The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

The violence of the Great War had become transformative. By 1918, World War I had shattered the old empires of Eurasia – Tsarist, Habsburg and Ottoman. China was convulsed by civil war. By the early 1920s the maps of eastern Europe and the Middle East had been redrawn. But dramatic and contentious as they were, these visible changes acquired their full significance from the fact that they were coupled to another deeper, but less conspicuous shift. A new order emerged from the Great War that promised, above the bickering and nationalist grandstanding of the new states, fundamentally to restructure relations between the great powers – Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia and the United States.

Churchill looked forward to the future, not in a spirit of grim resignation, but with considerable optimism. Out of the violence of the Great War it seemed that a new international order had emerged. A global peace had been built on two great regional treaties: the European Peace Pact initialed at Locarno in October 1925 (signed in London in December) and the Pacific Treaties signed at the Washington Naval Conference over the winter of 1921–2. These were, Churchill, wrote, ‘twin pyramids of peace rising solid and unshakable . . . commanding the allegiance of the leading nations of the world and of all their fleets and armies’.

Churchill, Trotsky and Hitler make for an incongruous, not to say antipathetic, grouping. To some it will seem provocative even to place them in the same conversation. Certainly they were not each other’s equal as writers, politicians, intellectuals or moral personalities.

Hitler and Trotsky recognized the same reality that Churchill did. They too believed that World War I had opened a new phase of ‘world organization’. But whereas Churchill took this new reality as cause for celebration, for a communist revolutionary like Trotsky or a national socialist such as Hitler it threatened nothing less than historical oblivion.

But although sovereignty was multiplied, its content was hollowed out.7 The Great War weakened all the European combatants irreversibly, even the strongest amongst them and even the victors. In 1919 the French Republic may have celebrated its triumph over Germany at Versailles, in the palace of the Sun King, but this could not disguise the fact that World War I confirmed the end of France’s claim to be a power of global rank.

Between 1914 and 1919, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Serbia had all faced national extinction as the fortunes of war swung back and forth. In 1900 the Kaiser had brashly claimed a place on the world stage. Twenty years later Germany was reduced to squabbling with Poland over the boundaries of Silesia, a dispute overseen by a Japanese viscount. Rather than the subject, Germany had become the object of Weltpolitik.

If there was a European victor it was Britain, hence Churchill’s rather sunny assessment. However, Britain had prevailed not as a European power but as the head of a global empire. To contemporaries the sense that the British Empire had done relatively less badly out of the war only confirmed the conclusion that the age of European power had come to an end.

Was the United States the universal, world-encompassing empire similar to that which the Catholic Habsburgs had once threatened to establish? The question would haunt the century that followed.

Unless the political leaders of Europe could shake their populations out of their usual ‘political thoughtlessness’, Hitler warned in 1928, the ‘threatened global hegemony of the North American continent’ would reduce them all to the status of Switzerland or Holland.

As we shall see, Britain’s governments in the 1920s again and again found themselves confronting the painful fact that the United States was a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state’, exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.

It requires a particular effort because of the peculiar way in which America’s power manifested itself. In the early twentieth century, America’s leaders were not committed to asserting themselves as a military power, beyond the ocean highways. Their sway was often exercised indirectly and in the form of a latent, potential force rather than an immediate, evident presence.

Getting this history right matters because we need to understand the origins of the Pax Americana that still defines our world today. It is crucial too, however, to understanding the huge second spasm of the ‘second Thirty Years War’ that Churchill would look back upon from 1945.12 The spectacular escalation of violence unleashed in the 1930s and the 1940s was a testament to the kind of force that the insurgents believed themselves to be up against.

It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action. Their enemies were often invisible and intangible. They ascribed to them conspiratorial intentions that enveloped the world in a malign web of influence.

if we are to understand the way in which the ultra-violent politics of the interwar period was incubated in World War I and its aftermath, we need to take this dialectic of order and insurgency seriously. We grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history, or if we tell their story backwards from the dizzying ...

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 ...

What were the essential elements underpinning this new order that seemed so oppressive to its potential enemies? By common agreement the new order had three major facets – moral authority backed by military power and economic supremacy.

The Great War may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged – a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order.

Trotsky characteristically cast the scene in rather less exalted terms. If it was true that domestic politics and international relations would no longer be separate, as far as he was concerned, both could be reduced to a single logic. The ‘entire political life’, even of states like France, Italy and Germany, down to ‘the shifts of parties and governments will be determined in the last analysis by the will of American capitalism .

Since the wars of religion in the seventeenth century, conventional understanding of international politics and international law had erected a firewall between foreign policy and domestic politics. Conventional morality and domestic notions of law had no place in the world of great power diplomacy and war.

Indeed, by 1917 the revolutionary purpose was being made more and more explicit. Regime change had become a precondition for armistice negotiations. Versailles assigned war guilt and criminalized the Kaiser. Woodrow Wilson and the Entente had pronounced a death sentence on the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

Churchill could afford to talk in sanguine terms. His nation had long been one of the most successful entrepreneurs of international morality and law. But what if, as a German historian put it in the 1920s, one were to find oneself amongst the disenfranchised, amongst the lower breeds in the new order, as ‘fellaheen’ amidst the pyramids of peace?

They demanded that the liberal train of moralistic international organization should be reversed and international affairs returned to an idealized vision of a Jus Publicum Europaeum in which the family of European sovereigns lived side by side in a non-judgemental, non-hierarchical anarchy.19 But not only was this a mythic history, with little bearing on the reality of international politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ignored the force of Bethmann Hollweg’s message to the Reichstag in the spring of 1916. After this war, there was no way back.

The other was insurgency, epitomized in the immediate aftermath of the war by Benito Mussolini. In Milan in March 1919 he launched his Fascist Party by denouncing the emerging new order as ‘a solemn “swindle” of the rich’, by which he meant Britain, France and America, ‘against the proletarian nations’, by which he meant Italy, ‘to fix forever the actual conditions of world equilibrium . . .’21 Instead of a reversion to an imaginary ancien régime, he held out the promise of further escalation.

But though this analogy may be tempting, it is misleading in that in 1919 there was nothing like the symmetry that prevailed in 1945.22 By November 1918 not only was Germany on its knees, but Russia too. The balance of world politics in 1919 resembled the unipolar moment of 1989 far more than the divided world of 1945.

Through remarkable staff work, the Kaiser’s generals were repeatedly able to establish local superiority and to threaten breakthroughs: in 1915 in Poland, at Verdun in 1916, on the Italian front in the autumn of 1917, on the Western Front as late as the spring of 1918.

Only against Russia did the Central Powers actually prevail. On the Western Front, from 1914 down to the summer of 1918, the record was one of frustration. And one central factor helps to explain this, the balance of military materiel. From the summer of 1916 onwards when the British Army brought an enormous transatlantic supply line to bear on the European battlefield, it was only ever a matter of time before any local superiority established by the Central Powers was turned into its opposite.

In the months that followed, their once proud armies were disbanded. France and its allies in central and eastern Europe were masters of the European scene. But this, as the French were acutely aware, was no more than a start. On the third anniversary of the Armistice, in November 1921, an exclusive club of leaders gathered for the first time in Washington DC to accept a global order defined by America in unprecedentedly stark terms.

There would be none of the ambiguity of Versailles, nor the obfuscations of the League of Nations Covenant. The rations of geostrategic power were fixed in the ratio of 10:10:6:3:3. At the head stood Britain and the United States, who were accorded equal status as the only truly global powers with a naval presence throughout the high seas. Japan was granted third spot as a one-ocean power confined to the Pacific. France and Italy were relegated to the Atlantic littoral and the Mediterranean. Beyond these five, no other state reckoned in the balance.

Whatever their military utility, battleships were the most expensive and technologically sophisticated instruments of global power. Only the richest countries could afford to own and operate battle-fleets. America did not even build its full quota of ships. It was enough that everyone knew that it could.

Economics was the pre-eminent medium of American power, military force was a by-product. Trotsky not only recognized this, but was eager to quantify it.

In 1872, Trotsky believed there had been rough parity between the national wealth of the United States, Britain, Germany and France, each possessing between 30 and 40 billion dollars. Fifty years later the disparity was clearly enormous.

what no one disputed was that at the time of the Washington Naval Conference in November 1921, the British government owed the American taxpayer $4.5 billion, whilst France owed America $3.5 billion and Italy owed $1.8 billion. Japan’s balance of payments was seriously deteriorating and it was anxiously looking for support from J. P. Morgan. At the same time, 10 million citizens of the Soviet Union were being kept alive by American famine relief.

If we turn to modern-day statistics to plot the development of the world economy since the nineteenth century, the two-part storyline is clear enough (Fig. 1).26 Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the British Empire had been the largest economic unit in the world. Sometime in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, the combined output of the British Empire was overtaken by that of the United States of America.

The problems of world order posed by World War I were unlike any previously encountered – by the British, the Americans or anyone else. But, on the other side of the balance sheet, American economic power was of a different quantity and quality from that which Britain had ever deployed.

The United States was everything that the champions of imperial preference longed for, but the British Empire was not. The United States began as a heterogeneous collection of colonial settlements that in the early nineteenth century had developed into an expansive and highly integrative empire. Unlike the British Empire, the American Republic sought to incorporate its new territories in the West and the South fully into its federal constitution. Given the cleavage in the original founding of the eighteenth-century constitution, between the free-labour North and the slave-labour South, this integrative project was fraught with risks. In 1861, within a century of its birth, America’s rapidly expanding polity shattered into a terrible civil war.

In 1914, just over fifty years on, the American political class consisted of men whose childhoods were deeply scarred by that bloodshed. What was at stake in the peace policy of Woodrow Wilson’s White House can only be understood if we recognize that the twenty-eighth President of the United States headed the first cabinet of Southern Democrats to govern the country since the Secession. They saw their own ascent as vindication of the reconciliation of White America and the refounding of the American nation state.

At a terrible cost America had forged itself into something unprecedented. This was no longer the voraciously expansive empire of the westward movement. But nor was it Thomas Jefferson’s neo-classical ideal of a ‘city on a hill’. It was something judged impossible by classical political theory. It was a consolidated federal republic of continental scale, a super-sized nation state.

To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain’s hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford’s Model T as a ‘horseless carriage’. The label was not so much wrong, as vainly anachronistic.

Having formed itself as a nation state of global reach through a process of expansion that was aggressive and continental in scope but had avoided conflict with other major powers, America’s strategic outlook was different from either that of the old power states like Britain and France or their newly arrived competitors – Germany, Japan and Italy. As it emerged onto the world stage at the end of the nineteenth century, America quickly realized its interest in ending the intense international rivalry which since the 1870s had defined a new age of global imperialism.

confronted with the reality of imperial rule in the Philippines, the enthusiasm soon waned and a more fundamental strategic logic asserted itself.

Not how the Filipinos would see it bro

America would see to it that its neighbours in the Caribbean and Central America were ‘orderly’ and that the Monroe Doctrine, the bar against external intervention in the western hemisphere, was upheld. Access must be denied to other powers. America would accumulate bases and staging posts for the projection of its power. But one thing that the US could well do without was a ragbag of ill-assorted, troublesome colonial possessions.

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The true logic of American power was articulated between 1899 and 1902 in the three ‘Notes’ in which Secretary of State John Hay first outlined the so-called ‘Open Door’ policy. As the basis for a new international order these ‘Notes’ proposed one deceptively simple but far-reaching principle: equality of access for goods and capital.32 It is important to be clear what this was not. The Open Door was not an appeal for free trade. Amongst the large economies, the United States was the most protectionist. Nor did the US welcome competition for its own sake. Once the door was opened, it confidently expected American exporters and bankers to sweep all their rivals aside.

the US had no interest in unsettling the imperial racial hierarchy or the global colour-line. Commerce and investment demanded order not revolution. What American strategy was emphatically directed towards suppressing was imperialism, understood not as productive colonial expansion nor the racial rule of white over coloured people, but as the ‘selfish’ and violent rivalry of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan that threatened to divide one world into segmented spheres of interest.

Wilson wanted international arbitration, freedom of the seas and non-discrimination in trade policy. He wanted the League of Nations to put an end to inter-imperialist rivalry. It was an anti-militarist, post-imperialist agenda for a country convinced of the global influence that it would exercise at arm’s length through the means of soft power – economics and ideology.

As this book will show in its opening chapters, as Wilson drove America to the forefront of world politics in 1916, his mission was to ensure not that the ‘right’ side won in World War I, but that no side did.

This book will argue that despite the fiasco of that policy already in the spring of 1917, despite America’s reluctant engagement in World War I, this would remain the basic objective of Wilson and his successors right down to the 1930s. And it is this which holds the key to answering the question that follows. If the United States was bent on instituting an Open Door world and had formidable resources at its disposal to achieve that goal, why did things go so badly awry?

Even before it occurred, they were anticipating the failure of the Versailles peace conference. They depicted Wilson, their hero, in tragic terms, vainly trying to extricate himself from the machinations of the ‘old world’. The distinction between the American prophet of a liberal future and the corrupt old world to which he brought his message was fundamental to this storyline.

This storyline has dramatic force and has spawned a remarkably rich historical literature. But beyond its usefulness for historical writing, it matters because it actually informed transatlantic arguments about policy-making from the turn of the century onwards. As we shall see, the attitudes of the Wilson administration and his Republican successors down to Herbert Hoover were powerfully shaped by this perception of European and Japanese history.

For radical liberals, socialists and social democrats in Britain, France, Italy and Japan, Wilson provided arguments to use against their domestic political opponents.

the fact that this historical vision of a Dark Continent violently resisting the forces of historical progress had actual historical influence, also harbours risks for historians.