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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 20 9 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 2 1 22 23 24 10 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 25 26 27 1 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 29 12 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 30 13 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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: 31 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 14 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 34 35 36 37 15 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 38 39 40 41 42 43 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 45 46 47 17 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 48 49 50 18 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 51 52 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 53 20 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 54 55 56 21 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 57 5 8 59 60 22 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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. 61 62 63 23 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 6 4 65 66 24 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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. 67 68 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 69 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 70 71 26 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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: 72 73 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 27 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 76 77 78 7 9 80 81 82 83 8 4 85 28 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 . 86 87 88 89 90 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 91 9 2 29 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 93 94 95 96 97 30 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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 98 31 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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; 99 1 0 0 32 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 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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Running head: MODERNITY

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Modernity
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MODERNITY

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Modernity

The new world began when pictures were taken showing the solar eclipse in West Africa.
People noted that the Newtonian laws, as well as those by Galileo, had remained in use for more
than 200 years and there was the need to make changes and adapt new measures that would
explain the world better (Johnson, 2001). Using the framework of having an understanding that
would revive people's ability to know their world in better terms, there was the formation of
European Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution that aimed at expanding human
knowledge on different matters in the world. Modernity refers to both a historical period where
people have changed t...


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