The first part discusses what led up to August 1914 (with focus primarily on atmosphere and calculations, without discussing the diplomatic operations in July of that year), namely the Balkan Wars (with focus on causes, effects, and logistics rather than the exact course of military operations), as well as military operations and their impact on the region where battles took place from August 1914 to December 1916). This section of the book discusses, among other things, the consequences of ‘attacks at any price’, the everyday lives of soldiers and their relations with civilians, the espionage mania that was widespread along the Eastern front, war crimes, medicine and diseases, the siege of the Przemyśl Fortress, the Battle of Gorlice, the great retreat of Russia in the summer of 1915, and the Brusilov Offensive a year later. Separate sections are devoted to the Serbian and Romanian fronts and prisoners of war.

In 1914, occupation’ was a concept as alien as the gas mask, ration card, or aerial bomb. In the history of Europe various territories had been repeatedly occupied by enemy armies and, after the end of hostilities, had been either annexed or returned to the defeated state. The longest such episode began in 1878, when Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the consent of the international community, this occupation was euphemistically referred to as an ‘administration’; it would last for thirty years. In 1908, the Habsburg monarchy annexed Sarajevo and adjacent areas, provoking a storm of protest. Lawyers had long struggled with the problem of how to define the responsibilities of an occupier (which had no legal right to the given territory under international law) towards the population of the territory it administered. War presented an additional problem: how decent could one realistically expect a state to be if the (largely hostile) occupied territory was situated close to its front lines?

Until recently, historians were agreed that European societies welcomed the outbreak of the Great War with near-ecstatic enthusiasm. In support of this view they could point to newspaper reports and to photographs of festive crowds thronging the streets of the belligerent states’ capital cities. The consensus was also reinforced by politicians, who in their memoirs described August 1914 as a sequence of completely spontaneous patriotic manifestations that practically forced leaders to go on the offensive. The streets of Paris, London, St Petersburg, and Berlin were indeed filled with joyous crowds cheering their leaders and denouncing their enemies, and as they did so, young men reported to recruiting stations. Serried ranks of students strode along Berlin’s Unter den Linden, singing as they went. The participants and observers of those events had a sense that the whole nation was united in a common purpose.

The soldiers and officers who went off to fight in the summer of 1914 not only had modern weapons but also held certain beliefs about the enemy and the territories in which the hostilities were to take place. For the most part they had scant information about the specific characteristics of Galicia, Serbia, the Kingdom of Poland, East Prussia, Lithuania, and Belarus, but they did not go there free of prejudice or lacking in a priori judgments. Sometimes their ideas combined to form a very precise image of a place. These fixed notions, which had little to do with reality but were nonetheless enduring, came to be known as stereotypes shortly after the end of the war. The American journalist and adviser to President Wilson who coined the term ‘stereotype’, Walter Lippmann, based his theory on an analysis of the American press during the Great War. It is likely that the Eastern Front, and especially the ways in which the Germans and Austrians perceived the East, would have provided Lippmann with even more interesting data.

In the western Russian Empire and Romania the Germans occupied territory previously unknown to them. Austro-Hungarian officials had, at least in theory, some idea about both Serbia and the Russian Polish lands. Regardless of the starting position, however, each occupier had its own idea of the new regime it wanted to establish. To do so it would need the assistance of local people, but it had little or no intention of consulting them on the appropriateness of its plans. The question of official time is a good illustration of the approach taken by the occupiers. It so happened that the countries participating in the war were not only located in different time zones (Russia did not ratify the international agreement on this matter and left the setting of local time to municipal authorities), but also used different calendars. Every occupier put the clocks either forward or back, which was not devoid of symbolic meaning.

This part deals with psychological and social transformations, changes in employment and organization of production (including a sharp increase in the number of women employed and the significance of farming), inspections, and rationing; the narrative often descends to the level of everyday life on the front. Alongside economic deterioration and maintenance, significant attention is given to atmospheres (especially in cities that were particularly afflicted by crisis) and ethnicization, which foreshadowed in 1916 the difficult times ahead for multinational empires. After a section about information scarcity and propaganda, the narrative concentrates on the issue of the allegiance of stateless nations. Despite the full acceptance of the emperors in the summer of 1914, leaders soon began to treat these nations with growing distrust, which found expression in the vocal repression of such ethnic groups as Baltic Germans, Serbians, Ukrainians and – above all – Jews. The book argues that it was precisely these repressive politics which, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, hastened the collapse of the empires.

In the summer of 1914 the armies that went to war in the East were formed according to similar rules and used similar tactics; all were based on conscription and all boasted vast numbers of men. It was believed that the biggest reservoir of human beings offered the best chance of victory. In this respect the statistics were unequivocal: no state could rival Russia. Moreover, even on a peace footing, the Russian army was three times the size of the German army and ten times that of the Austro-Hungarian army. One could attempt to redress this imbalance through training and equipment, and indeed that is what the Central Powers started to do on a large scale, once war had begun. In July 1914 all sides in the conflict – Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Serbia – had comparable ordnance which did not differ much from the arsenals tested recently on the battlefields of Thrace and Macedonia.

In the summer of 1914 it had been more than forty years since the last major European war. That period had witnessed unprecedented economic growth and the flourishing of culture. Lasting peace was conducive to prosperity, technological progress, and social change. Between the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 trams appeared on the streets of European cities, and the bigger capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Budapest – acquired underground metro lines. New factories were built and the urban proletariat grew so rapidly that politicians began to vie for its support. Although the European powers pursued overseas campaigns, the latter’s impact on the daily life of Europeans was limited to articles in the morning press. Nor were peace and development the sole preserve of the West. In Central and Eastern Europe, too, war was not within living memory for the vast majority of citizens.

Introduction

The intervention of (Western) powers has a long history in Afghanistan. It is not without a great degree of pride and dignity that Afghans can refer to a history in which no occupying power has successfully conquered Afghan soil and its people for a long period in time. Throughout history, only some have come close to claiming a long lasting victory over the Afghans, but military experiences from more recent times all resulted in disenchantments. Against the background of these disillusioned military endeavours, one would have expected a certain degree of modesty with regard to what can be achieved.

Yet, many Western nations and their respective (military) organisations entertained ambitious goals in terms of changing the regime, beliefs and habits of the inhabitants of Afghanistan. In turn, the majority of the Afghans were not in favour of the imposition of foreign models of governance and development, amongst others. As posited in Jonathan Steele's book, Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths, the Afghan people predominantly wanted to be left alone, leaving the presence of foreign troops likely to be one of the major causes of current instability.

This chapter serves merely to set out the developments in Afghanistan since the intervention of the ‘coalition of the willing’: a formation of Western military powers led by the United States that invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 until NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan in the summer of 2006. As such, this chapter is designed to provide an understanding of the environment in which the Netherlands and the United Kingdom felt they needed to engage by contributing to NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan. This chapter, however, does not engage with the current ongoing problems in Afghanistan since this carries beyond the scope of this book.

Setting

The pursuit of stabilisation of Afghanistan has been hindered by the amount of strategic goals set for the mission, as well as a recurring shift of priorities. The initial goal was defeating Al-Qaida and the Taliban and, in doing so, eradicating their ability to threaten the West as well as regional neighbours (2001). The goal then changed to developing the Afghan economy through the security and development agenda (2002 onwards), building good governance (2005) and creating stability, possibly via deals or negotiations with the Taliban (2008).

Introduction

The context of the United Kingdom's decision to commit its armed forces to the stabilisation of the Afghan province of Helmand should largely be seen in relation to the British intention to shift its attention from Iraq to Afghanistan. The Prime Minister's guidance on a prominent role for the United Kingdom in NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan, combined with military alliance politics, was instrumental in the decision path that emerged.

Throughout the whole process of deciding if and how the British armed forces were to contribute to the stabilisation of southern Afghanistan, several strategic decisions, such as the selection of the province, were taken without having been articulated at the political level. These decisions were taken at the military level, as such implicitly questioning the primacy of politics in the matter.

Before scrutinising the series of decisions that resulted in the deployment of British forces to Helmand, we will first get acquainted with the features of British foreign and security politics in order to understand the context in which the decision-makers operated.

The United Kingdom: The Grandeur of a Great Power

The United Kingdom is a medium power with substantial military capabilities. A player in the major league of nations, it not only engaged in operations as a loyal partner of the United States, but especially during the time under study, also tended to view itself as a ‘force for good’, especially during the time under study. Ever since the First World War, a relatively steady decline in British economic and military power can be observed. Britain nevertheless maintained its relevance on the international stage through the mobilisation of ‘soft power’ (diplomatic) resources. Its foreign policy rhetoric and policy behaviour is predominantly guided by a ‘power broker’ conception of the state´s role in the international arena.

Three traditional pillars can be distinguished in British foreign policy: multilateralism, Atlanticism and neo-liberalism. At the time under study, the governing party (Labour) employed multilateralism and liberal values to utilise Britain's soft power capability to shape the rule-based international order. In practice, Prime Minister Blair's consecutive Cabinets utilised a combination of both formal and informal multilateralism: a formal kind either through established international organisations or through informal coalitions of the willing.

The study on which the book is based was designed to carry out research on, and through its findings to increase awareness of, the attitudes towards Jews, the Holocaust and memory of the Holocaust among young Poles. It was also intended to promote interest in school programmes and projects that can overcome prejudice and antisemitism according to the findings of empirical studies confirming that prejudices are “bad” habits that could be extinguished (Dovidio et al., after: Grzesiak-Feldman 2006).

The phenomenon of antisemitism, one of the main variables in this study, does not have one agreed definition and historians, political scientists and sociologists describe it from various angles. According to the working definition of the IHRA, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It was hoped that the research results would be used as a pedagogical basis for educational programmes that would bring the research findings and recommendations into practice to combat antisemitism. Despite many obstacles, comparative research was applied as a way of studying the direction of the educational process and the interdependence of different factors affecting attitudes towards Jews and the Holocaust in Poland. The first empirical study that I conducted in 1998 was undertaken before the first major (but belated, since it occurred more than 10 years after the fall of communism) debate on the attitudes of Poles towards Jews. The current study was carried out 10 years later. Both debates deleted the line (strongly engraved in Polish consciousness) between German persecutors and the local ethnic Polish population and were related to the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross's books. The first, Neighbors (2000) discussed the murder of Jews by ethnic Poles in Jedwabne and neighbouring Radziłow, Wizna, Wąsosz, Stawiski, and Szczuczyn and the second, Fear (English edition June 2006, Polish edition January 2008) investigated antisemitism and pogroms in Poland after the Holocaust.

Introduction

The act of deciding if and how military force ought to be deployed lies at the heart of what is known as the strategic civil-military interface.33 In this interface military operations are designed and directed by a group of senior civil and military decision-makers. These agents and their actions are the focus of the theoretical and empirical puzzle of this book. Yet, one cannot comprehend their decisions without an understanding of the context in which this decision transpires and without an understanding of the prescriptive theories foundational to the roles the actors fulfil.

This chapter explains the theoretical concepts that are foundational to the rule-based international and national environments in which the civil and military decision-makers operate. First, the context of contemporary military interventions is delineated with a particular focus on the concept of stabilisation operations. Above all, this was the dominant concept at the time when the decisions at the centre of this study were made. The concept of stabilisation operations serves as an organising framework and, as such, has ideological utility for the civilian and military decisionmakers at the time under study.

Subsequently, the theoretical underpinnings of Western rules on civilmilitary relations are delineated, followed by a theoretical description of their shared process, which is strategy-making. These two theoretical concepts contain prescriptive models of the way the relations between civil and military actors ought to be organised and upheld and are, in theory, foundational to their respective roles in decision-making and to the process of drafting strategies for military interventions.

The Context: Contemporary Military Interventions

The context of Western military interventions has exhibited considerable variations in terms of its normative dimension. Hence, the pattern of military interventions throughout the last few decades cannot be understood when separated from the changing normative framework in which they occurred and which also shaped the various conceptions of interest. Standard analytical (mostly realist) assumptions about states and other actors pursuing their interests tend to leave the sources and motivations of interests vaguely defined or unspecified.

The end of the Cold War heralded a rapid and dramatic transformation in the practice of military interventions. The majority of interventions were multinational peacekeeping operations instead of unilateral interventions by world powers.

Introductory remarks

Is memory a process, object, feature or phenomenon? According to Sztumski (2002, 8), memory itself is a phenomenon and a feature (quality), training memory is a process, and the preservation of memory has the character of a material object. Cultural context: paradigms, ideologies, worldviews, systems of values and concepts of identity determine the replication of memory images. Multiple disciplines and areas of interest deal with memory: philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology, political studies, cultural studies, and the ethics of memory which is connected with transitional justice (Margalit 2002, 6).

Much has been said about the meaning and function of the past for the present and future but remembering the past ought to incorporate remembrance of moments that are not exclusively glorious, also including those that show the fall of humanity, the dark pages of human history which should not be repeated. The historical past plays a role in the development of contemporary political culture, its norms, values, rules and attitudes through the choice of what our societies should remember. Formal and non-formal education are crucial in shaping political culture in which the social, collective memory of the past also has many functions apart from informing us about history and warning us that crimes and cruelty might be repeated. Collective memories, as sociologists remind us, are loaded with strong emotions and evaluations of facts and personalities, and they allow us to reassess them (Szacka 1983; Kwiatkowski 2008, 231).

One of the examples of how collective memories/representations of the Holocaust were created is found in the content and form of the International Military Tribunal Trials at Nuremberg in 1945–1949. Tangible evidence presented in films and photography from the liberation of the Western camps created an association between the Holocaust and death camps. The role of the Einsatzgruppen (special operational groups), battalion-sized mobile killing squads of the Security Police (ger. Sicherheitspolizei; Sipo) and SS Security Service (ger. Sicherheitsdienst; SD) created by the RSHA and which followed the German armies in June 1941 after the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, was given little or no attention in post-World War II representations of the Holocaust despite the fact that the Einsatzgruppen killed more than 1 million Jews.