Graduation address: Professor Sir Hew Strachan
Friday 7 December 2018
Chancellor, Principal, ladies and gentlemen, and – most importantly – new graduates:
A month ago, on 11 November, communities across Britain and much of the world marked the centenary of the armistice with Germany in 1918. Conventionally we associate that moment with the ending of the First World War. But it did not end the war, any more than it ended all wars. A hundred years ago, the University’s Rector was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, a Fifer (at least in part) who had been elected in 1916, the year of the Somme, when he was Commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force. He delivered his Rectorial Address in May 1919, and in it he described a war which was drawing to a close, rather than one which had already been concluded.
An armistice is a pause in the fighting, not a peace settlement – and although the first peace treaty would be signed at Versailles the following month, the last – that with Turkey – would not be agreed until 1923. While the peacemakers deliberated in Paris, the realities on the ground were being settled by fighting, by wars of national self-determination, civil conflict and revolution. Between 1919 and 1923 possibly four million more were killed – almost half as many again as in the First World War proper – in fighting that raged from the Baltic to the Balkans, and across the southern arc of the British empire, from Ireland to India. Few British soldiers would be home by Christmas 1918, even if most Germans were.
It is those returning soldiers that I want you to think about this morning. When we invoke the memory of the war, we tend to focus on the dead: the graduates of 1914 who would go to war and not return, or the school leaver who did not come up to university because he was in khaki. We remember them but not the vast majority of those who served, the eighty-eight percent who came back. In May 1919 some were in the audience to hear Douglas Haig’s words. Like him, having confronted the challenges of the war, they faced the complexities of reconciliation, peacemaking, and peacekeeping. They did so in an era of populism, political extremism, and domestic division. This was the challenge which Douglas Haig gave the students of 1919: ”The seeds of future conflicts”, he said, ”are found in every quarter of the globe, awaiting the right conditions, moral, political and economic, to burst once more into activity and cover the fields with harvests of young men”.
Three years later, when Haig became the University’s Chancellor, his successor as Rector, JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, gave his address. His theme was courage. He told the students of 1922 that their predecessors who had died in the war would ‘want to know if you have learned wisely from what befell them; if you have they will be braced in the feeling that they did not die in vain’. His speech criticised his own generation, the old men who were responsible for the war but did not have to fight in it. And he issued an injunction to the younger generation – your predecessors: ‘Learn as a beginning how world-shaking situations arise and how they may be countered. Doubt all your betters [by whom he meant your elders] who would deny you the right of partnership. Begin by doubting all such in high places – except, of course, your professors. But doubt all other professors… If it necessitates your pushing some of us out of our places, still push’.
We today may be emerging from nothing more serious than the commemoration of a centenary, not a world war, but the international and domestic situation that confronted the student body then has resonances for you today – with its divisions of the moment and its uncertainties for the future. The older generation is not doing a very good job. They require the courage and conviction of youth to face them. My immediate and most pleasurable task is to congratulate you: enjoy your success today – but tomorrow recognise the responsibilities
Professor Sir Hew Strachan
School of International Relations