by Cheryl Rofer
Sidenote: This is post number 1913 in the WhirledView blog. That reference is to the interwar years.
I have a running argument with Mark Safranski and Lexington Green. When the idea of getting to zero nuclear weapons comes up, one of their responses is that a world with no nuclear weapons would resemble the world of 1913, in the sense that wars of all against all would again become possible.
My customary response to this (after batting away their ideas that we are talking about unilateral disarmament or that we might have zero nuclear weapons in the next month or so) has been that the negotiations and concessions necessary to move toward zero nuclear weapons will restructure the world in such a way that it will resemble no world we know or have known.
But Nicholas and Alexandra has given me a new argument: Europe is no longer ruled by a single dysfunctional family.
That’s an exaggeration of the Europe of 1913, which was the problem back then. But no such important grouping of countries is any longer ruled by a single family. And there’s more to it than that: the form of rule is important, and the world has pretty much given up on absolute monarchies. There are still autocracies of various kinds around the world, but they are few.
Many of the rulers of Europe before World War I were related to Queen Victoria. She provided the fateful hemophilia gene that the Tsarevich suffered from. Both Nicholas and Alexandra were related to the British royal family, Alexandra a granddaughter of Victoria. Kaiser Wilhelm was a cousin. King Alfonso of Spain was a cousin by marriage, and there were ties to Greece, Prussia, and Denmark. The members of the family were fabulously wealthy, and, as we have recently seen, the values and interests of the fabulously wealthy are not the same as those of the rest of us.
Nicholas regretted having to go to war against Cousin Willy, but his other duties required it. Russia’s national interest was part of it, but a big part of how he thought of national interest was a pride-duty-upholding-our-sacred-values kind of thing that is more like a family’s sense of who they are than today’s national interests of economic growth or security for citizens.
There was much visiting back and forth among the members of the family, which kept them within the bubble of their family values. It was a way of thinking as much as particular values and interests, that of an extreme in-group.
Conversely, one might argue that such cozy arrangements are more likely to lead to common interests and stability than a bunch of unrelated nations going their own way. But the common interests of this family were only indirectly related to the interests of the subjects of their nations. The fabulously wealthy are not like the rest of us. Nicholas and Alexandra seem not to have noticed, until close to the end of their reign, that there was a lot of unhappiness among their subjects.
Monarchy exacerbated the problems
Most of the countries of Europe were monarchies; now most are democracies. In a monarchy, the monarch is in charge of everything. There may be ministers, but they are advisors who have only as much power as the monarch grants. Britain had been moving away from this model for some time, but Nicholas and Alexandra were hardly alone in believing that only one person can rule. When World War I broke out, Nicholas commanded the troops directly. This left a bit of a vacuum in other spheres, which Alexandra tried to fill, with Rasputin’s help.
Power is that centralized in very few countries today. Heads of government have access to advice from experts in many fields: military, scientific, economic, societal, political. The ballot box and the media remind those heads that accepting advice can be a good idea. None of this implies that decisions will be perfect, but it does mean that big decisions, like going to war, will be thought out and justified in ways that a monarch does not need to.
And the heads of government are exchanged more frequently, usually with minimal guarantees of tenure. Nicholas and Alexandra were nice people, one of my friends remarked, somewhat similarly to Mark’s comment, but they weren’t cut out to be autocrats. But with a monarchy, you’ve got the monarch you’ve got, not the monarch you might want.
Not a definitive argument
This isn’t a definitive smackdown of Mark’s and Lex’s worries about 1913, but I think it undercuts their historical parallel pretty seriously. And it doesn’t guarantee that a world without nuclear weapons would be a world without war. But a world without nuclear weapons would be a world less in danger of widespread destruction.