Herbert Butterfield was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. He was a renowned historian, who contributed important books on diplomatic history, the history of historical writing, the politics of George III, and the history of science. He and Leonard Liggio—a close associate of Murray Rothbard for many decades—were friends.
I would like to concentrate on an aspect of Butterfield’s thought, likely to be of considerable interest to libertarians, especially libertarians who follow Rothbard. Butterfield, though not himself a libertarian, viewed with alarm the power of the state. He would have agreed with Jacob Burckhardt that “power is evil.” Power, he thought, often disguises itself in self-righteousness: a powerful state will endeavor to portray itself as the champion of the good, locked in battle with the forces of evil.
Such ideological distortions were especially characteristic of the 20th century, and Butterfield developed in response a resolutely revisionist account of World War I and World War II. To understand this account, we need to sketch the background of the pre-20th-century European state system.
This system developed in reaction to the immensely destructive Wars of Religion. Following the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the European states deliberately endeavored to limit war and to avoid ideological conflicts. The arrangements they arrived at were far from ideal; but in this vale of tears, utopian schemes that seek to impose perpetual peace, blind to the reality of original sin, invite disaster. (Butterfield, it is essential to realize, wrote as an Augustinian Christian for whom original sin is of prime significance).
As Butterfield noted,
In the background of eighteenth-century thought there was the repeated remembrance of a past, still fairly recent, but darker than anything else — the cruel Wars of Religion…against the notion of a uniform Empire with a uniform culture, they [the creators and defenders of the Westphalian system] promoted the idea of a civilization fundamentally one but broken into panes of many-colored glass — achieving greater richness through the variety of its local manifestations.
The Westphalian system was sharply interrupted, but not permanently frustrated, by the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress of Vienna reverted to the older tradition; and whatever the defects of the monarchical European states in the 19th century, global war was avoided for a century.
An essential component of the Westphalian system was that wars should be fought for strictly limited ends. Even before World War I became a Wilsonian “war for righteousness,” the British government ignored this vital lesson:
For one of the troubles of war is that it acquires its own momentum and plants its own ideals on our shoulders, so that we are carried far away from the purposes with which we began—carried indeed sometimes to greater acts of spoliation than the ones which had produced the original entry into the war. Before the War of 1914 had lasted a year, its own workings had generated such a mood that we had promised Russia Constantinople.
World War I replaced this non-ideological system with a different view, and Butterfield did not see this as a change for the better. Butterfield points to World War I as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century because it shattered the old order, replacing it with a series of wishful but vacuous platitudes and creating the conditions in which the rise of totalitarian ideologies became possible. He writes that,
…in 1919 men had no feeling that an international order had been destroyed through a war that had broken all rules for the maintenance of such a system. They felt on the contrary that, in a “war for righteousness,” the last seat of evil had been eliminated and now, for the first time in history, an international order had been installed.
One objection to Butterfield’s account is the claim that Germany sought in 1914 to overturn the European state system through a ruthless grasp for world power. Owing to German aggression, a limited response in the old style was no longer possible. Butterfield rejected this view. Instead, he was inclined to stress that Germany in the years before 1914 had a justified fear of the growth of Russian power.
Butterfield’s praise for limited diplomacy must confront another challenge. Even if the harsh settlement of Versailles led to the rise of Hitler, isn’t it true that once that monstrously evil figure had come to power, a war of annihilation against his regime was necessary? Butterfield is well aware of the evils of Nazism, but he doubts the Manichean terms in which World War II is often framed.
The great failure in both world wars, according to Butterfield, was the Western allies’ decision to ignore the realities of the balance of power and, instead, to insist that they were fighting wars of righteousness. Butterfield writes that,
…we may wonder sometimes whether Russia was so much more virtuous than Germany as to make it worth the lives of tens of millions of people in two wars to ensure that she … should gain such an unchallenged and exclusive hold over that line of Central European States as Germany never held in all her history. . . The problem in Central and Eastern Europe was the balance of power between Russia and Germany, and the destruction of either state was foolhardy precisely because it inevitably created the conditions in which one power could dominate the whole region.
He says about “wars for righteousness”:
…the questionable character and the moral dangers of the “war for righteousness” are still more clear to us if we face the fact that that it is generally almost impossible for the most critical minds in any country to escape from that framework of story—both the details and the interpretations—in which a government formulates its case before public opinion.
Butterfield warns against one consequence of wars for righteousness—the proposal to try the leaders of the “evil” powers for their crimes. After World War I, there were efforts to put Kaiser Wilhelm II on trial, but nothing came of them. The Nuremberg Trials, held after World War II, of course did fulfill these ideas. Butterfield says about the trials,
…it might seem to many people that, when the crimes of the enemy have been patent, the trial of individual culprits by the victor-powers is a fitting culmination of the principle of justice in the world. The matter has not been left unconsidered by our predecessors, who felt, however, that the structure of justice was gravely undermined when those who were parties to the conflict conducted the trials, so that the prosecutor was also the judge...What perturbed our predecessors of abuse that the procedure concealed, and the fantastic degree to which the abuse was capable of being carried.
Peaceful international relations are more important than ideological clashes, however great these clashes may be. That is the fundamental lesson we can learn from Herbert Butterfield, and it is a lesson that supporters of Ron Paul will welcome.
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