On Bluesky there has been a little discussion of counter-factual history, sparked by a post asking what position you could defend against 20 questioners and which in turn produced answers about which were the most decisive battles in history. That in turn inevitably lurches towards counterfactuals (which is why it’s a War Studies rather than a History question), prompting a comment by Stephen Bush: ‘[…] is why I don’t have much time for counterfactual history. Most of the time the answer to “what if X had won?” is “they couldn’t”. Here is a little riff on why I don’t think that’s right (inspired by but not directed at Mr Bush, whose writings and social media posts I enjoy and also some of the comments made in response), founded ultimately on my belief that history is ‘random, chaotic, ironic, and unpredictable’.
The obvious point is that saying that A rather than B won a
war is because the other side couldn’t win is teleological. It implies that
there is only possible outcome for a historical process. After the event of
course this is true. Napoleon can’t now win the battle of Waterloo; that’s now
the only possible outcome. But up until some point of 18 July 1815, it wasn’t. That’s
true of all historical processes, and you can’t really understand them without
thinking about the other outcomes that were once possible but aren’t now. I
have called this keeping faith with the impossible. Things don’t have to be
this way. At no point in the past did things have to be a particular way. I
think that’s important for a number of reasons, above all because in my view it’s
important in giving hope in dark times (like now – and I admit I am finding
this hard at the moment). One of my key beliefs about history is that it has –
or ought to have – some sort of emancipatory potential. But saying that, in
order to get a proper understanding of what happened, you need to think about
what people were trying to do, what they thought might happen, what other outcomes
might have been possible, is not the same as building an argument that says ‘if
X hadn’t happened, Y and Z would have done’. When the latter is expressed
differently, as ‘if we assume that this thing that happened didn’t happen, then
these other things that didn’t happen somehow would have happened’, the
proposition’s absurdity is easier to see. No historian can hang an argument on
a counter-factual in that way.[1]
The other problem with analyses which suggest that one side won
a war – or came out on top in some other sort of process – because the other
side couldn’t, is that the whole exercise is framed teleologically. The factors
which are studied to explain that side’s success are identified precisely on
the basis that we know (in a way that people at the time, the people actually involved
in the historical process didn’t) that it came out on top in the end. Because
the Union won the Civil War, it’s easy to look at factors such as
industrialisation, population, economy and so on and conclude that the
Confederacy’s defeat was inevitable. But, if the Confederacy had won the war
(and it’s not outrageous to suggest that it might have done, in a number of
different scenarios [2]), historical analysis
would focus on quite other issues. We’d be looking not only at why the Union’s
massive superiority in numbers, industrialisation had not led to what
ought to have been a one-sided conflict, but also at a whole set of other
factors and issues that – after the event – would be identified as crucial and
structural and deep-seated, in explaining what the South’s inevitable victory.
And we’d be asking ‘what if’ the Union had had a greater political will to
defeat the south, what if it had made better use of its industry and manpower… The
(to me anyway) obvious analogy is the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the ‘decisive
battle of the Fall of the Roman Empire’.[3]
Really the Romans had no business losing that battle at all (armour, logistics,
organisation, training, discipline, and, for all we know, possibly even numbers
all being in their favour), so all the analysis focuses on what on earth went
wrong? If Valens had retained some sort of control over his army and had – as he
should have done – annihilated the Goths, we would be talking about how the
outcome of that battle was inevitable and how the Goths stood no chance, and
how silly any ‘what if?’ scenario that posited the opposite would be. There is
always too much contingency, and too many variables involved in any historical
process for the historical outcome to have been the only one possible. Someone
will doubtless say, ah yes but for how long would the North have accepted an
independent Confederacy? But now we are well and truly into ‘what if’
territory, with no empirical fixed points and, at that point, as I will argue,
anything goes. What I would say, for now, is that that brings up the whole
issue of historical narrative as literary construct, and its story arcs. As I
have said somewhere (possibly on here; possibly in some unpublished musing),
what if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo? Well, who knows? But what if he had
lost? His nephew still ended up as Emperor of the French in 1853. What if the
allies had won WWII? Forty-five years later the map of eastern Europe had ‘reverted’
to something like its outlines in 1921. Eighty years later there were actual
fascists and neo-Nazis sweeping to power across the once-free world. What if
the US had won the Cold War? By 2025 …
As I have argued before, every point on a historical
narrative is selected as being a significant point in that story after the
event. No one at the time knew where they were going, and at every one of those
points another outcome, however minimally different, was possible. People were (and
are) not programmed to respond to events in a particular way; they were often
trying to do things that were very different from the actual outcomes of their
actions – as I argued in 2007, the end of the Western Roman Empire was brought
about by people were definitely not trying to bring about the end of the
Western Roman Empire. And so on. All this undermines every teleological or
determinist (Whiggish, Marxist, or whatever) approach to history that see
things unfolding on a particular, inevitable path.
And it therefore undermines any counterfactual, or ‘what if?’
approach, at least as anything other than an amusing game – or the basis for
alternative history fiction. One of the laughable things about Niall Ferguson’s
‘what if?’ book was that it aimed to undermine determinist Marxist approaches
to history by showing that other outcomes were possible. But this approach is,
logically, nonsensical. It’s absurd to claim that a teleological or determinist
approach to history is wrong by saying that a string of different things would
have happened if things at historical conjuncture X had gone another way.
What you’re saying is that you can’t predict the outcome of history
because, if X had gone differently, I predict (counterfactually) this
would have happened instead. If you do this, you are clearly admitting that
historical developments can be predicted. This is so elementary
that you would really have liked to have thought that a senior academic
historian with one (or indeed several) handsomely-remunerated university
positions would have had a sufficient command of logic to spot this, but once
again we run into my perennial intellectual disappointment with the historical
discipline…
Furthermore, once one has let the ‘what if something else
happened’ genie out of the bottle you can’t get it back in. Suppose Napoleon
had won the battle of Waterloo… suppose he fell off his horse the next day and
broke his neck. Suppose he didn’t but that all the remaining Prussian, Russian,
Austrian and other armies swamped him and it was like 1814 all over again. Or
suppose a (un)lucky canon ball decapitated Alexander I (who has decided to lead
his army as in 1814), leaving the throne to the incompetent and horrible, but
less virulently anti-French, Grand-Duke Konstantin. Or suppose that, following dramatic
early victories by Napoleon, the German states that defected from him in 1813,
like Bavaria, declare their neutrality, and/or, as nearly happened in 1814,
Frederick-William III and Francis I lost their nerve. Suppose … Once you assume
(as you must) that things can always go a different way at any point in a story
you’re left with no fixed points and nothing solid to base any argument on.
This is why arguments about what would have happened if
something else hadn’t, or about which were the most decisive battles of history
are not serious subject-matter for historians.
Notes
[1] Not that this stops people, especially in the ‘strategy
and tactics’ wing of war studies from trying. See, e.g., the argument by Paddy
Griffith, Gary Sheffield and other ‘Haigiographers’ that if Britain hadn’t gone
to war in 1914 a whole string of things ‘would have’ happened. Or see Peter
Heather saying that the Roman Empire wouldn’t have fallen if it hadn’t been for
the Barbarian Migrations. These are not arguments with any historical (or
indeed logical) merit.
[2] Suppose for instance that
one of Lee’s serious defeats of the Army of the Potomac had, in spite of
Lincoln’s best efforts, led to a collapse of political will to continue the war.
[3] Not the decisive
battle of the Fall of the Roman Empire.
