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4.5
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916 – 1931 by Adam Tooze is a remarkable book. Quite easy to read and full of insights about the Great War, and its aftermath, right up to today. Yes, our modern world of 2017 is deeply affected by World War One.Tooze advances many questions that he answers, sometimes necessarily at length, but one I find provocative is, did declaring a perpetual peace imply a profoundly conservative commitment to upholding the status quo?This question about preserving the status quo is crucial. France, desperate to control Germany, saw the status quo as an existential issue. The Germans, Japanese, and Italians, among others, considered themselves have-not nations and they were going to change that status. If they could not ascend to the summit of world power peacefully, then they would turn to war. The Soviet Union decided to foment worldwide communist revolution and sent its agents to carry that out. By disrupting the status quo, held to by the victors, these nations would rip away the power of the elites for themselves.Of course, the paths were disjointed. The USSR and Germany may have had a similar idea, to smash the status quo, but the communists were tearing down capitalism while the Germans were tearing at the superior power of their opponents. All the outs, Germany, Japan, Italy, the USSR, and others, had plans to overthrow the system established after WWI and replace it with another, but the various “outs” all had divergent ideas about what the nature of a changed order would look like.Tooze hits on the major problem of WWI’s aftershock in his introduction, and follows it through to the Great Depression with a focused mind. The problem, as stated by Tooze: “If the idea of reordering the world around a single power bloc and a common set of liberal, ‘Western’ values seemed like a radical historical departure, this is precisely what made the outcome of World War I so dramatic.”That upset the apple cart. The victors of WWI were going to change the world, prevent another holocaust, and spread the ideas of liberty; although they differed on what liberty meant. What the author effectively points out is a lot of other world leaders simply did not like what appeared as a western cabal oozing power. With the US pulling away and fracturing the west, the power of the group plunged incredibly. Tooze closely examines the derailment of liberalism in the 1920s and, in an in-depth analysis, explains what went wrong on a worldwide basis.The victors of WWI failed to establish a stable economic foundation for their new creation. The Great War had cost so much that the old economic order was in shambles. Then the victors decided the vanquished – which ended up being Germany alone – would pay for it all. The fact that Germany was smashed and had no money bothered few in political power at the time, even if it bothered leading economists a lot. By walking away after Versailles with no economic arrangement they imperiled their liberal experiment. Arguments over German repatriations scarred every political aspect of the 1920s, and the inflexibility of the US on repayments of war loans destroyed any chance of fixing the problems. The French were destitute and wanted US war loans forgiven. The US would not consider it. Germany was starving and impoverished and could not pay France the required repatriations, some of which would have gone to repay US war loans. In the 1930’s the repatriation and war loan problem was solved by recycling. The US sent money to Germany, who sent it to France, who sent it back to the US. Tooze is able to explain in detail how this ludicrous funding problem harmed the world dramatically.On top of all this, the western world was goaded to return to the gold standard and the resulting deflation hurt recovering economies and, if Tooze is correct, may have been a key factor bringing on the Great Depression. The economic and political problems of WWI combined to crack the world order based on a single power block of liberalism and capitalism.The Deluge is one of the best books on WWI and its consequences that you can read. Tooze’s book on the Nazi economy, The Wages of Destruction is also excellent. Another outstanding book on the run up to World War I is Dreadnaught by Robert K. Massie. Massie’s book on the Great War, Castles of Steel is good, although I preferred his pre-war analysis in Dreadnaught. For an overview of the effects of WWI on the USA a must read is David Kennedy’s, Over Here. If you are looking for a good analysis of the fighting itself, I recommend The Great War, Strategies and Tactics of the First World War, part of the West Point Military History series edited by Thomas E. Griess. The American Way of War, by Weigley, has a chapter on WWI that is worth reading. My book, The Super Summary of World History, Revised, has chapters on WWI and WWII that I think are the best in my book. I might be prejudice.I highly recommend The Deluge.AD2
