Illustration: John Spooner

There has been an outpouring of reflections this year, both here and abroad, on the centenary of the start of the First World War. Much of it recycles old clichés about the war or dwells on the merits and consequences of Australian involvement on the side of the British Empire.

At a time when there is growing debate about the rise of China, the wisdom or otherwise of attempting to ‘contain’ it and the merits and possible consequences of Australia’s alliance with the United States, we would do well to ponder the beginnings of the First World War in at least three comparative respects.

First, we should reflect on Germany’s sense of being hemmed in by the Triple Entente (England, France and Russia) compared with China’s concerns about being hemmed in by America and its allies.

Second, it took decades of painstaking scholarly inquiry to achieve clarity as to who was to blame for war starting in 1914. In our time, we cannot afford such a luxury. We need much greater clarity in advance, in order to head off destructive conflict.

Germany was an ascendant military and economic power in the decades before 1914. It wanted and felt it was entitled to a more dominant and acknowledged position on the European continent and around the world. Does this sound familiar? It should. Its major neighbours were, for differing reasons, uneasy about this and formed an alliance which grew firmer as Germany grew stronger and more assertive.

France felt threatened directly by Germany’s rising power. Russia feared German territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. Britain had always been concerned to prevent the domination of the European continent by a single power and saw the protection of Belgium, directly across the North Sea from its own shores, as a trigger point for intervention. In all these respects, we might readily draw parallels with aspects of the current situation in Asia and ponder these thoughtfully.

When the July crisis came, in 1914, after the famous assassination in Sarajevo of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Germany of the Kaiser overplayed its hand and brought on continental war in a fit of misplaced hubris.

A generation earlier, under Bismarck, it would almost certainly have played a more cautious hand and averted such a war. But the Kaiser and those around him lacked Bismarck’s canniness and sense of proportion.

This is a crucial consideration for our time. Deng Xiaoping, while he lived, counselled canniness and restraint in Chinese foreign and security policy. Under China’s post-Deng leadership, that restraint has been ebbing away as Chinese military power has grown.

For decades after 1919 the question of who had been most responsible for ‘causing’ the outbreak of war was endlessly debated. The most telling contributions did not come until after the Second World War. It then emerged, from German and other diplomatic archives, that the circle around the Kaiser and in the German high command had conceived dangerously ambitious war aims by July 1914.

When the crisis came they opted for confrontation rather than for restraint. That, more than any other element in the situation, precipitated the ‘Great War’ in August 1914. Their aims at that point and right into 1918 were to exert control over Eastern Europe at Russia’s expense, crush the power of France ‘for all time’ and reduce Belgium to the status of a German protectorate.

Though it may sound unduly alarmist to make this point in 2014, there are those in China now whose outlook warrants comparison with such German aims a century ago. In place of France read Japan. In place of Russia in Eastern Europe read the United States in East Asia and the Western Pacific. In place of Belgium read the littoral states around the South China Sea.

Yet there is nothing foreordained about the coming of war. And while we ponder the dangers and dilemmas we face and the lessons of history, we need always to bear in mind the third point I noted above: the humanity of the other side. In the case of Germany, in the summer of 1914, many deeply civilized and educated people neither wanted nor expected a war. Yet, when it came, they were patriots who saw the war through distinctly German eyes.

My own favourite example is the Bonhoeffer family, the parents and siblings of the famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the dissenting theologian executed by the Nazis in the last days of the Second World War. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer and their eight children were rooted in the finest traditions of the German Enlightenment and liberal-minded pietism. They were model citizens and human beings.

Karl was professor of psychiatry and neurology at Berlin University and an active member of a remarkable inter-disciplinary circle of intellectuals. Their son Walter was killed in April 1918 and several nephews killed or wounded. They never lost their sense of balance during or after the war and they went on to oppose Nazism. As a consequence, two more of their sons and two of their sons in law were executed, along with Paula’s brother, Paul von Hase. In short, they paid a terrible price for Germany’s 20^th century war-making.

Right now, there are very many people in China who meet the description I have applied to the Bonhoeffers. They are deeply civilized, highly educated, thoroughly decent; but also, under most circumstances, patriotic. Our caution and concern about the strategic intentions of the Chinese government are warranted. But we must never lose sight of the core humanity and natural outlook of the finest itizenry of China. It is with their hopes and values that we must strive to connect if conflict is to be avoided in the years ahead.

Paul Monk is an author, former senior intelligence analyst and commentator on public and international affairs.