The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  The choice as it increasingly appeared to nationalist insurgents was between supine, democratic conformism and national self-assertion driven by a new form of domestic authoritarianism. There could be, it seemed, no compromise. This was in no way a traditional formula. Insofar as the insurgents themselves had a historical model, it was Bonaparte and he was hardly a traditionalist. The authoritarian movements of the interwar period and the regimes they spawned were a novel answer produced in response to the dramatic changes in international and domestic politics. But this challenge developed gradually. Throughout the 1920s dictatorships like that of Mussolini were still very much the exception and confined to the periphery. Neither the Polish nor the Spanish dictatorship of the 1920s was conceived of as permanent. It was only in the 1930s, in their all-out drives to challenge the status quo, that Stalinism, Nazism and Japanese imperialism would shed any inhibition. The new imperialism was unprecedented and uninhibited in its aggression both toward the domestic population and that of other countries. Hypocrisy was one crime that Nazism would not be accused of.

  But what gave the insurgents their chance to undertake their doomed effort at revolt? As we saw in the first part of this book, World War I was won by a coalition that appeared to demonstrate a new level of international cooperation. The United States and the Entente acted together militarily. They combined their economic resources and sought to articulate certain common values. In the aftermath, France, Britain, Japan, and for a time Italy as well, looked to consolidate those relationships. The United States was the crucial factor in all those calculations. The League of Nations that emerged from the Versailles negotiations did serve down to the 1930s as a new forum for international politics. It was no coincidence that every major European initiative of the 1920s revolved around Geneva. But the League without its great political inspiration, the American President, became symbolic of the truly defining feature of the new era – the absent presence of US power. America was, as one British internationalist put it, the ‘ghost at all our feasts’.3

  Woodrow Wilson had, of course, intended for America to exert its influence from within the League of Nations. But as he had made clear with his ‘peace without victory’ speech in January 1917, he had no desire to place the United States at the head of anything like an international coalition. Already at Versailles he was pulling away from his wartime associates. The actual structure that emerged by the early 1920s was an ironic fulfilment of Wilson’s ambition. As Austen Chamberlain pointed out in 1924, America’s absence from the League, combined with Britain and France’s dependence on it, had the effect of making America into a de facto ‘super-State’, exercising a veto over the combined decisions of the rest of the world.4 Nothing less was the ambition both of Wilson and his Republican successors.

  The entire story told in this book – from ‘peace without victory’ down to the Hoover moratorium of 1931 – is inflected by this basic impulse on behalf of successive United States administrations: to use America’s position of privileged detachment, and the dependence on it of the other major world powers, to frame a transformation in world affairs. The ‘revolution’ in Europe and Asia that was as yet far from complete must be allowed to run its full course. This was in many respects a liberal and progressive project according to the terms defined by the US. Peace between the great powers, disarmament, commerce, progress, technology, communication were its watchwords. But fundamentally, in its view of America itself, in its conception of what might be asked of America, the project was profoundly conservative.

  Wilson and Hoover had wished a revolutionary transformation upon the rest of the world, the better to uphold their ideal of America’s destiny. However, theirs was a conservatism that did not look forward to MacCarthyism and the Cold War but instead backwards to the nineteenth century. In the half-century before 1914, no country had experienced the conflicts produced by ‘uneven and combined development’ more violently than America. After the traumatic blood-letting of the Civil War, the gilded age had promised a new unity and stability. The central purpose of two generations of American progressives was to hold at bay the disruptive ideologies and social forces of the twentieth century, so as not to disturb this new American equilibrium. The fragility of that vision was exposed by Wilson’s humiliation in Congress, by the panic of the Red Scare and the sudden deflationary recession of 1920–21. With the return of ‘normalcy’ conservative order appeared to have been restored, only to be struck in 1929 by the most devastating economic crisis of all time. By 1933 the idea that America could be exempted from the maelstrom of twentieth-century history had collapsed from within. Billions of dollars were lost in Europe. In Asia, America’s efforts to stabilize the world at arm’s length were reduced to tatters. The Kellog-Briand style of internationalism without sanctions threatened to discredit the very idea of ‘new diplomacy’.

  One reaction was a true isolationism. The New Deal in its early phase was hostage to this impulse. It manifested, as one historian has put it, ‘the great isolationist aberration’.5 Domestic change was bought at the price of international withdrawal. But as the international challenges of the 1930s intensified, Roosevelt’s administration did not stand aside. Out of the New Deal would emerge an American power state capable of exerting influence on a global stage in a far more positive, interventionist sense than anything seen in the aftermath of the First World War. But that militarized great power status was precisely the destiny from which progressives of Wilson’s and Hoover’s stripe had hoped to escape. For all America’s new power, the disconcerting conclusion could not be escaped. The US was as much moved by the jarring, unpredictable momentum of the ‘chain gang’ as it was a mover.

  In 1929, when introducing his proposal for European integration, Aristide Briand acknowledged the radicalism of what the new world demanded. ‘In all the wisest and most important acts of man there was always an element of madness or recklessness,’ he insisted.6 This typically elegant and dialectical phrase provides a striking framework for the recurring debates about the history we have traversed here. With hindsight it is, of course, easy for self-stylized realists to criticize progressive visions of interwar order as symptomatic of the delusions of liberal idealism and as doleful overtures to appeasement. But hindsight deceives as well as it clarifies. As has been presented here, the restless search for a new way of securing order and peace was the expression not of deluded idealism, but of a higher form of realism. The search for international coalition and cooperation was the only appropriate response to the experience of uneven and combined development, to life in the international ‘chain gang’. These were the calculations of a new type of liberalism, a Realpolitik of progress. It is a drama all the more moving for the fact that it remains an open, unfinished history, no less a challenge for us today.

  1. Too proud to fight: Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson, 1915.

  2. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, Dublin, 1916.

  3. German troops marching into Bucharest, December 1916.

  4. Would-be Emperor: Yuan Shi-Kai, 1916.

  5. Men and women queuing to vote for the Russian Constituent Assembly, November 1917.

  6. Waiting for Russian democracy: the Tauride Palace, meeting place of the Constituent Assembly, January 1918.

  7. American and French troops with Renault FT light tanks, 1918.

  8. A blindfolded Russian negotiator with Habsburg troops en route to Brest-Litovsk.

  9. Prince Leopold of Bavaria signing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, March 1918.

  10. German troops in Kiev, August 1918.

  11. Poster for the eighth German war loan, March 1918.

  12. Poster for the Third US Liberty Loan, April 1918.

  13. The revolution comes to Berlin: Kiel marines on the Friedrichstrasse, 7 November 1918.

  14. The SMS Hindenburg sailing into Scapa Flow to surrender, 21 November 1918.

>   15. Woodrow Wilson welcomed on arrival at Dover, 26 December 1918.

  16. Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George at Versailles.

  17. ‘Red Scare’ cartoon by William Allen Rogers showing the expiring Russian bear on a stretcher being carried by allegorical figures of Czechoslovakia, Britain, Japan and America, while the lizard-like Lenin and Trotsky look

  on, 1918.

  18. Japanese Red Cross nurses returning from the Siberian intervention, 1919.

  19. Risking Peace: Matthias Erzberger (sitting left) and advisors discussing the future of Danzig, March 1919.

  20. Patriotic, anti-Japanese protestors in Shanghai, spring 1919.

  21. Unemployment rally, London, January 1921.

  22. An old woman being escorted to vote in the Upper Silesia plebiscite, March 1921.

  23. Normalcy: Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

  24. The Washington Naval Conference, November 1921.

  25. Gandhi Day, Delhi, July 1922.

  26. French troops guarding the entrance hall to the Coal Syndicate, the Ruhr, January 1923.

  27. Lenin’s funeral, Moscow, January 1924.

  28. Ku Klux Klan parade, Washington DC, 1926.

  29. Architect of peace in East Asia: Japan’s Foreign Minister Kijuro Shidehara.

  30. General Chiang Kai Shek being greeted by crowds in Hankow, 1927.

  31. Architects of peace in Europe: Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, September 1926.

  32. Crowds gathering outside the London Stock Exchange after the Gold Standard had been suspended, 21 September 1931.

  Notes

  EPIGRAPHS

  1.W. Wilson, ‘The Reconstruction of the Southern States’, Atlantic Monthly, January 1901, vol. lxxxvii, 1–15.

  2.J. M. Keynes, ‘Mr Churchill on the Peace’, New Republic, 27 March 1929.

  THE DELUGE: THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER

  1.The Times, 27 December 1915, issue 41047, 3.

  2.Reichstag, Stenographischer Bericht, vol. 307, 850 ff, 5 April 1916, 852.

  3.W. S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, MA, 1948), vii.

  4.W. S. Churchill, The Aftermath (London, 1929), 459.

  5.G. L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitler’s Second Book (New York, 2006).

  6.See the works collected at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/.

  7.The central preoccupation of C. Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles 1923–1939 (Berlin, 1940).

  8.The phrase was popularized by D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2000), who borrowed it from H.-G. Gadamer, most likely from ‘Karl-Jaspers-Preis Laudatio für Jeanne Hersch’, Heidelberger Jahrbücher 37 (1993), 151–8. Gadamer himself located this impression in the early years of his childhood in the aftermath of World War I.

  9.Two highly sophisticated responses are M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2001), and C. S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

  10.L. Trotsky, ‘Is the Slogan “The United States of Europe” a Timely One?’ http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/25b.htm.

  11.A. Hitler, ‘Zweites Buch’ (unpublished), 127–8.

  12.There is a kindred relation here to ‘power transition’ and ‘bargaining’ theories of war developed by political scientists, such as A. F. K. Organski and J. Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago, IL, 1980).

  13.Amongst ‘power transition’ theories of war, the factor of risk-acceptance is stressed by W. Kim and J. D. Morrow, ‘When Do Power Shifts Lead to War?’, American Journal of Political Science 36, no. 4 (November 1992), 896–922.

  14.On the political stakes engaged even at the beginning of the war see H. Strachan, The First World War (London, 2003).

  15.F. R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 (Cambridge, 2013), 87.

  16.L. Trotsky, ‘Perspectives of World Development’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/07/world.htm.

  17.L. Trotsky, ‘Disarmament and the United States of Europe’, 4 October 1929, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1929/10/disarm.htm.

  18.F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, CT, 1957), 432.

  19.C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York, 2006).

  20.For a comprehensive historical corrective see P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994).

  21.S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 163.

  22.A. J. Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New York, 1964); N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (Oxford, 1968).

  23.L. Trotsky, ‘Perspectives on World Development’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/07/world.htm.

  24.L. Trotsky, ‘Europe and America’, February 1924, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1926/02/europe.htm.

  25.Ibid.

  26.See, for instance, the data compiled for the OECD by Angus Maddison, http://www.theworldeconomy.org/.

  27.The modern classic being P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1987).

  28.J. Darwin, Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009).

  29.D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton, NJ, 2009).

  30.E. J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, KS, 1994), 48–52.

  31.A distinction deliberately blurred by the capacious notion of ‘informal empire’ introduced by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, second series, VI, no. 1 (1953), 1–15.

  32.W. A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959).

  33.A self-consciousness beautifully captured by V. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

  34.To give just one highly influential example, E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (London, 1994).

  35.Of which by far the most influential was R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement (New York, 1922).

  36.See its use even in accounts critical of Wilson, for example T. A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York, 1944), 154–5.

  37.American radical critics of Wilson concluded that there had been no ‘failure’ at Versailles, but that upholding the vested interests of the established order was always the true purpose of the peace; see T. Veblen, Editorial from ‘The Dial’, 15 November 1919, in Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York, 1934), 459–61.

  38.This is the basic storyline of A. Mayer’s oeuvre, threading through The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981), Wilson versus Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New York, 2nd ed., 1964), Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967), and Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York, 1988).

  39.M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998), has been hugely influential.

  40.J. L. Harper, American Visions of Europe (Cambridge, 1994).

  41.D. E. Ellwood, The Shock of America (Oxford, 2012).

  42.For different flavours of this kind of theorizing see P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression: 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA, 1973), R. Gilpin, ‘The Theory of Hegemonic War’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 591–613, and G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994).

 
43.J. Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ, 2001).

  44.C. A. Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford, 2012).

  45.C. Bright and M. Geyer, ‘For a Unified History of the World in the Twentieth Century’, Radical History Review 39 (September 1987), 69–91, M. Geyer and C. Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age’, in American Historical Review 100 (October 1995), 1034–60, and M. Geyer and C. Bright, ‘Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 4 (October 1996), 619–57.