History’s Warnings

Margaret MacMillan, professor emeritus of International History at Oxford University, cited Mark Twain’s famous quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” in her recent article in Foreign Affairs, “Which Past Is Prologue? Heeding the Right Warnings from History.” In our current time of global danger and uncertainty, MacMillan points out that history is rhyming so much that it is eerily uncomfortable. Still, times of crisis have also been times of opportunity.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, conditions were created for a long period of peace and stability. The two world wars of the 20th century also opened the doors to new ideas and institutions that promoted a more just and stable international order, based on cooperation more than on confrontation.

MacMillan reminds us that the most recent historiography recognizes the 1920s as a period in which serious and courageous efforts were made to establish a new international order that would avoid the outbreak of another catastrophic war. Those years were, on the whole, a time of cooperation. In its early stages, the League of Nations achieved important successes, such as the avoidance of a war in Corfu in 1923 between Italy and Greece and the international naval disarmament conferences in 1921 and 1922. After the Great War (World War I) agreements were made between Germany and France (Stresemann and Briand), for which these two leaders won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. Even Mussolini started behaving like a statesman when, in 1925 as part of the Pact of Locarno, along with Great Britain, he signed a treaty of nonaggression with Germany, France and Belgium. In 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed. More than 50 countries, including all the major powers, renounced war as an instrument for resolving disputes.

The promises of the 1920s washed up in the Great Depression. Many citizens lost faith in capitalism, in democracy, and even in their leaders’ abilities to confront the crisis. As a consequence, the parties of the extreme right and left grew.

In relatively stable times, the world can “absorb” problematic and aggressive leaders, but in uncertainty and instability, such leaders can become very dangerous, especially if they govern large powers. Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese military leaders and Stalin (in Poland and Finland) opted in favor of military aggression to expand their national territories. Meanwhile, Chamberlain and Daladier believed in appeasement, and Roosevelt was too busy dealing with the internal socioeconomic crisis.

In the debate about just how important leaders are in history, the two extreme positions are, on the one hand, the historicist, who sees history as collective action taken within social structures and the impersonal forces of history, and on the other hand, the individualist, who emphasizes the action of Great Men in the course of history.

Along with Alexander Herzen, I am of the opinion that “history doesn’t follow a script,” and that it is the complex result of a web of relationships between leaders and individual circumstances including, among other things, institutions, ideas and values. But in times of serious instability, the personality and abilities of leaders take on exceptional relevance.

The pandemic has unleashed an extremely serious socioeconomic crisis, the consequences of which are still unpredictable, in an uncertain world full of tension among the superpowers. We can only pray that world leaders will be up to facing the challenges ahead.