It's so hard to look at Versailles without projecting backward from WWII; I'm glad that reading Tooze encourages us to look at it fresh.
Wilson does seem to score a lot of own goals; given his desire to keep everyone else in line, it was probably unavoidable. It makes me curious about how the Republicans would have negotiated it, given their "we're partners in war" stance regarding the rest of the Entente.
Italy having to give back the bribe that brought them to the Entente side in the first place does seem to go a long way to explaining their presence as a fixture in the Axis.
1: Thanks.
4: That the historiography of WWI is full of WWII projection is one of my two main takeaways of this book, along with that the WWI period is full of conditionality.
I found this hard to summarize. Tooze has a lot of detail. Negotiations are hard to talk about, since you have to game out a lot of possibilities that end up getting thrown away due to the shifting relative power of the negotiators.
Especially when you have so many different negotiators.
you have to game out a lot of possibilities that end up getting thrown away due to the shifting relative power of the negotiators.
Tooze is really good at this and it's something I've appreciated.
I definitely came away from these chapters less receptive to the "those darned vindictive French" strain of Versailles historiography. I felt like Wilson and the British should have been more understanding of the fact that, as the only major* power to be invaded and have a significant part of their national infrastructure burned down, France would have a somewhat different view of what constituted an equitable peace than either Britain or the US.
*Sorry Belgium.
Tooze's description of Wilsonism is simply the promotion of American imperialism by using American economic power to undermine any possible challengers in the field. Any residual idealism was vitiated by his inability to consider the interests of those parts of the world which were neither great or small powers, or powers of any kind at all. It isn't unreasonable for the President of the United States to promote the perceived interests of his country, in fact it would be wrong for him not to do so, but he shouldn't have been surprised when he tried to slip his agenda through disguised as philanthropy and nobody was impressed.
So we talk about Wilson's idealism, but given all this plus his noted racism (especially in resegregating federal government staffing), would it be fair to summarize his conception of freedom as a Southern aristocratic "freedom for the right people to be on top"?
10. That was certainly how I came away from Deluge feeling about him.
10: I also came away with that conception. While he's theoretically open to freedom for all, he gets specific about it only for the white race. Especially in the chapters addressing Asia, he's quick to stifle China and reluctant to admit that the Japanese were also on the right side and deserved similar spoils to his European allies.
(Well, that, and his reluctance to subjugate any Germans to mere Poles!?)
I don't have my copy with me, but there's a great quote of Wilson talking about how important it is that the new international order is organized so that there will be no more wars as destructive as the Great War in the future.
Which sounds fine, until he adds something along the lines of "Another war like this will threaten the future of white supremacy."
To be fair, he was more or less right about that as an empirical matter.
|| "Chapter 7: The Air Dragoons" now up. |>
(Well, that, and his reluctance to subjugate any Germans to mere Poles!?)
Not reading too much into what you said, but that (and it wasn't just him, it was also IIRC Lloyd George and Smuts) stood out to me as particularly messed up. That reaction bothers me--I suspect it's a sign of some internalized racism I haven't worked out yet. Being racist* against some white people isn't worse than being racist against people of color, even though it's (probably?) even less acceptable in today's society.
* We had some discussion about non-racist ethnic hatred recently, so if you find the use of that word questionable substitute "bigoted"
"We" in 10 is of course the preacher's "we".
That reaction bothers me--I suspect it's a sign of some internalized racism I haven't worked out yet.
It clearly is, but it's also a sign of the alienness of early 20C racism to us: its frank, pseudoscientific nature combined with its arcane and foundationless application. We recognize (and internalize) racism, but in a pretty unsubtle, unsophisticated way that doesn't really prepare us for the mindset that one set of fair-skinned Europeans is obviously superior to their neighbors.
16, 18: There's also a modern reaction where, I think, we tend to think that even if racism is wrong, race, at the black/white/Asian level of granularity is a biologically real thing, but differences between two 'white' or two 'black' groups couldn't possibly be real. So a white person being racist about black people is maybe a bad person, but isn't insane -- they're talking about a thing that exists in the world -- while an Englishman being racist about Poles is just nuts.
I think that reaction is kind of wrong in both directions -- 'race' as we think of it isn't a neat concept that applies to biologically distinct groups, but if you're going to talk about doing DNA testing to distinguish between people, I believe you can do that sort of thing to some extent on a pretty ethnically fine-grained basis, so you could probably distinguish Poles from English people as well -- but it's how we're accustomed to think about these things.
19: Indeed, virtually all non-Africans are more genetically similar than any two Africans with distinct regional origins, because of the out-of-Africa bottleneck. Point being that the Pole/German genetic distinction is only slightly more salient than European/Asian.
Actually, 19.2 makes me wonder: famously, not even East Asians can reliably identify nationality from appearance; does this suggest that (say) Japanese vs. Korean is a level of difference comparable to, I dunno, Dutch vs. Holstein? Or is the genetic expression just so varied that it washes out the lines of distinction?
Famously? That has not been my impression. Not sure exactly how it fits into the argument, but I have definitely heard people say "Looks Korean" or "Looks Japanese".
That's mutable, hence all the talk of "turning Japanese."
In high school the site AllLookSame made it a quiz, and some people did pretty well on it, but they said some of the distinction was in dress and hairstyles.
I'm like 90% sure that came up once here and people took the quiz
Nice summary. Just like to add on Japan: Dickinson talks a lot about how the League was viewed in there. It had tremendous cachet and very wide popularity, largely because it recognized Japan as one of the great powers, but less concretely because it represented the highest level of modernity. Dickinson talks about Japan striving to catch up to the West: under Meiji that meant a nation state and a colonial empire; post WWI it meant cooperation in a new world order. We see more of this later with arms control and the gold standard.
On French security, Tooze (like Moby) emphasizes how the Germans mistreated occupied civilians and destroyed infrastructure; and so France felt the need not only to avoid losing a war (which security guarantees could do) but also to avoid being invaded, hence all the wrangling over the Rhineland. All of this was new to me.
The comments about German sovereignty throw an interesting light on the current EU. Reunification made Germany the biggest country in Europe again, and it legally got its sovereignty back in 1994, and at that exact time Europe starts on the road to a German-dominated hard-money euro that's doing more than anything else to strangle European unity. Obviously not straightforward causation, but interesting to think about.
. Well, that, and his reluctance to subjugate any Germans to mere Poles!?)
Seriously. "Orientalized Irish" the British leaders called them.
Also struck by how the French wanted to make permanent the wartime alliance and its unified army, as NATO essentially did exactly that. More and more I want Tooze to write a direct sequel to this book, up to maybe 1957. The periods mirror each other in all sorts of ways. Apparently his next book is about the Great Recession, but I'll keep hoping.
On the racism, Tooze talks about 1919 as a "postcolonial moment", when all hierarchies were in flux.
28: it's not causation. It's not really even correlation. The Euro started then but the early work in preparation for monetary union started very shortly after the fall of Bretton Woods. Mostly this was trying to keep the exchange rates in a narrow band. The Germans always were the key player. Monetary union was the explicit goal after 1979.
It's also never worked very well, as near as I can tell. Or at least, it has always been subject to period crises/George Soros enrichment opportunity.
27 I've mentioned before that my wife, her brother, her father, and her grandfather were all born in the same house, in 4 different countries.
(Different national arrangements, I suppose you'd call them.)
You get a definite view of things hanging around with Saarlanders.
And Wilson. I don't get what he was even trying to do at Paris. He wants disarmament, because armament implies modernization, but he doesn't want the League to have any meaningful disarmament mechanisms. He wants America to be the arbiter of the world, but promotes a totally amorphous League that gives America no mechanisms to do that. Granted, amorphousness leaves America dominant by default, but the only tools available to it were those of conventional realpolitik, which again demand a modern state; plus financial leverage, which was dominated by Yankee bluebloods Wilson hated. WTF, seriously?
32: Thanks. One might have thought that the collapse of Bretton Woods would have held some lessons but I guess not.
There was a lesson. Nixon and French people are assholes. Anyway, Bretton Woods was a system, but nothing like even the EMS.
One might have thought those lessons were evident before Bretton Woods.
34 - he wanted America to dominate the world WITHOUT ever having to raise taxes at home or send a standing army anywhere (or pay for it) or be beholden to the international financier class; the league would allow free white men of intellect to arbitrate disputes between the lesser peoples, disarmament would mean to not use finance to pay for war, and everyone could submit to the natural domination of free white Europeans based on their natural superiority. Something like that. Small state, small banks, big domination without having to pay for it, because of our inherent likelihood of world domination. All tied up in our stupid American legacy of dumbass Jeffersonianism.
That was the other wtf. Wilson said IIRC no enforcement/security mechanisms because 'goodwill' was sufficient. But his whole shtick is that Europe doesn't have any goodwill. And he can't say democracy will fix that because he believes democratization can't be accelerated. Asshole.
he wanted America to dominate the world WITHOUT ever having to raise taxes at home
And yet, Wilson also presided over the initial establishment of a permanent income tax. I actually have no idea how this relates to 38, which sounds right overall, and upon some cursory googling it doesn't seem like Wilson personally had much to do with the issue of the constitutionality of an income tax despite this being a major issue at the time.
He also presided over a tripling of the peacetime federal budget, doubling of peacetime military spending (ie 1920=1914*3) and massive expansion of federal activities in all kinds of stuff. His ideology met reality and got ditched left and right. Except at Paris, where it broke the world.
the French wanted to make permanent the wartime alliance and its unified army, as NATO essentially did exactly that
They also wanted to keep the wartime alliance's economic and financial machinery in being, and you know what? the European Union did exactly that...
But on May 4, 2045 the hundred years is up and the French get all the money and the Germans the nukes.
Don't worry, all their physicists have emigrated.
"I'm gonna build a lasting concord, and I'm gonna make Germany pay for it!"
So I hadn't quite caught up with the reading when this thread started, but there really wasn't an explanation of what Brazil did at the talks, right? That one really jumped out at me because I had (racistly!) assumed there wouldn't have been South American representation.
Famously? That has not been my impression. Not sure exactly how it fits into the argument, but I have definitely heard people say "Looks Korean" or "Looks Japanese".
Well, it was on Howard, so I kind of figure hoi polloi knows by now.
Like, the ignorant stereotype was, indeed, that the various nationalities are easily identified, but over the past 20 years there have been myriad instances showing that, actually, no.
I had (racistly!) assumed there wouldn't have been South American representation.
Not just racism; I mean, there was no SA front, no B[razilian]EP, no seizure of German colonies in SA. Other than signing up for the alliance, I'm not clear on what, if anything, Brazil contributed militarily. I know they had a couple dreadnoughts; were they in the Med or something?
Obviously, I may be all wrong about my first sentence*, but I don't think so. I wonder if it was intended as a way to have global credibility: give Brazil a seat at the table so that the biggest country in SA would be pro-League, even though their objective contribution to the effort was on the level of South Dakota or whatever.
*as far as military history goes, I know 10x more about WW2 in Europe, and 20x more about WW2 in the Pacific, than I do about WW1
I guess it should be "hoi polloi know".
Well, it was on Howard
What could this mean. Howard Stern? But then you would say "on Stern." Ron Howard?
49 - there were very significant naval battles off the coast of South America, but yes.
51: very significant? By WWI standards I guess, but that's a low bar.
47/49: There is some precedent for neutrals attending negotiations when the war is big enough. eg. Portugal attended at Westphalia hoping to get an enforceable general settlement with the Dutch.
I think what really struck me about it specifically was that with all of the hype about the BRIC economies (Brazil Russia India China) five years or so ago, it's the same story as a century earlier. (I mean, it's _not_ but still not all that different.)
53 is interesting. Of all the rising powers people were obsessing about ~1900 only Japan and the US have actually made it. China is getting there but has a long mountain to climb yet.
Historically Brazil, and L. America generally, mattered a lot more economically than they do now. Like in the Napoleonic wars Brazil was something like a third of Britain's total trade. And pre-WWI they were some huge slice of British and American investment.