Historians and novelists love asking “What would have happened if…?”
Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle imagines the consequences of Germany and Japan winning World War II, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America imagines what would have happened if Charles Lindberg had been elected president. These are counterfactual histories — they run counter to the facts. They are things that could have happened, but didn’t.
We often use counterfactual reasoning in our daily lives, in situations that are less dramatic than those we find in novels. For example, suppose that I got drunk last night and argued with my colleagues. Today, I regret the argument and wish that I had acted differently — counterfactually. The counterfactual change I would make is not drinking. Not drinking generates a counterfactual scenario in which I didn’t have an argument, and in which I am not suffering regret today.
Historians like to consider more complicated counterfactuals. They ask things like: What would have happened if Alexander had conquered Rome, or Britain had stood up to Hitler in 1938? As with my drinking example, these sorts of questions are taken to reveal what we should have done but didn’t.
The counterfactual confrontation of Hitler in 1938 is often followed by Hitler backing down and the avoidance of World War II. At the Munich conference in 1938, Czechoslovakia was asked by the UK and France to cede part of its territory to Germany. At the time, the UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought that he had averted military conflict, and secured peace in Europe. Today, it is usually seen as an unsuccessful act of appeasement. The lesson history appears to teach us is that another ‘Munich’ must, and can, be avoided. We should stand up to aggressive regimes. We often draw similar conclusions about our own lives: If only I hadn’t got drunk, I wouldn’t have got into an argument. It’s easy to imagine a different course branching off from a decision we made differently. However, this sort of thinking is misleading.
The first reason we are misled is that a counterfactual change sounds like it is easy to make. It would have been easy for me not to have drunk last night, right? However, historians recognise that we can’t just have done things differently. We (usually) make decisions in ways that seem reasonable to us at the time, so it turns out that a lot of things would have had to have been different for us to have made decisions differently.
Continuing with the Munich example, Chamberlain was not simply deciding whether to stand up to Hitler, or not. He knew that the UK was unprepared for war in 1938, which limited his options. The memory of World War I was also still fresh, so he was not alone in wanting to avoid war at all costs. Chamberlain couldn’t just have acted differently; the environment in which he was operating and …
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