NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE-3
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2017
NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE -3
THE CHOICE BETWEEN PRACTICAL AND IMPRACTICAL POLITICS
For the Peace of Versailles was not, in fact, based on ideals but on solid historical experience. The most obvious fact about the outbreak of war in 1914 was that it was 100 years after end of the last Great War in Europe: and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that gave shape and coherence to the peace, were based on the historical fact that Europe had known a century of peace after 1815, largely due to the political leadership of Great Britain based on what Phillip Guedalla called “a lofty dream of England that served as a model and umpire for Europe, which lived on for forty years through the work of Lord Palmerston”.
And in turning to Guedalla’s account of his life, I knew that I was heading back personally to old familiar territory. For Lord Palmerston will always be for me first and foremost the son of the Second Viscount Palmerston, who I first ‘got to know’ more than 50 years ago through Brian Connell’s “Portrait of a Whig Peer”, at a time when I too was a young man feeling somewhat prematurely required to assume adult responsibilities in a post war world, which inevitably meant travelling and educating myself about the world, which is exactly what Second Viscount did in 1763, when he seized on the end of the Seven Years War as the first opportunity to make ‘the Grand Tour’.
1763, in fact, was a crucial moment in world history because the recent war had arguably made Great Britain the most powerful country on Earth in terms of global outreach, and there seemed a good chance that, if Britain refused to impose savage terms on the defeated French, such a peace treaty might finally put an end to the endless stream of European wars. It was, in fact, an aspiration that motivated Adam Smith to write “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 and along with others like Jeremy Bentham, as Steven Watson explained in his volume of the Oxford History of England (1960), to turn these years into an “Age of Civilized Security” from 1760 to 1790, an age in which it was increasingly assumed that those who had access to power should use it for the benefit of their fellow men, improving the lot of humanity in the emerging global reality, and spreading the kinds of rights, and liberties, and the opportunity to live in “civilized security”, that English people regarded as their ‘inalienable’ birth right.
And the second half of the “Age of Civilized Security” overlapped with Professor Asa Briggs’ “Age of Improvement” from 1783 to 1867, an age that inspired T.B. Macaulay to hail England as great the land of progress, and Herbert Spencer to postulate a very English way of tackling the ever-changing challenges of life and make up a word for it- ‘Evolution’, which all seemed to marry-up very conveniently with the thrust of the new ideas of produced by Charles Darwin about “The Origin of the Species”. And for a while Darwin and Evolution seemed to be a marriage made in a new reality that had no need for God or Heaven.
But, when that great parliamentary orator, Benjamin Disraeli, called the extension of the franchise in 1867 “a Leap in the Dark”, he was using an image that meant a great deal in a new and uncertain age, an age without balance, poise, or any real sense of security, an age when the mood in England changed out of fear of fast losing its place in a world that had discovered the grim reality of its “Heart of Darkness”, and suddenly felt doomed to decline and fall like the “Lost Civilizations” that were suddenly being revealed by recent Archaeology, or like those species now revealed by recent discoveries of Palaeontology, most notably those dinosaurs whose remains so fascinated visitors to the new Natural History Museum.
And the result of all this was not only the terrible life and death struggle between 1914 and 1918, but also the determination of many people to show that the victory had been a victory for Civilization and not barbarism.
And in 1926 the great French authority on English History, Elie Halevy, wrote in the last volume of his history of England, that in the 1860s the English had possibly been the most peaceful people that the world had ever seen, and had only lost some of that serenity and self-confidence out of fear, which was significant right then because, as a hundred years before, the burden of making a success of the peace had fallen mostly on Great Britain and France. And by the end of 1926, as Stephen King-Hall brought out very clearly in his best-selling account of “Our Own Times” (1935), the outlook for peace seemed quite positive.
To which one might add that this is in contrast to the outlook for the world in January 2017, when, in fact, worries about Brexit pale into insignificance when compared with the widespread anxiety over what Trump’s USA, Putin’s Russia and Merkel’s Germany has in store for us all this year. Which surely all just serves to highlight the significant fact that the most fatal flaw of the Versailles Settlement was not within it at all, but the facts that none of the three emerging ‘superpowers’ were ‘signed up’ to the peace, and furthermore that each one was still “fully committed” to pursuing their own particular national destiny irrespective of any other country, as arguably they still are.
THE ROAD TO THE WORLD CHAOS OF 1932-3
For it can have been no accident that each of the three superpowers chose powerful predators as their national emblematic creatures; eagles and bears, creatures which live apart and alone in their own wild spaces: and each one responded to the end of the First World War by launching into a new and distinctive chapter in its own ‘in one country’ History.
Moreover the times seemed to be favourable to the opening up of new chapters in the adventure of these large continental states that were so richly endowed with land. For as Andrew Birnie of Edinburgh University could still assert in 1930, the “terms of trade” had moved away from industry and back towards the land: and in fact Lenin’s offer of “Peace, bread and land” had an almost universal appeal to ex-servicemen, many of whom asked nothing more than the chance to escape from the horrors of industrial war back to the healthy and invigorating life of working on the Land and with the vitality of nature.
For that decline in global prices for all Land produce over the forty years before 1914 had been dramatically reversed during the First World War: and global prices not only recovered to the levels of 1870, but rose to about 124% of those prices by the mid-1920s: and, while the USA, Germany and Russia were not the only states to respond to the new market conditions, they were the three countries in which the sheer size and scale of production had become something of a national obsession before 1914, with all three after the war setting about very conscious drives to get back to pre-war levels of production, and then to go on increasing production at the same pace.
But the prices had only shot up because of the violent disturbance of the global economy brought about by the Great War, and when something like normality returned around 1925 global prices began to fall faster than ever in a way that was only made worse by the belief that truly powerful countries might “buck the market” and “ride out the storm” by maintaining the levels of Income on which they had come to depend by further increases production, which only further increased World Supply and drove prices down even lower.
And all of this impacted on the “American Dream”, which had achieved an even higher world profile as the ‘way ahead’ because the USA had not been scarred and ravaged by war like Europe. And the “Brave New World” it offered was heavily based on the possibility escaping from the industrial cities and ghettos into new-build rural and suburban societies made possible by a new industrial revolution with new ‘metalled’ road systems and electrical grids offering “the good life”, backed by the finance industry of the Roaring Twenties.
Moreover as the economics of farming has long been known to be famously volatile, it was not initially too difficult for those working on the land, to borrow in hopes of a better day against their ‘real estate’ assets. But, as the global prices continued to fall, many found themselves struggling to make even the barest subsistence. And when eventually it came to bankruptcies and selling up the assets to pay off the debts, the assets no longer covered the debts, and suddenly large numbers of banks were ‘at risk’ because their assets did not cover their liabilities. Moreover, as the new industrial revolution had been based on an emerging economy of mass consumption in a world that was still more rural than urban, when the rural economy fell into depression there was no market for the consumer goods that had been rolling off of the production lines, and industries fell into crisis.
Furthermore the world’s financial system was very vulnerable because, when J.M.Keynes had tried to explain to some American bankers at Versailles just what Old Etonian, ‘noblesse oblige’ responsibilities now devolved on the USA with the Gold Reserves of the Bank of England, they just replied that Americans needed no lessons about what to do with gold. Eventually the USA had the clever idea of lending the gold to Weimar Germany, so the Germans could hand it to the French, who just hoarded it away in their vaults: and then American dollars flooded in attracted by the enormous potential of the German economy, which had rebounded miraculously before Germany was hit very hard by the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and then by the onset of the Great Depression in the USA.
THE CHOICE BETWEEN PRACTICAL AND IMPRACTICAL POLITICS
For the Peace of Versailles was not, in fact, based on ideals but on solid historical experience. The most obvious fact about the outbreak of war in 1914 was that it was 100 years after end of the last Great War in Europe: and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that gave shape and coherence to the peace, were based on the historical fact that Europe had known a century of peace after 1815, largely due to the political leadership of Great Britain based on what Phillip Guedalla called “a lofty dream of England that served as a model and umpire for Europe, which lived on for forty years through the work of Lord Palmerston”.
And in turning to Guedalla’s account of his life, I knew that I was heading back personally to old familiar territory. For Lord Palmerston will always be for me first and foremost the son of the Second Viscount Palmerston, who I first ‘got to know’ more than 50 years ago through Brian Connell’s “Portrait of a Whig Peer”, at a time when I too was a young man feeling somewhat prematurely required to assume adult responsibilities in a post war world, which inevitably meant travelling and educating myself about the world, which is exactly what Second Viscount did in 1763, when he seized on the end of the Seven Years War as the first opportunity to make ‘the Grand Tour’.
1763, in fact, was a crucial moment in world history because the recent war had arguably made Great Britain the most powerful country on Earth in terms of global outreach, and there seemed a good chance that, if Britain refused to impose savage terms on the defeated French, such a peace treaty might finally put an end to the endless stream of European wars. It was, in fact, an aspiration that motivated Adam Smith to write “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776 and along with others like Jeremy Bentham, as Steven Watson explained in his volume of the Oxford History of England (1960), to turn these years into an “Age of Civilized Security” from 1760 to 1790, an age in which it was increasingly assumed that those who had access to power should use it for the benefit of their fellow men, improving the lot of humanity in the emerging global reality, and spreading the kinds of rights, and liberties, and the opportunity to live in “civilized security”, that English people regarded as their ‘inalienable’ birth right.
And the second half of the “Age of Civilized Security” overlapped with Professor Asa Briggs’ “Age of Improvement” from 1783 to 1867, an age that inspired T.B. Macaulay to hail England as great the land of progress, and Herbert Spencer to postulate a very English way of tackling the ever-changing challenges of life and make up a word for it- ‘Evolution’, which all seemed to marry-up very conveniently with the thrust of the new ideas of produced by Charles Darwin about “The Origin of the Species”. And for a while Darwin and Evolution seemed to be a marriage made in a new reality that had no need for God or Heaven.
But, when that great parliamentary orator, Benjamin Disraeli, called the extension of the franchise in 1867 “a Leap in the Dark”, he was using an image that meant a great deal in a new and uncertain age, an age without balance, poise, or any real sense of security, an age when the mood in England changed out of fear of fast losing its place in a world that had discovered the grim reality of its “Heart of Darkness”, and suddenly felt doomed to decline and fall like the “Lost Civilizations” that were suddenly being revealed by recent Archaeology, or like those species now revealed by recent discoveries of Palaeontology, most notably those dinosaurs whose remains so fascinated visitors to the new Natural History Museum.
And the result of all this was not only the terrible life and death struggle between 1914 and 1918, but also the determination of many people to show that the victory had been a victory for Civilization and not barbarism.
And in 1926 the great French authority on English History, Elie Halevy, wrote in the last volume of his history of England, that in the 1860s the English had possibly been the most peaceful people that the world had ever seen, and had only lost some of that serenity and self-confidence out of fear, which was significant right then because, as a hundred years before, the burden of making a success of the peace had fallen mostly on Great Britain and France. And by the end of 1926, as Stephen King-Hall brought out very clearly in his best-selling account of “Our Own Times” (1935), the outlook for peace seemed quite positive.
To which one might add that this is in contrast to the outlook for the world in January 2017, when, in fact, worries about Brexit pale into insignificance when compared with the widespread anxiety over what Trump’s USA, Putin’s Russia and Merkel’s Germany has in store for us all this year. Which surely all just serves to highlight the significant fact that the most fatal flaw of the Versailles Settlement was not within it at all, but the facts that none of the three emerging ‘superpowers’ were ‘signed up’ to the peace, and furthermore that each one was still “fully committed” to pursuing their own particular national destiny irrespective of any other country, as arguably they still are.
THE ROAD TO THE WORLD CHAOS OF 1932-3
For it can have been no accident that each of the three superpowers chose powerful predators as their national emblematic creatures; eagles and bears, creatures which live apart and alone in their own wild spaces: and each one responded to the end of the First World War by launching into a new and distinctive chapter in its own ‘in one country’ History.
Moreover the times seemed to be favourable to the opening up of new chapters in the adventure of these large continental states that were so richly endowed with land. For as Andrew Birnie of Edinburgh University could still assert in 1930, the “terms of trade” had moved away from industry and back towards the land: and in fact Lenin’s offer of “Peace, bread and land” had an almost universal appeal to ex-servicemen, many of whom asked nothing more than the chance to escape from the horrors of industrial war back to the healthy and invigorating life of working on the Land and with the vitality of nature.
For that decline in global prices for all Land produce over the forty years before 1914 had been dramatically reversed during the First World War: and global prices not only recovered to the levels of 1870, but rose to about 124% of those prices by the mid-1920s: and, while the USA, Germany and Russia were not the only states to respond to the new market conditions, they were the three countries in which the sheer size and scale of production had become something of a national obsession before 1914, with all three after the war setting about very conscious drives to get back to pre-war levels of production, and then to go on increasing production at the same pace.
But the prices had only shot up because of the violent disturbance of the global economy brought about by the Great War, and when something like normality returned around 1925 global prices began to fall faster than ever in a way that was only made worse by the belief that truly powerful countries might “buck the market” and “ride out the storm” by maintaining the levels of Income on which they had come to depend by further increases production, which only further increased World Supply and drove prices down even lower.
And all of this impacted on the “American Dream”, which had achieved an even higher world profile as the ‘way ahead’ because the USA had not been scarred and ravaged by war like Europe. And the “Brave New World” it offered was heavily based on the possibility escaping from the industrial cities and ghettos into new-build rural and suburban societies made possible by a new industrial revolution with new ‘metalled’ road systems and electrical grids offering “the good life”, backed by the finance industry of the Roaring Twenties.
Moreover as the economics of farming has long been known to be famously volatile, it was not initially too difficult for those working on the land, to borrow in hopes of a better day against their ‘real estate’ assets. But, as the global prices continued to fall, many found themselves struggling to make even the barest subsistence. And when eventually it came to bankruptcies and selling up the assets to pay off the debts, the assets no longer covered the debts, and suddenly large numbers of banks were ‘at risk’ because their assets did not cover their liabilities. Moreover, as the new industrial revolution had been based on an emerging economy of mass consumption in a world that was still more rural than urban, when the rural economy fell into depression there was no market for the consumer goods that had been rolling off of the production lines, and industries fell into crisis.
Furthermore the world’s financial system was very vulnerable because, when J.M.Keynes had tried to explain to some American bankers at Versailles just what Old Etonian, ‘noblesse oblige’ responsibilities now devolved on the USA with the Gold Reserves of the Bank of England, they just replied that Americans needed no lessons about what to do with gold. Eventually the USA had the clever idea of lending the gold to Weimar Germany, so the Germans could hand it to the French, who just hoarded it away in their vaults: and then American dollars flooded in attracted by the enormous potential of the German economy, which had rebounded miraculously before Germany was hit very hard by the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and then by the onset of the Great Depression in the USA.
