The Future of War: Bloch, Wells, Angell

Ironically in the pre-1914 generation, as the world stood under the impending shadow of the First World War, thinkers were establishing beyond doubt the ‘natural decline of warfare’. (The phrase was coined by Alexander Sutherland during the euphoria of Tsar Nicholas II's world peace proposals of 1898.) While Jean de Bloch demonstrated that modern war was too costly and disruptive to be tolerated, and Norman Angell ‘proved’ that it was economically prohibitive, influential peace apostles such as Jacques Novicow, David Starr Jordan and Vernon Kellogg dismissed war as biologically destructive and outmoded. An age of fevered nationalisms and militaristic determinisms also brought forth ‘peace eugenics’, a discourse that brilliantly used the new genetics to reinforce mainstream peace Darwinism, and conducted a furious rhetorical offensive against the militarists. Ignoring their own inclinations towards determinism and use of analogies from nature, the peace eugenists blamed the enemy for breaching free will and the western moral tradition, for distorting nature and the nature of war. War was excoriated as dysgenic, an anachronism fated to disappear as human history moved into a higher phase of civilisation. Right up to August 1914 the optimists emphasised the basic peacefulness of the west's advanced civilisations.

This was based upon irrefutable fact. Europe had maintained a long, if fragile, peace since the Franco-Prussian war. This was despite the romantics who glorified war, the ‘yellow press’ who sensationalised war to make sales, and science fiction writers who prophesied war.