11/12/19

1

Fall 2019Prof. Kenneth F. Ledfordkenneth.ledford@case.edu368-4144

Senior Scholars:Interwar Europe: Working Out Modernity in the Midst of Crisis

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• The second war that book-ended the Interwar Era in Europe proved vastly more destructive and murderous than the first

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• But even before that destructiveness was evident, the judgment of intellectuals about the Interwar Era was harsh

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• William Butler Yeats• “The Second Coming”

– Written 1919– First printed in The Dial 1920– Published in collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer 1921

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• At its very beginning, one of the great poems of the 20thcentury, but one of the great poets, voiced ominous concerns of foreboding.

11/12/19

2

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• W. H. Auden• “September 1, 1939”

– First published in the New Yorker, October 18, 1939– Another Time (1940)

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy,

And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

11/12/19

3

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Historians immediately pronounced their judgment, too• Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1929-1939: An

Introduction to the Study of International Relations• Planned in 1937; completed summer 1939; in page proofs on

September 3, 1939

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Twenty Years’ Crisis– Part One: The Science of International Politics– Part Two: The International Crisis– Part Three: Politics, Power and Morality– Part Four: Law and Change

11/12/19

4

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Twenty Years Crisis, Preface to First Edition– If and when peace returns to the world, the lessons of the breakdown

which has involved Europe in a second major war within twenty years and two months of the Versailles Treaty will need to be earnestly pondered. A settlement which, having destroyed the National Socialist rulers of Germany, leaves untouched the conditions which made the phenomenon of National Socialism possible, will run the risk of being as short-lived and as tragic as the settlement of 1919. No period of history will better repay study by the peacemakers of the future than the Twenty Years’ Crisis which fills the interval between the two Great Wars. The next Peace Conference, if it is not to repeat the fiasco of the last, will have to concern itself with issues more fundamental than the drawing of frontiers.

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Twenty Years’ Crisis– Chapter 14: The Prospects of a New International Order

• The End of the Old Order• Will the Nation Survive as the Unit of Power?• Power in the New International Order• Morality in the New International Order

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• The Peace Treaty envisioned by Carr was not signed until September 12, 1990– Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany– “Two Plus Four” Treaty

• Federal Republic of Germany• German Democratic Republic• French Republic• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics• United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland• United States of America

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Despite the delay in post-World-War-II peacemaking, the states of Europe drew a number of lessons from the Interwar Era and took concrete steps toward implementing institutions to avoid the very errors that Yeats, Auden, Carr, and others identified

11/12/19

5

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Even as we see ominous parallels to the Interwar Era in developments in the U.S. and the world since 2016, we still benefit from the institutional arrangements built on the lessons drawn from in during the Second World War and immediately after.

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Institutions born of lessons from Interwar Europe– Bretton Woods Monetary System– European Union– NATO– GATT/WTO– Cold War/Military/Warfare Keynesianism– Multilateralism

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• Bretton Woods Conference, July 1944– 730 delegates from 44 Allied powers, calling selves the “United

Nations”– Created International Monetary Fund and International Bank for

Reconstruction and Development

– Set up system whereby all other states pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, and the U.S. pegged the dollar to $35.00 per troy ounce of gold

– Possible because U.S. held 60 percent of all gold in the world, and had a huge balance of payments surplus, a surplus of current account

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• Bretton Woods Conference, July 1944– Mt. Washington Hotel

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

6

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• Bretton Woods system, 1944-71– Great stability into late 1960s– So initially little need for Europe to consider common currency, focus

on eliminating tariffs by 1968– But U.S. balance of payments deficit forced Nixon to abandon Bretton

Woods on August 15, 1971, and end convertibility of U.S. dollar to gold

– New international system of “fiat money” and floating currency rates– Currencies each backed by “full faith and credit” of issuing

government, and value determined by calculations of traders and speculators

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

7

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• European Union

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• John Foster Dulles– Waldorf-Astoria, January 17, 1947– “Europe must federate or perish”

• Benjamin Sumner Welles– Washington Post, February 5, 1947– “Europe desperately needs some effective form of political and

economic federation.”

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• Walter Lippmann– New York Herald Tribune, April 5, 1947– “The crisis is developing because none of the leading nations of Europe

– Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany – is recovering from the war, or has any reasonable prospect of recovery. . . . The truth is that political and economic measures on a scale which no responsible statesman has yet ventured to hint at will be needed in the next year or so. To prevent the crisis which will otherwise engulf Europe. . .the measures will have to be very large – in Europe no less than an economic union and over here no less than the equivalent of a rival of Lend-Lease.”

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

John Foster Dulles Sumner Welles Walter Lippmann

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

• Marshall Plan sent $13 billion to Europe before it ended at the end of 1951

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

11/12/19

8

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

9

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• NATO, 1949

HISTORY DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interwar Europe

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

10

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947)• World Trade Organization (1995)

HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Cold War/Military/Warfare Keynesianism

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

11

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

Interwar Europe

• Multilateralism– Bretton Woods/World Bank/IMF– European Union– NATO– GATT/WTO– Climate Change Accords

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT

11/12/19

12

HISTORY DEPARTMENT