The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  This brings us to the second major strand of interpretation of the interwar disaster, which we will call the crisis of hegemony school.42 This line of interpretation starts exactly where we do here, with the crushing victory of the Entente and the United States in World War I, and asks not why the main thrust of American power was resisted, but why the victors, those who held such a preponderance of power in the wake of the Great War, did not prevail. After all, their superiority was not imaginary. Their victory in 1918 was no accident. In 1945 a similar coalition of forces would impose an even more comprehensive defeat on Italy, Germany and Japan. Furthermore, after 1945 the United States in its sphere went on to organize a highly successful political and economic order.43 What had gone wrong after 1918? Why had American policy miscarried at Versailles? Why had the world economy imploded in 1929? Given the starting point of this book, these are questions that we cannot escape and they too resonate down to the present day. Why does ‘the West’ not play its winning hands better? Where is the capacity for management and leadership?44 Given the rise of China, these questions have an obvious force. The problem is to find the right standard by which to judge this failure and to provide some compelling explanation for the lack of will and judgement that are the serious shortcomings of rich, powerful democracies.

  Faced with these two basic explanatory options – the ‘Dark Continent’ versus the ‘failure of liberal hegemony’ schools – the ambition of this book is to seek a synthesis. But to achieve that is not a matter of mixing and matching elements from both sides. Instead, this book seeks to open the two main schools of historical argument to a third question, one that reveals their common blind spot. What the historical schemas offered by both the ‘Dark Continent’ and the ‘hegemonic failure’ models of history tend to obscure is the radical novelty of the situation confronting world leaders in the early twentieth century.45 This blind spot is inherent in the crude ‘new world, old world’ schema of the Dark Continent interpretation. This ascribes novelty, openness and progress to ‘outside forces’, be they the United States or the revolutionary Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the destructive force of imperialism is vaguely identified with an ‘old world’ or an ‘ancien régime’, an epoch that in some cases is seen stretching back to the age of absolutism, or even further into the depths of blood-soaked European and East Asian history. The disasters of the twentieth century are thus ascribed to the dead weight of the past. The hegemonic crisis model may interpret the interwar crisis differently. But it is even more dramatic in its historical sweep and even less interested in acknowledging that the early twentieth century may actually have been an era of true novelty. The strongest versions of the argument insist that the capitalist world economy has since its inception in the 1500s depended on a central stabilizing power – be it the Italian city states, or the Habsburg monarchy, or the Dutch Republic, or the Victorian Royal Navy. The intervals of succession between these hegemons were typically periods of crisis. The interwar crisis was merely the latest such hiatus, in the interval between British and American hegemony.

  What neither of these visions can encompass is the unprecedented pace, scope and violence of change actually experienced in world affairs from the late nineteenth century onwards. As contemporaries quickly realized, the intense ‘world political’ competition into which the great powers entered in the late nineteenth century was not a stable system with an ancient lineage.46 It was legitimated neither by dynastic tradition nor by its inherent ‘natural’ stability. It was explosive, dangerous, all-consuming, attritional, and in 1914 no more than a few decades old.47 Far from belonging in the lexicon of a venerable but corrupt ‘ancien régime’, the term ‘imperialism’ was a neologism that entered widespread use only around 1900. It encapsulated a novel perspective on a novel phenomenon – the remaking of the political structure of the entire globe under conditions of uninhibited military, economic, political and cultural competition. Both the Dark Continent and the hegemonic failure models are therefore based on a faulty premise. Modern global imperialism was a radical and novel force, not an old-world hangover. By the same token the problem of establishing a hegemonic world order ‘after imperialism’ was unprecedented. The scale of the problem of world order in its modern form had first crowded in on Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as its far-flung imperial system faced challenges from the heartland of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, the Indian subcontinent, the huge land mass of Russia, and Central Asia and East Asia. It was Britain’s world system that had knit these arenas together, and brought their crises into global synchrony. Far from presiding triumphantly over this panorama, the scale of this challenge had forced Britain into a series of strategic improvisations. Threatened by the emergent powers of Germany and Japan, Britain had abandoned its offshore position and opted instead to commit itself to understandings in Europe and Asia, with France, Russia and Japan. Ultimately, in World War I the British-led Entente would prevail, but only by further intensifying its strategic entanglements and extending them around the world through the global reach of the British and French empires and across the Atlantic to the United States. The war thus bequeathed an unprecedented problem of global economic and political order, but no historical model of world hegemony with which to address it. From 1916 the British themselves would attempt feats of intervention, coordination and stabilization to which they had never aspired in the empire’s Victorian heyday. Never was British imperial history more closely entwined with world history and vice versa, an entanglement that continued perforce into the post-war period. As we shall see, despite the limited resources at its disposal, Lloyd George’s government in the post-war years played a quite unprecedented role as the pivot of European finance and diplomacy. It was also his downfall. The train of crises that reached their nadir in 1923 ended Lloyd George’s tenure as Prime Minister and exposed for all to see the limits of Britain’s hegemonic capacity. There was only one power, if any, that could fill this role – a new role, one that no nation had ever seriously attempted before – the United States.

  When President Wilson travelled to Europe in December 1918 he took with him a team of geographers, historians, political scientists and economists to make sense of the new world map.48 The spatial sweep of the disorder confronting the major powers in the wake of the war was vast. Throughout the length and breadth of Eurasia the war had created an unprecedented vacuum. Of the ancient empires, only China and Russia were to survive. The Soviet state was the first to recover. But the temptation to interpret the ‘stand off’ between Wilson and Lenin in 1918 as an anticipation of the Cold War is a further instance of the refusal to recognize the exceptional situation created by the war. The threat of Bolshevik revolution was certainly present in the minds of conservatives all over the world after 1918. But this was a fear of civil war and anarchic disorder and it was in large part a phantom menace. It was in no way comparable to the awesome military presence of Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, or even the strategic heft of Tsarist Russia before 1914. Lenin’s regime survived the revolution, defeat at the hands of Germany and civil war, but only by the skin of its teeth. Communism was throughout the 1920s fighting from the defensive. It is questionable whether the United States and the Soviet Union were on the same footing even in 1945. A generation earlier, to treat Wilson and Lenin as equivalent is to fail to acknowledge one of the truly defining features of the situation – the dramatic implosion of Russian power. In 1920 Russia appeared so weak that the Polish Republic, itself less than two years old, decided that this was the time to invade. The Red Army was strong enough to ward off that threat. But when the Soviets marched westwards they suffered a crushing defeat outside Warsaw. The contrast to the era of the Hitler–Stalin Pact and the Cold War could hardly be more stark.

  Given the astonishing vacuum of power in Eurasia from Beijing to the Baltic, it is hardly surprising that the most aggressive exponents of imperialism in Japan, Germany, Britain and Italy sensed a heaven-sent opportuni
ty for aggrandizement. The uninhibited ambitions of the arch-imperialists in Lloyd George’s cabinet, or General Ludendorff in Germany, or Goto Shinpei in Japan, provide ample material for the Dark Continent narrative. But violent as their visions clearly were, we must be attentive to the nuance of their war-talk. A figure such as Ludendorff was under no illusion that his grand visions of the total redesign of Eurasia were expressions of traditional statecraft.49 He justified the scale of his ambition precisely on the basis that the world was entering a new and radical phase, the ultimate or the penultimate phase in a final global struggle for power. Men like these were no exponents of any kind of ‘ancien régime’. They were often highly critical of traditionalists who in the name of balance and legitimacy shrank from seizing the historic opportunity. Far from being exponents of the old world the most violent antagonists of the new liberal world order were themselves futuristic innovators. They were not, however, realists. The commonplace distinction between idealists and realists concedes too much to Wilson’s opponents. Though Wilson may have been humiliated, the imperialists also found themselves on the back foot. Already during the war the problems inherent in any truly grandiose programme of expansion had become amply apparent. As we shall see, within weeks of its ratification in March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the ultimate imperialist peace, was repudiated by its own creators who found themselves struggling to escape the contradictions of their own policy. Japanese imperialists raged impotently against the refusal of their government to take decisive steps to subordinate all of China. The most successful imperialists were the British, their main zone of expansion in the Middle East. But this was truly the exception that proves the rule. Amidst the rivalry of British and French imperial demands, the entire region was reduced to chaos and disorder. It was World War I and its aftermath that made of the Middle East the strategic albatross it has remained to this day.50 On the better-established axes of British imperial power, towards the White Dominions, Ireland and India, the main line of policy was one of retreat, autonomy and Home Rule. It was a line pursued inconsistently and with considerable reluctance, but nevertheless it was unmistakable in its direction.

  Whereas the familiar narrative of Wilsonian failure pictures the American President as caught up in the irrepressible aggression of old-war imperialism, the actual situation was that the former imperialists were of their own accord arriving at the conclusion that they must search for new strategies appropriate to a new era, after the age of imperialism.51 A number of key figures came to embody this new raison d’état. Gustav Stresemann brought Germany into a cooperative relation with both the Entente powers and the United States. The British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, the eldest son of the Edwardian imperialist firebrand Joseph Chamberlain, shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Foreign Minister Stresemann for their tireless efforts toward a European settlement. The third to receive a Nobel Prize, for the Locarno Treaty, was Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister and ex-socialist for whom the 1928 Pact to Outlaw Aggressive War was named. Kijuro Shidehara, Japan’s Foreign Minister, embodied the new approach to East Asian security. All of them orientated themselves towards the United States as the key to establishing a new order. But to identify this shift too closely with individual figures, however significant, is to miss the point. These individuals were often ambiguous exponents of transformation, torn between their personal attachment to older modes of policy-making and what they perceived to be the imperatives of a new age. What made the likes of Churchill confident that the new order was robust and what made Hitler and Trotsky so despondent was precisely that it seemed to be founded on foundations more solid than the force of individual personality.

  It is tempting to identify this new atmosphere of the 1920s with ‘civil society’ and the plethora of internationalist and pacific NGOs that sprang up in the wake of World War I.52 However, the tendency to identify innovative moral entrepreneurship with international peace societies, cosmopolitan congresses of experts, the passionate solidarity of the international women’s movement, or the far-flung activities of anti-colonial activists, backhandedly reinstates the well-worn stereotypes about the recalcitrant persistence of imperialist impulses at the heart of power. Conversely, the powerlessness of the peace movement licenses the cynical realists in their hard-bitten insistence that, in the final analysis, it is only power that counts. The wager of this book is different. It seeks to locate a dramatic shift in the calculus of power, not external to, but within the government machinery itself, in the interaction between military force, economics and diplomacy. As we shall see, this was most obviously the case in France, the most maligned of the ‘old world powers’. After 1916, rather than remaining mired in ancient grudges, we will see that Paris’s overriding aim was to forge a novel, Western-orientated Atlantic alliance with Britain and the United States. It would thus free itself from the odious association with Tsarist autocracy on which it had relied since the 1890s for a dubious promise of security. It would bring France’s foreign policy into line with its Republican constitution. This search for an Atlantic alliance was the novel preoccupation of French policy that after 1917 unified individuals as far apart as Georges Clemenceau and Raymond Poincaré.

  In Germany the scene is dominated by the figure of Gustav Stresemann, the great statesman of the Weimar Republic’s stabilization period. And from the climactic Ruhr crisis of 1923 onwards, Stresemann was no doubt crucial to anchoring Germany’s Western orientation.53 But, as a nationalist of a Bismarckian stripe, he was a late and hard-won convert to the new international politics. The political force that sustained every single one of his famous initiatives was a broad-based parliamentary coalition with which Stresemann in its inception had been bitterly at odds. The three members of this coalition, the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and progressive Liberals, were the leading democratic forces of the pre-war Reichstag. All three shared the distinction of having been, at one time, bitter foes of Bismarck. What brought them together in June 1917 under the leadership of Matthias Erzberger, the populist Christian Democrat, were the disastrous consequences of the U-boat campaign against the United States. As we shall see, the first test of their new policy came as early as the winter of 1917–18. When Lenin sued for peace, the Reichstag coalition sought as best they could to deflect the heedless expansionism of Ludendorff and to shape what they hoped would be a legitimate and therefore sustainable hegemony in the East. The notorious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk will emerge from this book as comparable to Versailles, not in its vindictiveness, but in the sense that it too was a ‘good peace gone bad’. What marked the argument within Germany over the victorious peace of Brest-Litovsk as a significant overture to the new era of international politics, is the fact that it was always as much about the domestic order of Germany as about foreign affairs. It was the refusal of the Kaiser’s regime either to make good on promises of domestic reform or to craft a viable new diplomacy that prepared the ground for the revolutionary changes of the autumn of 1918. When Germany faced defeat in the West, it was, as we shall see, the Reichstag majority that dared, not once, but three times between November 1918 and September 1923 to wager the future of their country on subordination to the Western Powers. From 1949 down to the present the Reichstag majority’s lineal descendants, the CDU, SPD and FDP, remain the mainstays both of democracy in the Federal Republic and of their country’s commitment to the European project.

  In this nexus between domestic and foreign policy, and in the choice between radical insurgency and compliance, there are remarkable parallels in the early twentieth century between Germany’s situation and that of Japan. Threatened in the 1850s by outright subordination to foreign power, facing Russia, Britain, China and the United States as potential antagonists, one Japanese response was to seize the initiative and to embark on a programme of domestic reform and external aggression. It was this course, pursued with great effectiveness and daring, that earned for Japan the sobriquet of the ‘Prussia of the East’. But what i
s too easily forgotten is that this was always counterbalanced by another tendency: the pursuit of security through imitation, alliance and cooperation, Japan’s tradition of new, Kasumigaseki diplomacy.54 This was achieved first through the partnership with Britain in 1902 and then through a strategic modus vivendi with the United States. Simultaneously, however, Japan was undergoing domestic political change. The alignment between democratization and a peaceful foreign policy was no more simple in Japan than it was anywhere else. But during and after World War I, Japan’s emerging system of multi-party parliamentary politics acted as a substantial check on the military leadership. It was the importance of this linkage that in turn raised the stakes. By the late 1920s, those calling for a foreign policy of confrontation were also demanding a domestic revolution. It was in the 1920s in Taisho-era Japan that the bipolar quality of interwar politics was most manifest. So long as the Western Powers could hold the ring in the world economy and secure peace in East Asia, it was the Japanese liberals who held the upper hand. If that military, economic and political framework was to come apart, it would be the advocates of imperialist aggression who would seize their opportunity.

  The upshot of this reinterpretation is that contrary to the Dark Continent narrative, the violence of the Great War was resolved in the first instance not into the Cold War dualism of rival American and Soviet projects, nor into the no less anachronistic vision of a three-way contest between American democracy, fascism and Communism. What the war gave rise to was a multisided, polycentric search for strategies of pacification and appeasement. And in that quest the calculations of all the great powers pivoted on one key factor, the United States. It was this conformism that filled Hitler and Trotsky with such gloom. Both of them hoped that the British Empire might emerge as a challenger to the United States. Trotsky foresaw a new inter-imperialist war.55 Hitler already in Mein Kampf had made clear his desire for an Anglo-German alliance against America and the dark forces of the world Jewish conspiracy.56 But despite much bluster from the Tory governments of the 1920s, there was little prospect of an Anglo-American confrontation. In a strategic concession of extraordinary significance, Britain peacefully ceded primacy to the United States. The opening of British democracy to government by the Labour Party only reinforced this impulse. Both the Labour cabinets over which Ramsay MacDonald presided, in 1924 and 1929–31, were resolutely Atlanticist in orientation.