In Defense of Norman Angell
I was pretty surprised to see Daniel Drezner list Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion as one of the ten worst international relations books ever, and even more surprised when it became clear that Drezner knows perfectly well what the book says:
This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let’s be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.
Let’s think this through. In pre-WWI intellectual circles you had Angell arguing that imperial competition and war would be self-destructive and therefore war wouldn’t happen. He was right about the analysis but mistaken about the prediction. But at the time, other main schools of thought included a nationalist approach which held that imperial competition and war would be awesome and therefore war should be welcomed and a Leninist approach which held that imperial competition and war were inevitable under capitalism and therefore Soviet-style revolution and Communism would be a good answer.
Put alongside the architects of the disasters of 1914-45, I think Angell comes out looking pretty good. Was there an important mistake in his analysis? Yes. But to this day, one can learn a lot of important things from Angell’s argument, and unlike the other ideas in the air at the time Angell’s didn’t cause any catastrophes. His book is an important one, and certainly not one of the ten worst ever.
31 Responses to “In Defense of Norman Angell”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
April 15th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Daniel Drezner’s blog may be the second worst on the Net (after, of course, Megan McArdle). That is a shame, because the new Foreign Policy website is otherwise superb.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:10 am
It sounds to me like Drezner is, at least with this particular pick, making the same mistake made by sports fans everywhere, and confusing the concepts of “most overrated” and “worst.” It’s true that there’s a lot of overlap in most cases between the two, and that causes people to occasionally conflate the concepts, but What Drezner’s done here is like calling Allan Iverson one of the worst players in the NBA. Surely Iverson is the most overrated player, by a wide margin, but legitimate argument is over whether, despite his completely undeserved reputation as a Hall-of-Fame caliber player, he’s an average plus ar a very good player, not over whether he’s the worst in the league.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Re Drezner’s point that “He[Angell] argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong. ”
—————-
Look — I think Academician Daniel Drezner is a careerist horse’s ass. He banned me from his blog after I pointed out that his Foreign Policy defense of globalization was based on shoveling several malign externalities under the carpet and ignoring them.
I’m sure he secretly banned others as well. His blog , like many right wing blogs, is not a real debate — it merely
puts on the misleading impression of a free discussion. In which the dominant voices coincidentally support Drezner’s views while a few timid voices of ineffectual opposition are kept around for show.
But in this case, Drezner is correct. Angell’s error was in thinking that the mass of citizens in a democracy run things. They do not — they are just along for the ride.
We have plenty of recent examples of selfish US elites pursuing acts that badly damage the United States but which enrich the favored few. The British Government of the early twentieth century had the same venal , lying shitheads that we suffer under today. And a similar propaganda machine to con the rabble.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:43 am
It’s obviously because Angell is a dirty stinking hippie, forever and ever, amen.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Whether they do or don’t, it’s clear that the vast majority of citizens in belligerent countries were eager to fight World War I.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:56 am
He assumed people were rational actors; BIG mistake.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:56 am
The prediction was based on the idea that the only reason people went to war was for wealth. That’s rubbish. Lots of people (read “intellectuals”) urged the world into WWI because the grand spectacle of war was the kind of high drama that they thought would drive the ennui from their civilization-drained psyches. Or so they thought. Very like the neo-cons today who want war because only in war is yadda-yadda-yadda. All these bozos claim to read history and seemingly agree with the dictum about needing to read history to avoid repeating it. I think they read history to find scripts to follow.
April 15th, 2009 at 9:58 am
It’s obviously because Angell is a dirty stinking hippie, forever and ever, amen.
Or because he’s read this book.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:00 am
1) Does anyone, for example, think that Winston Churchill was all that different in mindset from Adolph Hitler — other than being in more favorable and prosperous circumstances. After all, when the Nazis were drawing up the Holocaust, they had plenty of examples from the British Raj to inspire them.
2) The concentration camps of the Boer War. Letting one million Irish starve to death in the midst of plenty –and another million survived only by fleeing to America and other lands. Using the British Navy to BLOCK aid shipments from landing in Irish Ports.
3) Plus, of course, the widespread extermination of civilians in India during the Sepoy Mutiny. See, for example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy_mutiny#Retaliation_.E2.80.94_.22The_Devil.27s_Wind.22
April 15th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Don, what point are you really trying to make? Churchill wasn’t a Nazi, and the point of the Boer concentration camps, while abhorrent, were not to exterminate the Afrikaaners. The Raj was pretty horrible, but not Auschwitz horrible. Let’s keep a little perspective here.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:08 am
1) So how did the British elites stir up their normally placid citizenry into bloodthirsty war? With lies , of course. The East India Company found that some clergymen made particularly good propagandists — a lesson the Republicans use even today.
2)Consider how the reprisals in India during the Sepoy Mutiny were sold back home:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy_mutiny#Reaction_in_Britain
An excerpt:
“While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against European women and girls were rare during the rebellion, inaccurate, or falsified reports were accepted as factual and these were often used to justify the excesses of the British reaction to the Rebellion. These newspapers printed various apparently eyewitness accounts of English women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, that were later found to be in general false. One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10-14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized as a false propaganda story by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion.[98]”
3) Wiki notes how even “progressive” Charles Dickens was driven into a frenzy:
[ The December 1857 issue of Charles Dickens' Household Words contained an essay by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in which Dickens says, in words that are representative of that otherwise progressive novelist's "reversal" of views when it came to Imperial affairs, and are considered by some scholars to be emblematic of the middle Victorian literary encounter with imperialism:
"I wish I were a commander in chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental Race with amazement....should be to proclaim to them that my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested; and that I was there for that purpose and no other, ...now proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth."[97] ]
4) Heh heh. Sound kinda like a certain progressive blogger circa 2002 who ,after hearing from Kenneth Pollack, agreed that Saddam and his ilk needed to be wiped off the face of the Earth.
So who benefited from that little soiree? And who did not?
April 15th, 2009 at 10:18 am
It would seem that Angell correctly analyzed that war in 1914 would be tremendously stupid, from a material welfare point of view, but like a good economist who believes in rationally economic men, he assumed since war would be a stupid choice, it wasn’t what would happen. I think that the second part of his analysis is where he failed.
Per the start of WWI, the weird dynamic of it was that ‘the powerful’ weren’t trying to start a Europe wide war, though nevertheless one started, though one can criticize the Kaiser… for not trying hard enough to make sure it didn’t happen since they didn’t think it would be as horrible as it turned out to be.
In addition, during the run up, sizeable portions of European societies that ran far beyond the ‘powerful’ were itching to have a chance at having a go. The best comment on this I’ve ever read is that one should never underestimate the effect of boredom in human affairs. The ‘problem’ with the goods delivered by bourgeois capitalism, for the most part steady, but year to year undramatic, increases in living standards, is that it is boring. One can say lots of obvious bad things about a big war, but that it is boring isn’t one of them. They got the ‘interesting times’ the Chinese sage warned about.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:21 am
The First World War was basically caused by the Kaisers’ insistence on building the High Seas Fleet and challenging British supremacy on the seas. This resulted in the great Dreadnought race between Great Britain and Germany which forced the former into the alliance with France and Russia. Had the Kaiser not entered into this arms race, it is likely that Great Britain would not have allied with France and Russia and, thus, it is unlikely that the latter two nations would have gone to war with Germany.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Plus lets not forget who INVENTED the techniques of modern day terrorism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive#Later_analysis_and_commentaries
April 15th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Does anyone, for example, think that Winston Churchill was all that different in mindset from Adolph Hitler
Or Mother Teresa, Yogi Berra, or Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Re SLC’s comment “The First World War was basically caused by the Kaisers’ insistence on building the High Seas Fleet and challenging British supremacy on the seas.”
—————-
Actually, my understanding is that 15 Million people died in WWI — and 70 Million in the follow-on WWII — largely because of a little asshole named Gavrilo Princip:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip
Now THAT’s what I call an activist. I always thought the NRA should have made him an honorary member.
April 15th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Plus an organization named “The Black Hand” sounds way cooler than “Dean for America”.
Although the level of operational competence of the two groups appears to have been similar:
“After Čabrinović’s bomb missed the Archduke’s car, five other conspirators, including Princip, lost an opportunity to attack because of the heavy crowds and the high speed of the Archduke’s car. To avoid capture, Čabrinović swallowed Cyanide and jumped into the River Miljacka to make sure he died. The cyanide pill was very old and made him sick, but failed to kill him and the River Miljacka was only 5 inches (130 mm) deep. A few seconds later he was hauled out and detained by police.”
————–
ha ha ha. Definitely sounds like the 2004 Iowa Primary.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:05 am
That the assassination of Franz Ferdinand sparked WW1 has become writ in stone, but it’s (as usual) more complicated than that. Lots of people in the Empire were glad to see him go. It was an era with lots of assassinations and one more dead jerk-in-waiting didn’t really faze people. It seems to be the occasion of the war rather than its cause, like a family heirloom dish cracking as its passed around the table.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Re Don Williams
1. It was Bismarck who remarked that the next European war would be started by some damn fool incident in the Balkans.
2. The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand was only the spark. IMHO, it is doubtful that France and Russia would have gone to war with Germany over a dispute between Austria and Serbia without the assurance of backing from Great Britain, which backing was due to the Dreadnought race.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:52 am
That’s cute. Isn’t Drezner a Republican who has voted for George W. Bush more than zero times?
April 15th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Best synopsis of this theory I ever heard was “he figured out it was cheaper to just buy stuff than it was to finance a war so we could steal them.”
April 15th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
WTF does Don Williams think he’s doing, comparing the Howard Dean campaign to terrorist and murderers? Compare this to Matt’s post, which compares the Republican opposition to terrorists only because the Republicans themselves are makign that comparison. Are the rules of civil discourse in this country only for Democrats?
April 15th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I’m not sure how the Soviets and the warmongers being wrong doesn’t make Angell’s theory less stupid. The idea that war is impossible because it’s not economically feasible has been a great arguement for isolationists since the 1890s (I can’t think of the writer’s name right now, but there was a Russian who made this point)while ignoring that war has far more basis in geopolitical and political fields than economics. It’s the sort of nonsense that allow people to say Hitler could never invade Poland because he couldn’t endanger trade relations. Just as dangerously, it’s the reason though a world war couldn’t last long. Perversely, states could feel there was a built-in time limit which meant wars were less dangerous but also called for a country to act faster.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Matt, I would think you’d understand what’s so terribly wrong about the books’ assumptions given that it’s precisely the same assumption you’ve been attacking free market philosophy on. The problem is that people are not rational political actors. They are motivated by things other than national economic prosperity; in the World Wars, they were motivated primarily by nationalism. Nationalism is not a rational behaviour; Angell’s mistake was to assume people are always rational.
Both world wars were economically disastrous for the nations in which they were fought, that just didn’t make it impossible for them to happen.
Also, on the topic of WWI – contra Scott P., a majority of the citizens weren’t eager for war in all the involved nations. In France at least, people were resigned to war, having accepted that Germany would fight them at some point and they would have to defend themselves, but there wasn’t the same celebratory air there was in, say, Britain about the war.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Don Williams,
While the reprisals against Indian civilians were horrible, let me say as an Indian that the Indian Mutiny was a terrible and misbegotten idea, and the people of India were better off in the long run because it failed. Had I been around at the time, I would have sided with the British (as did, in fact, the majority of Indian people and troops- three quarters of the country stayed loyal during the Mutiny.)
As the Sikh regiments said at the time, “better the British than the Mughals.”
April 15th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
RE rea at 22: “WTF does Don Williams think he’s doing, comparing the Howard Dean campaign to terrorist and murderers?”
———–
Sigh.
I worked in the Howard Dean campaign as a volunteer — in New Hampshire and Delaware (because Pennsylvania’s primary is late.)
I was joking.
Whereas I’m pretty sure humorless rea was a Kerry supporter. Or maybe Gephardt.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Maintaining an Empire. So difficult. Elites are forced to Machiavellian extremes. Happens every time.
Thank god the good old US of A doesn’t go in for that kind of stuff. No no. Our way is to slip a couple of military bases into practically every country on the planet.
In fact, the United Statres emphatically rejects the classical Empire model. Who needs an Empire when you can cover the world with military bases instead?
April 16th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
SLC: The First World War was basically caused by the Kaisers’ insistence on building the High Seas Fleet and challenging British supremacy on the seas. This resulted in the great Dreadnought race between Great Britain and Germany which forced the former into the alliance with France and Russia.
Wrong. Great Britain’s decision to enter the war had nothing to do with Germany’s naval forces, which wound up virtually useless during the war. WWI was a result of the alliance system, but its immediate cause was the weakness of Austria-Hungary, which was largely due to irredentist forces within the empire. Germany knew that its ally was only getting weaker with the passage of time, and decided that since war appeared to be inevitable, it might as well be “now,” while Austria-Hungary remained a Great Power.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
There’s also the question of how different international trade is from corporately (rather than bureaucratically) administered empire. How sovereign is a country whose economic fate is at the whim of the IMF?
April 16th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Give please. Never does the human soul appear so strong and noble as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.
I am from Lanka and now study English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: “Why use student universe? When you are looking for cheap student flights you.”
Regards
Chin.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: In Defense of Norman Angell [...]