The Deluge Quotes

“Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany. ‘Out of Wilson’s and Kerensky’s Peace programme’, Germany could surely have rescued a peace”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“Economics was the pre-eminent medium of American power, military force was a by-product.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“This scenario of capitalism in its final stage consuming itself in an orgy of imperialist destruction is one of the hallmarks of Lenin’s political thinking.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty.

Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion.

But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann.

'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“It was only in 1893 that Britain had seen fit to upgrade its legation in the American capital to the status of a full embassy. Now, less than a generation later, European history seemed to hang on the posture that Washington would adopt towards the war.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“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.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“In light of fierce contemporary struggles over the ethnic make-up of America, anxieties about foreign subversion and mounting unemployment, it was no surprise that already in the autumn of 1920 Congress was actively discussing a ‘genuine 100 percent American immigration law’.50 Within weeks of his inauguration Harding approved a law that cut immigration from 805,228 in 1920 to 309,556 in 1921–2. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia was reduced to a trickle. In 1924 the cap was further lowered to 150,000 entrants per year. For centuries the New World had stood open to adventurous settlers. The damming up of transatlantic immigration marked the most decisive break between the liberal modernity of the nineteenth century and the increasing centrality of nation-state regulation in the twentieth century.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“Despite the disaster unleashed by Bismarck’s creation of 1871, an integral and sovereign German nation state was taken for granted as a basic element in the new order. For Bainville this assumption was the hallmark of sentimental nineteenth-century liberalism.5 The bizarre mixture of cruelty and kindness that characterized the peace was the direct result of Clemenceau’s effort to reconcile the security needs of France with his romantic attachment to the principle of nationality. Whatever we may think of Bainville’s politics, the force of his point can hardly be denied. Across the sweep of modern history since the emergence of the modern nation state system in Europe in the seventeenth century, the assumption of German national sovereignty marks the treaty of 1919 as unique. Most, if not all, of the problems peculiar to the Versailles Treaty system arose from it.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931