The end of the Great War

‘It marked an end to a century of relative peace.’

Relative peace in Europe.

I’d even dispute the “relative peace in Europe” claim. You might not have had one big “world” war involving all the Great Powers at once (a la WWI or the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars), but between 1854 and 1870 almost all of them fought each other in one combination or another: Britain, France, & Turkey against Russia; France and Italy against Austria; Germany against Austria; Germany against France. Cumulatively, that all adds up to a respectable spate of violence marking the middle of the 19th century.

Excessively long threadjack deleted

“It marked an end to a century of relative peace”

That made me jump. This is the century where Europe ravaged the world.

“While that progress has stalled”

Has it really? It seems to me that on average (if this means anything), the world is a more progressive place than 20 years ago. But I am open to counter-arguments.

Deleted – nothing more on this thread from you, please Jack

“But European empires and their client networks already controlled most of the world by 1815, and had worked many of their worst ravages (eg the Atlantic slave trade, the conquest of South America) by then.”

Hardly. The United States (and Haiti) were independent. Much of Asia and all of Africa were still independent. More than the simple conquest of much of the world, Europeans were going to start genocidal violence. Congo, Putomayo, Namibia. And the wars, wars, wars. The mfecane. India 1857. The American Civil War. The jihads of west Africa.

The only thing you can say about violence is the 19th century is that it was ultimately dwarfed by that in the 20th century.

13: China was largely self-ravaging, Z. The minor wars and expeditions of the European powers along the coast, compared to the Taiping Rebellion.

I’m sure that will come as a surprise to the people of (for example) Iraq.

That was my reaction as well. I’d like to believe that JQ’s observation holds for the rest of the world (or even parts of it), but as far as the US is concerned it’s wildly off the mark.

The default state is constant war.

Post 1945 is relatively speaking a golden era.

Post 1989 is relatively speaking a platinum era.

Iraq is an exception that proves the change.

Iraq isn’t ruled by a brutal strong man looting the nation for Exxon.

I am not endorsing the actual result in anyway. I am merely pointing out that even in this instance of war the results are different from the previous general default results.

The Imperialism in Iraq is much different from the Imperialism in Gaul or the Congo or Vietnam.

Maybe these years are just a concidental outlier. But they really do seem to be relatively different.

We learned no lessons at all from WW1, because we have pretty much forgotten that it happened.

True enough, but it’s interesting that in many ways WWI established the template for what Americans think of as “war.” Specifically, war is something that happens, as the old song goes, “Over There.”

@23: Based on my understanding of the time period, it seems like Germany was vastly more aggressive than France or England. This is where the Fischer school of history comes from: Germany preferred fighting 3 opponents (France, England and Russia) to peace. That’s a pretty vile government and as distasteful as the French and British governments were at the time, I think you can make a pretty strong case that the US got involved on the right side. Versailles created a lot of problems, of course, and they were partially responsible for the lead up to WWII (there were other factors that contributed heavily as well), but I don’t think you can fault the US for getting involved on the ‘wrong’ side as a result. Even if there is a counter factual where the Central Powers force France to sue for peace and less human suffering through 1950 results.

I sometimes wonder how things would have turned out had Germany defeated France in 1916 and the war ended much sooner on the Western front.

Well, IIRC, one of the main reasons for Germany wanting to start a war before 1914 was colonial rivalry (in particular, with Britain) – they wanted a place in the sun. They wanted attractive territories that they could send settlers to, and they wanted natural resources to exploit, and they wanted naval strength sufficient to protect all that from interference by the Royal Navy. And then they lost that war, and twenty-five years later they start another war, for more or less the same objectives, this time with an much more overtly racial slant, and going after Lebensraum and resources in Europe rather than in Africa and Asia.

If they’d beaten France in 1916 – and, presumably, taken a few French colonies as loot – I’m not sure that they wouldn’t have had another crack at it a little later on. In fact, wouldn’t it have made it all the more likely? Two successful wars of territorial expansion (Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, and then whatever they got in 1917) would make a third one seem rather tempting; this time, presumably, against a weaker France again, and/or against the arch-rival, Britain.

1) It’s not controversial that 1815-1914 was a period of relative peace in Europe, “relative” being the key word and “in Europe” being an important qualification. (K. Polanyi in The Great Transformation exaggerated somewhat in calling the period “the hundred years peace”.)

2) Malaclypse, above, mentions the Munich analogy. See e.g. F. Logevall and K. Osgood, “The Ghost of Munich,” World Affairs, July-August 2010. (Specifically on Munich and Vietnam, one of the best discussions is Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War, 1992.)

@12:

Actually, 18th century warfare was a relatively tame and ritualized affair, compared to the ravages of the Thirty Years War or the bloodiness of U.S. Civil War battles.

@28: I don’t want to split hairs, but from a historical perspective it’s relatively easy to make the case that the Kaiser’s were the bad guys on the continent after all and isn’t that all it takes to justify the US getting involved? I think WWI is under studied by Americans for other reasons, mostly just because American high school history is terrible.

I’d agree that Africa might not have seen much difference under German rather than French or other colonial rule, but I think the German regime in the early 20th century (as opposed to under Bismarck) had an appetite for expansion that would not have easily been sated. I’m not sure whether an early end to WWI (which was already quite costly) would have scared them off further continental wars or not.

So in the 20s and 30s the german industrialists rebuilt the…Wehrmacht in the Rhineland with Churchill’s tacit approval

Beauregard, why do you imagine that Churchill controlled the British government in the 1920s?

I difer. As many people have remarked before, the pre-Great War world wasn’t exactly a peaceful one. And no, European empires did not control the greater part of the world until, I’d say, the Berlin Conference of 1885.

IMHO Germany rebuilding itself had more to do with the Allies’ greed and lack of strategical thinking. For instance, John Quiggin mentions the Sykes-Picot Agreement (which was publicly denounced by the Bolsheviks as they were denied, post-revolution, what the Allies had promised the Czar *). One of its consequences is the Greek-Turkish War (or Turkish War of Independence). We might say that the split among the Allies probably begins with this war (where mainly UK encouraged Greece to land grabs, using tools as shady as Basil Zaharoff, and then protested when France backed Atatürk). I’d like to argue that Ally disunion [over the enforcement of Versailles, which was diplomatically awful to begin with], not British approval, was behind Germany’s rearming.

* Fear of and reaction to the Russian Revolution being another major “distraction”.

Yes, but it is by no means clear that Imperial German colonialism was worse than Imperial British, Imperial French, or Imperial Belgian colonialism.

Cold comfort for the Herero.

“Neville Chamberlain and his faction were also involved and supportive of the Germans’ re-armament—and Churchill had shifted allegiances from liberal to conservative, and at least in early 30s said a few slightly flattering things about Hitler (and Blackshirts I believe). At any rate the conservative, pro-German forces in England—including Family Windsor itself—allowed the re-armament of Germany to occur and encouraged it.”

And the US encouraged German re-armament after 1950 why? And as a precaution towards what? And as a defence against whom?

I won’t call this story a “big lie”, but I can think it, and I expect to see this story repeated over and over until it becomes the accepted truth.

If you read the actually linked article, it makes it quite clear within the first paragraph that these were simply the last of reparations related bond payments and that Germany repeatedly defaulted on payment. Do you have an axe to grind here?

That being said, I don’t see how you could make a case that the original reparation payments were based on any particular assessment of damages. They were a negotiated amount resulting from the preferences of a number of different actors with varying motivations. They were constrained by what some of those actors regarded as Germany’s ability to pay. Others wanted a higher number- whether they were tied in their minds to reconstruction costs or as punishment I couldn’t say. Whether they were affordable or not… well Keynes certainly didn’t think they were. If central banks of the time knew how to run a country and monetary system on something besides a gold standard that might have made things easier, though.

‘Cold comfort for the Herero.’

Yeah bet they were kicking themselves they hadn’t been born in Kenya.

To defend our host, it certainly seems very fair to describe the century from 1815 to 1914 as one of “relative” peace, compared to what followed, notwithstanding various colonialist ventures and the Tai-Ping Rebellion. It’s not like the years from 1914 to 1945 were a good time to be a third world native, or Chinese either. And they were also a bad time to be an educated and cultivated European, which the preceding century hadn’t been.

Also, the commentators slight the point about how, in 1914, an educated person could reasonably believe in a democratic socialist future. Depending on one’s definition of “socialism,” that’s between hard and impossible to do now. Which is fine with me, but I would think it would move some people.

“To defend our host, it certainly seems very fair to describe the century from 1815 to 1914 as one of “relative” peace, compared to what followed, notwithstanding various colonialist ventures and the Tai-Ping Rebellion. ”

Yes, exactly. If you ignore tens of millions dead from famine and war, the 19th Century was indeed relatively peaceful. For that matter, so was the 20th.

John Livesay @40, thank you for pointing that out. Everybody seems to get this point wrong.

Joh Livesay @43, I’m sorry, but that’s idiotic. The Germans lost their colonial empire — mostly to the British — in WWI. By the time the colonies in question became independent, most links to Germany had been (quite deliberately) dissolved. The British in Tanganyika / Tanzania, for instance, shut down the large German investments, prohibited further immigration from Germany, replaced German with English as the official language, and shut down all school instruction in German. By independence, only a handful of old people still spoke German or remembered the German times.

Hektor @53, the only former colony that Germany has particularly close relations with is Namibia. That’s because it’s the only former German colony that (1) still has the descendants of German settlers living there in significant numbers, and (2) still sees the broad use of German as a second language.

(Trivia question: what former territorial possession of Imperial Germany is now part of the United States?)

Doug M.

Doug M: Trivia question: what former territorial possession of Imperial Germany is now part of the United States?

Mariana Islands?

Martin W: One of the secondary arguments made in Hitler’s Empire is that much of the horror visited by the Nazis on Europe can be seen as colonialism coming home…

Didn’t Hannah Arendt argue this in Origins of Totalitarianism sixty years ago?

Bloody Sunday and Shoot-to-Kill notwithstanding.

Also, since we are talking about wars, what about the Falklands war back in the 80s? Good thing they didn’t try to hold on to Hong Kong.

Andrew @36:
Was it either surprising or a fortunate accident, as you imply, that the collapse of the USSR/eastern bloc in 1989-91 was not accompanied by a great-power war? IMO, no. One could argue, on the contrary, that the real surprise would have been if the collapse of the USSR had been accompanied by a major war, given the growing discredit into which the whole idea of great-power war had fallen since the end of WW2 (and the fact that the US and USSR had managed to avoid a direct armed conflict during the Cold War, though sometimes just barely). The collapse of the USSR was itself surprising, of course, in the sense that relatively few people, including professional observers and ‘experts,’ saw it coming (long-cycle and other theories notwithstanding), but the fact that that collapse occurred relatively peacefully (i.e., without a major great-power war) was not surprising.

Though the historians on this forum will surely point to its many inadequacies, my thinking about WWI was profoundly changed by reading Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (“Germany’s Aims in the First World War” in translation). The war was horrific and represented more or less the suicide of what contemporaries might have called western European civilization, Germany’s aims and the political processes that produced those aims are frightening to contemplate.

Even if one strongly disagrees with his conclusions, I do not feel that it is possible to make an informed evaluation of the progress of the war, the stakes of the combatant governments, or its outcomes without reading this text (and at least some of the scholarship it generated).

mpowell @ 44

The reparations determination were subject to an intensely political process , but livesay is correct to point out that the fundamental reason for them was to pay for the repair of France and Belgium. Payments in kind of coal, telephone poles etc, attest to this.

Just as Fischer is the go-to man if you want to know more about the criminal intent of the German regime before the war, Sally Marks is the person to read to about Germany’s utter bad faith concerning the reparations.

The reparations determination were subject to an intensely political process , but livesay is correct to point out that the fundamental reason for them was to pay for the repair of France and Belgium. Payments in kind of coal, telephone poles etc, attest to this.

What about the reparation payments to the British? Maybe I should read Sally Marks though- sounds interesting.

Technology is employed to mitigate the general misery of human life. The population subsequently rises beyond its sustainable limits. Technology is then employed to mitigate the general misery of a surplus population of the unemployed, divided along competing utopian camps. The population subsequently drops below its sustainable limits. Technology is then employed to mitigate the general misery of a surplus population of survivors who combine their pragmatic efforts to recover from the formerly utopian conflict of the unemployed. The population subsequently rises beyond its sustainable limits.

And so it goes…

notsneaky @62, you’re right — the figure for 1800 is more like 3-5 million in North America. My bad.

James Kroeger @64, Germany give up Alsace-Lorraine? After they’d already won the war in the East? I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous — it simply could never have happened.

BTW, Angola was Portuguese, not German.

JJ @67, a cite for this actually happening would be useful.

But to bring it back — WWI as the central catastrophe of the last 200 years is really a very British thing. In France, WWI has to compete with the defeat and occupation; in Germany and points further east, it’s WWII that occupies the central place in historical memory.

That’s understandable. But “WWI ended a golden age of peace and prosperity and brought on the Century of the Toad” — that’s just really Anglocentric. The 19th century was just not that great for the rest of the world, and the 20th — the century of vaccination, mass literacy, civil rights and the end of imperialism — was not a universal nightmare.

Doug M.

One has to remember that the imperial German government was heavily un- or even anti-democratic. The Social Democrats hat won a plurality in the 1912, after they had lost seats in the Hottentottenwahlen of 1907, and it was expected that their growth would continue in the election scheduled for 1917. So “reigning them in” by appealing to their patriotism was a attractive idea for the ruling clique and it deplorably worked.

I have read (but don’t remember whether as a direct quote or a historian’s speculation) that the foolishness of a war against three Great Powers was a political necessarity: In order to “sell the war” to the industiralists and colonialists, they had to fight the commerical rival Great Britain, the militarists and Junkers would support a war against “Erbfeind” France, while the socialists and progressives could be won for fighting the autocratic regime of the Tsar.

Concerning the reparations: I really should read Marks, but weren’t they also imposed to enable France and the UK to pay off the mostly American loans they had needed from 1914 on?

One of my favourite contrafactuals about WWI is the non-invention of the Haber-Bosch process, so Germany runs out of ammunition in late 1914 or early 1915. I can see the GGS going into the war even with very limited reserves of Chile Saltpeter, since they believed the war would be a short affair.

As to the rest: I don’t really see where the WWI/WWII distinction comes in; I suspect you may be confusing me with another poster. I’m taking issue with your statement that WWI ended — in your words — ” a century of relative peace and to what seemed (at least to the people with whom I’m most in sympathy) like steady progress towards some form of internationalist democratic socialism.” That’s certainly true for dear old Blighty, some parts of the Continent, and maybe — if you cross your eyes — the United States. But the further you get from Edwardian England, the more absurd that statement becomes.

(You don’t even have to get that far. Was 1815-1914 a century of peace and steady progress toward international democratic socialism in Ireland? Really?)

If you lived in South or Central America, the 19th century was mostly a string of military dictatorships punctuated by coups — not much progress towards democratic socialism there. If you were Chinese, it was a century of political collapse into catastrophic civil war, warlordism, and foreign invasion — not good times there either. If you were Japanese, you got sudden fast modernization, but under a limited democracy that was authoritarian and aggressively imperialist. If you were Native North American, an Australian aborigine, or an inhabitant of the Belgian Congo, you were in the path of a major genocide. And if you were a native of India, Indochina, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia or Indonesia, you would spend the century under distinctly illiberal imperial rule with very little progress towards democratic socialism to be seen.

In other words, for rather more than half the human race the 19th century saw little or no “progress toward international democratic socialism”, and for a large minority of humanity it was in no sense a century of “relative peace”.

I’d have no problem with your statement if it were appropriately qualified. But it isn’t. So it gives the strong impression of promoting a discourse where the historical experiences of Englishmen are privileged over those of (for instance) Australian Aborigines, Indonesians, Chinese or Native Americans. The parenthetical about “at least to the people with whom I’m most in sympathy” doesn’t help in this regard.

Doug M.

J. Raddatz @72:
I can see the GGS going into the war even with very limited reserves of Chile Saltpeter, since they believed the war would be a short affair.

As I’ve had occasion to mention on CT before (though not on this thread and evidently not to very much effect), the once widely accepted view that the German General Staff thought WW1 would be short is, in light of recent historiography, now debatable. (See eg K. Lieber, “The New History of WW1 and what it means for IR theory,” Int’l Security, 2007).

If the memory of World War I, and its causes, have been lost, they have been lost in an eclipse imposed by the far larger, brighter, nearer disc of World War II. The memory of the Great War shaped the Second World War and its aftermath, decisively, but we, who have lived most or all of our lives in the World created after 1945, can only struggle to understand what came before the singularity of 1945.

The First World War was the culmination of the political progress of revolution, whereby feudal institutions were destroyed and displaced by modern ones. It was a process that began with the Dutch Revolt and continued with the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, and, of course the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Arguably, the American Revolution and the American Civil War also belonged to this process. The War was a failure of the politics of Imperial international relations, driven by reactionary, landed, hereditary elites. And, it was a failure of states, organized on imperial and hereditary, landlord principles.

The bloody, indecisive conduct of the war was a product, certainly, of technology, and the hubris of early technocrats in the military, but also a product of military strategy and tactics chosen by reactionary and class-bound political elites and military leadership cadre. The international conflict between Empires quickly became a revolutionary conflict between the remnants of feudalism and the forces of modernity.

That the War ended the careers of four great Empires — the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires — and eliminated the claims to sovereign authority of their respective monarchies and aristocracies marks out its historical significance. It was a business continued from the past, and still not finished, at the end. The war marked a nearly revolutionary change in the British class system and initiated great changes in Republican France, as well, which, unfortunately, would not reform the French military sufficiently.

LFC @ 60: there were effectively two collapses: the effective breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, with the overthrow of Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, then the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. That either collapse occurred without significant bloodshed is (to me) remarkable: the breakup of former Yugoslavia led to a material amount of fighting over the course of nearly a decade.

Russia chose not to fight the independence of its satellite buffer to the West – that in itself is fairly remarkable. Then it acquiesced in the loss of territory which it had gained control over during the previous 400 years or so – not just the Central Asian republics acquired in the 19th century, or the Baltic states in the 20th, but Ukraine and Byelorussia. You suggest that this peaceful transfer of power wasn’t surprising: perhaps your threshold for surprise is significantly higher than mine.

Maybe the US would shrug if Hawaii, Alaska, California and much of the territory transmitted in the Louisiana Purchase were to declare independence – but I doubt it.

“a century of relative peace [and] steady progress towards some form of internationalist democratic socialism” seems to miss key features of the course of Europe in the 19th century rather badly. In the initial aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, political reform in Europe, of a liberal, but not a socialist character, seemed to have the upper hand, and political progress and institutional reorganization came in waves, with relatively mild violence. Circa 1822, independent nation-states emerged in Latin America, and the Greeks began the process of freeing themselves from Turkish domination. Circa 1832, the British managed the Great Reform Bill, and the French finally disposed of the Bourbons, in favor of the Citizen King.

But, by the time of the revolutionary pulse, circa 1848, the forces of reaction were rising in power. The starving Irish just barely discredited the landed aristocracy enough to allow repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain. The socialist vision, rivaling the liberal reform movement, found a much more effective Reaction, in opposition to its aims, in Germany and the Hapsburg possessions. By 1867-70, the irony of the conservative Disraeli expanding the franchise, or the House of Savoy uniting Italy, paled by comparison to thoroughly monarchist France establishing a Republic, because the French could not agree on which monarch. Liberal failure to establish parliamentary supremacy in Germany, or even a parliament in Russia, were significant failures, which contributed decisively to nurturing the War. The socialists, meanwhile, were thoroughly frustrated in the late 19th century, which frustration and alienation from power contributed to their highly theoretical radicalism.

The ability of Reaction to frustrate liberal as well as socialist reforms was the cork in the bottle that allowed pressure to build. The liberal alternative to Empire — the self-governing nation-state — had some serious drawbacks, connected to the inevitable legacy of Empire, which liberals tended to deny or idealize. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, spoke glowingly of Jefferson Davis and the aspirations to national self-determination of the Confederacy, and the Liberal Party foundered repeatedly on the problem of Irish Home Rule. The terrible ethnic mish-mash, mixed with feudal anachronism, which Turkish and Austrian Empire had made of the unfortunate Balkans, could not be papered over by such weirdnesses as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, anymore than Serbia or Corsica could be rescued from their degenerate fates.

Far from steady progress, it was the failures of liberal reform and the frustration of socialist reform, leaving reactionary Empires and hereditary elites in power, which drove the creation of new colonial Empires and the Great Game of Great Power rivalry, which led to War.

@ novakant

I thought that bit was weird too. It is cited in a book by Kagan? that I have not read. There is no mention of Melchior in the Myths article I’ve noted.

“Japan would presumably have conquered northern China in the 1930s”

Since Japanese imperialism in China dated to the 1890s, this is a pretty good bet. By 1914, Japan had already taken Korea, Taiwan, Port Arthur and the Pescadores. And the Man-Mon concept — the idea that Japan could only be secure by conquering Manchuria and turning Inner Mongolia into a buffer puppet state — was already well developed.

“and the fundamental aspects of chinese society leading to the civil war would have been present.”

Viz., a weak, unpopular central government dominated by fiercely conservative local landowners and barely held together by a massively corrupt and sclerotic bureaucracy.

That was true under the Manchus, and even more true under the Republic. Things got dramatically /worse/ in China after the 1910 revolution; the new Republic was every bit as weak and incompetent as the Manchus, but had less legitimacy. And its feeble attempts at reform were utter anathema to the landowners, who quickly turned to local warlords instead.

By 1914 central authority had broken down completely over most of the country. China had to go through a generation of Hobbesian anarchy before Chiang arose to establish some semblance of a central state. The outbreak of WWI in Europe affected this barely at all; if anything, it made things a bit better, by raising export prices while bringing some relief from European imperialism for a while.

“I would bet that the promise of land-reform was a much larger factor in the communist party victory than any actual soviet support”

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which Chinese political life, from the 1840s to the 1930s, was dominated by large local landowners. It’s also difficult to overstate how stupid, petty and reactionary these guys were. China was a nation of immiserated landless peasants, and the folks actually running the country liked that just fine. (It’s the main reason the late Manchu reforms failed: they were top-down, and got no support from the squirearchy that actually made things happen.)

Again, the idea that things were getting better in China in the years before WWI is just daft. Aside from a very thin gloss of modernization, the country was far worse off in 1914 than in 1815 by any conceivable metric. And the idea that Sun and the Republic were going to bring democratic socialism… I mean, one doesn’t know what to say.

“To start with a specific point: Sun Yat Sen career was not impaired by WWI, quite the contrary.”

And modern Indian historians do not view the World Wars as catastrophes. Quite the opposite!

History is complicated.

Doug M.

And modern Indian historians do not view the World Wars as catastrophes. Quite the opposite!

I would guess this is largely because, thanks to the Indian Army (and despite the best efforts of Indian heroes like Subhas Chandra Bose), the Japanese never got very far into India. Nations which actually played host to the IJA generally look back on the experience as not very nice. Vietnam, for example. China. The Philippines. Korea. If the Japanese had made it into Bengal, say, I suspect that modern Indian historians would regard WW2 as a catastrophe.

Andrew @80: there were effectively two collapses: the effective breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, with the overthrow of Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, then the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. That either collapse occurred without significant bloodshed is (to me) remarkable

I have no problem agreeing that the absence of “significant bloodshed” was remarkable. There is a difference, however, between “significant bloodshed” and interstate war involving major powers, and my point is that the absence of the latter was not so remarkable.

More exceptions to the “century of [relative] peace” trope which was (and probably still) such a staple of potted European History texts: (concentrating even just on, say “Napoleonic-era” Europe:

Greek War of Independence 1821-30
Civil conflicts in Spain throughout much of the 19th Century
Prusso-Danish War of 1864
Civil conflicts in Italy 1860-70
Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78
Balkan Wars of 1909-13

This leaves out the war carried out by an Austro-Russian alliance to crush Hungarian independence circa 1849. Of course, the Magyars always get short shrift.

What’s not to like about Bose? Patriotic nationalist, fierce anti-imperialist, anti-racist, socialist to the bone.

What’s not to like is that he tried to help the Japanese Empire conquer his home country (which they would presumably have done with their customary energy and panache), and also recruited Indian troops for the Wehrmacht, whom they used to help keep a hold on occupied France. For an anti-imperialist, anti-racist socialist, those are some pretty odd things to do. It is unquestionably a good thing for the world that Bose was not more successful in his efforts – that he only raised one rather ineffectual brigade for the Wehrmacht and a couple of weak division groups for the INA, rather than anything approaching the size and expertise of the Indian Army, which was and remains the largest volunteer army in history.

He was getting help from one empire to free his people from another

I still hope Doug M is tongue-in-cheek here, but the Japanese were certainly not going to play the rich-uncle role that the French played in the American Revolution, and Bose would be damned as a Quisling if Japan had indeed marched into Delhi.

It took a light touch for Britain to rule India as long as it did, and for the country that invented the tea ceremony, Japan was not so adept at the light touch.

Also, as far as we can tell, the Japanese were serious about Indian independence. They didn’t view India as part of their sphere of influence, and weren’t interested in joining it to the Empire. Their goal seems to have been independent India that was neutral, friendly and weak—basically a buffer state.

That was more or less the German plan for Britain. That still doesn’t make me feel very well disposed towards Oswald Mosely. And Mosely at least didn’t actually command a brigade in the SS.

He was indeed rather fiercely anti-racist, and there were a number of uncomfortable episodes where he upbraided his German friends for their racist attitudes.

He “upbraided” them? Ooh. I bet that made them feel all guilty and self conscious over the coffee and cakes. And then he went back to recruiting an army for them.

Ajay, by that standard, people who are actually for democracy and freedom don’t ship vast tonnages of weapons and materials to Stalin. But they did, when necessity demanded it.

“And you don’t think the rise of Fascism and Stalinism in Europe after the War had anything to do with that development?”

Some. But most of it was endogenous. Japan stayed more-or-less quiescent through the prosperous 1920s, after all. The phase change came in 1930-31, as a direct result of the Depression.

Japan embarked on naked aggression in China in 1931. At that time, Fascism had only come to power in a single country, and Mussolini hadn’t exactly set the world on fire. As for Stalinism, Stalin had been sole leader of the USSR for only a couple of years. (Exact date depending on when you start the clock; I’d put it at the fall of Bukharin, late 1929.) So neither of these were exactly compelling models.

Five or six years later, sure — Five-Year plans, Anschluss, Ethiopia, the spread of copycat fascist movements around the world. At that point the Japanese were indeed taking copious notes and being consciously influenced.

But in 1931? No, not really. As noted upthread, Japanese aggression against China dated back to the 1890s (and they’d been thinking about it for a decade or two before that). So it’s not like they needed Mussolini or Stalin to give them ideas.

Doug M.

In terms of counterfactuals towards China, you really don’t need to posit a possible government worse than the Communists, as the pre-revolution easily KMT represents such a possibility. As some historian whose name I am too lazy to look up said, “the KMT was fascist in every respect except efficiency.” Whatever havoc the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution has wreaked on China, it’s not terribly difficult to imagine that 60 years of government by a reactionary, corrupt and autocratic state would probably have been worse on the whole than Communist leadership has been.

Also, arguing that the Communists only succeeded due to help from Stalin is similar to arguing that the KMT was only as successful as it was due to help from Hitler or the US: both sides received weaponry and expertise from foreign powers, but ultimately the Communists succeeded by capitalizing on support from the countryside and from the failure of the KMT–that is, from internal domestic factors rather than outside support.

#99-100-101

Almost never mentioned in this discussion about how awful the Axis powers were is the case of Finland. Indeed, Haaretz recently had an interesting article about Jews who fought for Finland (and, therefore, implicitly, the Axis). I agree with Doug M. Despite the fact that, in the final analysis, we might decide that Bose was wrong, he deserves more than just being consigned to history ‘Cos teh Nazis was bad, mmm’kay?’ Life’s a bit more complex than that.

Amusement.

Doug M.

ajay, you know about “Operation Paperclip” and all that, right? The point being that associating with unsavory characters to further your strategic goals seems to be rather common in international politics.

(Er, I see that actually some people who aren’t obviously mad, such as Sally Marks and Donald Kagan from whose writings those comments about Keynes are taken, are skeptical about the usual view that reparations destabilized Germany. I don’t know whether they’re right, but I’m not really qualified to declare that they aren’t.)

It’s interesting that no one has brought up Indonesia. Japanese colonial rule did in fact ensure the independence of Indonesia. It was brutal and unpopular, but it also ended up politicizing Indonesians and made their independence much quicker and easier. The Japanese occupation authorities deliberately cultivated Indonesian nationalism, and that lead to the declaration of independence a couple of days after the Japanese surrendered.

Bose and the INA were probably expecting something even better by cooperating with the Japanese. Considering that the British let 3 million people starve to death in Bengal in 1943, no one ends up looking very good.

I’m sorry, but Horthy was not a fascist. He was a conservative Catholic aristocrat. After the early 1930s, he had to deal with local fascist movements — which he did by a combination of co-opting (Gombos) and purging (Szalasi). But he himself was about as fascist as Franz Josef.

To bring this back to the main point, no, Japanese aggression against China in the early 1930s had little to do with fascism, nor with Leninism-Stalinism either. It was a logical continuation of trends that, at that point, dated back half a century. The proximate causes were the Great Depression and the rise of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists. (The Japanese right saw the Nationalists as a serious menace, even though the actual threat level was modest — a rough modern comparison might be to the Islamic Republic of Iran.)

Another contributing factor was the tendency of radical nationalist groups to assassinate liberal Prime Ministers — between 1931 and 1934, they got four out of five of them — and the tendency of the very conservative police, security forces and judiciary to more or less passively let this happen. The cumulative effect of multiple assassinations was, unsurprisingly, to mute and demoralize liberalism within Japan.

But this had exactly nothing to do with WWI or fascism. Ideologically motivated assassinations had been a problem in Japan since the early Meiji period. Google Okubo Toshimichi — he was killed in 1878, and there were half a dozen more between then and the 1920s.

There is some existing scholarship on this, you know.

Doug M.

John, Fair enough, though it’s a disputable counterfactual to claim that a Communist revolution would have occurred nowhere else in the world if it didn’t occur in Russia first.

I guess I was more taking umbrage with the claim that China would have done better in the second half of the twentieth century without Communism than with it. I think that requires a far too rosy view of other political movements in mid-century China and the general conditions of extreme poverty, corruption and chaos that were present at the time.

In terms of counterfactuals towards China, you really don’t need to posit a possible government worse than the Communists, as the pre-revolution easily KMT represents such a possibility. As some historian whose name I am too lazy to look up said, “the KMT was fascist in every respect except efficiency.”

Is Taiwan’s history as nasty as China’s through that period?

There was already a revolution in Russia in 1905, you know. Bolsheviks were a part of it, and there were already Soviets. Without any war whatsoever.

And it failed, you know.

Captain Obvious, but in 1905 neither Russia (socially) nor the Party (in organisative terms) was ready for Revolution. Need the war as a catalyst, etc.

Also, Henri, I think you are forgetting the Russo Japanese War. It did influence the 1905 revolution, and Parvus draw inspiration from it to co-develop the theory of permanent revolution with Trotsky.

I don’t think you can make that case convincingly. The Herero genocide and the Mau-Mau concentration camps killed about the same numbers of people. (I notice that no one has brought up the Tasmanian genocide as a British colonial atrocity, for example.)

I don’t see how I can’t, especially if I restrict, as I did, to colonial behaviour in Africa.

If roughly the same number of people were killed in the Herero genocides as in the Mau Mau stuff — and the execution, in at least two senses, of the Emergency wasn’t as bad as the genocides — then British behaviour in Kenya wasn’t as bad as German in Namibia. I’m taking the bit in the middle to follow from the fact that what happened in Namibia was pretty clearly genocide, while events in Kenya simply don’t look that way — the lack of good evidence for exterminatory intent looks like the the key thing — even though they were very horrible in their own way.

Hektor,

“Namibia was worse than Kenya, and German colonial expansion, at least in Africa, was almost always clearly worse than British.

The second part of the sentence doesn’t follow from the first. Suppose we grant that Namibia was worse than Kenya. It still doesn’t mean that the German colonies were always more brutally administered than the British colonies. Contemporaries, for example, claimed that overall levels of education in German East Africa were much higher than in the surrounding colonies.

Sorry. I took you to be saying two things: that the Namibian genocide and British suppression of Mau Mau were on a par, and (therefore) that it couldn’t be true that German colonial expansion in Africa was worse than the British version.

The first clearly isn’t true: even if the same number were killed in both the Emergency and the Herero genocides, it doesn’t follow that they were equally bad; presumably genocide is worse than things which fall short of genocide.

The second seems obvious to me. Germany had three (or is it two) real colonies in Africa: German South West Africa and German East Africa (as they were). In one, the German empire managed to carry out (prolly) the first properly mechanised genocide in history; in the other, it managed to wipe out about a third of the population during the conquest phase. The British Empire, while really pretty horrible, fell short of these unusually low standards.

“If the war had ended quickly in say 1914 or 1915 the British would have faced the coming years from a much stronger military and financial position. Would they have stood by and allowed the Japanese to expand unchecked in China? ”

Well, they did nothing to check Japanese expansion in 1895, 1905, 1910, or 1915. Japan’s first attempt to seize Shandong in the 1890s was checked by the Triple Intervention — but that was France, Germany and Russia; Britain had nothing to do with it.

Also, note that for much of this period Japan was formally a British ally.

Doug M.

even if the same number were killed in both the Emergency and the Herero genocides, it doesn’t follow that they were equally bad; presumably genocide is worse than things which fall short of genocide.

There is no water-tight, uncontroversial definition of genocide and we should stop pretending that there is. The vagueness comes with the territory, it will always be a gray area. Suffice it to say that if the same amount of people belonging to an ethnic group are killed, saying “oops, sorry, we didn’t really mean it” instead of “we wanted to kill these guys” doesn’t really make much of a difference.

AntiAlias, The Russo-Japanese war was widely believed at the time and later to have created the coditions for the 1905 revolution in Russia, so it’s not necessarily that unlikely.

Trotsky (and other revolutionaries) looked to a German revolution because a. there was a massive Socialist movement in Germany and had been since Marx was a lad, b. because it was an explicit part of Lenin’s strategy in seizing power that a German revolutio would fall out of the war and that German industry and Russian agriculture would complement one another in creating a base for revolutionary expansion – Lenin never supposed that socialism in Russia could survive on its own, and c. because Germany looked like the best bet for spreading revolution in the developed world.

The Bolsheviks were clear in 1904/5 that Japan was a industrialising, capitalist state and they would have been delighted to see a revolution there (lack of a mass party made it unlikely). But they would have been perplexed as to what it might lead to.