[Peace-discuss] The End of the Great War

[David Green]

https://solidarity-us.org/atc/197/end-of-great-war/
The End of "The Great War"Allen Ruff

WORLD WAR I drew to a close a hundred years ago with the cease-fire on
Europe’s Western Front, the Armistice of November 11, 1918. It then came to
a formal conclusion with the German signing of the Allied-dictated “Treaty
of Versailles” in late June, 1919 and subsequent Paris accords imposed upon
Berlin’s co-belligerents, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria.

At its end, the war left old class-based social and political antagonisms
and national grievances unresolved and created massive new ones. As such,
it would have immense impacts on social and political currents down to the
present — making the study of the war’s events much more than an academic
pursuit.

The “Great War” had come about as a result of imperialist rivalries and, in
the view of historian Arno Mayer and others, parallel attempts by various
ruling circles to divert or blunt increasing domestic, internal class
tensions — decades of mounting class conflict and increasing challenges
from the organized labor and socialist movements.

The class struggle, temporarily derailed as it were in 1914 by chauvinist
calls for “national unity” and defense of respective homelands, did not go
away, but resurged in one country after another as the prolonged cataclysm
inflicted ever increasing tolls upon the popular classes.

The conflict marked the appearance of modern “total war,” protracted
warfare that targeted not only each belligerent’s combatants but their
productive capacities and resources. As such, it exacted an unprecedented
toll on the laboring classes at “the rear” while necessitating their full
social and economic mobilization and sacrifice.

A monstrous zero-sum game demanding “total victory” — the unconditional
surrender of the vanquished and a vindictive penal “peace” — it precluded
the chances of a lasting, stable postwar world.

Harnessing the latest in scientific development, technological innovation
and mass production techniques for military ends (the airplane, the tank,
the submarine, poison gas and the machine gun), the war’s industrialized
mass slaughter resulted in an estimated 40 million casualties, dead and
wounded, the majority of them civilian. (By 1914, to be sure, each of
Europe’s dominant “civilized nations” had long engaged in the mass murder
of millions deemed racially inferior and expendable worldwide.)

Contagious disease, especially typhus and influenza, continuing into the
postwar years, took perhaps the heaviest toll, numbering in the tens of
millions among populations weakened by hunger and exposure. Leaving entire
societies physically devastated, the war and its aftermath additionally
created millions of displaced — an estimated four to five million refugees
set in motion between 1914 and ’22.
Massive Transformations

Nowhere among the European belligerents (except perhaps in England) did the
war’s destruction, deprivations and forced movement of populations allow
the prewar social order to remain unscathed as the conflict telescoped and
intensified pre-existing social cleavages.

Well before its conclusion, the issue had become not whether the war would
change the political and social face of Europe — but how extensive and deep
the transformations would be. It ended with not only a major power
reshuffling of the global order, but also societies torn by internecine
conflicts, many of which took on the character of protracted civil wars
with varying degrees of political and class violence.

The war additionally exacted far more than the immense physical and
material toll. Unrelenting suffering and loss, especially during the
conflict’s latter two years, affected the perceptions, thoughts and desires
of Europe’s masses.

As the cataclysm plodded on, fanning flames of resentment and desperation,
it forced countless millions to think about fundamental issues involving
war and peace, justice and oppression and the folly of their leaders’
wisdom in ways that had never before seemed possible or required. As a
result, the world would never be the same. (Kolko, 105).

Various classes fared differently in different countries, of course. Those
cushioned by old accumulated wealth and class privilege, and the
beneficiaries of industrial and finance capital, did well as war demand, as
usual, generated immense profits.

So too, did black marketeers and profiteering middling merchants even as
war-induced inflation, scarcities and rationing of necessities gnawed at
the wellbeing of urban middle and white-collared classes — those rentiers,
shopkeepers, civil servants on fixed incomes and petit professionals,
layers that would soon display widespread receptivity to reactionary
postwar political currents.

And while those remaining in the countryside, at least in those
agricultural regions not laid waste or stripped of resources, fared better
in general than those in the cities, the laboring classes as a whole faced
the greatest hardships, both as military fodder and as hard-pressed
home-front toilers.

The war’s devastation, dislocations and hardship, most significantly, paved
the way for the Russian Revolution — the regime change of March (February)
1917 and then the November (October) Bolshevik-led soviets’ seizure of
state power, in class terms the first successful social revolution since
1789.

The October Revolution and the opposing counterrevolution shaped the way
the war ended and the contours of the immediate postwar era.
War’s End and Social Upheaval

The war moved toward a conclusion not solely because of the often
attributed Allied counteroffensive following a failed last-ditch German
effort to take Paris in Spring 1918. The end had already come into view by
mid-1917 as war weary battered troops on all sides, encouraged by news of
Russia’s February Revolution, proved increasingly reluctant to fight any
further.

Following a disastrous failed offensive that April, for example, mutinies
and associated disruptions occurred among nearly half the French infantry
divisions deployed on the Western Front. In Germany, a harbinger of later
events came that August in the form of a short-lived mutiny of 4000 sailors
in the northern port of Wilmershaven.

On the Austro-Italian front at Caporetto in that fall, some 250,000
hard-pressed Italian troops surrendered to the enemy in what amounted to a
mass desertion.

Paralleling such rising discontent in the military, ongoing strikes and
mass demonstrations in cities such as Berlin, Turin and Vienna took on an
increasingly political character. In Eastern and Central Europe especially,
military rebellions and left-organized home front demonstrations and
strikes demanding bread and peace increasingly doomed the Central Powers’
further prosecution of the war.

In Berlin in January, 1918 a demonstration organized by radical shop
stewards, largely employed in the city’s munitions factories and
independent of the trade union and Social Democratic (SPD) leadership,
brought out some 400,000 workers and touched off solidarity demonstrations
by millions nationwide. Protesting not just deteriorating conditions, they
called for “peace without reparations” and democratic reform in what
amounted to a dress rehearsal for later events.

That same month witnessed a mass general strike against the war in
Budapest, again a preview of things to come. Mass strikes by hundreds of
thousands in Vienna and surrounding industrial towns during the same period
also made increasingly political demands. A February 1918 sailors’ mutiny
aboard Austro-Hungary’s Adriatic fleet, though brief, sent its own signals.

In Allied Italy, strikes in war industries, unrest among the white-collared
middle classes, women-led protests in food markets and rural peasant
mobilizations surged in the late spring.

In Germany by the following fall, the Reich’s high command faced an
untenable situation — the threat of a U.S.-bolstered Allied offensive
threatening a push into the German heartland, an incredibly hard-pressed,
famished and radicalizing working class at home, and increasing
rebelliousness in the military, especially in the navy.

With initial armistice discussions already underway in early October, the
German leadership finally capitulated as the growing threat of revolution,
kicked off in early November by a mass rebellion of sailors throughout the
country’s northern ports, spread among workers in Berlin and beyond.

By the 9th, with workers’ and soldiers’ councils forming in numerous
locales, the Kaiser abdicated and the reigns of government passed to a
conservative SPD leadership fearful of communist-lead dual power forming
from below. The Armistice came two days later.
The Absent Presence at Paris

While representatives from 24 nations and additional aggrieved peoples
convened at the Paris Peace Conference beginning on January 18, 1919,
several major players remained conspicuous in their absence.

The defeated Central Powers, denied any say in the deliberations, awaited
the victors’ terms. Technically denied a presence since it had already
signed a “separate peace” with Berlin, the infant “Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic” was also excluded. The threat its very
existence posed to ruling classes everywhere nevertheless pervaded the
conference deliberations and framed the outcomes.

What transpired at Paris did not take place in a vacuum but was shaped by
widespread and still-contested social and political ferment set in motion
by the war and the Bolshevik example.The Soviet regime’s calls for
international revolution aside, its immediate actions had already made it
an absolute pariah guilty of committing a host of crimes against the
capitalist order.

On November 8, 1917, the day after it took power, the Revolution issued a
“Decree on Land” that formally passed crown, church and private estates to
the peasantry and erased its debt.

A Lenin-authored “Peace Decree” that same day announced Russia’s intention
to withdraw from the war and appealed for an immediate armistice and
transparent peace negotiations “involving representatives of all peoples or
nations…involved in or compelled to take part in the war.” Significantly,
it called for peace without territorial annexations or reparations.

Days later, the Revolution began publishing a host of secret Entente
treaties signed by the Czarist and Provisional governments retrieved from
the Russian Foreign Office. Soon distributed abroad, those compacts for the
postwar division of territorial spoils exposed the Allies’ actual war aims
and discredited the various “defensive war” justifications of the alliance.

Included among them were a 1915 agreement between Paris, London and St.
Petersburg which established that upon victory, the Czarist Empire would
receive Constantinople, France would recover Alsace-Lorraine and London
could take control of Persia.

Revealed as well was that April’s “Treaty of London” signed by Russia,
Britain, France and then-neutral Italy, promising significant territorial
gains to the latter for joining the war against Austria-Hungary.

Other revelations included accords defining the future division of the
Ottoman Middle East. Among these was a copy of the Anglo-French
“Sykes–Picot Agreement,” the basis for postwar partitioning which, along
with double-dealing British promises to both Arab and Zionist leaders,
mapped the region’s coming century of conflict.

The trove also contained an August, 1916 promise for territorial
aggrandizement that brought Romania into the war; a July 1916
Russo-Japanese accord for the “mutual defense” of their holdings in China;
an Anglo-French-Belgian agreement divvying up Germany’s African holdings,
and much more.

Russia’s foreign debt, already the largest in the world in 1913, had more
than tripled during the war. The Bolsheviks suspended payments on it in
early January, 1918.

The next month, sending shock waves through the international capitalist
order, Petrograd repudiated billions of dollars of pre-existing and
war-incurred private and state-to-state debt primarily owed French, as well
as British, Italian and Japanese creditors and investors.[For Eric
Toussaint’s detailed discussion of Russia’s revolutionary debt repudiation,
see www.solidarity-us.org/atc/195/rr-tzarist-debt/ — ed.]

Entente indignation then became apoplexy with the Bolsheviks’ signing of a
formal “separate peace” with the Central Powers, the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918. While assuring the survival of the infant
Revolution at immense material and territorial cost, it enraged the Allies
as Russia’s exit allowed the German high command to shift major forces
westward for their massive push on Paris.

To the horror of ruling classes worldwide, word of Brest-Litovsk —
initially the negotiations and an accompanying months-long cease fire, and
then the actual agreement — galvanized increasing demands for peace among
the war-weary everywhere.
Peace and Specters of Revolution

Still swirling as the Peace Conference convened, the German Revolution that
began the previous November provided a key backdrop for the deliberations
at Paris. The smoke and rubble from Berlin’s premature communist-led
“Spartacist Uprising” of January 4-15, 1919 had barely cleared when the
attendees first convened days later.

The revolt was crushed with the approval of now-governing SPD reformists by
well-armed Frei Korps militias deployed by the military command, but news
of Berlin’s class war did not escape the dignitaries’ notice. Neither could
word of additional revolutionary insurgencies.

The short-lived Bavarian or “Munich Rate-republik” (soviet), soon defeated
by German reaction, was established in April 1919. The month prior, the
Hungarian Soviet Republic led by Bela Kun took power in Budapest, lasting
until the following August when it was overthrown by a French-backed
Romanian invasion. All this deeply intensified concerns at Paris.

Events in Italy, enveloped at the time in the social and political post-war
“Biennio Rosso” (Red Biennium, 1918-1920), added to the bourgeois
attendees’ unease as did a global spike of social unrest — in Britain,
Egypt and India for example.

Beginning well before the Armistice, in the summer of 1918 and continuing
during and after the Paris conference with its endless talk of “the right
to self-determination,” some fourteen countries (among them Britain,
France, the United States, Japan, Poland, Canada, Greece, Serbia and
Romania), all present at the peace conference, sent an estimated 180,000
troops to assist the counterrevolution against the Soviet Republic.

As part of the Armistice agreement, the Allies even allowed Germany,
overnight a counterrevolutionary ally, to keep its troops in those Russian
territories ceded at Brest-Litovsk in order to keep the Soviet government
from retaking them. (In the west, in contrast, disarmed German forces were
required to withdraw east of the Rhine.)

That attempt to strangle the Revolution would continue until the Red Army
proved victorious in late 1920. (A Japanese occupation army would remain in
eastern Siberia until 1922.)

Accompanied by mass famine, the civil war took more Russian lives than the
World War, an estimated 1.5 million combatants and eight million civilians.

Additional realities shaped the Paris deliberations as the end of the war
left no old government standing between the French border and the Sea of
Japan. (Hobsbawm, 29) Various conservative nationalist movements and
diverse democratic and revolutionary forces looked to fill the resulting
power vacuums.

“Self-determination” had come to hold different meaning for various
movements of nations and peoples, ethno-linguistic and confessional groups
and classes often pitted against each other. Demands for independence and
republican rule and statehood, hopes for some new order versus the
restoration of reconfigured ruling class power, and the question of
dictatorship versus popular democracy and the extension of franchise
reverberated globally.

Such evolving facts on the ground impacted upon the results at Paris.
Versailles Results and Consequences

The major terms of the Versailles Treaty were ultimately decided during
numerous closed deliberations among the “Big Three” — Britain, France and
the United States. (Initially, there had been a “Big Five” but a rebuffed
Japan withdrew and Italy sporadically played a junior role.)

Their agreements were then distributed as accomplished facts for the other
delegates’ ratification and for the signatures, under threat of resumed
hostilities, of Germany’s representatives. While the “Big Three” had
differing priorities regarding Germany and its co-belligerents, they were
joined in their determination to overthrow the Bolshevik regime or to at
least halt the revolution’s spread.

The Treaty’s final version included a “war guilt clause” that tagged
Germany, alone among the imperial powers, with responsibility for the
conflict.

Under threat of a resumption of open hostilities and the continuation of a
“starvation blockade” by the British navy, Germany’s representatives signed
the “Versailles Dictat” which burdened the nation with impossible
reparation payments, loss of territory east and west that left millions of
German speakers beyond newly imposed frontiers, French troops on its soil,
the drastic reduction of its military, and forfeiture of all its colonial
possessions.

In order to approach paying off the onerous reparations (approximately $442
billion in today’s money), the SPD-led Weimar Republic would soon take to
printing vast sums of fiat money to finance the purchase of exchangeable
hard currency. The result was a disastrous hyperinflation that prolonged
popular class hardship and compounded national resentments across the
ideological spectrum.

In brief, what British economist John Maynard Keynes, present at Paris,
labelled a doomed “Carthaginian peace” created new resentments and
grievances that fanned the smoldering coals of ultra-nationalism and
eventually, support for Nazism.

Allied Italy also came away from Paris a loser, denied the territories
promised it upon joining the Entente cause in 1915. As a result, the
perception that the country paid a heavy price in a meaningless war and had
come away with a “mutilated victory” (vittoria mutilata) became an
important element of ultra-nationalist grievance and fascist propaganda.

Other results included a cobbled-together Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia
comprised of diverse ethno-linguistic and confessional groups — a future
source of gnawing social and political conflict — an enlarged Romania, a
resurrected Poland, Baltic states and Finland, and a greatly diminished
Austria and Hungary.

The war’s outcome also energized nationalist demands and often conflicted
anti-colonial movements of subject peoples in India, Vietnam, Indonesia,
Iraq, the Philippines, China, all across the former Ottoman Empire, Africa,
Central Asia and elsewhere.

Imperial Japan, offering to join the Entente in exchange for German
territories in China and the Pacific, had entered the war in August 1914.
It proceeded to seize German holdings in China and the Pacific, and in 1917
made secret agreements with Britain, France and Italy that promised
annexation of those territories at war’s end. But as Japanese imperialism
sought to expand on the mainland, it came head up against British, and
especially U.S. strategic interests in the Asia/Pacific.

Long aware of the discriminatory treatment and racist exclusion of its
citizens in the U.S. and British “white dominions,” and determined to win
recognition as an equal among the imperial powers, Tokyo’s Paris
representatives not only laid claim to the former German possessions but
introduced a motion to include a “racial equality” provision in the
Covenant of the League of Nations, then under deliberation.

The proposed stipulation would have granted “…to all alien nationals of
states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect
making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race
or nationality.” That would have conceded the major powers’ recognition of
Japan as an equal. But Britain and especially the United States, with
Woodrow Wilson playing a key role, blocked its passage.

To placate Tokyo, Wilson then voiced support for Japan’s China and Pacific
territorial claims which, in turn, were included in the final peace treaty.
Nonetheless, the rejection of the racial equality clause subsequently
strengthened the hand of the nation’s ultra-nationalists and militarists
looking to grab even more of China.

Additionally, word of the Japan concessions set off widespread nationalist
and anti-imperialist demonstrations, beginning at Beijing on May 4, 1919.
What became the “May Fourth Movement” laid foundations for the coming of
Chinese communism and the nation’s 20th century history.

The Paris treaties designated compulsory postwar “exchanges of populations”
by states forced millions to move: 1.3 million Greeks repatriated to Greece
from Turkey while 400,000 Turks went eastward; 200,000 Bulgarians moved to
their “national home,” and upwards of two million Russian nationals
escaping the revolution found themselves homeless. (Hobsbawm, 50-51)

The mandated expulsions and displacement of ethnic and national minorities
occurred on such a scale that a new term, “stateless people” came into
being. “Genocide” would enter the vocabulary to describe that first modern
attempt to eliminate an entire population under cover of the war, the
Turkish annihilation of perhaps two million Armenians.
Imperialism’s New World Disorder

A major result of the war, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired numerous class
insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles worldwide as it simultaneously
induced reactionary responses among the defenders of the bourgeois order.

With the defeat of the postwar revolutionary upsurge in Europe, most
significantly in Germany but also in Italy, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere
in 1918-1920, that first audacious attempt to build a new society from the
ruins of the war was forced to go it alone, made to face the immense
obstacles inherited from the harsh legacies of uneven and combined
backwardness, made worse by the War’s devastation, civil war, encirclement
and economic blockade.

Relatedly, the unsuccessful Civil War attempt to overthrow the revolution
by force marked the turn by Britain, France and the United States toward
differing strategies of containment. Indeed, it was the Bolsheviks’
understanding and perceived necessity to internationalize the Revolution
and the imperial powers’ determined hostility and direct intervention
against it — long before the outcome of the Second World War — that marked
the true beginning of the Cold War. (Morrow, 305)

The United States came out of the war positioned to challenge Britain not
only as a center of the global capitalist order but as a leading
counterrevolutionary bulwark. Already looking toward an enhanced postwar
position, it had entered the conflict not as a formal member of the
Entente, but as an autonomous “Associated Power” not bound by pre-existing
Allied agreements and free to pursue its own strategic objectives.

On January 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson outlined his proposed terms for a
postwar peace process, his “Fourteen Points,” often lauded as the failed
initiative of an idealist liberal statesman hampered later by British and
French vindictive priorities at Versailles and by stateside Republican
opponents.

That Wilsonian vision called for the removal of all economic barriers,“free
trade,” while maintaining U.S. interventionist prerogatives; diplomatic
transparency, self-determination for Europe’s national minorities, and a
“League of Nations” to mediate international disputes.

This package can best be understood as a liberal counter to Lenin’s
November, 1917 “Peace Decree” and an attempt to frame a postwar environment
favorable to U.S. interests. Espousing the rhetoric of “self determination”
for national minorities and the equality of nations, Wilson at Versailles
in essence played various nationalist cards against the Bolsheviks’
class-based appeal.

The creation of a zone of small Eastern European nation-states, a
conservative “quarantine belt” against the “Bolshevik bacilli,” did become
a shared goal among the often contentious imperialist powers at Paris and
indeed a reality after 1920.

But while the major Allied powers agreed with the goal of overturning or
isolating the Soviet heresy, the British, and especially the French, in no
rush to resuscitate and reintegrate the historic rival and capitalist
dynamo at the heart of Europe, remained committed to exacting retribution
and blocking future German ambitions.

They remained leery, as well, of war-enhanced U.S. power wrapped in the
rhetoric of liberal Wilsonian internationalism.
Towards New Catastrophe

“Free of foreign entanglements,” the United States never ratified the
Versailles Treaty nor joined the League of Nations, but signed separate
peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary only in 1921. Not part of
the reparations regime, it continued to do business with Germany, and it
was American short-term loans and private capital investment that assisted
the Weimar’s economic recovery in the mid-1920s.

That returned economic stability allowed the country to meet reduced
reparations payments owed Britain and France, which then used the funds to
pay down their war debts to the United States — a circular system that
worked well until the crash of 1929. (Morrow, 293)

The ascent to superpower hegemony and “American Century” aspirations would
have to wait until after 1945. But under the rhetorical haze of “self
determination for oppressed peoples” and a “liberal internationalist” right
to intervene anywhere, U.S. policy became the determined opponent of
independent nationalist and anti-colonial efforts, and all movements even
remotely tainted by the communist virus, whether in reality or in the
imaginings of Washington and Wall Street.

The two interwar decades, largely due to the conflict’s outcomes, were
marred by incessant instability. They witnessed horrific civil wars, bitter
class conflict, the international capitalist crisis that was the Great
Depression, the Soviet turn toward the building of “socialism in one
country,” and fascism’s reactionary assault upon both socialism and liberal
democracy.

Years filled with crises, they witnessed the reemergence of imperialist
rivalry and aggression as competing powers, the First War’s emboldened
winners and aggrieved losers alike, readied and rehearsed for what amounted
to the next round of what has been called the “Second Thirty Years’ War” of
1914-45.

Among the contenders, were a revived expansionist Germany and Italy, and
the United States and Japan. The latter had both come out of the First War
already situated to challenge Britain, which would never be the same
afterwards, for leadership of the capitalist order. The past became prelude.
Selected Readings

The historiography on the World War and its aftermath is massive, of
course. Below are several titles, older and more recent, that contain
valuable insights.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes — A History of the World, 1914-1991
(Pantheon/Random, 1995)

Gabriel Kolko, Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914
(New Press, 1994)

Mark Mazower, The Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
(Random/Vintage 1998/2000)

Arno Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peace­making — Containment and
Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (Knopf, 1967)

John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War — An Imperial History (Routledge, 2004)

Adam Tooze, The Deluge — The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the
Global Order, 1916-1931 (Penguin, 2014)

Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood —The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (Verso,
2016)

November-December 2018, ATC 197
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