The misuse of history: Germany, Putin, and the betrayal of Ukraine

Christmas reads (3)

Kaiser Wilhelm II (center) with his son (left) Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, as they toured the con- quered Serbia in 1916. (Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP)

Between Christmas and New Year, I am getting away from current affairs and updating pieces on writers and thinkers I admire.

In 2012 the Cambridge historian Sir Christopher Clark published The Sleepwalkers. It is a superb description of how the great powers of early 20^th century Europe blundered into the First World War.

As I wrote in March, he deserved all the praise he received.

But even Sir Christopher could not have foreseen how the German political class would be so enamoured of his work, they would use it to justify undermining Ukraine and appeasing Vladimir Putin.

---

The Christmas reads are for paying subscribers. You can upgrade at a cost of £1.15 ($1.40) a week via the button below, and there is a free trial of offer too!

---

There is a respectable way for European politicians to betray Ukraine. They do not spew out Russian propaganda like Trump and his admirers. Rather, they behave like decent European liberals, who deplore Russian imperialism, but nevertheless refuse to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs.

They rarely find the courage to spell it out bluntly, because plain speaking would make them sound cruel and selfish, but in their hearts – or what’s left of their hearts – they believe that Ukrainians must suffer for the sake of keeping progressive Europeans safe.

Like a sadistic teacher beating a pupil, they insist that they are doing it for the best of motives.

We are not selling out Ukraine because we want to, they say. Good God, no! How can anyone believe such a calumny? We are acting for the greater good.

The model they invoke is the outbreak of the First World War.

We are so used to appeasement, Nazism and the holocaust being used and abused in contemporary discourse that it is easy to miss how the disaster of 1914 can still influence thoughtful people, particularly thoughtful people on the European centre-left.

The story of the arrogant great powers unintentionally unleashing a conflict that destroyed Europe, and led to communism, fascism, the Second World War, the partition of Germany, and the Cold War, can have a paradoxical effect.

You might have thought that German war guilt from the Nazi era would lead to social democrats being unequivocal in their opposition to Russian attempts to find lebensraum in Ukraine.

But the First World War allows a way out. It does not inspire opposition to tyranny. Instead, it inspires a belief that the righteous course is to go easy on the aggressors. Otherwise, we might sleepwalk into a disaster where a humiliated Russia unleashes its nuclear weapons

.

As its frontline comes under pressure and supplies of munitions and men fall low, Ukrainians are given stern lectures from Olaf Scholz’s coalition on the need for restraint, even as they stare catastrophe in the face.