Is this really 1914?

For those historical-minded among us, we recently witnessed the Centennial Anniversary of the commencement of World War 1, which began on 28 July 1914. More than any event in modern history, WW1 was truly epoch-changing in its consequences. Prior to the war, the world was divided into competing empires, each Crown gaining its legitimacy through an appeal to a higher religious claim, be it the Ottomon Muslim Caliphate, the Christian Eastern Orthodox Czar of Russia or the Catholic Church of Western Europe. Post-war, and 9 million deaths later, there was an entirely different landscape: secular nation-states replaced imperial strongholds, and a religious world order was done away altogether. The partitioned Muslim world in particular is still reeling from the effects of what was known as the "The War to End All Wars" (which it clearly was not).

With its 100th anniversary, many Western historians still ponder as to what exactly caused this breakout of war, even if they are agreed that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was the trigger. Yet an even more interesting discussion is taking place; are we at the cusp of a new global conflict? With nuclear-armed Russia and NATO at seeming loggerheads over Ukraine and civil war, bloodshed and anarchy spread over much of the Middle East, the situation seems quite precarious. The ingredients seem there. Yet much of the prognostication over whether we may be heading for WW3 or not (for example, here and here) also has at its heart an idea an interesting conception of history, that history is patterned.

In the ancient world, the vision of history was either one of decline (that history has departed from a glorious utopian age to gradually one of increasing ignorance and decadence) or cyclical (history will continuously experience peaks and troughs, rises and falls). Only in the modern West over the last 500 years did we begin to view history as one of progressive incline, with each era being more enlightened and just plain better, be it in the areas of scientific knowledge, material well-being or cultural sensibilities.

As history marches onward, and with each passing century, we can look back and reflect on how far we've trodden. In these moments of reflection, we are struck by the occurrence of seminal events that echo those which have occurred before or after by almost a century.  Major events which occur at around the same time in one century often have a parallel event at approximately the same year in the century that has passed or is to come. Are the parallels mere coincidences, or do they suggest that there are deeper patterns to history that we have yet to uncover?

A classic example is the dual assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln (1865)  and John. F Kennedy (1963), both with far-reaching implications. The presidents were elected to the House in 1860 and 1960 respectively, and both purportedly assassinated by assassins with three names you are likely to remember (John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald). Both also were known to dabble in some interesting monetary experiments, in Lincoln's case being the Greenbacks, and Kennedy by issuing silver certificates. The more you dig beneath the surface, the more similarities arise.

In the early 1870s, the world powers, headed by the British Empire, at the time colluded to introduce the world's first international gold standard, allowing for convertibility of paper money into gold by a fixed standard ratio. Conversely, this time period is marked by historian as the exact peak point of British power, following which the empire when into imperial decline and steadily experienced a loss of financial capital and dominance. Nearly a 100 years later, in 1971, the super power of the time, the USA, made the decision to do away with the gold standard altogether, now having the dollar alone as the reserve standard for the world with gold no longer functioning as money. Strangely, the exact period is also seen by analysts as the peak of US dominance, with the de-industrialization, deregulation and Reagonomics slowly but surely whittling the might of the super power following that.

Not all parallels have to be exact matches, many are opposites as well. In the same way that 1914 ushered in a time of conflict between competitive nation states, nearly a 100 years earlier in 1815, the Congress of Vienna was held in Europe to settle the Napoleonic Wars, with a diplomatic settlement leading to a century of peace and prosperity in the region between the colonial powers.

There are many, many more example to bring up of history repeating itself in significant ways. Moving to the present moment, there is in the background undeniably a sense of foreboding, that the troubling hotspots in different parts of the world are only a sign of larger conflagration to come, threatening to engulf all of Mankind. Perhaps this may seem a tad fatalistic though. In the end, we also must believe in human agency as being able to set our own destiny, and the destiny need not necessarily be destruction. Nevertheless, what we can expect soon to come in the world stage are events that will likely dictate the course of the next century, assuming human beings survive that long. As the Chinese may have said, "may you live in interesting times."