Rethinking Interwar Foreign Policy
Secretary of State Frank Kellogg
It’s conventional to treat inter-war American foreign policy with a kind of contempt. This was the era of “isolationism” in which the United States is said to have engaged in the folly of believing that Europe could handle its own problems in a manner that didn’t require American interventionism. US policymakers went in for such daft notions as arms control treaties limiting the size of navies, and even the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement to “outlaw war.”
Meanwhile, if you read coverage of the global financial crisis, it seems to be the case that the consensus among economic historians is that the Great Depression was a preventable disaster. A stock market crash and a downturn of some kind look fairly inevitable, but US policymakers could have responded quickly expansionary monetary policy, the sort of bank guarantees that became the FDIC in the late-1930s, and a willingness to run federal deficits to maintain the (then rather modest) size and scope of public sector activities.
Similarly, if you look at the history of Germany, the Nazis were not an especially large, powerful, or influential political movement. Indeed, as of 1928-29, the troubled Weimar Republic looked to have substantially stabilized itself. It seems very plausible to imagine that a normal economic downturn, rather than a years-long total collapse, would have prevented the Nazis from ever coming to power.
And had that happened, is it really so implausible to think that the US foreign policymakers of the 1920s would have looked pretty vindicated? Not that all wars would have been avoided, of course, but that the era of great power wars would have ended in 1918 rather than 1945, not because of a difference in foreign policy but because of a difference in macroeconomic management? Was it really so naive of Secretary Kellogg to have not foreseen an unprecedented economic collapse years in the future leading to the rise of an unprecedented political movement?
74 Responses to “Rethinking Interwar Foreign Policy”
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June 21st, 2009 at 11:46 am
This conveniently ignores the entire problem of the rising Japanese empire of that era. Japan was not going to be constrained by better macro-economic thinking – the US really had two choices with regards to Japan in the 1930s:
– Continue to trade with Japan, and allow it to eat as much of China and Southeast Asia as it desired
– Confront Japan (as actually happened)
No amount of clever theorizing by Kellog (or anyone else) was going to prevent that. Perhaps the Nazi rise could have been prevented with better policy choices, although the best one at the time would have been France and Britain resisting the re-militarization of the Rhineland – Hitler would not have survived a strong response then, and it’s likely that his successors would have had far less grandiose plans for Germany.
But hey, if we want to rethink the events of the early 20th century, there’s a far better set of counterfactuals available:
– The UK stays out of WWI, which then ends relatively quickly, with Germany acquiring a few of France’s colonies. The German Empire of 1914 was not any worse (or better) than the other European powers of that era
– Failing that, had the US simply adopted complete neutrality, the UK and France would have been forced to end the war by 1916 at the latest, due to failing finances
Either of those would have provided better outcomes than what actually happened, and had the Allied powers not treated Japan with racist contempt in Paris (1919), Japan may well have been more open to negotiation over the next 20 years as well.
June 21st, 2009 at 11:51 am
I’m trying to imagine a world where the Great Depression did not happen precisely as it did, but where Mussolini was still in power, where the Treaty of Versailles still stuck Germany with reparations, where the Americans had still ended the Spanish empire, where the Spanish army (especially its officer corps) had still been humiliated in 1920-21, and where the Japanese empire still existed. History would have been different, but the only way to argue that smarter economic policy would have eliminated the era of great wars is to pretend that World War II was set up only by events starting in 1929.
June 21st, 2009 at 11:52 am
Well J.M. Keynes predicted that the Versailles treaty was stupidly vindictive and would cause big problems, even quitting the British delegation in protest.
And the Brits were still dedicated to empire and more than eager to push weaker nations around. They weren’t interested in any Wilsonian idealism. What could the US possibly have done?
And a stock market crash was no more inevitable than the housing bubble. In fact, the similarities between the two are striking.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Mr. Yglesias cavalier dismissal of the Navel Treaties of the 1920s demonstrates astounding ignorance. As at least one British naval historian has opined, the treaties probably prevented a war between the US and Great Britain over trade in the late 1920s. It also saved pots of money for the major powers that agreed to them in that useless super-dreadnaught battleships were not built. Instead, experiments were done on aircraft carriers which proved to be the capital ships of WW 2. A perfect example of the total waste of resources that battleships entailed was the Japanese Yamato and Mushashi super-dreadnaughts neither of which never fired a shot against a respectable target in the war and both of which were dispatched to Davy Jones Locker by carrier based aircraft.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Re James Robertson
1. Actually, the biggest mistake made by the “good guys” in WW 1 was not demanding unconditional surrender of Germany and the occupation thereof. That mistake was not made after WW 2. Hitlers’ most effective argument was the canard that the traitorous politicians in Berlin threw away the victory that the German armed forces had gained on the battlefield.
2. The notion that Great Britain could have stayed out of WW 1 is piffle, because the dreadnaught competition between it and Germany made it unthinkable that Germany could be allowed to control the European continent. The naval competition forced Great Britain to sign on the the French and Russian alliance as its policy over centuries was not to acquiesce in the control of the continent by one power. As Barbard Tuchman makes clear in her seminal book, “The Guns of August,” once the mobilization orders went out, it was like a ponderous machine which could not be put into reverse.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:24 pm
SLC – Having the UK stay out wouldn’t have disabled them from continuing to keep a naval lead on Germany. There’s no telling whether conflict would have erupted in the future had things gone that way; it’s entirely likely. However, had WWI ended quickly, we might not have had the horrors of the USSR and the Nazis. It could have gone worse, perhaps, but I seriously doubt it.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Matt should probably think this through a little deeper. People dealing with the great depression weren’t drooling idiots. They were listening to very ideological economists about how to deal with the economic difficulties. They thought they were doing the right thing. Ideology prevented them from seeing how they were wrong.
Right now, the economy looks like it is beginning to stabilize, and if it does Obama will probably be vindicated by history (though it probably won’t save him from 10 unemployment and a failed reelection campaign). However, if another another shock occurs or banks are not as stable as people are being led to believe, then history will look at Obama and see Hoover.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Failing that, had the US simply adopted complete neutrality, the UK and France would have been forced to end the war by 1916 at the latest, due to failing finances
Curiously enough, this would have been not just the best outcome for Germany, but also Britain and France.
The nature of European conflicts over the last two centuries is such that they tend to resolve themselves within a short period of time, if only out of logistics and finances.
American involvement simply added fuel to the fire, and kept the fire, which burned even more viciously, going for a few years more.
By the way, there are no “good guys” in the Great War. I can’t possibly imagine a world where Germans would not have been kinder colonial masters than the imperial Russians. And the French certainly were not the kindest of colonial masters either.
And when the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires ended, the resolution was so botched as to almost guarantee future problems.
Humanity would have been far better off had the war been smaller in scope and been earlier resolved, in whoever favor. The longer it dragged on, the more every single European power was damaged.
In no world could the Great War be justified in any way.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
The UK stays out of WWI, which then ends relatively quickly, with Germany acquiring a few of France’s colonies. The German Empire of 1914 was not any worse (or better) than the other European powers of that era
Okay, firstly, the UK couldn’t stay out of WWI, and there’s no plausible counterfactual that allows them to do so. The majority of Asquith’s cabinet was isolationist, but Asquith himself and Grey were interventionist. With Germany attacking Belgium, even most of the isolationists were swayed to agreeing to back France.
But let’s imagine that the Germans didn’t attack Belgium and the isolationists in the Cabinet held firm. This still wouldn’t have kept Britain out of the war. Grey was convinced that his own personal honor was at stake in terms of getting Britain to back France – Britain and France had made naval agreements which moved the bulk of the French fleet to the Mediterranean, as the British fleet was supposed to protect the North Sea. Grey felt this was basically a British commitment to help France. He would have resigned, and Asquith might have as well – the most likely result of the isolationists holding firm would have been to bring down the Liberal Cabinet.
What would follow? The most likely result is a coalition between the Unionists (as the Conservatives were then known) and Asquith and Grey’s group of Liberal Imperialists, or else a minority Unionist government backed by the Liberal Imperialists. Either way, Britain would have entered the war anyway.
Beyond the question of actual personalities, there’s just little reason Britain would have allowed German domination of the continent.
I’d add that the act that the Kaiser’s Germany was better than Hitler (and better than Tsarist Russia) is not a particularly good reason to wish for the Kaiser to rule the continent. We can see what that would have looked like from the plans the Germans produced for what they wanted to do in the west (destroy Belgian independence, annex more of northern France, take a pretty substantial amount of Central Africa); and from what they actually did do in the east at Brest-Litovsk – they intended to impose a punitive peace at the end of which they would dominate the whole continent in a not particularly friendly way. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were not particularly nice or humane guys, and it was totally reasonable to wish to prevent them and people like them from controlling Europe.
Finally, Germany’s colonial policies were distinctly worse than the British and French, I’d say (although probably not than the Belgians or Portuguese). Ask the Herero and Nama about that.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:41 pm
The perhaps really sad thing is, the great British statesmen of the interwar era, if they had observed the situation rationally, would have realised that it would have been better for Britain and the empire to have capitulated in 1916 instead of to have won in 1919.
That’s perhaps the great irony of the war. That Britain lost more in victory than it would have in a loss. It gained territories and concession at Versailles, to be sure; but the continuation of the war, and the drain it had on finances, made it almost impossible to hold on to them. Had it ended in 1916, Britain would conceivably have lost very little; the African empire (ex-South Africa, which was independent) was on balance worthless, while India would have been physically impossible to be ceded. Apart from India, the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) were economically important, but they too were independent and outside the orbit of European negotiations.
The only significant loss would have been the South America informal empire.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:47 pm
We can see what that would have looked like from the plans the Germans produced for what they wanted to do in the west (destroy Belgian independence, annex more of northern France, take a pretty substantial amount of Central Africa); and from what they actually did do in the east at Brest-Litovsk – they intended to impose a punitive peace at the end of which they would dominate the whole continent in a not particularly friendly way. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were not particularly nice or humane guys, and it was totally reasonable to wish to prevent them and people like them from controlling Europe.
Yes, but was it worth it sending millions of people to untimely deaths to just to prevent a couple of “not-particularly nice guys” from gaining power? Especially as Hitler of all people gained power later on?
You are missing a sense of perspective here.
(destroy Belgian independence, annex more of northern France, take a pretty substantial amount of Central Africa);
I fail to see what difference it would have been to the world had Central Africa been in German, French, or British hands. Again, they were economically worthless at best and a financial drain at worst. I certainly can’t see how it would matter to me.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Again, there were no good guys in the Great War, not even the Americans, although they were perhaps somewhat better than most of the European powers.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:53 pm
And I am also surprised that no one has mentioned “Splendid Isolation.”
June 21st, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Re John
Mr. John is correct. The entire history of British foreign policy over several centuries was to prevent control of the European continent by any one continental power. Britain has been criticized for getting into bed with the Czarist Russia of Nicholas II in WW 1. During the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century, Britain got into bed with the King of Prussia, the Czar of Russia, and the Emperor of Austria in their opposition to France, not exactly a bevy of “good guys”.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Heaven forfend, but SLC’s point 2 is on the mark. The ‘Britain stays out’ counterfactual is Niall Ferguson’s obsession, and it’s been a distorting lens for pretty much everything he’s done.
I’m receptive to the strand of modern historiography that treats 1914-45 as a “long world war”, since the “interwar years” had more than their share of side-wars.
Ratcheting back, I think it’s a mistake to see Weimar as “substantially stabilized” in the late 1920s. The terms of the Dawes Plan were considered unsustainable and under renegotiation before the Crash, showing the extent to which the German economy was propped up by the US bubble. And even absent Hitler, you still have the Junker-led DNVP with a substantial presence in Weimar, representing reactionary nationalism and the Dolchstosslegende.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Who says that Japan would have become a military-ruled society without the great depression? The Taisho era before the Great Depression was one in which the military was influential, to be sure, but it wasn’t until the great depression, collapse of silk prices, etc, that political parties were all folded into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, the Kwantung Army took over Manchuria, etc.
My impression is that Taisho-era Japan was a society about as “democratic” as Wilhelmine Germany. The highly martial values of the Japanese elite were always a threat, but the path Japan followed in the ’30s was not preordained, and I don’t see why a similar argument about better economics influencing Japan toward a more peaceful path don’t apply as much as in Weimar Germany.
Now, Italy — Mussolini had taken over before the crash of ‘29.
June 21st, 2009 at 1:03 pm
And even absent Hitler, you still have the Junker-led DNVP with a substantial presence in Weimar, representing reactionary nationalism and the Dolchstosslegende.
And somehow you can draw a straight line from the Junkers to world war, and to the Holocaust?
Give me a break. The Junkers were far better than the crew running Russia at the time. If you had to look to dangerous political elements, look to the Stalin’s Russia, not some stiff, thick Prussians with back pain from doing too many military drills.
June 21st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
The presence of ‘establishment’ reactionary nationalists (including the Stahlhelm paramilitary) that were neither marginalised or suppressed during the 1920s helped institutionalise populist reactionary nationalism.
Engage brain before putting fingers in gear, Myles.
June 21st, 2009 at 1:53 pm
The presence of ‘establishment’ reactionary nationalists (including the Stahlhelm paramilitary) that were neither marginalised or suppressed during the 1920s helped institutionalise populist reactionary nationalism.
And Stalinism and the Comintern were? I fail to see your point.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I’m just not thinking that Matt spent a lot of time thinking about this.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:52 pm
One thing people often forget about the interwar ‘isolationism’ is that it was a reaction against the radical interventionism of the WIlson years. The U.S. invaded Russia, Haiti, a whole host of Latin American countries, and sent the army into Mexico 4 separate times, not to mention WWI. The stability and outcome of the post-WWII years made the isolationists look bad, but the 1910s made foreign interventionists look bad.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I fail to see your point.
This does not surprise me in the slightest.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Yeah, the weakness of the post is clearly evident where he imagines the Weimar Republic could have survived. The Weimar Republic was created to fail, taking down with it any hopes of Germany paying reparations, discrediting democratic rule in Germany, and leaving a wrecked economy and social structure that “needed” a strong-man government to survive.
Kinda like the Carter years, come to think of it.
Clues- France was an agrarian state. Germany didn’t exist until 1870, but emerged as the leading industrial state on the European continent.
And, Myles SG, you’ve made your point- the point being, that you’re someone I, and probably others, scroll past without reading. Thank god for having the name of the commenter at the top of their comment.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I would say that the problem that’s not being addressed so far, is the reliance during the interwar years on an extremely shaky system of internal finance, whereby American financiers bought up huge amounts of German municipal bonds, which in turn allowed Germany to pay off their reparations, which in turn allowed the Brits and the French to pay off their war debts.
This was not a sustainable system, because the moment that any part of the chain broke down, it was going to cause a huge credit crunch and spiral out of control. It broke down first in the U.S, when the Wall Street crash cut off the source for German munipal bonds, but it could have happened anywhere.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:34 pm
i think the post attributes a degree of prescience to Kellogg and others that simply wasn’t there. Was a war in Europe avoidable either in 1919 when the terms of the peace set set, or thereafter? Was a Pacific war avoidable? What would have been necessary to avoid either war? Well, we aren’t going to answer that in a post, let alone a comment to a post.
that being said, here’s some the best reading on this stuff that i know of for those interested:
for the rise of the nazis, my favorite is sebastian haffner, in two fantastic and highly readable books: Defying Hitler and The Meaning of Hitler. What a writer!
for getting at least a little sense of what woodrow wilson was attempting, thomas knock’s excellent To End All Wars was very illuminating to me and i think should be read by all critics of wilson before they start in on him. it’s easy to attack wilson, because in the end he failed, but knock certainly makes a case for his skill as a politician and presents an able defense of what he intended against formidable opposition. our whole political system was as corrupt then as it is now, though in a less sophisticated way, so wilson didn’t have an easy time trying to secure a lasting international peace that would be based on more than realpolitik.
For a withering view of us policy in the 20s from fdr’s only trusted hand in the state department, see sumner welles’ The Time for Decision, especially Chapters One and Two “It Might Have been” and “The Tragic Years.”
To see how much U.S. policy in the 20s was anything but isolationist, and in fact significantly involved protection of oil interests, especially in mexico and the ussr, read (in addition to Welles above): We Fight For Oil by Ludwell Denny, 1928; Oil Imperialism, Fischer, 1926). I think you can find them online and/or through the google book search function because of their age. (”Isolationism” has never dominated US foreign policy since McKinley. In the 30s, in the US military and big business, there was a considerable desire to avoid a great-power war in Europe, because the result was uncertain, could well result in a socialist europe, and possibly could have ended capitalist dominance of the world. Hitler ultimately overreached, and without much political sense (see quigley, tragedy and hope), causing the Brits to stand firm under Churchill and thereby making it no longer desirable from the perspective of US military and business interests for the US to sit out the war. (When the world is being divided up, to be a player, you have to get into the game.) See You Can’t Do Business With Hitler, published for the first time in the middle of 1941.
To understand the american military’s perspective during the 20s, including what separated the generals and admirals who favored limitations on naval building and armaments, see books like Social Attitudes of American Generals 1898-1940 by Richard Carl Brown (u. wisc. dissertation); Roskill, Naval Policy Between the Wars (1968). There is of course a vast amount more out there too. The impetus for disarmament wasn’t in the military, it was with ordinary people. the military’s goal was to thwart those foolish popular impulses, which military men always consider naive. Nobody with any sense thought outlawing war by decree alone would really do the trick. It let Kellogg and Coolide say they were doing something without really doing anything. You know, politics.
as for the pacific, i really don’t know if we would have fought japan had it not been considered necessary to deal with hitler. certainly we maneuvered the japanese into attcking us to facilitate our entry into the european war before the USSR was crushed by germany, as our military incorrectly believed was almost certain to happen. But the possible destruction of the british empire, which was touch and go, made the japanese altogether too powerful in the pacific too. So the questions were bound up with each other. But even apart from that linkage, teddy roosevelt long before then had predicted a terrible war with japan was inevitable in the pacific. i tend to agree with that, given the extent to which the military is intrinsically aggressive and dominated by corporate interests, but judging what is inevitable is pretty tricky business.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Soviet conquest on Europe in 1950s. Possible alliance with Japan if it goes to war with America.
So there you have it.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Matt’s argument may be flawed due to Geographic realities. It could be argued that pre-1945 Germany would always have a default setting as bellicose, as it is a strong country (i.e. has the means to start a war) and was surrounded by potential enemies, sharing borders with Poland, Russia, Czechosolvakia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Netherlands (i.e. it had the motivation to start a war – fear of attack). A lack of natural defences on the border with Poland and the low countries has traditionally made Germany very paranoid. One reason why the UK, US and Switzerland have isolationist tendencies, is because they can, defended by oceans or mountains.
In the end the “German Problem” has only been solved by splitting the country in two, and then pooling sovereignty as part of the European Union. It could be argued that it won’t be truly solved until the EU has a unified army. But either way, the basic geographic facts on the ground were not solved by 1919.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Besides what others have said in criticism of this post, I take issue with the idea that, had World War II as we know it been averted, “the era of great power wars would have ended in 1918 rather than 1945.”
It seems to me that the era of great power wars ended in 1945 only because there were no more great powers, except the United States and the Soviet Union, and the uneasy balance between the two was such as to make war worthwhile to neither.
It is difficult to imagine that an equivalent to that kind of balance, which kept peace until one collapsed, or the kind which exists today, in which the United States still dominates so overwhelmingly as to keep the rest of the world in line, could have been achieved if half a dozen or so great powers remained.
June 21st, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Some posters have mentioned the Versailles treaty as practically assuring the resumption of hostilities in 1939. I’m not so sure of that – I seem to recall that most of Keynes’ predictions on the economic consequences of the treaty did not come to pass. Of course, there was the 1923 hyperinflation, but this was caused more by the incompetence of the Germans than the burden of reparations. I think the central problem with the treaty wasn’t economic, but rather political, in particular the “War Guilt” clause, which forced the Germans to acknowledge their responsibility for the war, and the loss of the eastern territories to Poland. Both were deeply unpopular provisions, and kept revisionist sentiment alive.
June 21st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Re: This conveniently ignores the entire problem of the rising Japanese empire of that era.
some sort of confrontation with Japan was probably inevitable. However Japan’s ambitions might have been a bit restrained had it faced not just the US, but the UK and France not distracted by events in Europe.
Re: Failing that, had the US simply adopted complete neutrality, the UK and France would have been forced to end the war by 1916 at the latest
The US did not enter WWI until 1917, so even in real history the UK and France were able to keep fighting until then. Had the US stayed out of the war, it’s anyone’s guess how it would have ended once Russia was out of it and Germany no longer an Eastern Front.
Re: …where the Americans had still ended the Spanish empire
The Spanish Empire waas a pale ghost of itself by 1898. (And Spain did retain some African territories all the way into the 1970s). It would be better to say that Napoleon and the French Revolution doomed the Spanish Empire as the major portions of Latin America broke away from Spain in that era. The US played little role in those events. Even the famous Monroe Doctrine did not really count for much as it was mainly Britain’s sea power and disinclination to allow a New World reconquista that allowed, Mexico, Argentina, etc. to make good on their bid for independence.
Re: However, if another another shock occurs or banks are not as stable as people are being led to believe, then history will look at Obama and see Hoover.
No, because the mess started under Bush. The future may look at Obama and see Grover Cleveland (who inherited a Republican-caused financial mess he failed to cure), but Obama will not be blamed as Hoover was. George W Bush will be playing that role.
Re: The nature of European conflicts over the last two centuries is such that they tend to resolve themselves within a short period of time, if only out of logistics and finances.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are a vast exception to that rule.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Good point, Matt.
Outright pacifism didn’t start to be widespread until the very end of the 1920s with the publication of frank books about the horrors of WWI, such as All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and so forth. Before then, most people had more or less believed the old propaganda and tried not to think about what the war had actually been like. Combined with the economic crash from 1929, this led to disillusionment with the old verities. The French kept their huge army, but morale vanished. The British cut back on arms through 1935, after which they slowly regained a fatalistic stubbornness.
Viewed in this perspective, the anti-war diplomacy of the mid-1920s seems sensible. The real failures were in 1933-onward.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Keynes’ argument against the Versailles terms was pure arithmetic.
A nation can’t pay reparations unless it can run a current account surplus.
The French and Brits removed the ability to run a surplus at the same time they demanded the reparations.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:08 pm
It is difficult to imagine that an equivalent to that kind of balance, which kept peace until one collapsed, or the kind which exists today, in which the United States still dominates so overwhelmingly as to keep the rest of the world in line, could have been achieved if half a dozen or so great powers remained.
And what, exactly, would have been undesirable with that scenario? Having a number of Western powers, instead of a US-Soviet bipoly, or an American unipoly?
June 21st, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Matt Y:
Similarly, if you look at the history of Germany, the Nazis were not an especially large, powerful, or influential political movement. Indeed, as of 1928-29, the troubled Weimar Republic looked to have substantially stabilized itself. It seems very plausible to imagine that a normal economic downturn, rather than a years-long total collapse, would have prevented the Nazis from ever coming to power.
I think that Germany would have remained unstable even without the depression. True, things were getting better in ‘28-’29, but the fact remains that most of the major political parties (KDP, NSDAP, DNVP etc.) participating in the republic were formed with the general or direct goal of dismembering the republic. That doesn’t make for a stable government. The best thing (for stability’s sake) that could have happened after Hindenburg died was for some kind of rightist dictatorship headed by Von Schleicher. The other option was a uprising by the KDP which probably would have been bad news no matter how you cut it. But who knows if even that could have prevented some kind of revanche against France and England? I doubt it.
Not that all wars would have been avoided, of course, but that the era of great power wars would have ended in 1918 rather than 1945, not because of a difference in foreign policy but because of a difference in macroeconomic management?
Great power wars ended because of the invention of the nuclear bomb. I think that the horrors of WWII would have given the great powers pause before starting WWIII if there were no bomb. But we haven’t had WWIII because all concerned parties know that it would be indeed the last war ever fought.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Myles SG @ #8: Hat-tip to you, couldn’t have said it better myself.
And SLC, I still don’t see why you put so much importance on the Naval Arms Race. The British weren’t “forced” to up the ante by anything but their own paranoia. I still maintain the High Seas Fleet wasn’t an existential threat to British control of the oceans. But we’ve been over that territory before I guess.
June 21st, 2009 at 6:11 pm
The best thing (for stability’s sake) that could have happened after Hindenburg died was for some kind of rightist dictatorship headed by Von Schleicher.
It was near impossible, because of the Prussian-Catholic animus. I cannot imagine a world where the German conservatives would have been able to retain authority.
I still maintain the High Seas Fleet wasn’t an existential threat to British control of the oceans. But we’ve been over that territory before I guess.
You are quite right. There is actually something called an empirical experiment, which were the two wars. The German surface fleet proved totally unable to even venture out into the Atlantic.
The notion of the High Seas fleet challenging British naval stranglehold, except in a no-holds-barred all-out war, should be laughed out of respectable conservation.
June 21st, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Conversation*
June 21st, 2009 at 6:43 pm
And what, exactly, would have been undesirable with that scenario? Having a number of Western powers, instead of a US-Soviet bipoly, or an American unipoly?
I think history shows that the more states you have that are capable of avoiding domination by their neighbors and acting independently the more likely you are to have wars. That’s one reason why the world is a more peaceful place today than it has ever been before.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Re Miles SG
Mr Myles SG shows his immense ignorance of the situation of the German High Seas Fleet during WW 1. If Britain had stayed out of the war and France had been defeated and partially occupied as it was in WW 2, the French Atlantic ports would have become available for use by the High Seas Fleet, which would have made the job of the British Navy of bottling it up well nigh impossible. The fact that Britain controlled the exits from the North Sea was the cork in the bottle that prevented the High Seas Fleet from venturing into the Atlantic.
The fact is that the High Seas Fleet was superior to the Grand Fleet in many respects, particularly with respect to armor protection and gunnery (evaluations by US Naval historian F. Holloway Frost indicate that the Germans’ percentage of hits scored was 3 times that of the British). It should also be noted that 3 British battlecruisers blew up at Jutland while 1 German battlecruiser was sunk after suffering a number of hits.
In addition, the British AP shells were defective in that they tended to break up if they struck at an oblique angle. As historian Correlli Barnett has noted, the inadequacies of the British Dreadnaughts were well known to its commander, Admiral Jellico, which was, in part, the reason for his very conservative approach to the Battle of Jutland.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I think history shows that the more states you have that are capable of avoiding domination by their neighbors and acting independently the more likely you are to have wars. That’s one reason why the world is a more peaceful place today than it has ever been before.
There never really were a “dozen” powers. There were only three Great Powers on the Continent after the power; Britain, France, Germany.
In any case, the hidden plus of a multipolar structure was that it would have been able to decontaminate communism and socialism far better than any sort of bipolar or unipolar structure. The presence of strong, regionally dominant power projection by European powers with global reach would have almost made any advance of collectivist belief nigh well impossible.
I suspect had America of the pre-Vietnam era bothered to seriously empower the British and the French (the 1950’s Indochine effort was miserable), the Cold War would have ended a lot sooner, and the Soviet advance a lot more difficult. The whole Indochine scenario could potentially not have appeared at all. Instead, Eisenhowever, in a great feat of foolishness, organised a run on the sterling upon Suez.
There is a reasonable argument to be made that what made the Cold War so awful had in part to do with the fact that the traditional Western powers were engaged in a sort of enforced self-destruction. America eventually perked up, and tried to step into the breach, so to speak, but a lot of it was already down the drain. From a Cold War point of view, America’s (initial) post-war anti-British and anti-French vigour was insane.
At the end of the day, it is a lot more difficult to keep problems down in a unipolar world rather than one with a few dominant powers, with clear and well-defined spheres of influence.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I think the whole “Weimer was doomed” argument is reading history backwards. The French Third Republic was just as fucked up as Weimar, had the same problems of legitimacy, and had to contend with groups that wanted to destroy the Republic, such as the Royalists and the Bonapartists. But the Third Republic survived from 1870 until 1940, when it was toppled from the outside by the German conquest of France.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Just to give an example of the sort of problems that arise from an unipolar world: Georgia. The Georgians presumed a certain degree of protection from unipolar American power, that, frankly, was not only unrealistic but nigh well insane.
Had we had a more hot-headed executive and Congress in place, we could potentially have gone to conflict with the Russians over what was easily within the Russian sphere of influence.
In a multipolar world, where the rules are the clear and the spheres of influence well-defined, well-known, and inviolable, the Georgian delusion would not have been possible, and influential politicians of Great Powers would have recognised that arrangement.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
A stock market crash and a downturn of some kind look fairly inevitable, but US policymakers could have responded quickly expansionary monetary policy, the sort of bank guarantees that became the FDIC in the late-1930s, and a willingness to run federal deficits to maintain the (then rather modest) size and scope of public sector activities.
Or Hoover could have shut up and not browbeat companies into keeping wages up when profits were declining, disappearing, or going negative. The fact that real wages for those who had jobs were actually 10% higher in late 1931 than in late 1929 certainly did nothing to help the unemployment rate.
And monetary policy was expansionary from 1929 to 1931 – the Fed dropped the discount rate from 6% to 1.5%. It was factors that were beyond the Fed’s control that led to the massive deflation. And if the deflation had been allowed to run its course, with the appropriate defaults and decreases in prices and wages, the Depression would have probably corrected itself by 1931.
Actually, the biggest mistake made by the “good guys” in WW 1 was not demanding unconditional surrender of Germany and the occupation thereof.
Thanks, Mr. Hanson. Now go back to reading about ancient Greece.
If we had done what SLC wanted, we would have likely cost a huge amount more in lives and money. What if that had led to Communist revolutions across easern Europe?
June 21st, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Wow, apparently Glaivester is going to make the same wrong argument about monetary policy (an argument refuted by Milton Friedman, among others) on every thread.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:28 am
Actually, the biggest mistake made by the “good guys” in WW 1 was not demanding unconditional surrender of Germany and the occupation thereof.
If we had done what SLC wanted, we would have likely cost a huge amount more in lives and money.
Not at all true. The German army in the west was collapsing in November of 1918. The British and French were pushing them hard, taking tens of thousands of prisoners weekly, while the Americans, after a few weeks of bloody, stumbling attrition in the Argonne, had reformed under Hunter Leggett and were grinding the German army opposite them into the mud. Pershing was organizing a million fresh American troops to break through to the Rhine and the Germans knew it.
We have the testimony of the German generals to back all this up. Ludendorf had something resembling a nervous breakdown and the rest of the generals were all talking about getting an armistice before the army completely dissolved. Like the Japanese generals in 1945, they didn’t have the moral courage to admit they were beaten, so they fobbed the responsibility off on the civilians. If the civilian politicians had not bravely asked for negotiations–at least one of them was murdered for his part in them–the allied armies could have been up to the Rhine and possibly over it by the end of December.
What if that had led to Communist revolutions across easern Europe?
It did, anyhow. All of them failed except the one in Hungary, which didn’t last long.
If Germany had surrendered the allies armies would have been responsible for dealing with the Communists and would have been in position to do a better job of it than the locals did. We know they would have taken the threat seriously because they made an attempt to deal with it in Russia, bungling the job badly. Communists in Germany would have been easy to track down and extirpate. Rail connections for allied forces across Germany into Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine might have allowed intervention that would have saved those countries from Communist tyranny and probably fifty million lives over the next three decades.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 am
Mr Myles SG shows his immense ignorance of the situation of the German High Seas Fleet during WW 1. If Britain had stayed out of the war and France had been defeated and partially occupied as it was in WW 2, the French Atlantic ports would have become available for use by the High Seas Fleet, which would have made the job of the British Navy of bottling it up well nigh impossible. The fact that Britain controlled the exits from the North Sea was the cork in the bottle that prevented the High Seas Fleet from venturing into the Atlantic.
SLC illustrates the point that, when you are talking about historical alternatives, talk about the credible ones. The Americans staying out of World War I is plausible. For the reasons SLC gives, Britain leaving France to be defeated by Germany was only marginally less likely than the Martian invasion from War of the Worlds.
Culturally, the British and French hated each others guts and made war on each other every couple of decades from the Norman invasion up through 1815. France had been Europe’s single greatest military power since for two hundred years before 1870. France and Britain only stopped starting wars with each other after 1815 because France gave up trying to challenge Britain’s world naval domination and the two countries, despite the occasional crisis, found better things to do with their time.
The disaster of the Franco-Prussian War saw the rise of a new dominant military power in Europe, the German Empire. France, stripped of allies thanks to Napoleon IIIs incompetence, spent the next 40 years with a German gun to its head, constantly being bullied and threatened with another invasion.
The British and French continued their tradition of animosity until Kaiser Wilhelm decided to build a High Seas fleet to rival Britain’s. That fleet, if it could have gained control of the north sea or English Channel even for a few days, would have allowed the worlds most powerful army to invade an island with no hope of defending itself. The Germans gaining access to French ports and possibly to the French fleet would have put Britain in the same desperate straits it faced in Napoleon’s time.
At that point, only a few years after the British and French had almost gone to war over the Fashoda incident in the Sudan, both powers now had a German gun to their heads. This drew them into a tentative alliance, and the near disaster of the battles of 1914 sealed the bargain. Britain and France had to much to lose if they did not fight together.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:15 am
SLC illustrates the point that, when you are talking about historical alternatives, talk about the credible ones. The Americans staying out of World War I is plausible.
Yes. The problem is, why didn’t they? America staying out would have been to the long-term advantage of both the British and French empires, even though they themselves were unable to see it at the time. The pattern of European conflicts seems to be that the more people get involved, the worse it gets.
The disastrous impact the two wars had on the course of European history, and the long-term welfare of the European peoples, still remains to be fully realised. It reminds one of the Sword of Honour trilogy by Waugh, where at the end, Guy Crouchback, the protagonist, realises that it was all for naught, and his endless days amidst muck and fire led to not a better world, but a worse one.
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 am
Re: The presence of strong, regionally dominant power projection by European powers with global reach would have almost made any advance of collectivist belief nigh well impossible.
Huh? Russian fell to Communism during the era of multi-power polarity.
Re: suspect had America of the pre-Vietnam era bothered to seriously empower the British and the French (the 1950’s Indochine effort was miserable), the Cold War would have ended a lot sooner
You suspect wrong. In regards to Indochina we should have supported Ho Chih Minh’s bid for indpenendence from WWII on. That would have saved everyone a lot of grief. Meanwhile it’s hard for me to imagine a better conclsuion to the Cold War in Europe. Yes, it dragged on for a while, but the denouement was quite calm, relative to what might have been.
Re: The fact that real wages for those who had jobs were actually 10% higher in late 1931 than in late 1929 certainly did nothing to help the unemployment rate.
This was the result of deflation. Not of companies giving raises. Wages (as any economist will explain) are notoriously sticky, very resistant to decline even in a period of general deflation.
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:04 am
Unlike Myles Gloriosus some people thought parliamentary democracy was a good thing. Had Germany gained hegemony over England and France, it would not exist in any country in the world today, for the Germans despised it. My grandfather, although not of British ancestry, enlisted in WWI out of regard for British institutions (he had had a British teacher in high school).
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:10 am
US policymakers could have responded quickly expansionary monetary policy,
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:19 am
In the end the “German Problem” has only been solved by splitting the country in two, and then pooling sovereignty as part of the European Union. It could be argued that it won’t be truly solved until the EU has a unified army. But either way, the basic geographic facts on the ground were not solved by 1919. – Daniel E.
You forgot that the “German problem” (which, to begin with, was a “problem” because Europe decided to blame Germany for doing things which pretty much all the European nations were doing — it’s just that Germany was the last big nation at the table and thus out of the clique) was “solved” in large part by rounding up all the German minorities in Eastern Europe and shipping them back into one of the Germanies.
Interestingly, it was the Commies who did the rounding up, but we (U.S. occupied Bavaria) did a lot of the accepting. Now how come we didn’t house said Germans in refugee camps for generations and use them as a bargaining chip in the Cold War?
*
Also in re: Erich’s point — I think we still tend to see (witness the debate about how to deal with terrorism) foreign policy as having to be either isolationist or “Wilsonian”. The wisdom of Truman, et al., was to craft a foreign policy that engaged the world and its challenges but did not descend into Wilsonian interventionist madness (with the exception of Vietnam) until Ronald Wilson Reagan got into power.
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:27 am
Ah, the great Sword of Honour trilogy, in which Waugh argues essentially that the worst thing about Nazi Germany was that they (briefly) allied themselves with the dreaded Bolshies. I tried reading it once, it gave me nausea.
I agree with JonF about supporting Ho CHi Minh’s bid for independence, BTW. The Cold War was one of those things that started for very good reasons (standing up to Stalin) and degenerated into a mess, particularly by the 1970s and 1980s, in which we found ourselves on the wrong side as often as not. Opposing Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Salvador Allende and even Castro in Cuba had very little to do with any noble effort to free the captive Hungarians, Poles, and Siberian political prisoners. And it had everything to do with supporting decadent oligarchies. But then Myles has freely copped to liking decadent oligarchies, just like his idol Waugh. The Cold War could, I suppose, have been avoided if we had supported the Socialist-Revolutionaries over the Bolsheviks in 1917, or helping Bukharin get supremacy over Stalin in the mid 1920s. Then Stalin would have ended up facing a firing squad and 20 million people would have not died (maybe more, inasmuch as Mao and other tyrants were inspired by Stalin). But that would have meant allying ourselves (horrors) with (moderate) revolutionaries, which Myles SG doesn’t do.
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
DAS,
It’s not a perfect analogy, because as bad as Arab countries have been to the Jews (and yes, I know that the Mufti of Jerusalem, the king of Iraq, and many other Arab leaders in the 1930s and 1940s were essentially pro-Nazi in sentiment so you don’t need to tell me that) they haven’t herded them into concentration camps and exterminated them, unlike the Germans. The Germans in 1945 were in _no_ position to protest their deportation and relocation.
Plus the fact that Jerusalem is holy ground for Muslims (as well as Jews). Germany isn’t holy ground for anyone.
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 am
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June 22nd, 2009 at 7:45 am
Re Midland
Just to hammer home Mr. Midlands’ point, consider what happened in 1940 when France fell and the German Navy gained access to the French Atlantic ports. In fact, it could have been much worse. If Hitler had not been obsessed with battleships and had used the labor and materials frittered away in building the Bismarck and the Tirpitz to construct Uboats, he might have had 50 or 60 such vessels ready to deploy to the French ports instead of the 1/2 dozen that were available at the time. With 50 or 60 Uboats, given the inadequacy of the British anti-submarine force in 1940, I think that there is little doubt that he could have forced Britain out of the war by starvation within 2 or 3 months without the wastage of the bombing campaign which took a serious toll on the German Luftwaffes’ bombers, fighter aircraft, and more importantly, aircraft crews. By the time the German Navy had beefed up their Uboat fleet in 1943, the British had used the time to similarly beef up their anti-submarine forces, particularly with the development of the escort carrier.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:19 am
Look, everyone is missing a sense of perspective when they are speeching on and on about moral imperative and all that.
The fact of the matter is, the British Home Counties family that just lost all of their holdings, in Malaya, at the end of the 50’s, certainly didn’t feel moral imperative about it. They felt abject horror at the complete and irreversible loss of the sort of income that had sustained the family for at least several generations. The British working-man who no longer has an upward future, because his firm has been squeezed out of foreign markets by the end of empire, certainly felt no such grand moral imperative.
What happened, contrary to what seems to be the tone here, wasn’t just some grand, epic, excellent video game where you get to go “game over” and start again. The conflicts shook nations to the ground, and took a lot of casualties with them.
And I find it hard to say it was worth it in the end. For what? To defeat a clown-like Kaiser, a farcical Caliph-Sultan, and a ludicrous King-Emperor of Austria-Hungary? Never in history have so much been staked for so worthless few.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:27 am
The Cold War could, I suppose, have been avoided if we had supported the Socialist-Revolutionaries over the Bolsheviks in 1917, or helping Bukharin get supremacy over Stalin in the mid 1920s.
It’s generally very bad policy to get oneself tangled up in the politics of any large power, and it is especially ill-advised to get oneself entangled in Russian politics, of all things. The thought that anyone good could have come out of the West involving itself in horror-show that was Russian politics is risible.
The best policy, as tested through the centuries, is to leave Russia alone to its own little patch of grass, and get as far as one can from it and avoid it like the plague. It is to the West’s disadvantage if they have not done so.
Involving Russia in Continental political football, for example, was a supremely bad call. Tacitly supporting Russian adventurism in the Balkans ran in a direct line to the upheavals of 1917.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 am
Re: The thought that anyone good could have come out of the West involving itself in horror-show that was Russian politics is risible.
Well, yes. My point is that the horror-show could largely have been prevented if we had teamed up with Bukharin to assassinate Stalin in 1924.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:02 am
Hector @52 is either deliberately lying or does not know what he is talking about-I am doubtful he has actually read Sword of Honour.
Guy Crouchback, the main character, envisions World War II as a noble struggle against all the evils of the modern world-and when Nazi Germany aligns with the Soviet Union, he is convinced that he is going to be some kind of hero. “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”
Then the Nazis turn on the USSR, his country allies with the Soviet Union, and the main result of the war, from Guy’s point of view, is that it makes the world safe for Communism. (He is not alone in that view-Richard Overy has said as much, in Why the Allies Won.) All the things he counts on, all the causes he believes in, prove flawed and corrupt-”He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.” All his attempts to be noble and honorable have backfired-and his country is doing things like handing over dissidents to Communist secret police.
Sword of Honour should be read with things like Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle, Catch 22, and The Naked and the Dead: a nice corrective to the popular mythology of World War II.
The “Sword of Honour” in question, btw, is the one that the British government presented to Stalin, which was displayed in Westminster Abbey for crowds to gape at before it was sent on.
Just in case anyone doubts me on this one, pick up the trilogy. Compare my view of it to Hector’s after you are done.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:13 am
@Hector 58
Leaving aside the issue of whether Bukharin actually wanted to assassinate Stalin in 1924 (or at any other time1), why would Bukharin would all that preferable? Like every other major Bolshevik leader, he was quite willing to engage in politicide on a grand scale.
1Yes, I know Stalin and his cronies claimed this. Guess what-they probably made it up.
Comparing Bukharin’s attitude to Stalin (he wrote a note to Stalin asking “Why do you need me to die, Koba?” just before Stalin had him murdered) to Stalin’s attitude to Bukharin makes Bukharin look good-until one remembers his role in previous Bolshevik works. The big difference between Stalin and the rest of the early Bolshevik leaders is that Stalin cheerfully murdered his old colleagues and pals along with various other groups of class enemies.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Pseudonym,
If I recall correctly Bukharin opposed the forcible and rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture. _By itself_ that was responsible for up to half the deaths attributable to Soviet rule, so perforce Bukharin would _at worst_ have only have been half as bad as Stalin. Leaving that aside, I don’t believe there would have been the Great Purge, the Moscow Trials, the network of Siberian labor camps, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the Korean War if Bukharin had been in charge.
Bukharin didn’t actually try to kill Stalin, you’re right. But I’m sure he would have thought, as did most people, that the world would be a better place if Stalin was dead. He might have consented to an assassination plot if the West had promised its support.
My basic point is that the idea that Bolshevism was a monolithic evil was dumb, pernicious, and to some extent a self fulfiling prophecy. By keeping constant pressure on the Soviet Union and fulminating on the evils of socialism we created the conditions that favored the rise of tough, hard men, and made the rise of the demonic Stalin inevitable. We would have done better to work with the revolution, and try to tame and moderate it.
As I said, I only read the beginning of, I think, the third book of ‘Sword of Honour’, but my impression was definitely that Mr. Waugh considered the Soviets worse than the Nazis.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:31 am
And no, I don’t think Bukharin was the perfect man for Russia- I think that the SRs were. Russia needed a radical Left revolution in 1917 but I would have much preferred the Socialist Revolutionaries to the Bolsheviks- and if I had been alive in 1920 I would have sided with the SRs when they rose in revolt against the Bolshies.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Hector @61&62
I wouldn’t disagree that Waugh thought the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany-that is a different statement than “Waugh argues essentially that the worst thing about Nazi Germany was that they (briefly) allied themselves with the dreaded Bolshies,” an idea nowhere to be found in the books.
It might be a good idea, in the future, to refrain from commenting on a series that one has only read part of.
Bukharin did oppose collectivization at one point-as did Stalin. Of course, Bukharin later changed his mind-in 1930, he wrote an article called “The Great Reconstruction” which supported it.
The Siberian labor camp system came into being in the very early 1920s-albeit on a smaller scale than Stalin envisioned-Bukharin did not object.
It’s possible the rest of it would not have happened (although there were mini-purges in the party from day one-they just didn’t become lethal to higher levels until Stalin, and the early Soviet state was quite willing to engage in ruthless realpolitik and cooperation with Germany), though.
Half as bad as Stalin is pretty bad, though.
Why do you think Bukharin would have wanted Stalin dead in 1924? If you’re thinking of Lenin’s “Secret Testament,” (actually several documents) keep in mind that was critical of all the Soviet leaders at the time-including Bukharin.
In 1924, Bukharin and Stalin were political allies, so even if Bukharin was willing to conspire with non-Bolsheviks to murder a fellow party member, I doubt Stalin would have been his target. (Trotsky, on the other hand…)
That’s without getting how the World War I allies tried very hard to wipe out the Bolshevik state in the late teens and early 20s-and failed. Do you really think they were in a position to try again in 1924?
Yes, Bolshevism wasn’t a monolith-but it’s hard to imagine any Bolshevik leader not presiding over a nasty state full of mass murder and slave labor. Give Emma Goldman’s essay Trotsky Protests Too Much a read, sometime, for a contemporary view.
There really wasn’t an alternative to the Bolsheviks in Russia after they took down Kerensky. The Left SRs got coopted, then smashed when they broke free and rebelled.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
A Pseudonym,
I’m sorry for slandering Waugh. I have a tendency to exaggerated and florid rhetoric, which gets me into trouble sometimes, and I’ll try to refrain in future.
Yes, the allies intervened, but they intervened (or were seen as intervening) on the side of the monarchists and capitalists, and not on the side of the non-Bolshevik revolutionaries. Which reduced their credibility among those Russians who might dislike the Bolsheviks but also disliked capitalists and monarchists. (And there were a lot of those- the SRs, if I recall correctly, had overwhelming popular support.) That was my point: an intellectually and morally serious Left should have seen that Russia needed a revolution, that capitalism and monarchism had to go, but that the Bolsheviks were not the people to do it.
What Bukharin thought in 1930 is hard to discren. Stalin was in power then, and he may simply have been lying and trying to save his head. The purges hadn’t started by then but I suspect that even then it was apparent that it was unsafe to disagree with Stalin. Regardless, Bukharin was seen, at the time, and until he died, as a relatively moderate and humane figure among the Bolsheviks.
I will check out the Emma Goldman book too.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Well, yes. My point is that the horror-show could largely have been prevented if we had teamed up with Bukharin to assassinate Stalin in 1924.
I don’t think you grasp this, but Russian politics’ tendency to become a horror-show goes back to before even the Romanovs. The Soviet Union had greatly aggravating effects, to be sure, but the origin of the brutal tendency was not Stalin but Russia itself.
Everyone puts Stalin within the Communist context, but nobody puts him within the Russian context; could there ever been such a man in English Socialism?
And the greater public support was for the liberal Constitutional Government of the brief interregnum between Tsarism and Communism, not for either the radical leftists or the Communists, which obtained power by coup, and commanded at most a slice of the discontented urban work classes, a very small minority at the time in Russia.
So it was indeed dictatorship by the proletariat; except, in this case, the Russian proletariat wasn’t even close to being the plurality, left alone the majority.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Compared to past horrors, the ilk of Putin and Medvedev are pure vanilla. The West should be helping them cement their power, not chip away at it. After them, the real maniacs on the nuclear button.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:49 pm
I’ll quote something here that I have heard somewhere: the Russian (quite apart from Communist) view of human life is way down the drain. Something to keep in mind when discussing Russian Communism.
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Unlike Myles Gloriosus some people thought parliamentary democracy was a good thing. Had Germany gained hegemony over England and France, it would not exist in any country in the world today, for the Germans despised it.
I don’t agree, the Germans had a parliament dating back to the era of Bismark. By the 19-teens it was not as robust as the British parliament or our congress, but it was powerful enough to stick a thumb in the Kaiser’s eye when he was trying to found the construction of the fleet and bills over funding the Army were usually political bloodbaths, they even let hated SDP members to sit.
In contrast all of the democracies set-up after the war save had Czechoslovakia turned in to dictatorships by 1934. So the war didn’t do much for democracy for Germany nor anywhere else.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Re: Involving Russia in Continental political football, for example, was a supremely bad call.
Russia was not like a vampire that needed a formal invitation to enter European politics. Russia began taking an interest in Europe all the way to Peter the Great and by the end of the 18th century it was already hip-deep in Europe. Simply ignoring Russia, whether of the Tsar or of the Commisar, would not have dismissed the country to the outer darkness.
Re: I don’t think you grasp this, but Russian politics’ tendency to become a horror-show goes back to before even the Romanovs.
Once upon a time just about every country’s politics was a horror show. Recall Henry VIII’s reign– not just his marriage troubles, but his judicial murders and his persecution of anyone who disagreed with his religious leanings du jour. Meanwhile on the Continent we had the Spanish Inquisition, the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, Vlad the Impaler, the Thirty Years War…
Re: Everyone puts Stalin within the Communist context, but nobody puts him within the Russian context; could there ever been such a man in English Socialism?
Imagine Cromwell just as fanatical, but for the sake of socialism rather than Puritanism– and give him modern technology to make good his desires. Then yes, I can imagine such a man in an English context– maybe even a Drogheda-type massacre with nuclear weapons.
Re: I’ll quote something here that I have heard somewhere: the Russian (quite apart from Communist) view of human life is way down the drain.
Myles, there are people who say that about the USA in the context of our liberal abortion laws. As Sophokles (or maybe Vergil) said, Is any region of the Earth not full of our calamities?
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:58 pm
The Germans had a parliament but they did not have free speech, and its powers were limited.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
I would think that Henry VIII would compare rather favourably with Ivan the Terrible.
But even putting that aside, have you been to Russia? I have, and I can tell you that the best thing to happen would be for Russia and the rest of the world to have as little to do with each other as possible. I am quite willing to give Russia its turf: Georgia, Armenia, South Ossetia, et al. In no other place have nature and history so shaped life to be bleak.
At the end of the day, Russia is simply trouble. And the West would do well for itself to divorce itself of any Russian associations or entanglements.
We have seen this twice, already, in the past century. First the powder keg ignited by the shot in Belgrade; then the totalitarian horror we joined at the hip.
Buy the oil from Putin, sell them diamonds and Bentleys and Patek Philippe, and let’s get out of there. Because there has been no country that as proved greater entanglements for the West than Russia.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:25 pm
As Sophokles (or maybe Vergil) said, Is any region of the Earth not full of our calamities?
I understand that you perhaps went to a quality college and thus imbibed the corrected spellings, but really, Sophokles? That’s pushing it.
This is like affecting Hercules as Herakles; dilettantism.
(Does anyone without a sound classical education even recognise Herakles? At least Vergil is clear)
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:06 am
Re: I would think that Henry VIII would compare rather favourably with Ivan the Terrible.
You think wrong. Both were vicious and tyrannical. Ivan murdered his son; Henry offed two of his wives.
Re: In no other place have nature and history so shaped life to be bleak.
I can think of any number of countries where the standard of living is far lower than in Russia. Haiti? Bangladesh? Somalia?
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:11 am
JonF,
I think that Cromwell is more analogous to Mao (as both of them were genuinely, and sincerely, ideological fanatics). I don’t think Stalin was really that ideological, as his repeated betrayals of foreign communist insurgencies demonstrates- he was violently opposed to any communist movement abroad that he couldn’t control. He was a power-hungry gangster, I think, more than any kind of ideological extremist, and in America he might have been a Mafia don. There is even some purported evidence (the Eremin Letter) that he was passing information on his comrades to the Czarist secret police in the 1910s, which seems like hardly the action of a sincere ideological fanatic. (I’m not sure what the opening up of the archives since 1991 has taught us about the provenance and veracity of that letter though- its veracity was disputed at the time).