War leads to war: A brief history of the past three hundred years
Every war sets up the next. Closing off unfinished business from the previous war will inevitably creates more issues for future wars to try to resolve. War leads to more war, conflict leads to more conflict, strife leads to more strife. This is not to say that any war has only one cause but it does underline that fighting wars cannot bring peace. At some point, I intend to create a causal chain starting with the Trojan war and leading all the way to whatever the latest conflict is at the time, but that is a story for another day.
For our purposes today, we start at 1713, the year the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI issued the pragmatic sanction, allowing his daughter, Maria Theresa, born four years later, to succeed him to the throne of the empire and the possessions of house Habsburg in the absence of any male heirs. And while many states accepted the edict, when Charles died in 1740, the Prussian state, under the leadership of the young king Frederick II, used the illegality of Maria Theresa’s succession as an excuse to annex Silesia, effectively doubling Prussia’s population overnight and starting the war known as the War of Austrian Succession. The Prussians allied themselves with the french, forcing the Austrians to fight a battle on two fronts. Austria on the other hand allied itself with Britain, France’s natural enemy. Almost everyone in Europe ended up on one side or the other but for the sake of brevity, let us skip to the end and say that the war ended with the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle in 1748 with the Austrians unable to take back Silesia from the Prussians but otherwise keeping the status quo before the war (status quo ante bellum).
Seeing the rising power of the Prussians, the British abandoned their Austrian allies and sided with the Prussians. France, fearing the growing power of Britain, allied itself with Austria and Spain, which was ruled by the same Bourbon Dynasty as France, effectively switching sides from the alliances of the previous war. In 1756, seeing that war was inevitable, King Frederick II of Prussia lead his troops across the border to Saxony, starting the conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. The war raged all over the globe, with battles in Europe, North and South America, West Africa, and India, in what Churchill two hundred years later called “the [real] first world war”. Many lands were exchanged by the end of the war but the two most important outcomes for our purposes were that France lost New France in North America, which is why there is considerably more English speakers in North America than French ones, and that Britain was almost bankrupt.
The British parliament, seeing the dire state the countries finances were in, passed the Stamp Act, putting direct taxes on the thirteen British colonies in North America for the first time. This “Taxation without Representation” was the first step in the colonists viewing themselves as a new nation instead of British citizens. France, seeking revenge after its defeat in the Seven Year War, signed an alliance with the American Revolutionaries, providing them with many supplies for their fight and later fighting the British directly in Europe along with their Spanish and Dutch allies. The American Revolutionary War ended with Britain acknowledging the independence of the American Colonies. France had its revenge but was now saddled with crushing national debt.
Failing to learn from the British government’s failed taxation strategies, the French government placed heavy taxes on the French people, which, along with a series of bad farming seasons, sowed the seeds of The French Revolution. In the spring of 1792, King Louis XVI, desperate to save his throne, launches a campaign against both Prussia and Austria (AKA France’s allies during the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Year War respectively); except the victories on the field served only to embolden the French Revolution to abolish the French Monarchy and launch even more military campaigns across Europe and the middle east, equally spreading French influence and revolutionary ideas wherever they went.
The French campaigns gave rise to a brilliant military leader by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon was able to exploit the power vacuum left by the monarchy and rise through the ranks until he declared himself the first French Emperor, effectively concluding the French Revolution by replacing the king with an emperor. Napoleon launched even more military campaigns, controlling most of Europe at the height of his power and dissolving the Holy Roman empire (that started this whole chain of events). The failed invasion of Russia followed by a European coalition ended Napoleon’s ambitions at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, but as you might expect by now, not before setting up the next conflict.
There were two important outcomes from the Napoleonic Wars. First was its effect on the German people. The Prussian defeat at the hands of Napoleon left the German speaking people in general and the Prussians in particular in a very nationalistic mood, especially after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, which was mostly German towards its end. The German states allied under Prussian leadership, who lead them into the Danish-Prussian War (1864) then into the Austro-Prussian War (1866), both times increasing German Nationalism and weakening Austria’s influence over the German people. The final war was the Franco-Prussian War (1870), which ended with the Prussians taking over Paris and declaring their new German Empire in the hall of mirrors at Versailles, delivering the final blow at the very heart of the French Empire and ushering the age of the Third French Republic.
The second outcome of the Napoleonic wars was the alliance system it forged. Despite the French defeat, the French Revolution presented the European super powers with a frightening new enemy, the spread of secular republicanism, threatening the control of both church and monarchy. Prussia, Austria, and Russia created The Holy Alliance in 1815, promising that the representatives of the major Christian faiths (Prussian Protestants, Austrian Catholics, and Russian Orthodox) would act on the basis on “justice, love, and peace” but effectively ended up being an alliance against democracy, revolution, and secularism. The alliance fell apart during the Crimean War (1853 - 1856) only to be reinstated after the unification of Germany. The Alliance with Russia was lost completely when Austria (now Austria-Hungary) annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a land with Slavic people closely related to the Russians, leaving the Austrians and Germans in the alliance alone (for those keeping track, these are the same two countries that fought on either side of the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, and the Austro-Prussian War).
This leads us to the big one, World War I. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 caused the Austro-Hungarians to declare war against the kingdom of Serbia, triggering a complex alliance system across Europe. This effectively meant that Austrians were at war with the Russians as well. The Ottomans, seeing their Russian enemies enter the battle, sided with the Austro-Hungarians. The other Austrian allies , the Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourger, and moved into France, causing the British to declare war against the Germans (for those keeping track, Britain and France fought each other during the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolutionary War, and the Napoleonic Wars). By the end of WWI in 1918, the German, Austrian, Russian, Ottoman empires had all fallen, destroyed by the same alliance system that was meant to keep them alive.
But again, the ironically named “war to end war” had already sown the seeds for the next conflict. The rise of communism in Russia during WWI lead to the fall of the Russian Tsardom and from its ashes came the Soviet Union. On the German side, the fall of the German Empire along with the horrible post-war situation in Germany lead to the rise of Nazi Party, which of course led to WWII.
Like Napoleon, Hitler took over most of Europe but not Great Britain, decided that the next logical step would be to invade Russia which ultimately lead to his downfall. Unlike Napoleon, Hitler spread fascism, the belief that the people of one nation are inherently superior than everyone else, as opposed to Napoleon’s French revolutionary values, the belief that people are equal.
Post WWII, the two remaining superpowers, the Americans and the Soviets, could not fight direct wars for fear of destroying all life on earth with nuclear weapons; so instead they fought a series of proxy wars in Korea (1950 - 1953), Vietnam (1955 - 1975), and Afghanistan (1979 - 1989). The last one lead to the rise of extremist groups including Al-Qaida, who after fighting off the Soviets, turned their attention against the other world superpower, the US.
The biggest blow Al-Qaida was able to deal to the US was of course 9/11, which lead to the US war in Afghanistan (2001 - 2014) and the Iraq War (2003 - 2011), both wars technically still on-going. The Iraq war lead to the rise of ISIS which helped in the destabilization of both Iraq and Syria (2014 - present), which brings us to today.
This, of course, is only a very quick, mostly European-centric, view of the past three centuries. The goal here is not to say that the War of Austrian succession is really the cause of every event since, but to disprove the thought that we can have peace by fighting more wars. Every war would inevitably set up the next one. Fighting for peace is as self-defeating a proposition as eating all the left over cake to start a diet. It does not work.
P.S. If you want to know what other solutions there are to war, read my other article here.
