Journalist Max Hastings thinks the first world war was a “necessary war”. Historian Niall Ferguson says Britain should have kept out of it. The BBC’s gave each a documentary to make their case. Chris Nineham was not impressed by either of them

As if to confirm its dissapproval of those who oppose foreign wars by conviction, the BBC this week managed the feat of organising a debate on the rights and wrongs of World War One between two of Britain’s most high profile supporters of empire.

In the pro-war corner on 24 February 2014, we had The Daily Mail columnist Sir Max Hastings, a man whose credibility as an objective war historian has clearly survived his 1982 comment on the Falklands War, “No British reporter could be neutral when his own country was fighting.”

Conducting interviews in various establishment drawing rooms he put together a conventional militarist case for the war. Germany was not just the instigator of the war, it had to be stopped on account of its recklessness and innate tendency to dictatorship and atrocity. Cue the vague conflation of the two World Wars; “German war aims were little different from those of Hitler”, and of course the insistence that Britain’s entry in the war was all about Belgium.

Even the staunchly pro-war Hew Strachan blanched a little when Hasting took at face value Sir Edward Grey’s famous speech in parliament in which he said Britain entered the war to defend Belgian democracy. Strachan was honest enough to mention that Belgium’s neutrality was precious to the British establishment because it kept Germany out of channel ports and away from imperial trade routes. Hastings ploughed on undeterred, keen to get back to his main contention that the greatest slaughter in history up to that time, with all its unimaginable horror, was justified to save European civilisation.

Apart from the striking paradox in this central argument, Hasting’s account had multiple blindspots. Most startlingly, beyond a cursory glance at the Balkans, there was little discussion of the wider context of the war. So, nothing for example on Germany’s challenges to British and French imperial interests in Africa and the Middle East. These had led to a series of crises in the decade before the war that were much talked about at the time. There was no recognition even of the fact that Britain was the world’s largest imperial power and of course no mention of the terrible atrocities it committed in India, various Africa countries, China and elsewhere.

There was barely a reference either to the fact that, despite the unimaginable bloodletting, the war didn’t resolve the tensions that generated it, but raised them to a new level. This inescapable fact is most obviously illustrated by the success right-wing forces in Germany had between the first and second world wars– most notably Hitler’s Nazi party — by exploiting discontent with the terms of the peace treaty imposed in 1919.

On 28 February 2014, opposing Max Hastings in the not-very-anti-war corner, was Niall Ferguson, author of a series of books arguing the case for the benign impact of Western empires in general and the British Empire in particular. His performance was frankly puzzling.

It consisted of a series of unconnected and often conflicting assertions including the view that World War One interrupted a century-long trend towards world peace and civilisation and that its start was essentially an accident. This was contradicted however by Ferguson’s welcome admission that the background to the War was a complex set of rivalries between imperial blocs which erupted in what he called “a sudden breakdown of complex systems”.

Freed up by his at least partial disapproval of the war Ferguson’s was at least able gave some sense of the horror of the mechanised slaughter of the war. Also welcome was the admission that Britain’s entry in to the war served to raise the stakes and generalise the war.

But he drew no sensible conclusions from such occasional insights. Having asserted that it would have been better if Britain had held back and let the war play itself out he went on to say ‘it would still have had the option to intervene later’ if the British Empire had been threatened.

Such confusion was then compounded when Ferguson resorted to psychoanalysis to explain the barbarity and longevity of the war. Out of nowhere we were told that the continuation of the war could only be explained as exposing “the fundamentally violent nature of the male of the species.” This appeared to flatly contradict his earlier “theory” of the gradual upwards curve of civilisation.

As well as making nonsense of his previous argument and being utterly ahistorical, the ‘human nature” explanation sits uneasily with one of the facts that is conveniently forgotten in so much of the historiography of the war – that the conflict was brought to an end by the combatants themselves.

The Russian troops began walking away from the trenches as part of the revolutionary process in 1917 and German sailors mutinied the following year, partly inspired by events in Russia, but also as a response to Naval Command’s crackpot demands for ‘a final offensive’. The spirit of rebellion spread across the country and led not just to the end of the war but to the proclamation of a republic in Germany on 9 November 1918.

The scattergun confusion of Ferguson’s account is hardly surprising. It is what is going to happen when an apologist for empire half opposes what was essentially an imperialist war. The problem with the war for Ferguson is that it contradicts in the starkest terms his astonishing view that the British empire’s contribution to history was to spread civilisation, democracy and goodwill around a world. So he is under pressure to deal with it as an isolated aberration, and he ends up being able to explain nothing much at all.

If the BBC wants to contribute in a serious way to this important national debate it is going to have to invite on some people prepared to talk openly and seriously about the wider dynamics that led to the terrible carnage of 1914 – 1918. That may mean lifting its undeclared ban on people who oppose war.

From No Glory