The Deluge
Page 28
Far from serving as the stable anchor of a new international economic order, the effect of the wartime mobilization on the US economy was profoundly destabilizing. Both the American public and key decision-makers in the Wilson administration came to experience their country no longer as standing detached and pre-eminent above the global crisis, but as dangerously enmeshed within it. The stage was set for the post-war backlash.
Table 5. A Low-Growth War Economy: The United States, 1916–20
11
Armistice: Setting the Wilsonian Script
The battle on the Western Front turned decisively against Germany in the first weeks of July 1918. On 22 July Ludendorff ordered a general retreat from the Marne salient. Since the beginning of the year the German Army had lost 900,000 men. Fresh American troops were arriving at a rate of 250,000 per month. Twenty-five powerful divisions had already formed in France. Fifty-five more were building on the other side of the Atlantic.1 From week to week the balance would tilt more and more severely against Germany. This did not, however, imply an immediate end to the war. It was not until October that the German Army began to disintegrate. Faced with far more overwhelming odds, Hitler’s regime would use every means of coercion and propaganda to rally the Reich for an apocalyptic last stand. There were those in Germany in 1918 who wished to do the same. If they had gained the upper hand, 1919 might have witnessed the kind of inferno that laid waste to much of Germany and central Europe in 1944–5. Instead, thanks to decisions taken by the remnants of the Kaiser’s regime, the majority parties in the Reichstag and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans, the war was brought to an end on the morning of 11 November 1918.
To this day, the decision for peace in November 1918 is not given its due as a remarkable victory for democratic politics. This was hardest for Germany. But the armistice was controversial also in London, Paris and Washington. Their leaders too had to choose peace. Were they right to settle for an armistice rather than fighting on to an outright German surrender? By October Germany’s defences were collapsing. If the war had been continued even for a few weeks, the Entente might have ended the year by imposing an unconditional surrender. Instead Germany managed not only to rescue itself from the jaws of absolute defeat but, to a surprising degree, to define the politics of the peace. For sure, Germany was no longer in a position to claim the ‘peace of equality’ promised by Wilson in January 1917. Nevertheless, in the course of negotiating the armistice, Berlin quite deliberately wrote Wilson and his promise of a peace without defeat back into the heart of the script.
I
After the failure of the last German offensive in July and the immediate French counter-attack, it was the British push towards Amiens that knocked Germany onto the ropes. After 8 August, ‘the black day of the German Army’, Ludendorff and Hindenburg never regained their balance.2 But thanks to wishful thinking and the tangled lines of communication between Berlin and the Kaiser’s headquarters at Spa, it wasn’t until the second week of September that the true severity of the military situation began to dawn on Germany’s politicians. In November 1917 the Reichstag majority had installed the Christian Democrat Georg von Hertling as Chancellor. He was expected to protect civil rights on the home front, to democratize Prussia, and to craft a sustainable and legitimate peace in the East. He had failed to deliver on every front. The result of the fiasco of Brest-Litovsk was to rob Germany of any credibility as an international actor. As Friedrich Ebert of the Socialist Party charged in Reichstag committee: ‘We are pursuing a policy that is internally dishonest. One takes what one can get! And speaks of reconciliation and negotiations . . . at the political level we face nothing but a field of rubble!’3 In mid-September 1918 Austria appealed openly for peace and yet Hertling’s government refused to react. With its allies collapsing, it was clear that Germany needed to negotiate, but it would need a new government to do so. Of course, both the British and Americans had stated that they expected regime change in Germany. Even the conservatives around the Kaiser were now growing used to the idea that they might have to concede a democratic facade. But power was slipping from their grasp. To the Reichstag majority parties, currying favour with the West was not the point. They demanded power because the existing regime was politically bankrupt. Only the Liberals, Centre Party and SPD appeared to be capable of formulating a coherent foreign policy and backing it with the necessary popular support. Like Russia’s revolutionaries of February 1917, their aim was not to surrender. On the contrary, by putting the home front on a democratic basis they hoped to negotiate from a position of relative strength.4 When Matthias Erzberger on 12 September 1918 first summoned the SPD to join the Centre Party in a new Reich government, the leading Liberal spokesman Friedrich Naumann chose a telling historical analogy. He hoped that the entry of the socialists into government would bring to the Reich the same rush of patriotic excitement with which the French radical Léon Gambetta had re-energized resistance to Bismarck’s invading armies in the autumn of 1870.5
In the first days of October the liberal Prince Max von Baden took office as Chancellor on a governmental platform agreed between the SPD, Liberals and Centre Party. Internally his government promised the democratization of Prussia, an end to martial law, and a fully parliamentary constitution in the Reich. A peace on the basis of a League of Nations was a logical complement to this domestic reformism. Berlin offered the full restoration of Belgium and complete autonomy for all the territories liberated from the Tsar. But if peace was refused, the new government of Germany would launch a democratic levée en masse and steel itself to fight to the finish.6 That such a government would appeal to President Wilson for mediation was not surprising. But it was not an automatic choice. The new Chancellor distrusted the American President. Von Baden was particularly opposed to any unilateral approach to Washington. London and Paris could not help but regard any such move as an attempt to gain bargaining advantage by setting the Entente and America against each other. It would be interpreted as further evidence of Berlin’s bad faith. It was not the way for a government to start whose watchword was credibility and coherence. If Germany was serious about making peace, it must seek it directly with the powers whose armies were about to win a crushing victory in the field, Britain and France, not attempt to gain leverage by parlaying with their American associate.7
This hostility to Wilson was shared by prominent voices in the SPD. From the right of the party, Albert Suedekum drafted a memo arguing that the real enemy both of Germany and of Europe as a whole was American capitalism. Wilson ‘was openly aspiring to the role as arbiter of the world’.8 His aim was to humble all of Europe, reducing the continent to a collection of national republics all of which were economically dependent on America. The only way for Europe to escape this collective ‘violation’ was for the SPD to seek to settle the terms of a European democratic peace with the Socialists in France and the British Labour Party.
But this was not the majority view amongst the spokesmen of the Reichstag majority. In August 1918 Matthias Erzberger finished his book Der Völkerbund: Der Weg zum Weltfrieden (The League of Nations: The Path to World Peace).9 Erzberger’s aim was to persuade the German public that contrary to the prevailing view Wilson was not merely a hypocrite, but in fact the representative of a tradition of liberalism deeply rooted in American democratic and anti-militarist politics. Furthermore, despite the bellicose rhetoric of the British and French governments, the League of Nations idea had genuine friends there as well. Imperial Germany had put itself in the wrong already before 1914 by flouting the Hague conference on international arbitration. Germany must not surrender the new politics of peace to its enemies. It must claim the idea of a league of peace as part of its own national history, in such forerunners as the medieval Hanseatic League and in philosopher Immanuel Kant’s speculations on an order of perpetual peace. Furthermore, after the experience of this war who could doubt that Germany had a vested interest in peace? If the war ended with a League
, Erzberger insisted, Germany would have won far more than it would be losing.10 As far as Philipp Scheidemann and the SPD were concerned, the war had demonstrated beyond doubt that as far as Germany was concerned, war had lost its utility as a means of politics. Whatever the triumphs of its soldiers, Germany could not prevail against a global coalition.11 Instead, Germany should commit itself to compulsory international arbitration overseen by a League with a strong executive. Erzberger foresaw a League reinforced by the weight of world public opinion and sustained by a common underpinning of Christian and democratic values. Public opinion was a nebulous thing no doubt. But it was a force that Germany’s militarists had for too long ignored. In October all 50,000 copies of Erzberger’s first edition were sold within a matter of weeks.12
Above all, however, Germany’s internationalism was Atlanticist. On 12 September 1918, two weeks before the final crisis broke on the Western Front and Max von Baden took office, Erzberger insisted to his colleagues in the Reichstag that they must espouse the League as the first step toward a ‘great gesture across the ocean, to Wilson’.13 And despite the Chancellor’s anti-Americanism this was the strategy that prevailed.14 On 6 October von Baden asked Wilson to negotiate a peace on the basis of the principles laid out in the 14 Points: self-determination, no annexations, no indemnities. The dramatic implications of this move were not lost on Berlin. Germany was humbling itself. In a desperate effort to secure its survival, Germany was exploiting Wilson’s evident desire to establish America as the arbiter of world affairs. The possibility that Berlin might actually take up Wilson’s offer of ‘peace without victory’ had been the nightmare of Entente strategy ever since the Peace Notes of December 1916. Until the autumn of 1918, political divisions within Germany had made it impossible for Berlin to avail itself of this option. The Reichstag’s peace appeal of July 1917 had been overshadowed by Germany’s military triumph over Russia. The effort to make a progressive peace at Brest-Litovsk had been derailed by the disastrous interaction between the German militarists and the Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1918 the German bid for a liberal peace would once again come close to fiasco. In November the politics of the armistice negotiations would unleash first a mutiny and then a revolution, but not before Berlin had given Wilson the chance to force the hand of London and Paris. In defeat, Germany conferred on Wilson the position that the Entente had worked so hard to deny him. It was the armistice that once more transformed the President from a combatant into the arbiter of European affairs. On the brink of collapse Germany allowed Wilson to fashion the script that has defined the story of the peace ever since.
II
On 27 September 1918, sensing that the end was nigh, Wilson used the occasion of the Fourth Liberty Bond drive in New York to set out once more in a speech the basic outlines of a ‘liberal’ peace. A ‘secure and lasting peace’ could be obtained only by sacrificing ‘interests’ to ‘impartial justice’. The one ‘indispensable instrumentality’ of this peace would be a League of Nations. In his new effort to formulate the basis for a peace, known as the ‘five particulars’, Wilson documented once more the reluctance with which he had entered into the coalition against Germany. The League could not be formed during the war since that would make it into an instrument of the victors. The new order must offer impartial justice for both victors and vanquished. No special interests ought to prevail over the common interests of all. There could be no special understandings within the league. There could be no self-interested economic combinations, nor any continuation of warlike boycotts or blockades. All international agreements must be entirely public. Once more Wilson claimed to be giving voice to the ‘unclouded’ thoughts ‘of the mass of men’, and he challenged the leaders of Europe, if they dared, to voice their dissent from his principles. Unsurprisingly, whereas London and Paris were silent, Max von Baden’s government eagerly signalled its complete agreement. In the first armistice note addressed to Wilson on 7 October, Berlin offered negotiations on the basis of his speech of 27 September, plus the 14 Points.
It becomes far easier to understand the course of events after October 1918 if we acknowledge at the outset that Wilson was always highly sceptical about the democratization process in Germany. The American President was the very opposite of the universalist for which he is too often mistaken. For Wilson, genuine political development was a gradual process deeply determined by profound ethno-cultural and ‘racial’ influences. Regarding Germany he held simplistic views. Ever since the summer of 1917 he had been convinced that the ‘military masters’ of Germany were pursuing a two-pronged strategy: ‘... stand pat if they win, yield a parliamentary government if they lose’.15 For this reason the fate of the Reichstag majority and the Weimar Republic were incidental to Wilson’s calculations. At the Paris Peace Conference he made every effort to avoid meeting the German delegation. ‘He would not have minded,’ Wilson remarked, ‘meeting the old blood and iron people of the old regime, but he hates the thought of seeing these nondescript creatures of the new . . .’.16 ‘Nondescripts’ like Ebert and Erzberger might take a few steps in the right direction, but it would take years if not decades for true self-government to take root in Germany. For Wilson, the negotiations with Germany were above all a lever through which to gain purchase on the victors. Now that Germany was on the brink of defeat, it was French and British imperialism that Wilson believed posed the main threat to his vision of a new world order. It was for this reason that, though American troops in their hundreds of thousands were fighting side by side with the Entente, he chose to respond to Berlin unilaterally without consulting either London or Paris. Wilson asked the Germans to give more details of their position, to which the Max von Baden government responded delightedly that it wholeheartedly accepted every one of the 14 Points and was willing to withdraw German troops from all occupied territories under the supervision of a ‘mixed commission’.
In October 1918 Britain and France were faced with an extraordinary situation. At the moment of military triumph it seemed that Wilson was abruptly veering back toward the vision of US pre-eminence as an arbiter in world affairs that had first confronted them in January 1917. Tensions between Washington and the European capitals had risen seriously since the spring of 1918. The Entente had been furious over Wilson’s laggardly reaction to Ludendorff’s final assault. Over the summer, relations had worsened over the question of intervention in Russia. Similarly, though London was rather more firmly committed to the League of Nations than Washington turned out to be, Wilson and Lloyd George were already arguing over its design. Within Wilson’s inner circle, the talk about the Europeans was relentlessly hostile. On the European side, even the official minutes record the indignation of the British cabinet at Wilson’s effrontery in opening unilateral peace talks with Berlin. Less discreet records of Lloyd George’s meetings in early October report furious outbursts. Wilson was acting alone. He was letting Germany off the hook and he was doing it all in the name of progress and justice. When even The Times hailed Wilson’s peace notes as a great liberal gesture, Lloyd George could barely contain himself.17 Nor was it only in Europe that memories of ‘peace without victory’ were reawakened. In the US as well, the Republicans were demanding not an armistice but an unconditional surrender.
Anxious about the anger stirred by his unilateral diplomacy, but determined to seize the opportunity that Germany was offering him, Wilson raised the stakes. On 14 October in his response to Max von Baden’s second armistice notice, the President demanded proof that Germany was really on the road to democracy. The implication was clear: the Kaiser must go. Once again Wilson’s concern was as much for public opinion at home as for any real change in Germany. He needed to appear both forceful and liberal at the same time. But as far as London and Paris were concerned, this too was a serious misstep: In Germany, making democratization a condition of peace was bound to have a counter-productive effect; the advocates of reform would look like puppets of the enemy. The European Allies were right.
Over the winter of 1917–18 at Brest-Litovsk the aggression of German militarists had sabotaged the Reichstag’s effort to broker a legitimate peace in the East and sparked strikes in Berlin and Vienna that splintered the democratic opposition. Now the attempt by the right wing to sabotage a peace in the West resulted in the full-scale breakdown of the Kaiser’s regime. Thanks to the insubordination and irrationality of the German ultra-nationalists, the attempt by German parliamentarians to manage an orderly democratic exit from the war came close to disaster. As reports of mutiny and rebellion poured in from across Germany in the first days of November, the von Baden government, with its authority crumbling around it, waited with bated breath for news from the West. Would Wilson be able to strong-arm the Entente into accepting the armistice terms to which Germany had so eagerly agreed? Would the Allies come to the table before the German state was torn apart by the clash between the revolution from the left and the right-wing fronde? By 4 November, as it appeared that London and Paris were holding out and Germany’s military defences were disintegrating before their eyes, Berlin was in a state of repressed panic.