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

by Adam Tooze

To Foreign Secretary Kühlmann the Brest-Litovsk negotiations thus seemed to offer an opportunity to found a new order in the East not merely on Germany’s undoubted military dominance, but on the emphatic embrace of a new principle of legitimacy. Germany would secure power on a continental scale not through annexation, but through the formation of an economic and military bloc of smaller eastern European states under German protection. The autonomous Polish entity carved by Germany and Austria out of Russian territory in the autumn of 1916 was a start. 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’.