The outside view Compiègne, 100 years on
Das historische Foto vom 24. März 1941 zeigt den Waggon von Compiegne, in dem der Waffenstillstand, der den Ersten Weltkrieg beendete, am 11. November 1918 unterzeichnet wurde. Er steht vor dem Reichstagsgebäude. Bundeskanzlerin Merkel und der französische Präsident Macron werden sich am 10.11.2018 in Compiègne, dem Ort der Unterzeichnung, treffen, um an das Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges vor 100 Jahren zu erinnern.
The armistice took effect „on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month“, 100 years ago on Sunday. Matthias Erzberger, a German anti-war politician, had signed Germany’s surrender in a French railway carriage parked in a forest near Compiègne. Erzberger was later murdered for it by German nationalists.
For the French, victory in the Grande Guerre was revenge for their loss against the Germans 47 years earlier. For the Germans, defeat was a humiliation that generated its own genre of fake news: the „stab-in-the-back“ myth. 22 years later, Adolf Hitler would accept France’s surrender in the same railway carriage on the same spot. The cycle seemed doomed to go on forever.
But it didn’t. Standing on the rubble of their continent, Europe’s postwar leaders embarked on the grandest peace project in human history. Today it is called the European Union. At its heart is Franco-German friendship. Strasbourg/Straßburg, a city that for centuries didn’t know whether it was French or German, is today the home of the European Parliament. It is also near bases of a Franco-German brigade that could sprout into a European army one day.
So it is a fitting gesture that Emmanuel Macron will on Saturday meet Angela Merkel at Compiègne to commemorate the armistice, before joining other leaders in Paris for the centennial on the 11th. Macron and Merkel embody the lesson of Europe’s fratricidal past: That nationalism – „My Country First“ – leads to disaster; that respectful cooperation – „multilateralism“ – is the only enlightened way.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will also attend. They embody an ahistorical contempt for that lesson: a crude Neo-Nationalism that is spreading around the world. Even in France and Germany the exhortations of the past are losing force. Macron had to defeat a Neo-Nationalist to become president; if he and Merkel fail to reform Europe, the outcome may well be different next time. The great postwar peace project is at risk.
Who today remembers Gavrilo Princip? Who even knew him back then? He was the Bosnian Serb who in 1914 shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The rest is history.
That’s because Europe’s leaders did not understand that they had unwittingly created a system – based on mobilization tables, Schlieffen plans and train schedules – that contained hidden automaticities of doom once triggered. As Christopher Clark has described, they „sleepwalked“ into disaster.
Who and where is Princip today? In Ukraine, the Baltics, the Middle East, the South China Sea? Are we sleepwalking? Wherever you are, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, ponder this.
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