The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  For a few days the labour movement celebrated the triumph of workers’ power. All the governing parties of the Republic, including the Liberal Democrats, were required to sign up to a manifesto reaffirming the call for state ownership of key industries.62 Gustav Noske and other SPD leaders contaminated by collaboration with the Freikorps were forced out. There was excited talk of a new government of socialist unity. But even if they had been able to collaborate, the USPD and the SPD fell well short of a majority in the National Assembly. And, as quickly as it had arisen, the fantasy of left unity was dispelled when in the Ruhr, the heartland of German heavy industry, the anti-Kapp general strike transformed into a rolling socialist uprising. By 22 March communist militants had formed into Red Guard detachments and seized control of the industrial cities of Essen and Duisburg. A desperate effort was made at mediation, but with 50,000 of its own men under arms, the radical left now wanted a trial of strength.63 Amidst bitter fighting and gruesome reprisals, tens of thousands of pro-government troops, spearheaded once more by the Freikorps, retook the Ruhr. The government side suffered at least 500 dead. Over 1,000 insurgents were killed, the majority of whom were executed after capture.

  The Kapp putsch and the subsequent Ruhr uprising revealed how close Germany had come to civil war. It also confirmed Erzberger’s nightmare of foreign intervention. The Ruhr was part of the demilitarized western territory of Germany. In reaction to the entry of German army units, the French seized control of the city of Frankfurt. But astonishingly, despite this escalating violence, the well-habituated machinery of German democratic politics continued to function. Elections were the one wish granted to the putschists. Two months after the fighting ended in the Ruhr, on 6 June 1920 almost 28.5 million men and women voted for the first Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. The 80 per cent turnout delivered a body blow to the founding parties of the Republic. From a commanding share of 75 per cent the ‘Reichstag majority’ coalition of SPD, Centre Party and Democratic Liberals slumped to less than 45 per cent. Punishing the SPD for its complicity with the counter-revolution, the voters of the left made the USPD into the second largest party in the Reichstag. Meanwhile, the intransigent nationalists of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) surged to 15 per cent, as well as the conservative right had done in any German election since the days of Bismarck. A huge fund of democratic political capital had been wasted in 1919–20, but the result did not overturn the founding compromises of the Republic. A vote for the USPD was as likely to be a vote for a more radical democratic Republic as it was for a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Leninist Communist Party scored a derisory 2 per cent.

  The big winners of the election were the nationalist liberals of the DVP. Their leading spokesman was Gustav Stresemann, who had made himself infamous during the war as one of the most uproarious exponents of Wilhelmine imperialism. Following the revolution Stresemann had suffered a nervous collapse and in March 1920 he came perilously close to complicity with the Kapp putsch.64 But with the passing of that crisis he gained a new sense of purpose. What 1919–20 taught was that the advocates of acceptance of the Versailles Treaty had been correct. For the foreseeable future the fate of Germany hung on the fate of the Republic and its ability to come to terms with the former enemies in the West. Like Erzberger, Stresemann understood that the decisive power was above all the United States. But whereas Erzberger had gambled on the fickle politics of Wilsonian liberalism, Stresemann would place his bet, like Francesco Nitti in Rome, on what he believed to be a more durable force, the strategic interest of American business in the future of the European economy.65

  17

  Compliance in Asia

  At the signing ceremony on 28 June 1919 the Chinese were the only delegation to stay away. Since the first week of May the Versailles conference had reduced the largest country in the world to uproar. The transfer by the conference of Germany’s Shandong concession to Japan was to go down in the epic of modern Chinese nationalism as a founding moment. China became at once the victim of both Japanese aggression and Western hypocrisy.1 But this morality tale of Chinese martyrdom and Japanese aggression was always incomplete. The high stakes involved for both sides had been made evident by the crisis precipitated by China’s entry into the war in 1917 and the fraught politics of the Siberian intervention. The attempt to make peace in 1919 forced basic questions about Asia’s future back onto the global agenda.

  I

  In tune with the ‘spirit of the times’, Japan’s new post-war government had dispatched a pro-Western, liberally inclined delegation to the peace conference.2 The year 1918 ended with Prime Minister Hara Takashi drawing down one-third of the Japanese contingent in Siberia. Meanwhile, though Hara brought the activist China-hand Tanaka Giichi into his cabinet as Defence Minister, the policy of cooperation with Beijing remained firmly in place. General Duan, Japan’s pawn in 1917, was gone. Instead, Tokyo had encouraged peace talks in Shanghai between North and South, enabling China to send a unified delegation to Versailles. But what road would a unified Chinese state take?

  The government in Beijing after the fall of Duan showed little sign of rebelling against Japanese tutelage. From the South, Sun Yat-sen looked for recognition wherever he could get it. In January 1919 he sought to interest the leaders of global capitalism in a remarkable plan for comprehensive economic development.3 But he could not even get an acknowledgement from the White House. America’s ambassador in Beijing, Paul S. Reinsch, continued his anti-Japanese agitation. However, his own visions for China’s development, like those circulating in Washington, were deeply patronizing, involving large-scale international supervision. In early 1919 Japan agreed to join the international loan consortium, seeming to suggest an end to its high- pressure financial diplomacy of the war years. Its sole reservation was that its prime Manchurian railway assets should be exempted from consortium oversight.

  The British, given their enormous stake in China, viewed the prospect of a clash between Japan and America with considerable anxiety. London was reluctant to abandon its Japanese ally and uncertain of America’s true intentions. It was left to Britain’s ambassador in Beijing, Sir John Jordan, to advocate a new policy in Asia based on building a fresh relationship with China. He hoped to neutralize and internationalize all foreign concessions in China, abolishing spheres of interest, thus rendering ‘such terms as open door and China’s integrity realities and not the meaningless expressions they too often are at present’. ‘Without sacrifices on the part of the powers who acquired or inherited leased territories of 1898, no solution of the China problem seems possible,’ Jordan insisted. It was up to the United States and Britain to lead the world toward a system that would ‘guarantee economic freedom and military security . . .’4 Whilst London and Washington weighed up their options, Jordan feared that the initiative might pass to the Japanese.

  In January 1919 the Counselor to the State Department, Frank Polk, put a dark construction on Japan’s new support for Chinese unity in a report to Secretary of State Robert Lansing.5 At Versailles he warned they might join together to mount an all-out attack on Western privileges in Asia. With Japanese backing, Beijing would demand a wholesale treaty revision. Such claims were fully consistent with the new language of a liberal international order, but they were demands that ‘the white powers could not meet’ without forfeiting their grip on East Asia.6

  Given this uncertainty, the Americans were only too happy to turn the Paris negotiations into a stage for a confrontation between Japan and China. On 27 January, at President Wilson’s insistence, the Chinese delegation was in attendance when Japan bluntly presented its demands for Germany’s treaty rights in Shandong. The Americans then coached the most articulate element in the Chinese delegation, headed by the American-trained Wellington Koo, representing the Northern government in Beijing, to formulate a set-piece of liberal outrage directed against Tokyo. Koo rejected Japanese claims to German privileges as unwarranted intrusion on the rights
of a nation of 400 million people. Putting on display his American legal training, Koo invoked the principle of rebus sic stantibus, insisting that a treaty could be overturned if the conditions under which it were signed were overturned. The Western delegations were impressed by his fluency and within days, as the news of the hearings in Paris spread eastwards, the Beijing government received messages of support from across China.7 The original intention of the Chinese political class in joining the war had been to secure a seat at the table. Now, with American approval, it appeared that China would score a great diplomatic triumph over Japan.

  But what Koo failed to acknowledge was that Japan was not demanding the German rights by force majeure. In compliance with its new policy of cultivating good relations with Beijing, in September 1918 the Terauchi government had gained the signature of Chinese Prime Minister Duan to an understanding that conferred on Japan the right to maintain a garrison in Shandong in exchange for a further tranche of Nishihara’s financial largesse and a promise that Japan would back China’s campaign to revise the entire structure of unequal treaties.8 Meanwhile, Britain and France had conceded Tokyo’s claim already in January 1917 in exchange for Japanese naval assistance in the Mediterranean. The revelation of these commitments by Beijing, Paris and London brought the first debate on the Shandong question to an embarrassing standstill.

  For the representatives of Tokyo the first days at the Versailles peace conference had come as a painful shock. The Japanese had acknowledged Wilson’s 14 Points, but they had not anticipated that the entire conference would be framed in liberal terms. They had certainly not expected to be made to plead their case in front of the Chinese. What were the West’s intentions? Were they seriously interested in a more equitable international order, or were they, as the Japanese right wing suspected, intending ‘to freeze the status quo and hold in check the development of second-rate and lower-ranked nations’?9 It was this uncertainty that gave crucial salience to the Japanese demand for race equality to be written into the League Covenant. As the Western strategists suspected, this had pan-Asian appeal and would allow Japan to offset its image as an imperialist aggressor. But above all this was a question of domestic politics.10 In the wake of the rice riots of 1918 the complexion of Japanese politics had irrevocably changed. The masses were agitated. After touring Europe and the United States in 1919, the leading parliamentary liberal Ozaki Yukio returned to Japan convinced that only universal suffrage could channel the forces of change in a constructive direction.11 But it was not only the left that drove Japan’s new era of popular political mobilization.12 Popular nationalism too experienced a dramatic revival. The significance of the demand for racial non-discrimination for the Hara government in the spring of 1919 was precisely that it was the only issue on which the militants of both left and right could agree. How would the West respond?

  Already on 9 February the American legal expert David H. Miller recorded a frank exchange between Colonel House and Lord Balfour on the question of the upcoming Japanese motion. To pre-empt the Japanese, House sought to persuade Balfour to accept an amendment to the Covenant’s preamble that would include a quotation taken from the Declaration of Independence to the effect that all men were created equal. ‘Colonel H’s view was that such a preamble, however little it squared with American practice, would appeal to American sentiment, and would make the rest of the formula more acceptable to American public opinion.’13 Balfour’s response was striking. The claim that all men were created equal, Balfour objected, ‘was an eighteenth-century proposition which he did not believe was true’. The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century had taught other lessons. It might be asserted that ‘in a certain sense . . . all men of a particular nation were created equal’. But to assert that ‘a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European’ was, to Balfour, patent nonsense. To this remarkable broadside, House offered no immediate rebuttal. He was not about to disagree about Central Africa. But he pointed out that ‘he did not see how the policy toward the Japanese could be continued’. It could not be denied that they were a growing nation who had industriously exploited their own territory and needed room to expand. They were refused outlets in ‘any white country’, in Siberia and in Africa. Where were they to turn? ‘They had to go somewhere.’ Balfour did not question this fundamental premise of the age. Dynamic populations needed space into which to expand. Indeed, as a staunch advocate of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, Balfour ‘had a great deal of sympathy’ for the Japanese predicament. But with Central Africa on his mind, he could not admit the general principle of equality. Other ways must be found of satisfying Japan’s legitimate interests. In any case, Balfour was clearly interpreting the proposal far more expansively than the Japanese ever intended it. The idea that Japan might be speaking on behalf of Africans would no doubt have caused indignation in Tokyo. What was at stake were European-Asian relations and specifically the right of Asians to join Europeans in the settlement of the remaining open territories of the world.14

  Blocked at the first attempt, the Japanese delegation could not settle for a simple rejection. At the end of March they presented a new, watered-down version of their proposal, eliminating any reference to race and demanding only non-discrimination on a national basis. But they now found themselves caught in the labyrinthine internal politics of the British Empire. It was the authority of the British delegates – Robert Cecil and Lord Balfour – that had blocked the first Japanese amendment. But, when pressed, the British insisted that it was not they but the Australians who were the real obstacle. This further raised the pressure on the Japanese delegation. How were they to explain to the Japanese public that a principle of such obvious importance had failed as a result of the objections of a country as insignificant as Australia? But London stood by the White Dominions and on this occasion Wilson was only too happy to back Australia up. In light of attitudes in California on the Asian issue it was hugely convenient to let the British Empire provide the first line of resistance.15 There was no prospect whatsoever of Congress approving a Covenant that limited America’s right to restrict immigration.

  The affair reached its discreditable climax on 11 April at the final meeting of the League of Nations Commission. The Japanese had now retreated to demanding nothing more than an amendment to the preamble, calling for the ‘just treatment of all nationals’. On this basis they could count on a clear majority in the Commission. As the French put it, they had no wish to cause embarrassment to London, but ‘it was impossible to vote for the rejection of an amendment, which embodied an indisputable principle of justice’. When the Japanese put the question, their opponents were so shamefaced that they asked that their No votes not be officially recorded. As Cecil’s notes reveal, only the notoriously anti-Semitic Polish delegate Roman Dmowski voted with the British, forcing Wilson to use his power as chairman to block the amendment by ruling that it required unanimity.16 Despite the clear majority in favour, the Japanese proposal was dropped.17 Whereas House was pleased to celebrate a demonstration of ‘Anglo-Saxon tenacity, with Britain and American alone against the majority’, the affair clearly left a nasty taste in Cecil’s mouth.18

  II

  The peace-making process in Asia never recovered from the humiliation dealt to Japan over the League of Nations Covenant.19 On 21 April, ten days after the racial equality proposal was vetoed by the Americans and the British, the diplomatic advisory council met in Tokyo to chart their strategy for the final round of negotiations. In light of the humiliation over the Covenant, the council concluded that Japan must threaten to abandon the conference if it was not granted Germany’s Chinese concession on the Shandong Peninsula. Early on in the negotiations in Paris, Japan had secured its fair share of Germany’s Pacific Island colonies. It had joined Britain and France as a mandatory power. But China was a matter of even greater import. As Foreign Minister, Viscount Uchida cabled the delegation ‘to maintain our government’s dignity there shall be no room for conciliatory ad
justment’.20

  Predictably enough, when they returned to the matter in late April, the Western Powers proposed that Shandong should be ‘internationalized’.21 Some mandate-like structure should be devised. The mandate model had been proposed by Jan Smuts to deal with central Europe, but had been rejected there. In January it had been used to distribute the fragments of the German and Ottoman empires between the British Empire, the French and the Japanese. But Shandong was a different matter altogether. Japan angrily rejected any such idea.22 Mandates were for ‘colonies . . . where the native peoples still lacked modern civilization . . . in cases like China, a country with a developed culture’, quite different principles applied.23 More constructively, the Japanese delegation were at pains to explain to Wilson that they represented a government that belonged to the ‘moderate’ wing of Japanese politics. They were willing to consider a fundamental revision of the international order in East Asia, but this made it particularly regrettable that they were being made the scapegoat of Chinese nationalism. The Western Powers could not defend Beijing’s rights in the name of the equality of states and at the same time allow the Chinese delegation to disregard, on grounds of incompetence, treaties signed by their own government only months earlier. As one of Japan’s delegates put it to Robert Lansing, was it not ‘ridiculous for a nation of 400 millions to go around complaining that they had signed a treaty under duress’.24 Japan was asking no more than that China honour its contractual commitments. If Japan was not accorded its rights, its representatives would depart from the peace conference. Unlike the Italians they did not muddy their case with additional claims. And they could count on sympathy both from the British and the French. Saionji appealed particularly to his old friend Georges Clemenceau to appreciate the pressure that he was under on the home front.25