Principal Investigators: Nicholas Martin, Corey Ross.
This project examines how cultural symbols, artefacts and activities helped to mobilise European societies for military conflict of unprecedented scale during the First and Second World Wars. Focusing on three major European powers (Britain, Germany and France) it investigates an important element of how consent for industrial-scale violence and loss of life could be generated and sustained in modern and relatively non-deferential societies. As such the project addresses a topic of remarkable contemporary relevance in an age in which justifications for violence and the waging of war are to be found as much in the realm of cultural expression and popular entertainment as in political debates narrowly defined.
Historians have continually noted that one of the distinguishing characteristics of industrialised or so-called 'total war' in the twentieth century was the need to organize entire economies and societies for the purpose of military conflict. By and large, research on the evolution of 'total war' has tended to focus on evolving defence strategies, economic and labour mobilisation. Yet as the boundaries between the military and civilian spheres blurred, the winning of popular consent also became a cast-iron requirement of modern warfare and statecraft. Indeed, it is generally accepted that the First World War witnessed a fundamentally new concern about 'propaganda' and 'morale' on what tellingly became called the 'home front', and it is widely thought that this manufacturing of consent peaked during the Second World War.
Although we already know much about the propaganda agencies and (dis)information campaigns of the major belligerents during both world wars, such state efforts to steer opinion, though unprecedented in scope, ultimately constitute only one aspect of how popular consent for large-scale destruction and loss of life could be sustained. This project deliberately transcends the narrow, conventional focus on the state in favour of the broader cultural response to the world wars, in which non-state actors from literary elites to music hall directors to film producers played an equally important role in supporting the war effort through their activities. In other words, it considers how societies have mobilised themselves for war, quite apart from state attempts to control information and influence public opinion. Moreover, it addresses this question both at the level of intellectual and cultural elites as well as the level of popular culture and entertainments, which have attracted far less scholarly attention to date.
A central element of the project is to examine these processes in a comparative perspective, across different states and cultures. There are two primary aspects to this. First, the project analyses how the patterns of cultural mobilisation during the two world wars compared with one another, how far they were variations on a common theme in the era of total war or, rather, were contending with fundamentally different problems in different temporal contexts. The legacy and memory of the First World War in shaping the way in which societies and cultures were mobilised in the Second is one element of this comparison over time. Equally important, however, is the evolution of cultural forms and communications technologies during the inter-war period, and how this shaped the cultural response to the Second World War.
The second primary aspect of comparison concerns how these developments compared from one country to another. Only by placing these processes within a wider international context is it possible to understand the extent to which cultural mobilisation was an inherent part of mass, industrialised warfare, and the extent to which it reflected specific needs or circumstances within individual states and national societies bounded by their own cultural and political institutions and, of course, by language. In addition to these two axes of comparison, the project also draws on a wide range of different disciplinary perspectives and research methods to achieve a multi-faceted understanding of the dynamics of cultural mobilisation during the world wars, including literature and intellectual history, art history, social and cultural history and military history.