MODERN
TIMES
REVISED EDITION
From theTwenties
to the Nineties
PaulJohnson
AuthorofTHE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
$35.00
Now available in a revised and updated edi
tion, the continuing national bestseller (nearly
200,000 copies sold) about the events, ideas,
and personalities of the seven decades since the
end of World War I. Originally published in
1983 and named one of the Best Books of the
Year by the New York Times, this edition con
tains a new final chapter, and the text has been
revised and updated.
Modern times, says the author, began on
May 29, 1919, when photographs of a solar
eclipse confirmed the truth of a new theory of
the universe—Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Paul Johnson then describes the full impact of
Freudianism, the establishment of the first
Marxist state, the chaos of "Old Europe," the
Arcadian twenties and the new forces in China
and Japan. Here are Keynes, Coolidge, Franco,
the '29 Crash, the Great Depression and Roo
sevelt's New Deal. And there are the wars that
followed—the Sino-Japanese, the Abyssinian
and Albanian conflicts and the Spanish Civil
War, a prelude to the massive conflict of World
War II. The incredible repression and violence
of the totalitarian regimes brought a new
dimension to the solution of social and political
problems, and in Germany, Russia and China
we see this frightening aspect of the new
"social engineering."
Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mao,
Hirohito, Mussolini and Gandhi are the titans
of this period. There are wartime tactics, strate
gy and diplomacy; the development of nuclear
power and its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
the end of World War II and the harsh political
realities of the uneasy peace that followed. The
rise of the superpowers—Russia and the United
States; the emergence of the Third World; the
Marshall Plan and the Cold War; Tito, Nehru,
de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Sukarno, Eden, Ade
nauer, Nasser, Ben Gurion and Castro are
described. The book covers the economic
(continued on back flap)
1191N
(continued from front flap)
resurgence of Europe and Japan; existentialism;
Suez; Algeria; Israel; the New Africa of Kenya tta, Idi Amin and apartheid; the radicalizing of
Latin America; the Kennedy years, Johnson
and Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, the Rea
gan years; Gorbachev and perestroika; Saddam
Hussein and the Gulf War. And there are the
Space Age, the expansion of scientific knowl
edge, the population explosion, religion in our
times, world economic cycles, structuralism,
genetic engineering and sociobiology.
Incisive, stimulating and frequently con
troversial, Modern Times combines fact, anec
dote, incident and portrait in a major full-scale
analysis of how the modern age came into
being and where it is heading.
was educated at Stonyhurst
College, Lancashire, and Magdalen College,
Oxford. He was assistant editor of Realités and
was then on the staff of the New Statesman from
1955 to 1970, the last six years as editor. In 1980
and 1981 he was visiting professor of commu
nications at the American Enterprise Institute
in Washington, D.C. He has received the Fran
cis Boyer Public Policy Award and the Krug
Award for Excellence in Literature. Among his
other books are A History of the Jews, A History
of the English People, Intellectuals, and The Birth of
the Modern: World Society 1815-1830.
PAUL JOHNSON
Jacket design © by One Plus One Studio
Author photograph © by Mark Gerson
YlarperCollinsPublishers
"Truly a distinguished work of history . . . Modern Times unites historical and critical
consciousness. It is far from being a simple chronicle, though a vast wealth of events
and personages and historical changes fill i t . . . .We can take a great deal of intellectual
pleasure in this book."
— Robert Nisbet, New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant, densely textured, intellectually challenging book. Frequently surprises,
even startles, us with new views of past events and fresh looks at the characters of the
chief world movers and shakers, in politics, the military, economics, science, religion
and philosophy for six decades."
—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal
"Wide-ranging and quirky, this history of our times (since World War I) hits all the
highlights and hot spots: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, World War II and
on to the 1980s. . . . A latter-day Mencken, Johnson is witty, gritty and compulsively
readable."
—Foreign Affairs
"Johnson's insights are often brilliant and of value in their startling freshness."
— Peter Loewenberg, Los Angeles Times
"A marvelously incisive and synthesizing account."
— David Gress, Commentary
"A remarkable book. . . . It is a powerful, lively, compelling and provocative political
history of the world since 1917."
—Hugh Thomas, Times Literary Supplement
"A sweeping interpretation of world history since the failure of peacemaking at Ver
sailles in 1919. His central themes are the bankruptcy of moral relativism, social engi
neering, and totalitarian regimes, all linked in his analysis, and the superiority of open
societies and free market capitalism. The book is bound to be controversial.... Never
theless, it is a fascinating book. Johnson's range is vast, his citations are impressive,
and he has a knack for the apposite quotation. He sees the century as an age of
slaughter, but also one of human improvement."
— Library Journal
"Paul Johnson's Modern Times is an extraordinary book: a comprehensive narrative
history of the contemporary world, and at the same time a sustained and passionate
meditation on the meaning of history in general, and of modernity in particular."
—American Spectator
MODERN TIMES
MODERN
TIMES
The W from
the Twenties
to the Nineties
Paulfohnson
mt HarperCollinsPublishers
This work is published in England under the title A History of the Modern
the 1980s.
World: From 1917 to
MODERN TIMES: THE WORLD FROM THE TWENTIES TO THE NINETIES. Copyright © 1983 by Paul
Johnson. Revised edition copyright © 1991 by Paul Johnson. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. N o part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New
York, NY 10022.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 91-55161
ISBN 0-06^133427-9
91 92 93 94 95 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated
to the memory of my father, W. A. Johnson,
artist, educator and enthusiast
Contents
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
ix
A Relativistic World
1
The First Despotic Utopias
49
Waiting for Hitler
104
Legitimacy in Decadence
138
An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos
The Last Arcadia
203
Dégringolade
230
The Devils
261
The High N o o n of Aggression
309
The End of Old Europe
341
The Watershed Year
372
Superpower and Genocide
398
Peace by Terror
432
The Bandung Generation
466
Caliban's Kingdoms
506
Experimenting with Half Mankind
544
The European Lazarus
575
America's Suicide Attempt
613
The Collectivist Seventies
659
The Recovery of Freedom
697
Source Notes 785
Index 841
vii
176
Acknowledgements
Among the many institutions and individuals to whom I am
beholden I would especially like to thank the American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, which gave me
hospitality as a Resident Scholar; Dr N o r m a n Stone, w h o read the
manuscript and corrected many errors; my editor at Weidenfeld,
Linda Osband; the copy-editor, Sally Mapstone; and my eldest son,
Daniel Johnson, who also worked on the manuscript.
ix
'Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron;
thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
Be wise n o w therefore, O ye kings:
be instructed, ye judges of the earth'
Psalms,
2: 9 - 1 0
ONE
A Relativistic World
The modern world began on 2 9 M a y 1 9 1 9 when photographs o f a
solar eclipse, taken on the island o f Principe off West Africa and at
Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth o f a new theory o f the universe.
It had been apparent for half a century that the Newtonian cos
mology, based upon the straight lines o f Euclidean geometry and
Galileo's notions o f absolute time, was in need o f serious modifica
tion. It had stood for more than two hundred years. It was the
framework within which the European Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, and the vast expansion o f human knowledge, freedom
and prosperity which characterized the nineteenth century, had
taken place. But increasingly powerful telescopes were revealing
anomalies. In particular, the motions of the planet Mercury deviated
by forty-three seconds o f arc a century from its predictable behaviour
under Newtonian laws o f physics. W h y ?
In 1 9 0 5 , a twenty-six-year-old G e r m a n J e w , Albert Einstein, then
working in the Swiss patent office in Berne, had published a paper,
' O n the electrodynamics of moving bodies', which became known as
the Special Theory o f Relativity. Einstein's observations on the way
in which, in certain circumstances, lengths appeared to contract and
clocks to slow down, are analogous to the effects o f perspective in
painting. In fact the discovery that space and time are relative rather
than absolute terms o f measurement is comparable, in its effect on
our perception o f the world, to the first use of perspective in art,
which occurred in Greece in the two decades c. 5 0 0 - 4 8 0 B C .
T h e originality o f Einstein, amounting to a form o f genius, and the
curious elegance o f his lines o f argument, which colleagues compared
to a kind of art, aroused growing, world-wide interest. In 1 9 0 7 he
published a demonstration that all mass has energy, encapsulated in
the equation E = m c , which a later age saw as the starting point in
the race for the A - b o m b . N o t even the onset o f the European war
prevented scientists from following his quest for an all-embracing
1
2
2
3
1
2
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
General T h e o r y o f Relativity which would cover gravitational fields
and provide a comprehensive revision of Newtonian physics. In 1 9 1 5
news reached London that he had done it. The following spring, as
the British were preparing their vast and catastrophic offensive on
the S o m m e , the key paper was smuggled through the Netherlands
and reached Cambridge, where it was received by Arthur Eddington,
Professor o f Astronomy and Secretary of the Royal Astronomical
Society.
Eddington publicized Einstein's achievement in a 1 9 1 8 paper for
the Physical Society called 'Gravitation and the Principle of Relativ
ity'. But it was o f the essence o f Einstein's methodology that he
insisted his equations must be verified by empirical observation and
he himself devised three specific tests for this purpose. T h e key one
was that a ray o f light just grazing the surface of the sun must be bent
by 1 . 7 4 5 seconds o f arc - twice the amount of gravitational
deflection provided for by classical Newtonian theory. T h e exper
iment involved photographing a solar eclipse. T h e next was due on
2 9 M a y 1 9 1 9 . Before the end o f the war, the Astronomer Royal, Sir
Frank Dyson, had secured from a harassed government the promise
of £ 1 , 0 0 0 to finance an expedition to take observations from
Principe and Sobral.
Early in M a r c h 1 9 1 9 , the evening before the expedition sailed, the
astronomers talked late into the night in Dyson's study at the Royal
Observatory, Greenwich, designed by Wren in 1 6 7 5 - 6 , while
N e w t o n was still working on his general theory o f gravitation. E . T .
Cottingham, Eddington's assistant, who was to accompany him,
asked the awful question: what would happen if measurement of the
eclipse photographs showed not Newton's, nor Einstein's, but twice
Einstein's deflection? Dyson said, 'Then Eddington will go mad and
you will have to come h o m e alone.' Eddington's notebook records
that on the morning o f 2 9 M a y there was a tremendous thunder
storm in Principe. T h e clouds cleared just in time for the eclipse at
1.30 pm. Eddington had only eight minutes in which to operate. 'I
did not see the eclipse, being too busy changing plates . . . We took
sixteen photographs.' Thereafter, for six nights he developed the
plates at the rate o f two a night. O n the evening of 3 June, having
spent the whole day measuring the developed prints, he turned to his
colleague, 'Cottingham, you w o n ' t have to go home alone.' Einstein
had been right.
T h e expedition satisfied two o f Einstein's tests, which were
reconfirmed by W . W . Campbell during the September 1 9 2 2 eclipse.
It was a measure o f Einstein's scientific rigour that he refused to
accept that his own theory was valid until the third test (the 'red
shift') was met. ' I f it were proved that this effect does not exist in
4
3
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
nature', he wrote to Eddington on 15 December 1919, 'then the
whole theory would have to be abandoned'. In fact the 'red shift' was
confirmed by the Mount Wilson observatory in 1923, and thereafter
empirical proof of relativity theory accumulated steadily, one of the
most striking instances being the gravitational lensing system of
quasars, identified in 1 9 7 9 - 8 0 . At the time, Einstein's professional
heroism did not go unappreciated. To the young philosopher Karl
Popper and his friends at Vienna University, 'it was a great exper
ience for us, and one which had a lasting influence on my intellectual
development'. 'What impressed me most', Popper wrote later, 'was
Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as
untenable if it should fail in certain tests . . . . Here was an attitude
utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even
more so that of their followers. Einstein was looking for crucial
experiments whose agreement with his predictions would by no
means establish his theory; while a disagreement, as he was the first
to stress, would show his theory to be untenable. This, I felt, was the
true scientific attitude.'
Einstein's theory, and Eddington's much publicized expedition to
test it, aroused enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No
exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted
so many headlines or become a topic of universal conversation. The
tension mounted steadily between June and the actual announcement
at a packed meeting of the Royal Society in London in September
that the theory had been confirmed. To A.N.Whitehead, who was
present, it was like a Greek drama:
5
6
W e were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the
development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very
staging: the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of
Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalizations was now,
after more than t w o centuries, to receive its first modification . . . a great
adventure in thought had at last c o m e home to s h o r e .
7
From that point onward, Einstein was a global hero, in demand at
every great university in the world, mobbed wherever he went, his
wistful features familiar to hundreds of millions, the archetype of the
abstracted natural philosopher. The impact of his theory was im
mediate, and cumulatively immeasurable. But it was to illustrate
what Karl Popper was later to term 'the law of unintended conse
quence'. Innumerable books sought to explain clearly how the
General Theory had altered the Newtonian concepts which, for
ordinary men and women, formed their understanding of the world
about them, and how it worked. Einstein himself summed it up thus:
'The "Principle of Relativity" in its widest sense is contained in the
4
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
statement: T h e totality o f physical phenomena is of such a character
that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of "absolute
m o t i o n " ; or, shorter but less precise: There is no absolute motion.'
Years later, R . Buckminster Fuller was to send a famous cable to the
Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi explaining Einstein's key equation in
exactly 2 4 9 words, a masterpiece o f compression.
But for most people, to w h o m Newtonian physics, with their
straight lines and right angles, were perfectly comprehensible, rela
tivity never became more than a vague source o f unease. It was
grasped that absolute time and absolute length had been dethroned;
that motion was curvilinear. All at once, nothing seemed certain in
the movements o f the spheres. ' T h e world is out of joint', as Hamlet
sadly observed. It was as though the spinning globe had been taken
off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to
accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the
1 9 2 0 s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular
level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of
good and evil, o f knowledge, above all o f value. Mistakenly but
perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
N o one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misap
prehension. H e was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error
which his work seemed to promote. H e wrote to his colleague M a x
B o r n on 9 September 1 9 2 0 : 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned
everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a
fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practising J e w , but he
acknowledged a G o d . H e believed passionately in absolute standards
of right and wrong. His professional life was devoted to the quest not
only for truth but for certitude. He insisted the world could be divided
into subjective and objective spheres, and that one must be able to
make precise statements about the objective portion. In the scientific
(not the philosophical) sense he was a determinist. In the 1 9 2 0 s he
found the indeterminacy principle o f quantum mechanics not only
unacceptable but abhorrent. F o r the rest o f his life until his death in
1 9 5 5 he sought to refute it by trying to anchor physics in a unified field
theory. H e wrote to B o r n : ' Y o u believe in a G o d who plays dice, and I
in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists and
which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly
believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way or
rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to f i n d . ' But
Einstein failed to produce a unified theory, either in the 1 9 2 0 s or
thereafter. H e lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a
social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into
existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his
life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.
8
9
10
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
5
T h e emergence o f Einstein as a world figure in 1 9 1 9 is a striking
illustration of the dual impact o f great scientific innovators on
mankind. They change our perception o f the phvsical world and
increase our mastery o f it. But they also change our ideas. T h e second
effect is often more radical than the first. T h e scientific genius
impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman
or warlord. Galileo's empiricism created the ferment of natural
philosophy in the seventeenth century which adumbrated the scienti
fic and industrial revolutions. Newtonian physics formed the frame
work of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and so helped to
bring modern nationalism and revolutionary politics to birth.
Darwin's notion o f the survival o f the fittest was a key element both
in the M a r x i s t concept o f class warfare and o f the racial philosophies
which shaped Hitlerism. Indeed the political and social consequences
of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out, as we shall see
throughout this b o o k . So, too, the public response to relativity was
one o f the principal formative influences on the course o f
twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded
by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings
in the faith and morals o f Judeo-Christian culture.
T h e impact of relativity was especially powerful because it vir
tually coincided with the public reception o f Freudianism. By the
time Eddington verified Einstein's General Theory, Sigmund Freud
was already in his mid-fifties. M o s t o f his really original work had
been done by the turn o f the century. The Interpretation
of Dreams
had been published as long ago as 1 9 0 0 . He was a well-known and
controversial figure in specialized medical and psychiatric circles,
had already founded his own school and enacted a spectacular
theological dispute with his leading disciple, Carl Jung, before the
Great W a r broke out. But it was only at the end o f the war that his
ideas began to circulate as c o m m o n currency.
T h e reason for this was the attention the prolonged trench-fighting
focused on cases o f mental disturbance caused by stress: 'shell-shock'
was the popular term. Well-born scions o f military families, who had
volunteered for service, fought with conspicuous gallantry and been
repeatedly decorated, suddenly broke. They could not be cowards,
they were not madmen. Freud had long offered, in psychoanalysis,
what seemed to be a sophisticated alternative to the 'heroic' methods
of curing mental illness, such as drugs, bullying, or electric-shock
treatment. Such methods had been abundantly used, in ever-growing
doses, as the war dragged on, and as 'cures' became progressively
short-lived WTien the electric current was increased, men died under
treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims
of the Inquisition. T h e post-war fury o f relatives at the cruelties
6
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
inflicted in military hospitals, especially the psychiatric division of
the Vienna General Hospital, led the Austrian government in 1 9 2 0 to
set up a commission o f inquiry, which called in F r e u d .
The
resulting controversy, though inconclusive, gave Freud the world
wide publicity he needed. Professionally, 1 9 2 0 was the year of
breakthrough for him, when the first psychiatric polyclinic was
opened in Berlin, and his pupil and future biographer, Ernest Jones,
launched the International
Journal of
Psycho-Analysis.
But even more spectacular, and in the long run far more impor
tant, was the sudden discovery o f Freud's works and ideas by
intellectuals and artists. As Havelock Ellis said at the time, to the
M a s t e r ' s indignation, Freud was not a scientist but a great artist.
After eighty years' experience, his methods of therapy have proved,
on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than
cure the s i c k . W e now know that many of the central ideas of
psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formu
lated by Freud before the discovery o f Mendel's Laws, the chromoso
mal theory o f inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors,
the existence o f hormones and the mechanism o f the nervous
impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar
has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it
contains isolated nuggets o f truth, but the general theory is f a l s e .
M o r e o v e r , as the young Karl Popper correctly noted at the time,
Freud's attitude to scientific proof was very different to Einstein's
and more akin to M a r x ' s . Far from formulating his theories with a
high degree o f specific content which invited empirical testing and
refutation, Freud made them all-embracing and difficult to test at all.
And, like M a r x ' s followers, when evidence did turn up which
appeared to refute them, he modified the theories to accommodate it.
T h u s the Freudian corpus o f belief was subject to continual expan
sion and osmosis, like a religious system in its formative period. As
one would expect, internal critics, like Jung, were treated as heretics;
external ones, like Havelock Ellis, as infidels. Freud betrayed signs,
in fact, o f the twentieth-century messianic ideologue at his worst namely, a persistent tendency to regard those who diverged from him
as themselves unstable and in need of treatment. Thus Ellis's
disparagement o f his scientific status was dismissed as 'a highly
sublimated form o f r e s i s t a n c e ' . ' M y inclination', he wrote to Jung
just before their break, 'is to treat those colleagues who offer
resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation'. T w o
decades later, the notion o f regarding dissent as a form of mental
sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in
the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression.
11
12
13
14
15
16
But if Freud's w o r k had little true scientific content, it had literary
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
7
and imaginative qualities of a high order. His style in German was
magnetic and won him the nation's highest literary award, the
Goethe Prize o f the City of Frankfurt. He translated well. T h e
anglicization o f the existing Freudian texts became an industry in the
Twenties. But the new literary output expanded too, as Freud
allowed his ideas to embrace an ever-widening field of human
activity and experience. Freud was a gnostic. He believed in the
existence of a hidden structure o f knowledge which, by using the
techniques he was devising, could be discerned beneath the surface o f
things. T h e dream was his starting-point. It was not, he wrote,
'differently constructed from the neurotic symptom. Like the latter, it
may seem strange and senseless, but when it is examined by means o f
a technique which differs slightly from the free association method
used in psychoanalysis, one gets from its manifest
content to its
hidden meaning, or to its latent t h o u g h t s . '
Gnosticism has always appealed to intellectuals. Freud offered a
particularly succulent variety. He had a brilliant gift for classical
allusion and imagery at a time when all educated people prided
themselves on their knowledge o f Greek and Latin. He was quick to
seize on the importance attached to myth by the new generation o f
social anthropologists such as Sir J a m e s Frazer, whose The
Golden
Bough began to appear in 1 8 9 0 . T h e meaning o f dreams, the
function of myth - into this potent brew Freud stirred an allpervading potion of sex, which he found at the root of almost all
forms o f human behaviour. T h e war had loosened tongues over sex;
the immediate post-war period saw the habit o f sexual discussion
carried into print. Freud's time had come. He had, in addition to his
literary gifts, some o f the skills of a sensational journalist. H e was an
adept neologian. He could mint a striking slogan. Almost as often as
his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, he added words and
phrases to the language: 'the unconscious', 'infantile sexuality', the
'Oedipus complex', 'inferiority complex', 'guilt complex', the ego,
the id and the super-ego, 'sublimation', 'depth-psychology'. Some o f
his salient ideas, such as the sexual interpretation o f dreams or what
became known as the 'Freudian slip', had the appeal o f new intellec
tual parlour-games. Freud knew the value o f topicality. In 1 9 2 0 , in
the aftermath of the suicide of Europe, he published Beyond
the
Pleasure Principle, which introduced the idea o f the 'death instinct',
soon vulgarized into the 'death-wish'. For much o f the Twenties,
which saw a further abrupt decline in religious belief, especially
among the educated, Freud was preoccupied with anatomizing
religion, which he saw as a purely human construct. In The Future of
an Illusion
( 1 9 2 7 ) he dealt with man's unconscious attempts to
mitigate unhappiness. ' T h e attempt to procure', he wrote, 'a protec17
8
A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
tion against suffering through a delusional remoulding o f reality is
made by a considerable number o f people in common. The religions of
mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. N o
one, needless to say, w h o shares a delusion ever recognizes it as s u c h . '
This seemed the voice o f the new age. N o t for the first time, a prophet
in his fifties, long in the wilderness, had suddenly found a rapt audience
of gilded youth. W h a t was so remarkable about Freudianism was its
protean quality and its ubiquity. It seemed to have a new and exciting
explanation for everything. And, by virtue o f Freud's skill in
encapsulating emergent trends over a wide range of academic
disciplines, it appeared to be presenting, with brilliant panache arid
masterful confidence, ideas which had already been half-formulated in
the minds o f the élite. T h a t is what I have always thought!' noted an
admiring André Gide in his diary. In the early 1 9 2 0 s , many intellectuals
discovered that they had been Freudians for years without knowing it.
T h e appeal was especially strong among novelists, ranging from the
young Aldous Huxley, whose dazzling Crome Yellow was written in
1 9 2 1 , to the sombrely conservative T h o m a s M a n n , to whom Freud was
'an oracle'.
T h e impact o f Einstein and Freud upon intellectuals and creative
artists was all the greater in that the coming of peace had made them
aware that a fundamental revolution had been and was still taking place
in the whole world o f culture, o f which the concepts o f relativity and
Freudianism seemed both portents and echoes. This revolution had
deep pre-war roots. It had already begun in 1 9 0 5 , when it was
trumpeted in a public speech, made appropriately enough by the
impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets
Russes:
18
We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name
of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also
sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the
ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a
new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is
that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that
the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.
19
As Diaghilev spoke, the first exhibition o f the Fauves was to be seen in
Paris. In 1 9 1 3 he staged there Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps; by then
Schoenberg had published the atonal Drei Klavierstucke
and Alban
Berg his String Quartet (Opus 3 ) ; and Matisse had invented the term
'Cubism'. It was in 1 9 0 9 that the Futurists published their manifesto
and Kurt Hiller founded his Neue Club in Berlin, the nest o f the artistic
movement which, in 1 9 1 1 , was first termed E x p r e s s i o n i s m . Nearly
all the major creative figures o f the 1 9 2 0 s had already been published,
exhibited or performed before 1 9 1 4 , and in that sense the Modern
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Movement was a pre-war phenomenon. But it needed the desperate
convulsions o f the great struggle, and the crashing of regimes it
precipitated, to give modernism the radical political dimension it had
hitherto lacked, and the sense o f a ruined world on which it would
construct a new one. T h e elegiac, even apprehensive, note Diaghilev
struck in 1 9 0 5 was thus remarkably perceptive. T h e cultural and
political strands o f change could not be separated, any more than
during the turbulence of revolution and romanticism o f 1 7 9 0 - 1 8 3 0 .
It has been noted that J a m e s J o y c e , Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all
resident-exiles in Zurich in 1 9 1 6 , waiting for their time to c o m e .
With the end of the war, modernism sprang onto what seemed an
empty stage in a blaze o f publicity. O n the evening of 9 November
1 9 1 8 an Expressionist Council o f Intellectuals met in the Reichstag
building in Berlin, demanding the nationalization o f the theatres, the
state subsidization o f the artistic professions and the demolition o f
all academies. Surrealism, which might have been designed to give
visual expression to Freudian ideas — though its origins were quite
independent - had its own programme of action, as did Futurism and
Dada. But this was surface froth. Deeper down, it was the disorienta
tion in space and time induced by relativity, and the sexual gnostic
ism o f Freud, which seemed to be characterized in the new creative
models. O n 2 3 J u n e 1 9 1 9 M a r c e l Proust published A l'Ombre
des
jeunes filles, the beginning o f a vast experiment in disjointed time
and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new pre
occupations. Six months later, on 1 0 December, he was awarded the
Prix Goncourt, and the centre o f gravity o f French letters had made a
decisive shift away from the great survivors o f the nineteenth
c e n t u r y . O f course as yet such works circulated only among the
influential few. Proust had to publish his first volume at his own
expense and sell it at one-third the cost o f production (even as late as
1 9 5 6 , the complete A la Récherche
du temps perdu was still selling
less than 1 0 , 0 0 0 sets a y e a r ) . J a m e s J o y c e , also working in Paris,
could not be published at all in the British Isles. His
Ulysses,
completed in 1 9 2 2 , had to be issued by a private press and smuggled
across frontiers. But its significance was not missed. N o novel
illustrated more clearly the extent to which Freud's concepts had
passed into the language o f literature. T h a t same year, 1 9 2 2 , the poet
T.S.Eliot, himself a newly identified prophet of the age, wrote that it
had 'destroyed the whole of the nineteenth c e n t u r y ' . Proust and
Joyce, the two great harbingers and centre-of-gravity-shifters, had no
place for each other in the Weltanschauung
they inadvertently
shared. They met in Paris on 18 M a y 1 9 2 2 , after the first night o f
Stravinsky's Renard, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended
by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had
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already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his
taxi. T h e drunken Irishman assured him he had not read one
syllable o f his works and Proust, incensed, reciprocated the com
pliment, before driving on to the Ritz where he had an arrangement
to be fed at any hour o f the n i g h t . Six months later he was dead,
but not before he had been acclaimed as the literary interpreter of
Einstein in an essay by the celebrated mathematician Camille Vett a r d . J o y c e dismissed him, in Finnegans Wake, with a pun: 'Frost
bitte\
T h e notion of writers like Proust and Joyce 'destroying' the
nineteenth century, as surely as Einstein and Freud were doing with
their ideas, is not so fanciful as it might seem. The nineteenth
century saw the climax o f the philosophy of personal responsibility
- the notion that each o f us is individually accountable for our
actions - which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the
classical world. As Lionel Trilling, analysing Eliot's verdict on
Ulysses, was to point out, during the nineteenth century it was
possible for a leading aesthete like Walter Pater, in The
Renaiss
ance, to categorize the ability 'to burn with a hard, gem-like flame'
as 'success in life'. 'In the nineteenth century', Trilling wrote, even
'a mind as exquisite and detached as Pater's could take it for
granted that upon the life of an individual person a judgment of
success or failure might be p a s s e d . ' T h e nineteenth-century novel
had been essentially concerned with the moral or spiritual success
of the individual. A la Récherche
and Ulysses marked not merely
the entrance o f the anti-hero but the destruction o f individual hero
ism as a central element in imaginative creation, and a contemptu
ous lack of concern for moral balance-striking and verdicts. The
exercise o f individual free will ceased to be the supremely interesting
feature o f human behaviour.
T h a t was in full accordance with the new forces shaping the
times. M a r x i s m , n o w for the first time easing itself into the seat of
power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through
the empirically-perceived veneer o f things to the hidden truth
beneath. In words which strikingly foreshadow the passage from
Freud I have just quoted, M a r x had pronounced: ' T h e final
pattern
of e c o n o m i c relationships as seen on the surface . . . is very different
from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but
concealed
essential patterns *
O n the surface, men appeared to be exercising
their free will, taking decisions, determining events. In reality, to
those familiar with the methods o f dialectical materialism, such
individuals, however powerful, were seen to be mere flotsam,
hurled hither and thither by the irresistible surges of economic
forces. T h e ostensible behaviour o f individuals merely concealed
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11
class patterns o f which they were almost wholly unaware but
powerless to defy.
Equally, in the Freudian analysis, the personal conscience, which
stood at the very heart o f the Judeo-Christian ethic, and was the
principal engine o f individualistic achievement, was dismissed as a
mere safety-device, collectively created, to protect civilized order
from the fearful aggressiveness o f human beings. Freudianism was
many things, but if it had an essence it was the description o f guilt.
'The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is
subjected to it', Freud wrote in 1 9 2 0 , 'is called by us the sense o f
g u i l t . . . . Civilization obtains mastery over the individual's danger
ous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by
setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a
conquered city.' Feelings o f guilt were thus a sign not of vice, but o f
virtue. T h e super-ego or conscience was the drastic price the individ
ual paid for preserving civilization, and its cost in misery would
increase inexorably as civilization advanced: 'A threatened external
unhappiness . . . has been exchanged for a permanent internal
unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.' Freud said he
intended to show that guilt-feelings, unjustified by any human
frailty, were 'the most important problem in the development o f
civilization'. It might be, as sociologists were already suggesting,
that society could be collectively guilty, in creating conditions which
made crime and vice inevitable. But personal guilt-feelings were an
illusion to be dispelled. N o n e of us was individually guilty; we were
all guilty.
M a r x , Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1 9 2 0 s :
the world was not what it seemed. T h e senses, whose empirical
perceptions shaped our ideas o f time and distance, right and wrong,
law and justice, and the nature o f man's behaviour in society, were
not to be trusted. Moreover, M a r x i s t and Freudian analysis com
bined to undermine, in their different ways, the highly developed
sense of personal responsibility, and of duty towards a settled and
objectively true moral code, which was at the centre of nineteenthcentury European civilization. T h e impression people derived from
Einstein, of a universe in which all measurements of value were
relative, served to confirm this vision - which both dismayed and
exhilarated - of moral anarchy.
And had not 'mere anarchy', as W . B . Yeats put it in 1 9 1 6 , been
'loosed upon the world'? T o many, the war had seemed the greatest
calamity since the fall of R o m e . Germany, from fear and ambition,
and Austria, from resignation and despair, had willed the war in a
way the other belligerents had not. It marked the culmination of the
wave o f pessimism in German philosophy which was its salient
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characteristic in the pre-war period. Germanic pessimism, which
contrasted sharply with the optimism based upon political change
and reform to be found in the United States, Britain, France and even
Russia in the decade before 1 9 1 4 , was not the property of the
intelligentsia but was to be found at every level o f German society,
particularly at the top. In the weeks before the outbreak of
Armageddon, Bethmann Hollweg's secretary and confident Kurt
Riezler made notes o f the gloomy relish with which his master
steered Germany and Europe into the abyss. July 7 1 9 1 4 : T h e
Chancellor expects that a war, whatever its outcome, will result in
the uprooting o f everything that exists. T h e existing world very
antiquated, without ideas.' July 2 7 : ' D o o m greater than human
power hanging over Europe and our own p e o p l e . '
Bethmann
Hollweg had been born in the same year as Freud, and it was as
though he personified the 'death instinct' the latter coined as the
fearful decade ended. Like most educated Germans, he had read M a x
N o r d a u ' s Degeneration,
published in 1 8 9 5 , and was familiar with
the degenerative theories o f the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. W a r or no war, man was in inevitable decline; civilization was
heading for destruction. Such ideas were commonplace in central
Europe, preparing the way for the gasp o f approbation which greeted
Oswald Spengler's Decline
of the West, fortuitously timed for
publication in 1 9 1 8 when the predicted suicide had been accom
plished.
Further West, in Britain, Joseph Conrad (himself an Easterner) had
been the only major writer to reflect this pessimism, working it into a
whole series o f striking novels: Nostromo
( 1 9 0 4 ) , The Secret
Agent
( 1 9 0 7 ) , Under Western Eyes ( 1 9 1 1 ) , Victory ( 1 9 1 5 ) . These despair
ing political sermons, in the guise o f fiction, preached the message
T h o m a s M a n n was to deliver to central Europe in 1 9 2 4 with The
Magic Mountain,
as M a n n himself acknowledged in the preface he
wrote to the G e r m a n translation o f The Secret Agent two years later.
F o r C o n r a d the war merely confirmed the irremediable nature of
man's predicament. F r o m the perspective o f sixty years later it must
be said that C o n r a d is the only substantial writer of the time whose
vision remains clear and true in every particular. He dismissed
M a r x i s m as malevolent nonsense, certain to generate monstrous
tyranny; Freud's ideas were nothing more than 'a kind of magic
show'. T h e war had demonstrated human frailty but otherwise
would resolve nothing, generate nothing. Giant plans o f reform,
panaceas, all 'solutions', were illusory. Writing to Bertrand Russell
on 2 3 O c t o b e r 1 9 2 2 (Russell was currently offering 'solutions' to
The Problem
of China, his latest b o o k ) , Conrad insisted: 'I have
never been able to find in any man's b o o k or any man's talk anything
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convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated
sense o f fatality governing this man-inhabited world . . . . T h e only
remedy for Chinamen and for the rest o f us is the change o f hearts.
But looking at the history o f the last 2 , 0 0 0 years there is not much
reason to expect that thing, even if man has taken to flying . . . . M a n
doesn't fly like an eagle, he flies like a b e e t l e . '
At the onset o f the war, Conrad's scepticism had been rare in the
Anglo-Saxon world. T h e war itself was seen by some as a form o f
progress, H . G . W e l l s marking its declaration with a catchy volume
entitled The War That Will End War. But by the time the armistice
came, progress in the sense the Victorians had understood it, as
something continuous and almost inexorable, was dead. In 1 9 2 0 , the
great classical scholar J . B . B u r y published a volume, The Idea of
Progress, proclaiming its demise. 'A new idea will usurp its place as
the directing idea o f humanity . . . . Does not Progress itself suggest
that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain
not very advanced stage o f c i v i l i z a t i o n ? '
W h a t killed the idea of orderly, as opposed to anarchic, progress,
was the sheer enormity of the acts perpetrated by civilized Europe
over the past four years. T h a t there had been an unimaginable,
unprecedented moral degeneration, no one who looked at the facts
could doubt. Sometime while he was Secretary of State for W a r
( 1 9 1 9 - 2 1 ) , Winston Churchill jotted down on a sheet o f W a r Office
paper the following passage:
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32
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies
but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty
educated States involved conceived - not without reason - that their very
existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed
which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let Hell loose,
kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the
desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage
against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals - often of a
greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife
of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered
into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk
on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every
effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to
age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from
the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or
seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell
from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses
of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood
of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one
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A RELATIVISTIC WORLD
vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke
and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two
expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to
deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.
33
As Churchill correctly noted, the horrors he listed were perpe
trated by the 'mighty educated States'. Indeed, they were quite
beyond the power o f individuals, however evil. It is a commonplace
that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of
avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. H o w much more is
this true o f legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming
moral authority o f parliaments and congresses and courts of justice!
T h e destructive capacity o f the individual, however vicious, is small;
of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the
state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari
passu. As the American pacifist Randolph Bourne snarled, on the eve
of intervention in 1 9 1 7 , ' W a r is the health of the s t a t e . ' Moreover,
history painfully demonstrates that collective righteousness is far
more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. T h a t was
a point well understood by W o o d r o w Wilson, who had been
re-elected on a peace platform in 1 9 1 6 and who warned: ' O n c e lead
this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as
tolerance . . . . T h e spirit o f ruthless brutality will enter into every
fibre o f our national l i f e . '
T h e effect o f the Great W a r was enormously to increase the size,
and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of
the state. Before 1 9 1 4 , all state sectors were small, though most were
growing, some o f them fast. T h e area o f actual state activity averaged
between 5 and 1 0 per cent of the Gross National P r o d u c t . In 1 9 1 3 ,
the state's total income (including local government) as a percentage
of G N P , was as low as 9 per cent in America. In Germany, which
from the time o f Bismarck had begun to construct a formidable
apparatus o f welfare provisions, it was twice as much, 18 per cent;
and in Britain, which had followed in Germany's wake since 1 9 0 6 , it
was 13 per c e n t . In France the state had always absorbed a
comparatively large slice of the GNP. But it was in Japan and, above
all, in Imperial Russia that the state was assuming an entirely new
role in the life of the nation by penetrating all sectors of the industrial
economy.
In both countries, for purposes o f military imperialism, the state
was forcing the pace o f industrialization to 'catch up' with the more
advanced economies. But in Russia the predominance of the state in
every area o f economic life was becoming the central fact of society.
T h e state owned oilfields, gold and coal mines, two-thirds of the
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36
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railway system, thousands o f factories. There were 'state peasants' in
the N e w Territories o f the e a s t . Russian industry, even when not
publicly owned, had an exceptionally high dependence on tariff
barriers, state subsidies, grants and loans, or was interdependent
with the public sector. T h e links between the Ministry of Finance and
the big banks were close, with civil servants appointed to their
b o a r d s . In addition, the State Bank, a department of the Finance
Ministry, controlled savings banks and credit associations, managed
the finances o f the railways, financed adventures in foreign policy,
acted as a regulator of the whole economy and was constantly
searching for ways to increase its power and expand its activities.
T h e Ministry o f Trade supervised private trading syndicates, regu
lated prices, profits, the use o f raw materials and freight-charges, and
placed its agents on the boards o f all joint-stock c o m p a n i e s . Imper
ial Russia, in its final phase o f peace, constituted a large-scale
experiment in state collective capitalism, and apparently a highly
successful one. It impressed and alarmed the Germans: indeed, fear
of the rapid growth in Russia's economic (and therefore military)
capacity was the biggest single factor in deciding Germany for war in
1 9 1 4 . As Bethmann Hollweg put it to Riezler, ' T h e future belongs to
Russia.'
With the onset o f the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its
competitors and allies for aspects o f state management and interven
tion in the war economy which could be imitated. T h e capitalist
sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by
patriotism, raised no objections. T h e result was a qualitative and
quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been
fully reversed - for though wartime arrangements were sometimes
abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually
adopted again, usually permanently. Germany set the pace, speedily
adopting most o f the Russian state procedures which had so scared
her in peace, and operating them with such improved efficiency that
when Lenin inherited the Russian state-capitalist machine in
1 9 1 7 - 1 8 , it was to German wartime economic controls that he, in
turn, looked for g u i d a n c e . As the war prolonged itself, and the
losses and desperation increased, the warring states became steadily
more totalitarian, especially after the winter of 1916—17. In
Germany the end of civilian rule came on 9 January 1 9 1 7 when
Bethmann Hollweg was forced to b o w to the demand for unres
tricted submarine warfare. He fell from power completely in July,
leaving General Ludendorff and the admirals in possession o f the
monster-state. T h e episode marked the real end o f the constitutional
monarchy, since the Kaiser forewent his prerogative to appoint and
dismiss the chancellor, under pressure from the military. Even while
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16
still chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg discovered that his phone was
tapped, and according to Riezler, when he heard the click would
shout into it ' W h a t Schweinhund
is listening i n ? '
But phonetapping was legal under the 'state of siege' legislation, which
empowered area military commands to censor or suppress news
papers. Ludendorff was likewise authorized to herd 4 0 0 , 0 0 0 Belgian
workers into Germany, thus foreshadowing Soviet and Nazi slavelabour m e t h o d s .
In the last eighteen months o f hostilities the
G e r m a n élite fervently practised what was openly termed ' W a r
Socialism' in a despairing attempt to mobilize every ounce of
productive effort for victory.
In the West, t o o , the state greedily swallowed up the independence
of the private sector. T h e corporatist spirit, always present in France,
t o o k over industry, and there was a resurgence of J a c o b i n patriotic
intolerance. In opposition, Georges Clemenceau fought successfully
for some freedom o f the press, and after he came to supreme power
in the agony o f N o v e m b e r 1 9 1 7 he permitted some criticism of
himself. But politicians like Malvy and Caillaux were arrested and
long lists o f subversives were compiled (the notorious 'Carnet B ' ) ,
for subsequent hounding, arrest and even execution. The liberal
Anglo-Saxon democracies were by no means immune to these
pressures. After Lloyd George came to power in the crisis of
December 1 9 1 6 , the full rigours o f conscription and the oppressive
Defence o f the R e a l m Act were enforced, and manufacturing,
transport and supply mobilized under corporatist war boards.
Even more dramatic was the eagerness, five months later, with
which the Wilson administration launched the United States into war
corporatism. T h e pointers had, indeed, been there before. In 1 9 0 9
Herbert Croly in The Promise
of American
Life had predicted it
could only be fulfilled by the state deliberately intervening to
promote 'a more highly socialized democracy'. Three years later
Charles V a n Hise's Concentration
and Control: a Solution of the
Trust Problem
in the United States presented the case for corporat
ism. These ideas were behind T h e o d o r e Roosevelt's 'New National
ism', which Wilson appropriated and enlarged to win the w a r .
There was a Fuel Administration, which enforced 'gasless Sundays',
a W a r L a b o r Policies B o a r d , intervening in industrial disputes, a
F o o d Administration under Herbert Hoover, fixing prices for com
modities, and a Shipping B o a r d which launched 1 0 0 new vessels on 4
July 1 9 1 8 (it had already taken over 9 million tons into its operating
c o n t r o l ) . T h e central organ was the W a r Industries Board, whose
first achievement was the scrapping o f the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a
sure index o f corporatism, and whose members (Bernard Baruch,
Hugh J o h n s o n , Gerard Swope and others) ran a kindergarten for
4 4
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1 9 2 0 s interventionist!! and the N e w Deal, which in turn inspired the
New Frontier and the Great Society. T h e war corporatism o f 1 9 1 7
began one o f the great continuities o f modern American history,
sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface, which culmi
nated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon J o h n s o n brought into
being in the late 1 9 6 0 s . J o h n Dewey noted at the time that the war
had undermined the hitherto irresistible claims of private property:
' N o matter how many among the special agencies for public control
decay with the disappearance o f war stress, the movement will never
go b a c k w a r d . ' This proved an accurate prediction. At the same
time, restrictive new laws, such as the Espionage Act ( 1 9 1 7 ) and the
Sedition Act ( 1 9 1 8 ) , were often savagely enforced: the socialist
Eugene Debs got ten years for an anti-war speech, and one man w h o
obstructed the draft received a forty-year s e n t e n c e . In all the
belligerents, and not just in Russia, the climacteric year 1 9 1 7
demonstrated that private liberty and private property tended to
stand or fall together.
Thus the war demonstrated both the impressive speed with which
the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite
which it thereupon developed both for the destruction o f its enemies
and for the exercise o f despotic power over its own citizens. As the
war ended, there were plenty o f sensible men who understood the
gravity o f these developments. But could the clock be turned back to
where it had stood in July 1 9 1 4 ? Indeed, did anyone wish to turn it
back? Europe had twice before experienced general settlements after
long and terrible wars. In 1 6 4 8 the treaties known as the Peace o f
Westphalia had avoided the impossible task o f restoring the status
quo ante and had in large part simply accepted the political and
religious frontiers which a war o f exhaustion had created. T h e
settlement did not last, though religion ceased to be a casus belli. T h e
settlement imposed in 1814—15 by the Congress o f Vienna after the
Napoleonic W a r s had been more ambitious and on the whole more
successful. Its object had been to restore, as far as possible, the
system of major and minor divine-right monarchies which had
existed before the French Revolution, as the only framework within
which men would accept European frontiers as legitimate and
d u r a b l e . T h e device worked in the sense that it was ninety-nine
years before another general European war broke out, and it can be
argued that the nineteenth century was the most settled and produc
tive in the whole history of mankind. But the peacemakers o f
1814—15 were an unusual group: a congress of reactionaries among
whom Lord Castlereagh appeared a revolutionary firebrand and the
Duke of Wellington an egregious progressive. Their working ass
umptions rested on the brutal denial of all the innovatory political
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notions o f the previous quarter-century. In particular, they shared
avowed beliefs, almost untinged by cynicism, in power-balances and
agreed spheres o f interest, dynastic marriages, private understand
ings between sovereigns and gentlemen subject to a common code
(except in extremis),
and in the private ownership o f territory by
legitimate descent. A king or emperor deprived o f possessions in one
part o f Europe could be 'compensated', as the term went, elsewhere,
irrespective o f the nationality, language or culture o f the inhabitants.
T h e y termed this a 'transference o f souls', following the Russian
expression used o f the sale o f an estate with its serfs,
glebae
adscripti.
Such options were not available to the peacemakers of 1 9 1 9 . A
peace o f exhaustion, such as Westphalia, based on the military lines,
was unthinkable: both sides were exhausted enough but one, by
virtue o f the armistice, had gained an overwhelming military
advantage. T h e French had occupied all the Rhine bridgeheads by 6
December 1 9 1 8 . T h e British operated an inshore blockade, for the
Germans had surrendered their fleet and their minefields by 2 1
November. A peace by diktat was thus available.
However, that did not mean that the Allies could restore the old
world, even had they so wished. T h e old world was decomposing
even before war broke out. In France, the anti-clericals had been in
power for a decade, and the last election before the war showed a
further swing to the Left. In Germany, the 1 9 1 2 election, for the first
time, made the Socialists the biggest single party. In Italy, the Giolitti
government was the most radical in its history as a united country. In
Britain the Conservative leader A . J . Balfour described his catastro
phic defeat in 1 9 0 6 as 'a faint echo of the same movement which has
produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist
processions in Berlin'. Even the Russian autocracy was trying to
liberalize itself. T h e Habsburgs anxiously sought new constitutional
planks to shore themselves up. Europe on the eve of war was run by
worried would-be progressives, earnestly seeking to satisfy rising
expectations, eager above all to cultivate and appease youth.
It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1 9 1 4
by selfish and cynical age. T h e speeches o f pre-war politicians were
crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European
phenomenon, especially in Germany where 2 5 , 0 0 0 members of the
Wandervôgel
clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollu
tion and the growth o f cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers
like M a x W e b e r and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that
youth be brought to the helm. T h e nation, wrote Bruck, 'needs a
change o f blood, an insurrection o f the sons against the fathers, a
substitution o f the old by the y o u n g ' . All over Europe, sociologists
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19
were assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and
wanted.
And o f course what youth wanted was war. T h e first pampered
'youth generation' went enthusiastically to a war which their elders,
almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair.
Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the
most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized
their rifles. Charles Péguy wrote that he went 'eagerly' to the front
(and death). Henri de Montherlant reported that he 'loved life at the
front, the bath in the elemental, the annihilation o f the intelligence
and the heart'. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle called the war 'a marvellous
surprise'. Young German writers like Walter Flex, Ernst Wurche and
Ernst Jiinger celebrated what Jiinger called 'the holy moment' o f
August 1 9 1 4 . T h e novelist Fritz von Unger described the war as a
'purgative', the beginning of 'a new zest for life'. Rupert B r o o k e
found it 'the only life . . . a fine thrill, like nothing else in the world'.
For Robert Nichols it was 'a privilege'. 'He is dead who will not
fight', wrote Julian Grenfell ('Into Battle'), 'and who dies fighting has
increase.' Young Italians who got into the war later were if anything
even more lyrical. 'This is the hour of the triumph of the finest
values,' one Italian poet wrote, 'this is the Hour of Youth.' Another
echoed: 'Only the small men and the old men o f twenty' would 'want
to miss i t . '
By the winter o f 1 9 1 6 - 1 7 , the war-lust was spent. As the fighting
prolonged itself endlessly, bloodied and disillusioned youth turned
on its elders with disgust and rising anger. O n all sides there was talk
in the trenches o f a reckoning with 'guilty politicians', the 'old gang'.
In 1 9 1 7 and still more in 1 9 1 8 , all the belligerent regimes (the United
States alone excepted) felt themselves tested almost to destruction,
which helps to explain the growing desperation and savagery with
which they waged war. Victory became identified with political
survival. T h e Italian and Belgian monarchies and perhaps even the
British would not have outlasted defeat, any more than the Third
Republic in France. O f course, as soon as victory came, they all
looked safe enough. But then who had once seemed more secure than
the Hohenzollerns in Berlin? T h e Kaiser Wilhelm n was bundled out
without hesitation on 9 November 1 9 1 8 , immediately it was realized
that a German republic might obtain better peace terms. T h e last
Habsburg Emperor, Charles, abdicated three days later, ending a
millennium of judicious marriages and inspired juggling. T h e R o m a
novs had been murdered on 1 6 July and buried in a nameless grave.
Thus the three imperial monarchies o f east and central Europe, the
tripod of legitimacy on which the ancien régime, such as it was, had
rested, all vanished within a year. By the end o f 1 9 1 8 there was little
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chance o f restoring any one o f them, still less all three. T h e Turkish
Sultan, for what he was worth, was finished too (though a Turkish
republic was not proclaimed until 1 November 1 9 2 2 ) .
At a stroke, the dissolution o f these dynastic and proprietory
empires opened up packages o f heterogeneous peoples which had
been lovingly assembled and carefully tied together over centuries.
T h e last imperial census o f the Habsburg empire showed that it
consisted o f a dozen nations: 1 2 million Germans, 1 0 million
Magyars, 8.5 million Czechs, 1.3 million Slovaks, 5 million Poles, 4
million Ruthenians, 3.3 million Romanians, 5.7 million Serbs and
Croats, and 8 0 0 , 0 0 0 Ladines and I t a l i a n s . According to the 1 8 9 7
Russian imperial census, the Great Russians formed only 4 3 per cent
of the total p o p u l a t i o n ;
the remaining 5 7 per cent were subject
peoples, ranging from Swedish and German Lutherans through
O r t h o d o x Latvians, W h i t e Russians and Ukrainians, Catholic Poles,
Ukrainian Uniates, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish Muslims of a dozen
nationalities, and innumerable varieties o f Buddhists, Taoists and
animists. Apart from the British Empire, no other imperial conglom
erate had so many distinct races. Even at the time o f the 1 9 2 6 census,
when many o f the western groups had been prised away, there were
still approximately two hundred peoples and languages. By compa
rison, the Hohenzollern dominions were homogeneous and monoglot, but they too contained huge minorities o f Poles, Danes,
Alsatians and French.
T h e truth is that, during the process o f settlement in eastern and
central Europe, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, and during
the intensive phase o f urbanization which took place from the early
eighteenth century onwards, about one-quarter o f the area had been
occupied by mixed races (including over ten million Jews) whose
allegiance had hitherto been religious and dynastic rather than
national. T h e monarchies were the only unifying principle of these
multi-racial societies, the sole guarantee (albeit often a slender one)
that all would be equal before the law. Once that principle was
removed, what could be substituted for it? T h e only one available
was nationalism, and its fashionable by-product irredentism, a term
derived from the Italian Risorgimento
and signifying the union of an
entire ethnic group under one state. T o this was now being added a
new cant phrase, 'self-determination', by which was understood the
adjustment o f frontiers by plebiscite according to ethnic preferences.
T h e two principal western Allies, Britain and France, had origin
ally no desire or design to promote a peace based on nationality.
Quite the contrary. Both ran multiracial, polyglot overseas empires.
Britain in addition had an irredentist problem o f her own in Ireland.
In 1 9 1 8 both were led by former progressives, Lloyd George and
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Clemenceau, w h o under the agony o f war had learned Realpolitik
and a grudging respect for the old notions o f 'balance', 'compensa
tion' and so forth. W h e n , during the peace talks, the young British
diplomat Harold Nicolson urged that it was logical for Britain to
grant self-determination to the Greeks in Cyprus, he was rebuked
by Sir Eyre Crowe, head o f the Foreign Office: 'Nonsense, my dear
Nicolson. . . . W o u l d you apply self-determination to India, Egypt,
M a l t a and Gibraltar? If you are not prepared to go as far as this,
then you have not [sic] right to claim that you are logical. If you are
prepared to go as far as this, then you had better return at once to
L o n d o n . ' (He might have added that Cyprus had a large Turkish
minority; and for that reason it has still not achieved selfdetermination in the 1 9 8 0 s . ) Lloyd George would have been happy
to strive to keep the Austro-Hungarian empire together as late as
1 9 1 7 or even the beginning o f 1 9 1 8 , in return for a separate peace.
As for Clemenceau, his primary object was French security, and for
this he wanted back not merely Alsace-Lorraine (most o f whose
people spoke German) but the Saar t o o , with the Rhineland hacked
out of Germany as a French-oriented puppet state.
Moreover, during the war Britain, France and Russia had signed
a series of secret treaties among themselves and to induce other
powers to join them which ran directly contrary to nationalist
principles. T h e French secured Russian approval for their idea o f a
French-dominated Rhineland, in return for giving Russia a free
hand to oppress Poland, in a treaty signed on 11 M a r c h 1 9 1 7 . By the
Sykes—Picot Agreement o f 1 9 1 6 , Britain and France agreed to strip
Turkey o f its Arab provinces and divide them between themselves.
Italy sold itself to the highest bidder: by the Secret Treaty o f
London o f 2 6 April 1 9 1 5 she was to receive sovereignty over
millions of German-speaking Tyroleans, and o f Serbs and Croats in
Dalmatia. A treaty with R o m a n i a signed on 1 7 August 1 9 1 6 gave her
the whole o f Transylvania and most o f the Banat o f Temesvar and
the Bukovina, most o f whose inhabitants did not speak R o m a n i a n .
Another secret treaty signed on 1 6 February 1 9 1 7 awarded J a p a n
the Chinese province o f Shantung, hitherto in Germany's commer
cial s p h e r e .
However, with the collapse o f the Tsarist regime and the refusal
of the Habsburgs to make a separate peace, Britain and France
began to encourage nationalism and make self-determination a 'war
aim'. O n 4 J u n e 1 9 1 7 Kerensky's provisional government in Russia
recognized an independent Poland; France began to raise an army
of Poles and on 3 June 1 9 1 8 proclaimed the creation o f a powerful
Polish state a primary o b j e c t i v e . Meanwhile in Britain, the Slavo
phile lobby headed by R . W . S e t o n - W a t s o n and his journal, The
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New Europe,
was successfully urging the break-up o f AustriaHungary and the creation o f new ethnic s t a t e s . Undertakings and
promises were given to many Slav and Balkan politicians-in-exile in
return for resistance to 'Germanic imperialism'. In the Middle East,
the Arabophile Colonel T . E . L a w r e n c e was authorized to promise
independent kingdoms to the Emirs Feisal and Hussein as rewards
for fighting the T u r k s . In 1 9 1 7 the so-called 'Balfour Declaration'
promised the J e w s a national home in Palestine to encourage them to
desert the Central Powers. M a n y of these promises were mutually
incompatible, besides contradicting the secret treaties still in force. In
effect, during the last two desperate years of fighting, the British and
French recklessly issued deeds o f property which in sum amounted to
more than the territory they had to dispose of, and all of which could
not conceivably be honoured at the peace, even assuming it was a
harsh one. S o m e o f these post-dated cheques bounced noisily.
T o complicate matters, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized control of
Russia on 2 5 O c t o b e r 1 9 1 7 and at once possessed themselves of the
Tsarist diplomatic archives. They turned copies of the secret treaties
over to western correspondents, and on 1 2 December the Manches
ter Guardian
began publishing them. This was accompanied by
vigorous Bolshevik propaganda designed to encourage Communist
revolutions throughout Europe by promising self-determination to
all peoples.
Lenin's moves had in turn a profound effect on the American
President. W o o d r o w Wilson has been held up to ridicule for more
than half a century on the grounds that his ignorant pursuit of
impossible ideals made a sensible peace impossible. This is no more
than a half-truth. Wilson was a don, a political scientist, an
ex-President o f Princeton University. He knew he was ignorant of
foreign affairs. Just before his inauguration in 1 9 1 3 he told friends,
'It would be an irony o f fate if my administration had to deal chiefly
with foreign a f f a i r s . ' T h e Democrats had been out of office for
fifty-three years and Wilson regarded u s diplomats as Republicans.
W h e n the war broke out he insisted Americans be 'neutral in fact as
well as name'. H e got himself re-elected in 1 9 1 6 on the slogan 'He
kept us out o f war'. H e did not want to break up the old Europe
system either: he advocated 'peace without victory'.
By early 1 9 1 7 he had come to the conclusion that America would
have a bigger influence on the settlement as a belligerent than as a
neutral, and he did draw a narrow legal and moral distinction
between Britain and Germany: the use of U-boats by Germany
violated 'human rights', whereas British blockade-controls violated
only 'property rights', a lesser o f f e n c e . Once in the war he waged it
vigorously but he did not regard America as an ordinary combatant.
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It had entered the war, he said in his April 1 9 1 7 message to
Congress, 'to vindicate the principles o f peace and justice' and to set
up 'a concert of peace and action as will henceforth ensure the
observance o f these principles'. Anxious to be well-prepared for the
peacemaking in September 1 9 1 7 he created, under his aide Colonel
Edward House and D r S . E . M e z e s , an organization o f 1 5 0 academic
experts which was known as 'the Inquiry' and housed in the
American Geographical Society building in N e w Y o r k . As a result,
the American delegation was throughout the peace process by far the
best-informed and documented, indeed on many points often the sole
source of accurate information. 'Had the Treaty o f Peace been
drafted solely by the American experts,' Harold Nicolson wrote, 'it
would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific
documents ever devised.'
However, the Inquiry was based on the assumption that the peace
would be a negotiated compromise, and that the best way to make it
durable would be to ensure that it conformed to natural justice and
so was acceptable to the peoples involved. T h e approach was
empirical, not ideological. In particular, Wilson at this stage was not
keen on the League o f Nations, a British idea first put forward on 2 0
M a r c h 1 9 1 7 . He thought it would raise difficulties with Congress.
But the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties, which placed
America's allies in the worst possible light as old-fashioned preda
tors, threw Wilson into consternation. Lenin's call for general
self-determination also helped to force Wilson's hand, for he felt that
America, as the custodian of democratic freedom, could not be
outbid by a revolutionary regime which had seized power illegally.
Hence he hurriedly composed and on 8 January 1 9 1 8 publicly
delivered the famous 'Fourteen Points'. T h e first repudiated secret
treaties. T h e last provided for a League. M o s t o f the rest were
specific guarantees that, while conquests must be surrendered, the
vanquished would not be punished by losing populations, nationality
to be the determining factor. O n 11 February Wilson added his 'Four
Principles', which rammed the last point home, and on 2 7 September
he provided the coping-stone of the 'Five Particulars', the first o f
which promised justice to friends and enemies a l i k e . T h e corpus o f
twenty-three assertions was produced by Wilson independently o f
Britain and France.
W e come now to the heart o f the misunderstanding which
destroyed any real chance of the peace settlement succeeding, and so
prepared a second global conflict. By September 1 9 1 8 it was evident
that Germany, having won the war in the East, was in the process o f
losing it in the West. But the German army, nine million strong, was
still intact and conducting an orderly retreat from its French and
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Belgian conquests. T w o days after Wilson issued his 'Five Particu
lars', the all-powerful General Ludendorff astounded members of his
government by telling them 'the condition of the army demands an
immediate armistice in order to avoid a catastrophe'. A popular
government should be formed to get in touch with W i l s o n . Ludendorff's motive was obviously to thrust upon the democratic parties
the odium o f surrendering Germany's territorial gains. But he also
clearly considered Wilson's twenty-three pronouncements collec
tively as a guarantee that Germany would not be dismembered or
punished but would retain its integrity and power substantially
intact. In the circumstances this was as much as she could reasonably
have hoped for; indeed more, for the second o f the 14 Points, on
freedom o f the seas, implied the lifting of the British blockade. T h e
civil authorities t o o k the same view, and on 4 October the
Chancellor, Prince M a x o f Baden, opened negotiations for an
armistice with Wilson on the basis o f his statements. T h e Austrians,
on an even more optimistic assumption, followed three days l a t e r .
Wilson, w h o now had an army of four million and who was
universally believed to be all-powerful, with Britain and France
firmly in his financial and economic grip, responded favourably.
Following exchanges o f notes, on 5 November he offered the
Germans an armistice on the basis of the 14 Points, subject only to
two Allied qualifications: the freedom o f the seas (where Britain
reserved her rights of interpretation) and compensation for war
damage. It was on this understanding that the Germans agreed to lay
down their arms.
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W h a t the Germans and the Austrians did not know was that, on
2 9 O c t o b e r , Colonel House, Wilson's special envoy and US repre
sentative on the Allied Supreme W a r Council, had held a long secret
meeting with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. T h e French and British
leaders voiced all their doubts and reservations about the Wilsonian
pronouncements, and had them accepted by House who drew them
up in the form o f a ' C o m m e n t a r y ' , subsequently cabled to Wilson in
Washington. T h e ' C o m m e n t a r y ' , which was never communicated to
the Germans and Austrians, effectively removed all the advantages of
Wilson's points, so far as the Central Powers were concerned. Indeed
it adumbrated all the features o f the subsequent Versailles Treaty to
which they t o o k the strongest objection, including the dismember
ment o f Austria-Hungary, the loss of Germany's colonies, the
break-up o f Prussia by a Polish corridor, and r e p a r a t i o n s . What is
still more notable, it not only based itself upon the premise of
G e r m a n 'war guilt' (which was, arguably, implicit in Wilson's
twenty-three points), but revolved around the principle of 'rewards'
for the victors and 'punishments' for the vanquished, which Wilson
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25
had specifically repudiated. It is true that during the O c t o b e r
negotiations Wilson, who had never actually had to deal with the
Germans before, was becoming more hostile to them in consequence.
He was, in particular, incensed by the torpedoing o f the Irish civilian
ferry Leinster, with the loss of 4 5 0 lives, including many women and
children, on 1 2 O c t o b e r , more than a week after the Germans had
asked him for an armistice. All the same, it is strange that he accepted
the Commentary, and quite astounding that he gave no hint of it to
the Germans. They, for their part, were incompetent in not asking
for clarification of some of the points, for Wilson's style, as the
British Foreign Secretary, A.J.Balfour, told the cabinet 'is very
inaccurate. H e is a first-rate rhetorician and a very bad d r a f t s m a n . '
But the prime responsibility for this fatal failure in communication
was Wilson's. And it was not an error on the side of idealism.
T h e second blunder, which compounded the first and turned it
into a catastrophe, was one o f organization. T h e peace conference
was not given a deliberate structure. It just happened, acquiring a
shape and momentum o f its own, and developing an increasingly
anti-German pattern in the process, both in substance and, equally
important, in form. At the beginning, everyone had vaguely assumed
that preliminary terms would be drawn up by the Allies among
themselves, after which the Germans and their partners would
appear and the actual peace-treaty be negotiated. T h a t is what had
happened at the Congress o f Vienna. A conference programme on
these lines was actually drawn up by the logical French, and handed
to Wilson by the French ambassador in Washington as early as 2 9
November 1 9 1 8 . This document had the further merit o f stipulating
the immediate cancellation o f all the secret treaties. But its wording
irritated Wilson and nothing more was heard o f it. So the conference
met without an agreed programme o f procedure and never acquired
o n e . T h e modus operandi was made still more ragged by Wilson's
own determination to cross the Atlantic and participate in it. This
meant that the supposedly 'most powerful man in the world' could
no longer be held in reserve, as a deus ex machina,
to pronounce
from on high whenever the Allies were deadlocked. By coming to
Paris he became just a prime minister like the rest, and in fact lost as
many arguments as he won. But this was partly because, as the
negotiations got under way, Wilson's interest shifted decisively from
his own twenty-three points, and the actual terms o f the treaty, to
concentrate almost exclusively on the League and its Covenant. T o
him the proposed new world organization, about which he had
hitherto been sceptical, became the whole object o f the conference.
Its operations would redeem any failings in the treaty itself. This had
two dire consequences. First, the French were able to get agreed
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much harsher terms, including a 'big' Poland which cut Prussia in
two and stripped Germany o f its Silesian industrial belt, a fifteenyear Allied occupation o f the Rhineland, and enormous indemnities.
Second, the idea o f a preliminary set o f terms was dropped. Wilson
was determined to insert the League Covenant into the preliminary
document. His Secretary o f State, R o b e r t Lansing, advised him that
even such a putative agreement legally constituted a treaty and
therefore required Congressional ratification. Fearing trouble in the
Senate, Wilson then decided to go straight for a final t r e a t y . O f
course there were other factors. Marshal Foch, the French genera
lissimo, feared that the announcement of agreed preliminary terms
would accelerate the demobilization of France's allies, and so
strengthen Germany's hand in the final stage. And agreement even
between the Allies was proving so difficult on so many points that all
dreaded the introduction o f new and hostile negotiating parties,
whose activities would unravel anything so far achieved. So the idea
of preliminary terms was d r o p p e d .
Hence when the Germans were finally allowed to come to Paris,
they discovered to their consternation that they were not to negotiate
a peace but to have it imposed upon them, having already rendered
themselves impotent by agreeing to an armistice which they now
regarded as a swindle. M o r e o v e r , Clemenceau, for whom hatred and
fear o f the Germans was a law of nature, stage-managed the
imposition o f the diktat. He had failed to secure agreement for a
federated Germany which reversed the work of Bismarck, or for a
French military frontier on the Rhine. But on 7 M a y 1 9 1 9 he was
allowed to preside over the ceremony at Versailles, where France had
been humiliated by Prussia in 1 8 7 1 , at which the German delegation
at last appeared, not in the guise o f a negotiating party but as
convicted prisoners come to be sentenced. Addressing the sullen
German plenipotentiary, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, he chose
his words carefully:
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You see before you the accredited representatives of the Allied and
Associated powers, both small and great, which have waged without
intermission for more than four years the pitiless war which was imposed
on them. The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our accounts.
You asked us for peace. We are disposed to grant it to you.
74
H e then set a time-limit for outright acceptance or rejection. The
Count's bitter reply was read sitting down, a discourtesy which
infuriated many o f those present, above all Wilson, who had become
increasingly anti-German as the conference proceeded: ' W h a t abo
minable manners . . . . T h e Germans are really a stupid people. They
always do the wrong thing . . . . This is the most tactless speech I have
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ever heard. It will set the whole world against them.' In fact it did
not. A.J.Balfour did not object to Brockdorff remaining seated. H e
told Nicolson, T failed to notice. I make it a rule never to stare at
people when they are in obvious distress.' There were stirrings o f
pity for the Germans among the British, and thereafter, until 2 8
J u n e when the Germans finally signed, Lloyd George made strenu
ous efforts to mitigate the severity o f the terms, especially over the
German-Polish frontier. He feared it might provoke a future war as indeed it did. But all he got from a hostile Wilson and
Clemenceau was a plebiscite for Upper S i l e s i a . Thus the Germans
signed, 'yielding', as they put it, 'to overwhelming force'. 'It was as
i f , wrote Lansing, 'men were being called upon to sign their own
death-warrants . . . . With pallid faces and trembling hands they
wrote their names quickly and were then conducted back to their
places.'
T h e manner in which the terms were nailed onto the Germans
was to have a calamitous effect on their new Republic, as we shall
see. Lloyd George's last-minute intervention on their behalf also
effectively ended the entente
cordiale,
and was to continue to
poison Anglo—French relations into the 1 9 4 0 s : an act o f perfidy
which General de Gaulle was to flourish bitterly in Winston Chur
chill's face in the Second World W a r . At the time, many French
men believed Clemenceau had conceded too much, and he was the
only politician in the country who could have carried what the
French regarded as an over-moderate and even dangerous set
t l e m e n t . T h e Americans were split. Among their distinguished
delegation, some shared Wilson's a n t i - G e r m a n i s m . J o h n Foster
Dulles spoke o f 'the enormity o f the crime committed by Germany'.
T h e slippery Colonel House was instrumental in egging on Wilson
to scrap his 'points'. Wilson's chief adviser on Poland, Robert
H.Lord, was next to Clemenceau himself the strongest advocate o f
a 'big' P o l a n d . But Lansing rightly recognized that the failure to
allow the Germans to negotiate was a cardinal error and he
considered Wilson had betrayed his principles in both form and
s u b s t a n c e . His criticisms were a prime reason for Wilson's brutal
dismissal o f him early in 1 9 2 0 .
Among the younger Americans, most were bitterly critical.
William Bullitt wrote Wilson a savage letter: 'I am sorry that you
did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith in
the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in
you . . . . Our government has consented now to deliver the suffer
ing peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and
dismemberments - a new century o f w a r . ' Samuel Eliot Morrison,
Christian Herter and Adolf Berle shared this view. Walter
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Lippmann wrote: 'In my opinion the Treaty is not only illiberal and
in bad faith, it is in the highest degree imprudent.'
M a n y o f these young men were to be influential later. But they
were overshadowed by a still more vehement critic in the British
delegation w h o was in a position to strike a devastating blow at the
settlement immediately. J o h n M a y n a r d Keynes was a clever Cam
bridge don, a wartime civil servant and a Treasury representative at
the conference. H e was not interested in military security, frontiers
and population-shifts, whose intrinsic and emotional importance he
tragically underestimated. O n the other hand he had a penetrating
understanding o f the e c o n o m i c aspects of European stability, which
most delegates ignored. A durable peace, in his view, would depend
upon the speed with which the settlement allowed trade and manu
facturing to revive and employment to grow. In this respect the treaty
must be dynamic, not r e t r i b u t i v e . In 1 9 1 6 in a Treasury memoran
dum, he argued that the 1 8 7 1 indemnity Germany had imposed on
France had damaged both countries and was largely responsible for
the great e c o n o m i c recession o f the 1 8 7 0 s which had affected the
entire w o r l d . H e thought there should be no reparations at all or, if
there were, the m a x i m u m penalty to be imposed on Germany should
be £ 2 , 0 0 0 million: ' I f Germany is to be " m i l k e d " , ' he argued in a
preparatory paper for the conference, 'she must not first of all be
r u i n e d . ' As for the war debts in which all the Allies were entangled
— and which they supposed would be paid off by what they got out of
Germany — Keynes thought it would be sensible for Britain to let her
creditors off. Such generosity would encourage the Americans to do
the same for Britain, and whereas Britain would be paid by the
Continentals in paper, she would have to pay the U S A in real money,
so a general cancellation would benefit h e r .
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In addition to limiting reparations and cancelling war-debts,
Keynes wanted Wilson to use his authority and the resources of the
United States to launch a vast credit programme to revitalize
European industry — a scheme which, in 1 9 4 7 - 8 , was to take the
form o f the Marshall Plan. H e called this 'a grand scheme for the
rehabilitation o f E u r o p e ' . H e sold this proposal to his boss, the
Chancellor o f the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, and in April
1 9 1 9 drafted two letters which Lloyd George sent to Wilson. T h e
first argued 'the e c o n o m i c mechanism o f Europe is jammed' and the
proposal would free it; the second, that 'the more prostrate a country
is and the nearer to Bolshevism, the more presumably it requires
assistance. But the less likely is private enterprise to do i t . ' It was
Keynes's view chat America was enjoying a unique 'moment' in
world affairs, and that Wilson should avoid trying to dictate
post-war boundaries and the shape of the League and, instead, use
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US food supplies and economic power to aid Europe's long-term
recovery. A prosperous Europe would be more likely to forget the
bitter memories of the immediate past and to place in perspective the
frontier adjustments which were now so fraught with passion.
There was much wisdom and some justice in Keynes's view, and he
was certainly right about America's role, as some American his
torians now r e c o g n i z e . But Wilson, obsessed by the League and
uninterested in economic revival, brushed aside Lloyd George's
pleas, and the US Treasury was horrified by Keynes's ideas. Its
representatives, complained Keynes, were 'formally interdicted' from
'discussing any such question with us even in private c o n v e r s a t i o n ' .
There could be no question o f cancelling war-debts. Keynes's disgust
with the Americans boiled over: 'They had a chance o f taking a large,
or at least humane view o f the world, but unhesitatingly refused it,'
he wrote to a friend. Wilson was 'the greatest fraud on e a r t h ' . H e
was even more horrified when he read the Treaty through and
grasped what he saw as the appalling cumulative effect o f its
provisions, particularly the reparations clauses. T h e 'damned
Treaty', as he called it, was a formula for economic disaster and future
war. O n 2 6 M a y 1 9 1 9 he resigned from the British delegation. ' H o w
can you expect me', he wrote to Chamberlain, 'to assist at this tragic
farce any longer, seeking to lay the foundation, as a Frenchman put
it, "d'une guerre juste et durable"}'
He told Lloyd George: 'I am
slipping away from this scene o f n i g h t m a r e . '
Keynes's departure was perfectly understandable, for the settle
ment his wit and eloquence had failed to avert was a fait
accompli.
But what he now proceeded to do made infinitely more serious the
errors of judgement he had so correctly diagnosed. Keynes was a
man of two worlds. He enjoyed the world o f banking and politics in
which his gifts allowed him to flourish whenever he chose to do so.
But he was also an academic, an aesthete, a homosexual and a
member both of the secret Cambridge society, T h e Apostles, and o f
its adjunct and offspring, the Bloomsbury Group. M o s t o f his friends
were pacifists: Lytton Strachey, the unofficial leader of the Bloomsberries, Strachey's brother J a m e s , David Garnett, Clive Bell, Adrian
Stephen, Gerald Shove, Harry N o r t o n and Duncan G r a n t . W h e n
conscription was introduced, some o f them, rather than serve,
preferred to be hauled before tribunals as conscientious objectors,
Lytton Strachey featuring in a widely publicized and, to him, heroic
case. They did not approve of Keynes joining the Treasury, seeing it
as 'war work', however non-belligerent. In February 1 9 1 6 , he found
on his plate at breakfast an insidious note from Strachey, the pacifist
equivalent o f a white feather: 'Dear Maynard, W h y are you still at
the Treasury? Yours, Lytton.' W h e n Duncan Grant, with w h o m
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Keynes was having an affair, was up before a tribunal in Ipswich,
Keynes put the case for him, flourishing his Treasury briefcase with
the royal cipher to intimidate the tribunal members, who were
country small-fry. But he was ashamed of his j o b when with his
friends. H e wrote to G r a n t in December 1 9 1 7 : 'I work for a
government I despise for ends I think c r i m i n a l . '
Keynes continued at the Treasury out of a residual sense of
patriotism but the tensions within him grew. When the war he had
hated culminated in a peace he found outrageous, he returned to
Cambridge in a state o f nervous collapse. Recovering, he sat down at
once to write a scintillating and vicious attack on the whole
conference proceedings. It was a mixture of truth, half-truth, mis
conceptions and flashing insights, enlivened by sardonic charactersketches o f the chief actors in the drama. It was published before the
end o f the year as The Economic
Consequences
of the Peace and
caused a world-wide sensation. T h e work is another classic illustra
tion o f the law o f unintended consequences. Keynes's public motive
in writing it was to alert the world to the effects of imposing a
Carthaginian Peace on Germany. His private motive was to reinstate
himself with his friends by savaging a political establishment they
blamed him for serving. It certainly succeeded in these objects. It also
proved to be one o f the most destructive books of the century, which
contributed indirectly and in several ways to the future war Keynes
himself was so anxious to avert. When that war in due course came,
a young French historian, Etienne M a n t o u x , pointed an accusing
finger at Keynes's philippic in a tract called The Carthaginian
Peace:
or the Economic
Consequences
of Mr Keynes. It was published in
London in 1 9 4 6 , a year after M a n t o u x himself had been slaughtered
and the same year Keynes died of cancer.
The effect o f Keynes's b o o k on Germany and Britain was cumula
tive, as we shall see. Its effect on America was immediate. As already
noted, the League o f Nations was not Wilson's idea. It emanated
from Britain. O r rather, it was the brain-child of two eccentric
English gentlemen, whose well-meaning but baneful impact on world
affairs illustrates the proposition that religious belief is a bad
counsellor in politics. Walter Phillimore, who at the age of seventytwo chaired the Foreign Office committee whose report coined the
proposal ( 2 0 M a r c h 1 9 1 8 ) , was an international jurist and author of
Three Centuries
of Treaties of Peace ( 1 9 1 7 ) . He was also a wellknown ecclesiastical lawyer, a Trollopian figure, prominent in the
Church Assembly, an expert on legitimacy, ritual, vestments and
church furniture, as well as M a y o r of leafy Kensington. As a judge he
had been much criticized for excessive severity in sexual cases,
though not towards other crimes. It would be difficult to conceive of
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a man less suited to draw up rules for coping with global Realpolitik,
were it not for the existence o f his political ally, Lord R o b e r t Cecil,
T o r y MP and Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Cecil
reacted against the political scepticism and cynicism o f his prime
minister father, Lord Salisbury, who had had to cope with Bismarck,
by approaching foreign affairs with a strong dosage o f religiosity. He
was a nursery lawyer, w h o m his mother said 'always had two
Grievances and a Right'. He had tried to organize opposition to
bullying at Eton. As Minister responsible for the blockade he had
hated trying to starve the Germans into surrender, and so fell on the
League idea with enthusiasm. Indeed he wrote to his wife in August
1 9 1 8 : 'Without the hope that [the League] was to establish a better
international system I should be a p a c i f i s t . ' It is important to
realize that the two men most responsible for shaping the League were
quasi-pacifists who saw it not as a device for resisting aggression by
collective force but as a substitute for such force, operating chiefly
through 'moral authority'.
T h e British military and diplomatic experts disliked the idea from
the start. Colonel M a u r i c e Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary and the
most experienced military co-ordinator, minuted: '. . . any such
scheme is dangerous to us, because it will create a sense of security
which is wholly fictitious . . . . It will only result in failure and the
longer that failure is postponed the more certain it is that this
country will have been lulled to sleep. It will put a very strong lever
into the hands o f the well-meaning idealists who are to be found in
almost every government who deprecate expenditure on armaments,
and in the course o f time it will almost certainly result in this country
being caught at a disadvantage.' Eyre Crowe noted tartly that a
'solemn league and covenant' would be like any other treaty: ' W h a t
is there to ensure that it will not, like other treaties, be b r o k e n ? ' T h e
only answer, o f course, was force. But Phillimore had not consulted
the Armed Services, and when the Admiralty got to hear of the
scheme they minuted that to be effective it would require more
warships, not l e s s . All these warnings, made at the very instant the
League of Nations was conceived, were to be abundantly justified by
its dismal history.
Unfortunately, once President Wilson, tiring of the Treaty negotia
tions themselves, with their necessary whiff of amoral Realpolitik,
seized on the League, and made it the vessel o f his own copious
religious fervour, doubts were swept aside. His sponsorship o f the
scheme, indeed, served to strip it o f such practical merits as it might
have had. There is an historical myth that the European powers were
desperately anxious to create the League as a means of involving the
United States in a permanent commitment to help keep the peace;
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that Wilson shared this view; and that it was frustrated by Republi
can isolationism. N o t so. Clemenceau and Foch wanted a mutual
security alliance, with its own planning staff, of the kind which had
finally evolved at Allied HQ, after infinite pains and delays, in the last
year o f the war. In short, they wanted something on the lines which
eventually appeared in 1 9 4 8 - 9 , in the shape of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. They recognized that a universal system, to
which all powers (including Germa...
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