deluge epilogue
Raising the Stakes
World War I had seen the first effort to construct a coalition of liberal powers to manage the vast unwieldy dynamic of the modern world. It was a coalition based on military power, political commitment and money. Layer by layer, piece by piece, issue by issue, that coalition had disintegrated. The price that the collapse of this great democratic alliance would exact defies estimation. The failure of the democratic powers opened a strategic window of opportunity in the early 1930s. We know what nightmarish forces would tear through that window. In Berlin the Jewish pogroms began in the spring of 1933. Party government in Japan ended in the spring of 1932 after an all-out paramilitary-style assault on the headquarters of the Conservative Party, the Seiyukai. After years of posturing Mussolini finally slaked his thirst for blood in 1935 when he launched his assault on Abyssinia. But amongst the aggressive and insurgent members of the ‘chain gang’,1 Germany, Japan and Italy were second or third movers.
The first movers, as they had been since 1917, were the heirs of Lenin. Stabilization in Europe and Asia in the early 1920s had been built on the ground of their failure. In 1926–7, through their sponsorship the Great Northern Expedition, the Soviets delivered the first truly telling blow to the post-war order, making painfully obvious the failure of Japan and the Western Powers to come to terms with Chinese nationalism. When the Chinese Communists themselves were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek, a second process of transformation was initiated within the Soviet Union. Having crushed Trotsky and the domestic opposition, Stalin launched a programme of internal reconstruction without precedent. This process of collectivization and industrialization that uprooted tens of millions of people in a gigantic burst of development reveals something fundamental about the international order which had emerged in the 10 years since World War I. To those who sought to challenge that order, it seemed truly formidable.
Too often and too easily we write ‘interwar history’ as though there was a seamless continuity between the phase on which we have concentrated here, 1916–1931, and what came after in the 1930s. There were continuities of course. But the most important is that of a dialectical reaction and supersession. Not only Stalin, but the Japanese, German and Italian insurgents of the 1930s were impelled in their radical energy by a sense that at their first attempt they had failed. The Western Powers might squabble and prevaricate. Knowing the costs of full-scale war, both political and economic, they shrank from it. But they did not shrink from fear of failure. In a direct confrontation Britain, France and the United States were to be feared. In 1930 at the London Naval Conference, as they traded battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines, neither the Russians nor the Germans had a navy to barter with. The positions of Japan and Italy were second and third tier. As Stalin reiterated to factory managers in February 1931, at the height of the first, agonizing Five Year Plan: ‘To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind, and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten . . . We have lagged behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must cover that distance in ten years. Either we’ll do it or we will go under.’2
What Stalin articulated was not merely the common sense of an age of global competition. After World War I his was the characteristic perspective of those who had been made to feel what backwardness meant in the global power game, who had lived through the disappointment of the revolutionary elan, and witnessed the overwhelming force of Western capitalism mobilized against Imperial Germany, the main challenger of the nineteenth century. The men whom Lenin had hailed as the champions of organized modernity, Rathenau, Ludendorff and company, had put up a brave fight, but they had gone down to defeat. What was needed was something even more radical. Over the next generation Stalin’s refrain was to be reiterated by planners and politicians in Japan, Italy and Germany and – as decolonization began – in India, China, and dozens of other post-colonial states.
Once again we are, in some ways, too familiar with the story of the 1930s to appreciate the drama of what was occurring. We speak of an armaments race, as though what Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union were engaged in was akin to the dreadnought naval arms race of an earlier era. In fact, the rearmament drives of 1930s Japan and Nazi Germany were, like the efforts of Stalin’s Soviet Union, comparable to nothing ever seen in the three-hundred-year history of modern militarism. As a share of national income, by 1938 Nazi Germany was spending five times what Imperial Germany had spent during its arms race with Edwardian Britain, and the GDP at Hitler’s command by 1939 was almost 60 per cent greater than that available to the Kaiser. In constant prices the resources lavished on the Wehrmacht in the late 1930s were at least seven times greater than those received by Germany’s military in 1913. This was the compliment collectively paid by all of the insurgents of the 1930s to the force of the status quo. They knew the power arrayed against them. They knew that during the era of World War I the more conventionally minded efforts of Japan and Germany to escape the limits of their national power had run aground (Table 15). It would take something unprecedented.
There were those of course who hoped that new technologies, notably the aircraft, might provide an avenue of escape from the inexorable logic of materiel. But as Japan, Germany and Italy were all to find to their cost, air war was pre-eminently a field of attritional combat dominated by economics and technology. Up to 1945 there were two global naval powers – Britain and the United States. With his famous announcement in May 1940 of a US airforce of 60,000 planes, Roosevelt made clear that in the age of airpower the United States would claim sole pre-eminence. The cities of Germany and Japan would feel its terrible force, followed by those of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and many more.
Table 15. The Rising Cost of Confrontation: Military Spending before World War I Compared to the 1930s1919
But the would-be insurgents had not only economics and military power with which to contend. The challenge was political as well. The lesson of the first decades of the twentieth century was not simply, as is so often asserted, that democracies were weak. Though they no doubt had their weaknesses, they were vastly more resilient than the monarchies or aristocratic regimes that they replaced. The more strategic point was that the advent of mass democracy appeared to make certain kinds of power politics increasingly problematic. The comfortable half-way and quarter-way houses of the late nineteenth century, the Bismarckian constitutions, the limited franchises of Britain, Italy and Japan, had all collapsed in on themselves in the course of World War I. Before they did so, the Reichstag and the Japanese Diet had acted as real checks on the ambitions of German and Japanese imperialists. The default that emerged everywhere as the norm, from Japan to the United States, was a comprehensive or near-comprehensive manhood suffrage and, in the case of new states, national republicanism. These constitutions were often still thin and weakly established. But the popular demands that they reflected were real and made it hard to sustain truly large-scale imperial expansion under anything approximating to liberal conditions.
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.
World War I had seen the first effort to construct a coalition of liberal powers to manage the vast unwieldy dynamic of the modern world. It was a coalition based on military power, political commitment and money. Layer by layer, piece by piece, issue by issue, that coalition had disintegrated. The price that the collapse of this great democratic alliance would exact defies estimation. The failure of the democratic powers opened a strategic window of opportunity in the early 1930s. We know what nightmarish forces would tear through that window. In Berlin the Jewish pogroms began in the spring of 1933. Party government in Japan ended in the spring of 1932 after an all-out paramilitary-style assault on the headquarters of the Conservative Party, the Seiyukai. After years of posturing Mussolini finally slaked his thirst for blood in 1935 when he launched his assault on Abyssinia. But amongst the aggressive and insurgent members of the ‘chain gang’,1 Germany, Japan and Italy were second or third movers.
The first movers, as they had been since 1917, were the heirs of Lenin. Stabilization in Europe and Asia in the early 1920s had been built on the ground of their failure. In 1926–7, through their sponsorship the Great Northern Expedition, the Soviets delivered the first truly telling blow to the post-war order, making painfully obvious the failure of Japan and the Western Powers to come to terms with Chinese nationalism. When the Chinese Communists themselves were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek, a second process of transformation was initiated within the Soviet Union. Having crushed Trotsky and the domestic opposition, Stalin launched a programme of internal reconstruction without precedent. This process of collectivization and industrialization that uprooted tens of millions of people in a gigantic burst of development reveals something fundamental about the international order which had emerged in the 10 years since World War I. To those who sought to challenge that order, it seemed truly formidable.
Too often and too easily we write ‘interwar history’ as though there was a seamless continuity between the phase on which we have concentrated here, 1916–1931, and what came after in the 1930s. There were continuities of course. But the most important is that of a dialectical reaction and supersession. Not only Stalin, but the Japanese, German and Italian insurgents of the 1930s were impelled in their radical energy by a sense that at their first attempt they had failed. The Western Powers might squabble and prevaricate. Knowing the costs of full-scale war, both political and economic, they shrank from it. But they did not shrink from fear of failure. In a direct confrontation Britain, France and the United States were to be feared. In 1930 at the London Naval Conference, as they traded battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines, neither the Russians nor the Germans had a navy to barter with. The positions of Japan and Italy were second and third tier. As Stalin reiterated to factory managers in February 1931, at the height of the first, agonizing Five Year Plan: ‘To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind, and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten . . . We have lagged behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must cover that distance in ten years. Either we’ll do it or we will go under.’2
What Stalin articulated was not merely the common sense of an age of global competition. After World War I his was the characteristic perspective of those who had been made to feel what backwardness meant in the global power game, who had lived through the disappointment of the revolutionary elan, and witnessed the overwhelming force of Western capitalism mobilized against Imperial Germany, the main challenger of the nineteenth century. The men whom Lenin had hailed as the champions of organized modernity, Rathenau, Ludendorff and company, had put up a brave fight, but they had gone down to defeat. What was needed was something even more radical. Over the next generation Stalin’s refrain was to be reiterated by planners and politicians in Japan, Italy and Germany and – as decolonization began – in India, China, and dozens of other post-colonial states.
Once again we are, in some ways, too familiar with the story of the 1930s to appreciate the drama of what was occurring. We speak of an armaments race, as though what Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union were engaged in was akin to the dreadnought naval arms race of an earlier era. In fact, the rearmament drives of 1930s Japan and Nazi Germany were, like the efforts of Stalin’s Soviet Union, comparable to nothing ever seen in the three-hundred-year history of modern militarism. As a share of national income, by 1938 Nazi Germany was spending five times what Imperial Germany had spent during its arms race with Edwardian Britain, and the GDP at Hitler’s command by 1939 was almost 60 per cent greater than that available to the Kaiser. In constant prices the resources lavished on the Wehrmacht in the late 1930s were at least seven times greater than those received by Germany’s military in 1913. This was the compliment collectively paid by all of the insurgents of the 1930s to the force of the status quo. They knew the power arrayed against them. They knew that during the era of World War I the more conventionally minded efforts of Japan and Germany to escape the limits of their national power had run aground (Table 15). It would take something unprecedented.
There were those of course who hoped that new technologies, notably the aircraft, might provide an avenue of escape from the inexorable logic of materiel. But as Japan, Germany and Italy were all to find to their cost, air war was pre-eminently a field of attritional combat dominated by economics and technology. Up to 1945 there were two global naval powers – Britain and the United States. With his famous announcement in May 1940 of a US airforce of 60,000 planes, Roosevelt made clear that in the age of airpower the United States would claim sole pre-eminence. The cities of Germany and Japan would feel its terrible force, followed by those of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and many more.
Table 15. The Rising Cost of Confrontation: Military Spending before World War I Compared to the 1930s1919
But the would-be insurgents had not only economics and military power with which to contend. The challenge was political as well. The lesson of the first decades of the twentieth century was not simply, as is so often asserted, that democracies were weak. Though they no doubt had their weaknesses, they were vastly more resilient than the monarchies or aristocratic regimes that they replaced. The more strategic point was that the advent of mass democracy appeared to make certain kinds of power politics increasingly problematic. The comfortable half-way and quarter-way houses of the late nineteenth century, the Bismarckian constitutions, the limited franchises of Britain, Italy and Japan, had all collapsed in on themselves in the course of World War I. Before they did so, the Reichstag and the Japanese Diet had acted as real checks on the ambitions of German and Japanese imperialists. The default that emerged everywhere as the norm, from Japan to the United States, was a comprehensive or near-comprehensive manhood suffrage and, in the case of new states, national republicanism. These constitutions were often still thin and weakly established. But the popular demands that they reflected were real and made it hard to sustain truly large-scale imperial expansion under anything approximating to liberal conditions.
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.
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