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

by Adam Tooze

At the beginning of the year, the Chinese political class had thrilled to the idea that by joining the coalition against Germany they might gain recognition in the advance guard of the family of nations. Now, Lansing was openly asserting China’s unreadiness for any such alliance and refusing to take sides in China’s internal struggles. By contrast, Imperial Japan had picked a side and was shepherding China into the war under an authoritarian regime.

Amidst the chaos of Beijing’s factional politics, what Washington refused to acknowledge was that serious issues of principle were at stake.

Wang pilloried the stark difference in America’s attitude towards European and Asian affairs: ‘It is becoming rather ridiculous, at a time when America is engaged in a world-war . . . with the avowed principal object of saving democratic principle of government from being smothered by autocratic militarism, that the power and influence of the US should be applied in one place abroad, and should not be applied in another place abroad.’

In the wake of the summer crisis in Beijing, Washington did show some signs of formulating a more concerted policy towards China and Japan. But as far as the Chinese nationalists were concerned, the upshot of those deliberations was hardly reassuring.

China’s ambassador in Washington, Wellington Koo, a graduate of Columbia Law School, promptly protested that it was unacceptable for Japan and America to be conferring over the future of China without Chinese involvement. Had he been party to private conversations within the Wilson administration, Koo would have been even more indignant.

Compared to this kind of fantasy, Japan’s strategy was at least based on the elementary recognition that the Beijing government must be dealt with directly as a partner in power. But, by the same token, Japan now faced the consequences that America wished to avoid.

Japan’s Chinese allies were engaged in a high-stakes wager. They were gambling that the resources Japan would place at their disposal would be sufficient to overcome the opposition that that support aroused.

As one of the leading experts on warlordism has remarked, one of the great ironies of the period is that disorder in China was driven not by overt particularism, but by the excessive ambition to national unification.

Given the delicately balanced political situation within Japan itself, a determined move by the United States at this moment might well have produced an accommodating reaction. Despite the dark ruminations on the part of some Japanese imperialists, there was no majority in Tokyo for a confrontation with Washington.

At the end of 1917, six years after the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty, there were signs that Washington was finally about to put some financial muscle behind its strategy in Asia. Lansing proposed that $50 million would be provided for military reconstruction and the development of the Southern railway network. A further $100 million would help to stabilize the Chinese currency. The funds were be raised by an international bankers’ consortium with Wall Street taking the lead.46 Wilson approved the scheme and the War Department was keen on the idea of moving an army of 100,000 Chinese soldiers to France. But no money ever flowed.

When Lansing floated his loan plan in December 1917 it was immediately sunk by Secretary of the Treasury Macadoo. He did not want to ask Congress for authorization for a major government loan to China and he didn’t want a Chinese funding drive to compete with Liberty Bonds.

America’s resources were potentially far greater, but Washington’s refusal to commit to any coherent vision of Chinese political development stopped the flow of funds.

In the spring of 1917 America’s entry into the war had seemed to many to herald a transnational crusade for liberal republicanism. But by the end of 1917 the hope that Washington had either the capacity or the will to orchestrate such a sweeping campaign had already been shaken. The failure to produce a constructive policy of engagement in China was no doubt in part explicable in terms of racial and cultural prejudice. It would not be until the end of the 1920s that the United States took Chinese nationalism seriously. But this refusal was not confined to China.

In China and Russia, where revolutionary republican projects were immediately at stake, there was a bewildering mismatch between political rhetoric and the effective deployment of resources. The statement issued by Lansing on the need to prioritize the coherence of the Chinese state over participation in the war might well have been extremely welcome if it had been directed to Petrograd in July 1917.

There is a pattern here. In truth, despite the appearance Wilson created of speaking to them directly, China, Russia and Germany were objects of his strategy. They were not his real interlocutors. Transformation in such alien places was no doubt welcome, but it was at best a long-term process and one from which America should keep its distance. Wilson’s public rhetoric, his diplomacy and strategy were not directed to them, but to containing the dangerous association he had been forced to enter into with the British Empire, the rampaging Japanese, and the vindictive and unpredictable French, an association all the more dangerous because the Machiavellian imperialists of the old world had so many powerful and self-interested friends in America itself, in Congress and on Wall Street.

On 2 December 1917 in a gloomy barracks complex in western Russia, representatives of the Bolshevik regime and the Central Powers – the Germans, Austrians, Turks and Bulgarians – sat down to negotiate a peace. Four months later they concluded the notorious Brest-Litovsk Treaty that stripped Russia of territories inhabited by 55 million people, a third of the empire’s pre-war population, a third of its agricultural land, more than half its industrial undertakings and mines that had produced almost 90 per cent of its coal.

Surprisingly, for a treaty that is generally remembered as an act of imperial rapacity of Hitlerite proportions, the negotiations were prolonged and substantive, and the language they were couched in was the language of self-determination.3 From the Bolsheviks this was to be expected. Lenin and Trotsky, the commissar for foreign affairs, were after all famous exponents of the new principles of international relations. But in fact at Brest it was the Germans as much as the Soviets who sought to craft a modern peace in the East, based on the new standards of legitimacy, or at least it was the German Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann and his backers in the Reichstag majority who did.

As Lenin himself had forcefully argued, if the principle of self-determination was taken seriously it trumped any claim to preserve the territorial status quo.4 By what right could the Bolsheviks, who were violently consolidating their coup in Petrograd, claim the territories conquered by the Tsar?

Point

As draconian as the final treaty was from a Russian point of view, only a very small portion of the territory removed from Russia was directly annexed by Germany. Instead, Brest gave birth to the precursors to the Baltic states in their modern form, an independent Ukraine and a Transcaucasian Republic.

Since 1991, all of these creations of the ‘Brest-Litovsk moment’, and more, have come to be regarded as legitimate members of the family of nations. Now as then Poland and the Baltic states look to protectors in the West. Today they are keen members of an American-dominated NATO and the European Union, in which Germany is the dominant force. If they are not more anxious about their security, it has much to do with the early twenty-first-century map of Eurasia, on which Russian power is even more drastically circumscribed than it was at Brest.

the vision of a Brest-style peace in the East was not inherently illegitimate. What discredited it was the failure of Berlin to sustain a consistently liberal policy. The suspicion of bad faith hanging over Berlin had the effect both of making the Bolsheviks appear as victims and of handing the initiative back to the Western Powers.

Of the two statements it was Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points manifesto that would echo around the world. But far from challenging Lenin and Trotsky, as Cold War legend would have it, Wilson chose to conciliate them. In the process, by portraying Lenin and Trotsky as potential partners in a democratic peace and a unitary ‘Russian people’ as the victim of German aggression, Wilson helped to consolidate the black legend of Brest.

Certainly, Lenin in the first weeks of his new regime did not dare to say out loud that his policy might amount to accepting a separate peace on any terms the Germans would offer. Nor did the Central Powers demand this sacrifice. In acquiescing to an armistice, Germany agreed to negotiate on whatever version of the Petrograd peace formula the Bolsheviks could square with their conscience.

the negotiations at Brest were to be carried out with an unusual degree of publicity.7 To spread their message, the Bolsheviks were even permitted regular fraternization sessions with German troops. At Brest the atmosphere was a strange mixture of old-school aristocratic chivalry and revolutionary innovation.

The Bolshevik grip on power in November 1917 was truly precarious. Lenin and Trotsky’s partners in power, the Left Social Revolutionaries, were no friends of the Entente, but like all the other parties of the February revolution they rejected any idea of a separate peace with the Kaiser. Like the majority of the Bolshevik Party’s own activists, they clung to the idea that if acceptable terms could not be agreed, they would proclaim a ‘revolutionary war’, summoning the insurgent energies of both the Russian and German people for united resistance against imperialism.

Since the first major wave of strikes in April 1917, industrial unrest had boiled throughout the summer. The Reichstag majority that had passed the peace resolution remained in being.

Since August 1917 the ultra-nationalist Homeland Party (Vaterlandspartei) had been mobilizing the right wing of German politics to fight the war to a victorious finish; if this required an open military dictatorship, so much the better.9 The Vaterlandspartei, though it exhibited populist fascistoid traits, never in fact managed to break out of the pre-war nationalist milieu.

There could no longer be any doubt that the most vocal section of the German working class, perhaps a majority, were demanding a negotiated peace, an end to martial law, democratization in Prussia and an immediate improvement in food rations. Germany’s food situation in the coming winter was truly alarming.

With Russia suing for an armistice, the fabled granary of the Ukraine beckoned in the East. But to gain access to those desperately needed supplies, short of wholesale occupation, Germany and Austria needed a trade deal.

What the German home front needed was a prompt and profitable peace that was in tune with the Reichstag’s peace declaration of July 1917. The German right wing, however, were incensed even by the armistice terms. With the German Army victorious, how could Kühlmann agree to bind Germany to a peace formula proposed by Russian revolutionaries?

As the arch-conservative baron Kuno von Westarp put it in a Reichstag committee, what was at work, both at home and abroad, was the corrosive influence of ‘democracy’.

Conservatives.

Defying public appeals for a bold gesture of enlightened reform by the Kaiser himself, the Prussian House of Lords voted down the proposal for manhood suffrage.12 As one of Ludendorff’s closest collaborators, Colonel Max Bauer, commented approvingly, why should Germany lay down the lives of its best sons ‘only to drown under Jews and Proles’?

For men such as Matthias Erzberger, or Bethmann Hollweg’s close collaborator Kurt Riezler, democratization at home was the only possible basis on which Germany could pursue a great-power policy capable of matching that of Britain and the United States.14 The stalwart commitment of the vast majority of the Social Democratic Party had demonstrated the powerful force of German working-class patriotism. But if democracy would give the projection of German power a new energy and legitimacy, it would also impose its own self-limiting logic, restraining the tendency toward heedless territorial acquisition.

On the extreme right, pan-German ideologues might imagine a future in which Germans lorded it over a million-strong helot class. The radical leader of the pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, was even willing to contemplate mass clearances of native populations to create land in the East ‘free of people’. Such fantasies were encouraged in 1917 by the flight of a large part of the pre-war population.

The methods that Turkey had used to dispose of its Armenian population were no secret to the German political class. But most viewed the Turkish example with revulsion.

Gustav Stresemann, the nationalist liberal, called for Germany to consolidate a bloc of 150 million consumers, on the basis of which it might hope to face the power of American industry.21 At that point Russia had still been in the fight. Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917 and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means with which to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination.

Within ten days of seizing power on 15 November (2 November old style), Lenin and his trusted lieutenant Joseph Stalin had issued their Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia, which appeared to grant the right to self-determination up to and including secession.

While in economic and military terms the new Poland would be bound tightly and irrevocably to Germany, in the social and cultural sphere it would be given the freedom ‘to express itself nationally’.24 As Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had put it in 1916, ‘the times are no longer for annexation, but rather for the cuddling up [sic] of smaller state-entities to the great powers, to mutual benefit’.25 If only Germany were willing to embrace self-determination and domestic reform, Eduard David, a leading Social Democrat, explained to General Max Hoffmann at his headquarters in Brest, it could exceed even the wildest ambitions of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik.

Such a vision was self-serving of course. But the advocates of this alternative version of German hegemony should not be dismissed either as dupes or as forerunners of Nazi empire.27 Their opponents on the German right regarded them as a real threat. The bitterness of the nationalist vitriol poured on Philipp Scheidemann, the leader of the SPD, for his advocacy of a German version of a democratic peace was shocking even to hardened veterans of the Bismarckian era.

During the battles over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Erzberger twice risked prosecution in the military courts for his defence of Lithuanian and Ukrainian independence.

For most, full sovereignty was always a chimera. Even neutrality was an option only under exceptional circumstances. As Woodrow Wilson had discovered, even the greatest power could uphold it only through isolation.

What the more far-sighted strategists in Imperial Germany were advancing was a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states.

In light of twentieth-century experience the legitimacy of such a vision can hardly be denied in principle. Since 1945 it has formed an essential building block of the relative peace and prosperity established in Europe and East Asia.30 Furthermore, this vision of a new order in eastern Europe was tied to a programme of domestic reform that would not have left Imperial Germany unchanged. At Brest the Germans were arguing not only over a new order in eastern Europe. They were engaged in a struggle over Germany’s own political future.

Beginning on 22 December 1917 the first round of formal peace talks at Brest went eerily well.32 The agreement on the armistice principles of ‘self-determination, no annexations and no indemnities’ held. On Christmas Day the Central Powers and the Bolshevik negotiators issued a communiqué announcing their agreement on the basic principles of a peace of no annexations and a withdrawal of occupying forces, a formula to which they still hoped the Entente might adhere.

As was the intention of both sides, the success of the talks wrong-footed the Entente. If a peace could be made in the East on liberal terms, why was the Western Front still consuming thousands of men by the day?

Already in November, London and Washington had agreed on the need to make a new statement of war aims. But it soon became clear that neither the French nor the Italians would tolerate any such flexibility.

When London hosted the first Inter-Allied Conference attended by the United States at the end of November 1917, the risk of a humiliating dispute over war aims was thought so severe that the plenary sessions were restricted by Clemenceau’s forceful chairmanship to no more than eight minutes.

anyone close to the Brest negotiations could sense that there too a storm was waiting to break. As was always clear to the more sophisticated operators on the German side, the much-hailed Christmas Day declaration was not a selfless German gift to the Bolsheviks, but an explosive charge placed beneath the Russian Empire.

The Bolsheviks convinced themselves that by this agreement the Germans had miraculously conceded the status quo of 1914, prior to holding plebiscites in the contested regions. It was this same misinterpretation that fuelled the vicious attacks on Kühlmann from the German right. In fact, the German negotiators never had any intention of leaving it up to Lenin and Stalin to extend their idea of self-determination throughout the pre-war territory of the Russian Empire. As far as Kühlmann was concerned, following their liberation from the oppressive rule of the Tsar, the populations of Poland, Lithuania and Courland had made a de facto declaration of independence. They no longer belonged to Russia and did not fall under the terms of the Christmas Day agreement regarding troop withdrawal.

Under German protection these nationalities had exercised their right to opt out of the civil war that Lenin was openly advocating.35