General Internet Beg and Call for Help: Slouching Towards Utopia Chapter 15: The Knot of War - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
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Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, RealityBased, and Even-Handed Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.
Economics 210a Weblog Archives DeLong Hot on Google DeLong Hot on Google Blogsearch July 08, 2010
General Internet Beg and Call for Help: Slouching Towards Utopia Chapter 15: The Knot of War I have to have a chapter on World War I in a history of the twentieth century--even an economic history of the twentieth century. But is this the chapter I want to have? Sometimes I think definitely yes, sometimes I think definitely not. I am having the hardest time settling on what this chapter should be--much harder than I am having with any of the other chapters... Advice and suggestions generally wanted... Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century Chapter 15: The Knot of War, 1914-1920 J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley Research Associate, NBER July 8, 2010 From Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional” (1897): God of our fathers, known of old—/ Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold/ Dominion over palm and pine— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, / Lest we forget—lest we forget!... Far-called, our navies melt away;/ On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!... If, drunk with sight of power, we loose/ Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe— Such boasting as the Gentiles use/ Or lesser breeds without the law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/ Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust/ In reeking tube and iron shard— All valiant dust that builds on dust,/ And guarding, calls not Thee to guard— For frantic boast and foolish word, / Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!
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From Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1918): Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstacy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.... In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin... My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. With some notable exceptions, most economic histories pass quickly over the great wars of the twentieth century—if they do not exclude them from their narrative scope in the first place. They fast-forward through these mass orgies of death and destruction. The issues involved in mobilizing resources for war and then demobilizing them after war are interesting, but are hard to relate to debates and ideas about how the “normal” economy functions in peacetime. But wars play too big a part in the twentieth century for this to be a satisfying way of proceeding. And large pieces of the political history surrounding this century’s world wars are very important background without which understanding the economic and political dynamics of the interwar period is next to impossible. 15.1: The Pointlessness of It All 15.1.1: Reasons for Militarism Recall our two smart people who said interesting things before World War I about militarism, arms races, and empire. Both Hobson and Schumpeter saw imperialism as a con game. Empire might be worthwhile for those at the sharp edge—the Cecil Rhodeses and the Lord Lugards—and certainly for the settlers who colonize and rule or exterminate or displace the previous inhabitants. And it was a horrible thing for those whose encounter with the industrial revolution took the form of the maxim gun and of having your hand cut off because your village had failed to deliver its rubber quota. The alternative—a world in which merchants show up at your borders eager to buy what you can make and sell you the technology-intensive and -embodying products of the industrial civilization of the North Atlantic—would have been on balance more pleasant. But what was the effect of empire, of militarism, of the pre-World War I arms race on the people of the North Atlantic core? Hobson sees it as destructive but functional. Hobson is a proto-Keynesian, believing that the major economic problem is the business cycle that causes mass unemployment, and that the business cycle is made much worse by the maldistribution of income. The rich save a lot. Often the investment spending to soak it up is not there. The only potential balance wheels are military spending and exports. Hence empire, militarism, and arms races are a way of boosting exports via captive markets and soaking up savings so that the rich can continue to collect their wealth without triggering enough business cycle instability to bring the http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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system down. Hobson thus believed—absent the triumph of social democracy to produce a more equal distribution of income and so a flow of aggregate demand less vulnerable to crises of confidence—that as market capitalism advances, the need for imperialism, militarism, and arms races would become greater. Thus, Hobson thought, there would be no point at all to world war—an arms race and an empire were perfectly functional ways to keep the system running for the benefit of the rich, and there would be no point to actually using the weapons, especially not in Europe. But he feared that there might be. Joseph Schumpeter was more optimistic. He believed that he was seeing the last gasp of militarism, empire, and arms races. He saw imperialism as the last gasp of military status aristocracy that had all but completely lost their social role as governors, judges, functionaries, protectors, and the strong right arms of conquering barbarian kings that they claimed their ancestors had been in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages were over. Indeed, the Middle Ages were over. Feudalism was gone. But as long as they could serve the state and the king in the diplomatic corps and the military, and either spread the flag far abroad to claim dominion over palm and pine or prepare to defend the homeland should a Napoleon come to power again, they would have something to do. And what they did would help hold society together: Sir whatsit and Lord whoever and Colonel whichway essentially functioned as the equivalent of today's professional athletes in making people proud of their team: imperialism as spectator sport. Schumpeter hated this. And he thought that it was on the way out. He certainly did not expect to see a world war. 15.1.2: Norman Angell and the Futility of Great-Power Conflict Perhaps the saddest book on my bookshelf is Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, written on the very eve of World War I. Norman Angell thought that there would be no more big wars. Why not? Because, Angell argued, there were only two reasons who one people should wish to rule over another: to teach them the word of God, and to collect taxes from them. The age of religious wars was over, Angell thought—living a Christian (or a Muslim, or a Jewish, or a Buddhist) life was a more effective and humane way of proselytizing than conversion-by-the sword. And as far as extracting resources from others, conquest was expensive and destructive and maintaining alien rule more so in the long run: it was much better and cheaper, Norman Angell thought, to offer the carrot of trade than to fight. Moreover, Angell thought, all of the sober statesmen of Europe realized this. When push came to shove, he thought, they would all shy from the jump. “What would we gain if we won?” they would think, “and how much would it cost?” The arithmetic was obvious. For Angell the fact that national military power was not a road to prosperity was obvious: if conquest and extension of territory is the main road of moral and material progress... then... the position of the Russian should be more desirable than that of the Hollander.... The Austrian should be better off than the Switzer.... If a nation's wealth is really subject to military confiscation, and needs the defence of military power, then the wealth of those small states should be insecure indeed—and Belgian national stocks stand 20 points higher than the German. If nations are rival units, then we should benefit by the disappearance of our rivals—and if they http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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disappeared, something like a third of our [British] population would starve to death... The only people who claimed that national power was a road to prosperity no longer believed it themselves. He wrote of: the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is still defended..... If the growing power of Russia compelled us to fight a great war in alliance with the Turk to check her "advance on India," why are we now co-operating with Russia to build railroads to India?... It is not we who are the "theorists," if by "theorists" is meant the constructors of elaborate and deceptive theorems in this matter. It is our opponents, the military mystics.... And he looked forward to a future in which every politician agreed that we should study war no more: If the public as a whole had to follow all the intricacies of those marvelous diplomatic combinations... public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable and self-evident.... Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to fight— and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate—Great Britain... at the time of the Venezuelan crisis: the United States... laid it down... that her existence was imperiled if Great Britain should extend by so much as a mile a vague frontier running through a South American swamp thousands of miles away. And for that cause these decent and honourable people were prepared to take all the risks that would be involved to Anglo-Saxon civilisation by a war between England and America... That would come on the day when public opinion had been educated so that everyone knew what the thoughtful had long known: The revision of these fundamental conceptions will... be the work of individual men. States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think.... Unless the individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot even be a beginning... Norman Angell’s argument about the futility and cost of destructive industrial war was completely correct. The conclusions about Europe’s future history he drew from his argument were completely wrong. And he should have known that they were wrong, for the Britain in which he lived had just fought the Boer War. 15.2: The Meaning of the Boer War After the end in 1815 of the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain retained as a strategic asset the former Dutch colony at the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. The British navy saw control of the Cape of Good Hope as an important safeguard for communications with British-ruled India. And so after 1815 British colonists began to arrive in the Cape Colony. The response of the Dutch-descended Boers of the Cape to this growing influx of foreigners who could talk to the rulers sent out from London was to leave: to move north across the Orange River outside of the British Empire in 1835, to found the Orange Free State. Once in South Africa, the British Empire continued to expand: their http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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annexation of the neighboring Natal triggered another exodus of Boers to the Transvaal north of the Vaal River. But the expansion was slow—and costly: the Zulu kingdom founded by Shaka even annihilated a British column and mauled a second at the battles of Rourke's Drift and Islandhwana, doing even better against the advance of European settlers and their armies than the Sioux at the Little Bighorn. London shied away in the 1870s from an attempt to annex the Transvaal when it contemplated the difficulties of maintaining effective rule over a hostile population of Europeandescended and European-armed farmers. But the calculus changed when gold was discovered in large quantity in the Transvaal in 1886. Railroads were built to transport gold to the coast, powerful pneumatic tools were installed to crush gold-bearing rock, a complicated high-technology advanced chemicals industry was built to extract gold from the rock, for although the South African gold deposits of the Witwatersrand were vast indeed, they were too low-quality for mining to be possible without the most advanced chemistry of the late nineteenth century. Gold made the interior of South Africa important to Europeans, the swallowing-up of the rest of Africa by European colonial powers made British geopoliticians anxious to cement control over the Cape. Miners and speculators flooded from Europe into the interior. Johannesburg grew in a few years to a city of 100,000—the largest city in Africa south of the Sahara. The Boer farmers watched nervously as the numbers of the "uitlanders" grew. The denied immigrants the vote. They taxed the gold industry. They gave a monopoly over dynamite sales to Alfred Nobel's company. Their President Paul Krueger sought a railway line to the sea independent of British control. Cape Colony boss Cecil Rhodes sought to overthrow the Boer government by coup d'etat—the 1895 Jameson Raid. After the raid's failure the Boers began buying and stockpiling rifles, as Britain reinforced its troops in the Cape Colony and Natal. British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain—father of 1930s appeasement Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—preached the annexation of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State and in 1899 sent a demand: equal rights for British citizens in the Transvaal, or else. What, after all, did the mightiest empire the world had ever seen have to fear from two small republics of unindustrialized farmers? Transvaal president Krueger sent back an ultimatum: Britain needed to begin withdrawing troops from the Cape and Natal or else the Boers would attack. Thus the Boers struck first in self-defense in October 1899, besieging British garrisons in towns named Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley, and defeating British relief columns in battles at places named Spion Kop, Vaal Kranz, Magersfontein, Stormberg, and the Tugela River: 20% of Sir William Gatacre’s 3,000 troops captured at Stormberg as British troops fled after being sent up a near-cliff against entrenched Boers with rifles; 10% of Lord Methuen's 14,000 killed or wounded at Magersfontein as they assaulted the Boer trench line; and Buller's 21,000 suffering 1200 killed and wounded to the Boers’ 50 in a failed attempt to cross the Tugela River. Any costbenefit analysis done at this point would have led to an obvious conclusion: back down. Protest that the war was a mistake, and have some chair-polishing leading to British promises to respect the independence and autonomy of the Boer Republics and Boer promises to respect the rights and liberties of British-flag immigrants. That is not what happened.
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The Boer Afrikaans-speaking population of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was 200,000. The British sent 500,000 soldiers to South Africa starting in February 1900—the same proportional manpower commitment as four million would be for the U.S today. The British sent a competent general—Field Marshal Lord Roberts. They outnumbered even the total mobilization of Boer military manpower by fifteen to one. The Orange Free State capital Bloemfontein fell on March 13, Johannesburg on May 31, and Transvaal capital Pretoria on June 5. The reaction at home in Britain to victories was as if the country had won the World Cup in soccer: half a million British soldiers could defeat armies one-fifteenth their size! But the war was not over. The Boers were beaten, but they would not surrender. Defeated in open battle, the Boers turned to guerrilla warfare. The dispersed Boers waged a guerrilla insurgency against the British for a year and a half—and at one point captured the British second-in-command Lord Methuen, as well as capturing the young Winston Churchill What does an invading military superpower do when its troops are faced with a guerrilla insurgency in a land where they do not speak the language? The British invented the concentration camp. Mao Zedong was to remark that a successful guerrilla army is like a school of fish: they must learn to swim in the sea of the people. The British at the turn of the century knew how to fight such a guerrilla army: dry up the sea in which they swim by concentrating the population into camps where they can be monitored and watched. Are guerrillas active in an area? Round up everyone—everyone—and stick them behind barbed wire, don't feed them too well, and don't spend too much time worrying about sanitation. Build small forts and construct wire fences to reduce the guerrillas’ mobility. It is effective—even though the “concentrated” civilian population dies of disease at a relatively rapid rate, and even though it impoverishes the country. Roughly 30,000 Boers, most of them children under 16, died in the concentration camps. Nearly 100,000 people died in the Boer War: in addition to the 30,000 Boer civilians, perhaps 8,000 British battle deaths, 14,000 British soldiers dead of disease, 10,000 Boer soldiers, and perhaps 30,000 Africans—nobody counted them. Britain mobilized 2.5% of its adult male population for the war. One in ten of those died. The story of the Boer War tells us that at the start of the twentieth century wars cannot be analyzed as the pursuit of economic growth by other means. The fact that the people —the literate, urbanized people—were a nation and that the nation was at war had deep psychological consequences. At its most cynical, it leads politicians to think that their domestic political dilemmas could be resolved if only they could focus the people’s attention on a foreign enemy. We see this even today. Francis Fukuyama, for example, claims that the American Republican Party’s functionaries at the Weekly Standard made “actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when politics focused on domestic issues. Matthew Yglesias noted that “the obvious candidates were either China or something relating to Islamic fundamentalism and, as Fukuyama notes, what they came up with was China. Then 9/11 changed things...”
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We saw it at the very start of the early modern period. Here we have William Shakespeare’s version of England’s King Henry IV Lancaster speaking to his son Prince Hal, the future King Henry V Lancaster: [A]all my friends, which thou must make thy friends... by whose fell working[s] I was first advanced, and by whose power I well might lodge a fear to be again displaced.... [R]est and lying still might make them look too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry, be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days... The Princeton historian Arno Mayer is the most eloquent of those who attributed the colossal misjudgments and underlying bloodthirstyness of those who started World War I to the combination of this possibility of busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels and the political dilemmas created by the persistence of the Old Regimes in Europe. Europe in 1914 was a Europe of national populations, of industrialists and socialists, of factory workers and technicians. But Europe’s governments in 1914— especially the defense and foreign affairs ministries—were populated by Schumpeter’s aristocrats, ex-aristocrats, and would-be aristocrats who had no social function in the absence of war, and who could look forward only to continued erosion of their influence and status, erosion of their relative wealth, and erosion of their self-respect in the absence of war. As Joseph Schumpeter had noted, emerging industrialists and entrepreneurs bargained their political support for economic benefits, and those to whom they bargained their political support were the aristocrats and the ex-aristocrats who staffed the government and the army. In Germany this political alliance is often seen as marked by the 1879 “marriage of iron and rye”: the imposition of tariffs on imports of British steel (to protect the positions of German manufacturers) and on imports of American grain (to protect the positions of German landlords). Urban merchants, wage earners, and consumers were implicitly taxed to benefit the dual elite of the post-1870 German Empire. And there was a third current of thought: call it social-Darwinism. It claimed to be a social philosophy that proclaimed to be the result of applying the laws of natural science to the problems of social development. On the one hand, social Darwinism believed in the survival of the fittest: thus those who have deserve to have. On the other hand, social Darwinism believed that the fittest emerged as a result of struggle: hence competition—and after competition, domination—not cooperation, was the key form of social life. And soon one of the principal forms of competition focused on by social Darwinists was that of competition between nations: were the Germans, the French, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Russians to become the superpower of the twentieth century that would leave its imprint on all future civilizations? The growing belief that nature rewarded struggle—and that struggle was or could become bloody—was reinforced by the turning away from the values of the Enlightenment and of the Christian tradition that is usually given the name of Nietzscheism: the name of the game was “creative domination, exploitation, and subjugation,” and any hint that things might be different—that one might be in a winwin situation, a positive-sum game of some sort—was rejected as an obvious and offensive ideological attack by those who were too weak to meet the strong in open and fair contest (and who were probably Jewish as well). As Arno Mayer puts it: The upper reaches of [European] society and polity ceased to deplore war… In an… atmosphere heavy with social Darwinist and Nietzschean influences, war was http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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clebrated as a new cure-all. The violence and blood of battle promised to reinvigorate the individual, re-energize the nation, resanitize the race, revitalize society, and regenerate moral life…. [W]ar was a fiery ordeal that tested physical prowess, spiritual soundness, social solidarity, and national efficiency. The idea of defeat became well-nigh unthinkable as victory was expected to provide irrefutable proof of personal, social, and political fitness. So the political and military elites of Europe rolled the dice in 1914... they believed that the risk was worth the potential gain, with the gain coming from the strengthening of power and influence that would come from victory and resulting international political domination. And— surprising as it may seem—the people responded: they truly saw the world as made up of nations in conflict, so that they should be willing to risk death to recover Alsace for the French Republic... Thus we have atavistic aristocrats seeking a role and nationalist social Darwinists and cynical politicians seeking a short victorious war to giddy busy minds with foreign quarrels. 15.3: The Setting of World War I The story of the Boer War tells us that all rational cost-benefit calculation went out the window throughout the governing apparatus of the British Empire as soon as Boers were shooting at British soldiers in places with names like Mafeking and Spion Kop. But Britain was not sporting for a European war with anybody—there were no demands made on Germany or Austria like those made by Joseph Chamberlain on the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The politicians and journalists of the French Third Republic, however, were spoiling for a war. The newly-formed German Empire had ripped the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France as part of the treaty that ended the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. (The justification was that these provinces had been previously ripped away from Germany by French aggression-but their incorporation into France had taken place more than two centuries before, Alsace in the first half and Lorraine in the second half of the seventeenth century.) And for more than forty years the French army and French politicians had been getting ready for a rematch. From the perspective of France's politicians and generals, a war with Germany was to be welcomed-as long as France's allies were securely on board as well. A war would restore French predominance in Europe and dominance over Germany, and repay their enemies across the Rhine for the insult of 1870. But why would France have any allies against Germany? Why wasn’t Germany Britain’s potential ally against France in 1914? Britain had been at war with France for more than half of the millennium before 1914, after all. British geopoliticians feared Germany because Germany had built a modern navy strong enough to challenge and—possibly, if they were lucky—beat the British navy. Such a naval defeat would leave food-importing Britain helpless, with no choice but to surrender. France had not built such a navy. Why had the Germans built such a navy? Because the admirals convinced the German Emperor—the “Kaiser,” i.e. “Caesar”— Wilhelm II that the British would never respect Germany unless it did have a fleet strong enough to challenge the British navy. His British cousins, they told him, only respect those who are strong. If we are strong enough to harm them they will respect you and us. If we are not, they will not.
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It is not clear that the British respected pre-World War I Germany; it is clear that they feared it, and armed against it. As Winston Churchill said, when the magnitude of the German naval construction program became clear, “the politicians proposed [to build] four [new battleships every year], the admirals demanded six, and we compromised on eight.” It is worth stepping back, and noting that all of these politicians and military officers were at best badly mistaken, and at worst criminally insane. Nearly ten million people would die in World War I. All of the continental European emperors whose ministers made war would lose their thrones as a direct result of the war, the British monarch alone surviving (the kings of Italy and Belgium also survived: their countries joined the winning Anglo-French side). The not-so-old Czar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and his ministers thought that it was important to demonstrate that did not demonstrate that Czarist Russia was the great power in the Balkans, and that slavic-speaking small nations could count on it to protect them from Viennese hegemony. But World War I did not show anybody that Czarist Russia was the great power in the Balkans, and that slavic-speaking small nations could count on it to protect them from Viennese hegemony. Instead he lost his throne, his life, and his country. Russia lost a generation of young men dead or mutilated, and lost its chance to have a less-than-totally-unhappy twentieth century. The not-so-old German Emperor Wilhelm II in Berlin and his ministers thought that a short, sharp victorious war—first defeat France, then occupy Paris, then accept the French surrender, then move the army east to Russia and force Russia to make peace as well—would secure for Germany a dominant “place in the sun” among the great powers of Europe. World War I did not secure for Germany a dominant “place in the sun” among the great powers of Europe. Wilhelm lost his throne. His country lost its political and military autonomy, a generation of young men, and took the first steps along the road to Hitler's Third Reich, a regime that will blacken the name of Germany for millennia. The old Emperor Franz Josef in Vienna would die while World War I was still going on; but his Habsburg dynasty would lose its throne, and his empire would be chopped up and handed out to no fewer than seven nation-states (today between thirteen and fifteen, depending on whether you count Bosnia-Herzegovina as one or three). The French would lose a generation of young men dead or mutilated. And it would take more than thirty more years before French politicians would realize that trying to contain Germany by using your army simply did not work, and that perhaps a better way to try to contain German power would be to integrate it economically into a wider Europe. The British would lose a generation of young men. And the post-World War I British Empire would be much weaker, and eventually find itself in a worse strategic position, than even a pre-World War I Britain facing a German-dominated Europe would have possessed. And so the trigger would be pulled. The war would be fought by the mass-conscripted 18-21 year old boys of Europe, augmented by reserves who had received their military training in the previous decades. The mass armies marched off to war enthusiastically, singing, taking the causes of the emperors and the generals for their own, on all sides expecting a short victorious war. After all, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Prusso-Danish War of 1864, the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, and the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century had all been very http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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short. Few looked at the slaughter of the American Civil War of 1861-65, or at the bloody trench warfare of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, or even at the Boer War, and thought about what they might mean. Some were more realistic and looked forward to war with more fear. Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary who committed the British Empire to the war, is reputed to have looked out his window one evening at dusk in the last days before the shooting, and said: “The lights are going out all over Europe. I do not think we shall see them lit again in our lifetime…” Which raises the question of why—if that was truly his judgment—he did not do more to stop it. 15.4: The Approach of World War I The rulers of Austria-Hungary had for a long time been worried about Serbian nationalism, or rather the extension of Serbian nationalism northward as ideologues argued that Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Slovenes, and others were really one nation —“Yugoslavs”—and that only alien rule by Turks from Istanbul and Germans from Vienna had prevented the previous emergence of a glorious south-slav nation. From today’s perspective it is easy to be very, very cynical: less than 80 years separate the time when Serbs and Croats were blood-brothers (so much so that the Serbs would risk bloody war with Europe's great powers to rescue the Croats from oppressive foreign despotism) and our time, when Serbs and Croats cannot live in the same village or province without the political leaders of at least one side calling for (and getting) the extermination and exile of the other. To fight one set of wars at the start of the twentieth century to unify Serbs and Croats and to fight another set of wars at the end to dissolve the union and “ethnically cleanse” the region seems among the sickest of the jokes that History plays on human populations. From our perspective a semi-democratic, constitutional monarchy like that of the Habsburg-ruled Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruling over various nationalities, a monarchy that respected (most) local customs, kept the peace, and allowed freedom of commerce, belief, and speech (within limits), seems much more than halfway up the list of desirable regimes. Would one prefer Marshall Tito? Or Milosevic? Or Karadic? Certainly not. In the summer of 1914, a Bosnian terrorist seeking Bosnian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and union with Serbia assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The terrorists had received some assistance from the secret police of the Kingdom of Serbia —although almost surely not with the active knowledge of the King of Serbia: no ruler, monarchical or otherwise, has an interest in the declaration of an open hunting season against heads of state and their near relatives. The political objective of the assassination was to break off from Austria-Hungary her south-slav provinces so they could be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia. The assassins' motives are consistent with the movement that later became known as Young Bosnia. For the old emperor Franz Josef in Vienna and his advisors, the outrageous murder of his nephew—with help from at least some within the Serbian government—seemed to call for action to chase and punish the guilty, humble and shame Serbia, and make it plain that Austria was the great power in the Balkans. Thereafter Serbian foreign policy had better trim its sails to the Austrian wind. To establish this seemed worth a small risk of a large war. Austria demanded... Serbia essentially said "yes". Austria announced that wasn't good enough and that it was going to attack Serbia. Russia
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mobilized. For the not-so-old emperor in St. Petersburg, Czar Nicholas II, and his advisors, possible involvement of Serbian government officials and agencies in the assassination of his distant cousin Franz Ferdinand was beside the point. Russia, not Austria, was to be the dominant great power in the Balkans. Russia was to be the protector of Slavicspeaking states that had previously been part of Turkey's decaying Ottoman Empire. Russia needed to make it plain that it would fulfill its promises to protect other Slavspeaking states—and especially to protect them against the imperialism of Germanspeaking Berlin and Vienna. To establish this seemed worth a small risk of a large war. For the not-so-old German Emperor, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his advisors, the decision to back Austria to the hilt in whatever action it chose to take in response to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand-up to and including war-was nearly automatic. For the German government by and large viewed a large war not as a risk but as an opportunity. The rulers of Germany felt that their country deserved a larger place in international affairs: more influence, more respect, and more colonies. They looked back at a nineteenth century in which the standing and power of the core of the turn of the century German Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, had been radically enhanced by short victorious wars provoked and managed by the so-called Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, a German politician whose best-remembered sentence is that: “It is not by speeches and debates that the great issues of the day will be decided, but by Blood and Iron.” Bismarck’s shoes were hard to fill. His legend was hard to live up to. But attempting to live up to it seemed to involve an eagerness to court and welcome the risks of war. No one remembered that Bismarck had sought war against isolated powers without allies —Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870—and only when he had stacked the deck to make rapid victory all but certain. And no one remembered that Bismarck had never had any desire to escalate political conflict in the Balkans. Perhaps his second-best-remembered sentence is that: “There is nothing at stake [in the Balkans] that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” So with the Archduke dead, with Austria having rejected the Serbian response to their ultimatum, mobilizing, and on the point of attacking Serbia, with Russia mobilizing... At that point Germany attacked Belgium... It was that stupid. Why did Germany attack Belgium? The explanation was that Germany had only one war plan. France and Russia were allied—a war with one was a war with another. Germany was going to war with Russia. It would have to fight France too. Its war plan was to fight France first while Russia was still mobilizing. And its war plan was to begin the war not by attacking the French fortification line on the Franco-German border but by outflanking the French army by marching—hopefully unopposed—through neutral Belgium, apologizing while doing so. Hence the first shots in what was a dispute between Austria and Serbia were fired on the German-Belgian border. The laughter of the guns began as Germany’s heavy artillery began destroying Belgian forts and killing Belgian soldiers and civilians. That attacking Belgium might well push Britain into the war against Germany, immediately cut Germany off from all outside resources, and add an extra great power to its enemies was not thought to be important. Britain could only bring its power to bear if the war was long. And one way or another it would be a short war. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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But it was not a short war. The German decision to turn an Austro-Serbian or an Austro-Russian dispute into a world war was amazingly stupid—propelled by the belief that it would solve domestic problems by busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that it would improve the breed and demonstrate the fitness of the German race, and that it was what the Junker warrior aristocrats were born to do. But even those would probably not have tipped the scales had it not been for two other factors: the eastern civilizing mission of the German nation and the professional attitudinal habits of the Prussian army. On the eastern civilizing mission of Germany, consider the German Social Democratic Party. Founded in 1875, and promptly outlawed by Bismarck. By 1914 it had a million dues-paying members, was the largest political party of the world, and held 34% of the seats in the German Reichstag. It had been founded to bring about the overthrow of capitalism and a just socialist society—whether that would be created by revolution, evolve naturally as the contradictions of capitalism manifested themselves, or evolve and then have to be defended in the streets against a reactionary coup was not clear to anybody—to advance the international brotherhood of workers, and to oppose militarism in all of its forms. So what was the SPD supposed to do when the Emperor Wilhelm II’s ministers asked for money to fight World War I. The SPD’s caucus met on August 3, 1914. Hugo Hasse was appalled by what he heard: “You want to approve war credits for the Germany of the Hohenzollern [Emperor] and the Prussian [landlord-aristocrat-officer-bureaucrat] Junkers?” “No,” said SPD leader Friedrich Ebert. He went on: [N]ot for that Germany, but for the Germany of productive labor, the Germany of the social and cultural ascent of the masses. It is a matter of saving that Germany! We cannot abandon the fatherland in its moment of need. It is a matter of protecting women and children... What were they protecting women and children from? The Czarist tyranny that would follow a Russian victory and conquest. SPD Reichstag Deputy Karl Liebknecht voted with his party on August 4, 1914. But by December 2 he had moved into opposition to the war—the first deputy to do so: [T]his war which nobody desired... is an Imperialist war... for capitalist domination of the world markets and... important countries in the interest of industrial and financial capitalism... a preventative war by the German and Austrian war parties working in the shadows of semi-absolutism and secret diplomacy... a Bonapartist attempt to demoralise and destroy the growing Labor movement. The German slogan ‘against Czarism’ like the English or French slogan ‘against militarism’ brings forth the most noble instincts, revolutionary traditions, and hopes for the purpose of hatred between peoples.... Germany... does not possess any of the qualities necessary to play the role of a liberator [from Czarism].... This war is not a defensive war... it [is] impossible for us to trust a capitalist Government declaring that [the war] is for the defense of the country.... We must demand a peace which will humiliate no one as soon as possible... Simultaneous and continuous demands for peace in all belligerent countries can stop the bloody massacre before complete exhaustion.... [I am for] our brothers on the field of battle... those wounded and [the] sick.... [I am] against the war, against those responsible for it, against those who are http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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directing it; against the capitalistic ends for which it is being pursued, against the violation of the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg, against military dictatorship, and against the complete neglect of social and political duties of which the Government and the dominant class are guilty today... On the Prussian way of war, consider an army and an officer corps taught that ever since the days of the seventeenth-century Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I Hohenzollern that the best way to fight was to attack—ferociously, cleverly, ruthlessly, and unexpectedly from a surprise direction—no matter what. Robert Citino argues that the foundation-story was the June 28, 1675 Battle of Fehrbellin. Friedrich Wilhelm and his Field Marshall George von Derfflinger abandoned their supply wagons and marched their army 160 miles as the crow flies in two weeks over seventeenth-century roads— twice as fast as seventeenth-century armies typically moved. The 69-year old Field Marshall, riding alone, induced his Swedish enemies to open the gate of Rathenow after first having a fifth column inside the town hold a banquet to get all the Swedish officers as drunk as possible. Cut in two, the Swedish army retreated to regroup—and found itself trapped and forced to fight because Friedrich Wilhelm had destroyed the bridge over the Rhin River at Fehrbellin. The demoralized Swedes, fighting an enemy that wasn’t supposed to be there in a place where they were not supposed to have to stop, were beaten before the first cannon fired. An army trained in that tradition will respond to Russian mobilization during an Austro-Serbian dispute by attacking Belgium— ferociously, cleverly, ruthlessly, and unexpectedly from a surprise direction. Supply wagons and logistics? Leave them behind to be somebody else’s problem because you can always fix your logistical problems after your victory. Industrial mobilization? Ignore it, because if you have to fight a long war you have probably already lost. Strategy—what is this “strategy”? Grand strategy—how to avoid making more enemies and maximize your numbers of friends? Again, that only counts in a long war, which is one that you have lost. Tactics and operations are all. And, indeed, since Fehrbellin, the odds are that first a Prussian and then a German army would be a fearsome and terrifying foe, greatly outpunching its weight on the tactical and operational level—but, as far as logistics, industrial mobilization, strategy, and grand strategy are concerned, a group that could be out-thought and out-fought by a committee of six-year-old children. And so the war came. World War I would have been bad but not a disaster—check that: World War I would have been a disaster but not an utterly intolerable catastrophic disaster—if it had been a short war. But it was not a short war. It was a long one. British assistance to France kept it from being overrun in the fall of 1914. German assistance on the eastern front kept Austria from being overrun in the fall of 1914. And then they all dug trenches. It became a total war, a resource mobilization-based war of attrition that dragged on for more than four years. 15.5: World War I Itself Read somebody else to learn what happened during the war. I don't have the heart to write it down. Mobilizing economic resources for total war turned out to be suprisingly difficult. Military plans had all been based on the assumption of a short war: one in which http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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decisive victory would be won or lost in a matter of months, in a single battle or two. And at first it did seem as though victory would be quick, and would go to Germany and its allies, the so-called central powers. The first-mobilized vanguard of the Russian army was decimated in the forests of eastern Germany. The first battles between the French and the Germans saw the French take much heavier casualties, and retreat almost to Paris before the Germans outran their supply lines. Thereafter the front line settled down into a fixed line of trenches in which soldiers hid from flying death. And offensives degenerated into episode of machine-gun target practice in which the attackers always took far heavier casualties, and invariably gained little ground of no strategic value. As the war settled into stalemate, generals called for greater and greater commitments of resources to the front: if battles could not be won by strategy, perhaps they could be won by the sheer weight of men, metal, and explosives committed to the front. The share of each belligerent’s resources devoted to the war effort rose. In Britain—which attained the highest degree of mobilization—the government was sucking up more than one-third of national product (plus the time of conscripted soldiers) for the war effort by 1916. Production became much more that dictated by the representatives of industry's largest customer, the military, than by market forces. The example of the German war economy made some, like Vladimir Lenin, believe that a “command economy” was possible: that you could run a socialist economy not through the market but by using the government as a command-and-control bureaucracy. In the end, the weight of men and metal arranged against Germany and its allies did tell. France, Belgium, Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, (from 1915), Romania, and the United States (from 1917) against the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires and Bulgaria Russia withdrew from the war after the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks in the October Revolution in 1917—which took place in November—after the fall of the Czar and the proclamation of a Russian Republic in March 1917. Final victory was achieved at the end of 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire's army collapsed and with the German army in France facing defeat by attrition and the German population at home on the edge of starvation by blockade, Germany sought an armistice. 10 million dead; 10 million maimed; 10 million lightly injured—out of major belligerent populations of some 100 million adult men. July 8, 2010: 7589 words Brad DeLong on July 08, 2010 at 12:39 PM in Books, History | Permalink Favorite
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Comments Neal said... Is it a book on politics or history or economics? The fundamental thread of "economics" is lost in the other two potential topics. It would be hard to tell the intent of the book from this chapter. Being a polymath does not always lead to the the clearest path through a topic and would wear out anyone other than your own mother. Shouldn't someone who is presumed to wish to be informed on the ECONOMIC history be also assumed to already know the broader sweep of history? Distill, distill, distill. Reply July 08, 2010 at 01:02 PM Brad DeLong said in reply to Neal... That is one reason why I am not sure that this is the chapter that I want... Reply July 08, 2010 at 01:04 PM Francis Spufford said... It might be a useful as a sieving or distilling principle to say that the political and military history (both relatively well known to your likely readers) should only be there in so far as they serve the economic history (much less well-known). In which case your instinct that 15.5 should be very short, because the military conduct of the war doesn't matter very much, is right; but 15.4 should be short too, because the consequences of the war breaking out are much more important than exactly how it did. And you've already established, at a nice level of generality where we can be surprised by your synthesis of a vast & complicated social picture, what the *broad* causes were. If we've got aristocracy-threatened-by-relative-loss-of-position, plus Nietzchean & Social-Darwinist ethical currents, plus nationally framed zero-sum politics, then we don't really need the traditions of the Prussian army. (Though I learned a lot reading about them.) So: a ruthless slenderizing of the military/political narrative component of 15.4, and then a corresponding weight gain, either in 15.5 or in a putative 15.6, for a narrative about the specifically economic conduct of the war and its consequences. Bonds, militarization of production, disarrangement of pre-war factor costs with steeply rising wages, inflation, opportunities for New York as a financial centre, the whole lovely mess of 20th C path dependency in Europe and its empires. No idea if this helps. Thankyou, by the way, for the nice thing you did with Red Plenty. Francis Spufford Reply July 08, 2010 at 01:51 PM CapnBillysWhizBang said... I believe it was Rodin who said, when asked how he created a sculpture, that he simply took a block of marble and cut away what wasn't needed. The difference between a sculptor and a writer is that the sculptor can just go down to the quarry and buy his marble. The writer has to create his own marble. That's what you're doing right now. Don't worry about whether it fits. Finish your block of marble and then cut away what you don't need.
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Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:03 PM Aaron Gurwitz said... How much of the economic growth realized in Europe, the US, and Japan over the 20th century was a direct or indirect result of technological advances that would not have taken place or happened much later than they did were it not for the huge government spending on R&D associated with war efforts? Routine air travel. Radio. Rocketry. Computers. Antibiotics. The world would be a better, and perhaps richer, place today if we had waited a few more decades for these advances and avoided all the death and destruction. But the economic history is incomplete with some accounting of the economic benefits. That's the chapter I wish you would write. Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:13 PM Doctor Jay said... I didn't find the treatment tiring at all, by the way. But that's just me. I liked the focus on Schumpeter's ideas: the military aristocracy talking their book. I think almost everything in the chapter can be coalesced around this framework, and it is most definitely an economic framework. Let me show you what I mean: The German Admirals got their navy, and enhanced their station by talking up the hypothetical threat of England and playing on the Kaiser's insecurities. This is not a failed strategy, it was a successful one. Those who stood to benefit by the gold fields in the Orange Free State did not employ a failed strategy, they employed a successful one. Even the politicians that escalated the Boer War did not employ a failed strategy, they employed a successful one. The whole thing seems depressingly familiar. It begins to sound to me like the Iraq War, or like the mortgage bubble and great crash. It reminds me of the old curse: "May your every wish be granted". Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:16 PM Steve Bannister said... Brad. Am anxious for you to finish this so we can all learn. Re: WWI/20th century in context, I have probably learned more from Arrighi than anyone. The end of one cycle of capitalist accumulation, the beginning of another. And all the pretenders thought they could take it over in lieu of the natural successor who reneged. Ok, ok, I admit, I am a bit of a Kindleberger HST follower. Well, maybe more than a bit... Oh, and if you buy this, the current situation is riveting. So, unquestionably, you must cover WWI. It was the sum of all fears and hopes. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso http://hip.library.utah.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp? uri=full=3100001~!1849719~!1&profile=mrmain (Accessed April 26, 2010). Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:17 PM Steve Bannister said... oh, R.I.P., Giovanni. Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:20 PM sm said... I was going to say it was not just Germany (and Austria Hungary) whose internal political problems might be "solved" by a foreign war -- the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was on the verge of civil war in the summer of 1914.
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But the first two commenters have it right. Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:52 PM dilbert dogbert said... More focus on the nationalization of the economies to support the war and less on the stupidity of men? Why does your note only bring to mind the run up to Iraq? WMD (NBC to us old folks) AQ, the one percent solution, preventive war, bringing democracy to the unenlightened moslems and how quickly the anti war wing of the democrats folded. We are doomed. Reply July 08, 2010 at 02:54 PM matt b said... It important to know the non-economic reasons the pre-WW1 emerging economic order was crushed. I tend to rely on economic forces as as the primary drivers for society. In this case, the war changed everything and set the stage for much of the economic foundation of the 20th century. Keep it in. It is also a terrifying reminder of what can befall us if we are not careful and get suckered by the Vulcans. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:03 PM Scott de B. said... A very good summary, but I agree that it should have more on the economic assumptions and consequences of the war. One of the reasons that the war was expected to be short is that Angell and others assumed that the sheer expense would bankrupt one side or the other within 12 months. But every government was able to develop financing mechanisms that ensured the war could continue almost indefinitely. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:16 PM Peter Francis said... This is a good read, although I'm inclined to agree with the first commenter about whether it's economics as opposed to other things. One thing I am sure of is that any discussion that purports to cover 1914 to 1920 is surely incomplete without a discussion of the armistice and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which came out in 1919 iirc. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:21 PM Lee A. Arnold said... Maybe the world needed a Hitler to make lots of people see finally that war just won't work. But the "growing belief that nature rewarded struggle—and that struggle was or could become bloody" had been around since the ancient Spartans or before, wouldn't you say? The Age of European Anxiety that began in the late-19th Century (and which we are still in; I think it's a subcurrent of Romanticism) had rather different harbingers in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard -- and so Nietzsche's "will to power" was not the only curative prescription, though it comported bloodyhandily with the older tribal tendency. Now it looks like Kierkegaard and the existentialists still got game and may be winning, though we might have to call our continuation "the Age of Psych Meds." Where did Francis Fukuyama say that? It is priceless. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:21 PM Martin said... With the caveat that I am not a professional historian or economist (though I majored http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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in history in college (many years ago), including taking a grad course with Arno Mayer, and read history quite a bit avocationally) I think this contains some good stuff but needs a lot of work. Due to lack of time, I will give a bunch of reactions without trying to be too systematic. I think incorporating a lot political/social/cultural history in the chapter is fine, insofar as many of your readers may not even know the basics of WWI and you include a lot of stuff that even european history majors may not be familiar with any any detail. Having said this, you need to link the WWI chapter to the sweep of economic history-and have a plan (perhaps involving several economic themes) for doing so that, to at least some extent organizes and pervades the material. Some possible economic themes include (1) economic causes (or absence of such) for war, (2) effects of economic and technological development of course of war, (3) effect of conduct or war on future economic developments and ideas, among others. [I cannot quickly find a draft of your whole book, but I assume you have a later chapter on economic effects of the war, unless you just say "What he {JM Keynes) said."] Your current draft talks about (1) quite a bit focusing on Norman Angell etc. I think these debates are rather dated--they're to some extent part of the criticism of crude Marxist historical analysis. You shouldn't necessarily dropt the subject, but it should not be your main economic content. Nial Fergueson's work on pre-war military bugetary issues (Germany fearing it would lose the arms race in the long time becasue its political settlement limited taxation capacity)seems interesting--compare the literature on tax efficiency and Britain's rise to power from the late 1600s. However, I would want to check on how well Fergueson's work on WWI has stood up over time, since his work in general seems to have a huge variance in quality. Perhaps there is an economic story about the percieved (and maybe genuine) need to mobilize and attach quickly at beginning of war--e.g., economics and techonology of time made very big armies the most effective, but economy could not support big enough standing army, or something--but I don't know the literature, if any. With regard (2) I am sure there are a variety of stories to be told, but I am not sure how important they are in the long run. One possible important story is that WWI took place in the form it did becasue economic/technological development, for the first time, had reached the point where million person armies, and million cannon shell bombardments, could be sustained in the field for years on end, and no one had ever had to deal with the consequences of this before. This sounds good but I don't know if it is a true story, or a story with genuine explanatory power, however. With respect to theme (3), I believe there is quite large a literature on state directed economic organization during WWI--eg. Rathenqu's organization of the German economy and the government take over the railroads in the US, with claims for important postwar practical and intellectual influence. Even apart from issues or relation of the chapter to "economic" history, the chapter has some other serious problems. There is a lot of jumping around chronologically. Most importantly you jump around from an at-the-time-decisions-were-made perspective to a hindsight perspective. On a smaller scale you jump back and forth between descriptions of events in the war and background--e.g, you talk about background issues, then the origins of war in Serbia dispute, then invasion of Belgium, then background of war plans, etc. To some extent you have stylistic reasons for doing this--irony, excitement of reader's interest before http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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presenting materisl, etc., but the confusion outweighs the benefits, at least in the current form of the chapter. It might work if harnessed to a clear theme or small number of themes organizaing the chapeter as a whole, but to make it work would take a lot of time invested in artistry, and might not be possible at all. The jumping around also confuses subsantive analysis and judgments. For example, you characterize leadership decisons as at least in part insane. But you do not clearly distinguish "insane with hindsight" and "insane based on what was known in 1914, or 1916,etc., not to mention 1905 (when England started buddying up to France militarily) or the year I forget when Russia allied with France). The various decisions may well have been insane, or at least demonstrably wrong, from an ex ante perspective, but it is a different question from the hindsight perspective. In focusing on Hobson, Angell et al, I don't think you give adequate attention to issues of power and influence in Europe as motivators of policy. Were there consequences to a country's place in the power/influence scale in Europe going beyond the simplistic "ability to tax or religiously convert" measure of the benefits of power? Isn't that a lot of what the Germany Russia France jockeying was about rather than specific territory? And was all of this just stupid (as opposed to not important enought to justify the costs of war)? For example, during 1945-present did or does the US get benefits from conventional military predominance? Could the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire rationally have been concerned that they had to hang tough about intrinsicallty not very important Balkan issues or their whole empire would fall apart? Compare neo-conservative thinking about US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The chapter seems Western-European and even Anglo centric. You do talk about Russia, the Balkans, Austro-Hungary etc., but the balance seems off. This is a matter both of length, perspective, and order of discussion. For exampel,I get the sense that in some places you discuss England or France before Russion and the Balkans just because material about England or France came into your head first, rather than because of a thoughtful consideration of the best order of presentation. Even if this is not true, the text reads as if it were true. Some of your would-be colorful military history anecdotes to illustrate various points don't work. I'm especially thinking about the Prussian 17th century example, whose name I forget. It's just not all that interesting or that different from a zillion other military history stories (Ghengiz Khan (or however you spell him these days) early vintage Napoleon, George Patton, Bedford Forrest, Douglas MacArthur on a good day, etc. ad nauseum). And in serious terms, I would imagine that the Prussian military tradition in 1914=Frederick the Great and the war against Austria in the 1860s). The discussion of the Boer War goes on too long for the point you make, but is interesting enough that I would try to find an excuse to keep it in. (But compare Samuel Johnson's maxim about good writing that if you have a sentence you really like, strike it out--may the same goes for anecdotes.) Some technical points. I am not sure you deserve marks off for these since they are probably not that important. As part of your western-front centrism, you emphasize the static trench warfare interrpted by ineffective offencisves character of the war. My impression is that things in the East were much more mobile, due in part to a greater ratio of land to men and ammunition. On the other hand, arguably the mobility in the east translated to backing and forthing that was not that differenet in effect from the western fighting. Also, you refer to the conventional image of a machine-gun dominated battlefield. My http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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understanding is that many more casualties were caused by artillery, not that machine guns weren't pretty horrible. I'm not sure this is important, though it is possible that costs of artillery ammunition (on the scale used in WWI) were an order of magnitude greater than other weaponry and therefore were a big part of the ecomomic story of the war--but this is just a guess. (And I wouldn't be surprised if food issues were more important economically than weaponry, but this too is basically a guess.) To summarize, big organization issues balance issues (not in terms of bias but in terms of words/importance of topic ratio) thinking about clear themes, whatever they are, may help both substance and oranizations plus my substantive points, but these are more matters of opinion Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:26 PM Michael Carroll said... I agree with dilbert dogbert. The fascinating thing about WWI is that is the first time the industrialized world mobilized its economic resources for war. Reading this material I learned next to nothing about how industrialists, labor unions, banks, farmers made adjustments in their academic activity to support the prolonged diversion of economic activity towards preparing for and sustaining war. Instead I am learning about how the Germans defeated the Swedes in 1695!!? What do we learn about the responsiveness to the industrial economy for national ends? How does this compare to pre 20th century economies? What does this presage for the viability of national industrial policy? Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:28 PM Matt Austern said... Are you interested in typos and garbled sentences and such, or are you planning to rewrite all of this anyway? If you are interested, I found a few. At a higher level... I thought your discussion of the world before the war, and how a general war could have happened when it was in nobody's interest, was insightful. It's useful even though other books cover much of the same ground. I'm not sure you've achieved your stated purpose, though, of explaining the meaning of the war for early 20th century economics. I would have thought you'd spend more than one paragraph on what mobilization for total war did to the economies of Britain and Germany. Perhaps you're planning to have another chapter dealing with the economic aftermath, presumably drawing on Keynes? Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:30 PM Michael Carroll said... I should add that I liked this chapter, but it belongs in a book that was written in the 1930's. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:31 PM mike shupp said... Stuff I'd like to see added: (a) Between WWI and WWII there was fairly broad sentiment that war was due to armaments manufacturers and distributers (Merchants of Death). Was there any real
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evidence for this? What were the political implications in various nations, and how did they affect the actual developement (and economics!) of rearmament in the years leading up to WWII? (b) Growth and maturation of the aircraft industry, as affected by the war. Were there similar affects in other "high-tech" areas, for instance radio and powered vehicles (trucks and tanks and tractors)? (c) Methods of financing the war, with bonds or taxes or inflation, and their implications for the post war period. (d) Economic impacts of the war in distant places, such as South America, East Asia, Western Africa. Economic impacts of the war on near-by places, such as Switzerland and Sweden and Spain. Was the impact of war the same in Northern India (Pakistan) and Southern India (India)? Impact on Japan. (e) Economic impacts on different regions within Russia. Were the effects of war uniform, or did they lead to regional differences which eventually affected Soviet economic development? (f) Economic impacts of the war on Greece and the Balkans, with present day affects. (g) Economic and demographic affects of 1918 Influenza epidemic. (h) Was the impact of war deaths on the English upper crust as brutal as commonly believed, and were there economic implications? (i) Other social and economic aftershocks. Did the war increase employment of women? Did it have an impact on the migration of Negros from south to north within the US? (j) In the long run, did the Great War alter European/American growth rates, or the relative size of different sectors within these economies? Basically these all reduce to wondering if the Great War simply shook up and maybe accelerated existing economic/historical/social trends all around the world, or if it had a broad transforming affect, which underlay economic and international relationships before WWII. I realize there were huge social and political impacts on Europe, already covered in many histories. I'm wondering about possibly overlooked economic issues. Perhaps you've covered these in chapters that haven't been posted. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:35 PM Gary L. Wollberg said... I liked what you had. Difficult to correctly view the economics of war without being deeply into the political side. As an undergraduate at UCSD I did my honors thesis on the Anglo-French Naval Agreement of 1912. That is the event that allowed France to indulge in fantasies of revenge against Germany. My argument was that the agreement was as much a result of Britan's domestic economic priorities as geopolitical
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considerations. You are welcome to it if you think it may help. But the bibliography is a bit dated now... Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:36 PM mike shupp said... Brad DeLong said in reply to Neal... That is one reason why I am not sure that this is the chapter that I want. ---------------------Actually it probably is, but you might want to make it "even worse" with excerpts from Middlebrook's FIRST DAY ON THE SOMME or Alan Clark's THE DONKEYS or Solzhenitzen's AUGUST 1914. I don't think the typical year-2010 reader, particular the typical college aged reader of history or economics, has the slightest idea of what Total War entailed. Simply dropping down statistics won't convey the reality. You need to overwhelm. Reply July 08, 2010 at 03:46 PM Neal said... WW1 was when empires reached their limit. The limit was reinforced by the rise of egalitarianism and a resurfacing of ethnic division. Somehow, that change needs to be brought forward. Reply July 08, 2010 at 04:06 PM Dave Martin said... Martin's correct--the Western Front was mostly about artillery. Troops were needed to maintain the barbed wire and to shoot at the other side, should they be stupid enough to attack. The cost of keeping those trenches full of troops was enormously high. Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory" is good for that. And he's perfect for giving a sense of what the trenches were like. If the vast British, French, and German industrial mobilizations were improvised after the reality of a long war became apparent, that leads to questions about how the "merchants of death" notion got so widespread. You can't buy a Krups coffemaker even today without thinking of artillery. I wonder about the consequences of dead horses. Dominic Lieven's new history "Russia Against Napoleon" is said to explain that Napoleon's army was able to replace soldiers, but not the huge number of horses that had perished in the Russia campaign. For all the talk of 20th century technology, the publicity people for the English play "War Horse" note that huge numbers of horses perished in World War I. World War II was much the same. Thinking of war-induced technical progress, my grandfather worked in aircraft design for the military during World War I. He went on to designing and selling railroad equipment. Why? No money in airplanes. Reply July 08, 2010 at 04:16 PM dilbert dogbert said in reply to Dave Martin... I think I read that the Boer War wasted over 400,000 horses. 40,000??? Reply July 08, 2010 at 04:44 PM a historian said... There's lots of great stuff here, but it's more a "the lead up to the war" than a "WWI" chapter. As others have noted, 15.5 really isn't holding up its own here. US exports of barbed wire, among other things, grew by some ridiculous factor... Given the role technological change plays in many accounts of economic http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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development/transformation, I think it IS important to make the point that WWI was a weirdly low-tech defensive war in many ways (barbed wire, shovels, and soldier power are all you need to build a trench) even as it was an increasingly high tech offensive war. And most European historians would expect at least some mention of the war and GENDER: women in the work force (see Laura Lee Downs; Sue Grayzel), the effect this has on women as consumers as well as workers must belong in any economic history,etc. Maybe, too, it would help to read _early_ Niall Ferguson, back when his niche was "economic history of WWI." Reply July 08, 2010 at 04:55 PM dilbert dogbert said... Maybe an inclusion of the economic effects of the the American Civil War? Two nations with different schemes of nationalizing the economy. It was a mega death war for its time and at the end was evolving into trench war except for Sherman's March Through Georgia that broke the back of the South. Lots of places to go and lots of interesting ideas for us econo geeks and history geeks. Thanks for letting us view you thoughts. Another idea: Maybe the General Staff plan had more to do with the recognition that Germany could not sustain a long war and the swing through Belgium was driven by that recognition than any previous German military history. Reply July 08, 2010 at 05:03 PM John Smith said... I always thought it obvious that man goes to war simply because he enjoys it. It is a totally optional human activity, so no-one would do it if they didn't derive pleasure from it in some way. As such, we will always have wars, just as we will always eat fine food or have sex. It's just fun! Reply July 08, 2010 at 05:19 PM RW said... Couldn't the real rise of the military industrial complex and the detachment of their profitability from political boundary or home country growth be viably traced to this period? Reply July 08, 2010 at 05:45 PM DOW said... First time in a long time I've seen the now ubiquitous "As such..." used correctly. Good show, Smith. Reply July 08, 2010 at 06:42 PM Brad DeLong said in reply to Matt Austern... Indeed. The next chapter is called The Economic Consequences of the War Yours, Brad DeLong Reply July 08, 2010 at 06:47 PM Jamey said in reply to dilbert dogbert... "I once talked to an old cannibal, who hearing of the Great War raging in Europe was most curious to know how we Europeans managed to eat such huge quantities of human flesh. When I told him that the Europeans did not eat their slain foes, he looked at me with shocked horror and asked what kind of barbarians we were to kill without any real object." Bronislaw Malinowski, "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" From one perspective, World War I was enormously wasteful. But from the cannibal http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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perspective, the problem with World War I was that it was too productive. Reply July 08, 2010 at 07:23 PM The Raven said... Some thoughts: 1. There are reasons, and then there are the reasons for the reasons. Economics was a big part of the reasons for the reasons here, and I think that needs more attention. Surely an "economic causes of the war" section, at least, is called for? 2. The economic dislocations of the previous period played into the war. I am not clear on how, though I suspect this is an area where Marx might be of some help. 3. One of the economic stories here is the total failure of European rulers to grasp that economic changes had fundamentally altered the nature of war. Flintlock politics was controlling rifles and artillery. 4. That story, therefore, is part of reactionary politics. 5. Another part of the story is how the war broke the Second International. If the war proved, beyond doubt, that nation-states no longer had any right to command loyalty, it also proved that, nonetheless, people were loyal first to their countries. The international class unity that Marxists had sought to build dissolved when faced with an existential threat. Croak! Reply July 08, 2010 at 07:44 PM NewAlgier said... Since you asked: The chapter touches on the issue of power balances and elites who had a stake in a sharp, short war. I get the impression that the only country that WANTED to go to war was France, while it was more a question of paying off aristocrats in the other nations. Some footnoting here would be helpful. I think that most people think of economics as macro: balance of payments, GDP, that sort of thing. The microeconomic foundations of war would be very interesting to me: game theory, power balances, the role of protected elites in each country. After the war, did those responsible get their just deserts? (I don't think so, because the armistice was so one-sided, and led to another war just a short while later). If you made this the theme of the chapter, how elites in a country can drive it to terrible actions, even in a democracy, that would have a lot of relevance to modern audiences. Not a new theme, but a rigorous economic approach to the micro aspects, developing the theme of power balances, might lend this chapter some needed structure. The chapter is also completely silent on the economic role of the United States. Also on the telegraph, which was the essential "productivity improvement" that made such a war possible, moreso than guns, planes, battleships, and tanks, I thought. I found your discussion of the Schleiffen Plan incomplete, in that this was a great plan with appalling execution, since the German officer corps never retained an institutional memory of why the plan was structured the way that it was. This is boring old micro again: game theory, institutional memory, maybe the wrong people were promoted to run the German war machine? Or maybe the Russians were more modern than expected? If economics can broadly be considered a quantitative study of people's happiness, then war definitely has a place in the discussion, as the maximization of misery. It infuriates me that the Richard Perle's of the world can think of war as an abstraction in which
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others are miserable. Finally, it seems as though the Boer experience had at least some effect in Britain. They didn't try nearly the same level of repression in India, or maybe it's just that concentration camps are harder in a nation of 300 million. Finally finally, I thought that the Hapsburg's were close behind the Ottoman's in decadence, looting, and repression, no? Am I dead wrong here? Reply July 08, 2010 at 08:19 PM NewAlgier said... Richard Perles, Hapsburgs, Ottomans. I promise, I'm not illiterate, despite evidence to the contrary. Reply July 08, 2010 at 08:21 PM smc said... I thought it was great. I've been reading a bit about Winston Churchill in the last year; and learned something. And I liked the way you didn't hedge about how stupid war was and is. Reply July 08, 2010 at 08:55 PM DCA said... If you wanted to make the point about Social Darwinism and war stronger, you could mention Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American war to show how even a nation devoid of aristocrats and without much of a military could view some war as a splendid thing. Very readable; I think a lot of the buildup is needed to make clear just how pointless this war was--in the most literal sense--none of the belligerents had plans that involved a war as the route to some goal. (Unlike WW II, say). Reply July 08, 2010 at 09:16 PM Mark C said... Some humbly submitted thoughts. Okay - anything that starts with both Kipling and Wilfred Owen is great. 1. You've brought several historiographies into play (imperialism, economic history, European political history, military history, social history) without a strong narrative arc to hang them on. I applaud the brave effort, but you've done so at the risk of losing clarity. Focus on the themes you've been carrying through the entire work. If imperialism is the major "economic" explanation for the war, than keep it, but also expand on the other "issues" the war raised for the dominant economic thought of the time. I seem to recall from work done 20 years ago that a major supposed benefit of free trade put forth by those against the Corn Laws was that it would make Britain more secure due to the increased "interdependencies" between the major powers that would make war 2. You focus on the human cost - but what were the economic outcomes? What were the outcomes on economic thought? (Or are those coming in the next chapter). I believe this is the beginning of the shift from London to New York on the financial scene - definitely the arrival of America as a major power in every meaning. 2. I think the American Civil War might be a better precursor example than the Boer War in many ways, but the Boer War makes sense given the early emphasis on the somewhat dated arguments of Hobson and Schumpeter that have been plowed over
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several times. What brought that to mind was the "the British invented the concentration camp" line. Not sure that's supported by the historical record. The same point about partisans living among the population was, for example, illustrated even earlier by General Order 11 during the American Civil War which led to the forcible evacuation of the Missouri counties bordering Kansas. Also the advent of total war, (Sherman's March to the Sea), modern weaponry's effect on mass formations etc. By the way, my own personal thesis is that the horrific casualties and the lack of extended order formations were a combination of generals fighting the last war (at least early on) plus the very real difficulties of command and control of those formations prior to the advent of reliable radio communications. While the ability to kill at a distance increased exponentially, the combatants were still stuck using battlefield communications little different than Napoleon. The exception was the telephone and telegraph, but they weren't real helpful in a tactical operation. 3. I agree with Mike Schupp's point about conveying the cost of the war in human terms. The British lost more men in the first hour of July 1 on the Somme than America has lost in Iraq and Afghanistan in a decade. Bravo as always on exhibiting an incredible breadth and depth, good writing and a refreshing lack of jargon. Reply July 08, 2010 at 09:31 PM Gene O'Grady said... Why the assumption that the Hapsburg empire was close to the Ottomans in decadence? A too large proportion of really idiotic aristocrats, but all in all a tolerant multicultural society, particularly in comparison with what that part of the world has seen since, and a hotbed of creative and critical thinking on a world scale. Certainly the peace efforts of Karl II are great deal more admirable and realistic than those of the racist Woodie Wilson, as were those of Benedict XV. Reply July 08, 2010 at 09:45 PM derrida derider said... I think you have to focus more on the economics of how the war was conducted. Not only on how resources were mobilised (though that needs proper coverage) but the interplay between the technology available (including management and finance technologies), military realities and economic limits. It's surprising that the word "railway" nowhere appears in your chapter, for example. Yet it was railways that made the Schlieffen plan both possible and necessary, railways that were responsible for the long western deadlock (in the event you got through the enemy's trench lines he could rail reserves in much faster than you could advance) and lack of railways that meant Russia couldn't produce enough to use its massive manpower. Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:01 PM JP said... I would jettison 15.1.1 and 15.1.2, or at a minimum find a way to work the economic theory into the main narrative. The flow works better with: 1. Intro, 2. 15.2 (with new title -- e.g. "Wars of colonization" -- or something along those lines); 3. 15.3 4. 15.4 5. 15.5 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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At the end of 15.5 perhaps you could integrate some information from 15.1.1 and 15.1.2 if you can find a unifying thread. As it stand though, in 15.1.1 and 15.1.2, I read the ideas about economic theorists more along the lines of "Here are some theories from economists that turned out to be wrong, or only half-right". It might be interesting to spell out exactly why they were wrong and where their theories fell short -- this would require some understanding of their working assumptions and could potentially provide some illumination for how they and their contemporaries made serious misjudgments. e.g. "Norman Angell’s argument about the futility and cost of destructive industrial war was completely correct. The conclusions about Europe’s future history he drew from his argument were completely wrong. And he should have known that they were wrong, for the Britain in which he lived had just fought the Boer War." OK, he should have known the conclusions were wrong, but the historical fact is that he didn't make the connection. Why is this? Answering that question might provide a more universal and useful lesson. On balance, I found the piece thought-provoking. The question "why did the British align with the French instead of Germany?" isn't one that I'd considered. But the explanation makes sense and it definitely falls within the domain of economic history. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius at the University of Tennessee has a good survey course on this topic through The Teaching Company which might provide some interesting ideas. He takes a different approach, but touches on some of the economic impacts. Thomas Childers at the University of PA has a great take on WWII, which might have some value -- he's a great story-teller to boot. Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:11 PM hartal said... Now that the serious commentary is in, let me ask another question. What are people making of the possibility of black South Africans having to watch on their own soil a frenzied display of Dutch pride, given what has been done to them in the name of Dutch pride? I am sure some white South Africans of Dutch ancestry were hoping to beat the English silly in the final. Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:25 PM hartal said... Or will the Spanish get revenge for 1568? Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:27 PM John Casey said... The question that interests me is the collision between economic theory and war. In July of 1914, free market capitalism and the gold standard were pretty universally embraced by all the participants (and future participants, i.e., the US). But at some point during each participants war/struggle, their leaderships threw those economic orthodoxies right out the window, abandoned the gold standard, and adopted, in varying degrees, command-economy measures. So, why? Was it built into theory that war requires a different set of principles? Were the leaders just making it up as they went along? Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:53 PM Frank Ashe said... Excellent piece!
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Questions that aren't answered: How was the war funded? The US won this facet. How was labour and capital mobilised for the war? Look internal and externally. What were the productive capacities of the two sides? What were the social changes sped up by the war? e.g. rise to political power of labour movement in UK. Reply July 08, 2010 at 10:55 PM Porlock Junior said... A couple of small points from a non-historian. Or one more than that, because the piece about naval buildup reminds that Colonel Blimp made the definitive statement on the subject, some 20 years later: Gad sir, Lord Beaverbrook [or somebody] is right! We must build a bigger navy than the enemy will build when he hears we're building a bigger navy than he's building! 1. On the merchants of death as an ex post facto explanation: Major Barbara, written in explicit response to 1905. Not a historical treatise, of course, but a frivolous little stage piece; still, it shows the idea in the air 7 years before 1914. 2. As to the list of those who wanted a nice war: Check out Conan Doyle's *Germany and the Next War*, written very shortly before the war, and reporting on a very popular book in Germany with the converse title. According to him, that book was taken very seriously at the Highest Levels in Germany, and also by high-level military people not necessarily as stupid as the Kaiser. (My snark, not his, I think.) He has plenty of excerpts in which the German author showed why it was necessary to get a war going with Britain soon, before the favorable conditions went away. I don't know how sound the book is, but it's an interesting read; and this is not some later finger-pointing, but reportage on 1913-1914. Reply July 09, 2010 at 12:20 AM Peter T said... Brad I liked the writing and the details, but felt that it lacked a central argument. It's hard to see whether the war was an avoidable mistake, the result of underlying causes or what. On the whole, I think you lean to the "mistake due to obsolete habits of thought by those in charge" line. There is another line of thought, briefly outlined below, which gives more prominence to intertwined social and economic factors. I think you have read Dangerfield's Strange Death of Liberal England, and Arno Mayer. Have you looked at Mazower (Dark Continent) or David Cannadine on the British aristocracy? The points emerging from these and similar authors run something like: - mass industrialisation was relatively new to Europe, and involved very new ways of life. In 1914 these new ways had yet to fully emerge, and were constrained by the older agricultural/commercial order. This was still strong, economically (large numbers still on the land, in crafts or in traditional commerce) politically and socially. Above all, collective identities were still shaped by the older way of life. - the strains accelerated in the decades before 1914, as the safety valve of emigration closed, as new entrants came into play, as organised political challenges to existing elites came to the fore (social democracy), and as the process of industrialisation opened up new questions and made new impacts on people (women and ethnic
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minorities, as Dangerfield notes, were particularly affected) - war was, for Europe, a fairly "normal" thing - an accepted way of settling international disputes. It was part of the accepted order of things. In all states in Europe before 1914 there was a marked rise in militarism and military display - this may well have been a way to strengthen political identities that were under threat as older identities - regional, local, religious, linguistic etc were eroded. - war offered a lot of people a way out of what was widely felt to be a set of social, economic and political impasses. Some elites thought they could strengthen the old order, but a lot of others thought it would give various possible new orders a chance. And for young men with little prospect beyond a life of back-breaking drudgery it offered escape and excitement (I recall seeing a quote from an English farm labourer the trenches were the first time in his life he was fed properly and not worked half to death). - the small-state liberalism of the late 19th century was something of an anomaly anyway. The Britain that fought France from 1690 to 1815 was as tightly-organised as the times permitted, and as large as an efficient tax system allowed (one excellent perspective on this is given by the historian of the British navy NAM Rogers). Likewise France, Prussia and Russia to the extent they could. One problem for all in 1914 was that the old mechanisms of social and economic mobilisation were in some disarray, and everyone was unsure how to organise along new lines. - the two wars did in fact clear the way to move to an industrial society. It is not clear that this could be done peacefully (the comparable US experience is the Civil War). At least there are few precedents for doing so. This confluence of factors made the war more socially destabilising than usual - it and World War II were, in part, a European civil war, something more like the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries than the wars of the 18th or 19th centuries. I would add that war is something that does not sit easily with economics (this is not a criticism). I offer that this is because war is much more about collective identities than individual decisions, and because those involved accept death as a price they are willing to pay to preserve whatever collective stake is at risk. Both are hard to explain in terms of maximising individual utility. Reply July 09, 2010 at 03:19 AM Jeffrey Davis said... If you want an economic history of war, emulate Harry Truman and name the names of the profiteers. Tell the stories of creeps like Schliemann who sold the army boots with cardboard soles. Or the shame of George H.W. Bush meeting and greeting for the Carlyle Group. Or thugs like Cheney selling to Iraq during the embargo. Or ... or .... or... On and on. "I had not thought Death had undone so many." Reply July 09, 2010 at 07:06 AM JK said... The cultural side you have here is good, but it needs to be integrated with more economic material. Myself, I do believe there were reasons, and economics can help us understand them. I would therefore cut a little of the lament over stupidity to make space for more economics. 1. The big picture story of the first world war is the rise of the US, Germany and Russia as world powers and relative decline of Britain and France (cf Lenin, on the war as a redivision of the world). Things were only really settled at the end of the second world http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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war. In that sense, I think the details of Serbia could be given less weight. Make space for Fashoda, the Spanish-American war and occupation of the Philipines, and the Berlin to Baghdad railway. (I guess you have covered the Boxer rebellion elsewhere.) When war broke out it was the first genuinely world war, not simply a European affair. Also in this connection, secret diplomacy and the publication of the Sykes Picot agreement by the Bolesheviks in November 1917. In terms of the conclusion, the outcome is US supremacy, Russian collapse, German defeat, British and French decline. US entry into the war certainly needs a bit more emphasis. Across the colonial world a boost given to national independence movements. 2. On the cultural side the result was a collapse in belief in progress and Victorian morality by the elite - as in Keynes. Your Kipling and Owen capture this well. However, I think you do not address the extent to which this collapse accounted for attraction of the Bolesheviks as an alternative. There was little effective response to Lenin's charge that the war was an outcome of the connection between capitalism and imperialism. Mention should be made of the Wilhemshaven mutiny. Who else but socialists were against the war? In the developed world, one key outcome was an accelerated trend toward democratisation. (I have to say that I do not share your lament for the passing of the old monarchies.) In the colonial world the claim to the right to national self determination was the begining of the end of racism. Gender has been mentioned above. Female labour in the factories and on the farms certainly deserves mention. The relation to uncertainty about Victorian patriarchal morality (again, Bloomsbury group as a precursor to "the sixties") and votes for women. 3. There is a paragraph or two on the link between technological innovation and war an important theme in the twentieth century and beyond. e.g Winston Churchill moving the British navy to oil, aircraft, gas, radio technology including the rationalisation of the patent thicket that had emerged. The most important example is the scale up of the Harber Bosh process. Fixed nitrogen is necessary for two things: fertiliser and explosive. Without it Germany either not have fought the war. Without synthetic nitrogen fertiliser the twentieth century would not have seen much population growth. World nitrogen supplies in 1914 were mined from guano in South America, and subject to British blockade. Again, the role of horses has been mentioned above. Give perspective on relative underdevelopment at the time. For most men it was the first time in their lives that they had left the country. For how many was it the first time they had left the place they were born? It can do without reference to Iraq in the twenty first century (and, for that matter modern Serbian nationalism). Reply July 09, 2010 at 09:09 AM bakho said... The Japanese have a word, "Senshobyo" which translates, "Victory Disease". In WWII, the Japanese rapidly rolled over the French, Dutch, British and American possessions. From there, they became overconfident which led to some disastrous losses. Armies that have been successful in the past are projected as being successful in the future. The Franco-Prussian War was a lopsided rout. Why should the German's have expected a different result in 1914? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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Victory disease is important in making political decisions. It also applies to economics, especially in fueling irrational exuberance. The clearest antidote to Senshobyo has been "mutually assured destruction". Reply July 09, 2010 at 09:49 AM DaveL said... Very interesting read, but I agree that it appears to be more history than economics. My recollection of Tuchman's argument in "The Guns of August" and to a lesser extent one of John Keegan's in "World War 1" is that the entire German war plan depended on quick mobilization, and the same was true of the other Powers'. Thus they were in the sort of situation the US and USSR were in during the Cold War vis a vis First Strike. Whoever mobilized first had a huge advantage, in the view of all the strategic planners. Germany's ability to mobilize quickly was created by huge expenditures in railways, a detailed logistical plan, a government that could commandeer the rail stock, etc. The point being that only rise of the modern technological state enabled them to even try the Schlieffen Plan. Don't we really see the birth of modern industrial planning during the war? What I would find interesting, and what would tie the chapter to economics, is to talk about what happened in the pre-war era to create the degree of planning and control of the national economy that arose during the War, and how it evolved during the War. It's a topic I haven't seen covered (not that I consider myself widely read on wartime economics); perhaps you will cover it in the next chapter? Even the Boer War section of this one could be enriched by discussing the hows as well as the whys of sending an army of 400,000 British troops to South Africa and supplying them once they were there: it might tell a lot about British society and industry at the turn of the century. (Or not...) On the general question of why Angell was wrong and Nietzsche less so, it is always dangerous to expect that economic rationality will win out over "animal spirits" and the human fear of being beaten up by people unlike themselves, or of beating up such people preemptively. Alas. Reply July 09, 2010 at 09:53 AM Paul G. Brown said... Seems to me that the causes and conduct of the war are far less interesting, and even less important, than the technological, social and economic impact that the war had: industrialization, women in the workforce, etc. For my money - can everything 15.0 -> 15.3. Mention names like Krupp, Louis Renault, Parkhurst more than the names of generals and prime ministers. Reply July 09, 2010 at 11:18 AM Graydon said... I think this is fine as history; if there were to be some economics to follow it, after setting up the context this well, I don't think that's at all objectionable. If you want to talk about the war as a war, rather than a collection of economic results (though the total lost productivity of those dead and mutilated is worth calculating, or referencing a calculation thereof), I think you'd perhaps do better with Gwynne Dyer's discussion of the progression of the scope of conflict. In that framework, the surprise -the embarrassingly dumb surprise -- of the Great War was the possibility of the continuous front, when all the plans supposed battles of relatively short duration and relatively limited physical scope; a few weeks and perhaps a few tens of square miles. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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(Trench warfare dates back thousands of years, since the first time someone tried to take a walled city by encircling siege; the innovation was by no means trench warfare, but the continuous front, which really was a new thing on the earth.) The material possibility of a continuous front was a function of industrialization and might give you a good hook into economic considerations. (So might artillery tube production; there's a cannon barrel cost over time from 1580 through 2000 graph lurking in potential that you might find extremely illustrative for this chapter.) But, anyway -- if the core issues are "economic rationality is not what we reliably get", and the combination of the last verse of Kipling's "The Peace of Dives" and the Devil's laughter with your discussion of overly-slow cultural replacement being _why_ rationality wasn't what we got in this instance, I think you could use the idea of the sudden, industrially-enabled, evolution of warfare to from a model of disparate, distributed battles to the continuous front as an organizing principle. (Much as the generation-later introduction of mechanized warfare meant that the continuous front _moved_ was also a surprise, and also enabled by further economic growth.) If I was trying to do this, I'd be talking about how societies compete in terms of their ability to co-operate in groups, and this is limited by belief in legitimacy as much as organizational ability, and that the legitimacy of military co-operation was out in front of the legitimacy of commercial co-operation and that this predisposed both a belief in the decisiveness of military conflict and a sort of cultural blindness around just what military conflict would actually mean _for social organization_ in an industrial culture. (the actually applicable lesson available from the Slaveholder's Rebellion.) Which is nearly what you have, talking about the compromise between industrialists and landholding military aristocrats. Reply July 09, 2010 at 11:29 AM Josh G. said... I don't think you can effectively separate economics from politics (and I think the results of trying to do so are usually terrible), so I have few problems with this. Honestly, reading this I think Brad would have made a fine historian - I would have liked to read a full history of the 20th century written by him, even allowing for the anti-Marxist rants he would no doubt throw in from time to time. Reply July 09, 2010 at 11:38 AM Joe Smith said... You do not appear to mention the importance of Mahan's work in promoting the rush for Empire and domination of the seas which did so much to promote the First World War. Incorrect economic theories and a failure to predict economic developments contributed largely to the First World War - and that may be a proper subject for an economics text book. Or you could do a games theory analysis of the major powers to show what they wanted, what they thought was possible and what future events have shown was possible to show how seriously England, France, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia all misplayed their circumstances. The British Empire and the British economy, Germany, Russia and Austro-Hungary were effectively destroyed Whatever benefits may have come out of the wars much more could have been accomplished at much lower cost in men and treasure if governments and populations had supported better policies. Reply July 09, 2010 at 12:36 PM http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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sm said... World War I was not the first global war -- the Seven Years' War was one. Also what about the factor of imperial envy, both rational and entirely emotional? Reply July 09, 2010 at 02:01 PM Robert Driskill said... Brad, a very interesting project. I have some points that may be relevant. First, I believe John Oneal and Bruce Russett argue persuasively in their "Triangulating Peace" book that Angell did not predict that there would not be a war, but rather that if it happened it would be stupid because of the economic interdependencies that he documented. Second, there is a literature on the economics of conflict that views war as a failure of bargaining. Hirschleifer, Skaperdas, and others including political scientists that I cannot remember now are associated with this literature. It points out that because war destroys/uses resources, rational parties would strike a bargain and not go to war. War is thus a bargaining failure, due to informational problems (war as a "mistake" or as a rational outcome of randomized strategies), principal-agent problems,i.e., "Wag the Dog," and so on. This might provide a unifying framework for organizing thought about the various candidates for the causes of WWI. Finally, I agree with some of the commenters that the US civil war is quite relevant. I believe Keegan argued that the development of rifling, cartidges, and rapid-fire weapons tilted the advantage to dug-in defenders (compared to Napoleonic wars) during the later stages of our Civil War, thus accounting for Grant's horrendous casualties in Virginia. He argued, if I remember correctly, that the Europeans missed this lesson and were more influenced by the short Franco-Prussian war. And for other literary influences to encapsulate the insanity, you might think about the poem "Point of Balance" or the inscription above the Imperial War Museum in London from Thucydides. Reply July 09, 2010 at 02:19 PM mike shupp said... Still thinking about this. Y'know, less might be more. Or at least, less might be enough. You can't possibly write one chapter which encompasses ALL of World War One, which discusses strategy and political aspects and social impacts and technology and the justice of various claims made, etc. I suspect you can't write one chapter which adequately deals just with economic aspects. Let's suppose the German cabinet met in April 1916 and discussed whether taxes should be boosted and decided this was impractical and this affected the planning of the General Staff and deferred possible victory by six months or more -- fascinating stuff, but would it properly be part of a history of economics concerned with the entire world over the course of a century? Or should it be part of a volume dealing only with WWI economics? (The rationale for concentration camps in the Boer War strikes me as falling in this category -- it was an improvisation brought about a situation affected by economics, but not one deliberately shaped by economics). Maybe the chapter should limit itself to saying "It happened." And then the next chapter could begin by displaying statistics which described the world and particular states on January 1, 1914 and January 1, 1919, and sketching out simple models showing how the world could have been expected to develop economically before the war, what the possibilities were after the war, and quickly summarizing how the world http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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economy actually behaved in the immediate post war period. Reply July 09, 2010 at 04:17 PM kaleberg said in reply to dilbert dogbert... A comparison of the American Civil War and WWI is in order. They were the two first wars of industrial attrition. You can recognize points from Sherman's March strategy in discussions of strategic bombing in WWII. Reply July 09, 2010 at 07:29 PM kaleberg said... Wow, I'm pretty incoherent today, but the ACW was in many ways the first 20th century war. Reply July 09, 2010 at 07:30 PM Peter T said... Thinking more about this is your essential point that the course of economic events is inextricably intertwined with politics, technology, social changes and historical happenstance? That, while we can never know what would have happened, that World War I did happen at the place and time it did, in the way it did, with the results it had, changed the economies and the thinking about economies in very particular and lasting ways? It's a good point, and one that formal economics often glosses over. By the way, one point often missed is that there were many versions of the future on offer between 1870 and 1945 - liberalism, socialism of several sorts, corporatism, various flavours of conservatism, nationalism, syndicalism (which later morphed into fascism), all with fairly strong followings and respectable intellectual pretensions. This alone leads one to suspect that the war was more an outcome of polarising confusion than a mistake. Reply July 09, 2010 at 10:40 PM mike shupp said... Kaleberg -- It's quite a reasonable point to make that the American Civil War "was in many ways the first 20th century war." But is the ACW actually a reasonable lead in to WWI, from a perspective outside of military history? From the vantage of European generals and politicians, the last big war had been the Franco Prussian war in 1870. The ACW, the Spanish-American War, the Russian-Japanese War, and various battles and campaigns in Africa were sui generis. They taught no lessons and were due no great attention -- and to the extent that Europeans did may attention to the ACW, they seem to have embraced the wrong generals and the wrong lessons. Reply July 09, 2010 at 11:52 PM Peter T said... Mike Shupp From the military point of view, it's hard to go directly from the ACW to WW1. The pace of change was too great - not just railroads and machine guns, but smokeless powder, quick-firing artillery, aircraft and more. In 1870 naval gunners were peering over the barrel at the enemy as they had done since guns were invented. By 1914 they were laying guns by director at targets up to 15 miles away. The generals and admirals (mostly) took all this on board, but were understandedly a bit bemused about how it http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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would all work in practice. But the ACW was a precursor in another way. It was a conflict of social attitudes, involved unprecedented (for the US) levels of economic and industrial mobilisation, therefore became a contest of attrition, took much longer and was more costly than forecast, and led to larger social changes then either side had aimed at initially. As with WW1, once everybody committed, the war got out of hand. Reply July 10, 2010 at 06:33 AM Cranky Observer said... > From the military point of view, it's hard to go directly from > the ACW to WW1. The pace of change was too great - not just > railroads and machine guns, I would read van Creveld's take on that before taking such a definite stance. Cranky Particularly in the West, if the combatants in the ACW had had internal combustion engines or even somewhat more efficient/compact steam engines they would have been fighting WWII, not the Great War. Reply July 10, 2010 at 04:49 PM Rich said... You really need to have a chapter on World War One in an economic history of the 20th century. That said, too much happened in the war to be in one chapter. However, how to decide what to include and leave out is a huge problem. Delving into the details may not give you a solution. Instead, you might try organizing the chapter around the premise of what does the reader need to know to make make sense of the 20th century. The justification for this is that the war was the event that seperated the nineteenth century from the twentieth century (not in dates, but in terms of economic, social and political organization). So, I would recommend looking at the later chapters and then work backwards to organize the chapter around the themes of the book and later chapters. Anything that neither fits the book's themes nor is useful for the reader to know should be chucked - people can read it in another book. A second point is to try not to get too bogged down in the start of the war. Focus on the end of the war - especially the chaos, poverty and conflict that came out of the war. I like the posts on the Spartakist uprising. The end of the war saw the collapse of four major empires and faith in the liberal world view. This created the opportunity for new, and more ruthlessly brutal, world views to contend for power. Reply July 10, 2010 at 04:57 PM Peter T said... Re-reading Arno Mayer, I was struck by the number of quotations he gives in the last chapters from high-level members of government in all the major nations to the effect that a major war would be a social and political disaster (mostly conservatives forecasting that a general war would open the way to social democracy or worse). The somewhat manic enthusiasm of the populace at the start gives the impression that the same feeling was widespread. Yet they went ahead anyway. Which raises the question - what was there about the old order that made so many people so desperate for an alternative - any alternative?
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Cranky Observer - I have read Creveld. My comment was a bit short-hand, but the reference is not just to the particular technologies but to the whole supporting infrastructure. The ACW had Gatling guns, WWI could equip each battalion with 70odd heavy machine guns and supply the ammo. And bringing all the technologies (surveillance, communications, transport etc) together into a coherent whole was not achieved until the middle of WW2. Reply July 10, 2010 at 06:02 PM max said... I'm gonna disagree with some folks. This chapter needs to be THREE chapters: imperialism and the early 20th century, the buildup to WWI (including the economics & political economics if possible, of British dependencies on overseas grain, the German need for grain and resources and so on, and then a chapter on the war itself. The war itself takes no effort since nothing happened after the first year, but there's the economic impact of the war, and what happened immediately thereafter with the world including the big depression afterwards. It's the great Keynesian laboratory that lead into the Depression and WWII. However, thinking in terms of writing the thing, I'd suggest skipping over this and writing around the hole. I'd go to the twenties and finish up there and write the Depression. That should make it clear what you need from WWI. (Keeping in mind here that to me, WWI, the 20's, the Depression and WWII make a four-part play, with the Cold War as the epilogue.) Ah-ha! I see what's missing! The Boer War isn't introduced as the first mechanized genocidal total war, with economic warfare (concentration camps are a form of economic warfare) as part of the package. So yeah, colonianism, 1900-1914, 1914-1922 (which is when the Russian Civil War ends.) 15.1 should be in the conclusions of the chapter on 1900-1914. At any rate, I conclude the issue with the chapter is structural - lack of focus and trying to make one chapter do too much. WWI and WWII are keystones for Keynesism and Communism. Without the wars, you don't have the economics and then you have a very different century. (Although it occurs to me - if you HAD had a different century, one with no WWI, would there have been a depression? I presume there would have been, followed by a war, even if it was a different war than we got. It almost makes me think you could look at the Long Depression as running from the American Civil War to the colonial wars of the 1890's, followed by another depression (1907,1913) end by WWI... followed up with another depression ended by a war. War, post-war boom, depression, war, post-war boom, depression, WWI, post-war boom, great depression, WWII, post-war boom, Cold War, post-war boom (the 90's), which means we're due a depression. Ugh. And then a war! Oh, boy.) m, somehow i doubt this comment helped much Reply July 11, 2010 at 08:25 PM Altoid said... What I ask myself, Brad, is why you want to delve so deeply, and with a shovel so laden with emotion, into the non-economic reasons for what you so clearly regard as not only a monstrous human tragedy but, I presume, also as a monstrous economic error. That's why I want to start by side-stepping the direct issues and get to a fundamental question that matters more for the project at hand (and which you may http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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deal with in other work). The question is, what's an economy for? Is it to maximize certain statistical measures, to maximize human welfare, to maximize human choice, to keep people busy and out of trouble, to produce wealth, to amass wealth for some and not others, to provide a testing ground for moral virtues? Or for some other purpose(s)? I mean "economy" in the sense of organized economic activity. Once you articulate that at some level, even if only in the back of your mind as you write, you'll know what kind of tragedy/blunder/waste/crime the war was in economic terms and that will direct your treatment of it. That it was monstrous in human terms should be so obvious that you can state it baldly and insert a monstrous bibliographic note overflowing with references. Now to some lower-level reactions, as an American historian of an earlier era. I think Graydon and Peter T are on to the nub of the problem of the period as it relates to the war's background, which is how human effort was to be organized. In spite of about two centuries or so of thought on economic behavior, I don't think it was entirely accepted that it could be successfully thought of as distinct from, say, religious behavior or political loyalties. Certainly some key elements in the decision-making processes didn't separate them, eg Junkers or Colonel Blimps. And as many have pointed out above, the generation leading up to the war saw large-scale changes on the continent in how human economic effort was organized that related in complicated ways to older modes of organizing human effort, which themselves were changing too. The truism is that this was generally far more dislocating and problematic than it was joyous for those involved, particularly those whose experience was rooted in older modes and most particularly those whose status and authority depended on their place in the older modes. Were they prepared to think and speak economically? And in terms of dislocation, we shouldn't forget the depression of the 1890s, and I'd also point to massive population flows, not only to the Americas but within Europe itself, in the preceding quarter-century or so, with an effect on cities much like that of WWII here and-- where nationality-crossing occurred-- raising many of the same loyalty questions Wilson addressed through the Committee on Public Information and the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Imperialism was in some ways a response to these dislocations, an effort to implement human organization on a new scale but one that might transcend and amalgamate some of the other modes. As the opposition of Andrew Carnegie to the SpanishAmerican and Philippine guerrilla wars shows, it might have been more beloved of politicians than of actual industrialists. But, particularly given Mahan's influence, it could seem helpful in organizing what people did-- and here the Boer War could actually work better than you may think, because when the Empire found itself under attack, white settler colonials responded with a pro-imperial enthusiasm that astounded imperial officialdom. It was something they learned to use and rely on. In particular, it was a big reason why the British were willing to reduce their military presence in North America around 1905. It also gave them new reservoirs of potential troops and sources of war materiel to think about. If you want to stick with the Boer War, which I think is more apposite than the US Civil War in most ways, you might also look to its economic effects as Dave L suggests, particularly whether there was anything like a war-induced prosperity or political solidarity through propaganda and/or the pattern of war contracting, domestic and imperial. Granted that it was a long war, which undercuts completely the idea that http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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everybody expected a short one in Europe, if it afforded the same benefits domestically that it did in colonial loyalty, that would have been an important lesson. This isn't quite to say "give war a chance," but that if war was in the air (cf "Channel Firing," which Fussell begins with, written years before the guns actually began), it might, from certain perspectives, have its uses and benefits. Overall, I do think you tend to expect decision-makers of the period to have known what you know now, or at the very least to share your view of what would have been right and desirable. We often think that way about the British leadership in 1774-83. Couldn't they see the obvious? But we really can't be that Whiggish. Granted that there was massive corruption and perhaps incompetence, they couldn't all have been complete poltroons all the time, in either time. They operated within scales of values, with varying degrees of knowledge about situations, individuals, places, classes; and with prejudices and preconceptions both individual and class-based, and ethnicallybased as well; and within circumstances that very often were made for them, not by them, within which they had only a limited range of real choices. None of this excuses them. Slaughter is monstrous. But the most successful, powerful, and famed personality of the prior century, Napoleon, had unleashed slaughter on a newly epic scale. Did it really hurt his reputation that much in 1910? I see this current draft as being driven primarily by your outrage, which probably isn't quite the economic story you mean to tell. Reply July 11, 2010 at 09:04 PM Andrew said... This comment is a long time coming, and only partly down to me giving it some thought before posting. Hope it is in time to be useful. I’m not clear what you want this chapter to achieve. You say that it is ‘very important background’ to the interwar stuff which presumably comes in later chapters but without reading those chapters it is difficult to understand how – this chapter doesn’t talk a lot about the issues I would imagine being important to that discussion – the role of the state in managing the economy, for example. I can see how social Darwinist ideas continued to be important to many in the interwar period. This is a long winded way of saying maybe Chapter 15 makes better sense as a chapter in a book than it does standing on its own. I’m also not clear about your audience. Assuming this is a ‘popular’ book aimed at an educated, non-specialist audience then I appreciate that you might want to use engaging anecdotes and a relatively informal style. If I’m right about your target audience then I suppose I’m a fairly typical member of it and as such I know more about political and military history than I do about economics. I think this makes this a potentially dangerous chapter for you, because if I judge your chapter about something I do know a bit about as cursory and naïve – and currently I do – then that is going to undermine my trust in what you say about the stuff that you are more expert about and I know even less about, with the result that your whole book will be less useful to me than it deserves to be. You’ll see from my comments that I’m also confused about the ethical stance that you are taking in the book. Perhaps in an earlier chapter you have explained to the reader what your approach is, but from the chapter itself without context I can’t understand it. 15.1 Clearly you’ve already referred to Hobson and Schumpeter and therefore explained why I ought to care about their views, but without that context I am mystified. The http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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views presented don’t seem compelling except for the bits which are self-evident to the point of absurdity (Imperialism is beneficial for colonists and not for the colonised? Who could have guessed?). Some of these views are more remarkable in their context – e.g. when many people did genuinely believe in the civilising mission of Imperialism – so if that is the point you need to make you are going to have to work harder to contextualise these views within other contemporary views. But I’m not clear if you are mainly doing history-of-ideas here. You don’t seem to be trying to evaluate Hobson and Schumpeter (although you do say that Angell ‘should have known’ that he was wrong). Are you suggesting that these thinkers were influential in their day? If so how? Currently you report the views of three individuals chosen for no very clear reason, and then move on, so if 15.1 was completely removed I don’t see how the rest of the chapter would in any way suffer. 15.2 I find 15.2 even more mystifying than 15.1. The only reason you introduce the Boer War is because it is evidence that Angell ‘should have known’ he was wrong. Why the Boer War and not the Spanish-American or Russo-Japanese wars or any other latenineteenth century war? If this is only an illustration of why Angell was wrong, why do we need a (highly tendentious) account of South African history and the war itself rather than just a throw-away reference to the fact that the war happened? I don’t *think* that you want me to understand that the Boer War is in any way an important cause of World War I, but you have sowed doubt in my mind on this issue. Since you’ve put an account of the Boer War into your chapter, I’m going to criticise it. Presenting an account of the Boer trekking movement without any reference to slavery just isn’t acceptable. I honestly can’t believe that your explicit suggestion that the Boers got tired of having English-speaking neighbours is offered in good faith. To be honest, the reference to Isandlwana is a bit tired and lazy – the Zulus were conquered quickly and with little loss in comparison to say the Xhosa. Far from ‘shying away’ from annexation of the Transvaal, the British were thrown out by force after having attempted annexation and the experience of the First Boer War is important to the way both British and Boers approached the Second. Incidentally, I’m not clear why in discussing the irrationality of war your focus seems to be more on the British – who set out to bully a small nation and found it was harder than expected – rather than the Boers who, at the end of the day, launched an offensive war against the world’s leading power which resulted in the total destruction of both independent Boer republics within about a year. That wasn’t too clever either, and your characterisation of it as ‘striking first in self defence’ isn’t itself very defensible. I can’t see either why you say it was ‘obvious’ in that aftermath of Tugela that Britain should back down. If the Boer republics hadn’t been willing to concede what the British considered acceptable before defeating British armies, why would they be more conciliatory afterwards? Why were considerations like Imperial prestige more obviously wrong now than previously? You need to explain this, I think and perhaps clarify whether you mean obvious given the knowledge, systems and values of the time (as you seem to mean when you criticise Angell) or obvious in retrospect with our systems, knowledge and values. After all, you and I are probably happy with the view that growth in the power and prestige of the British state isn’t worth the death of 30,000 Africans. Not all nineteenth century Britons would have agreed. The ‘British invented the concentration camp’ line is an absurd old calumny and you shouldn’t be repeating it. There was nothing particularly novel in what Kitchener was doing – Wellington did pretty similar things in Portugal, so it wasn’t even novel for the treatment of white people by the British army in the nineteenth century. There’s also
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no particularly interesting parallel with the Nazi use of camps which the casual reader will infer you are trying to make. You conclude from this discussion that ‘wars cannot be analysed as the pursuit of economic growth by other means’. To be honest I don’t think any ordinary person thinks of the World wars in this way. The challenge for a popular history is more to recapture why starting these wars once seemed like rational acts of statecraft. And what has Shakespeare got to do with it? All this seems to boil down to a roundabout way of saying that Angell(and perhaps by implication Hobson and Schumpeter – although I don’t think you directly say this) had completely missed the point which only brings me back to my original question, why are these thinkers interesting or relevant? You now introduce Arno Mayer. I think you could be clearer that he is not a contemporary, incidentally. You briefly make a case that his thesis is relevant to the German Empire and seem to rely on your audience having a profound ignorance of early twentieth century Europe to carry this across to other nations like Britain – with a thoroughly unmilitarised aristocracy – or France, a veritable Republic where Mayer’s case is much harder to make. This thesis doesn’t even attempt to explain why nonEuropean countries like Japan, America, Australia or South Africa entered the war, which is surely just as interesting. 15.3 I appreciate you are trying to summarise, but the idea that the French didn’t have a modern navy strong enough to challenge or threaten the British is a bit silly. The ‘two power standard’ always and openly referred to France and Russia in alliance. I also think you are going to have to work much harder to make a charge of ‘criminal insanity’ stack up against *all* the military and political leaders of Europe. Is it genuinely obvious – even in retrospect – that allowing the German Empire to conquer France and Russia was really a better outcome for the British state than fighting and winning the war? What precise rational option was there for the French when invaded by Germans other than fighting back? I see that you can criticise this decision from a radical pacifist perspective, but if that’s your approach I think you need to make it more explicit. Again, the decisions of non-European leaders to engage in this war seem much more interesting from this perspective, and harder to explain so why do you seem to ignore them? At the end of the day, the German government took a conscious and deliberate decision to start a war, and various other governments chose – or were forced – to take part in that war (mostly in order to prevent the Germans winning). The difference between starting a war and joining one seems material to me, both morally, and as a matter of rational calculation and you sort-of acknowledge that when you say that Britain made ‘no demands’ on Germany – but then you elide that difference a couple of pages later. Then in 15.4 you admit again that the war decision was a German decision. Make your mind up! 15.4 You are now recounting a fairly standard history of the outbreak of the war. Why you want to do that isn’t clear (is this really ‘valuable background’ to interwar policy issues?), but you do a workmanlike job of it, and I acknowledge that most of the points I’m going to make are quibbles, really. I think you have the balance wrong between Austria and Germany in that the German Empire didn’t just ‘back Austria to the hilt’ but actively worked to ensure that there wasn’t a compromise solution, and war broke out because – as you say – it was seen as an opportunity. It would also be worthwhile emphasising the perceived urgency of fighting that war before Russia recovered from the Russia-Japanese war. Your judgment that the German war plan was a stupid one seems a little harsh, but justified by the eventual outcome. However you make it seem as if the stupidity was http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/general-internet-beg-and-call-for-help-slouching-towards-utopia-chapter-15-the-knot-of-war.html
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that they only had one plan. By definition you only have one plan that you actually implement, and the Germans implemented the plan that they judged best for a war against Russia and France. It isn’t strictly true that the Germans didn’t consider that the war might be long – they respected Dutch neutrality precisely because a neutral border would be handy in the event of Britain joining a long war. The section on the ‘eastern civilising mission’ of Germany is the most tendentious part of 15.4. First of all, the Germans were far from unique in genuinely treating the outbreak of war as a reason to put aside class division – look at the case of Ireland – secondly you seem to be arguing that the elite view that war would help heal internal national divisions was both ‘amazingly stupid’ and well-justified. The section on Prussian militarism seems a bit beside the point to me. All contemporary (and modern) armies thought (think) that attacking the enemy is the best way to win wars. Why is this interesting or relevant to economic policy in the interwar years? 15.5 You say that you don’t have the heart to write about what actually happened in the war and fair enough – it’s your book – but this seems like the section of the book that is genuinely relevant to the interwar years. Do you have a separate chapter on the Russian Revolution? I’d have thought that was also relevant. You don’t explicitly mention technology, but the experience of Governments forcing the pace on e.g. planes was presumably also relevant to how people thought about industrial policy after the war. Sorry that this is so long and so relentlessly negative. It has come out as more negative than I intended. Without having read the rest of your book I would say you should cut 15.1 and almost all of 15.2. Keep Mayer and Darwin in 15.2 and add parts of 15.3 to show how real decision-making in the pre-war period was based more on ideas about national prestige, Social Darwinism, state power and explicit class conflict than about national (still less international) prosperity per se. Perhaps you could bring out more strongly the way that states saw themselves in ruthless competition whereas class groups were perceived to cross national divisions in contrast to the modern system where states engage in clubby co-operation and the international solidarity of the working class seems like a quaint anachronism. Currently you give Liebknecht the last word on this issue, but it doesn’t seem to me that history was on his side…. 15.4 you may as well leave as it is. If you can find the heart, say more in 15.5 about how bureaucrats, politicians and academics during the war created and learnt to manage a command economy and how much (or little) that changed their habits in peace. I’d imagine the second war was more transformative here – it certainly was in Britain – but this is precisely the kind of thing I would benefit from learning more about. Again, apologies for being so relentlessly negative. I read your blog almost as often as you update it, so clearly there is something of significant value to me in the way you communicate ideas, and clearly I generally find the ideas you communicate helpful and convincing. Maybe I’m trying helplessly to backpedal from a whole bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have written in the first place, but maybe this chapter does genuinely fall a long way short of your normal standard. Reply July 14, 2010 at 02:54 AM Comments on this post are closed.
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Why Macro Matters
economics DeLong
Me:
Seeking Alpha - Oct 17, 2010 No wonder Brad DeLong is always saying Krugman's right about everything. I agree, the Fed (like the Supreme Court) clearly does respond at least somewhat to ... Related Articles » « Previous Next »
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