History cannot repeat itself in any necessary way because the present always has the freedom to turn out differently from the past. However, conditions in the present can sufficiently resemble those in the past to make a comparison useful.
The thesis of this essay is that a pattern of history began in Europe in 1815, ended in 1945, and (so far) has repeated itself in the world as a whole since 1945. This repetition suggests that great danger lies ahead.
Table of Contents
1. Background and Overview
2. The Eras of Bipolarity: 1815-1859 and 1945-1989
3. The Two Transitions: 1859-1871 and 1989-2001
4. Rising Tensions
5. Prospects
Background. I began to study international relations in my late teens and in 1974 I sent an initial version of a recurring pattern to the U.S. Department of State. The essay below is a version revised and updated to include events that have repeated themselves in the half century since then.
In my initial essay of 1974, I proposed that the dominant maritime power in 1815, Great Britain, had returned after 1945 as the United States of America. I also saw two other great powers of 1815 returning after 1945: the Austrian Empire came back as the Soviet Union (USSR), and Imperial Russia came back as the People's Republic of China. The last two pairings may seem unlikely but the relative positions and functions of the two states in each era were similar. However, I could not find in the period after 1945 a proper counterpart to Imperial Germany.
The main reason why I had trouble with Germany was that I did not give the second repetition the same number of years to unfold (130 years) as the first. I traced the second iteration only up to 1974. I also focused on domestic affairs only as I thought they affected foreign policy. The essay below now gives the same number of years to each repetition and traces domestic change over these longer periods in more detail. With these adjustments, one could have foreseen an eventual change in China making possible the development of military and naval power comparable to Imperial Germany, while still preserving in China the domestic features that have made the country analogous to Imperial Russia.
Overview. From 1815 to 1945, Europe divided into two zones, western and eastern, and moved through four phases in time: an era of bipolarity, a brief period of transition, an era of deepening multipolar tension, and an era of dictatorship, mass warfare, and genocide. After 1945, the modern world divided again into two zones and repeated the first two of these phases. The third phase is now repeating itself and shows signs of leading to a second coming of the First World War. If this happens, the last phase of the first repetition may then repeat itself.
Following the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815, the European world split into two ideologically-defined zones. Great Britain was the preeminent power in a liberalizing zone as France and some of the smaller countries of western Europe began to emulate Britain's model of more liberal and representative government and an industrializing economy. The former colonies of Spain and Portugal joined to a limited extent, as did parts of the British Empire, and the Royal Navy policed the world's oceans.
The Austrian Empire led an opposing zone after 1815 that consisted of the autocratic agrarian states of central and eastern Europe. With backing from Imperial Russia, Austria crushed liberal and nationalist revolts in Germany and Italy during the 1830s and 1840s. But the Austrian and Russian Empires rested on serf economies and their relative positions weakened as western Europe industrialized. Relations between Austria and Russia ruptured when each took opposing sides in the Crimean War of 1854-56. Austria's hegemony collapsed after 1859, when nationalists freed and unified the states of Italy. The states of Germany then threw off Austrian control in 1866.
Following the Second World War, a new era of bipolarity began. The United States led a liberal and democratic zone anchored in the North Atlantic west, while farther east the Soviet Union formed a continental empire and ruled an autocratic zone of adjacent satellite states. After 1949, Maoist China aligned itself with the Soviet Union. A recovering western Europe and Japan prospered as parts of the liberal zone, and after achieving independence the overseas colonies of western Europe joined to a more limited extent. Unlike Austria in its time, the Soviet Union was a more active threat to the liberal world; and the United States, a stronger world power than early nineteenth century Britain, pursued a policy of containment in response.
The USSR crushed liberal and nationalist revolts in eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s with the approval of Maoist China. But with economies based on rural state serfdom and central control, the Soviet and Maoist social systems were maladapted to the needs of power in the modern world and undermined the two empires from within. The two Communist regimes also became estranged. The second era of bipolarity ended in 1989 when Germany reunified itself, and the Soviet satellite states and non-Russian republics of the USSR achieved independence in 1991.
Austria became Austria-Hungary in 1867, and the Russian Federation succeeded the Soviet Union in 1991. The two new states in each era tried imperfectly to reform themselves. Imperial Russia and post-Mao China also tried imperfectly to reform, Imperial Russia after 1861 and post-Mao China starting in the decade before 1989. Britain in the 1860s and America in the 1990s each enjoyed a brief zenith of unchallenged global primacy and optimism about the spread of a more liberal world order.
New kinds of union emerged in Germany (1871) and in Europe (1993) but the German Empire and the European Union differed fundamentally in their degree of integration and in their underlying spirit. The German Empire of 1871 was a separate great power that would develop the strength and ambition to challenge Great Britain for global preeminence. After 2001, a separate great power with the potential strength and ambition of Imperial Germany did not emerge. However, post-Mao China combined the huge rural population and autocratic government of Imperial Russia with a developing modern urban economy and modern military. This military power would have the potential to challenge the United States in the way that Imperial Germany threatened Great Britain.
Austria-Hungary and the Russian Federation. The Austrian Empire of 1815 was a multiethnic state with a population that was about one-fifth Austro-German, one-fifth Magyar (Hungarian), and most of the rest Slavic nationalities. In 1867, following the loss of its influence in Germany, the empire reorganized as a binational state, Austria-Hungary, under a common crown. Austro-German nobles retained control of the western half of the empire and Magyar nobles controlled the eastern half. A modern industrial economy and democratic parliamentary government began to develop on the Austrian side of the empire. However, a land-owning oligarchy continued to rule the Hungarian side, and the southern Slavic periphery would become increasingly restive.
The Soviet Union of 1945 was also a multiethnic state and its breakup in 1991 left Moscow with control only of the Russian Federation. Russia did not divide into two halves like Austria-Hungary and democratic institutions took form over the Russian Federation as a whole. Russia was also more homogeneous, with ethnic Russians constituting a majority of four-fifths. But the Russian Federation was an ambiguous state, in which reformers vied with an oligarchy for control. Since 2001, a more authoritarian government has centralized power, and in recent years the country's leadership has moved to reconquer Ukraine. Moscow may next try to dominate the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. If successful, Russia will once again be a multiethnic empire with a restive periphery like Austria-Hungary.
Imperial Russia and Communist China. Imperial Russia was the largest state in the Europe of 1815 and its autocracy became famously reactionary under Tsar (emperor) Nicholas I. Russia tried to change after its defeat in the Crimean War, when a new Tsar, Alexander II, emancipated the privately owned serfs and adopted modernizing military and economic reforms. But emancipation burdened the peasants with onerous redemption payments and did little to relieve rural poverty. The reform program also left the autocratic power of the Tsar intact. Educated elites pressed for greater change and the result was a crackdown from above. Imperial Russia then embarked on a two-track policy of economic modernization and political repression.
Maoist China in 1949 had the largest population of any country in the world. But the ideological excesses of Mao Zedong's rule prompted his successor, Deng Xiaoping, to begin a series of reforms after 1978 to modernize the country. Deng partly freed the peasantry from Maoist controls by retaining state ownership of the land but allowing peasant households to lease land individually. A large number of peasants were also able to move to the cities. However, a majority of China's population remained rural and poor and agitation for democracy led to an uprising in 1989 that the regime put down. Afterward, China embarked on a two-track program, similar in spirit to late Imperial Russia's, of coupling a drive for economic modernization with autocratic political control.
Victorian Britain and the United States. Great Britain reached its zenith as an industrial power in the 1860s. By then, competitors of larger size (America, Germany) were beginning to industrialize but these nations were absorbed by internal problems. Britain had embraced free trade in 1846 and liberal thinkers believed that a new world of free trade was now emerging in which liberal ideals would spread. At home, electoral reforms in 1832 and 1867 made Britain much more of a modern democracy, although the grievances of Irish Catholics persisted. As the British looked to the future, only a few saw a world of increasing tension and diminishing relative British strength.
The United States reached its own geopolitical zenith in the 1990s. The end of bipolarity encouraged many Americans to believe that free trade and democracy were now globally irresistable. Competitors of large size were on the horizon but were not yet serious military challengers. At home, racial minorities in the United States achieved civil rights in the 1960s, although troubling social disparities continued. As Americans looked ahead to the twenty-first century, though, most assumed that their prosperity and global dominance would continue into the future.
Imperial Germany vs. the European Union. Germany began to unite in 1834 when a number of its states formed a customs union. A year after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the kingdom of Prussia welded the German states into a federal union with a constitution that mixed democratic and authoritarian features. In its bicameral federal parliament, an upper house appointed by the rulers of the German states initiated legislation and an elected lower house could only approve laws and budgets. The chancellor and the federal cabinet were responsible to the emperor, not to the people.
Post-1945 western Europe also began to unite when a number of its states negotiated a customs union, the Common Market, in 1958. After the collapse of Soviet power, the European Union emerged in 1993. To a remarkable extent, the framework of this union reproduced the institutions of the 1871 German Empire but without their spirit and authority. A Council appointed by member states functions as an upper house with a directly elected European Parliament as the lower house. An executive body, the European Commission, proposes laws and budgets that the European Parliament can only approve or reject. The Council and Commission are ultimately responsible to democratically elected national governments. However, the complex and indirect manner of accountability has created what critics have termed a "democratic deficit" in the union's structure. As a result, Europe does not constitute a true federal superstate.
There is a chance that Europe and America might become estranged. After 1993, Europeans enjoyed the peace and prosperity of a regional state without all of the burdens of actually having one. This situation depended on the willingness of the United States to lend its weight to the defense of allies in Europe. If America ever withdraws its support, Europe will need to make regional defense arrangements of its own. The United States could then face a peer-level friend, or foe, in the North Atlantic. However, authoritarian parties in Europe presently oppose regional federation. A democratic Europe may agree to a regional defense if American withdrawal induces the Russian Federation to try to extend its power farther to the west. But unless it arises somewhere else, a great power able to challenge the United States seems most likely to come from the People's Republic of China.
The periods of transition ended when sudden and unexpected shocks to the world system inaugurated a long period of deepening insecurity. Their effect was to sharpen multipolar tensions and set the world on a path to eventual conflict.
The Shocks of 1871 and 2001. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 demonstrated to Europeans the rapid and massive killing power of modern industrialized warfare. The conflict misled European strategists into thinking that future great-power wars would end quickly, but it correctly underlined the advantage that would go to nations with large troop reserves and modern industry, transport, and weapons. The German Empire after 1871 came to embody a nation with this kind of advantage.
The danger of rivalry with a rising Germany at first seemed remote to British leaders, who worried more about Imperial Russia's advance southward, threatening British control of India. Britain also distracted itself policing the wider Islamic frontier. Only after 1899 did Britain begin to realize that Germany was a growing peer-level threat that called for concentrated attention and British rearmament.
The terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, were a different kind of shock. Where technological conditions after 1871 pointed to the advantages of states having large populations and powerful industries, 9/11 pointed to the vulnerability of such states to mass-casualty weapons in the hands of smaller nations and private groups. This danger proved exaggerated at the time but may become real in the decades ahead.
After 2001, America began to notice the rapidity of China's advance as a competitor. But the shock of 9/11 preoccupied Washington with policing the Islamic frontier for the next two decades. Only in the 2020s did the United States pull back from these commitments in order to concentrate its attention and military assets on China.
The Rise of Multipolar Rivalry. Great-power rivalry increasingly dominated international relations after 1890, and a similar worsening of tensions has been underway since about 2020.
The world after 2020 still differs from the run-up to World War I. While Great Britain began to draw closer to allies in the years before 1914, the United States has become a less reliable global partner. Austria-Hungary was on the defensive against south Slav nationalism and only reluctantly annexed Bosnia in 1908 to arrest its spread. In contrast, post-Soviet Russia regrets the breakup of the Soviet Union and has launched a major war to reconquer Ukraine. There is also no separate great power counterpart to Imperial Germany; instead Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany have come back as the internal and external aspects of a single great power, the People's Republic of China.
However, the two eras are similar in other ways. After 1871, the hopes of a liberal order faded in a world of higher tariffs and renewed colonialism in Africa and Asia, and an arms race between the great powers accelerated in the 1890s and after. The liberal world today has begun to pull apart from protectionism. Great-power competition for influence in various regions of the world has been growing, and pressure has returned in the 2020s to rearm.
Domestic tensions contributed to these international ones. Imperial Russia's industrial modernization created a new and unrepresented urban working class and left behind a rural peasant majority, enabling revolutionary groups to spread. To unify and distract its people, the Tsarist regime appealed to anti-Semitism and backed Slavic nationalism in the Balkans. Conditions for China's urban workforce today are better than conditions were for workers in late Tsarist Russia, but a rural majority remains poor. Power in China is in the hands of an entrenched party elite, and Beijing fears revolutionary unrest since there is no peaceful way for the population to hold those in power accountable. The regime has tried to unify and distract China's people with great-power nationalism and territorial claims that other powers may resist.
In Great Britain after 1890, the working class found a moderate outlet through the new Labour party. But foreign competition ended Britain's industrial advantage and some Conservatives began to campaign for tariff protection. More seriously, Irish Catholics (ten percent of the United Kingdom population) demanded a measure of autonomy in Ireland and held the balance of power in Parliament from 1910-14. After 1912, Ulster Protestants began arming to resist a pending Irish home rule bill introduced by the ruling Liberal party, and Conservative party leaders began preparations to support the Ulster Protestants in violent resistance. Only the outbreak of the First World War in mid-1914 prevented civil war from breaking out in the United Kingdom.
The United States has managed to preserve a democratic form of government. But since 2001, and especially since 2020, the nation has become increasingly tense at home and its democracy more fragile. Automation and outsourcing of industry have dramatically reduced manufacturing employment, forcing more of the working population into lower-wage service jobs. Support for tariff protection has grown, and opposition to illegal immigration that was tolerated until recently appears to reflect a conservative white fear of minority status as a result of demographic change. A violent assault on the U.S. Capitol Building in early 2021 exposed a danger of civil war in the United States that may continue to be a threat.
The First World War of 1914-18 was not inevitable. While the other great powers embraced tariff protection, prewar Great Britain was willing to continue free trade, giving Germany unimpeded access to its home and imperial markets. Some Liberals hoped that Germany would refrain from expanding its navy in return, and some British Conservatives were interested in a military partnership with Berlin. On the other side of Europe, the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne was known to favor a reform to give all ethnic groups equal standing in his empire. The Serbian goal to unite the south Slavs in a single Yugoslavia was not the only possibility.
Unfortunately, fears and ambitions in all of the great powers made it all too easy for a local crisis in the Balkans to cascade into world war. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne on June 28, 1914, by a group with ties to Serbia compelled Austria-Hungary to issue an ultimatum that the Serbs rejected. Russia then mobilized its army to defend Serbia. This triggered the German Schlieffen Plan, in which German forces tried to knock out France quickly so that Berlin could move forces east to defend against Russia. However, France withstood the German invasion with British support and both sides settled into a disastrous stalemate for the next four years, broken only by the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the arrival of American troops on the western front a year later.
A local dispute could start a great-power war today. The Western alliance during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), continued after the Soviet collapse in 1991 and spread eastward to include Poland, Romania, and the former Soviet Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. NATO did not admit Ukraine and as a result the major NATO partners have restrained their support for Ukraine in its war with Russia since 2022. However, if Ukraine is subdued, Russian pressure on the three Baltic states could engage at least the European members of NATO in direct conflict with the Russian Federation. Direct conflict could also occur if there is larger Western involvement to prevent a Ukrainian defeat. A war in Asia could begin between China and America over Taiwan or over China's maritime claims against its neighbors. The Korean War could also resume, and a war between India and Pakistan, or between Iran and Israel, could draw outside powers into the conflict.
It might be argued that two conditions are sufficiently different today to prevent a war from breaking out between the great powers. First, many think that nuclear weapons will deter a war between states that possess them. However, the world avoided such conflict during the Cold War mainly because both sides were satisfied with their basic positions after 1945 and neither wanted occasional crises to erupt in a nuclear exchange. The United States saw containment as sufficient for its security and the Soviet Union did not see extinction of its system as a serious prospect until the late 1980s, when an effort to reform the USSR instead caused the Soviet state to unravel without war.
Today, three of the great powers no longer perceive their basic positions to be secure. Under its present leadership, the Russian Federation does not believe itself to be safe within its 1991 borders. China's leaders are convinced that they cannot be secure as long as the United States has naval supremacy in the seas around China, and Beijing may want to set an end date to a self-governing Taiwan. American leaders have held and may still hold that the United States cannot be secure if China grows strong enough to dominate east Asia and the western Pacific. These perceptions do not mean that war (let alone nuclear war) is inevitable. But the risk that a local clash in eastern Europe or east Asia could ignite a larger great-power conflict is now higher than it was during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.
Second, it might be argued that the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China are in effect allies, while their pre-1914 counterparts became estranged. However, the partnership between Moscow and Beijing today exists only because the United States is a barrier to the regional ambitions of both. Unless a war ruins them, a conflict between China and America will result in the victory of one or the other power. Either outcome would be a disaster for the present regime in Moscow because America or China would then emerge without another great power having the ability to act as a counterbalance.
The perilous condition of Russia after a future Sino-American war should encourage Russians today to reconsider their present foreign and domestic policies. The war with Ukraine, and presidential elections in Russia in which there is only one real choice, have alienated Western countries whose goodwill the Russian people may someday want. Conquest of Ukraine will not compensate for Russia's larger strategic isolation afterward.
China too must consider whether withdrawal or defeat of the United States would bring better relations with its neighbors, two of whom (India and Japan) either possess or could easily acquire nuclear weapons. These neighbors cannot retreat across the Pacific Ocean, as can the United States, and might be more desperate to defend themselves by all means at their disposal. Late Imperial Russia began to experiment with elected bodies for local government (zemstvo assemblies), and if the First World War had not intervened, Russia might have gradually advanced to a more representative central government. The People's Republic of China could evolve in a similar way if a major war can be avoided. As long as the present government of China sees its country as a rising power, though, it seems more likely that Beijing will reject any lessening of central control.
Assuming that great-power rivalry therefore continues in its present form, a world war may draw closer in the years ahead. World War I could have erupted sooner than in 1914, and its second coming could occur at any time from the late 2020s onward.
The key rivalry today is between China and America. If they remain at odds, the timing of a war between them will probably depend on whether Beijing feels that time is or is not on its side. This calculation may depend in turn on whether the United States is internally divided or united.
If America is too deeply divided at home to function as a global power, China may see an opportunity to attempt regional dominance. On the other hand, if the United States holds together at home, Sino-American rivalry could intensify and the outcome may depend on which side is militarily superior. If either China or America pulls ahead in an arms race, then the side falling behind will have an incentive to go to war to prevent sliding further behind. The proponents of rearmament in the United States hope that an arms race will favor America and that China will change without war, as the Soviet Union did at the end of the 1980s. But if China's leaders see this outcome on the horizon, they may prefer a different fate.
A second coming of the First World War is not inevitable. However, if leaders fail, as they did in 1914 and in the prewar years, then one must hope that prewar rivalries and signs of democratic crisis do not again prefigure a second interwar era of collapse, dictatorship, world war, and genocide.
David P. Billington, Jr. is an independent scholar. He is the author of Lothian: Philip Kerr and the Quest for World Order (Praeger Security International, 2006) and From Insight to Innovation: Engineering Ideas That Transformed America in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2020).