After Tamerlane (61 page)

In fact the post-war world that took shape in the 1920s was divided from the start into four geopolitical zones. The largest of these was certainly the League zone. It formed a loose international confederation under the fractious leadership of Britain and France. Most of its members were European or Latin American. It included China and also Japan (until 1933). At first, neither Russia nor Germany was invited to join: both later became members, though not at the same time (Germany left in 1933; Russia joined in 1934). The United States rejected membership. Outside Europe, the sphere of the League was practically coextensive with the imperial systems of Britain and France and of lesser colonial powers like the Netherlands and Portugal. The Latin Americans remained semi-detached. The League's ability to deter aggression and uphold the post-war settlement depended heavily on the naval and military power of its two great principals. But they in turn needed stability in Europe – chiefly the promise of Franco-German friendship – to be free to act. The Treaty of Locarno of 1925, in which France and Germany gave mutual pledges to respect the border between them, seemed to mark a new age in which Europe's affairs would be managed amicably by its four great powers: Britain, France, Germany and Italy. A League that enjoyed their collective support would indeed have been a real power in the world, enabling the tacit revival of much of Europe's pre-war primacy. But in less than ten years the four were in bitter dispute, and the League zone itself had become a scene of upheaval. The League's failure to prevent Italy's conquest of Abyssinia, itself a League member, was the indirect consequence of Anglo-French fears about Germany. It marked the brutal collapse of the last Europe-centred experiment in maintaining global order.

American refusal to join the League was at first sight baffling, since the League seemed to embody so much of the vision of Woodrow Wilson, its most powerful proponent. The United States had also become a far greater international power since 1914. It had built, or was building, a much larger navy – at least as big as Britain's. The scale of its overseas economic interests had been vastly extended. In 1914, America's investments abroad stood at $4, 820million (about £1, 000million), slightly less than its overseas borrowings – around $5 billion. By 1919, in a huge reversal, the positive balance was
more than $ 10 billion. Ten years later America had lent abroad the enormous figure of $ 35 billion, to overtake Britain as the world's largest creditor.
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Much of this sum was invested in Europe. The United States played (as we have seen already) a crucial part in the East Asian settlement of 1921–2. To WoodrowWilson's followers, it was glaringly obvious that American power should be used through the League to create a newglobal order. The progressive demolition of the European empires, universal free trade and the ‘open door' to commerce, and a ban on alliance systems that could threaten American interests were the prizes they sought. But they were defeated by the fear that being part of the League would hamper American freedom or exploit American strength. The League would mean guaranteeing the British Empire, claimed Senator Borah: it was ‘the greatest triumph of English diplomacy'. The Covenant would turn every future war into a world war said Senator Knox: ‘We are thus thrust fully into the terrible cauldron of European politics.' America's fleets and armies could be ordered to war by other nations, warned Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson's fiercest critic.
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Ironically, League membership was opposed by those (like Cabot Lodge) who wanted America to assert herself in the world, as well as by those (like Borah) who thought foreign entanglements a threat to democracy. For the ‘great power' school the League was a shackle that would prevent America from using its real power, and bind it into a Europe-led system dominated by Britain. America's influence could be better applied from outside the League. If economic muscle had replaced territorial control as the test of world power, as many experts nowclaimed,
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bankers in Wall Street, not diplomats at Geneva, would be the real engineers of America's future pre-eminence. Hence rejecting the League did not mean American withdrawal into isolation. American business was extremely active in Europe, in South America, and even in Asia. American culture, purveyed by Hollywood, spread even more widely.
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American leaders promoted the idea of universal peace, and favoured cooperation with Britain against an arms race at sea. But American thinking was at heart unilateralist. It expected America to supersede the existing world order, not help to maintain it. It refused to see America as one of a group of great powers, on terms of equality. It reflected the suspicion of Middle
America that foreign commitments were risky, and foreign countries malign. Hence America dealt with the League as with a rival, sometimes friendly, power. At the first sign of danger it rebuilt the commercial walls of protection, with the Fordney–McCumber Tariff of 1922. In the Manchurian crisis of 1931–2 (see below, p. 407), Washington's instinct was against collective action.
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Hence the inter-war years were not the prelude to an ‘American century', but an age of impasse. American leaders were dissatisfied with the world as it was, and became very much more so when depression set in during the 1930s. But they had no practical idea howit could be remade, and could scarcely imagine any possible terms on which they might cooperate with another great power – not even with Britain.
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Much the same might be said of the ruling power in the third great zone. By 1922–3 the Bolshevik government had recovered control of the vast tsarist domain in Inner Eurasia except for the provinces lost to Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. As we have seen, the new ‘Soviet Union' kept real control of all external relations firmly in Moscow's grip. Moscow was committed to promoting ‘world revolution' in partnership with the Communist International organization (or Comintern), theoretically autonomous, but in reality an agency of the Soviet government. In the 1920s this effort was concentrated for good strategic reasons in China. At the same time, there was an opening to the West for the sake of economic recovery. Under Stalin's rule, the first five-year plan for swift industrialization (1928–32) meant a heavy reliance on imported machinery, and swelled foreign debts to their pre-war level. But there was no question at all of any real rapprochement between the Soviet world and the world of the League. The Soviet leadership regarded the great League states as ideological enemies, doomed to extinction sooner or later. In the meantime they posed a potentially deadly threat to the great socialist experiment. Stalin's five-year plan was not intended to enlarge the Soviet share of international trade: quite the reverse. Its double aim was to create the proletarian class as the foundation on which the Soviet party state would be built, and to supply the industrial means to defend the revolution. Indeed, after 1932 Russia retreated into an extreme form of autarky: foreign trade shrank to one-fifth of its value in 1913.
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Stalin's foreign policy was defensive in outlook to the point of paranoia. His paramount aim was to secure the huge Soviet zone. The Russian tsars did many bad things, he told a private dinner in 1937, ‘But there's one good thing they did; they created an immense state from here to Kamchatka. We've been bequeathed this state. And for the first time we, the Bolsheviks, have rendered this state cohesive and reinforced it as a unitary and indivisible state.'
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Yet its cohesion, as Stalin knew, could not be taken for granted. He was anxious to seal the Soviet Union's frontiers: after 1930, border populations with uncertain sympathies were brusquely relocated.
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He feared an attack from the east by Japan, whom he sought to appease (by selling Russia's railway rights in Manchuria) while rebuilding his military and naval presence.
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But he feared even more an attack from the west, where the loss of Poland and the Baltic provinces had drastically weakened Russia's strategic position, not least in relation to the doubtfully loyal Ukraine. Hence Soviet policy was above all to keep on good terms with Germany. Economic and (discreet) military cooperation had been close in the 1920s. Hitler's rise to power forced a reappraisal: Stalin entered the League (1934) and made a pact with France. His preference, however, was to guard Soviet safety by avoiding a break with the Nazi state. There was no serious intent to align with the League, whose motives he mistrusted. In Europe (by covert intervention in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9) and in East Asia (by military help to the Kuomintang) Stalin played a lone hand.

The fourth zone was East Asia. Its post-war settlement was a tripartite arrangement between Britain, Japan and the United States. But it quickly became obvious that its fate was to be a contested sphere where neither the League nor any great power would have decisive authority. By the mid-1920s the British (who had the largest foreign stake in East Asia) were on the defensive, fearful that an insurgent nationalism would bundle them out of their treaty-port enclaves and make even Hong Kong a heavy liability. They sent a force to Shanghai in 1927, but were anxious to parley with the Kuomintang. The United States, with much less at stake (in 1931, American investment in China was only 6 per cent of the foreign total, far behind Britain with 37 per cent, Japan with 35 per cent, and even Russia with 8.4 per cent),
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preferred to rely upon good relations with the Kuomintang
regime, some of whose leading figures had strong American links. The Americans were keen to draw the Kuomintang away from its Russian connections. The same antipathy to Soviet influence made them reluctant to antagonize Japan, the Soviet Union's main enemy in North East Asia. When Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, the United States expressed strong disapproval, but drewback from active opposition, hoping that the politicians in Tokyo would restrain the army.
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The cooling of Anglo-American relations after 1931 – the result in part of economic friction – removed the main guarantee that the ‘Washington system' would be upheld in East Asia.

After 1931, what mattered most was the triangular rivalry of the Kuomintang government, nowbased in Nanking, the Soviet Union, anxiously reinforcing its colonial presence, and imperial Japan. The Nanking government had emerged victorious from the civil wars of 1928–31 that combined with famine to cost the lives of 6 million people.
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But it fell short of enjoying a monopoly of force (the acid test of effective rule) across China proper. It was powerless to prevent the savage Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, when Chinese anger at the occupation of Manchuria spilled over into violence against local Japanese interests. Under Chiang Kai-shek, in 1928 the Kuomintang leadership had broken decisively with the Communist elements of the party and had driven them out. But although the Kuomintang onslaught on the Kiangsi/Jiangxi ‘soviet' forced Mao and his followers into an epic withdrawal, the ‘Long March' to safe havens in north-west China in 1934–5, the Communists survived to fight another day under Soviet patronage. Soviet action in East Asia was designed to shore up Moscow's influence, prevent the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party, and check Japan's incursions into Inner Asia and its domination of China. But it was hampered by military and logistical weakness, Kuomintang animosity, and (as we have seen) fear of provoking a war on two fronts.

The initiative in East Asia was held by Japan. Japan's strength was disparaged by the Western powers in the 1920s: ‘a weak rather than a strong Power' said the British ambassador in 1924.
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In fact the Washington treaties, which forbade new fortifications in the western Pacific (including the British base at Hong Kong), had made Japan less vulnerable to a naval attack than before 1914. Tokyo's policy
was to avoid confrontation with the British and Americans, but to consolidate its grip in Manchuria by a virtual protectorate over its warlord ruler.
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Manchuria was the centrepiece of Japanese thinking. It obsessed the army, whose reputation had been made there. It was the great bastion against Russia's regional comeback. Its economic importance as a vast frontier region was taken for granted. After 1928, however, Japan's informal predominance came under growing pressure from a more assertive China. There was more and more friction with the South Manchurian Railway – Japan's commercial octopus – and with the Kwantung army that guarded the ‘railway zone'. When the Kwantung army staged a violent incident and then occupied Mukden, the Manchurian capital, in September 1931, Tokyo gave its reluctant assent. The severity of depression and the united opposition of army and navy to the disarmament clauses that Japan had accepted at the London Naval Conference of 1930 had created a newpolitical mood.
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Japan left the League of Nations (in 1933), repudiated the Washington treaties by creating the puppet state of Manchukuo, and was drawn deeper and deeper into northern China. As the Kuomintang government prepared for the struggle,
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the real uncertainties were when war would break out, who else would take part, how it would end, and what effects it would have on a fractured world order.

The failure to build a post-war system through which the most powerful countries could settle their differences and build coalitions against rule-breaking states might have been mitigated by economic good feeling. In the mid-1920s it looked as if the great commercial recovery would do this, and more. A dynamic world economy would draw America towards Europe, encourage liberalism in Germany, disarm Japanese fears, and keep the door ajar between the West and Russia. The fierce contraction of trade that had set in by 1930 had the reverse effect. Much the hardest hit were those who relied upon primary products as their main source of income: as their incomes collapsed, so did their buying. As markets slumped and prices fell (many by as much as 50 per cent), the main commercial states rushed to protect their stake. American tariffs, already high, rose by a quarter in 1930. To protect the value of sterling, the British abandoned free trade – for
the time being at least – and built a tariff wall around their empire.
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Soviet Russia all but withdrew from world trade altogether. The most obvious victims of this unfree trade (apart from the impoverished producers of rawmaterials and foods) were the industrial economies of Japan and Germany. German recovery after 1933 was based around production for internal demand, and strict exchange control to minimize imports. It also depended upon barter arrangements with Germany's South East European neighbours: by the mid-1930s, privileged access to rawmaterials in Eastern Europe – a de facto zone of German commercial control – had become an important part of the Nazi plan to retrieve Germany's status as a great world power.
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In the Japanese case, the dilemma was even more acute. Japan had to import its raw materials and fuel (rawcotton from India and oil from America). It paid for them by exports, especially of textiles – exporting three times as much of its national output as did the United States.
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Japan's main advantages were the low wages of labour, the remarkable efficiency of its large commercial firms, and the huge productivity gains made in cloth production.
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These all helped Japan to achieve industrial growth in the 1930s when other industrial states were in serious difficulty. But it remained acutely exposed to the threat of trade barriers (like those that seemed likely in 1933–4 to close off its second-largest market, in India), price falls (like that for rawsilk in the United States), boycotts (a recurrent menace in China) and the sudden dislocation of its whole economy – with terrifying consequences for social and political order. Fierce devaluation (by nearly 50 per cent), controls over imports, an aggressive diplomacy to win export quotas in overseas markets, and the attempt to build up a ‘yen bloc' in East Asia were Tokyo's answer. It was symptomatic of a newglobal order. The politicization of trade, the growing belief that international trade was bound to decline further in relation to output, and the urgency of securing a political grip on key markets and supplies were the hallmarks of an age which had seen the ‘globalization' of the late nineteenth century go into sharp reverse.
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