#45 Global Structural Change as a Consequence of the 1914-1918 War

What had changed by the end of the 1914-18 war? The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had disappeared. The Chinese Empire remained in place, just about. The Russian Empire had erupted into a socialist revolution. This revolution would focus the minds of the European and American ruling classes for the next 70 years, the new socialist leaders would nationalise the companies privately owned by wealthy Europeans. They tampered with private ownership; previously, private property had been untouchable.

A multitude of smaller nations arose off the back of the 1914-18 war. The breakup of the above three empires was based largely on ethnicity. Single-language groups of people tied in with the rise of nationalism across ideas closely associated with racial ideas of separateness:

• Poland was created from former Russian, Austro Hungarian and German land.

• Serbia, which later became Yugoslavia, annexed the land that is now Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro.

• Romania was extended by including Transylvania and Bessarabia.

• Austro-Hungary was broken up and became three independent states: Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

• Finland, Estonia Latvia, and Lithuania were taken from the Russian Empire and made into independent states.

Eastern Europe was fundamentally changed by the 1914-18 war. The old kings and empires were swept away. In many ways, these societal 'transformations' were one major step towards creating capitalist industrial societies, as we argued in part three of this blog series. Yet again, cataclysmic violence had been necessary to break the hold of ancient feudal bonds. All these relatively small new states, created on the back of war and from the ideas of single language/religion to form a 'nation', would have to wait for the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 before the larger unit of the European Union would provide sufficient conditions for full industrialisation. Racism was at the heart of these new ideologies.

Nationalism, Racism and Anti-Semitism in Europe

The breakup of the old empires led directly to the spread of nationalism across the face of Europe, which had several consequences which ring loud bells in the 21st century and the breakup of the Arab world. First, there was a massive refugee problem. The collapse of the three empires left millions stateless. People were moving in all directions across Europe during these 20 years. People of all the nationalities and religions that had been included within the old Empires suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders. It was in this context that we must view anti-Semitism.

The deep-seated anti-Semitism that occurred in Germany in the 1930s did not arise out of nowhere. Jews had been respected and accepted citizens of all the old empires across Europe, including the Ottoman Empire. After 1918, people on the wrong side of a new smaller nation began to be expelled everywhere. Systematic anti-Semitism spread across Europe in these 20 years. Everywhere, and particularly in central Europe, Jews became second-class citizens. The massive refugee problems post-1918 across Europe provided the background to the deep-seated anti-Semitism which arose in the 1930s. Then, as it is now, the economy was in turmoil. The problem for any urban society in economic turmoil has always been that the people do not have the ability or the generosity to accept large numbers of refugees. The new nationalism, the economic turmoil, and the acceptance and legitimisation of ethnicity focused on new mini-European states all provided the framework for the anti-Semitism which the Jewish people faced in the 1930s.

Anti-Semitism was part of ‘race theory’ which claimed to be a science and was assumed to be an objective fact. It was argued that races, like breeds of dogs or cows, had specific characteristics. This ‘science’ was taught at many universities, where skulls were measured and races classified. German race theory had it that they were the ‘master race’, and ‘inferior races’ were Semites or Slavs. Jews and Arabs were Semites. All this is now considered nonsense; the Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group, with age-old rituals which like its Semitic counterparts have many variations.

Finally, to add to the miseries of the period, Spanish flu hit the world. No one really knows the numbers of deaths. The epidemic began in the winter of 1918 and killed across the world. It was thought that somewhere between 50 and 100 million died, compared to the 10 million from the 1914-18 war. The chaos of the war was finally consummated by the Spanish flu.

Seattle police officers wearing white cloth face masks during the Spanish flu pandemic, December 1918. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

"Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward". Photo of Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C., during the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 - 1919, also known as the "Spanish Flu". Photo by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress website.

To most people then and now, the carnage, the wasted lives of millions of young men, was the ultimate issue. That value has resonated down the decades. But to the people who ruled and owned large companies, while they would forever pay homage to the dead in countless ceremonies, their major concern was to resurrect the world of power and privilege of the 19th century. They had not lost their lives; they still ruled their various sovereign states. The idea of race remained the dominant ideology, although it was then mixed with a strong dose of nationalism. Ideas of how to run the world had not altered. The structure of the classes that ruled the dominant nations remained in place. Colonial ownership remained a primary theme.

Intended Consequences

Germany: The Versailles Treaty

The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919. By William Orpen - Imperial War Museum Collections. retrieved from Wikipedia.

The Armistice that ended the war in November 1918 terminated most but not all hostilities. The Versailles Treaty made it clear that Germany was responsible for the war and equally responsible for paying for the costs of the war in reparations to Britain, France, and Italy. The Germans were required to evacuate France, Belgium, and Alsace Lorraine. The German navy handed over all its military vessels to Britain; the army handed over its machine guns and other weapons. But the blockade which stopped the import of food for non-combatants was not lifted, leading to starvation in 1918 and 1919 in German towns. The land of Germany herself had not been invaded, only France and Belgium. A vast sum, to be paid in gold annually, was demanded in reparations.

At the time, it was considered normal for winners of war to extract reparations from the loser. What was abnormal was the size of the reparation payment here. The purpose was to impoverish the German economy; reparations were designed to be so large that Germany would never again rise as a dominant European nation. The aim of France, whose economy had been devastated by the war, was to humiliate Germany.

The Versailles Treaty should be understood in part under a colonial frame of reference. From day one of the war, the British and French goal had been to remove Germany forever as a colonial competitor. Germany's three African colonies, German East Africa and southwest Africa and Rwanda, were therefore parcelled out. The first two went to Britain, (now Tanzania and Namibia) and Rwanda went to Belgium. There were numerous much smaller pieces of land and islands across the world, all of which were taken away and redistributed.

J M Keynes, who was later to write on the world economy, was at the conference in 1919 as a representative of the British Treasury, He concluded that the Treaty was a disaster, and resigned his position when he concluded that the Treaty could not be altered. He wrote his thinking in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919:

“... If the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria Hungary, now prostrate, they invite their own destruction, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims psychic and economic bonds…” (Page 6) 

It is now widely accepted that the Versailles Treaty set the initial conditions that led to the next war in 1939. Germany was humiliated. Her people did not consider they had been treated fairly or justly. They deeply resented the terms of the agreement that the French and British had cooked up between them. There was a widespread feeling by the German people that the terms of the peace should have been concluded according to the 14 points which President Woodrow Wilson of the USA had outlined in January 1918, including free trade, democracy, and self-determination. Wilson had looked for a 'just and secure peace', not merely a new balance of power in favour of the winning side. In retrospect, Wilson's 14 points were an enlightened approach to peace. Most importantly, it was the basis for the German surrender as negotiated by her generals. But it was not to be. The actual treaty of Versailles fuelled huge anger in Germany.

The Germans had been forced to sign in 1919. J M Keynes, an observer at the talks in Versailles, predicted the next war. The reparations alone were intended to make sure that German industries could never be developed in competition with the British or the French.

Many contemporary 21st century people find shocking the level of the punishment the German people were supposed to bear:

1. Reparations: 132 billion gold marks

2. Limitations on German military forces

3. Return of all German colonies in Africa and the Pacific

4. Annulling of all German concessions in the Ottoman spheres of influence; property and railway rights passed out of German control

5. Imposing a 26% tariff on all German imports

6. Losing her entire maritime shipping for inland and export needs, 25% of her fish fleet, plus 150,000 railroad trucks

7. France taking back control of Alsace Lorraine, valuable iron ore deposits (75% of her iron ore, 68% of her zinc and 20% of her coal needs), which she had lost to Germany in 1871

The terms of Versailles were consciously intended to make sure Germany never again arose as a great power that could compete against either France or Britain. As J.M Keynes understood at the time, the treaty was a disaster waiting to happen.

Article 119 of the treaty required Germany to renounce sovereignty over former colonies and Article 22 converted the territories into League of Nations mandates under the control of Allied states. Togoland and German Kamerun (Cameroon) were transferred to France. Ruanda and Urundi were allocated to Belgium, whereas German South-West Africa went to South Africa and Britain obtained German East Africa.

American political cartoon depicting the contemporary view of German reparations, 1921.

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