Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: An Interview

22 Historically Speaking November/December 2006 Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: An Interview Conducted by Donald. A. Yerxa NIALL FERGUSON IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S BEST KNOWN historians. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegier Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a SeniorResearch Fellow ofJesus College, Oxford University, and a SeniorFellow of the HooverInstitution, Stanford University. Ferguson is authorof severalbooks thatadvance bold, often controversialtheses, includingThe Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books, 1998), Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic Books, 2003), and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin, 2004). He is a regular commentator on history, politics, and economics on television andradio andin opinionjournals andnewspapers. He writes weekly columns forthe Sunday Telegraph andthe LA Times. In 2004 Time magazine namedhim as one of the world's hundred most influentialpeople. His latest book, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Decline of the West (Penguin, 2006), is an extendedessay on why the 20th century was the bloodiestin history . On September 13, 2006, Historically Speaking editorDonald Yerxa caught up with Ferguson at Harvard's Minda de Gun^burg CenterforEuropean Studies. Donald Yerxa: What is your basic argument in The War of the World? Niall Ferguson: The War of the World asks the question: Why was the 20th century so violent when it was in so many ways a century of unprecedented progress in economic , scientific, and political terms? I felt when I asked this question that the conventional answers were not very compelling because they didn't tell you where and when specifically the violence happened. And I thought if I could answer that question—why were some places and some periods so excessively violent—I might actually make a contribution. The War of the World says that places that were ethnically very mixed, that experienced economic volatility, and that were located on a sort of imperial fault line were likely to experience extreme violence in the 20th century. And that's why Central and Eastern Europe, North Korea, and Manchuria were very dangerous places, and Canada wasn't. Yerxa: You state in the book that "[w]hen a multiethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage." Do the circumstances of ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline necessarily unleash the basest instincts of ordinary people in "tribal bloodletting?" Ferguson: The problem is that the ideal of the nation -state implies homogeneity, that everybody in France is a Frenchman. And it's very hard to apply that model the farther east you go in Europe because the patchwork of linguistic, ethnic, and religious setdement is just too great. To create a nation-state called Turkey out of what was left of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War was almost by definition going to lead to conDonald Yerxa and Niall Ferguson at Harvard University. Photo by Blake Marshall. flicts. The Armenians, who were Christians, and who were seen as being close to Russia geographically and politically, were in some ways the first victims of a succession of genocidal conflicts that arose when empires tried to become nation-states. In that sense carnage was likely. Of course, carnage took different forms. At the "starter" level it consisted of merely expelling people or discriminating against them, treating them as second-class citizens. It didn't mean automatically that genocidal policies would arrive. War was necessary for the process of homogenization to take on an extremely violent, genocidal form. I'm not sure how else the circle can be squared in multiethnic societies other than through fragmentation. Balkanization is the essence of the alternative scenario where the empire simply breaks apart into multiple mini-nation states, which was the Austro-Hungarian "solution," if that's the right word. Yerxa: The UK edition of The War of the World carries the subtitle History's Age of Hatred, whereas the U.S. edition's subtitle is TwentiethCentury Conflict and the Descent of the West. Which captures your argument better? Ferguson...