| Friday, November 11 marks the 87th anniversary of the end of the First World War. The signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918 marked the cessation of a conflict that had begun, officially, 1,560 days earlier on August 4, 1914.
It wasn’t quite that neat, of course. Technically, the war wasn’t over until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. And while it was Britain’s declaration of war on Germany that formally tipped a belligerent Europe over the brink, that act was merely the latest in a long series of events that had propelled the continent towards open conflict.
All the same, the point remains that the First World War bears all the marks of an earlier age, in which government ministers delivered formal declarations of war and, subsequently, signed gentlemen’s agreements to mark their termination. As such, it has the sort of concrete, objective identity that wars would come to lack as the 20th century progressed.
The clarity of war had already begun to blur by the time of the Second World War. Historians traditionally identify that conflict’s origin with Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939. But this time it took not one but two armistices to bring about the war’s end. In Europe, VE Day (May 8, 1945) followed Germany’s surrender the day before; in the Pacific, VJ Day (August 15, 1945) came a week or so after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On this basis, the Second World War lasted either 2,074 or 2,233 days, depending on where you peg its end. But there are good reasons to argue that it was, in fact, either much shorter or much longer than either of these totals. The war took on its truly global nature only with the entry of America on December 7, 1941, and as such the Second World War is considerably shorter than the history book account. On the other hand, the war’s start can be pushed back to any number of provocative actions by Nazi Germany in the years before September 1939.
Further afield, Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in September 1931 can, plausibly, be regarded as the first act of the Second World War. Or perhaps, as many historians now contend, it makes little real sense to view both world wars as separate conflicts, so intertwined are their causes, and instead they should be regarded as a single war that spanned most of the first half of the 20th century.
Almost no sooner was the Second World War over than the next global conflict began. The Cold War, however, was a very different kind of war.
For one thing, it was fuelled not by "nationalist fervour" as was the case in both world wars, but by a clash of ideologies (capitalism vs. communism) that had been simmering under the surface of international politics ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917.
For another, while the Cold War left few areas of the globe untouched, its two major combatants – the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. – never engaged each other directly. Now armed with nuclear weaponry, they could not afford to, as the near-miss of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 underlined. Instead, a series of "proxy" wars was fought, notably in Korea and Vietnam in the ’50s and ’60s, in which both superpowers lined up behind their "client" states.
Finally, the "undeclared" nature of the Cold War makes it difficult to date the conflict with any precision. Its end is most commonly linked to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, it being rather difficult to continue a war when one of the sides no longer exists. Yet the resilience of the Communist party in the new Russian federation might suggest that the Cold War has merely gone into hibernation.
Then U.S. President George H.W. Bush identified the passing of the U.S.S.R. with the birth of a "new world order." "Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed," he said as early as February 1990. "And in each instance, a new world order came about through the advent of a new tyrant or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end." Any hope that the world had just entered a new era of peace, however, was about to be shattered. Within a year, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Bush launched the first Gulf War.
No formal declaration of war was served. Instead, backed by a United Nations sanction and a fair measure of international support, Bush simply authorized a two-prong assault on Iraq. The first attack was a 39-day bombing campaign in January-February 1991. This was followed by a ground offensive – the infamous "Desert Storm" – that by contrast lasted a mere 100 hours, but all the same managed to kill 100,000 Iraqis. (That’s 25,000 casualties per day; by contrast, the First World War’s Battle of the Somme in 1916 saw the slaughter of a million soldiers over four months, about one-third the death-rate of Desert Storm.)
Much as with both world wars, the first (1991) and second (2003) Gulf Wars can be viewed as single, interconnected conflicts. In turn, they are both causally linked to the current "War on Terror." This latest global war is very much a declared war, with leaders such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair repeatedly asserting it’s every bit as much a war as any other in the 20th century.
Unlike any of its predecessors, however, it’s unclear just how, if or when the current war will ever be declared over. In their study of how wars end, Dunnigan and Martel conclude that, "All wars go through stages from peace to war and ultimately back to peace again." Those words were written in 1987, however, when old notions of war still applied. With the anniversary of 11/11 approaching, those notions look more and more like quaint historical artifacts. |
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