably, with the 1914 assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. This incident led through war and insurrection to the massacre of the Russian imperial family on July 17, 1918, at Yekaterinburg by those whose mission was, and still is, to destroy civilisation as we know it.

On that evening of infamy, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra and their beautiful children, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the young Tsarevich Alexei, as well as their supporters, were shot, bayoneted and clubbed to death. Their bodies were then disfigured and buried in a hidden grave, all on the secret orders of the bloodthirsty tyrant Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

As the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, declared as the imperial family’s remains were at last buried in St Petersburg’s great St Peter and St Paul Fortress, this was one of the “most shameful episodes” in Russian history. Bowing his head before the victims of this “merciless slaying”, he affirmed that the interment was a symbol of unity for the nation and an act of atonement.

Not only does Yekaterinburg recall this bloody massacre, it also recalls the terrible crime committed by the German High Command in injecting into the very heart of the Russian empire, and then the world, what Churchill was so accurately to describe as a “bacillus plague”, a plague which was also to mutate into National Socialism, that is Nazism. This infection spread so quickly and so remarkably that by 1940, acting together, they had replaced almost all constitutional government in continental Europe with a barbaric rule from the dark ages.

With the world wars, this plague would result in the deaths of around 200 million, many more casualties, and the enslavement of more than a billion people across a vast part of the world under the most brutal of dictatorships.

Had the First World War been as limited and as short as most expected—which could easily have occurred—it is likely the European powers would have recovered and continued much as they were, without producing the calamities that have shaken the world. But the war dragged on for four long years. For the men in the trenches on the Western Front and in the East it was a hell on earth. Men died in wave upon wave, all in the vain hope of capturing a few yards of ground from the enemy. The forces on either side were so finely balanced that most of the war was a deadly stalemate.

What tipped the balance was sending the British Expeditionary Force onto the continent. It was likely that without the BEF, France would have been defeated within a few months just as it had been in 1871.

Niall Ferguson, in his brilliant book The Pity of War, argues that the British should have remained neutral. The Asquith government and the Liberal Party were divided on whether they should join the war. Had the Germans not so cavalierly applied the Schlieffen Plan and violated Belgian neutrality, the Asquith government would probably have remained neutral. However, a number of ministers, including Winston Churchill, would probably have then joined the Conservatives who were determined to support France whether or not Germany had violated Belgian neutrality. As a result the government would have collapsed.

King George V may well have decided to call the election due by 1915 so that the government would have a mandate to go to war or to remain neutral. If such an election had been called, and even if the Tories had won, there could have been a delay in the British being able to send in the BEF. A short war would still have been a possibility.

In any event, the Germans violated Belgium’s neutrality and that allowed the Asquith government to declare war. They might have had more regard for the lessons of history. But as the great Sir John Glubb once observed, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. One of the lessons of history is that when a nation achieves dominance—in today’s language, becomes a superpower—it should do as Theodore Roosevelt advised, “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Above all, a superpower, a hegemon, must always avoid any lengthy land war unless of course this is because of the invasion of the homeland. This is what the British seemed to learn for a century after they ascended to hegemon status after Waterloo. This learning was not perfect and was forgotten as regards Crimea and the Boer War, fortunately without reducing in any significant way the wealth, the power and the standing of Great Britain.

Niall Ferguson argues that the British should have remained neutral in 1914. I think this is unrealistic. The Tories and sufficient Liberal ministers were intent on supporting the French.

What could have happened

The British government could have done what is quite often done in wars: they could have limited their involvement. Speculating about this is not pointless; it can teach us about what might happen at some point in the future by drawing from the lessons of the past.

The British could quite properly have decided that their contribution, at least at the beginning, would be only through the Royal Navy, then the most powerful in the world. The Royal Navy could have imposed a blockade and intensified patrols in the North Sea, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, possibly deterring the Ottomans from declaring war and joining the Central Powers.

Britain could still have invited the formation of a volunteer Imperial Army, including Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Indian, South African and colonial forces. But instead of sending them to the Western Front, they could have been based in Egypt, ready to support any action to take the Ottoman empire out of the war, probably by taking Constantinople.

In the event of war by the Ottomans, and with the likely Arab revolt led by T.E. Lawrence, the Ottoman provinces in North Africa and the Middle East could have been liberated with a series of monarchies. These would have been more often than not constitutional, stretching from Syria to Tunisia and to the Gulf and with a Jewish homeland still reserved under the first Balfour Declaration.

In this scenario it is likely that the Germans would have advanced to Paris as they did in 1871, with the French suing for peace in the winter of 1914. The German advance to the East would have been intensified but with winter advancing would have stalled.

Let us continue to rewrite history. If we do that, we can learn what to do next time. And there is always a next time.

Let us imagine that at this stage, a vigorous diplomatic demarche by the British government, with Papal encouragement, persuades the American leader, President Wilson, to call a peace conference to be held in Washington in early 1915. The powers agree.

The final terms are quite benign for the Central Powers:

• German ambitions have been shown to be surprisingly similar to Germany’s today, a European customs union dominated by Germany.

• Germany demands the payment of quite reasonable reparations by France and the transfer of several African and Pacific Island colonies. France protests but secretly many French leaders are pleased because all of these colonies impose substantial burdens on the French budget, said to be greater than the reparations payable.

• Russia agrees to referendums in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine and Finland as to whether each should become an independent constitutional monarchy under a German or other prince or become an autonomous province in the Russian empire. This is far better for Russia than the terms of the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

• The United States and Britain insist that Poland be restored as an independent state. Germany reluctantly agrees with certain territorial concessions balanced by territory excised from the Russian empire.

• Austria-Hungary successfully evades President Wilson’s wish to dissolve the empire on the principle of self-determination by agreeing to become an empire of independent realms under the Emperor, rather like the British Empire.

• Before the conference, Tsar Nicholas has abdicated both for himself and the seriously ill Tsarevitch Alexei. Tsar Michael II declares Russia a constitutional monarchy.

The result is that the British Empire emerges from the war as rich and as powerful as it was at the beginning, without losing the flower of the empire’s young men. The German Reich and the US are both challenging the British as rising powers, but fortunately both are democracies. The Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Romanovs survive, and more importantly, so does the institution of constitutional monarchy as the default constitutional model, one which can be exported and survive over a significant period including during wars and depressions.

If this had happened, as Niall Ferguson suggests, Adolf Hitler ekes out his life as a mediocre postcard painter and a nuisance in the local veterans’ association. Living in a German-dominated Central Europe, his associates tell him he has little to complain about. Vladimir Lenin carries out his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to collapse—and forever disappointed. Joseph Stalin continues his career as a bank robber, kidnapper and racketeer until he is caught and jailed for life. Leon Trotsky is fascinated by the theory of gender fluidity as the realisation of Engels’s theory in his book Private Property, the Family and the State. He becomes Leonie Trotsky, a not very successful Viennese cabaret performer.

What really happened

Let us come back to history as it happened.

By 1914 both the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian empire were well on the way towards something akin to the advanced British constitutional model. Tsarist Russia was not so advanced, but it was a far better society than the horror which was to be subsequently imposed by Lenin and Stalin. Sarejevo not only catapulted Europe into a general then a world war, it also brought constitutional development in Russia to a halt.

So how did the Tsarist system compare with the subsequent Soviet regime? Was the USSR, at least economically, as we are often told, superior to Tsarism? The Russian economy industrialised with extraordinary speed in the three decades before 1914, with economic development faster than that even in the up-and-coming challenger to Britain, Germany.

KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky once headed the KGB’s rezidentura in London, but becoming disillusioned, he defected in 1985. He is one of the highest-ranking and most valuable of Soviet era defectors. He writes:

Russia under Nicholas II, with all the survivals of feudalism, had opposition political parties, independent trade unions and newspapers, a rather radical parliament and a modern legal system. Its agriculture was on the level of the USA, with industry rapidly approaching the Western European level. [In contrast] in the USSR there was total tyranny, no political liberties and practically no human rights. Its economy was not viable; agriculture was destroyed. The terror against the population reached a scope unprecedented in history. No wonder many Russians look back at Tsarist Russia as a paradise lost.

It could have been different, even as late as 1917. When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in favour of his brother Michael Alexandrovich, the new Tsar declared that he would assume supreme power only if the people invested him with this through an elected constituent assembly. But when the assembly met in January 1918, the Bolsheviks, unwisely armed by the Kerensky provisional government, closed it down. In the last free vote they allowed in Russia, the Bolsheviks attracted less than 25 per cent of the vote. When Alexander Kerensky died in New York in 1970, not one Orthodox church, Russian or Serbian, would bury him.

Had Tsar Michael II been invested by the people, there can be no doubt Russia would have become a constitutional monarchy. Fearing such a democratic result, the communists murdered him. Had Tsar Michael II reigned, Russia would never have known that long and evil dark age under communist tyrants.

It could have been so different. In some ways it still can.

As to the imperial family, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the Tsarevitch Alexei: may they rest in peace.

God Save the Queen!

Advance Australia Fair!

Bozhe Tsaryah Khrani!

God save the Tsar of All the Russias!