Sympathy and the sources of Keynes’s critique of the peace

The first phrase may need a footnote in a year’s time, or a month’s.

Whee, I guess that people have to seriously address every antiquated anti-gay slur that some right-wing creep makes. This was better than the last one, anyways.

But sure, I’ll try to derail the thread before they turn up to take the “Keynes did too betray his country because he was gay and besotted with lust” side. Let’s talk about hot German guys! Specifically The Heart of Thomas.

Noah Berlatsky:

“Specifically, I’d argue that a big part of the appeal of setting the comic at a boys’ school is that it allows male, European characters to be objectified, just as Asian women often are in Western fiction. In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.

The genre of boys’ love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire. It is, then, perhaps, no accident that the villain of The Heart of Thomas—a boy named Siegfried—is distinguished primarily by his interest in the Renaissance and by his odd, octagonal glasses. Siegfried’s fetishization of old Europe parallels Hagio’s fetishization of contemporary Europe; his dangerous gaze parallels Hagio’s dangerous gaze. And Siegfried’s abuse of Juli, the protagonist, is congruent with Hagio’s own stylized sexualization of her characters. His desire is her desire—and also, perhaps, the desire of her readers. Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.”

So, Keynes / Melchior slash fanfic? Hotter with or without success of the “tempted to betray his country” scene? Discuss.

Less-sexy derailments:

1. I’ve heard it said that _Economic Consequences_ had an impact on the League of Nations debate in the USA, mainly because it made Wilson look bad. Is this true?

2. How did the debate over reparations play out in Britain between 1919 and 1944? Keynes remained interested in the issue; was there a point at which opinion turned in favor of his critique?

3. Also apropos of nothing in particular, _Economic Consequences_ seems to me wholly Burkean in argument, warning against large-scale social experiment. From its opening paragraph:

“Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.”

http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Keynes/kynsCP1.html

I have no idea whether it’s the consensus view or not, but there is clearly a substantial body of contemporary historians whose views on the Great War are of the same value (and, I suspect, similar motivation) as those of the Dunning school regarding the US Civil War and Reconstruction, which represented the scholarly consensus for 100 or so years afterwards.

I’m unconvinced by the claim that any particular respect needs to be paid to expert knowledge here. The central facts about the War and the Peace were already known when Keynes wrote (except that Keynes’grim assessment had not yet been validated by events).

Those who want to justify the conduct of the victors are simply taking sides with Keynes’ “enlightened contemporaries”, Lloyd George and Clemenceau.

It’s unthinkable that senior figures in the British establishment might have had some sympathies for Germany during the Great War period ….

Keynes’ essay on Melchior is really lovely. I remember when I first read it, I thought, if this guy had not become an economist he could have made a great modernist novelist.

Josh Mason at 12: Wasn’t Alasdair MacIntyre’s big complaint against Keynes, essentially, that he was a great modernist novelist?

Josh: After Virtue. Haven’t read it since grad school — and as with so many of my books it’s in storage — but that’s my memory of his critique. It’s a brilliant book, and it takes its bearings (negatively) from G.E. Moore’s ethics. Moore was a huge influence on the entire Bloomsbury crowd, whom MacIntyre loathes, and Keynes plays a fairly big role there. But he sees Keynes as symptomatic of a modernist ethic in morals (inherited from Moore), which finds expression in literature, philosophy, and economics. Also I remember reading (I think) in one of the biographies of Virginia Woolf or Lytton Strachey (I used to be obsessed with those guys) that one of them did think Keynes was a great portraitist/novelist and that part of his success as an economist had to do with that sensibility and those skills.

@Eric Having been repeatedly bruised in arguments about this stuff, I don’t think “too clever by half” is the right diagnosis in many cases. Versailles revisionism, like revisionism about the Great War in general, is driven at least as much by simple jingoism. (Worth remembering, given the inevitable protestations, that the original jingoes “didn’t want to fight”).

Corey and JW-
MacIntrye makes essentially the same argument in both his _A Short History of Ethics_ (around p. 256) and in the start of _After Virtue_ (14-17). The idea is, very briefly, that Keynes and the other Bloomsbury types followed G.E. Moore in thinking that “good” was an undefinable, non-natural property available to intuition, and that certain things such as pleasant states of mind, friendship, the enjoyment of art, etc. could be intuitively known to be good (or to have this undefinable non-natural property). But, MacIntrye thinks, it’s clear that all that they did was give pride of place to their own (rather narrow and idiosyncratic) preferences, not “intuit” anything at all, and that mere rhetorical skill and force of personality is what passed for argument among them. MacIntrye clearly holds them in low regard, but his criticism of Moore’s method (while a bit unfair) isn’t without its strengths. It’s pretty unclear to me, however, how this would be a good argument against Keynes’ work in economics or at least most of his policy work, and as far as I can tell, MacIntrye doesn’t argue against that, at least not in these books.

That might be right, Corey- I haven’t read the whole book carefully for a long time either- but I think this is the only extended discussion of Keynes as such, and there doesn’t seem to be a careful discussion economics at all, though he does complain quite a bit about “experts” and the “managerial attitude” in government, and the attendant bureaucracy. It’s all a piece with the “It’s all been down hill since 1300” shtick of the book, I’d think.

Like many in Britain, Keynes’ sympathy extended only to his fellow Teutons. He didn’t give a damn about those who suffered for years under German occupation.

@ 8 The facts about the War and the Peace were most certainly not clear to everyone during the 1920s. The fact that John Quiggin says as much betrays his deep ignorance of history. Until very recently, for example, historians dismissed stories of German mass atrocities in Belgium as wartime propaganda. We now know that those stories were true and that they had been blotted from public memory by a concerted German propaganda campaign during the 1920s. See John N. Horne & Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History Of Denial (Yale University Press, 2001). The same pattern is visible across the whole spectrum of historical research about the First World War. Until the 1960s, there was no real effort to untangle the myths from the truth about the reparations. The few serious works on the subject, like Étienne Mantoux’s posthumous The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, were completely ignored. In sum, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a dramatic shift in the way Anglophone historians interpreted the origins and settlement of the First World War.

Quiggin would like us to ignore this shift and the research accumulated over the past half-century because it does not accord with his preconceptions. It’s not that he has conducted his own research. Nope. He is guided entirely by faith. If there is a “Dunning School” in First World War historiography, he embodies it perfectly. It is a school based on ignorance and faith. His only recourse is ad hominem. Only a jingoist would dare suggest that Keynes was wrong about the Treaty, he tells us. If “a substantial body of contemporary historians” endorses views contrary to his, then it can only mean these academic historians are all unreformed jingoists. He is not impressed by “expert knowledge,” but unwilling to provide his own. What a great model for academic inquiry!

@ 10 Members of the British establishment strongly sympathized with Germany because they considered themselves part of the same Teutonic race. For them, the war was an unmitigated disaster. It not only led to great social leveling at home but it also beckoned the rise of the racially inferior Slavs and perfidious Latins abroad. This dual emancipation was incredibly threatening to the British establishment and it explains, in part, why German propaganda, and later appeasement, found such strong support in interwar Britain.

Good night.

I have a long-standing appreciation for transformation fiction, in which what wasn’t human becomes so (or is recognized as already having the crucial elements of humanity), from Pygmalion to the Oz books to modern riffs like Clive Barker’s and Neil Gaiman’s. It’s fascinating, in its own way, to watch someone like Anon turn themselves from human into straw.

@jch Exactly right. As I said, there’s a big contradiction between Keynes as economist and Keynes as member of the Bloomsbury group. He looks at some of the tensions in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, where he says

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

He’s talking mainly about market incentives, but the point is even more true of policies to stimulate consumption demand.

This thread is about World War One, not World War Two.

Or were you referring to a different thread?

@Phil Indeed, that was my point – there was a big “but”, just as in all defences of Allied conduct before, during and after the the Great War.

They “didn’t want to fight”, but by jingo, they would if the alternative was to scale back their imperial ambitions.

I notice “the anon” has signed off. A pity. I was hoping for a demonstration that the claims of 10 million dead were a hoax by pacifist propagandists.

To restate my general point, the historians of the Dunning School were experts, who knew more about the Civil War and Reconstruction than I ever will. But all their extra knowledge added essentially nothing to what was already on the public record. The facts about slavery were brutal and obvious, and no amount of archival work was going to change them. Participants chose one side or the other at the time, and historians did so thereafter, for the same reasons.

Exactly the same is true of the Great War.

On WW I Niall Ferguson thinks German misdeeds overstated.

“Here’s getting to the point where gay-baiting yields similar results; the reaction this time is very encouraging, but we’re not there yet”

I think that would be a terrible point to get to

Damned Teutons. They still owe me two woolly mammoths. I got records.

Does anyone have any reading recommendations on the interwar years?
Amazon has been telling me:

Zara Steiner The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-193
and
The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization by Robert Boyce

Something that incorporates politics and economics (rather than either or), reasonable, not overtly ideological..

Just on empirical grounds Keynes made certain predictions about the consequences of Versaille and its unworkability. And everything that happen after 1919 and 1923 proved its unworkability. Reading the revisionists on Versailles they like to say that Keynes was unfair or somehow wrong about the kind of treaty that could have been constructed, but that revisions to Versailles through Locarno and reparation and Allied debt payments with the Dawes and then the Young Plan fixed the problems that Keynes was so unfair to point out. But of course, even these limited corrected steps did not.

The stated purpose of Versailles was to create a new, stable, international that would provide for wide spread prosperity and prevent the outbreak of a another Great War. By its own goals it was total failure almost from the start. The fact that near 100 years later we find people defending it is further evidence of the perversity of the human intellect and the existence of “original sin.” Much like the popularity of the term “War of Northern Aggression” in some circles.

ronnie @13:

I still laugh at the exceedingly-gay Mr. Keynes’ reply to WWI draft board members, outraged at his conscientious objector stance, who asked: what would you do if a German soldier were raping your sister. He replied: I would try to interpose myself between them!

Ronnie is misremembering: the protagonist in this little anecdote/story was Lytton Strachey, not Keynes. (Or at least that’s how I remember it, from past bits of reading on the Bloomsbury group.)

Correction: “The plotters who tried to kill him….”

13, 46: yes, Lytton Strachey. The same occasion, I think, where before he took his seat at the conscription hearing, he made a small production of blowing up his inflatable hemorrohoid pillow?

Anderson @50:
we must have read the same account

55: Yah, I figured it must be something like that, given the source. But for a couple of reactionaries condemning the Treaty, Hoover and Smuts are good.

Of course, they were despicable Teutonophiles – Hoover is reliably reported to have actually prevented many Germans from starving! – so their opinions can be discounted.

Hey, it’s Keynes who says “milked”.

Sorry, that was a drive-by nitpick – I read Peter T’s ‘lemon’ reference & assumed it was evoking Lloyd George’s (public) stance of “squeezing the Kaiser till the pips squeak”.

JQ@32: “They “didn’t want to fight”, but by jingo, they would if the alternative was to scale back their imperial ambitions.”

Right, suppose you’re President Poincare (sorry, can’t do accents) in 1914. Several German armies have invaded neutral Belgium and are poised to fall upon the weak French left flank.

Do you really think “scaling back France’s imperial ambitions” is a realistic alternative?

@ 59

According to Wikipedia, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and asked France to remain neutral. The French PM says that “France will act in accordance with her interests.” which leads to Germany declaring war. Had France confirmed they would stay neutral the German Ambassador would have asked her to temporarily surrender the Fortresses of Toul and Verdun as a guarantee of neutrality.

Not sure what would have happened if the French had confirmed their neutrality but refused to hand over the fortresses. If it had handed the fortresses over I’m not sure whether the Germans were ultimately planning on attacking the French anyway after defeating the Russians. Its certainly not a request I could imagine them acceding to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I

bexley@62: by 1914, the only German war plan was to attack France, in any circumstances.

I can’t blame the French for objecting to being attacked. Maybe JQ can.

If France had complied then Germany would have been guaranteed a one front war . Wilhelm might have tried forcing the German general staff to accept only a war with Russia in those circumstances.

Of course it would have been almost impossible for the French to comply because as you say they would have worried that Germany would declare war on them anyway. Either immediately or after defeating Russia.

67: Then just possibly the peace-loving Germans, aware in general terms of this alliance, should not have declared war on Russia?

66: As it happens, because Wilhelm misunderstood British intentions due to an over-optimistic report from his irenic ambassador to the UK, we know what would’ve happened had Wilhelm tried to change the plan: Moltke would’ve put his foot down, and the Kaiser would’ve folded, with a reproachful remark that “your uncle would have had a different answer.” Which was probably true, because (1) the elder Moltke’s view was to stand on the defensive in the west and attack in the east, and (2) I can’t imagine his having *one* plan.

“Then just possibly the peace-loving Germans, aware in general terms of this alliance, should not have declared war on Russia?”

Indeed they should not. Austria should not have declared war on Serbia, Russia should not have mobilized in support of Serbia, Germany should not have declared war on Russia, France and England should have declared themselves neutral, and all sides should have sought a peace “without indemnities or annexations” at the earliest opportunity.

Of the various imperialists who made the war, it’s easy enough to make a case that the Germans were the worst, but with 10 million dead by 1918, and tens of millions to follow, there’s plenty of guilt to go around.

Well, I think my views on this turn-the-other-cheek style of foreign policy were made sufficiently clear in a previous thread, so no need to repeat them here. I think Machiavelli in the “Discourses” gave the definitive reply anyway.

(And the 100-year anniversary is over a year away! What fun, internet!)

@ 70

The British clearly had the ability to stay neutral. I’m not sure how you think the French could have. Are you suggesting that the French should have handed over two key military instillations at the German’s request? How could they have guaranteed they wouldn’t be attacked anyway?

Quiggin, you batty old man, who ever said the “10 million dead were a hoax by pacifist propagandists”? You malign professional historians because you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. Let this thread stand as a testament to your intellectual dishonesty.

For everyone else:
The Dunning School was discredited not because historians finally acknowledged the brutality of slavery, but as a result of painstaking research into the motivations of the Southern elite. The argument we now take for granted was the result of considerable labor. Yet again, Quiggin devalues such labor. Historical research is irrelevant to his way of thinking. For him, it suffices to know that slavery was brutal and the First World War was destructive to understand what happened in 1861 and 1914. Everything else follows seamlessly from these judgments.

There is, of course, a glaring tension in Quiggin’s approach to suffering and death in these two wars. Suffering and death in the American Civil War is cast as noble despite its enormity (and the pacifists who argue otherwise are apologists for slavery). Suffering and death in the First World War was ignoble because of its enormity (and the pacifists who argue so are not apologists for German militarism). Of course, one can argue that wars always produce injustice, stupidity, and callousness on a massive scale regardless of the legitimacy of the cause. And there is no doubt that both the Union and the Allies caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and death. But that’s not Quiggin’s argument. He is drawing inferences about the origins of the war based on a post-hoc moral calculus that completely discounts Germany’s responsibility for starting the war and its wartime conduct. (On origins, aims, and conduct see Isabel Hull and John Röhl). Quiggin’s logic is quite simplistic: the war was bad. Everyone who participated in it must have wanted it (by virtue of participating). Therefore those who participated in the war were all bad (and equally so), whether they were fighting in self-defense or not.

Quiggin’s thinking about of the War and the Peace is built backwards from Keynes writings. It is grounded in circular reasoning. “Those who want to justify the conduct of the victors are simply taking sides with . . . Clemenceau.” But he has shown no evidence that his interpretation of Clemenceau is based on anything other than what Keynes published. Quiggin’s logic is based entirely on leaps of faith that devalue the hard work of professional historians.

@ 33. No. Here is the comment to which you are referring:

“The current consensus among most historians attributes the largest share of responsibility to the decisions made by German leaders in 1914 …”
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/26/gallipoli-and-crimea/#comment-463814

@ 39 Germany had only one war plan. That is a very well-known fact. You do not have to be a historian of Modern Europe to know that. So it is simply not true that France could have stayed out. Germany’s only plan was to violate Belgian sovereignty, knock out France, and then wheel back to the eastern front to defeat the Russian army just as it finished mobilizing. This is why Germany’s military elite wanted war in 1911 and in 1914. They had long planned for a two front war (at least since 1890, when Germany declined Russia’s offer to renew the Reinsurance Treaty). But the window of opportunity for such a bold move (essentially continental conquest) was rapidly vanishing. The German military knew that once Russia finished its program of railway construction, Germany would no longer be able to perform this maneuver. Russia would be able to mobilize much faster.

I referred to the Kramer & Horne book on the Belgian atrocities because they convincingly argue that German propaganda during the 1920s has left a huge imprint on historical memory and obscures basic truths about the war. But now that you have mentioned the atrocities in Galicia it is worth distinguishes between the radicalization and racialization that occurred in the east as the three empires implemented various misguided nationality policies (in order to mobilize ethnic support) and the atrocities that were committed in Belgium at the very start of the war and without any prior radicalization. The Belgian massacres are now cited as evidence of Germany’s overall attitude to international law. Germany subordinated everything, including the welfare of its own people and its international reputation, to the war effort and war aims. It is these exaggerated war aims that justified continuous law-breaking on a massive. There is no question that Germany was exceptional. Read Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, and keep an eye out for her next book which is a comparative account.

cont.

@ 72

I agree that this does seem to understate the degree to which Germany was responsible, but to act as if he is somehow “apologizing for Germany”, or to accuse him of sympathizing with Germany is bizarre.

Who is this aimed at? I wasn’t aware that anybody had accused him of apologizing for Germany on this thread.

Certain phrases that have been used here (Anderson’s sarcastic “peace-loving Germans” is a clear example) give me the impression that people think Quiggin is too sympathetic towards them and/or not hostile enough towards them). Anon, in particular, made this accusation out loud.

It might be mistaken, but that is the impression I am getting.

JQ@69: to repeat the treaty you so object to:
“The Franco-Russian Alliance Military Convention – August 18, 1892. France and Russia

being animated by a common desire to preserve peace, and having no other object than to meet the necessities of a defensive war,

provoked by an attack of the forces of the Triple Alliance against either of them”.

You seem tohave a problem with the central bit. Why?

77: it *is* kinda cute that they would put that in a secret treaty. Almost like the French were thinking, “hey, this Tsar guy almost got the Louis XVI treatment in 1905, maybe we should imagine some chain-smoking revolutionaries taking the place over and publishing this stuff.”

Or then again, maybe the treaty was “secret” in the sense of “show it to the other guy but don’t let him have a copy.”

“I think JQ is naive on this issue and too inclined to judge July 1914 from a post-1918 p.o.v.”

I think you’re quite obviously naive on the nature of the European state system at the time, on the behaviour of those states leading up to the war and in the decades after, on how those who lead those states viewed the world (either leading up to the war or for decades after), on the morale authority those states possessed (either leading up to the war or for decades after), on the nature of the victors political systems (either leading up to the war or for decades after)..’the discourses’ really doesnt help you out here.
On the specifics of the war, I see no one has taken up Chris Williams challenge to actually read anything up to date on the conflict..but why bother when you can moralise with such certainty?

“I think you’re quite obviously naive on the nature of the European state system at the time, on the behaviour of those states leading up to the war and in the decades after, on how those who lead those states viewed the world (either leading up to the war or for decades after), on the morale authority those states possessed (either leading up to the war or for decades after), on the nature of the victors political systems (either leading up to the war or for decades after)”

I look forward to reading your monograph on the subject, but I don’t see how it will address the specific claim that France should (and could) have declared neutrality after Germany declared war on Russia. Your own grasp of the period 1870-1914 seems uncertain. Bismarck’s war scare in 1875, for instance?

German unification, combined with the post-Bismarck decision to put its relations with Austria over those with Russia, made something along the lines of the Franco-Russian alliance inevitable. Germany made itself very scary. What did it expect?

“Go read Sally Marks. The reparations imposed on Germany were below what Keynes thought doable. Sally Marks established this over forty years ago.”

Interesting between Marks and Boyce on this

http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XII-12.pdf

Serious question:

If the Treaty of Versailles was not “punitive”, even though it deprived Germany of about 10-15% of its territory, imposed severe restrictions on its military, and required high reparations payments, than what, precisely, would a “punitive” treaty have looked like?

I can understand the argument that the treaty was justified because it was no worse than what Germany would have imposed in the event of victory, or was nessecary to secure the self-determination of the Poles and prevent Germany from waging war again. But to insist the treaty wasn’t punitive rather puzzles me.

Additionally, I may have been mistaken in declaring the accusation that Germany deliberately created inflation to be “bulls***t”, but the assertion that the Germans deliberately acted to damage their own economy and society in order to get out of paying reparations strikes me as rather wrongheaded. It may be true, but nothing of what I have read would suggest this.

Which is not to say that Quiggins’ views are automatically correct of course.

Coming in late, but please, MacIntyre’s After Virtue is a terrible book, wrong all over the place in its claims about the history of philosophical ethics and hopeless in its positive suggestions. They involve a kind of relativism, so what’s right in a community is determined by the history of that community, which can of course involve slavery and God knows what else. (It can certainly involve Catholicism.) And trying to base ethics on concepts like “good blacksmith” faces the obvious problem that we also talk about “good con men,” “good torturers,” and “good safecrackers.” One of the things people in the philosophical school to which Moore belonged realized was that “good” as used in “a good F” is irrelevant to ethics, because the F can itself be either good or bad. MacIntyre didn’t bother to think about that.

About the Keynes quote in #45: yes he did say that in My Early Beliefs, but although I don’t have my copy with me it’s in general very respectful of Moore’s ethical views. Keynes talks about the “religion” he and the Bloomsberries got from Moore and thinks it was a pretty good religion. He blames the group for not taking in all of Moore’s view, for embracing only its implications for personal life and not its larger social and political implications. (Leonard Woolf, in a reply, contested that, saying they had understood that side of Moore.) But the fault there was with his crowd, not with Moore.

In which connection it’s worth mentioning that Moore’s one bit of writing on practical ethics was a piece written during WWI and arguing, against the prevalent jingoism, that morality requires you to care equally about the interests of all people, whether citizens of your country or not. John Quiggin should applaud that bit of consequentialism.

But the idea that Alasdair MacIntyre is any kind of guide to the thought of Moore or Keynes or anyone else? Puh-leeze!

As for Keynes,

@the anon:
There is no question that Germany was exceptional. Read Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, and keep an eye out for her next book which is a comparative account.

I looked at Hull’s Absolute Destruction some time ago after a friend mentioned it. I found it a bit daunting in terms of length, w/ a substantial section on SW Africa (German violence vs the Herrero) before one gets to the section directly on WW1, if memory serves. I did not find it sufficiently compelling to do more than dip into it here and there, though no doubt that is my failing rather than Hull’s. To the best of my recollection the book has to do w how Germany fought the war and its war aims, not directly w the question of causes/origins, which is what animated much of the discussion in the previous thread on this whole subject. The book is interesting, as I recall, on the issue of ‘military culture,’ but, again, I’m not sure that’s esp. central to this particular discussion. Could be wrong.

I think ‘the anon’ might do well to acknowledge that one can value the work of professional historians and at the same time realize that there is no historical account that is not affected in some way by a historian’s particular predispositions and values. As someone said upthread, interpretations change over time, and while there are certainly better and worse interpretations, more and less convincing claims, about most big events there is, I think, no final-for-all-time historical truth.

Tom Hurka may be the first person to keel over from sheer disgust with MacIntyre. Not a bad way to go, I hasten to add. I’ve never shaken the suspicion that, per MacIntyre, virtue existed only before the hoi polloi got all uppity n shit.

I don’t know, I came close when reading After Virtue, which I agree with Tom Hurka is quite a terrible book (which given that virtue ethics is a pretty terrible philosophical program should not be surprising) . I was genuinely surprised to see it getting so much love in a CT comment thread.

@ 93.

Quiggin’s remarks speak for themselves:

“there is clearly a substantial body of contemporary historians whose views on the Great War are of the same value (and, I suspect, similar motivation) as those of the Dunning school”

“I’m unconvinced by the claim that any particular respect needs to be paid to expert knowledge here”

“Versailles revisionism, like revisionism about the Great War in general, is driven at least as much by simple jingoism.”

“I was hoping for a demonstration that the claims of 10 million dead were a hoax by pacifist propagandists.”

No substance. Only disrespect.

@ 92.

A punitive peace could have involved the long-term occupation of Germany, trials of Germany’s political elite, foreign military government, the forced transfer of ethnic Germans from peripheral areas into a rump state, the division of that rump state into multiple polities, and so on. The peace imposed after the First World War was much more lenient than the one imposed after the Second World War (which, let’s not forget, also included reparations for the Soviet Union). Let’s not forget that.

Where have you read that German policies were not designed to exacerbate inflation? That is the argument I’ve encountered in nearly every economic history on reparations. It is not one of those questions that is being actively debated by the scholars in the field. I could be missing something (after all, I am not an economic historian and I do not specialize on the First World War). But before going analyzing where historians might have gone wrong we need to know what an opposing argument would look like. As you can see from Ronan’s link in note 90, these historians are very careful to address competing claims. Before dismissing the scholarly consensus it may be a good idea to take a look at the work. The problems in this thread started with Quiggin dismissing outright any account (including those of professional historians) that did not fit his narrow view.

@ 96. If Keynes cared about reconstruction he would not have been as hostile to the French delegation in this book. The French were the main champions of workable system of relief and reconstruction.

Hoover and Churchill repeated stories about the Bolshevik menace because they were more interested in the German market than in the long-term reconstruction of the continent. If you are going to cite U.S. and British political opinion about Germany you are going to have to address the systematic bias identified by historians like Robert Boyce, Sally Marks, and Stephen Schuker.

@ 96. Skepticism is always good and I look forward to other explanations about why someone as smart as Keynes could have been so wrong about the Peace, about Germany’s capacity to pay, and about Germany’s postwar aims. His collaboration with the Germans during this period was so extensive and so utterly wrongheaded that it begs explanation. Many historians have been attracted to the Melchior story as a potential explanation:

Other historians making the same claim: Stephen Schuker, “The collected writing of John Maynard Keynes,” 18 Journal of Economic Literature (1980): 124-6; Gordon Martel, “The prehistory of appeasement: Headlam-Morley, the peace settlement and revisionism,” 9 Diplomacy and Statecraft (1998), 242-65. The may be others as well. Note that Schuker’s review predates Marks’ 1986 essay.

@ 100. Read Röhl on origins and Hull on conduct. The reason Absolute Destruction does not spend a great deal of time on origins is that Hull already addressed the subject in her first book on Wilhelm’s Entourage. But if you read the books together you’ll see that the institutionalist argument in Absolute Destruction fits hand in glove with her earlier argument about the origins of the First World War. If you pick up Entourage you can skip to the last chapter for the origins explanation, but the whole book is excellent.

@ 102. Yes. I acknowledge the historians are influenced by their lived experiences. No historian will deny that. But will you acknowledge that the way Quiggin characterized professional historians at the top of this thread was beyond the pale?

Almost forgot: on the Treaty read Alan Sharp’s The Versailles Settlement (the revised 2008 edition)

And the point of this bit of history is that if utilitarians and consequentialists have trouble imagining that some people will choose the most desperate and unreasonable courses rather than abandon central elements of their felt identity. You can buy the acquiescence of slaveholders to liberation only if you are carrying a very big and visible stick as well as a bag of gold, and even then some will choose to take the beating rather than the money.

@Peter T I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said here. The consistent advocates of peace (liberals like Angell and social democrats like the ILP) were a minority of a minority in all countries. So, obviously they couldn’t possibly have prevailed. My point is that they were right, and that everyone else was wrong (some more than others, but all grievously) in ways that led to the catastrophe.

And, obviously, I see the same thing happening today, as do the consistent advocates of war. What I can’t fathom are those here who see huge differences between the war in Iraq today and that in Iraq (as well as many other places) a century ago.

As you say, no-one in Britain (except the kinds of people I listed) could imagine that the country could survive, let alone prosper, by abandoning its Empire. And none of them doubted (any more than their present-day supporters) the need to use military force to promote the national interest.

The German ruling class held the same beliefs in more virulent form, partly because of the power of the Prussian military class, and partly because they were the newcomers, and therefore likely to benefit from aggression, while the British were defending the imperial status quo and therefore preferred deterrence.

I don’t suppose many people are going to slog through to the end of this unpleasant thread, so I’ll note the one thing I have learned from it, thanks to anon

Ferguson’s slur on Keynes isn’t (only) an expression of personal bigotry. It’s the received view among pro-Versailles historians.

And, obviously, I see the same thing happening today, as do the consistent advocates of war. What I can’t fathom are those here who see huge differences between the war in Iraq today and that in Iraq (as well as many other places) a century ago.

What I see as different are not the morals of going to war but rather the practical possibility of evading war. From a British perspective it seems there was large scale support for WW1. By the time Germany invades Belgium it is difficult to see how Asquith could have avoided joining the war given the domsetic climate.

Contrast that with the Iraq war where there was huge opposition to British participation. It would have been much easier for us to not go to war so I think the politicians are far more culpable in this case.

The German naval challenge threatened more than empire – it threatened the economic and political survival of Britain itself should Britain choose to oppose German aims in Europe.

Why?

It was not a challenge that any but a convinced pacifist could refuse to meet

Really?

On the – ahem – intellectual bonafides of the ‘Keynes got things wrong cause he was one of those gay folk’ school of historical interpretation, see the piece from the always inestimably brilliant Jonah Goldberg (so much so, he stupefies himself as he writes), “Keynes was Gay Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That” at the NRO. You see, Schumpeter and Himmelfarb and others made the same points, so what we’re dealing with here is a *serious intellectual tradition*, not garden variety bigotry.

I thought that Quiggin’s original Dunning School comparison was unfair, but anon’s additional points have made me think he might have it right. Whatever Keynes got wrong in Economic Consequences of the Peace, it’s not something that requires maligning Keynes’ character to explain. As someone apocryphally said, “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.” anon’s comments about Keynes’ “utter wrongheadedness” are the words of someone with a score to settle.

The peace was largely a form of restorative justice intended to repair the enormous damage done to Belgium and northern France (much of it as Germany retreated).

Yeah, “restorative justice” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I know the thread has moved way beyond that point, but I couldn’t let that egregious abuse of the concept of restorative justice go unchallenged.

Walt@122

There’s also the point that it has little to do with the accuracy of Keynes’ arguments. It may well be true that his views on the Peace Settlement were influenced by his relationship with Melchior. This does not mean that his views were wrong. The fact that some libertarians may be motivated by greed, or leftists by hatred of the rich, does not make they arguments they advance automatically untrue either. And no one’s views are arrived at completely independently from their experiences. While objectivity is a worthwhile thing, no one is really completely objective.

Moreover, the implications of this argument are rather unpleasant. Am I required to avoid all friendships or relationships with someone if their country has recently been at war with mine? Is this nessecary to remain objective?

I actually agree that this argument is not automatically homophobic (although I have a rather hard time believing that homophobic prejudices played no role when it was first made, as that was decades ago), but it is quite wrongheaded.

the anon@106
Your mention of Hull’s ‘Wilhelm’s Entourage’ noted (thanks).
I haven’t read Rohl, Marks, Boyce, Schuker, so I will not express any view on them.

Peter T @109: I think I agree w most of this. (My questions about your view @117 would have to do w prospects for liberalism in post-WW1 Germany, but that’s a whole other subject [and not one I can discuss v. knowledgeably].)

@Peter T I didn’t accuse anon of homophobia. I just drew attention to his claim (backed by citations) that the ad hominem slur on Keynes was part of the consensus of the group of historians on whom he is relying, and not an individual aberration by Ferguson. As noted above, the badness of the argument doesn’t depend on the fact that Melchior and Keynes were of the same gender. And, as noted in the OP, the argument isn’t supported by the facts.

@chris y

See previous comments @46 and 50.

Evidence, as opposed to a laundry list of citations, for the alleged German conspiracy to devalue the mark, would be useful. Gordon A. Craig’s “Germany 1866-1945” volume is getting long in the tooth (1978), but as of his writing, the conspiracy theory was treated as Poincaré’s propaganda, or possibly as something he believed, but not as the real explanation. Per Craig, Germany in 1918 already had huge war debts, and the Weimar gov’t lacked the authority (one might say, the guns) to impose the necessary taxation on the business elites who, as Craig says, “assumed that the sacrifices would be made by others.”

If something new has turned up since 1978, I would be interested to hear about it.

… Going off into counterfactual ether, the very recalcitrance of the elites and the negative influence of the army on the Weimar gov’t are good indications that the Treaty was at least punitive in the wrong places. An occupation government, and Ludendorff hanged, might not have made things better, but with 20/20 hindsight they were probably worth a try. Perhaps that would have happened had the Allies won without Wilson’s intervention.

Re: Melchior, btw, is there any evidence that he was actually (1) gay and (2) Keynes’s lover? Wikipedia advises me that he “eventually married his long-time mistress, the French romance novelist Marie de Molènes with whom he had a child.” Not that that’s dispositive of anything, as Keynes’s own example shows. But it seems his Memoir Club paper just said he was “sort of in love” with Melchior, and in that setting, I doubt Keynes would have felt any necessity to conceal a sexual relationship.

A technical point:
Anderson @65 commented:
The sheer arrogance of a general staff’s having *one* war plan is mindboggling.
and reiterated it @68.

It was thought at the time, probably correctly, that having more than one was plan was not possible. This was due to the nature of war plans at the time. The issue was mobilization, as has been noted. To quickly bring into action huge numbers of civilians it was necessary that they be assembled and moved to the locations of their weapons. The result was a fixed deployment of forces; arrangements to move them to the front also needed to be in place.

The form all this took was an immensely complicated set of interlocking railway schedules. It was not thought possible to create and keep in sync more than one such set. Therefore, the countries involved were stuck with a single initial plan. If they had been planning the actions of forces in being they would have had more flexibility; the constraint was the need for mobilization.

The number of troops being mobilized was so much greater than those in standing armies that if your enemy had his forces mobilized and you did not you were doomed. The act of mobilization essentially became a declaration of war.

Peter T @117 commented:

Clearly the best course would be a Germany accepting the loss of territory, adopting more liberal institutions and settling down to cooperate with the rest of Europe in reconstruction and then in shared growth. This seems, as far as we can tell now, to have been a vanishingly unlikely prospect whether or not Keynes arguments prevailed – mostly because key German elites did not want that to happen.

My understanding has been the this implied that the only course of action that would have made a lasting peace possible would have been the occupation of Germany and the destruction of those elites. After WWII this actually happened. I would be interested in knowing whether this understanding is correct, since clearly many on this thread know far more about these things than I do.

Anon, thanks for the references.

@ 109. “Germany built the High Seas Fleet to try to buy support among the north German workers . . . just as British options were limited, so were German IF the elites refused to countenance social democrat participation in politics.”

Are you seriously arguing that the navy program was a way for the German military elites to buy off the working class? This argument is so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. The navy was built because the German military establishment (Tirpitz and Wilhelm specifically) wanted a big navy. They lost the arms race and alienated much of the working class which opposed cuts in social spending to fund the arms race. The Social Democrats were not in favor of an arms race. And the German military establishment was unwilling to work with the Social Democrats to expand the tax base if it meant giving them greater control in the government. This is pne of the most fascinating aspects of Wilhelmine Germany. The military establishment was constantly wrestling with the Reichstag over funding. And most of the time they were willing to do with less rather than hand over power to what they considered the domestic enemies of the Kaiserreich.

@ 113. This is perfect rendition of the conservative German nationalist argument: the decline of Germany and Austria-Hungary was a tragedy because it led inexorably to rise of Bolshevism, fascism, and mass death in Europe’s bloodlands. No need to worry about contingency or responsibility. It was inevitable. This is nonsense and like most narratives premised on historical inevitability it is designed to obscured responsibility. It is exculpatory (and has touches of Ernst Nolte). The tragedy of East-Central Europe is not the decline of German power but the failure of the Allies to restrain Germany and protect the new states (additionally, many lives would have been saved in the Soviet Union if the Allies did not do so much to ensure that the new regime was on a permanent paranoid war-footing). Arguing that the collapse of Austria-Hungary led inexorably to mass death is tantamount to blaming the victims of the Second World War for their own deaths (again, it has Ernst Nolte written all over it).

@ 115. Germany was primarily responsible for the DAMAGE caused during the First World War so therefore making Germany pay was right. Quiggin brought up the question of origins.

@ 118. JB is continuing to deny the truth about Germany’s war aims.

@ 122. The only score for me to settle is with those who continue to deny historical facts. As you’ve probably gleaned by now from this thread the twentieth century historiography was an extended attempt to correct the highly influential German propaganda of the 1920s (read Sally Marks’ comment from the link in note 90). It is incredibly frustrating to see that this propaganda still holds sway and that the painstaking work done by professional historians is casually dismissed as jingoism.

Keynes was not simply engaging in prediction. He was advocating on behalf of the Germans with whom he maintained a long-term correspondence. How can I not be frustrated at the state of the debate when you ignore the facts and prefer to malign my character?

@ 124. That is exactly what I mean when I use the word restorative justice. The reparations (in some cases timber, iron, and other commodities) were meant for the reconstruction of Belgium and northern France. Read about operation Alberich. Read about what the retreating forces did to the land, the wells, and the mines in northern France. We cannot have a conversation if you do not possess a minimal amount of knowledge about how the reparations were a form of restorative justice.

@ 140. Other countries had multiple war plans. Germany had only one war plan because it had only one set of war aims. It was an all or nothing gambit. That is the most shocking aspect of it.

@ 141. The alleged exchange between the Kaiser and Moltke’s is based entirely on the latter’s testimony. There is no other evidence of it having happened and there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that it never occurred. John Röhl explains this in the essay I linked above.

Keynes was so clearly right about the Versailles treaty that the major powers pretty much changed it at Locarno just as he suggested. However, this thread does show what a strong emotional current could push the allies at Versailles to go so disastrously wrong. What they wanted was a German republic that was normal – not communist, and not lead by the militaristic imperial elite. But what they did is loaded the republic up with all the sins of the imperial regime that lost, thus doing their best to discredit their own aim. It is best not to get on too moralistic about the allies and German crimes. I don’t think Belgium, for instance, ever paid reparations for the crimes committed by its king in the Congo, though these were exponentially worse than anything the Germans did – last time I looked, the conservative estimate was that a million died in the Congo under Leopold. The antisemitic Russian Czar, who was casually committing genocide in Russian Turkestan while waging war on the East Front, was not exactly attaching moral glory to the allied cause, either.
Myself, I think the twentieth century would have gone much better if the communists had succeeded in Germany in 1919, but that was an unlikely alternative. Given that the allies were unwilling to militarily occupy Germany for years after the armistice, the best course of action was to make Germany viable again under a Republic, rather than to engage on the one hand in showy vindicativeness, and on the other hand, in raising ethnic tensions while pursuing shoddy imperialist aims (such as the British encouragement of the Greek attack on Turkey).
Keynes was perfectly right, of course. I think the real heir to his pamphlet was the arrangement made by the allies in 1945, which did insure German viability and cemented peace in Western Europe. Which is just another of our debts to the great man.

@ 142. Seriously? You’re asking whether Jan Smuts embraced the idea that Germans were racially superior to Slavs? Seriously?

Smuts : “we were putting the Germans under a lot of Kaffirs.” Source: Bernard Baruch (Technical Adviser to American Peace Commission) diary, 2 June 1919.

145: as the H-NET roundtable suggests, Royce apparently bends over backwards to praise the French. Simply accepting Poincaré’s version of the facts at face value does not demonstrate that he was correct. Nor does it address the point about the weakness of the Weimar government.

The Anon: Why am I even bothering? Some of us have been wondering that too, since not a scrap of your blathering even begins to take account of the simple reality that Keynes correctly predicted the general course of bad consequences, as did others. You’re in the position of someone analyzing a baseball team’s performance with all their fine fieldwork and excellent rotation without noting that their opponents got all the runs scored.

@ 152. You are misrepresenting the discussion. Nobody in that discussion ever says that Boyce accepted Poincaré “version”at face value (whatever the fuck that means; Boyce cites archives and Poincaré did not defend his policies in a book, to my knowledge).

If you intend to continue participating in this conversation I recommend that you stop lying to the readers.

Keynes says, “We both stood all through the interview. In a sort of way I was in love with him.”

Given how things were talked about in Bloomsbury, this strikes me as extremely strong evidence that Keynes 1) never had any sexual contact with Melchior, and 2) is not here adverting to an attraction that was primarily sexual in any case.

The twee pre-Raphaelite romanticism of “in love in a sort of way” is just not how they talked about sex. If you saw semen, you said “semen.”

No, I think Keynes is describing some other kind of intense sympathy, perhaps like the kind that bonds straight men under fire. In any case, one that has little to do with his particular sexual orientation.

@ 155. When I find the time, I will check if there has been any historical research on the plan. The statements made by Keynes and Smuts are probative of their general attitudes but they cannot be used to explain the genesis of the plan.

@ 158. “The latest review of the controversy calls the debate a tie. Keynes was right.” You are wrong about the controversy ending in a tie. But assuming that you are not, how does a tie vindicate Keynes?

You’ve also managed to dredge up a review noting that while “the essays in in this volume are for the most part models of scholarship” we should nevertheless remember that Wilson was a hypocrite and the German representatives at the conference were good-intentioned. The claim about Wilson is true but irrelevant. He was a hypocrite and he made many unworkable promises.The claim about the German representatives is inaccurate. The best source on this is Richard Bessel’s Germany After the First World War but I don’t have a copy at my immediate disposal. I’ll look around for an alternative source.

But that’s not the locus of the debate. The revisionist agree that Wilson was a hypocrite and

Apart from the Dolchstoßlegende the best evidence of Germany’s bad faith at the conference pertains to the way they used the so-called “war guilt clause” to denounce the entire treaty.

MacGregor Knox: “Between the November armistice and the unveiling of the Allies’ terms in April-May 1919, the German people took collective leave of reality, as in August 1914 and so often throughout the conflict – in favor of that same “dreamland” in which the German army had returned undefeated from the field. Virtually all shades of German opinion harped passionately on Germany’s inalienable right now that it had overthrown the monarchy, to an essentially status-quo-ante peace, identified perversely or disingenuously with Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The SPD-dominated provisional government and its successor, the first cabinet of the German Republic created in January-February 1919, failed to dampen these expectations which it largely shared. Its negotiatiotors, under the irascible leadership of the new foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, truculently denounced as an assertion of German “war guilt” an innocuous treaty clause – the famous Article 231 – drafted primarily to underpin Allied claims for expenses that included the enormous damage caused by Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France, its calculated devastation of the occupied areas, and the depredations of its U-boats.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=I_yD9LlU6coC&lpg=PA235&dq=%22for%20expenses%20that%20included%20the%20enormous%20damage%20caused%20by%22&pg=PA235#v=onepage&q=%22for%20expenses%20that%20included%20the%20enormous%20damage%20caused%20by%22&f=false

Sally Marks: “Though he had not yet seen it, he denounced it for containing a war-guilt clause, whose inclusion his delegation assumed. Actually, the Allies did not intend Article 231 to connote war guilt, which it does not mention, and virtually identical clauses in the Austrian and Hungarian treaties were not so interpreted, but the German denunciation in a sense “created” a war guilt clause.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=JZCEnQvQjc4C&lpg=PA19&dq=%22virtually%20identical%20clauses%20in%20the%22&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q=%22virtually%20identical%20clauses%20in%20the%22&f=false

Zara Steiner: The Germans used the charge “to attack to only the reparation clauses but also the ethical basis of the whole treaty. In short time, the attack won the support of large sections of the public in Britain and the United States.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=zLeQoe_O9AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=oxford+illustrated+history+of+the+first+world+war&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mfCLUZKaCJX54AOU4IDICw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=%22ethical%20basis%22&f=false
Page 299

Also from Steiner: “This was not a ‘Carthaginian peace,” as J.M Keynes asserted in his brilliant, highly influential, and misleading polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace.”
Page 295

Back to Knox:
“The new Reich cabinent confirmed that view [that the revolution had changed little or nothing]. In examining the collection of top secret 1914 foreign office documents that it had commissioned, many of its members concluded privately that Germany had indeed launched the war. But Evert, now Reich president, and the Republic’s first cabinet under Scheidemann as chancellor shrank from publication. That decision foreclosed the one course that might have partially assuaged the Western powers: open repudiation of Imperial Germany’s action, policies, and ethos.”

More obviously, it would have completely shifted the responsibility for the war, the defeat, and the peace onto the militarists.

@ 161 “the Ferguson inspired case for the Versailles treaty”

That’s quite a claim. If this thread has established anything, it’s that Ferguson was merely following the consensus position on Versailles. His own “contribution” is the old discredited argument that Britain should have kept out of the war in order to preserve the Empire because German occupied Europe would have ended up looking exactly like Europe under the boot of the EU! He also argued that some soldiers relished killing. That’s the sum total of Ferguson’s contribution.

Don’t taint other historians just because Ferguson makes the same arguments.

roger@146

“Keynes was perfectly right, of course. I think the real heir to his pamphlet was the arrangement made by the allies in 1945, which did insure German viability and cemented peace in Western Europe. Which is just another of our debts to the great man.”

The problem with that argument is that the initial peace settlement in 1945 was in some ways harsher on Germany than that of 1918. It involved both the forceful transfer of ethnic Germans westward, and the transfer of large parts of eastern Germany to Poland (with East Prussia going to the USSR). Additionally the Russians in particular took a sizable part of Germany’s industrial wealth back to their homeland. I believe that there were also initially strict limitations on the German economy in the original settlement, though these limitations were quietly dropped in the next few years as the Cold War heated up. I don’t agree with anon at all, but when he brings this up as being more punitive than the Versailles treaty, he has a point.

Additionally, the case of whether Keynes was right about Versailles and whether he was right about the economy more broadly are very much two separate things.

That said, I think anon is largely eliding why the settlement in 1945 was both harsher (in some ways) than the last, and more widely accepted by the Germans:

(a.) When peace was made in WWI, Germany had been pushed back from most of the places it was occupying, but it still held most of its own territory. Many Germans thus expected a peace would be lenient, as Germany had been defeated, but not as drastically as would be the case in 1945. Additionally, official sources continued to tell the populace that Germany was winning, with the result that the defeat came as a great shock to many, and the “stab in the back” legend had fertile soil in which to take root.

(b.) In contrast, when Germany surrendered in 1945, its cities had been utterly blasted to rubble, its infrastructure was in ruins, and the Allies had already taken over the vast majority of its territory. By the last few months of the war, it was apparent to all but the most fanatical Nazis that Germany would be utterly defeated (and even they probably knew at some level). Additionally, as the war drew to a close, the German propaganda machine began pumping out vivid assertions that the Allies would destroy the German population, or deport them all to Siberia, and that Germany would be finished as a nation. All of this meant that the Germans expected much harsher treatment than they actually got, which was dramatically different than what they expected in 1918.

(c). Much has been said in this thread about the brutality with which Imperial Germany conducted WWI. It is true that the German forces in World War One conducted several atrocities, and particularly abused the people of Belgium. But the atrocities it committed pale in comparison to what the Nazis did in World War Two. The number of Belgian civilians deliberately killed by the Germans has been estimated at about about 6-10 thousand (by one of the sources anon uses). The number of civilians killed by the Nazis runs in the millions. And this is to say nothing of the Holocaust. Imperial Germany was bad, but it in no way compares to Nazi Germany. The revelations of Nazi atrocities inevitably meant that a much harsher peace would be imposed.

@ 163. The first paragraph is correct and probably understates the extent of Stresemann’s ambitions.

The claim that “war was likely just a matter of time” in 1924 is problematic. It’s way too deterministic. It rests on two questionable assumptions: that the attitudes of the German population would not moderate at some point in the future and that German nationalists would eventually launch a war whether or not they had the means to wage it. What happened after 1924 is important. France and her continental allies were were completely abandoned by Britain (and the U.S.) and Germany was allowed to re-arm (Britain gutted attempts at arms control). If the French had had British backing during the 1920s and 30s there would not have been a Second World War. It would have been nipped in the bud. So basically, the argument works only if you are willing to assume that British policy after 1924 was fixed (this is Schuker’s argument in his monumental The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan). But the argument is too deterministic for my taste. Things could have changed. The rest of the second paragraph is correct.

I don’t know enough to comment on LI theory but it is debatable whether the Soviet Union was passive until attacked. The French tried to integrate the Soviets into their security system but these efforts repeatedly failed because Stalin was unwilling to guarantee Poland and Romania’s borders. After the start of the Terror there was no way for the French to continue trying to attract the Soviets. The first victim was Tukhachevsky (the point man for the French in the USSR). The Terror took its deepest toll on those with foreign connections (the diplomatic corp was wiped out and borderland ethnic minorities suffered disproportionately). I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that Stalin preferred making a deal with Hitler because it gave him a buffer zone. On the other hand, the USSR was incredible passive once this security need was met.

Tooze is great. Highly recommended.

@ 169. You may be right. But I want to know what other historians have said:

Sally Marks: “in April 1919, Keynes contrived a clever scheme through which inter-Allied debts to the United States would be paid in German bonds whose value would probably be minimal at best. When Wilson rejected all attempts to dump the costs of Europe’s war on the United States, the battle over reparations was joined in earnest.”

I’m going to look into this issue more deeply. It matters whether or not the plan was politically viable. And it matters what the British delegation did after the plan was rejected by the United States.

Alan Sharp: “Keynes created the impression that the French, who ‘made in the first instance the most definite and the most extreme proposals’, were mainly responsible for the conference’s difficulties over reparations – essentially what compensation Germany and its allies should pay for wartime damage. In fact it was British representatives, most notably Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, who presented the highest demands, originally seeking £24,000,000,000, with £9,500,000,000 as their lowest offer. Lloyd George’s chosen negotiators were christened the ‘Heavenly Twins’ by their irreverent colleagues because they were always in each other’s company and demanded astronomical sums. The French suggested £8,000,000,000 with most other estimates in the region of £3,000,000,000 to £5,000,000,000, though the Americans were prepared to raise their proposal to £6,000,000,000 in the interests of achieving allied agreement. Lloyd George later claimed that he would have settled for much less but that he was trapped by the public expectations raised by the Twins’ figures. The reality seems to be that it was Lloyd George who insisted that the Twins maintain their demands, thus pursuing the high reparations policy he wanted, yet allowing him to present himself as powerless to follow his own moderate inclinations – a typical piece of Lloyd George chicanery. He would later claim credit for delaying the final naming of the German bill for two years so that tempers could cool – rather as if an arsonist, in mitigation, pleaded that he had summoned the fire brigade. For the Americans, it was the British rather than the French who presented the main obstacles to reaching agreement on a question that generated much more heat than light in Paris. ”

What I want to know is why Keynes misrepresented the French position.

the anon @ 170: “France and her continental allies were were completely abandoned by Britain (and the U.S.) and Germany was allowed to re-arm (Britain gutted attempts at arms control). If the French had had British backing during the 1920s and 30s there would not have been a Second World War. It would have been nipped in the bud.”

So what you’re saying is that France lost because they were stabbed in the back?
You don’t see the irony in this?
Typical warmonger logic: my plan is perfect, it’s the rest of the world that is wrong… if only they had fallen into line and acted the way I thought, everything would have been fine.

I admit to wondering how much of the attack on Keynes’ relationship with Malchior is based on right-wingers who don’t actually understand friendship very well. The attackers may not all be sociopathic, but people can accommodate themselves to sociopathic influence pretty readily, and normal friendship – including deep respect and attachments that don’t have to be sexual at all – has no place in such an approach to life. Anything of that sort, where there’s a lot of emotion and no dominant or inferior partner in the pair, must look sexual when sexuality is all you’ve got for bonding.

Meh… I don’t think that’s really the reason.

I figure this attack is used because of two things

a. Many of the people who defend the treaty feel that the case for it is so ironclad, and Keynes so utterly wrong, that they cannot understand how he came to hold the positions he did without some nefarious external influence. Hence Melchior.

b. Many people have a vague sense that Keynes was somehow “betraying his country” by having a friendship/relationship with a German. General disgust with homosexuality might have played a role in the initial argument, but is in no way necessary for it, and I’m guessing has been mostly abandoned by those who aren’t right-wing.

(I actually agree with ajay that this relationship was problematic. But this does not mean Keynes was wrong.)

Ferguson generally holds the completely opposite position from anon on WWI (he’s actually pro-German, not merely anti-war), but he hates Keynesian economics, so he decided to attack Keynes. Since his arguments against Keynes have been utterly destroyed whenever he comes into contact with a halfway decent economist, he decided to attack Keynes personally. He also loves making “controversial” statements that upset people, as he thinks they prove his “boldness”, so this isn’t exactly a departure for him. (This probably also influenced his position on WWI).

That said, I have no idea what Ferguson actually thinks of the peace settlement, as opposed to the war.

“It did not re-arm until very late because that was a deal-breaker for Britain and the French knew that the possibility of talking reason into the British was more valuable than unilateral re-armament.”

“Knew”? Better, “thought.” Incorrectly, as it turned out.

LFC@181

I’m not terribly suprised. Wasn’t it mainly the upper-middle class in Germany that was the most nationalistic?

@Peter T I can’t remember if you mentioned The Strange Death of Liberal England in one of our earlier discussions, but events like the Curragh mutiny suggest that the English elite had their share of pathological fears, as of course did their counterparts in France and Russia. To repeat, plenty of blame/explanation to go around.

“We also should not assume that historians that criticized this aspect of his life harbor a hidden agenda against Keynesian economics. Nor are they jingoists, right-wingers, or warmongers. ”

In Ferguson’s case, no assumptions are needed.

jb, I don’t disagree with you. The point, of course, is that harshness and leniency aren’t opposites. They are a policy mix. Keynes knew that the allies – while perfectly willing to enforce a harsh and punitive blockade on Germany – were not willing to occupy Germany. Being an economist, he thought in terms of scarcity and resources. A policy that enforced harsh terms without the resources to create a situation in which those harsh terms would solve the problem posed by the peace conference – mainly, how to make peace – was doomed. The Western allies in 1945 did not cripple the German economy, and make the government illegitimate in the eyes of German people.
As for the comparative harshness – this is hard to say. On the one hand, you have the breakup of Germany and the ethnic cleansing of German populations in 1945 – on the other hand, you have the breakup of the Austo-Hungarian empire and the loss of I believe 13 percent of German territory with Versailles. And of course the the UK and the USA in 1945 made every effort to feed the people, in contrast with the Allies in 1919, who alternated emergency food with a policy of starving the people.

Also Tooze has an article coming out (“Hegemony revisited: a critique of Barry Eichengreen’s interpretation of the interwar period” ) and argued in a recent article that Eichengreen’s position isnt satisfying as it ignores power and tries to fit the depression into a neoclassical framework, so I’m guessing the consensus on the interwar years is slowly moving back to a Kindlebergian interpretation (if such a thing exists. Im really just making stuff up now)

the anon: @ 124. That is exactly what I mean when I use the word restorative justice. The reparations (in some cases timber, iron, and other commodities) were meant for the reconstruction of Belgium and northern France. Read about operation Alberich. Read about what the retreating forces did to the land, the wells, and the mines in northern France. We cannot have a conversation if you do not possess a minimal amount of knowledge about how the reparations were a form of restorative justice.

Good grief – you read about a concept of justice aiming to repair personal and community relationships, with a person-centred ethos, and somehow manage to equate this to nation states paying reparations? We cannot have a conversation if you do not possess a minimal amount of knowledge about what restorative justice means.

Reparations =/= restorative justice. Reparations = reparative justice.

More fool me for falling into SIWrOTI Syndrome.

@ 191. Restorative justice if a broad concept and you don’t have a personal monopoly on the definition. It usually involves reparation and reconciliation of the victim and the wrongdoer.

@ 197. You accuse the historians and me of fanaticism because of our exasperation with the fanatical denial that The Economic Consequences of the Peace was wrong.

This was the reaction to my initial post: Dunning School, expert knowledge is irrelevant, Keynes called his shots correctly, and jingoism. All that in reaction to this simple cite:

“John Maynard Keynes’ cleverly written account of the Council of Four commanded lasting attention among popular writers, although neither enlightened contemporaries nor historians considered it fair-minded or well-informed .” The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.

This was followed by a “I was hoping for a demonstration that the claims of 10 million dead were a hoax by pacifist propagandists” and the reiteration of the claim that historical facts are irrelevant. This was then followed by another rounds of assertions that Keynes was proven correct.

Who are the real fanatics? In this thread I’ve responded with evidence. The deniers have responded with a mix of blind faith and abuse. I don’t give a damn what you think is “unmistakeable,” this thread speaks for itself.

anon, your responses have been a mixture of evidence and bizarre speculation about Keynes’ evil motives, where the most charitable explanation you’re willing to consider is that Keynes was acting like a lovesick teenager. If you didn’t act like an anti-Keynes fanatic, then people wouldn’t treat you like one.

The only reason for Ferguson to have brought this up in the first place is that Keynes is still alive politically as Keynesianism, i.e. as the opposite of the austerity that conservatives want right now. So his comment is just propaganda, intended like all good propaganda to establish connections that people absorb without really knowing how they did, or rationally thinking about them. It’s “Government spending = gay = traitor”.

I have no idea whether the anon is a dupe or thinks he’s in on the con. It doesn’t matter.

The scholarly consensus predates Ferguson. Ferguson added nothing of value. The historians I’ve identified are interested in Keynes’ book and his collaboration with the Germans, not in his economic theories. I realize some of you may be tempted to use the fact that Ferguson has been attacking Keynes because of his opposition to Keynesian economics in order to malign the motives of everyone else who subscribes scholarly consensus. Please do not do that. It is unprofessional.

Its now clear what happened in this thread. For a number of you, any critique of Keynes is an attack on Keynesian economics. You’re either with Keynes or you’re with Ferguson. If you subscribe to this kind of pro-Keynes fanaticism no amount of historical evidence is going to change anything. Keynes was perfect in every respect and anyone who argues differently must be doing so for the very same reasons as Ferguson. That is why some of you have been attacking professional historians throughout this thread.

Five historians are represented by those three quotes. Want more from this thread?

The following historians have looked in Keynes’ private motives for collaborating:
Other historians making the same claim: Stephen Schuker, “The collected writing of John Maynard Keynes,” 18 Journal of Economic Literature (1980): 124-6; Sally Marks, “1918 and After: The Postwar Era,” in The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Gordon Martel, “The prehistory of appeasement: Headlam-Morley, the peace settlement and revisionism,” 9 Diplomacy and Statecraft (1998), 242-65.

That makes eight. None of this information is new. I already posted it once in this thread. Somehow you’ve managed to miss it. Stop trolling and read up.

anon posted this earlier:

Alan Sharp: “Keynes created the impression that the French…were mainly responsible for the conference’s difficulties over reparations …. In fact it was British representatives, most notably Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, who presented the highest demands….

Anon asks (perhaps rhetorically), among other things, why Keynes threw blame on the French, i.e. rather than on the British representatives, where, according to Sharp, it more properly belongs. Not knowing much of anything about this particular issue beyond what I’ve read here and not having read ‘Ec Consequences of the Peace’, I wonder whether it wouldn’t be reasonable to surmise that Keynes was reluctant to put the main blame on the British reps b/c he viewed his prime audience for the book as a British one and perhaps thought that blaming the Br reps would detract from its being received well, or at least w/ an open mind? I don’t know, just asking…

An understandable proposal I guess, but of course, holding everything else constant and given the German invasion route in 1940, most of that buffer state wouldn’t have buffered anything… right?

I’m confused, doesnt Keynes’ analysis of what would happen with a punitive peace settlement track really well with what actually happened?

Is there some group of historians suggesting that the punitive peace settlement did not create the horrible circumstances that Keynes predicted? It seems weird to focus on his motives–especially in such a speculative way–when his analysis was right on.

Whether or not Keynes pushed for more lenient terms for Germany due to a British affinity for Germans ,a love for one of the German delegation, racism towards Slavs and Latins etc are interesting questions imo..there just doesnt appear to be any evidence to support any of them, I think
But the left often use these arguments (how life experience, personal relationships, racism etc) influence policy
The problems not the line of questioning but the lack of evidence, afaict

Sebastian H

“the punitive peace settlement did not create the horrible circumstances that Keynes predicted”

That is more or less what the anon is arguing, (supported by a good bit of evidence) The argument is, afaict, that it was failure to enforce Versailles rather than its punitiveness that helped created “the horrible circumstances that Keynes predicted”

@ 217

Is the revanchism because the east is poor or because after WW2 Germany part of its eastern territories became part of Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Presumably the Germans in East Prussia and the Sudetenland who were expelled ended up in East Germany and their descendants are more revanchist than west Germans who never got expelled from anywhere.

Minor quibble: Presumably not much rebuilding was needed in Germany after WW1. The War was basically fought in Belgium and France.

My comment is stuck in moderation. So I’m going to try posting this again:

@ 213. You malign me and these other historians because of your fanaticism. You’ve provided no evidence to suggest otherwise. No links. No sources. Nothing. I have shown that there is a legitimate question about Keynes’ acts and motives. My own motives have been impugned from the very beginning.

@ 210. The biography you’re citing is from 1975 and was not written by a specialist. He probably did not know about the new work. The French were interested in security, not harshness for its own sake. They briefly toyed with the idea of an independent liberal Rhenish state headed by liberal separatists like the young Adenauer but in the end opted against such a course.

@ 214. The consensus argues that the notion that the peace was punitive is a myth.

“The peace settlement and its subsequent revisions, viewed from this perspective, represented the most stable arrangement that could have emerged from the contentious peacemaking process in Paris. . . . Yet the broader public, to judge from newspaper opinion and textbook treatment, clings to the impression of a Carthaginian settlement that gave the French too much leeway to play a predominant role in Europe at Germany’s expense.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=zqj-oHp4KsgC&lpg=PA3&ots=5kWWr5Ysxm&dq=%22%20clings%20to%20the%20impression%20of%20a%20Carthaginian%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=%22%20clings%20to%20the%20impression%20of%20a%20Carthaginian%22&f=false

@ 215. Of course it’s not a pressing controversy. That’s my point. Ferguson and his opponents in this controversy are (ab)using history for short-term political ends. The only people who truly care about this topic are historians of Modern Europe. We have to deal with the fact that myths about the peace keep being perpetuated.

Why does this matter? I’ll give you one reason that hasn’t been brought up: the myth of the Carthaginian Peace is used to justify U.S. hegemony. Only the U.S. was/is magnanimous and innocent enough to nurture international organization and lead the world. Europe is vengeful and corrupt. That is the subtext. The myth of the Carthaginian Peace is used as evidence for U.S. exceptionalism. That is why I personally care about this interpretation of the treaty.

as ronan basically says above

Maybe a bit late to remind people of this, but “Germany” didn’t do anything, good or bad. Individual Germans, particularly military and political leaders, made decisions, and others went along with them, enthusiastically or otherwise.

Comparing the conduct of the Western Allies after the two wars, the big change was that in 1919, individual criminals like Hindenburg and Ludendorff got off scot free, while ordinary Germans were subject to collective punishment. In 1945, it was the other way around. I’ll leave it to the pro-Versailles historians to explain the superiority of their preferred approach.

AJP Taylor makes the point somewhere that Hungarians were subject to a punitive peace in the Treaty of Trianon, while most other non-German nationalities in the Habsburg Empire were treated well, simply because the name Austria-Hungary defined Hungary as one of the guilty countries.

For a balanced history of the Treaty and its subsequent reputation, see this article:
http://www.historytoday.com/antony-lentin/treaty-versailles-was-germany-guilty.
Lentin underplays the nuttiness of the process, but the treaty was nutty. It evidently did not produce peace. As Keynes said in his preface, ” If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds.” This was, of course, all too true, as events confirmed.

@ 223. The notion that historians should just cede the ground to the pro and anti-Keynes fanatics engaged in this historically illiterate bum-fight over Keynes’ reputation is laughable. When the dust settles, the origins of the Second World War will continue to be one of the most important questions in all of history, while the question of Keynes’ reputation will continue to command minimal interest. It seems to me that many of you actually believe that historians in the 1960s and 70s started writing about the Peace not because they were interested in studying the origins of the Second World War but in order to attack on Keynes. If that’s what you think, stop gazing at your navel. Your bum-fight over Keynes reputation is not that important. And the notion that professional historians would cede ground to someone with such a warped view of history, where everything revolves around Keynes, is laughable.

This is a question of stewardship. Historical fact may not matter to pro and anti-Keynes fanatics. And that is precisely why they should not be allowed to dictate how the public understands and approaches the question.

@ 224. You are wrong about the absence of collective punishment after the Second World War. That peace was designed to demonstrate to ordinary Germans that they had been defeated. They were expelled en masse, forced to visit concentration camps and extermination camps whether or not they were members of the regime, and were denied aid for quite a long time so that ordinary Germans feel the pinch of defeat. Many died in the winter of 47 because the Allies had purposefully delayed reconstruction. You couldn’t be more wrong about the peace after the Second World War. It was punitive. It was demonstrative. It afflicted ordinary Germans much more so than the elite (few were really tried and apart from Nuremberg, only the Soviets actually produces many convictions).

But going back to the First World War: the German government caused great harm during the First World War. Subsequent German governments were unwilling to acknowledge this fact or make reparations. Instead, they did their best to nurture revisionist sentiment.

@ 226. “In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes quoted and endorsed the German view that the Treaty of Versailles signalled ‘the death sentence of many millions of German men, women and children’. . . . Neither the acute and prophetic analysis published soon after, Jacques Bainville’s Les conséquences politiques de la paix (1920), which has never been translated into English, nor the detailed refutation of Keynes by Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes (1944), succeeded in stemming its influence, though while none of Keynes’ predictions were realised almost every one of Bainville’s were . More recent research contained in two collections of scholarly papers has fared little better. William Keylor, in his contribution to The Treaty of Versailles 75 Years After (1998), and Zara Steiner in ‘The Treaty of Versailles Revisited’, published in The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace without Victory (2001), strove to correct what Steiner calls ‘the misused image of the “Carthaginian” peace’. In The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933 (2005) Steiner repeats that ‘the traditional view’ of Versailles ‘needs to be abandoned’.”

“The war weakened Germany far less than Germany had weakened her continental adversaries. Unlike much of Belgium, north-east France, Poland and the Balkans, German territory was virtually unscathed, infrastructure unimpaired and industry poised to outstrip that of its ex-enemies. By 1921 Germany was producing three times as much steel as France.”

” Versailles was also blamed, inaccurately but obsessively, for Germany’s home-grown ills: for inflation, a consequence of the war rather than of the peace; for hyperinflation, unleashed by the German government’s reckless issue of paper money during the Ruhr crisis; and for the six million Germans thrown out of work by the Great Depression of 1929.”

Have you actually read the article? It contradicts everything else you say.

Roger, that was good stuff. thanks.

If only “the anon” were actually a historian! Then I could engage in some amusing slagging of the entire discipline. Sadly, I agree with roger that I don’t think he is. But I’ll look at some points where he gets things very, very wrong.

“The notion that historians should just cede the ground to the pro and anti-Keynes fanatics engaged in this historically illiterate bum-fight over Keynes’ reputation is laughable.”

Note: there are no pro or anti-Keynes fanatics in this dispute. The people like Ferguson who attack Keynes are doing so as a way of discrediting the current-day policies associated with him, which are what they really care about. Likewise, the people arguing against Ferguson care about a number of things — primarily, responding to anti-gay slurs, and defending those same current-day economic policies. No large number of people involved really care about the actual, historical Keynes to any great extent.

“When the dust settles, the origins of the Second World War will continue to be one of the most important questions in all of history, while the question of Keynes’ reputation will continue to command minimal interest.”

An amusing inversion of values! — caring about contemporary economic policy is unimportant, and no one should be expected to talk about it on blogs, while caring about historical footnotes is all-important. But of course, when the dust settles, all of us are dead.

“It seems to me that many of you actually believe that historians in the 1960s and 70s started writing about the Peace not because they were interested in studying the origins of the Second World War but in order to attack on Keynes.”

Of course right-wing historians purposefully wrote attacks on Keynes. Attacks on him in the 1960s and 1970s were just as relevant as they are today, for the same reasons. There has never been a shortage of academics willing to get ahead with rich right-wingers by writing to order.

That doesn’t mean that all academics who wrote on the subject were right-wingers, or that all attacks on Keynes came from this source, but they’ve certainly poisoned the well. And, specifically, attacks on him that start with him making a treaty deal because of gay sex would need extraordinary scrutiny to determine that they were *not* from this source.

@ 231. You’re making the stuff up about Stevenson. I have his article in front of me as a searchable pdf. Here is where Keynes comes up:

“French policy at the peace conference was contentious from the outset
and was denounced by interwar British and American memoirists ranging
from John Maynard Keynes and Ray Stannard Baker to Harold Nicolson
and David Lloyd George.1 It was defended by its authors, including
Clemenceau himself, and most persuasively by Andre Tardieu.2 It then suffered
a generation of neglect, although in the 1940s there was a riposte to
Keynes from Etienne Mantoux, and Philip Mason Burnett and Etienne
Weill-Raynal made major contributions to historical understanding of the
dispute over reparations.3”

“Keynes alleged at the time
that the French demanded reparations in order to stay in the Rhineland, and
Clemenceau told Maurice Barres that “Germany will not pay, and we will
remain.”56”

That’s it. That’s all. You are lying.

Anyone else think “the anon” sounds like the Del Rey character that would show up every once in a while and destroy threads. (Or maybe all trolls sound the same after a while.)

It’s always interesting, in a certain way, to see posters who utterly fail to grasp the reality that they have no power in someone else’s comment section to command attention, let alone respect, and that therefore they have to be persuasive in some way to influence others. Whether it’s mockery and slash fiction or compact citations and straightforward arguments building on basic decency, there are lots of ways to influence people. But shouting at them at great length in condescending tones…that one doesn’t generally influence any positively.

It’s one of those basic questions: Would I be persuaded by someone arguing against me in exactly this way? Generally not. But people like the anon press on regardless. I’ve decided in recent years that I’m comfortable saying they’re not actually serious about their cause. People who care about accomplishing things pay attention to whether their means work.

js.: Anyone else think “the anon” sounds like the Del Rey character that would show up every once in a while and destroy threads. (Or maybe all trolls sound the same after a while.)

The repeated giving of orders has the flavor (or the odor?) of Scent of Violets, but the overall style isn’t the same. So really, I think it comes down to your parenthesis.

There’s been a lot of that kind of thing lately. Real life beckons ever more enticingly.

Of course.

What I was getting at, however, was the comments policy on CT, whereby the OP has a prerogative to moderate or edit abusive or irrelevant comments on his or her thread. Not all public bulletin boards function that way; many employ an independent editor/censor who performs those duties.

I happen to think that the CT system is superior to other forms in the mentioned respect.

The problems of history are a lot like the problems of journalism: how to legitimately coordinate headline, narrative and fact, so that the last, fairly and accurately reported, can be said to support, or are consistent with in some “objective” sense, the former.

In the ideal case, the headline is just an extremely compact label, which unpacks into shorter and longer narratives, which account for the full array of factual evidence.

The headlines and shorter narratives have a currency, a value as propaganda in shaping the present and future, and a value in the expression of individual and tribal worldviews, which makes the tether to the array of factual evidence, . . . problematic.

Headlines take on a life of their own, in current politics. The rules that might unpack the headline into a factual, historical truth can easily be lost, along with the facts. And, narratives, by nature, are shaped in accord, not with facts per se, but dramatic and moral intuitions; it is the moral truth of the narrative, which gives it power. Factual, historical truth can ground narrative in realism, but that’s not something all of us desire strongly enough, imho.

I don’t know that one can get the “big picture” “right”, without reconciling with facts. I don’t subscribe to the sort of naïve pragmatism or absolutism, which would suggest that a narrative can be “proven” wrong by fact. Narratives are basically moral constructions, and a reasonably supple moral worldview can accommodate many value-less facts, without injury to its central, moral thesis. It is the human impulse to lie that trips up most political and historical narrative; that the architecture of the narrative seeks to distort or ignore or hide facts, is what reveals the narrative to be a lie — an attempt to persuade by deception. The facts, themselves, don’t have that power.

“how to legitimately coordinate headline, narrative and fact, so that the last, fairly and accurately reported, can be said to support, or are consistent with in some “objective” sense, the former.”

There are no facts about Keynes that bear on whether gay people are concerned for the future, or whether Keynesianism broadly is a good idea. That’s what people keep losing sight of. People never took the time to deny Ferguson’s basic premise strongly enough. There is no way to coordinate headline, narrative, and fact in this case, because the headline “Keynes was not substantially influenced by his ‘love’ for Carl Melchior” is not a headline.

“the anon”, if he wasn’t arguing so badly and being a tool, would be doing less damage than Eric, who is more sympathetic and generally seems like a better historian in every way, did. Eric’s post begins with “Apropos nothing at all I thought I might address the suggestion […]” But of course it’s not apropos nothing at all. It’s implicitly in answer to something, and it’s not a good answer, because it implies that there is a factual question about Keynes at issue. If someone like the anon jumps in and disputes that factual question, however badly, well, that’s inevitable.

That’s part of the general professional deformation of being an academic. Someone in the mediasphere is being wrong, so you have to answer, and the answer becomes the kind of answer that you’d give to a student. Not that mockery is better, really; the Bush to Obama transition made me realize that mockery is rather overvalued by the left and easily slips from mockery of power to mockery of the powerless. But it should still be possible, if you have to answer, to answer the real question, not the one that’s within your expertise.

@224:

Except that all the “lost” territories of the *Kingdom* of Hungary, most prominently Croatia, Slovakia and Transylvania, had only minority ethnic Hungarian populations.

Based on style, I would say that anon is clearly not Del Rey or Scent of Violets. He’s just someone who really, really likes the Treaty of Versailles. Sure, the original post was specifically about Keynes and his motivations, but what’s really important is that we have failed to love the Treaty of Versailles enough.

Btw, historical footnote re Lentin: he says in passing that the French suffered the highest proportion of casualties of any belligerent country in WW1. I thought it was Serbia first actually, w France second.

Am in perfect agreement with you, LFC. He may be opinionated on the historical question, but who isn’t. In any case, he made a sufficient distinction between Keynes the historian and Keynes the economist, and it’s not too far fetched that some of the interlocutors here, swayed by one side of Keynes, may have rushed to judgment when it comes to the other. Two separate, though perhaps related, questions.

Whatever the case, and take away the belligerent persona, anon is neither ignorant nor historically naive, as some may have insinuated.

re JQ at 255. Taylor is not reliable on this (and much else). It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1867 because it was a federation of the Kingdom of Hungary (which took in Slovakia, Transylvania, Croatia and some other bits) and Austria (the rest). Hungary had an independent parliament, army, Prime Minister, finances and internal policy. Tisza – the Hungarian PM – had the power to stay out of the war but was gung-ho, as the Hungarian elite had an expansionist agenda of their own.

This is not to support the Treaty of Trianon, although one could note that all parties in central and eastern Europe made large claim to their “historical” lands, and the nationalities – lacking the benefit of forcible assimilation practiced in France and Britain – were so extensively intermingled that drawing boundaries was exceedingly difficult, and drawing one to the satisfaction of all parties impossible.

On collective punishment – yes – but this is the nature of institutions. When a bank is fined for the idiocies of its CEO or a few traders, then collective punishment is visited on its employees and customers, and probably on taxpayers too.

Unsurprised that Taylor is unreliable, like most of the historians I’ve ever heard of, it seems.

OTOH, everything I’ve ever read refers to a declaration of war by “Austria-Hungary”. Is this similar to the British Empire where a declaration of war by the UK government was taken to imply the same by the colonies? IIRC that implication was rejected by Canada in the Chanak crisis, but it was still taken as binding by Australia in 1939.

I was under the impression, under the very complex arrangements of the Hapsburg empire, that the superintendence of the army and navy, and foreign policy in a military (but not an economic, aka commercial, sense) was in the hands of the Emperor/King, and a small common council of ministers, of which the PMs of Austria and Hungary were ex officio members. The Hungarians might have had the power to obstruct, if they really wanted to, but I don’t think there was any clear line of authority, by which the Hungarian PM (or his parliament) could, on his own, stop the Empire from going to war.

re 260 – I’m not an expert, but what I have read implies considerable Hungarian discretion. Hungarian support was certainly essential, and was forthcoming.

Taylor was a diplomatic historian, and he was working on what was known up to the 60s. Since then a lot more work has been done, in the many archives and with various unofficial papers (diaries, correspondence etc) that alter the picture considerably. If I wanted to snark, I could remark that history tends to be a cumulative endeavour, unlike those which are still arguing about simple theories from 150 years ago.

My other point was that, in practice, every member of an institution pays for the faults of its leadership. I am not aware that it would be possible to mulct the senior management of the banks for even a tithe of what they have cost us.

It might, in 1919, have been preferable to punish the military/industrial leaders and then impose lenient terms on Germany, Failure to do so was not entirely a matter of allied choice – the military had pushed the Social Democrats and other non-rightists to the front, and these were reluctant to deal with the right – in part because many shared the same nationalist agendas. The allies were not sitting in Berlin and had, moreover, to deal with increasing chaos and competing claims across eastern and southern Europe.

there are plenty of choices

In an endless chain, where this choice is a consequence of earlier choices, and the consequence of this choice are later choices.

I’m confused. Is JQ arguing for collective punishment of the 1 per cent as payback for the sins of the senior bankers? If so, I’m very supportive.

Millions of Germans were used as forced labor for years after the end of the Second World War. Industry continued to be dismantled and shipped out of Germany even after the start of the Marshall Plan (whose aid was was dwarfed by the cost of reparations). Germany was also stripped of important intellectual property. Isn’t this common knowledge?

The point I made earlier about facts and knowledge still stands. Some of you see facts only as a means to an end.

For some it is a means to a political end (e.g. Keynesian economics). The normative superiority of that end justifies the use or misuse of the facts. Facts are subordinate to norms. In fact, they matter only insofar as they allow us to achieve the desired norms. For others facts are a means to a theory (e.g. the 1919 peace was bad because it was a form of collective punishment, while the 1945 peace was good because it was not a form of collective punishment). The facts are subordinate to the theory. The theory comes first. The facts come later and made to fit like in Procrustean bed. Sometimes it’s not even clear how facts can be made amenable to the theory (e.g. how one would draw some kind of equivalence between one nationalism and a combination of nationalisms). But the formulation itself makes clear that the theory comes first.

This is all somewhat surprising. I was under the impression that pretty much everyone who is left of center in academia today subscribes to some Habermasian notion of deliberative democracy. The truth does not serve a normative end. Truth-seeking is the normative end. If the truth is made subordinate, we end up in the same place as the Straussians (and every other political movement based on the notion of a vanguard). This is why historians are ultimately going to be more faithful to truth-seeking discursive principles than political ideologues or political scientists. Everyone abstracts and generalizes. But some people do it to a point where facts no longer matter.

@272

“I was under the impression that pretty much everyone who is left of center in academia today subscribes to some Habermasian notion of deliberative democracy.”

That may be so for this group here; but the “Habermasian notion,” posed as an ideal, naturally, has had its critics, Jean-François Lyotard, for instance. More importantly, perhaps, aren’t you attributing to “bare facts” (if there ever was such a thing) the status of truth? My understanding of “facts” is that they’re already theory-laden.

You may be right, though, about historians, roughly speaking.

“Smear” makes it sound as if the only issue is the insult to Keynes’ reputation, though you make a case that Ferguson’s greater sin is a faulty model of historical causality. It seems to me, though, that the whole controversy is only possible, because people, generally, have so little sense of history. Americans, in particular, are notorious for their thin knowledge of history, and economists, as a profession, are also notoriously ignorant of economic history. People with very little base knowledge, and no easy reference to trusted sources, are easy to manipulate, easy to propagandize. They have no context, for any of the issues: what was the First World War about? what were the problems of international finance and economics in its wake? how did the Treaty of Versailles relate to the genesis of the Second World War? what was the gold standard about? what are reparations?

Keynes has become an iconic figure, but also an easily dismissed iconic figure, at least on the Right. It may be maddening, but Keynes, for all his legendary persuasiveness, was not, on the record, all that successful in persuading people about the issues that mattered to him most. If it is not to be all about the man, on the most trivial personal level, then, the outline of historical context matters.

This person at the Forbes site also believes that the “Left” is “trashing” “Downton Abbey” because it shows that “Stories sympathetic to virtue, preservation of property and admiration of nobility and of wealth can be told beautifully and to wide audiences.” Um, didn’t Julian Fellowes write the script for “Gosford Park”, which was hardly sympathetic to the rich.

I don’t want to get into a discussion of the TV series (which I only saw in part). But talk about straw men arguments! Previously, such troglodytes as this would have included for mention as among the purported evils of the modern world women’s rights – along with — or leading to — sodomy, religious toleration, and social justice.

The only reason your argument provokes any controversy at all is because it seems to entail the corollary that actually knowing or trying to understand any of the detailed history is itself war mongering at worst, and idle, useless knowledge at best (we’ve got the big picture — war bad — knowing anything else will just lead the right-minded astray or something). It’s that righteously blind corollary that makes the argument, trollish.

If you go back to the Anzac Day thread, you’ll see that I posted something saying, fairly simply that the war was bad. A string of commenters then insisted that if I knew more about the detailed history I’d realise that I was wrong in one way or another. Some argued that the empires on the Entente side acted rightly, others invoked various forms of moral relativism, and others just argued about military strategy in ways that trivialised the issue. So, while your phrasing is uncharitable, I think it’s pretty clear that detailed knowledge of diplomatic/military history isn’t much of an asset in understanding war, and can easily be a liability.

detailed knowledge of diplomatic/military history isn’t much of an asset in understanding war, and can easily be a liability

I suspect lots of people might regard this with incredulity (Anderson @281?), but it strikes me as pretty sound. It’s not unlike discussions of gun control, where inevitably some (often, lots of) people to show up to endlessly dispute what is or is not a semi-automatic, e.g. And that’s awesome, I guess, that they know the relevant minutiae, but it is obviously not useful to a fruitful discussion about gun violence or gun control.

N.B.: The “diplomatic/military” bit is crucial, of course. If you took that out or replaced it with another qualifier, the statement would very likely be absurd or awfully dumb.

280 & 282 remind me of Calvin Coolidge’s return from church on a day when his wife was stuck at home with a cold.

Mrs. C. – Calvin, what was the sermon about?
C. – Sin.
Mrs. C. – Well, what did the minister say about sin?
C. – He was against it.

I suspect lots of people might regard this with incredulity (Anderson @281?), but it strikes me as pretty sound. It’s not unlike discussions of gun control, where inevitably some (often, lots of) people to show up to endlessly dispute what is or is not a semi-automatic, e.g. And that’s awesome, I guess, that they know the relevant minutiae, but it is obviously not useful to a fruitful discussion about gun violence or gun control.

Surely the diplomatic and military history is actually useful in knowing who declared war? I don’t know a huge amount about this topic but what has struck me as odd about John’s line of reasoning is how he thinks the French could have stayed out of the War.

Yes war is bad and I’ll grant him that Britain & the Empire could have stayed out of the war given nobody attacked them. However that wasn’t the case for the French surely? Germany declared war and attacked France. Turkey’s navy attacked the Russians (although the Sultan didn’t actually want to enter the War) and entered the War on the German side.

We can deplore the way the British and French helped themselves to extra colonies at the conclusion of the War and also deplore the fact the British took part but those are seperate questions to whether the French could have avoided the conflict.

anon @269

The juxtaposition of the Marshall Plan and the Versailles treaty came later as American propagandists set out to create a triumphalist narrative about the superiority of U.S. hegemony when compared to a narrative of Soviet rapaciousness and French vindictiveness. Some of you appear to be laboring under that Cold War era narrative. It is,in my opinion, the single most important reason why the Carthaginian Peace myth keeps being perpetuated.

The defenders of the U.S.-led post-WW2 international order do not need to rely on any characterization of Versailles. They talk about the benefits of a relatively open trading system, the encouragement of (W.) European integration, etc. They argue that the post-WW2 rules and insts. were so beneficial to at least the relatively rich Western countries that the rules persisted even after ‘US hegemony’ seemed to wane in the 80s’ (cf. Keohane, After Hegemony).

anon @272

This is all somewhat surprising. I was under the impression that pretty much everyone who is left of center in academia today subscribes to some Habermasian notion of deliberative democracy. The truth does not serve a normative end. Truth-seeking is the normative end. If the truth is made subordinate, we end up in the same place as the Straussians (and every other political movement based on the notion of a vanguard). This is why historians are ultimately going to be more faithful to truth-seeking discursive principles than political ideologues or political scientists. Everyone abstracts and generalizes. But some people do it to a point where facts no longer matter.

I know some political scientists who would not take kindly to the bolded sentence. This opens up too big an issue for a comment box, but suffice to say that there’s a case to be made that historians and political scientists would benefit from more interchange and fewer reciprocal put-downs.

@Bexley France could have stayed out of the war (or rather, the French government could have kept the French people out of the war) by not entering into an alliance with Russia (or rather with the Czarist regime in Russia).

My point is that the kind of explanation of war that treats it as the outcome of a whole system of imperialist and nationalist rivalries, based on mistaken beliefs about the value of territorial expansion and the idea of war as the school of the nation, is going to give you a totally different view to one that starts the clock just after Sarajevo, and tries to nail the guilty party(ies). Detailed evidence of who said what in which chancellery, and which army was mobilised when, is useful in the second case, not in the first.

But even in the second case, hardly anything about the War that’s been discussed here over hundreds of comments was unknown to those at Versailles, although, just as today, they disagreed about how to interpret it.

I suspect the real argument to make is that Versailles didn’t matter that much. Weimar wasn’t necessarily unworkable. Third Republic France had its own extreme right, but it survived until it was toppled from without. If the Great Depression never happened, then Weimar might have survived indefinitely, and World War 2 averted.

“Maybe the REAL problem was bad economics! ”

Finally, we are in agreement. Angell got all this right in The Great Illusion, but no-one, or not enough people, listened.

“The current war, in Seeckt’s opinion, would end in the temporary exhaustion of all belligerents. It would be followed by a period of economic struggle. After that would come a final and decisive armed conflict. The task of German policy must therefore be to prepare for the next war ….” — Goerlitz, “History of the German General Staff,” at 174.

With such men, who thought like this before the war had even ended, in charge, what hope was there for Germany? or for Europe?

297: thanks for picking up that gauntlet. France had its ass seriously kicked in 1870, and had zero assurance it wouldn’t happen again next time Bismarck had an intractable domestic issue. I defy anyone to responsibly imagine having a duty to France and NOT seeking a defensive alliance. The map had its own terrible logic.

… I must also say that 100 years later, the casual invasion of Belgium as a mere stepping-stone – the 5-power treaty “a scrap of paper” – still has its power to shock. Recall Disraeli on Bismarck: “his idea of progress evidently was seizing something.” That “idea of progress” took two world wars to dispel … for a time.

Without having read all the comments, may I suggest that based on a recent reading of Keynes on Dr. Melchior the issue they were discussing was not the treaty per se but ending the naval blockade of Germany. To which the relevant American comparison is not the Marshall Plan but Douglas MacArthur (a man I despise) insisting that he would not go along with demands to block the import of rice to prevent the Japanese from starving because he had just hanged Japanese generals for doing that sort of thing and didn’t intent to hang himself.

@Peter T Even allowing for my obvious communications problems, I can’t see how you read

the outcome of a whole system of imperialist and nationalist rivalries, based on mistaken beliefs about the value of territorial expansion and the idea of war as the school of the nation

as inconsistent with the position you lay out in the next para, and as an assertion on my part that the war was the result of “BAD THINGS, and results from SILLY/EVIL actions by evil/stupid people” (CAPS in original).

By contrast, lots of my antagonists in this thread (and, some of the time, you) seem to me to be saying precisely that the war happened because the German leaders or sometimes just “Germany” were silly/evil.

“Should we then blame the economists?”

I’m not sure if this is meant as a rhetorical question, since the answer seems to me to be an obvious “Yes”. I regularly write posts blaming contemporary austerians for the bad effects of contemporary austerity, and no one (except austerians) seems to complain that I shouldn’t make judgements of this kind. Similarly I blame 1920s austerians for their bad policies (though they have the excuse, relative to their intellectual descendants, that they hadn’t yet seen the Depression, or the success of Keynesian policies after 1945).

I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations for bad economics, and I don’t see why there should be one for imperialism. To repeat, I’m not talking about individual blame, but about the set of ideas that brought about the Great War and are still (admittedly in a less virulent form) dominant today

Coming back to your central theme, you really don’t have to convince me that the German ruling class (and much of the population) were delusional believers in military power and the benefits of empire, or that they wanted war in 1914, and might have gone to war regardless of what others did. What I want is evidence that their Russian, French and British counterparts didn’t
* suffer from the same delusions,
* act in ways that made war more likely ,
* pursue imperial goals once the war began, and
* repudiate any idea of a negotiated peace

I’m beginning to think you haven’t even read those books, anon. If the best argument you can make is “Here’ s a 1000 pages of reading, it’s in there somewhere,” then you don’t actually have an argument. The few details you did offer were completely demolished by Eric, which doesn’t really inspire me with much confidence your claims about the historical literature.

The point about Versailles being a success because it was renegotiated is right there in your links. If you don’t think it, then maybe you shouldn’t link to it.

I don’t have an anti-Versailles argument. As I pointed out before, I think the badness of Versailles is overrated. It’s hard to see the actual words I write when the red mist descends, I suppose. My actual claim is that the pro-Versailles argument advanced by you and your links is an incredibly shitty one, one that requires dodgy accounting of the costs and benefits.

I like now how the failure of the interwar system is now the fault of the American taxpayer. I can’t imagine an argument better calculated to make isolationism look attractive.

I think it’s pretty clear that detailed knowledge of diplomatic/military history isn’t much of an asset in understanding war, and can easily be a liability.

Jesus. I am just trying to imagine exactly how much ridicule would be (rightly) heaped on someone writing for, say, the National Review, who said something like this.

In fact, this is the kind of thinking that got the US into Iraq in the first place. Actual knowledge about the Middle East was a sign that your opinion wasn’t to be trusted. That’s exactly why, for example, the State Department Arabists who described the chaos that would follow an invasion were sidelined and ridiculed.

“I think it’s pretty clear,” the Quiggins of the right wing said, “that detailed knowledge of the Middle East isn’t much of an asset in understanding what we should do about Iraq, and can in fact be a liability”.

Is there, incidentally, a good reason why all JQ’s arguments about WW1 don’t also apply to WW2?

It was, after all, a huge tragedy. Surely there’s enough blame to go around? If we blame the Germans (and the Japanese) exclusively, aren’t we just echoing Allied wartime propaganda? Shouldn’t we just say that it was a tremendous waste of life and that all sides were at fault, and leave it at that?

Didn’t the British and French, for example, act in ways that made war more likely? They actually declared war on Germany, not the other way round. And in response to an attack on Poland – far more remote than Belgium, which is right on England’s doorstep. Couldn’t they just have left Germany alone to fight its local war in central Europe? There wasn’t even a danger of Russia getting involved: Russia was on Germany’s side.

Did they suffer from delusions about military power and the benefits of empire? Yes they did – the French in particular, as was proved in May-June 1940.

Did the Allies pursue imperial goals once the war began? They certainly did! (Stalin in particular but the US as well.)

Did the Allies reject attempts at negotiation? Yes, they did. Hitler would have been quite satisfied by a negotiated peace in 1939, or even in 1940 and the British wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, the Allies decided on an aim of unconditional surrender – far more rigid even than in 1918.

Recent comments on this thread, esp. ajay @312, are in danger, imo, of muddying important distinctions betw. WW1 and WW2 in terms of origins.

Even if one accepts Peter T’s argument that German elites were more ‘delusional’ than British and French ones (and I think there is something to that), the fact is that historians are still arguing about the origins of WW1. Books continue to be published on this, two in English just recently: Clark, The Sleepwalkers and McMeekin, July 1914. The approaching hundredth anniv. no doubt has something to do w this, but it also shows that there is still controversy among historians.

By contrast, there is not, as far as I’m aware, much controversy about the origins of WW2. Contrary to what ajay says, Hitler would not have been satisfied by a negotiated peace in ’39; even if Br and Fr had said “sure, take Poland,” Hitler would not have stopped w Poland; he had made his aims quite clear in ‘Mein Kampf’.

As Hobsbawm wrote in ‘The Age of Extremes’ (1994), p.36: “The origins of the Second World War have produced an incomparably smaller historical literature than the causes of the First, and for an obvious reason. With the rarest exceptions, no serious historian has ever doubted that Germany, Japan and (more hesitantly) Italy were the aggressors.” The implication is that historians are not so unanimous about the identification of clear-cut, unambiguous aggressors w/r/t WW1, and even if the weight of scholarship points to German and Austro-Hungarian decisionmakers as being most at fault, there is still room for debate, as the new Clark and McMeekin books (at least from what I gather w/o having read them) suggest.

To paraphrase Hobsbawm (Age of Extremes, p.36), in the simplest terms there is a two-word answer for who or what caused WW2: Adolf Hitler (Hobsbawm goes on to say “answers to historical questions are not… so simple” but the point is that the statement ‘Hitler caused WW2’, while it may be simplistic, is accurate enough). There is no comparably clear, succinct answer for who/what caused WW1 that is or would be unanimously accepted by historians.

Anderson @315:
Well, we’re getting into counterfactuals here, which is always dicey. (Plus I’m writing this somewhat hungry, not having eaten lunch, which is prob. not a good idea.)

That said, re your: “Britain & France to stay neutral [in WW1] and let Germany cut Russia down to size. Sure, you then get a more powerful Germany, but look at all the non-dead Belgians, French, and Brits!” Assuming this counterfactual scenario is plausible — and I’m not sure it is — one can make a case, I think, that it would indeed have been preferable to the 1914-18 war that actually occurred. Some 750,000 Britons and well over a million Frenchmen would be alive instead of dead (drawing these figures from memory). Germany would have “cut Russia down to size,” no doubt forcibly displaced and perhaps killed lots of civilians, but would there have been the equivalent of the Holocaust? No. (I don’t know whether you’re assuming in this scenario that the 1917 revolution in Russia still occurs.)

In 1939, there is a fascist, deeply racist regime in Germany driven by an ideology to which the word “evil” fully applies, bent on pan-European conquest and the establishment of Lebensraum in the east, meaning the permanent occupation and conquest of not only Poland but at least the western part of USSR; despite the fact that USSR and Germany are allies at the start of the war, you don’t have to have a hugely sharp crystal ball to see that Hitler will eventually turn on the USSR, nor does one have to wait for the General Plan to know this, b/c the policy of Lebensraum in the east is stated in Mein Kampf. Nazi Germany was qualitatively different (i.e. worse), in terms of ideology and aims, than Wilhelmine Germany, and no 20/20 hindsight is required to reach this judgment; surely it was available to clear-eyed observers by the late 1930s.

So yes, I think 9/1/1939 is somewhat different than 8/1/1914.

Peter T @309: Britain and France did pursue their imperial ambitions during the war.

Very true, but there is an argument that doing so was the least bad option (and also a distinction to be made: it’s not the same as saying B & F entered into the war in order to pursue imperial ambitions).

Consider the Sykes-Picot agreement, which assigned much of the predominantly non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire to B & F as protectorates. B & F had not planned for war with Turkey, did not want war with Turkey and would have far preferred Turkey to remain neutral, were only at war with Turkey because Turkey had deliberately come into the war on Germany’s side: but it would have been unreasonable for them not to consider what should be done if Turkey were defeated. There were, I think, four possible outcomes.

(1) Set the former Turkish peoples free. The various Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Assyrian, Shia, Sunni, Alawi, Yezidi, Druze, Christian and Jewish elements of the former Ottoman states resolve their manifold differences by peaceful negotiation, and settle down to form tranquil, prosperous, honestly-governed, democratic states, respecting minority rights in an atmosphere of universal religious tolerance.

That would, of course, be the preferred liberal outcome. Sykes and Picot might be excused for thinking that a more likely outcome would be that the various Arab, Turkish etc. elements would resolve their differences by methods more traditional in those parts, with very illiberal consequences, and the survivors forming corrupt, ill-governed autocracies, with little mercy for the minorities on the losing sides.

(2) Leave Turkish rule in place, even if Turkey lost. That would have advantages: there would be no European Imperialism to be blamed, and the disadvantages of Turkish rule – traditionally considerable – might well be less than those of anarchic liberation.

(3) Remove Turkish rule and install B & F mandated rule to keep order. As an essential preliminary, get B & F to agree, well in advance, the boundaries of their areas. That is of course what they did.

Can anyone think of a fourth option?

316: “In 1939, there is a fascist, deeply racist regime in Germany driven by an ideology to which the word “evil” fully applies, bent on pan-European conquest and the establishment of Lebensraum in the east”

Leaving aside the considerable anti-Semitism in ruling circles, I think the 1914 Allies might have recognized something very close to the Kaiser’s Germany in that quotation. France and Britain, when it came down to it, probably went to war because they feared the alternative was to let Germany pick off its neighbors one by one. Something similar was the motive in 1939.

Just to ajays comment..yes you do have to deal with all of those questions, and try and work out why the Nazi regime took the form it did, and you do have to develop some sort of convincing argument as to why they were so aggressive, beyond merely stating evil as an answer..not that I have answers to any of those questions, but they are legitimate. And as LFC noted, the comparison is a little disingenous
Bruce a number of genuine military experts (Michael O Hanlon) and regional experts (K Pollack) to name two, did support the war. You (and I) might not neccessarily agree with their positions, but they are/were considered experts .. (and Bernard Lewis!)

Ronan(rf): genuine military experts (Michael O Hanlon)

LOL

Well he wrote a book on the topic Bruce!..But John Keegan did aswell, iirc

Ronan(rf) @ 327: sorry if it comes off that way, it wasn’t actually my intent. I just found it bizarre how normal pre-WWI Hitler seems, according to his biographers.

wrt ajay’s point at 310: having more information will only help you if your analytical framework is efficiently using the information you have. If you think “2+2 = 5” then verifying that each of the purported 2s is in fact rightly and properly a 2 to the limits of measurement won’t help you spot your problems.

Josh, no need to apologise, I was only joking really. I thought it was an interesting comparison

“And clearly we’re not going to settle it on this comment thread.”

Oh, come now, we’re barely over 300 comments in. ;)

… I took Ajay to be more satirical than arguing a strong case for Allied culpability in 1939. (Though the specific choice to go to war over Poland did, and continues to, draw some criticism from non-Stormfront types.)

And then, there’s always Gandhi’s advice to the UK in 1940:

“I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption. Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans. The only difference is that perhaps yours are not as thorough as the Germans. If that be so, yours will soon acquire the same thoroughness as theirs, if not much greater. On no other condition can you win the war. In other words, you will have to be more ruthless than the Nazis. No cause, however just, can warrant the indiscriminate slaughter that is going on minute by minute. I suggest that a cause that demands the inhumanities that are being perpetrated today cannot be called just. * * *

“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

When this thread is finally closed, may I suggest a topic for a follow-up thread? Cold War apologetics!

I think all your dads should duke it out.

Niall Ferguson was quite a prominent supporter of the Iraq war, and was treated as an expert, IIRC. As were Kissinger and Bernard Lewis.

Lewis, at least, knows far more about the Arab world than I ever will – the problem is that a lot of what he knows about the world in general is wrong, and that means he draws the wrong conclusions in his area or expertise.

Bruce W, you’ve greeted each of the pro-war expert names popped up to you with a LOL or similar. I found their claimed expertise similarly laughable, but that was because they made pro-war arguments very similar to those in this thread, so I knew I could disregard them. Presumably that’s not your reasoning. Can you explain your assessment procedure in a bit more detail?

j.c.h. @339
ok, I do not disagree w that. More one than consideration ‘explains’ Munich.

“I thought part of what “explains” Munich was a desire, at least on the French side, to buy time for re-armament.”

Yes, I know, this is the western interpretation. Everywhere else (and not just in Russia, afaik), it’s interpreted as the green light to Germany for Drang nach Osten, and nothing else.

345: not sure what you’re saying. It was indeed their obligation, but neither Britain nor France intervened to defend Poland. Were they still buying time for re-armament? Fine, if you say so. What do I care. Every culture is entitled to its own myths.

“Declaring war is indeed a strange way to buy time.”

Not necessarily, if it’s a phoney war.

“What did Germany have in the west in September 1939?”

Well, I don’t know any fancy historians, but wikipedia has this:

At the Nuremberg Trials, Alfred Jodl said that “if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.”[5]

General Siegfried Westphal stated (“World at War” – France Falls – Thames TV), that if the French had attacked in force in September 1939 the German army “could only have held out for one or two weeks”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War

JQ

I was laughing in particular at the name Michael O’Hanlon. I think expertise ought to be real and not just made for television. People with real credentials, but dubious ethics are more problematic. Niall disqualifies himself. For me, the hiding of information about Iraq was of a piece with hiding expertise. Ymmv

351: thanks for the link! Good review. Makes the books sound more definitive than they probably are, but that’s journalism for ya.