By April Wilson was pulled into the war anyway
I guess we're not doing spoiler alerts anymore.
One wonders what would have happened if Zimmerman had flatly denied the telegram. Without his admission, there was no evidence of its authenticity apart from the say so of British Intelligence. (This isn't from Deluge, it's from an ancient recollection of Barbara Tuchman.)
I have an ancient recollection of Barbara Tuchman about how much effort was put into getting another source for the telegram that wasn't through British Intelligence. That is, I think they (U.S. operatives who were told where to look by British Intellignece) swiped a copy from the Mexicans to avoid just that problem.
Makes sense. I have to say I'm inclined to endorse Mossy's thumbnail of Wilson. I feel that as a Brit I ought to take into account the fact that Anglophobia was a perfectly respectable position to hold in 1917, but still I find it hard to find much to love about him.
IIRC, they (the British) also delayed a whole ship ostensibly to search for contraband but really to keep the one particular German official (their ambassador to the U.S.?) who knew America well enough to know just how stupid Zimmerman's offer was from being able to communicate that to other Germans.
The other thing that struck me about the introduction was that it left me wondering whether Tooze is an ex-Trot. Identifying uneven and combined development as the key to understanding the 20s is a fascinating idea, but it came as a bit of a surprise to me because I've never encountered the concept except in Marxist analyses, and even then mostly Trotskyist ones.
Trotsky developed the idea on the back of work by Alexander Parvus (Israel Gelfand/Helphand) at the beginning of the century, and although various other people nodded at the idea, it was only in his own stuff that it was a central concept.
3 is correct. The full story is:
Start of the war, the RN dredged up and cut all Germany's telegraph cables. The German foreign office still needed to be able to talk to its embassies overseas, including in the US, so it put a workaround in place where it would send traffic via the US embassy in Berlin over a US diplomatic cable to the State Department and thus to the German embassy in Washington. The Zimmermann telegram took this route, and was then sent on by the German embassy, encrypted, over commercial telegraph to the German embassy in Mexico.
Now, the British had pinched the German diplomatic cypher off Wilhelm Wassmuss, "the German Lawrence", when they went after him in the Middle East. And the US diplomatic cable went through Britain, and the British were tapping it. But they didn't want to reveal the cypher break to anyone, and they didn't want to reveal to the Americans that they were tapping US diplomatic traffic (though the Americans should have guessed). They solved the second problem by getting an agent in Mexico City to get a copy of the relayed telegram from the Mexico City post office; and fortunately it was encrypted in a different older cypher, so they were able to break it (and demonstrate breaking it to the Americans) without revealing the Wassmuss pinch.
On the Zimmerman thing, Tooze pointed out in several places that plenty of Germans were already afraid of a U.S. dominated world. How they could combine that view of U.S. power with "and we can persuade Mexico to attack the U.S." is something I don't get.
Both sides held back for fear of antagonizing the US: Germany restricted submarine activity, and Britain didn't execute all the [unspecified - I would've liked more detail] fiscal measures it had planned against the Central Powers.
Which sort of torpedoes the Mahanian view that if you've got sea control and a fleet in being you can control international trade and then victory is yours. Yes, it would be interesting to have known more about this.
He wanted American pre-eminence, not equality; what he wanted from his peace policy was Europe exhausted and broken, and America supreme by sheer moral authority.
What this reminds me of is Molotov's smug comment during the Battle of Britain that "The British put their losses in one column and the German losses in another, and set them against each other; but we put them both in the same column and add them up."
Horrifyingly, this is essentially still true today
Why wouldn't it be? until the last ten years or so it's served white men very well.
9: Germany, as will become apparent, was not a unitary state. This is as close as I get to a Big Thing about international affairs: that we have a tendency to think of states as unitary, as in "France wants this" and "Japan is naturally afraid of that" but they aren't really ever, and it's only a useful shorthand under some circumstances, and it gets less useful during (among other situations) time of war, when states start to become less and less unitary, especially in modern war because we've spent the last forty years developing a way of waging war that relies on disruption, initially of the command structures of Soviet army-level formations, but now of entire governments.
12: No spoilers. But, while I understand states aren't unitary actors, I sort of figured that inviting somebody else into the war would have taken the support of a relatively broad set of German actors and that maybe somebody would have pointed out how fucknuts the idea was.
14: I don't know that it would actually - control of the war was held fairly tightly, and top-secret diplomatic initiatives would have been held even more tightly.
Wiki gives an interesting bit of background - Germany had been trying to promote war between Mexico and the US for some time. It cites the Ypiranga Incident, with which I assume you are all familiar. I certainly am, as of eight seconds ago.
I didn't know Robert Ludlum was writing that long ago.
Quiz concept: Robert Ludlum Novel Or Cocktail?
Germany had been trying to promote war between Mexico and the US for some time.
Which would have been a very easy job if Mexico wasn't so sure it couldn't win. When the Telegraph was sent, Pershing was on Mexican territory with 10,000 troops and a future tank commander carrying pearl-handled revolvers.
Fully endorse 13.
My knowledge of the Ypiranga incident is limited to the Wikipedia article, but on that tenuous basis it doesn't look so much as an attempt to start a war between Mexico and the United States, so much as a bet on the outcome of a Mexican civil war in the hope that Germany would be able to claim privileges with the new government. That it was kiboshed by US intervention would have annoyed the German government but it doesn't seem to have been the desired outcome.
I read the Tuchman book long ago, and don't really remember, but what kind of dope do you have to be to think that Mexico could have launched something significant in the midst of its civil war?
If you're pretty sure that the US is going to come in on the side of the Entente anyway, what do you have to lose? It's the old D&D adventurer's maxim: if you don't know what to do, set something on fire.
Great post Mossy C. Terrible day for conmenting, plus I haven't picked up the book and would be relying on the always reliable "this is something that was maybe in this book."
In large part the book is about two powers which were notionally very democratic and modern but crippled by bizarre antiquated constitutions ill suited to their modern rile. One, the massively weaker one, was subject to control by overaggressive army officers willing to gamble on moonshots to break it out of its crappy strategic position. The other was overwhelmingly the most powerful country the world had ever seen, but subject to control by ignorant aggressive nominally populist racist yokels who were stunningly irresponsible and short sighted. To date, only one of these powers has been destroyed.
So, racism is safer than militarism?
On German strategy, I believe the (correct) strategic assessment was that the German were fucked unless they could figure out a way to have the US stop financing their opponents. All sides in Germany understood that but the very stupid Kriegsmarine (mostly) managed to choose one of the dumber ways to accomplish that goal.
"Christ, what an asshole. The level of special pleading is extraordinary."
But quite typically American. Certainly symptomatic of something going a lot deeper than just Wilson's attitudes.
13, 19, 22: Thanks.
14: What Tigre said, basically. From the German POV. the US was essentially in the war already, any gamble that might buy more time could make sense.
24: The US could have financed the Entente as much as it wanted, but it would have done the Entente no good at all unless the financing could be converted into US goods and shipped safely across the Atlantic. Hence, unrestricted submarine warfare.
And I think unrestricted submarine warfare makes sense from the German point of view in a way that trying to get Mexico to invade the U.S. really doesn't.
27. Yeah, sure. But if you start randomly sinking the civilian shipping of a major power with a huge navy, you'd be an idiot if you didn't expect it to bite back eventually (for values of 'eventually' equating to 'fairly soon'.)
It is possible that the Kriegsmarine may have thought that the Americans would join the sea war but not get involved on land, but I've not seen any suggestion that this was so, nor does it seem like a very good bet, even if your government is running out of credit.
I think they probably thought that there would be a sequence of events like this:
a) Start unrestricted submarine warfare
b) Sink lots of ships
c) Supplies from US effectively interrupted
d) US declares war on Germany
e) US starts working on expanding its ludicrously tiny standing army
f) Shitloads of newly-raised American troops join in the war in Europe
And that in the several-month gap between d) and f) they would be able to win the war decisively. This is, after all, what they tried to do in spring 1918 - knock out the British and French before the Americans arrived. Plus, if you've managed to achieve step c), it's going to take even longer before you get to step f) because it's not going to be easy for those troops to get from the US to Europe.
On Ajay's 12 (so whooshing head-on towards him?), I think I can reconcile that with the idea of war being the health of the state, etc. The process of mobilisation means getting actors involved in politics who weren't previously involved. Although they are mobilised in support of the same goal, victory, they bring with them their own interests, prejudices, and perspectives.
To mobilise means to increase the size and therefore also the diversity of the coalition supporting state policy. This is generalisable, too.
Question for Mossy, or somebody who knows more about this period than I do: Tooze asserts that Wilson regarded the Entente blockade as illegal. But under what convention is it illegal to blockade the enemy. Britain maintained blockades of France to the limits of the available technology in both the 7 Years Way and the Napoleonic Wars; more immediately, within living memory the Union had blockaded the Confederacy. I can see how Wilson, as a Confederate sympathiser, would have found this distressing, but not how, as President of the United States, he could regard it as illegal.
33: IIRC it was partly that it was a "distant blockade" - the Fleet wasn't stooging around outside German ports as in the close blockade of Napoleonic times (because mines, U-boats etc). And I think it was also more intrusive, as in Britain retained the right to seize cargoes heading for neutral ports if it suspected they were going to be shipped on to Germany.
Let me add my appreciation to the heap, Mossy.
I was surprised by Romania; that they'd stayed out of the initial conflict, and that by 1916 their intervention was viewed as pivotal. It was odd to see them go from "the great hope" to "by the end of the year they were refugees in Moldova". I don't think those battles are something I've ever heard discussed.
For my part, the reading (at least so far) has gone quickly. The introduction was (to me) a slower read than the actual book chapters. I'm looking forward to the discussions of chapters 3 and 5--the contents of chapter 5 proved almost entirely new to me.
34. I suppose that's it. Sounds like a negligible argument in the 21st century, but it might have been stronger in 1917. We have lost a lot of inhibitions since then.
33, 34: IIRC ajay is right, especially 34.2. Before the war the German Staff thought they would be able to get significant imports via neutrals. 'Holland will be our windpipe' Schlieffen (?) said. That didn't happen, so the intrusiveness of the British blockade was somewhat new.
36 -iirc (and a quick Wiki confirms) there was a pre-1914 convention on seizing property of neutrals which Britain encouraged and then immediately disregarded completely once war broke out.
Plus, the British blockade of during the Napoleonic Wars really angered the U.S. and I'm fairly certain was never regarded as legal here. The British just didn't give a shit until we had more ships.
35: Thanks.
If you look at a map of Romania and the Central Powers in 1916, the 'refugees in Moldova' outcome' isn't surprising. An absurd fiasco; the British liaison mission spent its time blowing up (allied, Romanian!) oil wells so the Germans wouldn't get them.
38: Just like sterling could absolutely no exceptions whatsoever always be exchanged for gold, until the first hour of the war when it couldn't be.
41. It's outside the scope of this discussion really, but it's interesting how on both sides the imaginary conventions of restricted warfare were dumped long before it became clear to onlookers that this was going to be the worst war ever. The powers that were seem to have understood that all bets were off from August 1914.
By not just invading Belgium but imposing a punitive indemnity on them for being in the way, the Germans really set the tone.
And murdering anybody who fought back.
42 is very true. There are all sorts of quotes to that effect from the very start: 'This will be the worst since the Thirty Years' War' 'The lamps are going out all over Europe'. Anyone paying any attention knew it would be carnage.
Anyone paying any attention knew it would be carnage.
Which is part of what makes the slightness of the opening incidents to astonishing. I mean, it's been commonplace forever that the horrors of the war made no sense in the context of the incitement, but it's even more stark when you realize that "the horrors of the war" weren't only apparent in retrospect.
I mean, I think hoi polloi expected a splendid little war, like when Washingtonians rode their carriages out to watch the First Bull Run, only to race home in terror.
like when Washingtonians rode their carriages out to watch the First Bull Run, only to race home in terror.
They thought it would be like Pamplona...
There are all sorts of quotes to that effect too- people rushing to enlist so they would have time to do their bit before it was over; troops, presumably the sons of people displaced in 1870, marching under banners reading "Les Alsaciens qui retournes chez soi".
Not much of that by 1916.
made no sense in the context of the incitement
But did make sense in a context where the Germans were surrounded and outnumbered, and thought they couldn't survive without a world-state of their own. The impossibility of competing with America was part of that too.
Well, I think people (on all sides) thought it would be quick, and that it was being fought in a noble cause: "splendid little war" makes it sound like they expected it to be almost bloodless, and I'm not sure how true that is.
49: I was looking at the Franco-Prussian War as a likely basis for assumptions about the Great War, and the sources (compiled here) are treating civilian deaths from war-spread disease ion the total, which is interesting in light of a passing comment I read the other day, which stated that the Spanish influenza pandemic should be considered part of WW1.
Anyway, the consensus seems to be about 85k KIA, plus perhaps another 100-125k military deaths (POW camps, disease, accident). That's on a basis of 2.1M men at arms. Civilian deaths are almost entirely on the French side, and seem to be about 60k directly from battle/siege, and another 3-500k from disease and privation. Actually, wait, another source says 200k German deaths, half from smallpox spread by POWs. Whoops. Looks like prewar populations were ~38M and ~42M. The wiki chart of French population shows a small but visible dip during the war.
And, except for the first battle of the Marne, which since it involved weaponized taxi cabs was a close thing, it easily could have been a quick (if still bloody) war.
Hence the kicking of the Belgians for delaying troops needed in that battle.
Except, would the first battle of the Marne, if it had gone the other way, have knocked out the Entente? From what I read, for it to have worked, the Germans would have had to have weakened the Eastern Front so they could have had more troops in the west. Thus, they needed a complete win or Russia would have had an open door into Prussia. But if the Germans had taken Paris, the French might not have surrendered right away and the British could have still mobilized.
Apropos of 42, sort of, have y'all seen this propaganda poster?
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/38221
51 is a good point. Foch seems in retrospect to have been tolerably confident that he could hold his position, but that may have been mostly bluster. The British cabinet was divided over whether to go to war anyway, so presumably if France had fallen the Grey faction would have been ousted and they would have negotiated on the status quo, leaving Germany free to kick Russia around the field.
53. If the Marne had gone the other way, would the French have had anything left to fight with?
I don't know the whole disposition of their army, but if they had a enough troops so be sending a bunch of guys in taxis, they must have had something left.
As far as I know, the German diplomatic overture to Mexico was standard balance-of-power stuff that had been going on in European wars since forever: if you know you are about to gain a powerful enemy, try to make common cause with a neighbor of that enemy to weaken/distract the enemy. Their reasoning was something like:
1. We need to resume unrestricted submarine warfare to cut off supplies to the Allies, or we are screwed.
2. USW is likely to bring the US in on the side of the Allies.
3. If the US does come in, it would be useful to have a neighbor of theirs attack them to distract them and keep them from shipping lots of troops to Europe.
4. The US only has two neighbors, one of which is already in the war on the Allied side.
5. Mexico has a bunch of historical territory that is now part of the US which they might want back, and a bunch of resentment over various military interventions in Mexican affairs that might be inflamed.
6. Mexico!!!
Of course, Zimmerman wasn't counting on the message becoming public, or how the US public might react to what he was proposing.
57. I'm sure they had something left, but you don't call on taxi drivers if your logistics are solid. Where would they have retreated to? The Loire? That would have exposed their entire northern seaboard and pretty much guaranteed Brexit from the war.
58. If they reasoned like that, no wonder they lost the war. They might as well have asked Andorra to invade France.
They may have, except Andorra can keep a secret.
That would have exposed their entire northern seaboard and pretty much guaranteed Brexit from the war.
Except that I thought the main British foreign policy goal in Europe was to stop any single European power from being able to do that. They found a way round in World War II.
More controversially/ridiculously, I think that the scenario in 55 was not just possible (though once we're in hypothetical land obviously who knows) but would have been objectively on net A Good Thing (even though the German general staff weren't nice guys).
But I have long admitted to being Central Powers curious, maybe unjustifiably. Hard not to favor hypothetical outcomes with a quick peace when we know that the actual result of that not happening was beyond horrific.
even though the German general staff weren't nice guys
If you want to be willfully contrarian about it you could argue that the general staff were a lot less influential in German politics in 1914 than they later became. I have no idea what the terms of a negotiated peace in early 1915 would have been, except that they would probably not have been good news for the African continent, since on the record Germany was (Leopold II always excepted) the most brutal of the colonial powers and France the least, not that that's saying much.
OT: Is there a word -- in, Internet cliché would have me say, German, but the obliquely-interacting emotions at play suggest that maybe there is something to be found in the disused poetic treasuries of Chinese or something else non-honky-related -- for the way one feels when an old contact reaches out "to catch up" and one wearily responds to make arrangements, expecting another goddamned waste of a cappuccino, and then one idly Googles said contact and realizes that in the interim he or she has risen to a position senior enough, in an institution important enough, that one ought to wear a jacket, and possibly a tie, to meet? Something that suggests the physical discomfort of strangulation while alluding to the social discomfort of "Wait, what is this? No, it's probably just to ask for contact introductions"?
the general staff were a lot less influential in German politics in 1914 than they later became.
Yes, absolutely. And the German socialists and others who were reasonable later were about as reasonable then, only without the taint of having arguably lost the war by not bitterly pursuing it until the last drop of blood.
My preferred alt-hist is the first Moroccan Crisis. Germany attacks while Russia is still in shambles because the Japanese war. There are hints Schlieffen was scheming with the foreign ministry to do that, and he just might have pulled it off.
one ought to wear a jacket, and possibly a tie, to meet?
I'm surprised you would ever meet someone in anything less than a jacket and tie. My image of you is profoundly shaken.
Anyway, thanks to this reading group, I now think the best of all outcomes would have been a negotiated peace in 1917, as we see in chapter 3. By then all the belligerents had made massive concessions to their working classes, and were sufficiently bloodied to abandon business-as-usual.
69 is also true BUT even a negotiated settlement in early 1917 would have left racist donkey Woodrow Wilson and the braying "populist" yokels of the US Congress (all in pre-FDR mode) in charge of the world, so things could have still gone to shit quickly.
braying "populist" yokels of the US Congress (all in pre-FDR mode) in charge of the world
That particular problem is still with us today. I'd settle, personally, for just not having WWII. Baby steps.
Since we're doing fanfic, what would Teddy Roosevelt have done? From what little I know of him, I like him a lot, but am not sure how much substance there was behind the awesome. My favorite story about him is how he prayed during the Civil War for God to 'crush the Southern troops to powder.' In hearing of his southern mother. Very Tigrismo.
59.2: Or, on the other side, ask Romania to attack the Central Powers:
In 1915, Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Thomson, a fluent speaker of French, was sent to Bucharest as British military attaché on the initiative of Lord Kitchener to bring Romania into the war. Once there, he quickly formed the view that an unprepared and ill-armed Romania facing a war on two fronts would be a liability, not an asset, to the Allies. This view was brushed aside by Whitehall, and Thomson signed a Military Convention with Romania on 13 August 1916. Within a few months, he had to alleviate the consequences of Romania's setbacks and supervise the destruction of the Romanian oil wells to deny them to Germany.
Both sides did it, though admittedly, the Allies were in a much better position to provide potential help to Romania than the Germans would have been with respect to Mexico.
71 would be a good start. Not having fascism, or at least not having it spread beyond Italy, would be even better, and would have been perfectly possible with a negotiated peace in 1917.
The October revolution would almost certainly not have happened. One of my discomforts with Tooze is that he seems to think that Lenin only had to open his mouth and the Bolshevik party fell into line. Not so. He had great difficulty getting the April Theses accepted, and if there had been a real prospect of negotiated peace the Central Committee would have followed Zinoviev and Kamenev (not, pace Tooze, nonentities in revolutionary circles) in rejecting them.
Because I have nothing substantive to add at the moment, I'll say that while house-hunting (is there a less gaggy term?) I found that Liberty St. in my town has a special sign noting its name was changed from German St. I knew downtown in the big city those sorts of changes were marked, but I'm glad we do it too.
72: He wasn't even 7 years old when the Civil War ended.
The best contemporary experience would have been either the First Balkan War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lule_Burgas
or Mukden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mukden
basically, incredibly violent, but decisive, and over.
I was made to say my prayers when I was seven. But he wasn't in office in 1917, and if Wilson had been able to finagle a negotiated peace he would have been totally marginalised.
71 -- good point. My fanfic assumption was that America got a lot better at damping down the braying yokel factor during and immediately after WWII, so that it's not directly comparable to our situation now (though we're trending back to total braying yokel control).
Or, put differently, even with a negotiated peace in 1917 the US might have been so incompetent at international management and economic management that we get WWII anyway. But it sure would have been a hell of a lot better than what we got.
Or something. I need to stop commenting. But 72 is a great question. What would hypothetical President TR have done differently?
I say: Good TR would have enthusiastically backed the Allies in all ways, and by joining the war, by 1915, increasing the chances of bringing it to an end more quickly (through negotiation or otherwise). And then built an actually-viable international settlement based on something other than Wilson's vision of the US controlling everything while doing nothing.
Bad TR would have gotten charmed by a young Winston Churchill and crappy American soldiers, not ANZACs, would be buried at Gallipoli.
I'd settle, personally, for just not having WWII.
To me this begs the question that I have to assume is the main topic in all advanced ethics classes: When do people stop trying to go back in time and kill Baby Hitler? That is, somebody born in 1920 obviously wants to go back and kill Baby Hitler because they were there in the 1930s and had some idea of the future they wanted and that WWII obstructed. But in the future, and I think not too far from now, a generation will be born that is unable to meaningfully conceive of an alternative world history without WWII and thus if they get a time machine, they would probably do something pointless with it. Probably related to gambling or the stock market.
Somebody stole my enobling forms again.
78: Roosevelt ran for the Repub nomination 1912. If he had been in office...
And TR, unlike Wilson, had actually for real mediated a peace in a desperate war. Admittedly not one he was fighting in, but still.
81 They'd probably want to go back in time and kill baby Trump.
Really great summary Mossy. Wish I had time to read the book and participate meaningfully in the discussion.
There's still time Barry! It's actually much easier reading than I remembered.
It's better bath reading than I'd expected too, logistically I mean. You can flop the heavy side over the edge of the tub and it doesn't get too heavy. I mostly read it at lunch, though.
I've just been too busy for a lunch bath.
I've probably said this before, but I think that WWI is overrated as a cause of WWII. It's obviously a cause, but no Great Depression, no World War Two.
I think you need World War II, a Great Depression, and either no time machine or a time machine that is not available to the first few generations born after Hitler's death.
Co-sign 90. The 21 Years' Truce was only true in Hitler's mind.
Wikihistory is fun and short.
Well I guess 90 is true, but WWI changed the world so massively that it's kind of hard to think about it as "causing" WWII. I mean if there had been a peace in 1915 or early 1917 there's no way you get anything that looks like WWII, right?
But even assuming WWI, I think part of the point of the book is that if the Americans hadn't (broadly speaking) fucked up international management, there might well not have been WWII even without the Great Depression, and the GD itself would have been less likely.
92: I don't think that's true. I mean the thing about the 21 Years Truce being only in Hitler's mind. It was and is a pretty common opinion even among not-Nazis.
95: And I think that opinion is false. There was not a single war that paused and resumed 21 years later: there were vast changes in between, there were not cold hostilities in between, there was no inevitability to the second war.
I don't think you need to say it was inevitable to say they were related, but there most certainly were cold hostilities in between, even if not all around for the same parties as in World War 1.
But you need not only to avoid WWI, but any Great Power war. Is there a plausible counterfactual where this is avoided altogether? The temptation to repeat the Franco-Prussian war would always be there for German hawks.
I don't know how you'd characterize the whole process of German rearmament such that it wasn't considered cold hostilities.
Wasn't it a reasonably common opinion that Versailles went too far and that German rearmament was understandable ?
Yes. But that's why I think you can call the process hostile. France was trying to stop Germany from rearming for reasons that are also understandable.
I have no idea what either of you are arguing now.
That were was a more or less continuous set of hostile actions between France and Germany between 1918 and 1939.
And, more broadly, that World Wars 1 and 2 are in some fundamental sense connected.
Aside from having the same first and middle names.
Ah. 105 is clearly true. 104 is sort of true depending on how you define "continuous." Clearly at all times France was concerned about a potential German threat but there was a lot of fluctuation in that relationship.
But with all that said 96 is also clearly true, depending on how you define "cold hostilities." WWII wasn't close to a necessary consequence of WWI or even the Versailles Peace. It was a consequence of the bungling of that peace.
I have no opinion about whether or not the Versailles Peace could have been unbungled or not given political realities of the time, but I don't think I need to assert WWII was a necessary consequence of WWI (because I don't think that) to show they were connected.
To be more explicit, I'm not certain that after World War 1 there was a possible condition of the world that would have been mostly acceptable to a large enough set of political actors in Germany, France, and the U/SA/SSR/K* that it wouldn't have been violently resisted by one or more of them.
* I maintain that reusing the 'U' saves electricity.
They were connected! Done. Now let's talk about more important stuff like what would hypothetical fantasy President Teddy Roosevelt done in power in 1915. Or we can talk about Mireille from French in Action's nude scenes, I'm fine with either one.
I can't really google that stuff from work.
WWI was a necessary but not sufficient condition for WWII, because only after the name "World War I" was already taken would it make sense to call anything "World War II".
They're connected by marketing. It's like Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
I don't get your point.
Well, if there's one thing I have learned from my reading of alternate history, it's that even the tiniest change to our history would result in far more popular and efficient dirigibles.
Drive-by from New York to say that the above thread is very interesting, and now I have an incentive to actually read the book.
Oh, god, I have to start reading this now.
117: Wait, you're in New York? You said and I forgot. This is the worst week ever for a meetup, so I can't plan anything, but that's really annoying and you should be in New York again on a better week.
Tooze should get some turntables and then he could be DJ Wunzend Tooze
Or we can talk about Mireille from French in Action's nude scenes, I'm fine with either one.
I know, right? When I found out there were nude scenes of the sexist woman in the history of televised language learning, I though it was too good to be true!
It's genuinely mind-blowing, including the fact that I didn't know about it until yesterday. I'm trying to figure out how I can justify purchasing the movie from Amazon (apparently this movie) without angering my wife about a needless purchase. You are not helping, sensual cover art!
Look at yourselves
As I expected the reading group has descended into the usual counterfactualism based on top-down diplomacy, geopolitics, and war. Game of thrones.
Causes of WW II?: Mass production, mass literacy, mass communication, technological improvements in transportation, global science, early feminism and racial identity movements, rapid increases in agricultural efficiency etc etc
And global finance capitalism, financial imperialism based on the maturation of economics as a science, the ability to project future earnings and productive capacity...Tooze. Who can loan? An era of total war pretty much demands a Keynesian economics and control economy, as global as possible.
The connection between liberal capitalism and the petty bourgeois and counterfactualism and general speculative and fantasy thought patterns was studied of course by Lukacs. Between the wars.
I've seen the clips somewhere. Wish I remembered where. But it would be nice to see the whole movie so I could pine after her for a bit before she takes it off.
Right. Unfortunately it looks like the movie is famous directors coming up with imaginative visions of opera arias which frankly does not sound super great, yet still is a must own b/c Mireille.
very nice summary of complex writing, thanks mc.
WW wrote an article for the Antlantic in 1901 about reconstruction that I'll look at eventually to get his version of how horrible the Yankees were.
I'm traveling, will have more to say in later installments.
I agree with 109. If you (or Tooze) decide to blame the collapse of the postwar hemi-demi-semi order on Wilson, you have to explain why Wilson's first move was to try to get (e.g.) a "protectorate" over Armenia, why the French and British and Japanese continued their imperial projects as it nothing had happened, why they quickly joined to give tacit support to the German Right to quell the Bolshevik threat, etc. ad nauseum.
Remember that the people in the US who prevented joining the League of Nations were at least as much the VSP's of their age (Lodge, for example) as the "howling unwashed." Wilson killed himself to try to establish such an order, and yet he was a flaming racist. On the other hand he was also the leader of the progressive movement.
Perhaps later chapters explicate these and other conundrums. I am very suspicious of "history" with simplistic explanations.
In the meantime, I suggest "Paris 1919," which is about how a "peaceful postwar order" was never going to happen (though that is not its explicit thesis). Imperialism, rapacious capitalism, screaming nationalism, suppression of the left were all ongoing from the moment the guns fell silent.
League of Nations didn't matter much, and indeed the Euro imperialists took it up with enthusiasm b/c it suited their goals, and also because a lot of people believed in the positive part of Wilson's message. What mattered was (a) pumping enough money into the world economy to avoid the dread deflation and collapse, while keeping things stable enough to succeed (b) having the United States as the world's most powerful country credibly commit to actually doing stuff.
The problem with the 20s wasn't that we didn't get a league of nations, it's that we got a USA that wanted to be the most powerful country in the world, including militarily, but then didn't put in the resources necessary to ensure that the most powerful country was actually behaving responsibly. Among other problems the security problems were exacerbated by the relentless US demand for debt repayment -- much of the desire of France to eg reoccupy the Rhineland was that they didn't have much choice given the debt bill. And even that could have succeeded had the US been willing to actually support the idea of keeping the Germans down instead of just having the French do it to repay the US. But that's just one example of a lot of failure.
Paris 1919 is fun but gossipy and stupid.
Anyhow, a better, more accurate version of the above is coming once people have read the book in those parts and can summarize it, as opposed to my hazily-remembered version.
It is, and the book's not actually stupid. It is gossipy. It's also by Lloyd George's granddaughter (?) and let's face it, Lloyd George was a giant cock.
re: 119
Yeah, as it happens, I'm not sure I have much free time anyway. My one free day was going to be tomorrow, but now, not so likely. I might have one of Wednesday or Thursday evening free, but not 100% sure.
I am liking the bits of New York I've seen so far.
Resurfacing in my distant timezone:
I'm not certain that after World War 1 there was a possible condition of the world that would have been mostly acceptable to a large enough set of political actors in Germany, France, and the U/SA/SSR/K* that it wouldn't have been violently resisted by one or more of them.
Fair enough. The core of Tooze's later argument is that there was such a condition of the world, especially if it had included debt forgiveness and credible military deterrence from the US, like RT was saying.
WRT continuity between the wars
1. I should have said there weren't cold hostilities before the 1930s.
2. Tooze mentions in his conclusion, and argues at length in Wages, that WWII was qualitatively different from WWI. Mobilization starting in the 1930s was far more intense, and the war was fought far more desperately. Treating them as essentially a single war is deeply misleading.
I don't doubt that at all. That's pretty much the establishment story for what happened after World War II. What I don't see is how you get the U.S. domestic political backing for that after World War I. That kind of stuff was never popular with the masses and I think only worked because World War II terrified the elites enough that nobody of any consequence was going to run on some kind of "America First" platform. And maybe that wouldn't have been enough without the commie stuff.
134: I wouldn't call them a single war. For one thing, Asia was completely different. But I think much of WWII was still impelled by the same security dilemma as WWI (e.g. Germany's neighbors sought allies out of the very real fear that Germany could pulp them while Germany kept trying to increase its strength because the alliance [or potential alliances, depending on when] could crush it making Germany's neighbors even more threatened, etc.).
123 Fanfic is fun, Bob!
Causes of WW II?: Mass production, mass literacy, mass communication, technological improvements in transportation, global science, early feminism and racial identity movements, rapid increases in agricultural efficiency etc etc
I think that is arguably the ultimate cause of WWI, maybe WWII too. The state grows vastly more powerful, and states are still in the habit of going to war. Sooner or later they get in a big one, and you have WWI, if not in 1914 then some other time. (What you're getting at with feminism I'm not sure.)
An era of total war pretty much demands a Keynesian economics and control economy, as global as possible.
Yes. And the peak of the welfare state is non-coincidentally I think, in the Cold War.
The connection between liberal capitalism and the petty bourgeois and counterfactualism and general speculative and fantasy thought patterns was studied of course by Lukacs. Between the wars.
Interesting. Book recs?
What I don't see is how you get the U.S. domestic political backing for that after World War I
That's the rub.
much of WWII was still impelled by the same security dilemma as WWI
True: Tooze's key argument is that US commitment could plausibly have resolved that dilemma.
Well, yes. The U.S could do lots of stuff. Like put a man on the moon or make Mexico build a wall.
Yes. Most of them were ok. Admittedly all of them were ones who had bothered leaving the country, so.
I have both Paris 1919 and Between the Wars on a playlist.
We push out the ambitious ones so we can take their Cheetos.
studied of course by Lukacs. Between the wars.
Interesting. Book recs?
Well, History and Class Consciousness is the classic, Raymond Williams I think works with it in City and Country, e.g. Dickens was one of the first to regularly use forms like "The house glowered as he walked by." Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination talks about the rise in figurative language in "realistic and naturalist" work after the 1830s. I got Russell Jacoby on utopias on my TBR list.
Lots of stuff. One way to express it is that "enchantment" wasn't lost with secularization (I think Weber?) but displaced or sublimated or even maintained but with a denial of the sacredness attached.
Disenchantment ..yeah, Weber, but wouldn't give him that much credit. I mean, Nietszche. But my variation, god not original, is instead of (but yeah also) psychoanalysis or Wicca I look at economics, liberal progress, technology, categorical optimism.
Just a vague meme I keep rattling around as I watch the (residual isn't strong enough) animism in Japanese culture, mostly.
70s Cale is essential. I might like Vintage Violence, Fear, and Sabotage better. Maybe. Paris 1919 is warm.
I really liked the degree to which Tooze situates Wilson - and even Clemenceau, I DID NOT KNOW he personally fought in the US Civil War on the good side - in the history of southern racism. A big part of his point is that a federal government capable of living up to his foreign policy aspirations is also capable of relaunching Reconstruction, and you know, that's kind of what happened - it was the 101st Airborne that took James Meredith to class. Later in the book [FORESHADOW!] we'll see that it's basically a myth that "Wilsonian iidealism" had any commitment to anti-colonialism or anti-racism at all, and in this context this should be no surprise at all. He was very keen to avoid any possibility that Jim Crow would be brought up as an issue in an international forum with some welly, which foreshadows Malcolm X's effort to do just that in the 1960s.
It also struck me as very much a world systems school history, which is seriously rare in the anglosphere.
I was really interested by the opposition and resolution Tooze sets up between a League/UN vision of global security and a NATO one (roughly). People tend to see the UN as nice (if ineffectual), but Wilson's vision of the League was distinctly un-nice - a way of restricting everyone else's independence while not actually committing to security guarantees for anybody.
Clemenceau's vision of a US/UK/FR military alliance to back it up, keeping the NATO-ish integrated command structure and the EU-ish economic agencies in being, seems startlingly contemporary and vastly preferable. This also reminds me that I knew basically nothing about French foreign policy of the time other than that they wanted to screw the Germans, period. Tooze's embedded argument is that the two structures are complementary, and perhaps that's why we made it through the cold war?
1. I should have said there weren't cold hostilities before the 1930s.
But there were intermittent hot hostilities, and everybody expected more.
Asia wasn't totally different either. Japanese intervention in Manchuria was a common thread; also I think you could make an argument that that Japanese strategy in the 30s was responsive to ongoing European shenanigans. Tooze hints at this without expanding on it.
Bob is right about Vintage Violence, but I would put Paris 1919 above Sabotage, probably on a level with Fear.
why the French and British and Japanese continued their imperial projects as it nothing had happened
Not entirely - you've got three very different imperial projects happening there and none of them were unaffected by the First World War. In the British Empire you've got the continuation and acceleration of independent feeling among the white Dominions, and the acceleration of local elected government in India (at least in British India, not the Princely States) under the various Government of India Acts. From the point of view of much of the official community in India even pre-war, there had been a period of "British occupation" (yes, they used that phrase in public) in the 19th century, which was now giving way to a gradual transition to Indian rule - the end state being something looking a lot like, say, Canada, with India as a self-ruling Dominion.
In the French Empire the idea of a civilising mission was much more powerful and the idea of independence or even self-rule wasn't accepted even as late as 1944 (Brazzaville declaration) - at most, individual colonials might qualify for French citizenship.
And the Japanese empire was different again.
Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity sphere, please
(which makes me wonder whether the EU should be considered the Greater West European co-prosperity sphere)
(still giggling at smackharbour)
I think you could make an argument that that Japanese strategy in the 30s was responsive to ongoing European shenanigans.
(I really want and need to read up on China in the 20s and 30s)
Not really, unless very indirectly. China had gained a large level of independence by the end of WWI, and was in a development and industrialization mode. Western involvement was diplomatic, investment, and especially arm sales, US to Chiang, USSR to Reds.
Wiki:
China's industries developed and grew from 1927 to 1931. Though badly hit by the Great Depression from 1931 to 1935 and Japan's occupation of Manchuria in 1931, industrial output recovered by 1936. By 1936, industrial output had recovered and surpassed its previous peak in 1931 prior to the Great Depression's effects on China. This is best shown by the trends in Chinese GDP. In 1932, China's GDP peaked at 28.8 billion, before falling to 21.3 billion by 1934 and recovering to 23.7 billion by 1935.[39] By 1930, foreign investment in China totaled 3.5 billion, with Japan leading (1.4 billion) and the United Kingdom at 1 billion.
But the warlordism, civil wars, fractionation, and political chaos were a thing all the way to 1949, and if Japan deserves any explanation for its aggression, it would be about protecting its investments etc from Chinese threats.
Japan in China 1920-1945 is mostly about Japan vs "China"
131
It is indeed all the gossip, but my guess is that most of it is true gossip, not National Enquirer gossip.
133
The core of Tooze's later argument is that there was such a condition of the world, especially if it had included debt forgiveness and credible military deterrence from the US, like RT was saying.
Americans didn't want to take up that role, explicitly refusing to participate in deterrence and to forgive debts. Americans had been very reluctant to enter WW1 until the Germans did the Lusitania and finally the Zimmerman telegram. America did what America has always done and still wants to today: go out and kick ass and take names, then go home. I would guess most Americans still don't want that role, if you believe Sanders and Trump.
Trump is actually the perfect American stereotype (as true and untrue as any other stereotype). He is suspicious of foreigners, doesn't know much of anything about them or their countries, doesn't want to be involved in their problems, but wants to make "deals" with them to our own profit.
And people were wondering at the contemporary relevance of a WWI book.
147.1: Agree. The activist/isolationist foreign policy divide seems to reflect the domestic commitment to public goods.
Wilson's failings seem to be almost perfectly mirrored by the successes of the FDR/Truman administrations.
Huh, there's some sort of TV production (Canada-France, but it seems that many other national TV services were involved) of Paris 1919 (the gossipy one, not the avant garde one.
Also 147.4: I've long thought that the EU and NATO wouldn't have worked without each other, but don't know remotely enough to support that.
156. I too have wondered about that, but it's difficult to form a firm opinion given that both organisations have only happened once.
One thing that comes across from Tooze is that Clemenceau was by far the most creative of the major players, even when his proposals were a bit dodgy. That had not occurred to me because in British history books he's always portrayed as this intransigent old git who had outlived his usefulness.
156: I was thinking more of the UN, and NATO plus the EU. Roosevelt's 4 policemen concept was along those lines and very close (deliberately?) to the post-WW1 French thinking.
157: yes, the Brits were much better at finding problems than solutions.
So far loving Vintage Violence, but the cover image may be too disturbing for me to actually purchase.
and even Clemenceau, I DID NOT KNOW he personally fought in the US Civil War on the good side
Is this in Tooze? I can't find mentions online - Wikipedia says he graduated medical school 13 May 1865 and went to the US as a reporter thereafter.
162: Googling "Clemenceau" and "civil war" doesn't bring up any indications that he fought in it. The Encyclopedia Britannica has this:
Having completed his studies, Clemenceau left for the United States, where he was to spend most of the next four years (1865-69). He reached New York City at the height of the Civil War. He was struck by the freedom of discussion and expression, unknown in France at the time, and he had great admiration for the politicians who were forging American democracy. When his father refused to continue financial aid, he taught in a girls' school in Stamford, Connecticut. In due course, despite the opposition of her guardian, he married one of his pupils, Mary Plummer, in 1869. Three children were born of this union, but the couple separated after seven years.
Teaching at a girls's school and marrying one of your students, fighting in the Civil War. Close enough, I suppose.
1865 was not the height of the Civil War. Tooze seems to imply that he got there before it ended, but I think he's playing a little close to the line there as the calendar does not work out. A more reasonable claim is that he was an active propagandist in support of reconstruction, which is of course a worthy thing to be in itself.
I don't have Tooze in front of me but I recall his version of the story being that Clemenceau came over hoping to provide medical aid to the Union but ended up instead doing what's mentioned above. He did not include the detail Wikipedia does: Though Clemenceau had many mistresses, when his wife took as her lover a tutor of their children, he had her put in jail for two weeks and sent her back to the United States on a steamer in third class. He divorced her, obtained custody of their children and had her stripped of her French nationality.
Assuming he arrived in May or later, he wasn't even there during the course of the war at all.
Just wait till you see what he did to the Germans.
I thought this was a no-spoilers zone.
The French are so uptight about sex and adultery.
Having referred back to the book, per Tooze Clemenceau shipped out for the US as soon as he'd finished medical school, with a view to doctoring for the Union. The war finished before he got there, and he went to the South to cover Reconstruction for a French newspaper, which he kept up until the 14th amendment passed.
Teaching at a girls's school and marrying one of your students, fighting in the Civil War. Close enough, I suppose.
Donald Trump would agree.
the politicians who were forging American democracy.
This phrase always makes me smile because I can't help reading it as "producing a result that was superficially identical to actual democracy, but in reality worthless".
Tooze is giving a talk right now on the history of the MG42 (retweeted into my TL by our very own Alex)