A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (12 page)

By this point in 1927, Stresemann had succeeded in exerting some control over Reichswehr activities. Military officials were requesting his consent. They were not pursuing a wholly independent policy. Yet Stresemann did not use his position to check Reichswehr rearmament. He exerted influence over the program simply because he understood that knowledge is power and ignorance can cause a politician’s demise. The Foreign Minister wanted to ensure that he was kept in the know about Reichswehr programs. He does not appear to have had any interest in obstructing them.

Stresemann’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent historians, could have looked to the great statesman’s behavior at a critical pattern break. If Stresemann had truly been opposed to the Reichswehr’s secret program, Scheidemann’s speech represented the ideal moment to end it. The Foreign Minister could have insisted that the risks to Germany’s image abroad were simply too great. He could then have sought to placate the Reichswehr and industrial concerns by other means. Stresemann’s German People’s Party drew much of its support from German industry, and if anyone knew how to curry favor with industrialists, it was Stresemann. He might have used his considerable influence to persuade the industrialists who were profiting from rearmament that their interests would be better served by looking West. He could have appeased the industrialists with promises to seek more favorable trade agreements. He could have pointed out that the scale of American loans dwarfed the financial benefits flowing from covert rearmament. The industrialists would never have wanted those to be placed in jeopardy. He could easily have argued that the financial benefits from rearmament could not possibly outweigh the risk of further revelations similar to Scheidemann’s. Given Stresemann’s close working relationship with Chamberlain and Briand, he could also have quietly urged his counterparts to raise a ruckus against the Reichswehr’s activities, if he had really wished to dissuade the military from proceeding. Instead, he did none of these things. He accurately sensed that Britain and France were unlikely to object and that the Soviets were desperate to preserve the arrangement. Once his assessments proved correct, he supported the program’s continuation.
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Diplomats must often lie for their country, and Stresemann was no different in that respect. After Scheidemann’s revelations, Stresemann denied knowledge of the rearmament program. He continued to deny it thereafter. The fact that he did this so skillfully shows his effectiveness as a diplomat. In a speech before the Reichstag in February 1928, he went so far as to proclaim that “. . . no state has contributed more or even as much to the solution of the security question as Germany.” He categorically announced, “Germany is disarmed.”
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This statement was not entirely truthful. Although the IMCC had succeeded in destroying considerable quantities of munitions, German violations were many, and Stresemann was well aware of them.

Like most clever politicians, Stresemann said many different things to different audiences. One can find evidence to support claims of his aggressive intentions and counterevidence in defense of his pacific ways. Speaking about the far-off future, he once remarked to the State President of Wurtemburg, in response to the State President’s assertion that there could be no peaceful solution to Germany’s situation:

I fervently hope that if it comes to that—and I believe that in the final analysis these great questions will always be decided by the sword—the moment may be put off as long as possible. I can only foresee the downfall of our people so long as we do not have the sword—that much is certain. If we look forward to a time when the German people will again be strong enough to play a more significant role, then we must first give the German people the necessary foundation . . . To Create this foundation is the most urgent challenge facing us.
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If Stresemann had one underlying driver, it was to restore German greatness by any reasonable means. It was his responsibility to the nation to keep rearmament moving forward so that Germany’s sword would one day be ready. However, being a consummate diplomat, he recognized that the implicit threat of force, not its actual use, can often be sufficient to achieve one’s ends. To that end, cooperation with the Western powers and the Soviet Union made perfect sense.
Schaukelpolitik
, the policy of balancing between East and West, held that Germany could extract the most concessions from each side by preserving ties to both. The riskiness of this strategy was that it required a sensitive estimation of how far Germany could go. Stresemann witnessed Moscow’s transformation from arming German revolutionaries to arming the Reichswehr. That break in Moscow’s pattern of behavior helped him to sense just how much the Soviets needed German cooperation. This in turn enabled him to gauge how much German closeness to the West that the Soviets could accept. Conversely, by accurately assessing the constraints on British and French statesmen, Stresemann gained a sense of how much military cooperation with Russia the West could tolerate. One measure of Stresemann’s strategic empathy is that he never pushed either relationship beyond a point that the other side could bear.

Of Many Minds

There is yet another way of thinking about how Stresemann thought. His behavior at the pattern break moment strongly suggests an underlying driver: the desire to restore German greatness. But we do not need to conclude from this that the Foreign Minister possessed a definite long-term plan, one that he assiduously and consistently pursued. He could easily have held to a consistent desire for German great power status while varying his behavior over time. In other words, his specific actions at any given moment need not have been consistent with aggressive rearmament or peaceful conciliation. He might easily have been of many minds.

The evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban not only argues that most of us are awash in conflicting beliefs, but insists that it does not even make sense to say that a person holds consistent beliefs at all. At least when it comes to preferences, psychologists have argued that we do not hold fixed preferences, as rational choice advocates have long maintained. In just one of many studies, for example, people were asked to choose between receiving six dollars or a fancy pen. Roughly one-third of the subjects chose the pen. But when the choice was presented between receiving six dollars, a fancy pen, and a clearly inferior pen, the number of people who chose the fancy pen rose to nearly 50 percent. Other studies have shown how people reverse their preferences when the context changes. The evidence has been mounting that preferences are context-dependent.

In Kurzban’s view, and that of other evolutionary psychologists, the mind evolved bit by bit and not toward a state of rational perfection. Whereas psychologists such as Daniel Kahnemann see the mind as divided into two systems—one fast and emotional, the other slow and calculating—Kurzban asserts that our minds are constructed of many modules, each performing different functions. Those modules can be thought of as subroutines in a computer program. Sometimes they work in concert, but often they clash. This is why people sometimes hold contradictory beliefs. Different modules in the brain are engaged at different moments. This does not mean, of course, that we never believe anything or that we cannot maintain certain beliefs over a long period. It means instead that context can shape our desires, and it can activate a variety of conflicting beliefs. Kurzban puts it this way:

If the context one’s in, or the state one’s in, turns certain modules on, then the preferences in those modules will drive one’s performance. In a different context, the very same options will be evaluated by different modules, leading to the possibility of a different choice being made.
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These findings can offer us an alternative way of understanding Stresemann’s seemingly inconsistent behavior. Surely the choice between six dollars and a pen cannot be analogous to a statesman’s choices between passivity and aggression. This is true enough, but the massive body of research on rational decision-making, heuristics, and biases illustrates that, at least on small-scale decisions, we are frequently inconsistent and affected by context.
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Indeed, on larger-scale matters, there is also evidence that we compartmentalize our views. We need only consider the many professional scientists who hold deeply religious beliefs to realize that sophisticated thinkers often adhere to seemingly contradictory ideas. Seen in this light, the debate about Stresemann (and by extension the debates over the motives of other complex historical figures) has been too narrow.

Historians who depict the Foreign Minister as ceaselessly bent on a forcible revision of Versailles force him into an unnatural box. Such interpretations take a static and far too consistently rational view of individuals. These historians point to Stresemann’s ferocious support for unrestricted submarine warfare against the West during World War I, followed by his ongoing attempts to evade disarmament, and above all the aggressive aims outlined in his letter to the Crown Prince. In these acts, and many more, they see a man whose aims were unaltered throughout the course of his political life. By imposing upon him a long-term, single-minded consistency, they rob Stresemann of any true complexity.

The revisionists, however, who portray Stresemann’s views as having either transformed or evolved toward greater cooperation with the West appear overly optimistic about his unwavering commitment to peace. His support of rearmament during the Scheidemann affair, and indeed his failure to oppose it at such an opportune moment, suggests at the very least that he desired greater military might, not merely that he wished to placate the Reichswehr and industrialists. Stresemann lent his
support to rearmament knowing that the Reichswehr leadership sought military strength in order to use it. Whether he would have subsequently supported forceful territorial annexations can never be proved. His decisions would have depended on the future context. But the notion that he was compelled to follow the Reichswehr’s lead on rearmament is not substantiated by his behavior.

More than merely keeping his options open, he may have genuinely held both intentions at different times and sometimes simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine that at various points, such as when writing to the Crown Prince or when supporting covert rearmament, he longed for German greatness and even the satisfaction that comes from military conquest, especially the kind motivated by revenge and the desire to take back what was once in German hands. Yet at other times, at other moments, he may have felt it not only necessary but virtuous to construct the foundations for a stable peace with his former enemies. It is entirely possible to hold multiple and conflicting desires over time. Stresemann’s behavior need only remain an unsolved riddle if we insist on perceiving him as
either
a peacemaker
or
an aggressive nationalist. A view that accounts for the contradictory evidence would see him as a man caught amidst a stream of conflicting desires. This view would not diminish his political acumen or strategic savvy. On the contrary, it would be commensurate with the sophisticated thinker and passionate German that he was.

Stresemann’s conflicting behavior aside, his behavior at the pattern break indicates his genuine support for rearmament. His overall pattern of behavior, along with his actions at the pattern break, suggests an underlying desire to resurrect German greatness by any plausible means, namely skillful diplomacy combined with military restoration.

Conclusion

From the time that Stresemann assumed the Chancellorship in 1923 to his death in 1929, Germany transitioned from a country wracked by revolution, hyperinflation, and foreign occupation to a nation of growing economic strength and international power. These extraordinary achievements resulted in no small part from Stresemann’s strategic empathy, enabling his clever playing of the Russian card. Domestically,
cooperation with Moscow placated the Reichswehr, satisfied the industrialists who profited from the arrangement, and further secured Stresemann’s own position within the government, lending the Weimar Republic an invaluable degree of stability amidst frequently shifting governing coalitions. Internationally, the ongoing Soviet ties helped to wrest concessions from Britain and France and facilitate Germany’s entry into Western security arrangements from Locarno to the League. The ties, mainly the secret military cooperation, also helped the German government to maintain close communication with Moscow, providing a useful channel for Stresemann to voice objections to communist agitation. Despite the frequent tensions over Soviet meddling in German affairs, when a major pattern break occurred—Scheidemann’s revelations—Stresemann could recognize how much the Soviets valued their two nations’ military engagement.

Stresemann’s sense of precisely how far he could push rearmament proved astute. Against the wishes of his deputy, Schubert, who argued for terminating the arrangement, Stresemann correctly assessed both the drivers and constraints on his opponents. He saw that the Soviets had changed since their failed attempt to spark a German revolution in 1923. By 1926, the Soviet pattern of putting ideology first in foreign affairs had reversed. By the close of 1926, at least with respect to Germany, matters of national interest took precedence. The Kremlin was more concerned with avoiding international isolation and modernizing its military. Cooperation with Germany offered the best means of accomplishing both those ends. By May 1927, it was even more apparent that the Soviets wanted that relationship to persist, especially as Soviet efforts to forge agreements with Poland and France had not produced benefits comparable to cooperation with the Reichswehr.