by Morris, Ian;
Ever since Japan’s abortive effort to conquer China in the 1590s, rulers in the Eastern core had assumed that the costs of interstate war would outweigh the benefits, but the coming of the West turned that assumption on its head. Whichever Eastern nation industrialized, reorganized, and rearmed fastest would be able not just to hold the Western imperialists off but also to hold the rest of the East down.
It was ultimately Japanese industrialization, not British warships, that was China’s nemesis. Japan lacked resources; China had plenty. Japan needed markets; China was full of them. Arguments in Tokyo over what should be done were furious and even murderous, but across two generations the country gradually committed to forcing its way into China’s materials and markets. By the 1930s Japan’s most militant officers had determined to take over the entire Eastern core, turn China and Southeast Asia into colonies, and expel the Western imperialists. A War of the East had begun.
The great difference between this War of the East and the eighteenth-century War of the West, though, was that the War of the East took place in a world where the West already ruled. This complicated everything. Thus in 1895 when Japan swept aside Chinese resistance to its advances in Korea, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II reacted by sending his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia a rather awful drawing called “The Yellow Peril” (Figure 10.7), urging him “to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race.” Nicholas responded by confiscating much of the territory Japan had seized from China.
Figure 10.7. “The Yellow Peril,” an 1895 drawing based on a sketch by Kaiser Wilhelm II, aimed, he explained, to encourage Europeans “to unite in resisting the inroad of Buddhism, heathenism, and barbarism for the Defense of the Cross.”
Other Westerners, though, saw advantages in working with Japan, using its burgeoning power to police the East for them. The first opportunity came in 1900, when a Chinese secret society called the Boxers United in Righteousness rose up against Western imperialism (claiming, among other things, that a hundred days of martial-arts training would make its members bulletproof). It took twenty thousand foreign troops to suppress them; and most of the soldiers—though you would not know it from Western accounts (particularly the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster 55 Days in Peking)—were Japanese. So pleased was Britain with this outcome that in 1902 it signed a naval alliance recognizing Japan’s great-power status in the East. Confident of British neutrality, in 1904 Japan took its revenge on Russia, sinking its Far Eastern fleet and overwhelming its army in the biggest land battle ever fought. When Tsar Nicholas sent his main fleet twenty thousand miles around the Old World to put matters right, Japanese battleships sank it, too.
Fewer than fifty years had passed since Looty relocated to London, but the old Eastern core had responded so dynamically that it could already defeat a Western empire. “What happened … in 1904–5,” the disgraced Russian commander Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin concluded, “was nothing more than a skirmish with the advance guard … Only with a common recognition that keeping Asia peaceful is a matter of importance to all of Europe … can we keep the ‘yellow peril’ at bay.” But Europe ignored his advice.
THE WARS OF THE WORLD
Between 1914 and 1991 the Western core fought the greatest wars in history: the First World War, between 1914 and 1918, to determine whether Germany would create a European land empire; the Second, between 1939 and 1945, over the same question; and the Cold War, between 1947 and 1991, to settle how the United States and Soviet Union would divide the spoils (Figure 10.8). Together these added up to a new War of the West that dwarfed the eighteenth-century version. It subsumed the War of the East, left a hundred million dead, and threatened humanity’s very survival. In 1991 the West still ruled, but it seemed to many that Kuropatkin’s fears were finally coming true: the East was poised to overtake it.
The story of how the new War of the West began has often been told—how the Ottoman Empire’s long decline filled the Balkans with terrorists/freedom fighters; how, through bungling and bad luck, a gang called the Black Hand murdered the heir to Austria’s Habsburg throne in June 1914 (the bomb tossed by the would-be assassin bounced off the Austrian archduke’s car, only for the chauffeur to take a wrong turn, back up, and stop right in front of a second assassin, who made no mistake); and how the web of treaties designed to keep Europe’s peace dragged everyone over the precipice together.
What followed is equally well known—how Europe’s modernized states called up their young men in unprecedented numbers, armed them with unprecedented weapons, and bent their vast energies to unprecedented slaughter. Before 1914, some intellectuals had argued that great-power war had become impossible because the world’s economies were now so interlinked that the moment war broke out all of them would collapse, ending the conflict. By 1918, though, the lesson seemed to be that only those states that could effectively harness their vast, complex economies could survive the strains of twentieth-century total war.
Figure 10.8. The world at war, 1914–1991. Gray shading shows the United States and its major allies around 1980; the Soviet Union and its major allies are indicated by diagonal lines.
The war seemed to have shown that the advantage lay with liberal, democratic states, whose citizens were most fully committed to the struggle. Back in the first millennium BCE, Easterners and Westerners had all learned that dynastic empires were the most effective organizations for waging war; now, in the space of a single decade, they learned that these dynastic empires—history’s most enduring form of government, with an unbroken heritage from Assyria, Persia, and Qin—were no longer compatible with war.
First to go was China’s Qing dynasty. Mired in debt, defeat, and disorder, the boy emperor Puyi’s ministers lost control of the army as early as 1911, but when the rebel general Yuan Shikai promoted himself to emperor in 1916—as rebel generals had been doing for two thousand years—he found that he could not hold the country together either. Another military clique restored Puyi in 1917, with no better results. China’s imperial history ended a few days later, if not with a whimper then with just a very small bang: a single airplane dropped a bomb on the Forbidden City in Beijing, Puyi was deposed again, and the country descended into anarchy.
Next was Russia’s Romanov dynasty. Defeat by Japan had almost toppled Tsar Nicholas in 1905, but the First World War finished the job. In 1917 liberals swept his family from power and in 1918 Bolsheviks shot them. Germany’s Hohenzollerns and Austria’s Habsburgs quickly followed, escaping the Romanovs’ fate only by fleeing their homelands. In Turkey the Ottomans limped on, but only until 1922.
Despite the destruction, World War I strengthened Western rule by sweeping away Europe’s archaic dynastic empires and leaving China weaker than ever. The big winners seemed to be France and above all Britain, who not only gobbled up German colonies and pushed their oceanic empires still farther into Africa, the Pacific, and the oil fields of the old Ottoman Empire, but also bullied their Eastern ally Japan into handing over most of the German colonies it had captured. By 1919 more than a third of the world’s landmass and almost a third of its population were ruled from either London or Paris.
Yet the great swaths of color that still marked these empires in older atlases when I was a schoolboy were misleading. As well as strengthening Western power, the war redistributed it. Europe had fought beyond its means and the bills overwhelmed even British credit. Inflation hit 22 percent in 1920; the next year unemployment passed 11 percent. Eighty-six million worker-days were lost to strikes. The sun still never set on the British Empire, but it was struggling to stay open for business.
To pay its debts Britain hemorrhaged capital, most of it flowing across the Atlantic. The war had been hell, but the United States had had a hell of a war, emerging as both workshop and banker to the world. Back in the fifteenth century the Western core had shifted from the Mediterranean toward western Europe and in the seventeenth it had shifted again toward the oceanic empires of the northwes
t. Now, in the twentieth, it moved once more as northwest Europe’s bankrupt oceanic empires lost out to a North American empire.
The United States had turned itself into a new kind of organization, one we might call a subcontinental empire. Unlike traditional dynastic empires, it had no ancient aristocracy ruling downtrodden peasants; unlike Europe’s oceanic empires, it had no small, liberal, industrialized homeland holding dominion over palm and pine. Rather, after almost exterminating its native population, fighting a brutal civil war, and pushing millions of ex-slaves back into virtual serfdom, Euro-Americans had spread democratic citizenship from sea to shining sea, with prosperous farmers feeding a massive industrial heartland in the northeast and upper Midwest and buying its goods. By 1914 this subcontinental American Empire already rivaled Europe’s oceanic empires, and after 1918 its businessmen went global.
The giant sucking sound of European wealth rushing into the United States astonished contemporaries. An American secretary of state observed, “The financial center of the world, which required thousands of years to journey from the banks of the Euphrates to the Thames and the Seine, seems [to be] passing to the Hudson between daybreak and dark.” By 1929 Americans held more than $15 billion in foreign investments, almost as much as Britons had owned in 1913, and their global trade was worth almost 50 percent more.
The golden age of global capitalism seemed reborn under American leadership, but there was one crucial difference. Before 1914, thought Keynes, “the influence of London on credit conditions throughout the world was so predominant that the Bank of England could almost have claimed to be the conductor of the international orchestra,” but after 1918 the United States was unwilling to take on the job. Fleeing Europe’s contagious rivalries and wars, American politicians left the conductor’s podium empty, withdrawing into political isolation worthy of eighteenth-century China or Japan. While times were good the orchestra improvised and muddled through, but when they turned bad its music became cacophony.
In October 1929 a little bungling, a lot of bad luck, and the absence of a conductor turned an American stock market bubble into an international financial disaster. Contagion raced through the capitalist world: banks folded, credit evaporated, and currencies collapsed. Few starved, but by Christmas 1932 one American worker in four was jobless. In Germany it was closer to one in two. Lines of the gray-faced unemployed stretched out, “gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as animals in a trap,” the English journalist George Orwell thought. “They simply could not understand what was happening to them.”
At least until the mid-1930s everything the liberal democracies did just made things worse. Not only did it seem that the paradox of development had laid the Western core low; it also looked as if the advantages of backwardness were coming into play elsewhere. Russia, for centuries a rather backward periphery, had been reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like the United States, it joined a burgeoning industrial core to a vast agricultural hinterland, but unlike the United States, it promoted state ownership, collective agriculture, and central planning. The Soviet Union mobilized its people more like a modern Western state than like an old dynastic empire, yet its autocrats Lenin and Stalin ruled more like tsars than democratic presidents.
The Soviet Union was a kind of anti-America—a subcontinental empire, but decidedly illiberal. Stalin preached equality but built a centralized economy by forcibly transporting millions of his comrades around his empire and locking another million in gulags. Ideologically suspect ethnic groups and class enemies (often the same thing) were purged. And unlike the failing capitalist economies, the successful Soviet Union did let 10 million of its subjects starve. Yet Stalin was clearly doing something right, for while capitalist industry collapsed between 1928 and 1937, Soviet output quadrupled. “I have seen the future, and it works,” the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously told his fellow Americans after visiting the Soviet Union.*
By 1930 it seemed to many that the real lesson of World War I was not that liberal democracy was the shape of the future: it was that the Anglo-Franco-American alliance had won in spite of, not because of, its liberalism. The real answer was subcontinental empire, and the less liberal, the better. Japan, which had profited so much from following liberal models, abandoned them when global markets and its trade-oriented economy went into a tailspin. With unemployment soaring, democracy floundering, and Communist agitation growing, militarists stepped in, baying for an empire Japan could live off. The army—particularly its radical junior officers—went haywire, exploiting the Western democracies’ disarray and China’s civil wars to annex Manchuria and push toward Beijing. “It is only by bringing about Japanese-Manchurian cooperation and Japanese-Chinese friendship,” a lieutenant-colonel explained, “that the Japanese people can become rulers of Asia and be prepared to wage the final and decisive war against the various white races.”
Up to a point, militarism paid off. Japan’s economy grew by 72 percent in the 1930s; steel output rose eighteenfold. But once again the costs were high. “Cooperation” and “friendship” often meant enslavement and slaughter, and even by the low, dishonest standards of the 1930s, Japanese brutality was shocking. Further, by 1940 it was clear that conquest had not solved Japan’s problems, since the war consumed resources even faster than it captured them. Of every five gallons of oil the battleships and bombers burned, four had to be bought from Westerners. The army’s plan—keep conquering—brought no relief, and with China becoming a quagmire, an even more alarming naval plan gained traction: to strike into Southeast Asia and liberate its oil and rubber from Western imperialists, even if that meant war with America.
Most alarming of all was the plan coming out of Germany. Defeat, unemployment, and financial collapse scarred the heirs of Goethe and Kant so deeply that they were ready to listen even to a madman blaming the Jews and peddling the panacea of conquest. “The first cause of the stability of our currency is the concentration camp,” Adolf Hitler assured his finance minister as he brutalized and banished Germany’s Jewish business class and threw trade unionists into jail. Yet there was method in Hitler’s madness: deficit spending, state ownership, and rearmament wiped out unemployment and doubled industrial output during the 1930s.
Hitler openly trumpeted his plan to secure Germany’s western flank by defeating the oceanic empires and then to replace eastern Europe’s Slavs and Jews with sturdy Aryan farmers. His vision of a subcontinental empire centered on Germany went beyond illiberal to downright genocidal; and few Westerners could believe he really meant it. Their self-deception brought on the one thing they most wished to avoid, another all-out war. For a few dark months it looked—for the first time since 1812—like a land empire might unite Europe after all, but in an uncanny echo of Napoleon, Hitler was turned back at the English Channel, in the snows of Moscow, and in the deserts of Egypt. Overreaching, he tried to fold Japan’s War of the East into his own War of the West, but instead of knocking Britain out of the war this only brought the United States in. War made bedfellows of the liberal American and illiberal Soviet empires, and despite looting the minerals and labor of Europe and the East, Germany and Japan could not resist these empires’ combined money, manpower, and manufactures.
In April 1945 American and Soviet troops joined hands in Germany, embracing, drinking toasts, and dancing together; days later Hitler shot himself and Germany surrendered. In August, as fire rained from the skies and atomic bombs turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into ash, Japan’s god-king broke with all tradition to speak to his people directly. Making what gets my vote as history’s greatest understatement, he informed them, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” Even then die-hard generals attempted a coup in the hope of fighting on, but on September 2 Japan surrendered too.
Nineteen forty-five simultaneously ended Japan’s attempt to win the War of the East and expel the Western imperialists, and Germany’s to create a subcontinental empire in Europ
e, but it also ended the western European oceanic empires. Too drained by total war to resist nationalist revolts any longer, these melted away within a generation. Europe was shattered. Its “economic, social and political collapse,” one American officer mused in 1945, seemed “unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire.”
Western social development did not collapse in 1945, though, because the core was by now so big that not even the greatest war ever fought could wreck all of it. The Soviets had rebuilt their industries beyond Germany’s reach, and bombs had barely touched the United States.* By contrast, the devastation visited by Japan on China and by the United States on Japan had gutted the Eastern core, with the consequence that the Second World War—like the First—made Western rule still stronger. There seemed little doubt that Western dominance was here to stay; the question was whether its leadership would be Soviet or American.
These two empires divided the old European core between them, splitting Germany down the middle. American moneymen then hashed out a new international financial system for capitalism and crafted the Marshall Plan, perhaps the most enlightened piece of self-interest on record. If Europeans had money in their pockets, Americans reasoned, they could buy American food, import American machinery to rebuild their own industry, and—most important of all—restrain themselves from voting Communist; so America simply gave them $13.5 billion, one-twentieth of its entire 1948 production.
Western Europeans mostly grabbed America’s money, accepted its military leadership, and joined or drifted toward a democratic, pro-trade European union.† (The irony of the United States nudging Europeans toward a pale version of a land empire under West German industrial domination was lost on no one.) Eastern Europeans accepted Soviet military leadership and a Communist, inward-turned Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Instead of pumping resources into eastern Europe and promoting democracy, the Soviets pumped resources out and jailed or shot their opponents, but even so, eastern European output regained prewar levels by 1949. In the American sphere things went better still, and with remarkably few jailings or shootings, output doubled between 1948 and 1964.