Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Margaret MacMillan
[00:00:00 Opening video: A series of images of people walking along busy urban streets; a Canadian flag flying on the side of a building; an aerial view of Parliament Hill and downtown Ottawa; the interior of a library; a view of Earth from space. Text on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders, and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service, leadership, policy, governance, innovation, and beyond.
[00:00:16 Title page: Review and Reflections. CSPS logo. Text on screen: Produced by the Canada School of Public Service.]
Narrator: This is the Review and Reflection Series, produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:25 Professor Margaret MacMillan appears full screen. Text on screen: Margaret MacMillan, Historian / Expert on War & Diplomacy / Oxford Professor.]
Interviewer: We are here with Professor Margaret MacMillan, one of the world's foremost historians, and one of the world's foremost historians on the subject that we're going to spend most of our time on today, which is war. Professor MacMillan, welcome.
Margaret MacMillan: Thank you very much.
Interviewer: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school?
Margaret MacMillan: Born in Toronto, grew up here, a very different Toronto in those days, as you could imagine. Very few high-rise buildings, a much smaller Toronto. But it was a lovely place to grow up. I went to high school here. I went to local school, and then I went to the University of Toronto,
[00:01:05 Brief overlaid exterior image of the University of Toronto.]
Margaret MacMillan: where there was the most fabulous history department. I didn't realize how good it was at the time, but I look back and I think I was taught by some of the best people in the world at the time.
Interviewer: Then you also went on, I think, to Oxford?
[00:01:20 Brief overlaid exterior image of Oxford University.]
Margaret MacMillan: I went to Oxford, and I thought I might try another subject than history, so I did a two-year degree in politics, which I enjoyed, but it sent me back to history. And then I did a doctoral thesis on the British in India.
Interviewer: And that's a wonderful combination, history and politics, or political science, political studies as a combination. Did you find those two complementary?
Margaret MacMillan: Well, they work with each other when they work well. Sometimes we're in different silos. But what I like about political science and political theory and international relations, which I do a lot of, is they have theories, they have ideas which can be tested. And we tend, as historians, to be very specific. And so, we don't really trust theory very much, so it's quite good for us to have to engage with it. I like to think it's quite good for the political scientist to know a bit of history or quite a bit of history.
Interviewer: Now, at one point, I imagine you started becoming very interested in the topic of war and the related aspects, I imagine, of war, like maybe power, or conflict, or things like that. What made you spend your professional life mostly in this area?
Margaret MacMillan: Well, I didn't intend to, but I'd always been interested in war, even as a child. We had grandparents who had fought in the First World War.
[00:02:41 Brief overlaid archival image of soldiers at the front in the First World War.]
Margaret MacMillan: My father and my uncles were in the Second World War, so that it was something that was present in our lives. And my Canadian grandfather and grandmother had a curio cabinet in their living room with things like a shell they'd picked up on a beach somewhere and little models of this and that. Lots of people had them, but they also had a hand grenade in it, which my grandfather had brought back from the First World War. And we used to roll it around on the floor and play with it. And when I got a bit older and knew a bit more about weapons, I did point out to my father and others, and I said, I don't think it's been diffused. There's still the pin and the ring that perhaps we should actually get rid of it, which they did. I'm not quite sure where it went, but it was something that was in our lives.
And we heard stories, and I was interested in naval history. I was interested in military history. I suppose I just was. And if you grew up in the 20th century, there's an awful lot of war around. And if you get interested in history, well, there's a thread that runs through the past, which is that wars are very important and often make huge differences.
Interviewer: What are some of the definitions of war? What are some of the definitions that are salient to you or resonate with you?
Margaret MacMillan: I tend to define war in a very narrow way. The metaphor is war used very widely, and I think it loses a certain amount of its force. We talk about a war on obesity, we talk about a war on drugs, we talk about a war on this and that. And I define war as an organized, highly organized activity, which involves a group of people trying to apply their will through force on another group of people. And that other group of people is trying, of course, to do the same, but to resist that applied force.
And so, I don't see it as something random. It's not like a bar fight. It's not like a brawl in a hockey game, which is random and not terribly organized. It's a highly organized activity, probably the most organized of all human activities when you think of what goes into creating armed forces and managing them and deploying them and ensuring that people will actually fight. So that's how I define it, because I think we lose something if we define it too widely. And so, as I said, look at it in this rather narrow definition, which still covers an awful lot of things.
Interviewer: And I think most people, if they're asked to define it, would probably go back probably to the most famous one which is, politics by other means. What does that say to you, if anything?
[00:05:08 Brief overlaid portrait of Carl von Clausewitz. Text on screen: War is politics by other means. - Carl von Clausewitz.]
Margaret MacMillan: That was the famous Clausewitz's statement, the great German theorist of war. And there is – historians love debates – and there is a big debate about what he actually meant. How do you translate the German word "Politik", and it could mean policies. It doesn't necessarily mean politics. And so, I think what he was getting at is that war has a purpose. It's a purpose of activity. It's not just something that happens randomly because we feel like going and making war on someone, you're trying to achieve something through it. You have goals. Those goals may shift, but you start a war with goals, and you try and finish a war with achieving something.
Interviewer: Now, you mentioned that war – there's a notion of organization of purpose in your definition of war, and war goes way back, almost to the beginning of our species. Talk a little bit about maybe war in humanity and maybe war, maybe pre-states?
Margaret MacMillan: We don't know. I mean, we've been around for what? How many millennia? 50,000 [or] more. And history only goes back a certain distance. We're pushing it back because of archeology. There are some really interesting things happening in ancient archeology and decoding ancient DNA, so we're learning a bit more. But there's a whole swath of human history that we just don't know anything about because there was no way of keeping any records. No one was keeping records, and we can't find any evidence of it.
But once people started settling down, it seems, they were more likely to go to war. Once you settled in villages or whatever, you had something that someone else might want, and so you had to defend it. And so, we find, or archeologists have found, very early examples, some of the earliest examples of towns and villages which had walls around them. And the walls, presumably, it's a guess, but it seems to be a good guess, weren't there just to keep animals out. They were there to keep human predators out. And mass graves have been found with corpses or bones that bear the marks of trauma. So, it looks like war is something we've been doing for a very long time.
And one of the many paradoxes and ironies of war is the more organized we became, the more settled we became, the more we were able to develop more complex societies, the better we got at war. And so that the growth of human organization and war seems to have gone on. They seem to be linked. And so, the better organized you are, the better you are at fighting wars, the more successful you'll be. And once you are more successful, you can then get more resources and make even more wars. And people have argued the growth of the modern state with all its powers and its taxing powers is heavily dependent on the wars that were fought in the past.
Interviewer: Yes. And in fact, James Scott would define the state, or the first two great powers or necessities of the state were taxation, but for the purposes of preparing for war, whether offensive or in most cases, defensive. Now, I'm not sure what came first, Thucydides or Homer, but I want to spend a few minutes on both of them. Which one do you want to start with?
Margaret MacMillan: Well, Homer, I think, did come first. Sorry to be pedantic, but this is what teachers do.
[00:08:28 Brief overlaid image of the title page from a 1715 publishing of the Iliad, showing a sketch of a bust of Homer. Text on screen: The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem by Homer about the Trojan War, composed around the 8th century BCE. The poem focuses on the wrath of Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, and explores themes of honour, fate, and the brutality of war.]
Margaret MacMillan: So, let's start with Homer because the Iliad is one of the great pieces of writing about war.
Interviewer: Yes. So, tell us a little bit about the Iliad.
Margaret MacMillan: It's wonderful. And I went back and read it when I was doing my book on war, what is war all about. And I made myself –
[00:08:42 Brief overlaid image of Margaret MacMillan's book, titled "War: How Conflict Shaped Us".]
Margaret MacMillan: I thought the first book is of endless lists of people coming from different parts of Greece to Troy, to besiege Troy. And I thought, I can skip this. And then I realized it was very important because it was like a roll call more and more. And these people came from these distant islands, and they came from the mainland. And it gave you a tremendous sense. And it's extraordinarily good on the warriors, and it's very good on what it means for civilians, because civilians often pay a dreadful price for wars. They're often the targets of wars. They're often the spoils of war.
And so, it encompasses war, I think, in many different aspects, and the heroism of war, the cruelty of war, the fates of those who get involved in war. It is an extraordinary read, and I think it has heavily influenced the way that a lot of people over the centuries have thought about war.
Interviewer: Yes, and I love the way you talk about the Iliad because it is multifaceted in the sense of it doesn't just deal with the warriors. It deals with the suffering, the pain, the consequences of even those who don't battle. Now, I've read, I think, two translations of it. The very first word in one of them, I forget how the first word was translated in the second, but the very first word in the Iliad that I remember, it starts with one word. The word is rage. Tell us a little bit about that.
Margaret MacMillan: Rage. Rage is, well, we know it's one of the strongest of human emotions, but we have lots of others as well. But rage can descend like a red cloud. I mean, you think of the metaphors for rage. People go blind with rage. They can't contain it. Rage has to be contained in war. I mean, that's the interesting thing. You don't want in a war, lots of people absolutely furious rushing across. And you see that in the Iliad, you see warriors throwing themselves into war and getting themselves killed, which doesn't, in fact, do their cause any good. I was once teaching – I go down and do a seminar with mid-career military in Washington, usually once a year – and I was asking them once, we were talking about what makes good warriors. And I said, would you want someone who comes to you and says – and these were all different services. They were Marines, they were pilots, they were naval officers, they were army – and I said, would you want someone who came to you and said, I just hate people. I want to go and kill them. And they said, we could use it, but that person would have to be disciplined. They wouldn't make a good soldier.
And so, rage, I think, is not a key factor in war. It may be one of the reasons for making war. But again, I go back to my point, war is so disciplined. And what you want is soldiers, or airmen, or naval people who do what they're told. You don't want random violence.
[00:11:30 Brief overlaid image of a sculpture of Achilles. Text on screen: Achilles is the strongest Greek warrior in mythology and a hero of the Trojan War in The Iliad.]
Margaret MacMillan: You really don't want someone like Achilles, who's one of the great figures of the Iliad, who really thinks only of himself. And he goes off and sulks in his tent when his fellow warriors could use him. But he's sulking. He isn't interested in the cause.
[00:11:42 Brief overlaid image of painting of an armoured Hector. Text on screen: Hector is the greatest Trojan warrior and the eldest son of King Priam in Homer's Poem.]
Margaret MacMillan: Whereas Hector, who is, in my view, the great hero of the Iliad, Hector of Troy, who doesn't particularly want to fight, but does it out of duty to defend his homeland, to defend his wife, to defend his children, goes to war because he feels he ought to, and does it out of a sense of duty. And I think there's always that balance. And it's always a problem for the military because they want to encourage. They have to. They're training their people to be prepared to kill and fight.
But they don't want them to get out of control because once they get out of control, they're not as good at what they're doing. They're not as useful.
[00:12:19 Brief overlaid image of a 1629 publishing of "The History of the Peloponnesian Warre" by Thucydides. Text on screen: The history of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides is a detailed account of the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE), focusing on power, politics, and human nature. Thucydides, an Athenian historian and general during the war, provides a fact-based perspective on the conflict.]
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Interviewer: Let's turn to Thucydides now. Tell us a little bit about... Maybe tell us about, I think it's the most famous aspect of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Tell us about the Melian Dialogue.
Margaret MacMillan: Oh, I'm trying to remember it.
Interviewer: Can I tell it to you?
Margaret MacMillan: Yes, please, because it's a while since I read it. Remind me.
Interviewer: I will, then you tell me what it means. The Athenians basically marched into Melos, which was a neutral territory. In modern English, they basically said, there's no such thing as neutrality. You're either with us, or if you're not with us, you're with our enemy. And so, we will tell you what to do, so to speak. And the Melians basically said, why are you doing this to us? We've never done anything to you. We're neutral, and we just don't understand why you're behaving dishonourably. And the key line is where the Athenians said something like, look, it has always been like this. It will always be like this. If you were in our position, you would do the same thing because, for humanity, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
[00:13:58 Brief overlaid image of a drawing of Thucydides. Text on screen: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. – Thucydides.]
Margaret MacMillan: Thank you. It's the most famous line, pretty much.
Interviewer: Do you believe that line? Is that a line that crosses time and space for humanity?
Margaret MacMillan: Well, it's reflected in, I think, a split which certainly goes right up to the present. And in the present, it's classified as the idealists against the realists. And the realists – roughly put, the definitions keep shifting – the realists, roughly believe it's all about power. And you do what you can. And great powers just look after their own interests and too bad if you get in the way.
Whereas the idealists say, no, we can have a different world. We can have a world of cooperation. We can have a world where we work together to limit conflict. Because in the end, those who use conflict to try and achieve their ends often do damage to themselves.
[00:14:44 Brief overlaid image of Vladimir Putin.]
Margaret MacMillan: I mean, you think of what Putin has done to Russia with the invasion of war in Ukraine. It's not clear that he will emerge as something of a winner. And you look at what happened to the Germans in the First World War to Germany. They did extraordinarily well in the early stages of the war, and then it became a stalemate. In the end, they lost.
And so, I tend to sympathize with the idealist point of view. It doesn't mean that they're wishy-washy idealists. It means that they're trying to build a different world and pointing out the tremendous damage that war can create.
And the thing about war is it's uncontrollable. Once you start it, you never know where it's going. The idea that you can have a neat little military operation, a neat little operation in Iraq, or a neat little operation in Afghanistan, it usually doesn't work. And so, I think in a way, Thucydides' famous statement echoes that view that power can solve everything. And against that, people would argue that power actually sometimes undermines itself, defeats itself, and doesn't solve everything. But it has remained a very influential view.
[00:15:46 Brief overlaid image of Donald Trump.]
Margaret MacMillan: And if he read books, I think President Trump would have picked out that line, but perhaps someone has told him about it.
Interviewer: Now, we don't only find war on the global stage, per se. We also find war in our literature, in our plays, in our television shows, in our movies. Tell us a little bit about how you've seen war depicted in various, let's call them cultural media or mediums.
Margaret MacMillan: Well, there's a range. But we have, I think, culturally – and it's not just culture in Canada, I think a number of countries have it around the world – a fascination with war. We have this fascination where we're frightened of it, rightly. We are appalled at what it can do, but we also find a glamour in it. And so, I think our feelings as human beings are very mixed towards war. And if you go to bookshops and look along the shelves and see how many books there are on war and look at the video games and how many video games deal with war.
And so, I think there's this fascination. But what the arts do, what culture does, is represent war in different ways because there are many different views on war. And so, you will get those who glorify war. And a number of the great novels, music, glorify war.
But you also get, in the arts, you get people who deplore war, who point out its dreadful signs.
[00:17:21 Brief overlaid image of an archival publishing of "The Life of King Henry the Fifth".]
Margaret MacMillan: You think of some of the great Shakespeare plays. I mean, Henry the Fifth, which is a lot about war, but it is... Henry is in some ways a heroic character.
[00:17:25 Brief overlaid image of a portrait of King Henry the Fifth.]
Margaret MacMillan: But then you look at what he's saying to the people of Harfleur, a town he's besieging in France. And it's basically, we're going to kill you all. We're going to drag your women out. We'll rape them. We're going to kill your children. You're going to regret you ever fought us. So, that play, it seems to me, very well sums up this range of emotions about war. That we can see it as a glorious thing, but there's that whole other side where it's not glorious at all, and it's brutal, and it's awful.
And so, there's no one way in which we, or any culture, looks at war. We have a whole range of reactions to it, which is reflected in our cultures.
Interviewer: It seems to be, for sure, deep in our psyche and deep in our history, but it also seems in some ways to define us. And what I mean by that is – you were getting at it a little bit earlier with this notion that the victors of war continue – and it's almost a little bit of an evolutionary, well, the people that win wars are the people that propagate themselves over time. Are there any other aspects of war? We talk about culture, we talk about history, talk about power. Is there anything else that war impacts on us? Do you think war is almost biological in the human species?
Margaret MacMillan: No, that's an old debate, and I come down the side and say, no, it's not. I mean, look, we have a lot of things in our biology, and evolution has left us with all sorts of things which we understand, but it hasn't just left us with aggression. We're not simply about aggression. We don't always want to go out to fight other people. We're not always suspicious of people who aren't like us.
Evolution has also left us with altruism, with the capacity to work together, with the capacity to have empathy for other people who aren't like us. So, we're a mix. I prefer to think that we're not just a collection of impulses inherited from millennia of development, that we're actually rational and thinking beings, that we have emotions, but we also have brains, and we have ideas.
And I don't think you can draw a direct line from saying, yes, a lot of human beings can be aggressive to saying, that's why we have wars. Again, because, to just go back to my earlier point, war is so organized. And when you think of the training that soldiers, for example, go through, the reason they need training is because they're going against a lot of their own instincts. They don't want to necessarily go out and kill people. They don't necessarily want to go and risk their lives. I mean, self-preservation is a very strong motive. And so, what training does is actually overcome a lot of the things that we do have as part and parcel of our human nature and turn us into something different. And those who've been through military training do behave and react often in different ways.
So, I don't think just because we have aggressive impulses means that we will fight. I mean, you look at those who were turned into soldiers, and seamen, and airmen. A lot of the Canadians who fought in the First and Second World Wars had no military background at all. My father was in the Canadian Navy, and most of the crew came from the prairies. They'd never seen a big body of water, and they became very effective because they were trained.
But you don't start out with someone who immediately goes and becomes a soldier or a sailor. It takes a great deal of training. But people can be trained, as we see with sports. People can be trained to become different things than they might have been at the start.
[00:21:02 Brief overlaid image of a photo of Harold Innes.]
Interviewer: Yes, I like that because one of your colleagues in time at the University of Toronto,
Harold Innes, a great historian, when he came back from World War 1, everybody who knew him said that it changed him, seeing the front, seeing people die. So, it's kind of at the same time, it's human, but inhuman. Inhumane.
Margaret MacMillan: Well, a lot of people, when they come back from wars, who go back into civilian society, don't want to talk about it. They don't want to talk about it, perhaps because the memories are too immediate. And there are many stories of veterans having nightmares at night, things they never really talk about.
Sometimes interestingly, and it seems to be a pattern in a number of cultures, they talk to their grandchildren because the grandchildren are far enough removed and don't really understand what they're being told. And my Canadian grandfather talked to my sister about the trenches, and she said, I was just a little girl. I didn't really understand it. But he obviously wanted to talk to someone about it.
And she was perhaps the sort of person that he could talk to because he knew she didn't really understand it. He was just telling her stories, scary stories in some cases, rats running along and things, but he sort of made fun of it and said, life in the trenches.
So, I think I can understand why people don't want to talk about being in war. And there are those who never adjust. But when you look at the millions of men, mostly, but also women who fought in the Second World War, the great majority went back into civilian lives and had lives that were meaningful and productive. We know there are people who are so badly shattered by war that they have a great deal of trouble in readjusting to civilian society. But I think we have a capacity for resilience as well. People come back from wars, yes, they're changed, but they get on. Harold Innes had a very successful career as a great teacher and a great thinker.
Interviewer: Now, let's talk a little bit about the technology of war. Maybe the first technologies were rocks and sticks and stones and fences and moats and walls. It's very different in 2025.
Margaret MacMillan: Well, it is, and it isn't. Technology is enormously important. You were asking earlier on about factors in society and war that may work with each other. Technology is key. A new technology will often be adapted for war, and war will often push forward the developments of new sorts of technologies. In medicine; of course, the atom bomb is a prime example of that. We do things in wartime that we might not be able to afford or think of doing in peace time.
So, technology is important. And war does change as a result of technology. I mean, once the bow was developed, it meant that you could fire at people from a greater distance. And once the horse was introduced – which came from Asia, the steppes and into Europe and into the Middle East –
[00:24:04 Brief overlaid archival photo of a First World War Cavalry Division.]
Margaret MacMillan: once the horse was introduced, you had people on horseback or in chariots who were much more mobile, who could attack soldiers on the ground. And so, it made a difference in war. And then you got the move from bronze to iron to steel, and so the weapons became more deadly. Gunpowder, of course, made a huge difference. And so, there are always technologies which are affecting war.
But some of the basic nature of war hasn't changed. I mean, what I've really been struck with, in looking at the war in Ukraine, is how much it reminds me of the First World War. And I'm not the only one who's saying this. There's trench warfare. There is house-to-house fighting.
[00:24:04 Overlaid series of archival photos of First World War battle scenes.]
Margaret MacMillan: And some of the scenes look like Stalingrad in the Second World War, some of the other scenes. I mean, urban fighting is something the military thought they wouldn't ever be doing again, and they're now having to face it again. Then armies around the world are scrambling to try and deal with the fact they may have to go into heavily defended civilian areas. I mean, Gaza has seen urban fighting.
So, some things recur. The weapons are different, the uniforms are different, but the means of fighting, the fact of the fighting can be very much the same. And how to get the recruits you need? That's always been a problem for armies and other armed forces. And so, some of the issues are still the same. How do you end wars? We're still not very good at that. We're quite good at starting them, and we remain pretty hopeless at ending them.
Interviewer: That's a great segue to my second last question. Linguistically, at least, the opposite of war is peace. How do you define peace?
Margaret MacMillan: Well, I would say it's not just an absence of war, because that means there's always the prospect of war. I mean, peace, it seems to me, is something that is a positive thing and needs to be built. I mean, people say, why don't we just stop fighting and make peace? It doesn't happen like that. You have to rebuild, and you have to build trust, and you have to build friendships, and you have to build shared goals and shared values, and you try and build shared institutions.
That's what they did after the First World War and after the Second World War, those two great catastrophes in the 20th century, which brought losses on a scale that people couldn't really conceive. And so, what they tried to do, they, the public, but also many of the leaders, tried to build a new type of society in which nations would settle their disputes peacefully in which, collectively, nations would get together to say to aggressors, you can't do it.
And it's something you have to invest in. It's something you have to pay for. I think we've had trouble in Canada recognizing that we need to spend more on our military because we don't quite see the purpose. But I think we're recognizing now that in an uncertain world, that in fact, you get what you pay for, and you need to be. And if you're a small country, which we are in terms of population, you need to have allies. And I think this is being borne in on us increasingly at the present.
And so, peace is something that you don't just sit back and say, isn't that lovely? The blue birds are singing. Peace is something that you have to work at. And peace can be quite expensive. I mean – I'm trying to think who it was, it may have been Clausewitz – but one of the great thinkers about war said, if you want peace, prepare for war.
Interviewer: So, close this off. It seems to be a very difficult time for the 8 billion inhabitants of our little blue planet right now. I think a lot of us grew up with the notion that maybe war was in our past. I think probably a lot of us, at least in the Western world, are surprised of the salience that these things appear to be coming back.
What would you tell people in 2025, whether they're elected officials, or public officials, or people in armed forces, or even people who think they have no relationship to war in the private sector, what would you want to tell them about looking forward? What does war mean? What do they need to know about war?
Margaret MacMillan: I think they need to know you can't always escape it. We've been very privileged in this hemisphere, in the Western hemisphere, because we've been protected by geography. But those protections mean less and less in a world where you get interplanetary travel being as a prospect, you get the militarization of space, which I'm afraid is happening. We've had to think about intercontinental ballistic missiles for some time, but they're more and they're faster, and we have even less warning time. We never had much warning time. I think in the '60s and '70s, we had half an hour, and now it's down to a few minutes.
And so, we're not invulnerable in the same way that we used to be. And that's true for the Americans as well, and for Latin Americans, too. And I think we need to be aware of that. And we can't just say that's happening somewhere else in the world, let them fight it out. I think what happens in Ukraine matters enormously, because if Putin gets away with it, which it looks like he might, it will, of course, encourage him to make further moves if and when his armed forces have recovered sufficiently.
But it will encourage others who are claiming territory from their neighbours. Most borders in this world can be disputed, as we know. There's a famous saying of Trotsky's, the Russian revolutionary, who said, and I think he was absolutely right, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Interviewer: Professor Margaret MacMillan, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. And more importantly, thank you for giving us some wisdom.
Margaret MacMillan: Thank you very much. And thank you for reminding me about the Melian Dialogues.
[00:29:40 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
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