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Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012, $23.95). Pp. 256. isbn978 0 8223 5209 9.
- ANTHONY D'AGOSTINO
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- Journal of American Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 1 / February 2014
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- 18 February 2014, pp. 352-353
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11 - Mussolini’s moment, 1933–1935
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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- The Rise of Global Powers
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- 17 November 2011, pp 268-305
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Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 clearly represents a sea change in the world balance of forces and a crucial point in the story of the coming of World War II. This is the way we see it today. At the time, however, the main effect of the advent of Nazism on the world scene was to give greater freedom to the foreign policy of Mussolini’s Italy, suggesting a possible balance of power, or at least a distraction, among those likely to oppose Italian expansionism. Germany’s own war potential was certainly not such as to create an immediate worry. Hitler himself was reasonably well known, but there was no consensus as to his intentions, still less any general recognition of a blueprint for conquest. Mein Kampf was known in German-language editions, with a one-volume abridgement appearing in London and New York in 1933. Translation into French came only in 1934. Dozens of other translations were to appear in following years. Karl Radek, the leading Soviet expert on Germany, told Louis Fischer that he and his associates translated many passages for Stalin, along with all of Hitler’s speeches. Stalin read them carefully. The British Foreign Office summarized Mein Kampf in an eleven-page memo to Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, with a note appended by the Oxford historian E. L. Woodward. There was at least some recognition of the outlines of Hitler’s expansionist ideas, his lust for lands in the Soviet Union, his aim to win by diplomacy the adhesion of Britain and Italy to his plans. Aside from Robert Vansittart and his circle in the Foreign Office, most British politicians did not study the text nor consider it crucial until after the Munich Conference that divided Czechoslovakia for German benefit in 1938.
In France the story was similar. The ambassadors were much more alarmed by Nazism than the Parisian press. The leading authority on Germany and Nazism, André François-Poncet, the ambassador in Berlin, had followed Hitler’s path to power through its ups and downs in 1932–3. He regarded Hitler’s victory as that of a “Nietzschean despotism” according to the nineteenth-century racial doctrines of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. François-Poncet noted that England had been Hitler’s bête noire in 1921 but that now the “country of Lord Rothermere” (for a time, Oswald Mosley’s supporter) was preferred by Hitler over fellow reactionaries like Horthy or Mussolini. Hitler had been an Italophile in 1923 at the time of the Beer Hall Putsch and had renounced German claims in the South Tyrol in order to placate the Italians. French reactions were echoed in the White House. Roosevelt was said to have read Mein Kampf in the original German, with which he had some facility, to the extent of complaining about the translations. He told the French ambassador that “The situation in Europe is alarming. Hitler is a madman and his advisors, some of whom I know personally, are more so than he . . . France cannot disarm now and no one will demand it of her.”
7 - Drastic acts of unhappy powers, 1922–1923
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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- 17 November 2011, pp 162-189
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The Washington Naval Conference was an effort to reconcile the world’s naval powers which presupposed that these were really the only powers. France, Germany, Soviet Russia, China, and Poland, all land powers, were of a secondary order of importance. At the same time there was an attempt to balance the naval power of Japan and of France. Italy, almost written off in 1919, was in effect employed to balance France in the Mediterranean. The French even thought that Italy was granted a kind of superiority there. This was coupled with an attitude that favored the gradual normalization of the German situation in Europe, largely through humane efforts to lessen the reparations burden. It was not thought that Germany needed to be considered as a European power. Nor did many think ahead to the possibility of its full military recovery one day. Nevertheless, kindness toward Germany was a factor in balancing French hegemonism and militarism.
China’s situation in the Far East was similar. Kindness toward China was a factor in balancing Japan. Normalization in this regard was, as with Germany, largely thought of as a financial question rather than a military or political one. Neither China nor Russia was forecast as a factor in world politics for at least a generation. It was a victory of Mahan, who thought largely in terms of navies and rimlands, over Mackinder, who thought largely in terms of railroads and land power. The world balance was thought to have been fixed by treaty. Since it was a naval balance, there was not much sense of a need for armed forces, especially armies, to maintain it. The United States, arguably the world co-hegemon, after a spate of furious naval building from 1918 to 1921, scrapped ships to treaty specifications and neglected to build up to the treaty limits for the rest of the decade. It cut its army air force from 20,000 to 10,000 and made do with around 3,000 planes. Instead of extending financial aid to China, presumably to improve the Asian balance and maintain American interest, American officials were persuaded to take a purely financial view of the matter and concentrate investment on Japan, where it seemed to be more productive and economical.
10 - A vogue for national economy
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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The year 1933 saw the greatest transformation in our inquiry into the relations among the great powers and their expansion. It marks the low point of the slump, soon to be called the “Great Depression,” eclipsing the previous “great depression” of 1873 to 1896. Political values underwent a transvaluation at the low point of the slump. Or so we would say now. At the time, it was not so generally realized. Up to 1933 it was still easy for Europeans to think of France as the main problem, “French hegemony,” as the common phrase had it. Once Hitler had come to power, some observers, but unfortunately not most, perceived on the contrary that France was in fact part of the solution to the real problem, which was the German “solution” to the problem of the Versailles peace. It was one of those points in history that required a reversal of the previous signs.
At this moment Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office within a few weeks of each other. They would both leave the stage within a few weeks of each other in 1945. During the intervening dozen years they were actually the keenest political adversaries in the world, largely because Roosevelt chose to have it that way. Hitler did his best in his first years in power to avoid notice, in order to proceed with the rearmament of Germany as quietly as possible, knowing it could be stopped by any forceful action on the part of Germany’s neighbors if they were to perceive the threat. At first, neither Hitler nor Roosevelt wanted the rest of the world to grasp the depth of their antagonism. Eventually it became impossible not to notice.
15 - The world war
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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- 17 November 2011, pp 423-466
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Discourse about the balance of power is usually conducted by reference to what historian Paul Kennedy has called the “neo-mercantilist calculus of national power,” that is, largely in terms of heavy industry and the munitioning potential of national economies. This would seem to be ABC. Viewed historically, however, the balance of power in a given period should also take into account what might be called the balance of ideas. Great states have risen to prominence as a result of economic growth and decisions by their leaders to project power in encounters with other states. But states have also at the same time ridden ideas to the top of the order. Britain rose to greatness among the European states as the champion of the Reformation, at least according to the celebrated historian James Froude. For him Francis Drake was no mere pirate but a soldier of the faith in combat with the papacy and Catholic Spain and France. Germany’s rise to power in the nineteenth century reflected the rise of German industries and proven military prowess, but it also thought it represented the new scientific rationality and its own idea of the modern state as a law unto itself. It rejected the pretensions of liberalism and individualism as a cloak behind which the cynical British had established world supremacy. Soviet power rose up in the twentieth century proclaiming itself the vehicle of socialism and anti-imperialism. The United States has claimed to speak for liberal democracy. The balance of power has been repeatedly shaken by some new revolutionary idea personified in the rise of a new state. The historian has to take note of the theme of revolution intruding on the theme of imperial expansion and the calculus of national power.
In World War I the theme of revolution began to intrude on the calculations of a balance-of-power war among the great imperial powers at about the time, in 1915–16, when the ammunition ran out and the powers realized they were in a struggle for their very existence. We have seen their attempts to make an ally of revolution, by means, for example, of Irish nationalism, Bolshevism, the East European revolution, and jihad. Things came to this again in the European war of 1939–41, when the British dropped leaflets from planes urging a struggle against the bestial philosophy of fascism, when Mussolini issued a call to rebellion in the Middle East against British imperialism, and when the Japanese moved against the French empire and called for a New Order according to the ideology of Asianism. The point of no return for the old empires was the entry into the war of the Soviet Union and the United States.
13 - Last years of peace, 1937–1939
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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With the international civil war as the motif of the period 1936–8, Churchill’s “loaded pause,” the underlying question was: Which way would the British and the Americans tilt? At the end of that period the United States gave a sign of inclining toward anti-fascism. It was only a small tilt in that direction. The prevailing drift was slightly stronger and of the opposite kind, rather a Cold War paradigm, in effect accommodating the anti-Communist fascist powers in their presumed plans for a global struggle against the long arm of Moscow. There were many good reasons for the drift. The Soviet Union of this period was consumed by an ocean of terror against presumed “enemies of the people.” It was a dungeon in which every thinking person feared for his life every day. Conservative western critics could argue plausibly that it, not fascism, was the real threat in France, Spain, and China. Those who did not look at the matter ideologically also had good reasons to resist a rally to anti-fascism. The first was fear of war. Pacifists thought it ghoulish to contemplate revisiting the experience of the trenches of 1914–18. Realists wondered what would be left of Europe at the end of another general slaughter with even more refined battlefield weapons and, to boot, strategic bombing of cities.
Even those realist Europeans who recognized that the Nazis needed to be faced up to had to wonder: Who will bell the cat? Perhaps Mussolini, ever vigilant on the Brenner, according to his deepest nature, it was thought. Italy was the only power ever to make a threatening gesture to the Nazis. Certainly not Poland, which seemed to envision a role befitting its status as a great power in the new Europe that Hitler called for. Could France fight Germany alone? Should Britain permit this to happen and court the possibility of its own cities being bombed? After all, what did Hitler really want? Hadn’t he said in Mein Kampf, and didn’t he repeat constantly, that his objective was to conquer Russia? In the end, a war between the Soviet Union and Germany, ghastly as it might be, was not the worst possible nightmare that a west European could conjure. For that matter, horrible to say, it might even solve some problems. And, even if one supposed that the anti-fascists were right, where was the place to make a stand? It would certainly have been bizarre to propose declaring war on Japan because of Manchuria, or on Italy because of Ethiopia, or Germany because of the Rhineland. Should Spain have been allowed to become the Balkans of the new world war? In the nineteenth century each of these issues would have been a prompting for a conference to make the appropriate changes and offer compensation to those whose status had been insulted by them. But now it was 1914 every year. Was any single issue important enough to warrant a general war? One comfort, it was thought, was that there was still plenty of time. When the issue was important enough, it would let us all know. We would not have to argue about it.
Maps
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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6 - Scramble for Eurasia, 1919–1922
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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- 17 November 2011, pp 144-161
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The peace could not be fully concluded in 1919. There were still revolutions in process in Central Europe. The civil war and Allied intervention in Russia had not come to a close. War raged in Turkey. Japan’s troops were in control of Siberia up to Lake Baikal and seemed destined to overawe China. The peace was in effect shaping up as an ineffectual scramble among the victors for mastery of Eurasia, a scramble bearing more than a slight resemblance to the scramble for Africa and the near-scramble for China that had preceded the war. The Eurasian scramble had four theaters, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and the Far East. Events in one theater had a crucial effect on decisions in another. As we have seen, the failure of the British and French to establish the Whites in control of Russia meant that Poland was allowed to extend its power into Lithuania, White Ruthenia, and Ukraine, where it established a base for future claims to great power status and the potential leadership of a “third Europe.” The British, having lost in Russia, could not get a foothold at the Straits, in the Caucasus, or in Central Asia, and moreover had to deal with the opposition of a resurgent Soviet Russia to their attempts to hold on to gains won at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. When the Reds won in Russia, Japan’s cause in Siberia and China was weakened considerably, and the United States’ possibility of containing Japan greatly strengthened. Had it been different, had the Bolsheviks been defeated and Russia partitioned among the powers occupying its territory, the United States might have been the biggest loser, with Russia and China, which were to be its allies in World War II, reduced to the status of “sick men.”
British and French antagonism in the Middle East spilled over into attitudes on the European settlement, particularly strengthening the inclination of the British to look to Germany as a possible European balance to French power. The growth of a revisionist tendency in British opinion may have been inevitable in any event. Regret for the staggering and disheartening losses on the western front prompted a rosy retrospective appreciation of the pre-war Europe that was seemingly destroyed. It was in the cards that Britain would come to regret the diplomatic revolution that had made it the foe of Germany. But all this was sharpened to a much greater degree by the continuing tension with France that loomed up as a permanent feature of the new world situation.
1 - The great powers at the dawn of world politics
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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The history of the balance of power is the story of a struggle among great territorial states, a story that is for the most part a narrative of contention among Europeans. At any rate, that was the way it must have seemed at the turn of the twentieth century. It was all about to change profoundly. Today Europe is struggling to maintain its unity under a unified currency. It is a world “player” but not at all in the sense of projecting power and keeping formidable armies and navies. Yet, in 1900 Europe certainly appeared to be at an apogee in world history. This “little cape off the Asian mainland,” as the poet Paul Valéry called it, ruled the world as it had never been ruled. European states had just divided Africa into colonial spheres of influence. China appeared to be next. The six continents of the world were coming to understand their fates to be interdependent and at the same time tangled up with the actions of the great powers and their distant possessions. Events in the Transvaal, or on the Shantung peninsula, on San Juan Hill in Cuba or Manila Bay, reverberated all over the globe. They seemed to have their source in Europe. The people of the earth numbered some 1.6 billion, about a quarter of them Europeans, with approximately half of the remainder, some 600 million, under some form of European tutelage. Looked at in another way, in 1800, in a world population of one billion, there had been roughly 200 million Europeans. By 1900, the world’s population had augmented by around 60 percent, while the European population had doubled. To Europeans it seemed that theirs was the population that was growing the fastest and was marked by destiny to inherit the earth.
They looked at the map and saw most of it controlled by Europeans, along with some vast “empty” lands ready to be settled by them in the future. These were still being charted by intrepid explorers and cartographers. Most of the celebrated discoveries had already been made by the Spekes and Burtons, the Stanleys and de Brazzas. But maps still showed white spots, the Congo and Amazon basins, the centers of Arabia and Central Asia, the peaks and plateaus of Tibet. Sir Arthur Evans was digging around on the grounds of the palace ruins at Knossos in Crete, which, he was to claim, had been built in 1900 BC. Sir Aurel Stein was looking into the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas in the remote western Chinese oasis of Dunhuang, with their stone temples, ancient paintings, and libraries buried beneath the sand. The French thought that the expedition of their explorers Ferdinand Foureau and Amédée-François Lamy from Algiers to the Congo should result naturally in the construction of a Trans-Saharan railway. If the Canadians and the Americans could build rail lines across the North American continent, and the Russians Siberia, and the Germans their Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, surely this was feasible. The British themselves dreamed of a Cape-to-Cairo Railway and the Americans of a line from New York to Rio. The airplane, the motor car, and world politics were in a few decades to compel a change in these plans, but this was not for lack of energy and vision on the part of the white man. In 1900, it was impossible not to have great plans. Africa had been gathered under European political and military influence. The Germans were increasing their say in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Britain and Russia were sealing off the areas in Persia and Afghanistan regarded in London as the marches to India. There seemed to be no limit to the capacities of those presumed to be the natural governing races to extend their fields of activity.
5 - A ragged peace, 1919
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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The Armistice of 1918 and the ragged way that the war was ending put crippling limits on the peace that was made, or at least initiated, in 1919. On the other hand, the global military situation was so favorable to the naval victors that it seemed to suggest a lenient armistice and moderate peace treaties in Europe. Outside Western Europe, there seemed to be no limit on what might be gained, in Africa, the Middle East, and the rest of Eurasia. Alongside this redrawing of the world map, there occurred in Soviet Russia a call to world revolution. It was a curious juxtaposition: on the one hand, a systematic and, for the first time, doctrinal propaganda for anti-colonial revolt backed by one of the prewar great powers and, on the other, a gathering in by the victors of spoils of war all over the world. The whole process was overseen, moreover, by potentially the biggest naval power of them all, the United States, which spoke the language of New Diplomacy, neither revolutionary nor imperial, and which played the role, ineptly to be sure, of a balance to the other two forces.
Historical accounts of the peace originally put the European settlement center stage and saw everything else as a series of details. Not much was said about the Russian revolution and the civil war which continued while the peace conference sat. The stress was on the contradictions between the Wilsonian New Diplomacy and realities of the victor powers’ war aims. It was the Old Diplomacy versus the New. Both disappointed liberals and realists faulted Wilson for a variety of sins. During the Cold War, the Russian revolution came more clearly into view, perhaps blotting out the rest of the global picture. It was held that the world revolution against imperialism, which was assumed, dubiously, to have begun before the war, was the centerpiece of world politics and, with the Bolsheviks on board, now constituted an international party of change. It was resisted by a party of order, led by European imperialism and eventually abetted by the United States.
16 - Balance and hegemony
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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G. K. Chesterton once remarked that there was nothing wrong with Americans but their ideals. Men of the world tend to fear good intentions almost as much as bad. A British Foreign Office strategic paper of 1946 worried that “the Americans are a mercurial people,” unduly swayed by sentiment and prejudice, laboring under “an archaic constitution.” Not the least of the worrisome traits of the Americans was the pretension to have discovered an alternative to the balance of power, secret alliances, and the rest of the sordid devices of the benighted Old World. In 1919 the American alternative was the New Diplomacy, the League of Nations, open covenants openly arrived at, self-determination for the oppressed nations. The Old World suspected that these were only a cover for the American national interest, in fact an interest in the entire world according to the Open Door. But the Old World went along, assuaged by the thought that it was sated with the triumphs of the nineteenth century and the Great War. It could live with its hard-won gains even under a new dispensation.
This would certainly not have been the case had the Great War been averted. The United States would not have been in such an influential position. The Modernizing Old Regimes, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Japan would have had much more to say about the world order. Despite the fondest hopes of the European Social Democracy, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine any of these old regimes overthrown from within by revolution. Nor is it easy to envision their peaceful evolution into ceremonial monarchies run by democratically elected parliaments. An evolution like Japan’s would not have been excluded. Nor would some odd alignments among them. Their ruling classes would have been drawn from their confident and successful nobility, made all the more strident by the victories of imperial expansion. They would have been too much for the British to balance, even with the French and Americans as allies. Admiral Tirpitz’s idea of a “balance of power at sea” would have been the elusive ideal toward which all of peace-loving humanity would have striven. Failure to maintain the delicate equilibrium would no doubt have meant war, perhaps eventually war with nuclear weapons. The Wilsonian New Diplomacy that emerged after the Great War was a difficult rubric for the Old World to accept, but the alternatives might have been less pleasant.
Acknowledgements
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Notes
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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Contents
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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4 - Balance and revolution, 1914–1918
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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We are not accustomed to think of the war of 1914–18 as a great victory over absolutism, as in the slogan under which the United States entered the war, “to make the world safe for democracy.” Rather we see it as an unmitigated catastrophe, a ghastly apocalypse that consumed the lives of millions. Four absolute monarchies – the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman – were destroyed, and the winners so shattered by their victory that they stumbled subsequently down a slope of decline on which World War II was only a station. No one really wins wars, we might think, weighing the suffering of those who experienced the conflict. After we have paid our respects to the profundity of this thought, however, we have to ask whether the Great War did despite everything have winners both from the standpoint of geopolitical gains for the victor states and from that of the progress of ideas. The empires of the victors greatly augmented their territorial reach and freed themselves of the competition of rivals. The “autocratic and expansionist” absolute monarchies which Secretary Lansing called the great threat of the future were, except for Japan, completely ruined. The model of the Modernizing Old Regime was replaced by that of the multiparty democracy in new states organized as much as possible according to national self-determination. In effecting these changes the war was also a multifaceted revolution. And the great powers, pursuing their own war aims, were in fact eager participants in this revolution.
The winning powers did not win the way they thought they would. At the outset, some of their leaders feared the catastrophe that might result from a long war. Most expected a short war like the ones in their recent memory. This would have been a war to redress the European balance of power with some resultant changes in other parts of the world. In a short war, the United States would not have taken part and Russia would not have collapsed in revolution. Both these states at war’s end were in their different ways openly opposed to the very idea of the balance of power, along with all the other cherished nineteenth-century notions of international life. Bolshevism, fascism, and new states in East Central Europe and the Middle East were effects of the war that may have had some origins in the prewar period, but could not have been foreseen with clarity. The wonder is that the winners managed to navigate uncharted seas and pursue their national aims through all of it.
Maps
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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The Rise of Global Powers
- International Politics in the Era of the World Wars
- Anthony D'Agostino
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Does a system of great powers necessarily imply a struggle for world primacy? Do great states merely hold onto what is theirs, or do they reach for more? Anthony D'Agostino offers a fascinating new answer to these questions through a fundamental reassessment of the international history of the first half of the twentieth century. From the spatial limits of a purely European great power politics the book looks out to the new horizon of world politics. From the time limits of 1914 to 1945 it considers the interface with nineteenth-century imperialism at one end and the impact of the world wars on the Cold War at the other. This is a global retelling of the expansion of Europe coming up against its limits in the most violent conflicts and explosive social movements yet known to history, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
9 - Politics and economics of the great slump, 1928–1933
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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Our inquiry now turns to the Great Depression, the watershed in the period between the world wars, a suspect in the search for the main cause of World War II. How could the war have resulted, we now have to ask, if the depression had not cast Europe and the world into financial ruin and driven Germany into the arms of Hitler? Or, another way of putting the question: At the end of the 1920s Europe was solving its problems. If it had not completed its convalescence from the Great War, it was at least well on the way to recovery. Locarno meant the peaceful revision of the Versailles peace settlement. Germany would soon regain something roughly approximating its boundaries and European interests as they existed in 1914. France and Britain would have helped guide the process with the United States backing them. The statesmen of the Locarno era, even the revisionist Stresemann, harbored no real animus toward war, certainly not the type of war that occurred in 1939–45. It was only the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that ruined everything.
This idea has for good reason been an attractive one for historians, as it was for those who lived through the period. The revival of Europe and the maintenance of its hold on the rest of the world seemed assured at the end of the Locarno honeymoon. Europe had defied those who predicted the demise of the white man. Europe’s share of world trade, as we have seen, down to 41 percent in 1920, was back to 51 percent in 1929. European holdings in Asia and Africa also seemed to have been retained, sometimes with force, sometimes with bargaining. Britain appeased Chinese nationalism by yielding Hankow and control over China’s customs, thus securing its surpassing interest in Shanghai and the other treaty ports. The empire had a firm hold on India where there could be no comparable Soviet help to the nationalists. Sixty thousand British troops and as many colonists still managed to direct a country of 300 million. The Montagu–Chelmsford constitutional reforms of 1919 promised some of the outward appearances of elections and popular assemblies. Gandhi and supporters of his noncooperation campaign continued to fight for independence but there were more moderate voices among the nationalists to balance him. Indian Muslims also had to be considered, with their distinct interests and outlook. The British seemed able to divert these various forces from forming a united front against them.
3 - Global origins of World War I: a chain of revolutionary events across the world island
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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The road to the Great War led from of the alignment of powers that came out of the scramble for concessions in the Far East. The world crisis of 1904–6 shaped the alignments roughly into the form they took in 1914. It only remained to shift the locus of the confrontation, by a chain of revolutionary events, across the world island into Europe. After Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan, the two had little difficulty dividing their Asian spheres of influence. Japan made a similar settlement with the French. Japan was at this point in effect a member of the looming Triple Entente. It also attempted to settle matters with the United States. By virtue of the American victory over the Philippine insurgents in 1902, the American and Japanese spheres faced each other warily across the Luzon Strait that divides the Philippines from Formosa. Worldly Japanese knew that their relations with the USA would not go smoothly once the Panama Canal, on which the United States was working and which would be completed by 1914, was able to shift the American fleet to Asian waters. This was underlined when Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the Horn, into the Pacific, and around the world in 1908. Roosevelt had hoped that a show of force would quiet Japanese indignation about unfavorable American immigration policies, yet the United States at bottom had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to oppose Japanese dominance of Asia.
The Great War itself did not finally break out in the Far East, but rather in the Near East, that is, in the Ottoman Balkans, because of the spread of the international effects of the Russo-Japanese war across the Eurasian ecumene. The vehicle for this was the Russian revolution of 1905. As would be the case in 1917, revolution had grown out of military defeat. What was more, it was the defeat of a European great power by a non-European state. As such it sent a thrill throughout the world outside Europe, or at least through the hearts of the revolutionary intelligentsia of that world. It was a bigger and more dramatic version of the defeat of the Italians in Abyssinia in 1896.
Introduction
- Anthony D'Agostino, San Francisco State University
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- 05 June 2012
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- 17 November 2011, pp 1-7
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Summary
Does a system of great powers, with which we have lived, arguably, for the past four centuries, necessarily imply a struggle for world primacy? Do great states merely hold onto what is theirs, or do they reach for more? Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, foreign minister to Tsar Alexander II, mentor and patron saint of Russian diplomatists from Mikhail Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin, once attempted to address this question by explaining the geographical expansion of the Russian state as the mechanism of a natural law. As he saw it, “The United States in America, France in Algeria, Holland in her colonies, England in India – all have been irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward movement where the greatest difficulty is knowing where to stop.” Gorchakov wrote this in 1864, during the heyday of European imperialism, when it was assumed that any great state with an expanding economy would naturally increase its political and military sway to the farthest corners of the planet. This book seeks to explore the idea of an “imperious necessity” of forward movement in the foreign policy of the great powers to the extent that it was manifested in the first half of the twentieth century. It follows the story of the expansion of Europe coming up against its limits in the most violent conflicts and explosive social movements yet known to history, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
It is no accident that each of these topics continues to fascinate historians, even beyond the fact that new materials and sources frequently to appear and inspire new ways of trying to make sense of them. Here I propose to consider this cluster of events, along with their various connections, in an attempt to bring some history to bear on current and recurrent perplexities in the discussion of international politics. My intention is not so much a retelling as a reexamination of the story of the era of the world wars, one with a broader scope than the usual diplomatic histories. Most accounts of the component topics have devoted their main attention to European great power politics, with Anglo-German relations as the centerpiece, usually leaving aside or marginalizing the United States, the Soviet Russia, and the Far East. Often World War I has been treated as coming out of the blue, in the phrase of Virginia Woolf, “like a rut in the road,” and World War II as a kind of elaborate prelude to the Cold War. The present reexamination seeks to widen the field of vision. From the spatial limits of a purely European great power politics it looks out to those of world politics. From the time limits of the 1914–45 period it considers the interface with nineteenth-century imperialism at one end and the impact of the world wars on the Cold War at the other.