The 20 year armistice

I wouldn’t disagree, but offer two points. First, the civilian governments of the main agressor (Germany) couldn’t have been more different in 1914 and 1939–the great similarity being the highly professional army that both governments could use. But secondly, a counterfactual: had the Nazis not taken power in 1933 (at least possible), how likely is it that there would have been a major war in Europe a few years later?

From a discussion of Zola’s novels in a recent issue of The New York Review:

The punishing final pages of Nana make clear how entangled these assignments were. The year is now 1870. Nana lies dead, and a crowd of people, chanting “To Berlin!,” agitates for war with Prussia. Readers of the novel upon its 1880 publication would have felt choked by the irony of a jingoistic mob: still fresh in their memory were the ignominious defeat to the Prussians and the resulting collapse of the empire.

As far as I can tell, continuous warfare has been the European norm. The Hundred Years War and The Thirty Years war were not in themselves exceptional; their names delimit the scope and range of their respective endeavors, but such conflicts were practically endemic at the time. It would be a stretch to liken them to sporting events, but it’s worth noting that battle back then wasn’t nearly as lethal as it has since become.

Perhaps there was a common opinion that war was good clean fun. Up to a point it was an elite obligation; nobles were necessarily trained combatants, armored and well equipped, no match for a disorganized rabble. Machiavelli and Cromwell demonstrated the superiority of disciplined commoners, but it wasn’t until the advent of industrial technology that an agreement was reached that this wasn’t fun any more.

Mark Twain foresaw the mayhem of WWI in “A Connecticut Yankee”, describing dynamite turning combatants into “homogeneous protoplasm”, and of course the horror of the ensuing mayhem did not discourage its survivors.

Faulkner:

;For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…

I’ve long thought of these conflicts as one long war, with the Cold War that followed as a falling out between the victors.

There’s some value in this line of thought, of course, but only so much, I think – for one, a lot of the parties change sides mid-term, on this version – Italy, most obviously, but Turkey/Ottoman Empire drops out completely, Japan enters, etc. And, there is an earlier peace with the Soviet Union that needs to be dealt with. Japan then ends up on the side of the US after the war, w/ Germany split. So, I think looking at it this way is helpful for some aspects and obscures a lot of others. This suggests that it, at least, shouldn’t be taken as the whole truth or the central thread. (I suspect it’s very heavily a British way of looking at things. That’s not necessarily a bad way, but certainly a partial way.)

So with the American Civil War, which I now refer as the Slaver’s Rebellion… it didn’t end in 1865 nor did the Civil Rights Era of 100 years later end it. It seems to be a general agreement that the USA won the war but the CSA won the peace, influencing the course of history in defeat right up to the present. Maybe an end is in sight but given the schismatic nature of the 2020 election and the recently concluded second impeachment trial, I have my doubts.

E.H. Carr famously referred to the period 1919-1939 as “the twenty years crisis” in his (somewhat controversial) book of the same name. There is a lot of literature on Carr and on that book in particular, but for a short overview, which doesn’t take into account the recent lit. (but you don’t need that), see the chapter on Carr in Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (1986, pb 1987).

Although he doesn’t use the phrase “20 year armistice,” Eric Hobsbawm treats the two world wars as basically one long war in The Age of Extremes (1994).

Bad Jim: “Perhaps there was a common opinion that war was good clean fun. Up to a point it was an elite obligation; nobles were necessarily trained combatants, armored and well equipped, no match for a disorganized rabble. Machiavelli and Cromwell demonstrated the superiority of disciplined commoners, but it wasn’t until the advent of industrial technology that an agreement was reached that this wasn’t fun any more.”

I think that you are assuming that there was not a massive amount of death and destruction visited on everybody in the zones of those wars.

I’ve also sometimes seen it described as “The Second Thirty Years War”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thirty_Years%27_War

I’m not sure how many rulers might have switched sides between the two major parts of the first Thirty Years War, but it certainly wasn’t the same set of belligerents throughout the whole thing, and there was a moderately long peace in the middle.

Correction: I think I left out the main title of the Traverso, which is Fire and Blood.

Given that it is the only constant on the axis side of the two wars, these contemplations would have to be about Germany and Austria, specifically. IMO the problem then becomes not so much one of whether post-WWI Germany was treated too harshly, leading to a reaction that ultimately brought the Nazis to power (as was at least implied by some of the history I learned in school), or too leniently, leaving it strong enough to have another go, but instead one of governance.

At least to my understanding one of the key problems of the Weimar republic was that the administrative, economic, and military elites of the second Empire was left untouched in 1918-1919, when moderates allied with reactionaries to defeat communist uprisings, which they saw as the greater threat. Perhaps understandable under the immediate impression of Russia, but long-term fatal because those elites were able to undermine democracy.

The most obvious exemplar of this was Alfred Hugenberg, who controlled half the German media and fed the population a steady diet of antisemitic and nationalist propaganda, but others are police and judges systematically biased towards nazi activists and against unionists and left-wing activists. Point is, if the centre-left had been a bit more far-sighted in 1918-19, a proper revolution in the sense of exchanging elites could have taken place, Germany might have been set on a completely different course, and there may not even have been a WWII, not least because many people already tried to build institutional stabilisiers (e.g. League of Nations).

Admittedly, that leaves Japan, and it may be naive to think that the course of history could have so easily been changed. But my point is that institutional change may be underappreciated by the Fochs of the world.

@
”The proximate cause of Hitler’s rise was the austerity policy of the Bruning government, which worsened the Depression”.

and isn’t that a lot like the idea that –
”The proximate cause of Trumps’s rise was the policies of the Obama government?
While history has proven –
that with ”a little bit of luck” –
the Germans AND the Americans –
instead of choosing some ”Right-Wing Madmen STUPID – as their so called ”Saviors” could have picked completely different… and very peaceful ”Saviors” –

Barry, I’m certainly not suggesting that wars weren’t miserable for the rabble, but it’s my impression that the decision-makers rarely lost their enthusiasm for the game.

AlexSL 19: You are mostly correct, but: “the administrative, economic, and military elites of the second Empire was left untouched in 1918-1919”

If they really had been left “untouched”, why did they hate the republic so passionately? They certainly didn’t feel “untouched”, to the contrary they felt threatened and supported the fascists in the hope of being able to turn back the clock.

Foch’s quote is supposedly a comment reported in Le Monde at the time of the signing. Certainly that’s the cite in most of scholarly history books; the earliest I know of, though, is in Churchill’s 1948 “The Gathering Storm” (and hence certainly unreliable – as the old warmonger said “history shall be kind to me, for I shall write it”). Churchill knew and admired Foch and was citing him in the context of denouncing appeasement.

Apocryphal or not its more interesting for the more specific prophecy of the rest of the quote:
“The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through northern France and head for the Channel Ports, using them as a base against England”. (Williamson Murray; Jim Lacey (2009). The Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War, p209)

Matt @7 suggests that “the one long war” view is “a British way of looking at things.”

Though I’m not at all sure about this, I think that may be right, at least to some extent. It prompts the further speculative thought that the British experience in the First World War, more than a century later, may still occupy a place in the cultural imagination of the Anglophone world that the French, German, Russian, Australian (despite the 1981 movie Gallipoli), American, Austrian, Italian, Serbian, etc., experiences of that war don’t. This has something to do with the British poets of World War I and, perhaps, with the especially heavy impact the war had on Britain’s upper class. (“One quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students under the age of twenty-five who served in the British army in 1914 were killed.” – Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p.26)

In terms of seeing the two world wars as “one long war,” this could cut two ways, depending on the temporal perspective. At the time, i.e. in 1918 and immediately after, it probably seemed as if the experience that had just passed was unrepeatable — and in fact, for the British and for others, the experience of the Second World War was different in some important respects from the first. On the other hand, from a longer perspective, it’s not hard to see how 1914-1945 appears, at least from the Western or Anglophone view, as one destructive block of time, explaining the popularity of the references to the “thirty years war” or, as Hobsbawm puts it a bit more accurately, “the thirty-one years world war.”

AND –
doesn’t it make y’all… wonder?
That unlike in the US in the 21 Century –
IN 1920 in Germany – die Putschisten even managed to overthrow the government –
and forced it to flee the Capital?

AND only ”after a few days, when large sections of the German population followed a call by the government to join a general strike and most civil servants refused to cooperate with Kapp and his allies – and ”the Coup” finally failed –
it became possible that the Weimar Republic survived –
and that a very, very untalented Austrian Painter –
after getting rejected by the Wiener Kunstakademie –
and full of hate for the Jewish Professor who rejected him –
could become the ”Monsterous Führer” –
who broke ”the peace”

Ahem? –
The… the… ”armistice”?

For many centuries, war was the only alternative to monastic life to prove you were a 100% committed Christian. No wonder Arabs called the Christian lands the Realm of Warfare.

War was never a game that was costless either to elites or to the masses – despite its apparent popularity.

Perhaps relevant is that, while Everest has a 4% fatality rate for climbers, it is only the 10th deadliest. The two two, Annapurna and K2, have something like a 30% fatality rate, and have each been climbed by a few hundred people.

All activities, including war, have to be very deadly indeed before a certain type of person stops considering them a valid form of recreation.

https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/8000MeterPeaks

Was the Weimar Republic trying to finance its operations by unlimited money creation (in the 1923 hyperinflation)? I thought they were trying to undermine expectations that agreed reparations could be financed and paid to the allies, who in turn were obligated to service enormous debts to the U.S. (A neglected sidelight is the role of India in financing British war debt in both wars.)

Ambivalence about the barbarous relic of the gold exchange standard played a large part in the economic catastrophes of the interwar years. Wasn’t the need to pay reparations in gold marks a factor in the hyperinflation? Not to mention the General Strike in Britain that followed trying vainly to restore the pound to its pre-war gold value and the suffering induced in France by sticking so long to gold.

Austerity may have made the Depression worse, but what made the Depression in the first instance was a sustained deflationary spiral in the dollar associated with the mechanics of the gold exchange standard.

“The wars of 1914 to 1945 were over the transition from pre-industrial politics to industrial politics (the Kaiser was very much pre-industrial politics; fascism and Nazism tried to marry pre-industrial political forms to industrial power).”

There’s another link too. That concept of “lebensraum”. Wasn’t, by any means, a Hitlerian invention. Had been around in late 19th cent.

The logic even seemed sound. Military power comes from population thus military size. Population is limited by food supplies. Therefore more land is required to grow more food to have more people and a larger military. Germany didn’t have/couldn’t overseas colonies so look out Poland and Ukraine.

That’s very much a cod version of the argument.

The thing is that once there are artificial fertilisers then the logic doesn’t work. Fertilisers are, in one squinted view, the invention/creation of more land. The Haber Process, that even allowed Germany to fight WWI, largely destroyed one of the arguments for both wars.

Tm,

I don’t see a contradiction between untouched and threatened. In my view they remained in power and wealth as they were pre-1918 but felt threatened by the rise of the labour movement (in all its forms) and wanted to remove the risk of being dislodged from power and having to share more of their wealth.

Power here meaning “we own the media” or “we run the police force”, not “no social democrat ever gets to be chancellor while we run the media, universities, army, administration, courts, and police force”.

I’m not sure how much it affects your thesis, but the Armistice in Europe’s west did not stop a lot of fighting in its east. Poland and Soviet Russia were fighting nearly as soon as the German army left the front; the Russian Civil War ran through 1921; the fighting in Anatolia that set up the Turkish Republic did not end until 1923.

I’d disagree with some of characterizations that Steven t Johnson makes in 44, but think that the points themselves are useful for understanding how perspectives on the war(s) are often ultimately parochial. My favorite example was from a early post-Soviet Russian history textbook I looked at in 2000 or so (for kids around 12 years old, I think), that talked about how, in 1939, Germany invaded western Poland, and the Soviet Union “expanded its sphere of influence” into eastern Poland, as if by a coincidence.

RichardM @ 35, “All activities, including war, have to be very deadly indeed before a certain type of person stops considering them a valid form of recreation.”

made me laugh out loud.

“Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Adam 48: Relevant in this respect seems the Soviet attitude towards Germany. I don’t know whether this is a consensus view but some historians say that Stalin was so unprepared towards Germany because he considered Poland (let that sink in!) the greater threat for the SU. And in fact Poland had given the Red Army a bloody nose in the 1920s and territorial disputes betrween those countries were far closer to home than the perceived German expansionist ambitions of the 1920s and early 1930s. It seems that Stalin really didn’t expect Hitler to break the treaty and move against the Soviet Union after the division of Poland between Hitler and Stalin.

and about:
”it struck me that the ‘interwar’ period 1919-39 would better be described as a 20-year armistice”.
– while the period 1919-39 would better be described as a 20-years: ”Hedonism, sex and fear” –
(as the Guardian once titled)
explaining why ”Weimar Republic” is STILL ”en vogue”…
and as we just prepare another film about ”the Roaring Twenties” –
who in the world? –
besides a 74 year old French ”Marshal” – would call Josephines ”Un vent de folie” dancing in a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace –
in 1927 –

”armistice”???!

@52
“How does the civil war concept apply to WWI?”

Two domestic factors driving Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg in particular to war in 1914 were nationalism and ‘socialism’ (the demands of the industrial working classes – sometimes allied with rural labour). The socialists of the Second International thought that working class solidarity across boundaries would prevent war – and elites feared that they were right. More immediately, in Vienna – and even more in Budapest and Berlin – war was seen as as a way of consolidating existing power structures sufficiently to enable a staatsstreich’ an internal coup against the socialists. The Kaiser was fond of scribbling “First the French, then the Socialists” on memoranda (sometimes he reversed the order). In St Petersburg, the regime was shaky, and could not afford to alienate the slavophile and fervently nationalist urban middle classes – small in number but very influential – which it saw as its bulwark against peasant and proletarian discontent. Hence its refusal to back down against German demands (Dominic Lieven is very good on this). And, of course, the minority nationalist demands cut across boundaries, and were often in mutual sympathy – where their claims did not conflict.