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J M WINTER

oi the Orman war eHort »noe 1914. dui so The lengthening ęasuuity lifta added to the bttterness on the albed jucie of the linę and to their detcrmina* lian to see tłn* %»*j through to tolaJ Motors The krttscmrtch dug Its owo grave, and Intel attempts to dnrrt aftentłca* from thw faet gawr Great War propagand* « rrubtan sagnlfioance it dtd not ileserve Its fundamenta! eflfects were cultural not pabtłcal they pomted to an even darker futurę, and to the mobi-hzatton of hatred »n an evw> tnore terrible war

CHAPTER 17

Socialism, Peace, and Revolution, 1917-1918

JOHN HORNE

BI y 1914, war and peace, as well as revolution, had long exercised the imagination of soeialists. When, in November 1912, Europę seemed poised on the brink of war over the Balkans, the łeaders of the social-ist Second International met in Basie, Switzerland. As the great bells of the cathedral where they gathered tolled in waming, they issued a declaration that the likely price of war would be a revolutionary catastrophe for the rul-ing elites tliat unleashed it. Logically, perhaps, in an organization committed by its principles to socialist revolution, such a prediction should have been a matter of welcome, not waming. Sorne on the far left such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, indeed saw war as a possible path to revolution. A new theoret-ical emphasis in pre-war socialist thought on the latest stage of capitahsm as one of eeonomic imperialism, in which conflict between international eco-nomic forces would lead to continuous wars and eventual revolution, tended in the same direction. Lenin was to provide the most famous formulation of this idea in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916.

But, by and large, European soeialists were remarkable for their resolute hostility to the idea of war and for the detachment of the question ofwar and peace from tliat of revolution. Developments sińce die. founding of the International in 1889 had underlined the importance of the national circuni-

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