Brexit prompts more what-if questions around World War I

There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain’s Brexit negotiations are reaching their climax close to the centenary of Remembrance Day — November 11, 1918, when the guns of the Great War finally stopped firing.

Britain went to war in August 1914, with some hesitation, not to enforce a treaty that protected the rights of Belgium against invasion but to save the French from defeat and to prevent German domination of the European continent. Now, however, through the ­medium of the EU, the Germans, assisted by the French, exercise political and economic domination over the countries of Europe. Both France and Germany are determined to punish the British for having the temerity to leave the EU and have never negotiated in good faith from the outset of the discussions.

The EU’s bitterness ­towards the British was reflected in the comment of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker that Brexit was “a failure and a tragedy”, sneering that “the negotiations are now in the hands of our capable divorce lawyers”. The determination in Brussels to preserve the EU at all costs resulted in it providing loans to Greece that could never be repaid despite a pretence to the contrary.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for British Prime Minister Theresa May, confronted by this intransigence on the part of the EU negotiators, divisions within her own party and the implacable hostility to Brexit of almost all those in positions of power and influence in her own country. ­Before the 2016 referendum, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that a vote to leave the EU would be “succumbing to our worst ­instincts”. Earlier this month the Bishop of Leeds said that staying silent over the consequences of Brexit would be like staying silent over the persecution of Jews in Germany in the 1930s.

This is not the only way in which the British entry into the Great War raises some of the biggest what-ifs of modern history. Would it have done so if it had realised in advance that more than nine million soldiers on all sides would be killed and another 21 million wounded, many of whom had lost limbs or suffered permanent breakdowns.

There is still fierce debate among historians over the conduct of the war and its consequences. Was General Douglas Haig’s policy of attrition on the Western Front, which resulted, for example, in 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, the only viable strategy? Could Winston Churchill’s plan to force the Dardanelles and break the stalemate on the Western Front have succeeded if the British navy had not pulled back after the early loss of some of its ships? Churchill was the subject of enormous criticism, particularly in Australia, ­because of the loss of lives at Gallipoli, but it is far from clear that the exercise was doomed from the outset.

Would the Russian Revolution and its appalling aftermath have occurred in the absence of the collapse of the Russian army in 1917? The tsar’s regime no doubt faced many pressures but a transition to some kind of constitutional monarchy may have been possible and so may have averted the civil war that followed the taking of power by the Bolsheviks, and then the ­Joseph Stalin era when millions perished in purges, famines and labour camps.

One of the less plausible scenarios is that Hitler would never have come to power in Germany in 1933 except for German resentment at the terms imposed on them by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I. It is true that John Maynard Keynes and others complained at the time that the monetary reparations required of Germany were totally unrealistic, but most of these sums were in fact never paid. Arguably, the terms of the treaty were not severe enough, given that Germany was allowed an armistice rather than a surrender and was never occupied by foreign forces. This was not a mistake that the allies made after World War II, when they insisted on unconditional surrender and moved in troops to supervise German reconstruction.

The centenary of Remembrance Day still has special significance for Australia, which suffered the highest proportion of casualties on the Allies’ side — 60,000 dead out of a little more than 400,000 troops, leaving a generation of widows and spinsters between the wars. Australia is a very different country now from the one that rushed to the ­defence of the empire in 1914, but it is important we always remember its role in one of the great conflicts of modern times.

Michael Sexton is the author of a number of books on Australian history and politics.