Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (4 page)

With the onset of the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its competitors and allies for aspects of state management and intervention in the war economy which could be imitated. The capitalist sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by patriotism, raised no objections. The result was a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been fully reversed – for though wartime arrangements were sometimes abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually adopted again, usually permanently. Germany set the pace, speedily adopting most of the Russian state procedures which had so scared her in peace, and operating them with such improved efficiency that when Lenin inherited the Russian state-capitalist machine in 1917–18, it was to German wartime economic controls that he, in turn, looked for guidance.
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As the war prolonged itself, and the losses and desperation increased, the warring states became steadily more totalitarian, especially after the winter of 1916–17. In Germany the end of civilian rule came on 9 January 1917 when Bethmann Hollweg was forced to bow to the demand for unrestricted submarine warfare. He fell from power completely in July, leaving General Ludendorff and the admirals in possession of the monster-state. The episode marked the real end of the constitutional monarchy, since the Kaiser forewent his prerogative to appoint and dismiss the chancellor, under pressure from the military. Even while
still chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg discovered that his phone was tapped, and according to Riezler, when he heard the click would shout into it ‘What
Schweinhund
is listening in?’
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But phone-tapping was legal under the ‘state of siege’ legislation, which empowered area military commands to censor or suppress newspapers. Ludendorff was likewise authorized to herd 400,000 Belgian workers into Germany, thus foreshadowing Soviet and Nazi slave-labour methods.
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In the last eighteen months of hostilities the German élite fervently practised what was openly termed ‘War Socialism’ in a despairing attempt to mobilize every ounce of productive effort for victory.

In the West, too, the state greedily swallowed up the independence of the private sector. The corporatist spirit, always present in France, took over industry, and there was a resurgence of Jacobin patriotic intolerance. In opposition, Georges Clemenceau fought successfully for some freedom of the press, and after he came to supreme power in the agony of November 1917 he permitted some criticism of himself. But politicians like Malvy and Caillaux were arrested and long lists of subversives were compiled (the notorious
‘Carnet B’)
, for subsequent hounding, arrest and even execution. The liberal Anglo-Saxon democracies were by no means immune to these pressures. After Lloyd George came to power in the crisis of December 1916, the full rigours of conscription and the oppressive Defence of the Realm Act were enforced, and manufacturing, transport and supply mobilized under corporatist war boards.

Even more dramatic was the eagerness, five months later, with which the Wilson administration launched the United States into war corporatism. The pointers had, indeed, been there before. In 1909 Herbert Croly in
The Promise of American Life
had predicted it could only be fulfilled by the state deliberately intervening to promote ‘a more highly socialized democracy’. Three years later Charles Van Hise’s
Concentration and Control: a Solution of the Trust Problem in the United States
presented the case for corporatism. These ideas were behind Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘New Nationalism’, which Wilson appropriated and enlarged to win the war.
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There was a Fuel Administration, which enforced ‘gasless Sundays’, a War Labor Policies Board, intervening in industrial disputes, a Food Administration under Herbert Hoover, fixing prices for commodities, and a Shipping Board which launched 100 new vessels on 4 July 1918 (it had already taken over 9 million tons into its operating control).
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The central organ was the War Industries Board, whose first achievement was the scrapping of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a sure index of corporatism, and whose members (Bernard Baruch, Hugh Johnson, Gerard Swope and others) ran a kindergarten for
1920s interventionism and the New Deal, which in turn inspired the New Frontier and the Great Society. The war corporatism of 1917 began one of the great continuities of modern American history, sometimes Underground, sometimes on the surface, which culminated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon Johnson brought into being in the late 1960s. John Dewey noted at the time that the war had undermined the hitherto irresistible claims of private property: ‘No matter how many among the special agencies for public control decay with the disappearance of war stress, the movement will never go backward.’
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This proved an accurate prediction. At the same time, restrictive new laws, such as the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), were often savagely enforced: the socialist Eugene Debs got ten years for an anti-war speech, and one man who obstructed the draft received a forty-year sentence.
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In all the belligerents, and not just in Russia, the climacteric year 1917 demonstrated that private liberty and private property tended to stand or fall together.

Thus the war demonstrated both the impressive speed with which the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies and for the exercise of despotic power over its own Citizens. As the war ended, there were plenty of sensible men who understood the gravity of these developments. But could the clock be turned back to where it had stood in July 1914? Indeed, did anyone wish to turn it back? Europe had twice before experienced general settlements after long and terrible wars. In 1648 the treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia had avoided the impossible task of restoring the
status quo ante
and had in large part simply accepted the political and religious frontiers which a war of exhaustion had created. The settlement did not last, though religion ceased to be a
casus belli.
The settlement imposed in 1814–15 by the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars had been more ambitious and on the whole more successful. Its object had been to restore, as far as possible, the system of major and minor divine-right monarchies which had existed before the French Revolution, as the only framework within which men would accept European frontiers as legitimate and durable.
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The device worked in the sense that it was ninety-nine years before another general European war broke out, and it can be argued that the nineteenth Century was the most settled and productive in the whole history of mankind. But the peacemakers of 1814–15 were an unusual group: a congress of reactionaries among whom Lord Castlereagh appeared a revolutionary firebrand and the Duke of Wellington an egregious progressive. Their working assumptions rested on the brutal denial of all the innovatory political
notions of the previous quarter-century. In particular, they shared avowed beliefs, almost untinged by cynicism, in power-balances and agreed spheres of interest, dynastic marriages, private understandings between sovereigns and gentlemen subject to a common code (except
in extremis)
, and in the private ownership of territory by legitimate descent. A king or emperor deprived of possessions in one part of Europe could be ‘compensated’, as the term went, elsewhere, irrespective of the nationality, language or culture of the inhabitants. They termed this a ‘transference of souls’, following the Russian expression used of the sale of an estate with its serfs,
glebae adscripti.
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Such options were not available to the peacemakers of 1919. A peace of exhaustion, such as Westphalia, based on the military lines, was unthinkable: both sides were exhausted enough but one, by virtue of the armistice, had gained an overwhelming military advantage. The French had occupied all the Rhine bridgeheads by 6 December 1918. The British operated an inshore blockade, for the Germans had surrendered their fleet and their minefields by 21 November. A peace by
diktat
was thus available.

However, that did not mean that the Allies could restore the old world, even had they so wished. The old world was decomposing even before war broke out. In France, the anti-cleticals had been in power for a decade, and the last election before the war showed a further swing to the Left. In Germany, the 1912 election, for the first time, made the Socialists the biggest single party. In Italy, the Giolitti government was the most radical in its history as a united country. In Britain the Conservative leader A.J. Balfour described his catastrophic defeat in 1906 as ‘a faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin’. Even the Russian autocracy was trying to liberalize itself. The Habsburgs anxiously sought new constitutional planks to shore themselves up. Europe on the eve of war was run by worried would-be progressives, earnestly seeking to satisfy rising expectations, eager above all to cultivate and appease youth.

It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1914 by selfish and cynical age. The speeches of pre-war politicians were crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European phenomenon, especially in Germany where 25,000 members of the
Wandervögel
clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollution and the growth of cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers like Max Weber and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that youth be brought to the helm. The nation, wrote Bruck, ‘needs a change of blood, an insurrection of the sons against the fathers, a substitution of the old by the young’.
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All over Europe, sociologists
were assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and wanted.

And of course what youth wanted was war. The first pampered ‘youth generation’ went enthusiastically to a war which their elders, almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair. Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized their rifles. Charles Péguy wrote that he went ‘eagerly’ to the front (and death). Henri de Montherlant reported that he ‘loved life at the front, the bath in the elemental, the annihilation of the intelligence and the heart’. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle called the war ‘a marvellous surprise’. Young German writers like Walter Flex, Ernst Wurche and Ernst Jünger celebrated what Jünger called ‘the holy moment’ of August 1914. The novelist Fritz von Unger described the war as a ‘purgative’, the beginning of ‘a new zest for life’. Rupert Brooke found it ‘the only life … a fine thrill, like nothing else in the world’. For Robert Nichols it was ‘a privilege’. ‘He is dead who will not fight’, wrote Julian Grenfell (’Into Battle’), ‘and who dies fighting has increase.’ Young Italians who got into the war later were if anything even more lyrical. ‘This is the hour of the triumph of the finest values,’ one Italian poet wrote, ‘this is the Hour of Youth.’ Another echoed: ‘Only the small men and the old men of twenty’ would ‘want to miss it.’
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By the winter of 1916–17, the war-lust was spent. As the fighting prolonged itself endlessly, bloodied and disillusioned youth turned on its elders with disgust and rising anger. On all sides there was talk in the trenches of a reckoning with ‘guilty politicians’, the ‘old gang’. In 1917 and still more in 1918, all the heiligerem regimes (the United States alone excepted) felt themselves tested almost to destruction, which helps to explain the growing desperation and savagery with which they waged war. Victory became identified with political survival. The Italian and Belgian monarchies and perhaps even the British would not have outlasted defeat, any more than the Third Republic in France. Of course, as soon as victory came, they all looked safe enough. But then who had once seemed more secure than the Hohenzollerns in Berlin? The Kaiser Wilhelm π was bundled out without hesitation on 9 November 1918, immediately it was realized that a German republic might obtain better peace terms. The last Habsburg Emperor, Charles, abdicated three days later, ending a millennium of judicious marriages and inspired juggling. The Romanovs had been murdered on 16 July and buried in a nameless grave. Thus the three imperial monarchies of east and central Europe, the tripod of legitimacy on which the
ancien régime
, such as it was, had rested, all vanished within a year. By the end of 1918 there was little
chance of restoring any one of them, still less all three. The Turkish Sultan, for what he was worth, was finished too (though a Turkish republic was not proclaimed until 1 November 1922).

At a stroke, the dissolution of these dynastic and proprietory empires opened up packages of heterogeneous peoples which had been lovingly assembled and carefully tied together over centuries. The last imperial census of the Habsburg empire showed that it consisted of a dozen nations: 12 million Germans, 10 million Magyars, 8.5 million Czechs, 1.3 million Slovaks, 5 million Poles, 4 million Ruthenians, 3.3 million Romanians, 5.7 million Serbs and Croats, and 800,000 Ladines and Italians.
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According to the 1897 Russian imperial census, the Great Russians formed only 43 per cent of the total population;
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the remaining 57 per cent were subject peoples, ranging from Swedish and German Lutherans through Orthodox Latvians, White Russians and Ukrainians, Catholic Poles, Ukrainian Uniates, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish Muslims of a dozen nationalities, and innumerable varieties of Buddhists, Taoists and animists. Apart from the British Empire, no other imperial conglomerate had so many distinct races. Even at the time of the 1926 census, when many of the western groups had been prised away, there were still approximately two hundred peoples and languages.
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By comparison, the Hohenzollern dominions were homogeneous and monoglot, but they too contained huge minorities of Poles, Danes, Alsatians and French.