The accidental war

The second world war remains a bit of a taboo in Brussels, as was evident when the Poles insisted on dredging it up at the recent summit, when they said they ought to be given council votes on the basis of a population of 66m, which would have the number of inhabitants in their country had not a certain war started by a certain nation raged over their territory.
The second world war is taboo, but it's also been an axiom that the Germans were wholly at fault, and that the west fought a good war. Totalitarianism followed totalitarianism, so the cold war melded seamlessly with the second world war. Both fights were supposedly "good fights".
Yet these days absolute good and evil is no longer anything secular Europeans believe in. So it may be that AJP Taylor, the most controversial and most popular British historian of the last century, deserves to come into fashion again.
He rejected the standard narrative that westerners imbibe with their mother's milk: that the second world war was caused by Hitler and his totalitarian dictatorship, and that it might have been avoided has it not been for the policy of appeasement which only served to whet his appetite. The lesson learnt – that dictators must never be appeased, as they will be encouraged – has had amazing traction in western, especially American, foreign policy ever since.

AJP Taylor had, when the Origins of the Second World War was published in 1961, had a distinguished career as a fellow of Magdalen and a number of highly regarded books under his belt. His telly don period was yet to begin.
The book set off a storm, and probably cost him the regius professorship of history at Oxford, which went to his archrival Hugh Trevor Roper, who comdemned his theory for every available sin.
Trevor Roper, later responsible for the Hitler diaries fiasco, by the way, said that Taylor’s evidence was unreliable; he distorted documents by selective citation and dismissed those he didn't like by claiming they didn't count. Taylor, he said, contradicted himself repeatedly and drew conclusions at variance with his evidence. Many other historians of the time agreed. Yet the book continues in 2007 to sell well, especially to undergraduates.
Taylor’s thesis was that Hitler was not evil demon but rather on ordinary German, perhaps even just an ordinary European, politician. He was not bent on European or world domination, but was just playing the European power game, as all statesmen of the time were: their motives were simply to maximise the gains of their country without resorting to the kind of war that whose damage would negate any gain. Chancellor Stresemann, the “good German” of postwar myth, who wanted to follow a peaceful path, had exactly the same plans to dominate eastern Europe as Hitler did, one way or another. Inasmuch in that Hitler did have a personal characteristic it was dithering opportunism: Whereas others saw a demonic genius bent on dominating Europe by masterfully pulling all the strings because he had a carefully laid out plan, Taylor saw only an ordinary politician who let events fall into his lap and asked how he might benefit from them.
Nations’ interests were eternal, and leaders were not motivated by ideology in their pursuit of that. Whereas others saw in Mein Kampf a blueprint for worldwide domination, Taylor heard the confused beerhall chatter of the twenties put between hard covers, and rated it what it said as unimportant. .
Whereas some saw the Hossbach memorandum of 1937 as a timetable for war, Taylor saw it as a document typifying the intrigue and machinations of the Nazi system of government - but these were red herrings that other post-war historians, setting up the war as defensive white hat allies versus Nazis ideologically bent on world domination, had mistakenly pursued.
The important things were Germany's interests in dominating eastern Europe, Russia's fear of invasion from the west, Italy's dream of a new Roman empire in the Mediterranean, the tradition of non European intervention in British foreign policy so that Britain could concentrate on dominating the rest of the world instead, all were more important, in the international pursuit of power, than spreading the doctrines of Marx or Nietszche, exporting the Concentration camp or the swastika. True, in wicked acts “Hitler outdid them all” – partly because the context of war allows wickedness to flourish – though it must be remembered that it was the British who invented the concentration camp ad the Belgians who carried out racial cleansing in the Congo.
Not that leaders were unimportant; they made all the difference, usually by being tripped up by bit part players and smaller countries while in pursuit of their national interests. So history was in one sense predetermined; in another accidental..
This Europe was one where events were brought about by the unimportant characters, and few of the big name leaders got what they wanted, even when they knew it: the weak and second rate made things happen, puppets and puppet masters changing places. It was Papen and Hindenburg who thrust power on Hitler because they believed he could control them. Schusnigg brought about the collapse of Austriai when he invaded the headquarters of the Austrian nazis.
The second world war was started by the machinations of the Polish foreign minister, who refused the reasonable German request to Danzig, a German city and inveigled the British on to the side after tabloid British opinion decided something “must be done” before bowing out. The mutually negating settlement that became known as the second world war ended with both nations’ relative eclipse and the rise of the USSR and America, which had never been a part of the European power system.
AJP Taylor came to the project after wondering why the debate about the origins of the first world war still raged while the origins of the second were surrounded by complacency: Hitler's absolute personal wickedness, and the evil of totalitarian nazism, were the received wisdoms that closed off the debate. When researching the book he discovered that the Versailles revisionists were wrong to blame the unfair treaty for the next war, and that while all powers had interests, Germany was the indeed the dynamic, expansionist element in European policy, as France had been the century before, and the other powers were trying to constrain it.
The struggle for power between nations in fact described the EU today, and one wonders: could the state of affairs of competing states in 1930s Europe been brought to the identical situation of competing and prosperous states today without the second world war and the holocausts in all senses that it produced?
Was the second world war, in fact, a bit of an accident? Brought about by the Poles.