The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  III

  From a German point of view it would later seem that the combination of Wilsonian liberal moralism, designed to trick Germany into an armistice, followed by the dagger thrust of Franco-British aggression delivered at Versailles, was a dastardly tactical combination arranged by the Machiavellian genius of Anglo-American imperialism. That is not how it seemed from the vantage point of either London or Paris. In October 1918, Wilson opened negotiations with Berlin entirely without coordination with the Entente. To gain some grip on the situation, London and Paris demanded that Wilson dispatch to Europe a senior representative capable of formulating the final armistice terms in cooperation with them. On 27 October in Paris they duly confronted Colonel House.18 The British, French and Italians at first threatened to take a hard line, refusing to associate themselves with any peace that incorporated the 14 Points since those too had been a unilateral presidential announcement. The French and Italians did not object to the idea of a League of Nations, but did not want it written into the peace. The British objected to a general commitment to uphold the freedom of the seas. Rather than accept such a disabling limitation, they would prefer to fight the war to a finish on their own. The German peace notes had reopened fundamental differences between Wilson and the Entente. In the autumn and winter of 1918, as victory was imposed, Wilson on several occasions chose to remind those around him of his basic position. His aversion to European power politics did not discriminate between land and sea. ‘[A]t one time if it had not been for his realization that Germany was the scourge of the world, he would have been ready to have it out with England.’19 With Germany defeated, that moment had perhaps arrived. In the American cabinet in late October, when one of his colleagues warned him against forcing the Entente to accept a peace they did not want, Wilson had shot back ‘they needed to be coerced’. Coerced they undoubtedly were.20

  The exchange of notes with Germany had raised intense public excitement. The casualties during the final battles of 1918 were as terrible as any in the entire war. Not only did this add to war weariness, it made the question of manpower all the more pressing. In the first days of November 1918, Georges Clemenceau was forced to conclude a deal with the Senegalese leader Blaise Diagne which promised political rights for native Senegalese in exchange for a levy that would give France the shock troops it needed to claim part of the victory in 1919.21 In Ireland things had gone beyond the point of compromise. If the war continued into the winter, London faced the prospect of having to press-gang hundreds of thousands of rebellious Fenians. Despite their bellicose rhetoric, neither Clemenceau nor Lloyd George wanted war for its own sake. Even though they were unaware of Germany’s near complete collapse, it was clear that they had gained a historic victory. If they fought on into 1919 they might hope to impose an unconditional surrender on Germany, but it would be American forces that would claim a far greater share of the credit. If France and Britain made peace now, they could look forward to being hailed as heroes. The only thing that could possibly jeopardize their triumph would be a botched attempt to sabotage an armistice, from which they would emerge looking like reactionary opponents of Wilson’s vision of peace and democracy.22

  Furthermore, though Colonel House had instructions to ‘coerce’ the Europeans, he was, in fact, far more willing to make concessions than Wilson. In exchange for an acceptance of the 14 Points as the basis for the peace, House agreed that it should be up to the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies, General Foch, to lay down the military terms of the armistice. To France’s satisfaction, Foch insisted on the complete disarmament of the German military and the withdrawal of the German Army east of the Rhine. Allied forces would take up positions in the Rhineland and occupy bridgeheads on the eastern side of the river. These were provisional demands, not a final peace, but Foch was surprised when they were accepted. He had thought them so radical that Berlin was bound to decline, thus giving him the chance to push the war to a truly conclusive victory.

  As far as Britain was concerned, House went even further. He agreed to allow the British Empire to formulate its objections as an explicit set of reservations to the final note sent to the Germans. This was galling but it at least gave the British a more solid legal position. Britain could accept a peace that required no punitive indemnities. But in a war that had spread ruination across much of the world it was not equitable to restrict compensation to just those territories that the German Army had physically devastated. The armistice note therefore specified that Germany would be held to account for all the costs inflicted by its aggression, a far more all-encompassing rubric. The second reservation concerned freedom of the seas. Britain did not dispute the legitimate maritime interests of its partners. Since 1917 it had been urging the Wilson administration to consider a naval partnership.23 Failing a bilateral Treaty, London had proposed a four-way agreement including Japan and France. But to neutralize the oceans would give unrestricted licence to aggressors. The defeat of Germany had pivoted on control of the Atlantic. If the League of Nations was to have a powerful mechanism of economic sanctions, it would depend on an effective naval blockade. The only secure foundation for a liberal world order was to eliminate the threat posed by aggressive powers and to place the main global traffic arteries in the hands of states that could be trusted. Colonel House did not concede the principle but allowed the British to write their reservations into the terms of the armistice. Once the British and Americans agreed, Clemenceau had no option but to fall into line.

  On 5 November the German government was informed of the armistice terms. In Berlin the relief was profound. At that very moment the Bismarckian state was being swept away by the revolution. On 9 November the German Republic was declared not once but twice, first by the more radical then by the more moderate wing of German social democracy. By 10 November the German Army was in such disarray that the armistice delegation at Compiègne could no longer communicate safely with its own headquarters at Spa. It was not until 2 a.m. on 11 November that the delegation led by Erzberger received confirmation from Berlin that the new revolutionary government upheld their authority to sign the ceasefire. Under such circumstances, for the Entente to have accepted the 14 Points as the basis of the future peace was an astonishing triumph for the diplomacy initiated by the Reichstag majority in early October. If the French and British had realized how close to the precipice of disintegration Germany stood, they could easily have derailed Wilson’s coup. Within days the revolutionary avalanche would have left Germany completely unable to resist a further military advance. Instead, the German government had allowed Wilson to define the politics of peace.

  IV

  Those who sympathized with Wilson’s vision have ever since construed the Armistice as a founding document of the new era, a promise to the world and to Germany of a ‘liberal peace’. Critics of the eventual Versailles peace spoke of covenants, contracts and constitutions.24 Indeed, Wilson invoked nothing less than divine inspiration. But, in truth, this construction was a rearguard action, a rhetorical effort to bolster the extremely precarious political foundations of the peace.25 The manner in which Wilson had conducted his unilateral negotiations with Berlin in October 1918, the ways in which Britain and France had been coerced into accepting the Wilsonian terms, left the Armistice that followed on a weak footing. This was well understood by those in Berlin, including von Baden himself, who doubted the wisdom of a one-sided approach to Wilson. It was shouted furiously behind closed doors in London and Paris. Within the White House, Wilson had overridden critics in his own cabinet. The hair-raising coincidence of Germany’s military and political collapse with the armistice talks only added to the force of the point. The accusation later made by the likes of John Maynard Keynes, that Germany had been tricked, that the Entente had obtained an armistice on false pretences from a valiant and still combative foe, inverts reality. Up to the end the Entente continued to treat the German state as a sovereign counterpart, whilst the Reich was, in fact, collapsing into c
haos. Between 9 and 11 November 1918, it was the Germans who negotiated at Compiègne as though they represented a government and an army capable of continuing the struggle, when in fact both were in a state of dissolution. The Germans would protest their betrayal, but in light of what happened across Germany in the first two weeks of November, as far as the British and French were concerned, this was merely further evidence of their bad faith.26

  Wilson was engaged in a high-stakes wager. He was choosing to forego imposing a peace of his design by force of American arms. He was gambling that an armistice made on the basis of his 14 Points would hold the Entente in check. For this to succeed, Wilson needed to rally public opinion and he needed above all to control Washington, the new hub of global power. But it was precisely there, in the week prior to the Armistice, that Wilson lost his grip. In America, despite the impending military victory, the mood was intensely contentious. Whereas Clemenceau and Lloyd George could not afford to challenge Wilson openly, the same was not true of the President’s domestic political opponents. Wilson’s willingness to enter into a unilateral exchange of telegrams with Berlin, precisely at the moment when tens of thousands of American soldiers were laying down their lives in north-eastern France in the forest of Argonne, caused outrage. On 7 October, Republicans in the Senate initiated a debate demanding complete victory. Henry F. Ashurst of Arizona called for the Allies to drive ‘a wide pathway of fire and blood from the Rhine to Berlin’. Not surprisingly, such references to General Sherman’s march on Atlanta disturbed Wilson. He invited Ashurst to a personal conference at which he revealed his true strategic purpose. Whereas an unconditional German surrender would unleash British and French power, Wilson insisted that he was ‘thinking now only of putting the United States into a position of strength and justice. I am now playing for 100 years hence.’27 Wilson’s opponents were not swayed. On 21 October, Senator Miles Poindexter introduced a motion calling for Wilson to be impeached if he continued to negotiate with the Germans.28 Days later both ex-presidents Taft and Roosevelt did what no European dared to do – they publicly disowned the 14 Points. As Theodore Roosevelt put it with characteristic style, ‘let us dictate peace by the hammering of our guns . . . and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the ticking of typewriters’.29

  This was not idle posturing. Washington was in the midst of mid-term election fever. As in the presidential election of 1916, the partisanship was intense. On 21 October the Rocky Mountain News gave voice to a new narrative of rabid, anti-Wilsonian politics, denouncing ‘Bolsheviks in the democratic party’.30 In a three-hour address to a New York audience Roosevelt suggested that Wilson’s willingness to deal with a German government stacked with Social Democrats and allied with Lenin revealed his true sympathy for ‘Germanized socialists and the bolshevists of every grade’.31 In reply, on 26 October, Wilson was tempted into a disastrous gamble. Forced to play an unusually pronounced role in a mid-term race, the President announced to the electorate that ‘your vote this year will be viewed by the nations of Europe from one standpoint only. They will draw no fine distinctions. A refusal to sustain’ the Democrat majority would be ‘read as a refusal to sustain the war and to sustain the efforts of our peace commission to secure the fruits of war’.32 It was an appeal fully in line with Wilson’s vision of presidential leadership. But it was a shockingly presumptuous break with precedent and it was widely seen as having tipped the electoral balance against him. On 5 November 1918 the Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress. Wilson’s bitter opponent Henry Cabot Lodge emerged as Senate majority leader and chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  There is no question that much of the invective hurled at Wilson and the Democrats in 1918 was irresponsible. It spread like a virus through the American political system, helping to prepare the ground for the delirious Red Scare in 1919. The accusation that Democrats sympathized with socialism and were ipso facto unpatriotic has echoed through demagogic right-wing discourse in America down to the present day. But this should not obscure the substance of the disagreement. Wilson’s unilateral diplomacy was an extraordinary power play. It was motivated not by his concern for German democracy but by a desire to subordinate Britain and France to his particular vision of American power. Wilson’s Republican critics envisioned a very different peace. As Roosevelt confirmed to British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour, America should stand ‘for the unconditional surrender of Germany and for absolute loyalty to France and England in the peace negotiations . . . America should act, not as an umpire between our allies and our enemies, but as one of the allies bound to come to an agreement with them.’ ‘While we gladly welcome any feasible scheme for a League of Nations, we prefer that it should begin with our present allies, and be accepted only as an addition to and in no sense a substitute for the preparedness of our own strength and for our own defenses.’33 To a journalist friend Roosevelt spoke of a working agreement between the British Empire and the United States that he was now content to call ‘an alliance’.34 Wilson’s main Republican opponents were no more isolationists than Clemenceau and Lloyd George were reactionaries. What they had in common was their rejection of Wilson’s peculiar vision of American global leadership. Their concept of a post-war order would be based on a privileged strategic alliance between the United States and the other states they recognized as partners in an exclusive democratic club, above all Britain and France. This was a vision that was both menacing to Germany and profoundly distasteful to Wilson. In this respect his alignment with Berlin was no mere figment of the partisan imagination.

  12

  Democracy Under Pressure

  Between October and December 1918 the old world of Europe collapsed. Revolution swept away not only the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollern, but along with them the royal houses of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg, eleven Duchies and Grand Duchies, and seven smaller German principalities. They were not much lamented. Germany, Austria and Hungary all declared themselves republics, as did Poland and Czechoslovakia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. One of the remarkable things about interwar Europe, whatever its other political challenges, was the impotence of restorationist monarchism. The only exception to republican rule was the new South Slav state of Yugoslavia, built around the Serbian royal house that was relegitimized as the anchor of national identity in the course of the war. But the fall of dynasties was, as the Russian revolution had demonstrated, only the first phase. What would come next? As in Russia in 1917, in central Europe during the autumn of 1918 it was social democrats and liberals who dominated the scene. True communists were a tiny minority everywhere. Nevertheless, it was easy to imagine the Soviet regime lurking expectantly to the East. A day after the republic was declared in Berlin, the chief Soviet newspaper, Pravda, called for 10 November 1918 to be celebrated as a national holiday to mark the uprising of the German working class. Was this the signal for world revolution?

  Certainly, as Woodrow Wilson embarked for Europe on the first ever such tour by an American President, he imagined himself as the centre of a global storm. ‘The conservatives do not realize what forces are loose in the world at the present time,’ Wilson lectured his staff in December 1918 onboard the SS George Washington. ‘Liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization from chaos – from a flood of ultra-radicalism that will swamp the world . . . Liberalism must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilization is to escape the typhoon.’1 If Russia offered one vision of global revolution, to many Wilson seemed to offer another. Having been written into the Armistice, the 14 Points now acquired an extraordinary global currency. In Korea, China and Japan demonstrators carried Wilson’s slogan on their banners. In the mountains of Kurdistan, the Turkish nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk found himself confronted with the worldly younger sons of tribal chieftains insisting that Turkish-Kurdish relations be settled on the basis of the 14 Points.2 In the deserts of Libya the local Berber resistance, negotiating in the name of the newly fou
nded Tripolitanian Republic, lectured their Italian foes that ‘the age of imperialism had waned and that what had been possible in the nineteenth century was no longer possible in the second decade of the twentieth century’. They made peace on strictly Wilsonian terms and celebrated the occasion with a cavalcade of motor vehicles featuring effigies of the League of Nations.3

  The widening of political horizons heralded by such incidents was dramatic. It speaks to our global age in much the same way that the image of a stand-off between Lenin and Wilson spoke to historians writing in the era of the Cold War.4 But the worldwide revolution of 1919 is an event that did not happen, either in its Wilsonian or Leninist varieties. In Europe, revolution spread neither as far nor as wide as it had done three generations earlier in 1848.5 The defeat of radical socialism in 1919 was even more decisive than the setback suffered by Europe’s Liberals in 1848. Wilson’s ‘revolution’ ended in a notorious fiasco. Lenin and Wilson died within weeks of each other in early 1924 as deeply disappointed men. True believing Wilsonians and fellow travellers of Leninism have ever since derived dramatic conclusions from this failure. The aborted or failed revolution of 1918–19, it is said, shaped the rest of the twentieth century. It was the conservatism, the rancorous nationalism, the inveterate imperialism of the ‘old world’ that frustrated both Lenin and Wilson and made impossible any true break with the past.6 Instead, the violence of the Great War was stitched together with the even greater violence that was to come.