In remembering the First World War, Labour should say clearly: We are not warriors

98 years before the outbreak of the First World War, the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz began writing his long book on military strategy, On War. Clausewitz’s argument was that every war should have a political purpose. Military violence was not an end in itself, but, ‘a political instrument’, a way to achieve political objectives ‘by other means’.

Real events rarely live up to Clausewitz’s theory. In most wars from the War of Jenkin’s Ear to the occupation of Iraq (and probably long before) Britain blundered into conflict with no clear idea of what it was trying to achieve. The consequences for most of those conflicts in death and political chaos were far worse than the evils they were supposedly trying to avert.

The slow scrutiny of the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War during these last few weeks remind us how purposeless and unplanned the outbreak of that war were. This was a war which seven out of nine British cabinet members were opposed to the day before the UK got involved. Its legitimacy was challenged by big newspapers and major national leaders. The politicians who chose to join thought they were leading nations that had ‘slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war’ with little choice, as Lloyd George put it. ‘Things are out of control’, as the German Chancellor put it.

Why this lack of control? Because the First World War was caused by the culture of militarism that Britain shared with German and the rest of Europe. For Britain, there were no clear interests or war aims. As critics clearly saw at the time, it was not her belief in liberty, or desire to maintain the balance of power, which drove Britain to war.

Instead, Britain’s leaders felt that if one power mobilised, she must go to war or be humiliated.

In 1914 when they made their decision, Britain’s elite acted out the psychology of the playground bully who can’t cope with the idea that another boy has bigger conkers and is pushing his weight around. The difference was that Britain and Germany were armed to the teeth, two hi-tech nations who’d developed the technology of killing on a hitherto unseen scale. The consequence of their hubris was catastrophic, in millions dead, states annihilated and the rise of Nazism.

Britain went to war because her political leaders imagined she was a warrior nation, whose prestige depended on her capacity to defeat rivals with violence. Since 1914, time and time again, British politicians have acted out the same militaristic instincts, sending troops into battle for no other purpose than to prove we (still) possess military might. British foreign policy can’t be made sense of without this continual militaristic reflex.

The obsession with projecting military power explains the desperate British effort to suppress anti-imperial resistance in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s before stage-managing ceremonies where we pretended to ‘transfer’ power while maintaining our prestige: India, Kenya, Malaya.

Militarism explains how Britain got entangled in Korea, why Margaret Thatcher was so keen on fighting in the Falklands, how Tony Blair and David Cameron took Britain to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Few of these conflicts had clear war aims. None, perhaps marginally apart from the Falklands, achieved any good.

Let me be clear. I’m not making an anti-war argument. Wars are sometimes necessary. Occasionally they are good. But war is only justified when the cost of destruction is far less than the price of leaving the powers we destroy unchallenged. They are only legitimate when the protagonists of war have the cash and commitment to follow destruction with investment and the will to build afterwards.

For me, in the last hundred years, there has been only been one British war that was undoubtedly good. Instead, too often, our political leaders imagine they fight great battles for good causes when they’ve merely been seduced by hubristic delusions of military glory.

The projection of the power of the nation-state through force, the myth of military order, the ideal of the loyal obedient soldier, all have, since the 1840s been at the core of Tory ideology. It was the Duke of Wellington as much as his protégée Robert Peel who invented the modern Conservative party. It was hardly surprising that Thatcher grasped at the Falklands so quickly as her way to cement herself in power.

We, Labour, have always been divided on all this. Labour was split on participation in World War One. Too many of our ranks were seduced by the democratic protestations of Tory generals, or persuaded that making weapons were the only way to keep factories open. After all, the Jarrow marchers were protesting against the closure of a yard where they made warships. There are too many in the Labour Party, from our shadow defence secretary downwards, whose motivations for ‘strong defence’ are rooted in the British militarism which pointlessly propelled Britain to fight in the first world war.

But there is another tradition, which I’m proud of. It values English liberty rather than the authoritarianism of military violence. It’s anti-militaristic but not anti-war. It fought opposing the First World War, but was happy to support Britain against despotism, enlisting troops to fight against fascism in Spain and Germany. Its heroes are William Blake, William Morris, George Orwell, Frank and Edward Thompson. These were populist radicals who remembered that the descendants of those who robbed the poor of their common lands in the eighteenth century conscripted their great grandsons into war a century later. But when lives and liberty, not the power of an elite was at stake, they were willing to fight.

Sometimes, this tradition took wrong turns. Supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s was a mistake that which merely gave legitimacy to the west’s equally militaristic soviet rivals.

But now, when war causes havoc in Gaza, when the legacy of chaotic force in the middle east is so apparent, when Britain still claims to be a major power yet – thankfully by my book – can barely muster a few ships to defend an aircraft carrier, when the public asks what do these wars have to do with us: it’s time for Labour’s anti-militaristic tradition to reassert itself.

When we remember the First World War Labour needs to say clearly: we are a not a nation of warriors.