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

by Adam Tooze

If there was a dialectic of radicalization operating behind the scenes that would throw open the door of history to extremist insurgency, as of 1929 it was obscure to both Trotsky and Hitler. It took a second dramatic crisis, the Great Depression, to unleash the avalanche of insurgency.

Their victory in 1918 was no accident. In 1945 a similar coalition of forces would impose an even more comprehensive defeat on Italy, Germany and Japan. Furthermore, after 1945 the United States in its sphere went on to organize a highly successful political and economic order.43 What had gone wrong after 1918? Why had American policy miscarried at Versailles?

The problem is to find the right standard by which to judge this failure and to provide some compelling explanation for the lack of will and judgement that are the serious shortcomings of rich, powerful democracies.

What the historical schemas offered by both the ‘Dark Continent’ and the ‘hegemonic failure’ models of history tend to obscure is the radical novelty of the situation confronting world leaders in the early twentieth century.

The disasters of the twentieth century are thus ascribed to the dead weight of the past. The hegemonic crisis model may interpret the interwar crisis differently. But it is even more dramatic in its historical sweep and even less interested in acknowledging that the early twentieth century may actually have been an era of true novelty.

What neither of these visions can encompass is the unprecedented pace, scope and violence of change actually experienced in world affairs from the late nineteenth century onwards. As contemporaries quickly realized, the intense ‘world political’ competition into which the great powers entered in the late nineteenth century was not a stable system with an ancient lineage.

Far from belonging in the lexicon of a venerable but corrupt ‘ancien régime’, the term ‘imperialism’ was a neologism that entered widespread use only around 1900.

Both the Dark Continent and the hegemonic failure models are therefore based on a faulty premise. Modern global imperialism was a radical and novel force, not an old-world hangover. By the same token the problem of establishing a hegemonic world order ‘after imperialism’ was unprecedented.

It was Britain’s world system that had knit these arenas together, and brought their crises into global synchrony. Far from presiding triumphantly over this panorama, the scale of this challenge had forced Britain into a series of strategic improvisations. Threatened by the emergent powers of Germany and Japan, Britain had abandoned its offshore position and opted instead to commit itself to understandings in Europe and Asia, with France, Russia and Japan.

The war thus bequeathed an unprecedented problem of global economic and political order, but no historical model of world hegemony with which to address it. From 1916 the British themselves would attempt feats of intervention, coordination and stabilization to which they had never aspired in the empire’s Victorian heyday.

As we shall see, despite the limited resources at its disposal, Lloyd George’s government in the post-war years played a quite unprecedented role as the pivot of European finance and diplomacy. It was also his downfall. The train of crises that reached their nadir in 1923 ended Lloyd George’s tenure as Prime Minister and exposed for all to see the limits of Britain’s hegemonic capacity.

When President Wilson travelled to Europe in December 1918 he took with him a team of geographers, historians, political scientists and economists to make sense of the new world map.48 The spatial sweep of the disorder confronting the major powers in the wake of the war was vast. Throughout the length and breadth of Eurasia the war had created an unprecedented vacuum.

The threat of Bolshevik revolution was certainly present in the minds of conservatives all over the world after 1918. But this was a fear of civil war and anarchic disorder and it was in large part a phantom menace. It was in no way comparable to the awesome military presence of Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, or even the strategic heft of Tsarist Russia before 1914.

Communism was throughout the 1920s fighting from the defensive. It is questionable whether the United States and the Soviet Union were on the same footing even in 1945. A generation earlier, to treat Wilson and Lenin as equivalent is to fail to acknowledge one of the truly defining features of the situation – the dramatic implosion of Russian power.

In 1920 Russia appeared so weak that the Polish Republic, itself less than two years old, decided that this was the time to invade. The Red Army was strong enough to ward off that threat. But when the Soviets marched westwards they suffered a crushing defeat outside Warsaw.

The uninhibited ambitions of the arch-imperialists in Lloyd George’s cabinet, or General Ludendorff in Germany, or Goto Shinpei in Japan, provide ample material for the Dark Continent narrative. But violent as their visions clearly were, we must be attentive to the nuance of their war-talk.

A figure such as Ludendorff was under no illusion that his grand visions of the total redesign of Eurasia were expressions of traditional statecraft.49 He justified the scale of his ambition precisely on the basis that the world was entering a new and radical phase, the ultimate or the penultimate phase in a final global struggle for power. Men like these were no exponents of any kind of ‘ancien régime’.

Far from being exponents of the old world the most violent antagonists of the new liberal world order were themselves futuristic innovators. They were not, however, realists. The commonplace distinction between idealists and realists concedes too much to Wilson’s opponents.

As we shall see, within weeks of its ratification in March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the ultimate imperialist peace, was repudiated by its own creators who found themselves struggling to escape the contradictions of their own policy. Japanese imperialists raged impotently against the refusal of their government to take decisive steps to subordinate all of China.

The most successful imperialists were the British, their main zone of expansion in the Middle East. But this was truly the exception that proves the rule. Amidst the rivalry of British and French imperial demands, the entire region was reduced to chaos and disorder.

Whereas the familiar narrative of Wilsonian failure pictures the American President as caught up in the irrepressible aggression of old-war imperialism, the actual situation was that the former imperialists were of their own accord arriving at the conclusion that they must search for new strategies appropriate to a new era, after the age of imperialism.

What made the likes of Churchill confident that the new order was robust and what made Hitler and Trotsky so despondent was precisely that it seemed to be founded on foundations more solid than the force of individual personality.

It seeks to locate a dramatic shift in the calculus of power, not external to, but within the government machinery itself, in the interaction between military force, economics and diplomacy.

But, as a nationalist of a Bismarckian stripe, he was a late and hard-won convert to the new international politics. The political force that sustained every single one of his famous initiatives was a broad-based parliamentary coalition with which Stresemann in its inception had been bitterly at odds.

The notorious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk will emerge from this book as comparable to Versailles, not in its vindictiveness, but in the sense that it too was a ‘good peace gone bad’.

When Germany faced defeat in the West, it was, as we shall see, the Reichstag majority that dared, not once, but three times between November 1918 and September 1923 to wager the future of their country on subordination to the Western Powers.

In this nexus between domestic and foreign policy, and in the choice between radical insurgency and compliance, there are remarkable parallels in the early twentieth century between Germany’s situation and that of Japan. Threatened in the 1850s by outright subordination to foreign power, facing Russia, Britain, China and the United States as potential antagonists, one Japanese response was to seize the initiative and to embark on a programme of domestic reform and external aggression.

what is too easily forgotten is that this was always counterbalanced by another tendency: the pursuit of security through imitation, alliance and cooperation, Japan’s tradition of new, Kasumigaseki diplomacy.54 This was achieved first through the partnership with Britain in 1902 and then through a strategic modus vivendi with the United States.

during and after World War I, Japan’s emerging system of multi-party parliamentary politics acted as a substantial check on the military leadership. It was the importance of this linkage that in turn raised the stakes. By the late 1920s, those calling for a foreign policy of confrontation were also demanding a domestic revolution.

So long as the Western Powers could hold the ring in the world economy and secure peace in East Asia, it was the Japanese liberals who held the upper hand. If that military, economic and political framework was to come apart, it would be the advocates of imperialist aggression who would seize their opportunity.

What the war gave rise to was a multisided, polycentric search for strategies of pacification and appeasement. And in that quest the calculations of all the great powers pivoted on one key factor, the United States. It was this conformism that filled Hitler and Trotsky with such gloom.

Why did the Western Powers lose their grip in such spectacular fashion? When all is said and done, the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security.

The third key point to establish is that America’s own entry into modernity, presumed in such a simple way by most accounts of twentieth-century international politics, was every bit as violent, unsettling and ambiguous as that of any of the other states in the world system. Indeed, given the underlying fissures within a formerly colonial society, originating in the triangular Atlantic slave trade, expanded by means of the violent appropriation of the West, peopled by a mass migration from Europe, often under traumatic circumstances, and then kept in perpetual motion by the surging force of capitalist development, America’s problems with modernity were profound.

Out of the effort to come to terms with this wrenching nineteenth-century experience emerged an ideology that was common to both sides of the American party divide, namely exceptionalism.

But what was remarkable in the wake of World War I was the degree to which American exceptionalism emerged strengthened and more vocal than ever, precisely at the moment when all the other major states of the world were coming to acknowledge their condition as one of interdependence and relativity.

novelty and dynamism existed side by side, this book will insist, with a deep and abiding conservatism.61 In the face of truly radical change, Americans clung to a constitution that by the late nineteenth century was already the oldest Republican edifice in operation. This, as its many domestic critics pointed out, was in many ways ill-adjusted to the demands of the modern world. For all the national consolidation since the Civil War, for all the country’s economic potential, in the early twentieth century the federal government of the United States was a vestigial thing, certainly by comparison to the ‘big government’ that would act so effectively as the anchor of global hegemony after 1945.

The peace policy that he pursued up to the spring of 1917 was a desperate effort to insulate his domestic reform programme from the violent political passions and the wrenching social and economic dislocation of the war. It was in vain. The calamitous conclusion to Wilson’s second term in 1919–21 saw the coming apart of this first great twentieth-century effort to remake American federal government.

Exceptionalist ideology carried with it a memory of how recently the country had been torn apart by civil war, how heterogeneous was its ethnic and cultural make-up, and how easily the inherent weaknesses of a republican constitution might degenerate into stalemate or full-blown crisis.

This then is the central irony of the early twentieth century. At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centred world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future. Not for nothing did Wilson describe his goal in defensive terms, as one of making the world safe for democracy.

The tumultuous, blood-soaked events recorded in these pages turned the proud national histories of the nineteenth century on their head.

Instead of the neat stage theories projected by nineteenth-century theorists, history took the form of what Trotsky would call ‘uneven and combined development’, a loosely articulated web of events, actors and processes developing at different speeds, whose individual courses were interconnected in labyrinthine ways.

Taking the side, not of the revolutionaries, but of the governments, the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, writing in the 1960s, offered a rather more graphic image of ‘uneven and combined development’. He described the powers, great and small, as members of a ‘chain gang’, a lurching, shackled-together collective.68 The prisoners were differently proportioned. Some were more violent than others. Some were single-minded. Others exhibited multiple personalities. They struggled with themselves and with each other. They could seek to dominate the entire chain, or to cooperate. As far as the chain would give, they could enjoy some degree of autonomy, but in the end they were locked together.

Viewed from the trench lines of the Western Front, the Great War could appear static – a struggle waged over a handful of miles at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. But this perspective is deceiving.1 On the Eastern Front and in the war against the Ottoman Empire the battle-lines were fluid.

In the West, though the front line barely moved, this stasis was the result of massive forces locked in a precarious balance. From one month to the next the initiative shifted from one side to other.

By attacking a key point in the French fortress chain they would bleed the Entente to death. The result was a life-and-death struggle which by the early summer had sucked in more than 70 per cent of the French Army and threatened to turn the Entente’s concentric strategy into little more than a series of ad hoc relief operations. It was to seize back the initiative that at the end of May 1916 the British agreed to bring forward their first major land offensive of the war, on the Somme.

Vast amounts of cash and every conceivable means of diplomatic pressure were brought to bear on the last remaining central European neutral, Romania. If it could be flipped into the Entente camp it would pose a mortal threat to the soft underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The success of the Entente’s strategy depended on combining a devastating series of concentric military offensives with the slow economic strangulation of the Central Powers. Before the war the British Admiralty had prepared plans not only for a naval blockade but also for an annihilating financial boycott of all central European trade.

the blockade even in its partial form was hugely unpopular in the United States. The American navy regarded the British blockade as ‘untenable under any law or custom of maritime war hitherto known . . .’3 But even more politically charged was the German response.

The Lusitania in May and the Arabic in August 1915 were only the best-known casualties. Anxious to avoid further escalation, at the end of August the Kaiser’s civilian government retreated.

Just as the Entente could not properly enforce its blockade for fear of antagonizing America, Germany’s counterstroke miscarried for the same reason. Instead, in the spring of 1916, the German navy tried to break the maritime deadlock by luring the British Grand Fleet into a North Sea trap.