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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Adam Tooze
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October 30 - November 12, 2022
Whatever comforting, domesticated fantasies their followers may have projected onto them, the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order.
But at the mention of Wilson’s name the anti-war faction organized in the Independent Labour Party burst into a well-orchestrated ovation.26 Though this earned them a reprimand from The Times, the Manchester Guardian applauded.27
When Wilson said it would be a ‘crime against civilization’ for America to allow itself to become sucked into the war, it was ‘white civilization’ that he had in mind.
When Germans came to analyse and explain their own defeat, it was above all around this political factor that their thoughts circled. It was the flip-side of the notorious ‘stab in the back’ legend. They attributed an enormous influence to Allied propaganda and to the demagogic genius of Lloyd George and Clemenceau. What Germany had lacked was a populist, democratic ‘Führer’.
Birmingham, the heartland of jingoist nationalism,
As the ‘mother of parliaments’ Westminster took no lessons from foreigners.
Producers of goods that were in high demand and those who could set their own price generally did well out of the war.
The ultimate driver of this inflationary wave was monetary expansion originating at the heart of the global monetary system in Europe and the US.
Albert Suedekum drafted a memo arguing that the real enemy both of Germany and of Europe as a whole was American capitalism. Wilson ‘was openly aspiring to the role as arbiter of the world’.8 His aim was to humble all of Europe, reducing the continent to a collection of national republics all of which were economically dependent on America.
Whereas an unconditional German surrender would unleash British and French power, Wilson insisted that he was ‘thinking now only of putting the United States into a position of strength and justice. I am now playing for 100 years hence.’
The accusation that Democrats sympathized with socialism and were ipso facto unpatriotic has echoed through demagogic right-wing discourse in America down to the present day.
Wilson lectured his staff in December 1918 onboard the SS George Washington. ‘Liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization from chaos – from a flood of ultra-radicalism that will swamp the world … Liberalism must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilization is to escape the typhoon.’
The fact that between 1923 and 1945 Britain was to elect a Labour government three times on a platform committed to a British form of socialism, ought to be counted amongst the more remarkable peaceful transitions of modern political history. But it was only in 1945 that Labour on its own was in a position to win an outright majority. Both in 1923 and 1929 the Labour governments depended on Liberal support.
During the reform debates of 1917, it was the Conservatives who had pushed for proportional representation, wanting to protect themselves against what they took to be the inevitable working-class majority under a universal franchise.
The upsurge in working-class militancy between 1910 and 1920 was a phenomenon that swept the entire world.38 Rather than seeing it as a mere epiphenomenon of the socialist revolution that did not happen, it deserves to be seen as a transformative event in its own right.
the blank canvas of the League was filled, if not with an Anglo-American alliance, then at least with a commitment to avoid confrontation.
in his Memoirs, Monnet looked back with regret on what he saw as the missed opportunity of 1919. At this moment Europe might have taken a bold step toward industrial cooperation. ‘It was to take many years and much suffering before Europeans began to realize that they must choose either unity or decline.’12
The nineteenth century had been haunted by revolution. Now was the moment, it seemed, that revolution had arrived. But outside Russia the far left was everywhere defeated.
Across the world, as in Argentina and the United States, the resources of the state and the property-owning classes were mobilized to defend established order aggressively.
between 1919 and 1921 more days were lost in strikes in Britain than in revolutionary Germany or in Italy.
This militancy in turn stoked a groundswell of bourgeois resentment toward the ‘privileges’ being conceded to the working class.
To the new, all-Tory government it seemed that the greater the distance they kept from their turbulent neighbours on the continent the better.
In the autumn of 1923, with Mussolini on the loose in the Mediterranean, talk of a division of Germany, a new Westphalian peace and Franco-German rapprochement on the Rhine, with Nazis and Communists contending for power, and Stresemann, Ludendorff, Hitler and Adenauer all on the scene simultaneously, it was as though the entire drama of western European history for the next two generations was to be compressed into a matter of months.
Hitler’s fantasies of a Moscow on the Rhine prefigured the fiery hell that was to consume the Ruhr between 1943 and 1945.
In London, gallophobic conspiracy theories were rife. Prime Minister MacDonald raged that ‘France has been playing its usual small-minded and selfish game over the Hoover proposals. Its methods are those of the worst Jews …
It was not in the aftermath of World War I but in reaction to the disillusionment of the 1920s and the Great Depression that full-throated isolationism came truly to the fore in American politics.
in the summer of 1933 Germany’s atrocious new government was a sideshow. The business of the World Economic Conference was dominated by the question of whether America, France and Britain could come to an agreement on how to manage the violent fluctuations of the dollar and sterling against the franc, now the lead currency on gold.
on 3 July Roosevelt issued his ‘bombshell telegram’, denouncing any effort to stabilize the American currency as irrelevant to the business of achieving recovery. The dollar would float to whatever level suited the US economy, regardless of its impact on the rest of the world. Berlin took the hint. In October, Hitler withdrew the German delegation from the League of Nations disarmament talks and announced a near total default on all its outstanding international obligations.
As a share of national income, by 1938 Nazi Germany was spending five times what Imperial Germany had spent during its arms race with Edwardian Britain, and the GDP at Hitler’s command by 1939 was almost 60 per cent greater than that available to the Kaiser.
hindsight deceives as well as it clarifies.
