Never inevitable

In this, my last piece on the very core of History – people, human nature, choices and now, the issue of inevitability, I want to force home something that shocked me to the core when I first realised it (which was not until I was an undergraduate). For if History is always about people, and about human nature, and about the choices people made (and didn’t make), then it follows that History is never inevitable. Never!

Let me take you through your IGCSE course: WW1 need not have started, every country could have taken a different path long before they got to July, 1914. Each leader in that July Crisis could have made a different decision too. It follows then, that the Treaty of Versailles would not have been necessary, Hitler would almost surely have not have come to power, there could not have been a “second” world war if there wasn’t a first, and there may well not have been a Bolshevik Revolution and so we would not have had a Cold War. Neither would the Middle East countries have been drawn up and mandated as they were and so we would not have had trouble in the Gulf, or at least not in the form that we study. Of course it begs the question: what would we have been studying? But you see my point. We see the staggering knock-on effects of just one set of decisions.

What is more, within any of our topics, different paths might have been taken. America might have thought its best interests would have been better served by joining the League of Nations. Weimar Germany might not have chosen PR and so much would have been different. If different decisions had been taken by the British and the Americans, the Soviet Union might not have ended WW2 in control of so much of Europe. If any of five American presidents had studied History they might not have been so worried about Vietnam. Whereas if Gorbachev hadn’t come along we might still have a Berlin Wall and a Cold War. Who knows?

Then we have the freaky things. What if the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand had not taken a wrong turning? What if Hitler had been killed during the Munich Beer Hall putsch and not the comrade standing next to him? What if Saddam Hussein had been killed in the attempted assassination of Iraq’s ruler, General Abdul Karim Qassem, in which he was wounded? Again, things could have been very different.

Is this important? I think so. It puts the spotlight on the choices made, and the individuals, groups or whole societies that made them. And it demands that we come to understand them so that we can properly explain them. Let me finish by referring to Ian Kershaw’s excellent book, Fatal Choices. In his Forethoughts he directly addresses the issue of inevitability. He writes how we ‘presume that the way things turned out is the only way they could have turned out.’ And he suggests we are wrong to do so. To such an extent that he wrote a book that looks at ten decisions made in 1940 and 1941 that had a profound impact on the course of WW2 and its aftermath. And he identifies no less than ten important questions behind the central question: How were these decisions reached? Maybe not right now in your studies, but one day you should read it. Its an amazing read.