20 Century20 CenturyCreated 1/24/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
What Arthur Lewis calls the "regions of European settlement"--the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and perhaps South Africa--soon demonstrated that they could produce and ship staple grains, meats, and wool at vastly cheaper prices than could Europe itself. The American, Australian, and South American grasslands and woodlands provided enormous areas for the growing of grain and the raising of livestock. The steam-driven iron-hulled ship and the steam-driven iron-riding locomotive quickly brought down transport costs. From the 1870s German farmers found themselves with new competitors: not just new world producers, but Russian grain shipped from Odessa.
By 1900 the harvest west of Chicago affected grain prices in Odessa and Hamburg; the price of lambs in Auckland affected meat prices in London; the agricultural sector was the first to become globalized--and in becoming globalized, to demonstrate that farmers could feed more people better than had ever been possible before.
In 1850 the United Kingdom had half of the world's railroads. The United Kingdom's shipyards had built half of the world's ships. The United Kingdom's factories had more than half of the world's steam engines. The United Kingdom made some five times as much iron as did the United States. By 1870 the United States had more steam engines than did the United Kingdom.
In 1800 London, Paris, and Berlin had some 1,000,000, 600,000, and 200,000 inhabitants, respectively. By 1900 the corresponding figures were 4.7 million inhabitants of London, 3.6 million inhabitants of Paris, and 2.7 million inhabitants of Berlin. There were twenty-three cities in the world with more than one-half million inhabitants. Urbanization in the late nineteenth century came with industrialization.
As J.M. Roberts remarks in his Penguin History of the World, the terrible picture of the lot of unprotected children in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is "a picture of their life in a pre-industrial society" (emphasis in original).
In 1859 the Kingdom of Sardinia--which ruled the northwest corner of Italy, around Turin, as well as the island--joined forces with the Second French Empire (ruled by Napoleon III, nephew of the first Napoleon) to declare war on the Austrian Empire that the Habsburg dynasty ruled from their capital in Vienna. The result, a product of military victory and the diplomatic skill of the Sardinian Prime Minister Count Cavour, was the unification of Italy as a nation-state. In 1866 the north German kingdom of Prussia--perhaps the most militaristic society ever: termed by observers "not a state with an army, but an army with a state"--declared war on the Austrian Empire as well. The result was the expulsion of Austrian influence from the rest of German-speaking territories. Four years later, as a product of the diplomatic skill of the Prussian Prime Minister Bismarck--and a short victorious war with France that overthrew Napoleon III and led to the Third French Republic--came the creation of the German Empire, a semi-constitutional monarchy which the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty ruled with the title of German Emperor.
The unification of many of the components of the German nation-state marked a fork in history that was to lead toward many of the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
The years from 1775 to 1865 or so were full of revolutions--in North America, in South America, in western Europe, in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The biggest of all was the unsuccessful Tai-Ping Rebellion.
Afterwards the revolutionary tide ebbed. One reason for the ebbing was the speeding-up of economic growth. Material progress became an observed fact for nearly all Europeans and overseas settlers. When Thomas Carlyle wrote... When Marx wrote in 1848 it was possible to believe that the industrial revolution was doing no good for those not at the top of the income distribution. By 1870 such a claim was strained in the extreme.
Another reason that the revolutionary tide began to ebb--a reason of vital importance for the twentieth century--was that governments were becoming much, much better at suppressing them. The late nineteenth century gave central governments communications via telegraph to learn about insurrection, revolt, and discontent. It gave them railroads to send loyal troops from other provinces to suppress insurrection: Beijing in 1989 is only the latest example.
The nineteenth century created modern police forces. And the gap between the weapons available to armies and the weapons available to rebels yawned much wider from the late nineteenth century. After 1850 no revolt succeeded in Europe against a determined government that retained control over its own army and had not been defeated in war.
The growing power of the state to suppress insurrection was very bloodily demonstrated in 1871 in Paris, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Napoleon III and the loss of the Franco-Prussian War. A populist regime of radicals and reformers declared itself the "Commune" of Paris--"Commune" in the sense of the independent municipal self-governing bodies that had flourished in the middle ages, not in the sense of hippies at Big Sur. The competing government of the nascent Third Republic assembled an army from prisoners of war released by the Prussians. Paris became the scene of street fighting and subsequent massacres that killed more than the Great Terror of 1793-94 had during the First French Revolution. Trained armed forces rolled over workers, artisans, and shopkeepers fighting from behind barricades made of paving-stones.
The Commune and "socialism".
Even if universal male suffrage in Britain would not be introduced until 1918, the democratization of British politics was well past the point of no return in the middle of the nineteenth century.
In the second half of the nineteenth century it became clear that there was no part of the world in which Europeans could not--if they wished--impose their will by armed force without anything like total mobilization.
For example, at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, 10,000 soldiers of the Mahdist Sudanese regime died; only 48 British and Egyptian soldiers died. The Mahdist regime had machine-guns, telegraphs, and mines--but not the organizational capacity and discipline to make effective use of them.
Suppression of slavery. U.S.; Brazil; Russian serfdom; Indian Ocean slave trade.
Integration into the European dominated world economy; political submission (formal or informal) to rule by European proconsuls; these were inseparable from what we might call "cultural contamination". Missionary religion, European-founded schools, and policies of "Europeanization" were the thin edge of the wedge.
The Monroe doctrine to support Latin American independence from other European colonial powers.
Napoleon III and Maximilian.
Steamships and the rise of American interest in Asia made the United States government much more sensitive to central America--a man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
After a brief aggressive war against Spain--Puerto Rico and the Phillippines as U.S. possessions; Cuban "independence." U.S. provoked the break-up of Colombia in order to create an independent Panama in which to build a canal.
Venezuelan debt affair?
U.S. intervention in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua in 1912, Vera Cruz in 1914, 1915 a Haitian protectorate.
Dominion of Canada in 1867. Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885.
Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. New Zealand self government 1907. Union of South Africa in 1910.
The Boer War.
After the end in 1815 of the Napoleonic Wars that began the nineteenth century , Great Britain retained--as a strategic asset--the former Dutch colony at the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch government did not mind--or at least did not object. The Orange dynasty was not only being returned to power but was being returned in a stronger position, was protected from future French interference by a British and Prussian alliance--and was being given control over Belgium as well.
British colonists began to arrive at the Cape Colony. Exodus of Dutch-descended Boers. The Great Trek north across the Orange River in 1835. British annexation of Natal--another exodus of Boers north of the Vaal River. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British colonies at the Cape and in Natal. Boer Republics nonrth and inland: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
Zulu kingdom of Shaka. Attempted annexation of the Transvaal Republic in the late 1870s.
Gold discovered in the Transvaal in 1886. The result was a huge influx of miners and speculators. Johannesburg grew in a few years to a city of 100,000--the largest city in Africa south of the Sahara. Gold made the interior of South Africa important to Europeans. The swallowing-up of the rest of Africa by European colonial powers made the British geopoliticians anxious to cement control over the Cape.
The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. As Queen Victoria remarked, the possibility of defeat simply did not exist. A quarter of a million soldiers were sent to South Africa. Concentration camps. Peace treaty in 1902. By 1906 Boer control over the Transvaal legislature. 1910: Union of South Africa with equality for Afrikaans and English as official languages.
What the United States did to its indigenes: expel, concentrate absorb. What Australia did: provoke and massacre. What South Africa did--employ. Common to look down on South Africa in the late twentieth century--ignorant, rascist Boers. Had they treated the Zulu and the Xhosa as the United States treated the Cherokee and the Dakota...
Another difference--aborigines in Australia, Indians in the United States not very useful. Black Africans very useful indeed for South Africa given its role in the world economy.
Suez Caanl in 1869. The khedive Ismail. educated in France, pro-western, very extravagant. Became ruler in 1863. Cotton boom. Egyptan national debt of 7 million pounds at Ismail's ascension swelled to 100 million pounds 13 years later--interest of 5 million a year.
In 1876 Egyptian government declares bankruptcy. Two controllers--one British, one Frence--appointed to make sure that Egypt was governed by Ismail's son to keep up revenue and pay off the debt. Revolution against foreign domination and high taxation--British troops frustrate the revolution in 1882. Strategic importance of Suez Canal for Egypt meant that British troops were to stay in Egypt until 1956.
British rule in India.
The coming of the steamship and of the Suez Canal brought India close to Britain. Travel times. More Britons began to make careers in India--transformation of the British presence. Railroads from 1853; universities from 1857; missionaries from 1813.
Reform minded officials interested in suppressing female infanticide and suttee. Earlier conquerors had been absorbed by Indian society in greater or lesser measure. The Victorian British with their modern technology, confidence int heir intellectual and religious superiority, and continuously-renewed contacts with their homeland maintained their cast distinctiveness.
Indian mutiny of 1857. End of the company. Coming of the Viceroy. A check imposed on Indian industrialization by British textiles. Indian National Congress in 1885.
France: conquers Algeria in 1830-1870. Tunis accepts a French protectorate in 1881.
Mehemet Ali in the 1830s in Egypt. British occupation of Egypt in 1881.
China. Before 1800 the West could offer China little save for silver. After 1800 India could supply and China could consume opium. The 1839-1842 Opium War; treaty ports; Hong Kong.
Tai-Ping rebellion 1850-1864. Hung Hsiu-ch'uan: "God's Chinese Son". Japanese-Chinese War in 1895. Boxer rebellion in 1900.
"Hundred Days of Reform of 1898" in China angled up in the rivalry between the emperor and the dowager empress; failure of reform. Failure of reaction with the European attack on the Boxer rebellion.
What's left? Revolution. Sun Yat-Sen in 1905 formed in Japan a revolutionary movement to expel the Manchus, reform land ownership, and establish a Republic. 1905 also sees the abolition of the traditional examination system.
Revolts in 1911 lead to the fall of the Manchu dynasty when the most important of its military commanders, Yuan Shih-k'ai, turned on the regime. On 12 February 1912 the six-year-old Manchu emperor abdicated.
Failure of Republican consolidation. Warlords. Yuan Shih-k'ai "President" of the Republic.
Japan. Tokugawa shogunate. Closing off of the west in mid-seventeenth century. In 1851 the President of the United States commissioned Commodore Perry to open relations with Japan. American warships enter Tokyo Bay in 1853.
Muddled response. 1868 the "Meiji restoration." Re-emergence of the emperor and abolition of the shogunate. Transfer of the imperial court to tokyo. Rapid adoption of western organizations: prefects, bureaucratic jobs, newspapers, education ministry, conscription, railways, Gregorian calendar all by 1873. A representative local government by 1879. A bicameral parliament (with a peerage) by 1889.
Japan on the offensive: pressure on Korea in 1876. War with China in 1895. End in 1899 of extra-territoriality for Europeans in Japan. British alliance in 1902. Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Formal annexation of Korea in 1910. Mandate over German pacific islands in 1919.
1911: crippling of the House of Lords in Britain; in 1914 univeral adult male suffrage in France and Germany. Britain and Italy with large male electorates. But in Europe only Finland, Norway, New Zealand, some of Australia, and the U.S. allowed women to vote. Feminism. Women's pink-collar work. Contraception. Consumer durables.
Nationalism. Balkans. Alsace and Lorraine.
Roberts, Penguin History of the World, on science "The social phenomenon [of science] underlay the growing control of his environment and the improvement of his life which were so easily grasped by the layman. This was what made the nineteenth century the first in which science truly became an object of religion. By 1914 educated Europeans and Amerians took for granted anesthetics, the motor car, the steam turbine, specialized steels, the airplance, the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, an dmany more marvels which had not existed a century before.... Perhaps the most widely apparent were those stemming from the availability of cheap electrical power; it was already shaping cities by making electric trams and trains available to suburban householders, work in factories through electric motors, and domestic life through electric lights.... [T]he 36,000 horses pulling trams in Great Britain in 1900 had only 900 successors in 1914.
Great Britain as the only superpower in 1914.
The psychological atmosphere in which statesmen had to work in 1914. It was an age in which mass emotions were easily aroused by nationalism. There was a widespread ignorance of what war would be like--everyone remembered only the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; no one paid much attention to the American Civil War, the Boer War, or the Russo-Japanese War.
The beginnings of the First World War. Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Schleiffen plan. "Scrap of paper." "The lights are going out all over Europe."
The Russian Revolution. Versailles.
Fascism.
Peace failed to bring the nationalist gains Italins had been expecting. In the post-war recession, the socialists grew stronger in Parliament--and sounded more alarming now that a socialist revolutionary state existed in Russia.
In 1919 a journalist who before the war had been an extreme socialist, Benito Mussolini, founded a movement called the fascio di combattimento--"union for struggle." It would seek power by any means necessary--and would not be afraid to use street violence against socialists. Soon the fascists enjoyed official or quasi-official patronage and protection from local police.
In 1922 the king asked Mussolini to form a government. By 1926 Mussolini was a dictator.
The fascist regime had terrorism at is roots, and it explicitly denounced liberal ideas. Divergence between style and aspiration on the one hand and achievement on the other.
Two phenomena: one is the appearance of ideologists and activists who spoke of a new, radical, non-democratic non-parliamentary politics, emphasizing idealism, will-power, sacrifice, and obedience--and looked forward to rebuilding society and the state without respect for vested interestes or concessions to idealism. Fueled by economic collapse, outraged nationalism, and anti-Marxism.
The second is the--conservative, authoritarian, religious--rule by conservative elites. Call it "authoritarianism".
Fascism and authoritarianism blended into each other.
More important, perhaps, was the reality distortion field cast by the Soviet Union. Inside the Soviet Union it was convenient for Stalin for people to think of the world in terms of us vs. them. As this notion took hold, so outside did the preaching of the doctrine of international class-struggle by the Comintern--that politics-as-usual had to be supplanted by politics-as-revolution, and that social democrats were at least as bad as reationaries. The fears of conservatives were intensified. And as attitudes hardened on the right, communists were given new evidence for their belief in the inevitability of revolution.
But there was not one successful left-wing revolution outside of Russia. Hungary's communist republic and Bavaria's communist republic were of extremely short duration. The revolutionary possibilities in Europe subsided rapidly after the end of WWI.
Labour governments peacefully and undramatically ruled Great Britain for much of the 1920s. They were followed by conservative coalitions which governed with remarkable fideliyt to the tradition of progressive piecemeal social and administrtive reform that marked Britain's advance into the "welfare state."
Scandinavian social democray.
Even in France, where there was a large and active communist party, there was no sign that it commanded the assent of a majority even in the depths of the Great Depression
A new Asia. 1300 warlords between 1912 and 1928; KMT establishes its base in the south. Japanese government presents "21 demands" for control in Manchuria. 1916: British intervention to prevent the crowning of Yuan Shih-k'ai. 1921: forming of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai.
Cooperation of CCP and KMT. Chiang K'ai-Shek sent to Moscow for training. KMT military academy. "Northern expedition": a semblance of unity by 1927. Mao heads for the countryside--Hunan, where by 1927 10 million peasants were organized by the communists. KMT purges communists in the cities in 1927.
Japanese depression; 1931 the Mukden incident, and the creation of Manchukuo.
1934: the "Long March". Marco Polo Bridge. Japanese attack on China in 1937.
1907: "young Turks"; westernization; Sultn deposed. From 1909 to 1914 the revlutionaries ruled by increasingly dictatorial means from behind the facade of constitutional monarchy. Loss of Balkans before WWI. Loss of non-Anatolian Asian possessions during WWI. Genocide of the Armenians. Transformation of the multi-national Ottoman Empire into Turkey.
Mustafa Kemal: Ataturk. Exchange of Greek and Turkish populations. "Ethnic cleansing" Secularization--abandonment of Muslim calendar, forb idding of Polygamy, en dof religious instruction in schools. Urgng turks to "belong to the Turkish natoin, the Muslim religion, and European civilization." The alphabet was latinized. 1934 Turkish women receive the vote. 1938 death of Ataturk.
Persia: partition int spheres of influence in 1907. Reza Khan's coup in 1921. Played off Russian fear of British to achieve Russian withdrawal. Used the League of Nations to support his canceling of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company concession and to renegotiate terms.
Coming of World War II.
Soon after the end of WWI, German politicians began to demand the revision of the settlement of the Treaty of Versailles. In the 1920s this task was tackled in a hopeful spirit. The real burden of reparations was gradually whittled away. The Treaty of Locarno was seen as a landmark in the return of Germany to the international community.
Most believed that the "German question" had been settled by the creation of a democratic German Republic, the Weimar Republic, whose institutions would gently and benevolently reconstruct German society and civilization. The constitution of Weimar was liberal--but too many Germans were out of sympathy with it. Weimar would collapse when the Great Depression came and set loose the nationalist and social forces that the social democrats who ruled Weimar had contained.
Mussolini--contained Germany in 1934; not eager to see German annexation of Austria. Italy invades Ethiopia in 1935. Britain and France unwilling to apply strong sanctions against Italy; applied sanctions half-heartedly--and annoyed Mussolini. By 1938 Italy was allied with Germany rather than with France and Britain.
During the 1930s the Soviet industrialization prgoram was imposing strains and sacrifices, which were intensified by a savage intensificiation of the dictatorship. Turned not only against he peasants subject o collectivization, but also against the party cadres themselves. Death toll. Show trailas. Nine out of ten army generals. The officer corps. By 1939 over half the delegates who had attended the 1934 party congress were gone.
It was very difficult for outsiders to be sure what was happening--but Russia was not civilized, not liberal, and not apparently very strong as a potential ally.
Fear of the spread of Communism. Welfare state.
Withdrawal of America from European politics. The whole trend of American policy since Wilson failed to get his countrymen to join the League of Nations had been back toward isolationism. Ameircans had gone to Europe as soldiers in the war to end all wars. And it had not worked. So they did not want to repeat the process. Justified by boom in the 1920s, isolationism was somewhat paradoxically justified by slump in the 1930s.
When Americans did not blame Europe for their troubles (the question of war debt had great psychological impact), they distrusted further entanglements. And the Great Depression left them with enough on their plate.
Herbert Hoover. The Great Depression.
The next phase of American history was to be presided over by Democrats for five successive presidential terms, the first four of the elections won by the same man: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt won and maintained the presidency in an electoral contest which was basically one of hope versus despair. He offered confidence. He offered the promise of ation to shake off the blight of an economic depression. A political transformation followed his victory: the creation of the New Deal Democratic coalition.
There is a great deal of illusion in the folk memory of the New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration was still grappling not-very-successfully with the Gerat Depression in 1939. Nonetheless Roosevelt changed the relation of the American government to American society: America went from being a libertarian to a social democratic nation in the 1930s: a huge program of unemployment relief and unemployment insurance was started, new (probably counterproductive) regulations of finance were introduced, millions were poured into public works, and Roosevelt even experimented with public ownership witht he Tennessee Valley Authority.
The New Deal brought the most important extension of the power of the federal authorities over American society, and over the states, that had ever occurred in peacetime. The New Deal proved irreversible. Thus American politics reflected the same pressures towards collectivism which affected other countries in the twentieth century.
In this sense Franklin Roosevelt changed the course of American constitutional and political histoyr as nothing had done since the Civil War. He offered to the world a liberal democratic alternative to fascism and communism, by insisting that a liberal vision of large-scale governmental intervention in the economy could preserve freedom and prosperity and democracy.
His achievement was a remarkable demonstration of the power of the American political system. But Roosevelt could not make America internationalist in the 1930s.
Adolf Hitler, insane genocidal madman whose success seems to indicate politial genius. In the early 1920s he was a disappointed agitator who had failed in an attempt to overthrow the Bavarian provincial government. Hypnotically effective speeches. National Socialist German Workers Party.
In 1933 the Nazi Party was strong enough for him to be appointed Chancellor of the German Republic.
Though Hitler's messages were simple, his appeal was complex. He preached that all of Germany's troubles had a few identifiable sources: the Treaty of Versailles; the international capitalitsts; the Jews; the anti-natonal activities of German marxists. He believed that the righting of Germany's national and political wrongs must be combined with the renovation of German society and culture, with the purification of the biological stock of the German peple by the excision of non-Aryan components, and by the expansion of German territory to provide greater living space for German farmers.
In 1922 such a message was laughable. In 1930 it won Hitler 107 seats in the German Parliament--more than the communists, who had 77. The Nazis were the beneficiaries of the Great Depression.
The communists spent more energy trying to destroy the social democrats than doing anything else.
By 1930 the Nazis were an electoral power that won backers from those who saw in their street-fighting gangs a form of insurance against communism, those who sought rearmament and the abrogation of Versailles, and conservative politicians who saw Hitler as a new player in their parliamentary games of coalition formation and dissolution. In 1932 the Nazis became the largest party in Germany.
Hitler as chancellor. Reichstag fire. Governing by emergency decree. "Coordinaton".
Like Stalin's Russia, the Nazi regime rested in large measure on terror used mercilessly against its enemies. It also unleashed terror against hte Jews: revivals of the pogroms of Medieval Europe. Outside, some saw Hitler as a nationalist leader like Ataturk. Others saw a crusader against Bolshevism. The left saw him as a tool of captalism.
The path by which Germany came to be at war in 1939 was complicated. One important moment was when Mussolini decided to ally with Hitler. After relations with Britain and France had been strained by their reaction to his Ethiopian adventure, a group of Spanish generals mutinied against the left-wing republic and began a civil war. Hitler and Mussolini both sent contingents to support the man who emerged as the fascist leader, General Francisco Franco. Mussolini liked to use submarines to sink ships in the Mediterranean.
Russian foreign policy began to allow local communists to abandon their attacks on other left wing parties and form "popular fronts", and coordinate support for Spain.
British and French inaction at German rearmament and at the reoccupation of the Rhineland.
In earl Hitler seized Austria. To the French and British electorates this could be presented as a matter of legitimately aggrieved nationalism: Austrians and Germans spoke the same language, they should belong to the same nation state.
In the autumn Germany seized the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The areas involved were strategically important, and their loss crippled any future Czechoslovakian defense. But they were areas with many German inhabitants--and to which, by the every-language-its-own-single-nation logic of Versailles, Germany had a claim. In 1939, on the same grounds, came the annexation of Memel in Lithuania.
The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was a turning point. It marked the end of any eastern front coalition against Germany--the Czech army was strong and well-equipped. The dismemberment was achieved by a series of agreements in which Britain and Germany took the main parts in the German city of Munich in September 1938. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, belieed that the transfer of the last substantial group of Germans to Germany would deprive Hitler of any motive for further revision of Versailles. "Peace in our time." Unclear what Chamberlain thought would happen in Danzig and the Polish corridor. Unclear what the Poles--who joined the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia--thought would happen.
One reason for Chamberlain's fear was a fear of what air power would do to Britain. Air power. Fear of the bomber. "The bomber will always get through."
And, indeed, mass aerial bombing was one of the "innovations" of the second world war, and did prove much more costly to life and buildings. Cities were shattered. Impact on civilian life was large. Impact on military power was smaller.
Chamberlain was wrong. Hitler went on--as he had said he would in his autobiography, My Battle, to inaugurate a program of expansion to the east into areas populated by non-Germans: a revival in a sense of the medieval drang nach osten. The first step was the--sudden, brutal--absorption of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The second was pressure on Poland for the return of Danzig to Germany and for the elimination of the largely German-populated "Polish corridor" from Warsaw to Gdynia.
"Nationality" principle of Versailles settlement not a good idea. Interpenetration of populations. "Ethnic cleansing" as a central fact of twentieth century European history.
Russian policy. Should Britain and France sacrifice Poland to gain Russia as an ally? Nazi-Soviet pact. Fourth partition of Poland in 1939, September. Start of World War II.
Fall of Poland; Russo-Finnish War; Blitzkrieg; fall of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark; Italy joins the axis; Charles de Gaulle and the Free French; battle of Britain; defeat of Italy in Ethiopia and Libya.
The American president had believed since 1940 that in the interest of the United States Great Britain had to be supported up to the limits permitted by his own public and beyond the limits permitted by the international law that governed neutrality. By the spring of 1941 it was clear that to all intents and purposes the United States was an undeclared--albeit unmobilized--enemy. A crucial step was the American Lend-Lease act of March 1941, which provided war material and services to the allies without payment. Soon thereafter the American government extended its naval patrols and protection of shipping far out into the Atlantic. In late 1941 came a meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt which resulted in the Atlantic Charter, a statement of shared principles in which the two nations spoke of the needs of a post-war world "after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny." Roosevelt was looking for a casus belli, and hoping Hitler would provide him with one.
Submarine warfare; bomber warfare; radar; tanks; conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece by the Germans. Operation "Barbarossa." Destruction of the Soviet Unions standing armies. Total war. Battle of Moscow.
Lend-lease. Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor was a rash one. The crux of the matter was that Japan needed American (or Indonesian) oil in order to successfully conclude its war with China. The U.S. government had to give at least tacit consent to the Japanese conquest of China. And that consent no American government could give: in the fall of 1941 Roosevelt embargoed all trade by U.S. citizens with Japan.
There followed the final stages of a process that had begun with the assassinations of civilian politicians in the 1930s. The question had become purely strategic and technical: they had to take the resources in southeast Asia that they needed for the war in China by force, they feared the United States would use its base in the Philippines to interfer; all that had to be settled was how and when to wage war with the United States.
The choice was made to strike as hard a blow as possible against the American Pacific fleet in Hawaii, in Pearl Harbor.
Hitler's December 11 declaration of war on the United States. The United States enters the war. Midway; Guadalcanal.
In the absence of Hitler's declaration of war on the U.S., it is hard to see how America would have entered the war in Europe at all.
Stalingrad.
Mobilization in Britain, Russia, and the U.S. The battle of the Atlantic.
When on April 30 1945 Adolf Hitler killed himself in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin, historic Europe was in ruins.
The war in the Pacific took longer. In August 1945 two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. Russia declared war. On 2 September 1945 the Japanese government abandoned its plan of a last-ditch stand in the home islands and surrendered unconditionally to the United Nations. World War II was over.
In its immediate aftermath it was difficult to measure the colossal extent of what had happened. Only one clear and unambiguous good was at once visible: the overthrow of the fascist regimes. As the armies of the United Nations advanced into Eruope, the deepest evils of a system of terror and torture that outmatched even Stalin were revealed by the opening of the prison and extermination camps. It was suddenly apparent that when Winston Churchill had said:
"if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."
He wsa speaking the truth.
The reality of the threat could be seen in Auschwitz and Dachau. "Final solution of the Jewish question" (and the Gypsy question, and the Polish question, and the Communist question, and the mental disability question, and the homosexul question).
Even when the United Kingdom was the only opponent of Hitler, and was fighting for its survival, its democracy had hoped to see the war produce better than mere survival and the destruction of Hitler. Hopes of a new world of cooperation between the great powers, and of social and economic reconstruction were written into the Atlantic Charter, and into the declarations signed at the San Francisco meeting that was to turn the "United Nations" from a wartime alliance against fascism into a post-WWII organization to do the job of keeping the peace that the League of Nations had singularly failed to accomplish. And the war of 1939-1945 in Europe (and to a lesser extent the war in the Pacific) truly was a moral struggle in a way that no other war has ever been.
As J.M. Roberts remarks, "in many ways Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe, the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of Nazism had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific, controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way about which there was little that was 'irrational' except the appalling end which it sought."
At the end of the war Europe's cities were in ruins as a result of the aerial bombing campaign. The economic life and communications of central Europe were destroyed. Millions of refugees. Grave danger of famine and epidemic.
At the end of 1945 there was a line from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste. East of this line--with the exception of Greece--all governments were communist, or had communists in their coalitions. The russian army proved a very good instrument for the extension of international communism. The pre-WWII Baltic republics did not emerge. Romania and Poland were moved westward.
At the end of WWII Germany had ceased to exist: partitioned into zones occupied by France, America, Britain, and Russia.
British forces secured Dutch and French territories in Asia and tried to hand them back to the former colonial rulers. But fighting with rebels began almost immediately: it was clear taht the war had brought revolution to the European colonial empires.
After the first world war it had been possible to embrace the illusion that an "old order" might be restored. After 1945 no one imagined that the previous order could be restored--and no one wanted to. Structure of the U.N. Strength of the Security Council largely at the insistence of Stalin. Veto power for permanent members of the Security Council. General Assembly and Security Council in New York to make it more difficult for U.S. to withdraw into isolationism--IMF and World Bank in Washington as well.
In the later years of World War II, Winston Churchill and his government thought that Roosevelt and the United States had made too many concessions to Stalin. Poland. Return of Soviets captured by Germans. Withdrawal of Patton's Third Army from Czechoslovakia. Failure of Eisenhower to drive for Berlin. Withdrawal to previously-agreed-on zone divisions. Acquiescence in Soviet looting of Eastern Germany. Acquiescence in the Oder-Neisse line as western boundary of Poland--and consequent ethnic cleansing.
For all the military power of the U.S. in 1945, there was little will to use it: rapid demobilization was the principal goal.
The cost of World War II in Europe has never been adequately measured. Leaving aside some twenty million Russians dead in the war, perhaps fifteen million other Europeans had died. Seven million dwellings destroyed in Germany and Austria. The Germans had destroyed 40,000 miles of Russian railway track in their long retreat from Moscow.
There is every indication that Stalin wished Germany to be governed as a unit by the occupying powers, as had been agreed at the July 1945 Potsdam conference. Russian efforts to ensure security against German recovery led to the increasing practical separation of the Russian zone.
Truman doctrine in February 1947. Marshall Plan in June 1947. Coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. OEEC in the west, COMECOn in the East. The cold war had begun.
Independence of India and Pakistan. On 14 March 1946 the British government offered full independence--and a year later announced that it would hand over power. On 15 August 1947 India and Pakistan became indpendent.
China. Chinese civil war.
20
CenturyCreated 1/24/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
Associate Professor
of Economics Brad DeLong, 601 Evans