First World War

Background

Quigley dates the long Age of Expansion of Western Civilization at 1770–1929 and reads 1914 as the moment that age's optimism cracked (T&H 25). The pre-war European order rested on five Great Powers managed through a balance of power — a system Quigley examines in detail in his early T&H chapters on the diplomatic alignments of 1871–1914 (T&H 213–230). On the British side, the diplomatic-imperial faction that would push Britain into the war had been organizing for two decades around the Milner Group: men gathered first in the Kindergarten during the Second Boer War (AAE 5), then reorganized after 1909 as the Round Table Groups (AAE 5–6). By 1914 this network already controlled The Times, dominated All Souls College at Oxford, and had positioned its members in the Foreign Office and the Imperial General Staff (AAE 88, 131).

Quigley emphasizes that the war's causes were neither purely accidental nor purely imperialist: they were structural. The four-power continental alignment (Russia, France, Britain vs. Germany, Austria-Hungary) plus an unstable Balkan periphery meant a local crisis could metastasize. The Sarajevo assassination of June 1914 detonated mechanisms — Russian mobilization, the Schlieffen Plan, the German invasion of Belgium — that no actor could halt once started (T&H 224–229).

Quigley's framing

Quigley reads the war on three registers simultaneously. First, civilizationally, it ends the Age of Expansion: the optimism of 1770–1914, the assumption of perpetual material progress, the conviction that constitutional liberalism and free trade were the natural endpoint of human politics — all are buried in the trenches (T&H 25, 130). Second, structurally, it shifts financial primacy. Britain emerges from the war as a net debtor; the United States, as the world's leading creditor; New York's role in international finance now exceeds London's, with consequences Quigley traces through the Dawes Plan and into 1929 (T&H 318–322).

Third, and uniquely Quigley, the war is the moment the Milner Group surfaces as a directing force. In The Anglo-American Establishment he shows that during Lloyd George's 1917–1918 war administration the Group dominated the Imperial War Cabinet — Milner, Amery, Lothian, Smuts all in central roles (AAE 5, 154–158). The Group then dominated the Paris Peace Conference, founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs at the Hôtel Majestic in 1919, and through its American sister the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) set the terms of inter-war diplomatic discussion in both English-speaking countries (AAE 5, 182–192).

Quigley is also careful to insist that the war was not 'caused' by the Group — it was made structurally inevitable by the alliance system — but the war is what allowed the Group to graduate from an Oxford-South African coterie into the executive of the British Empire (AAE 158).

Conduct and outcomes

Quigley's substantive military analysis appears in his Weapons Systems and Political Stability material and in T&H's chapters on the war: the war was the moment when the defensive weapon (machine gun, barbed wire, trench, modern artillery) had so outstripped the offensive that any attack across no-man's-land was suicide (T&H 226; Quigley, 'Weapons Systems,' 1960). The result was four years of attritional slaughter — Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele — broken only when the United States entered in 1917 and tipped the balance of materiel decisively.

The war ended four empires. The Romanov dynasty fell in February 1917; the Bolshevik seizure of October 1917 inaugurated the Soviet experiment that would dominate the second half of Quigley's century (T&H 380–410). The Habsburg monarchy collapsed into successor states (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). The Ottoman Empire was carved up by the Versailles settlement and its sequel treaties (Sèvres, Lausanne), producing the modern Middle East. The Hohenzollern German Empire became the Weimar Republic, saddled with reparations its productive economy could not bear without American loans — the mechanism the Dawes Plan would later attempt to manage (T&H 321).

Consequences

Quigley treats the war's most important consequence as the dislocation of the international financial system. Before 1914, the gold standard, anchored in London and managed by the Bank of England, governed world commerce. The war forced every belligerent off gold and broke the synchronization between gold reserves, money supply, and price levels (T&H 313–318). The attempts to restore the system in 1925–1928 — including Britain's return to gold at the pre-war parity under Churchill's Chancellorship — were among the technical causes of the deflation that led into the Great Depression (T&H 333–345).

Politically, the war produced the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) and the League of Nations, and through the Hôtel Majestic meetings of the Anglo-American delegations also produced the RIIA and the CFR (AAE 182). The war's deeper consequence was to make the next war structurally probable: a humiliated but not destroyed Germany, a Bolshevik Russia outside the European order, an American population unwilling to underwrite the peace it had been decisive in imposing. Quigley reads the entire inter-war period — Dawes, Locarno, the Hoare–Laval Pact, Munich — as a sequence of failures to manage these contradictions (AAE 220, 238). 'Tragedy' and 'hope' are the antinomy that gives his book its title; the tragedy starts here.

Legacy

In Quigley's civilizational frame the First World War is the first paroxysm of the Age of Conflict that succeeds the Age of Expansion (T&H 25; EoC 121–137). It also marks the transfer of effective leadership of Western Civilization from the European core (Britain, France, Germany) to its peripheral derivatives (the United States and, less symmetrically, the Soviet Union). The peripheral-society dynamic he develops in The Evolution of Civilizations — that civilizational leadership tends to pass to societies whose less-encrusted institutions can adopt the instrument of expansion more flexibly — is, in his reading, exactly what 1914–1918 dramatized for the West (EoC 84–94).

For the Milner Group the war was the moment of arrival. Group members signed the Treaty of Versailles, founded the RIIA, drafted the mandates system, wrote the standard histories of the war and its diplomacy, and trained the Cliveden/Chamberlain generation that would carry the appeasement policy into 1939 (AAE 154–158, 220–240). The Second World War, when it came, was for Quigley not a fresh tragedy but the conclusion of the one that began in 1914.