I was brought up learning European history through the very famous Oxford professor of history Alan John Percivale Taylor whose books were used as textbooks, and sold in tens and hundreds of thousands of copies across decades. He was popular in the UK for his television programmes, but he was also read and studied by diplomats and school-children alike. The Americans didn’t like him as much as the English and the Europeans.
Today, Taylor’s historical theories have become mainstream in the European political chambers where decisions are made, and they are even applied by Europe’s most powerful decision-makers. Germany and France, who are capitulating to Russia, have applied the English historian’s historiographic thinking masterfully. Macron even digested Taylor’s extensive historiographic theories with a very simple policy statement: “Russia should not be humiliated”.
Taylor came up with the theory, very much influenced by John Maynard Keynes that the Second World War was caused by various historical factors including the military and imperialistic nature of the German state, and the very consequential Versailles Treaty which humiliated Germany and the Germans. Somehow, according to Taylor’s theory, it was inevitable that Germany was to go to war again and the Versailles Treaty only exacerbated the German reaction to its supposed humiliation. Although Hitler’s decision to start the war was made willingly and consciously, Hitler arrived at his decision after a series of events that were not in his control, and he was merely pursuing the German public’s desire and its social and military elite to restore Germany’s powerful place in Europe.
Taylor’s historiographic theories reduce the theory of cause and effect to absurdity by over-centextalising a historical event and reducing its causes into a list of contextual phenomena that are connected with the event speculatively and redundantly. Somehow, I suspect that Taylor as a historian enthusiastically gave history more merit than it deserved simply by the fact that it was his job to do so. Taylor’s quest to make history meaningful and useful.
Taylor was, however, wrong empirically and theoretically. At a granular, material, and practical level, there were many decisions taken by Western leaders that directly allowed Hitler to unleash horror, war, and the greatest crime in history (the Holocaust). The problem was not that Germany was humiliated by the Versailles Treaty: the problem was that it was not enforced and that it was not too harsh. Even before Hitler took power, the Weimar Republic was spending more on its military than it was allowed to, and the Western allies did nothing about these infringements. When Hitler came to power, he massively re-supplied the German military with Russian equipment sent by the Soviet Union in exchange for machinery and expertise and went on to escalate his acts of rearmament and conquest step by step, with total impunity and little or no opposition from the West.
Sure, we can come up with many speculative and complex historiographic theories as to why the German state was traditionally geared toward war and conquest, and why Hitler was filling a historical void to unleash this monster, but in reality and on a practical level, Hitler was possible because the West allowed him to re-arm, get aggressive and, basically exist. Hitler could have been stopped before he unleashed the Second World War but the West chose not to.
Europe is applying to Russia a foreign policy influenced by Taylor and inspired by Chamberlain, and European leaders expect that, with positive engagement and an avoidance of escalation, Putin will yield a different and positive outcome compared to Hitler. In reality, there is no evidence that Putin’s Russia can be more malleable to the West’s positive engagement than Hitler’s Germany. In a more generalised context, dictatorial regimes and brutal authoritarian states never changed with positive engagement and gradual or piecemeal reform – they either collapsed or were ousted from power by revolutions or wars. Europe has no option but to make sure to help Ukraine achieve a total victory in war unless it wants to live with a belligerent Russian empire that is always ready to fire and kill for conquest.
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