A Patriot's History of the Modern World (39 page)

As the historian of Third Reich economics Adam Tooze explained, there were alternatives to the nationalist/anti-Semitic Hitlerian view, but the competing Stresemann/Schacht model ran aground on the Young Plan. When the United States discovered Germany lacked the gold reserves to comply with the Dawes Plan, Owen Young introduced new measures to reduce German reparations further. As a corollary, however, the United States demanded further German austerity measures, which provoked dissatisfaction among Germans affected negatively by those policies. Insisting that their economy required restoration of industrial areas given away at Versailles, German leaders sought to attach territorial revisions to reparations payments, hoping they could regain some of their lost land after a certain amount of payments were made. German demands antagonized many active and potential American supporters and contributed to the collapse of talk about a German-American alliance. America complicated matters with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the single largest tax increase in American history, which imposed slightly to extremely higher accelerated tariffs on virtually all imported goods (some industrial raw materials saw their tariff rates leap by almost 30 percent). The effect on Germany (and all European nations) was to throttle trade at the very moment it needed to export more to acquire gold to make the reparations payments American politicians required. At the same time, increasingly interventionist fiscal policies the Allies pressed on Germany sought to restrict German spending. In the short term, Chancellor Stresemann's successor, nationalist Heinrich Brüning, responded by deflating the currency, sparking a wave of bankruptcies that nearly took down Weimar's premier steel firm, Krupp-Thyssen. All these contradictory and destructive policies coincided with the American stock market crash (which some claimed was brought on by
the pending Smoot-Hawley Tariff) and subsequent depression that destroyed the international order upon which the postwar structure was built.
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What aligned the sunlight of liberty behind the dark moon of totalitarianism was, simply, money. The Great Depression, already under way in Europe, simultaneously sounded the death knell of “corporate welfare” in American industry, destroyed the welfare state security of interwar Europe, and gave the final impetus to the eugenicists' demands for the sterilization of the unfit and unproductive.

“Abstract Lumps”

Reparations comprised only one dysfunction of the postwar era. Another came in the arbitrary and sizable population shifts forced by the Versailles Treaty. Versailles's formation of a half dozen new countries combined with the propensity of the Great War's winners to impose on their new creations expectations that they themselves had never met only added to the sense of collapse that ended the twenties. In the wake of Versailles, Europeans drafted a bevy of grandiose-sounding treaties and issued statements of rights that “took international law into uncharted waters.”
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Again, these largely resulted from an imprecise and inaccurate understanding of the principles employed by the diplomats at Versailles, and some of this could be laid at Wilson's feet. Robert Lansing had written of Wilson's “self-determination of peoples” speech in 1916 that the president was “a phrase-maker par excellence.” He “admires trite sayings and revels in formulating them…[but] he apparently never thought out in advance where they would lead or how they would be interpreted by others.”
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Later, Lansing had recorded in his diary: “The phrase [national self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized…. What misery it will cause! Think of [Woodrow Wilson's] feelings…when he counts the dead who died because he coined a phrase.”
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Fellow Progressive Walter Lippmann, in 1915, had observed a complete lack of understanding of these matters in Wilson and his advisers: “We are feeding on maps, talking of populations as if they were abstract lumps…. When you consider what a mystery the East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in something like its true proportions.”
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These warnings went unheeded at Versailles, and now, as the twenties unfolded, the structures of government in the newly created states and the international
system that had emerged began to crumble under the weight of ethnic hatreds, economic malaise, and ongoing European power grabs.

For example, Versailles set up an international system that “prized the homogeneity of populations under the state…rather than the acceptance of multi-ethnicity as the preeminent form of society under dynastic rule”
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(this was somewhat at odds with America's later mantra on the benefits of “diversity”). Czechoslovakia, for example, contained a large population of ethnic Germans, as did Poland. But other people born in newly created Poland or Hungary were moved to their “rightful” nations. In short, the Versailles Treaty
demanded
forced deportations and massive mandatory relocations of populations to comply with the map drawing that established the new states. This fact was missed by many observers, who thought the intention was always to integrate and assimilate minorities. A Brazilian delegate to Geneva in 1925, for example, insisted that the goal of the League's treaties was to end a situation where minorities saw themselves as “constantly alien” and to bring them into “complete national unity.”
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Of course, already the French were finding this untenable, deporting thousands of Algerian workers as “unassimilable” in 1919, and Portugal had concluded that large parts of its colonial population could never be made Portuguese. Yet even as the League of Nations and the Hilton Young Commission wrestled with the question of whether Africans and other colonial territories could ever adopt representative government in 1929, the League's own mandate system established at Versailles gave France and Britain governance authority over large parts of the Middle East and Africa. Even more stunning, the League's wizards required former German colonies to arrange their affairs along democratic principles. Intuitively, the idealistic magi of postwar Europe anticipated the very problems that France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands would experience with Muslim immigrants in the 1990s, but assumed that assimilation was not possible.

Until 1815, treaties contained protection for minorities, but the idea that religious or ethnic subgroups could serve as a central organizational force of any government was new. For example, no one thought in terms of a “Sunni state” or a “Bantu nation.” Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire acknowledged that it was itself a marriage of expedience between two substantially different peoples. Especially after the nations evolved into their more bureaucratic, centralized form in the late nineteenth century, less attention than ever was paid to the concerns of religious or ethnic groups within the larger state. Likewise none of the European leadership ever expected
religious minorities to convert to the more dominant religion, and more important, that they would ever govern. With the London Protocol of 1830, new definitions of nationality were employed in which the Greek state became the representative of the Greek people; and both the Berlin Congress of 1878 and the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85 continued this new application of definitions by permitting minorities to be “protected, deported, or civilized,” depending on the situation.
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Likewise, under the Berlin treaty, East Europeans were to be civilized; Armenians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire would both be deported (although many were killed); and generally populations were either to be removed or protected. In Muslim states under Sharia law, non-Muslims became
dhimmis
or protected minorities, but in actuality they became fourth-class citizens with few rights. Regardless of the situation, ethnic and religious groups first had to be “defined and labeled as either minorities or majorities.”
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Wilson's Commission of Inquiry of 1917 employed the language of minorities and majorities, insisting on the need to protect “minorities or weak [that is, colonized] peoples” and covered a diverse geographical area that included Anatolia, the Balkans, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Russia.
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Five years later, under the Rapallo Treaty (1922), half a million Slavs were stuck inside what was now Italy, but more often, rather than borders changing, entire groups of people were moved under the new terms of “population exchange” and “population unmixing” then in vogue. (The term “ethnic cleansing” would come much later.) Finally, in what was perhaps the last World War I treaty, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 put flesh on the theories by fixing the boundaries of Turkey after a population swap of a million Greek Christians from Anatolia to Greece and 350,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. One student of the treaties concluded, “the Lausanne exchange was no violation; it was an intrinsic element of the principles enumerated at Paris.”
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To protect people, the state had to remove them, and so much the better if they were moved to the state of their natural ethnicity—regardless of where they had lived their entire lives. Thus Sudeten Germans were to be uprooted, Poles living in Germany shipped to the newly created nation of Poland, Magyars forced out of Austria, and so on.

Ultimately the Jews would suffer the worst from this reshuffling because they had no clearly defined place of residence. But they were not the only minority to exist amid other nationalities in the postwar era. No group paid a higher price for its minority status in the short run than did the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. Rakish, with a resemblance to Errol
Flynn, the Ottoman leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) embodied the “good” Muslim from the European point of view (or, what in the twenty-first century would be called a “moderate” Muslim). The future Turkish leader had organized the resistance against the Allied occupying forces in 1919, led calls for a Turkish parliament in 1920, then ascended to the presidency of Turkey in 1923 as that state became the world's first Islamic republic. He sought a complete Western-style makeover. Suits replaced robes, secularism replaced clerical rule, Ankara replaced Constantinople as the capital. When it came to the Armenians, however, Atatürk looked much like his predecessors. He brooked little political resistance, and certainly did not tolerate the vibrant Christian Armenian community. This minority, comprising Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, had survived the Romans, Greeks, and Persians, and even maintained its Christian identity under Muslim rule. But its existence under the Muslim
dhimmi
system was oppressive in the extreme. As a British visitor reported in the 1890s:

In 1909, Armenians were wrongly implicated in a countercoup led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II against the “Young Turks,” where Abdul Hamid allied himself against the secularist Young Turks and with the Islamicist factions. In part, he mobilized support by claiming the Armenians had backed the secular government. Troops called into the Adana province to keep order instead went on a rampage against Armenians. After the war, Atatürk focused his attention on eliminating the Armenians, undertaking a systematic slaughter within eyesight of Western naval forces in Constantinople's harbor.
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Britain and France were outraged at the six thousand Belgians who died under German occupation during the war, but 1.5 million Armenians who were exterminated by massacre, starvation, or exhaustion by the Turks failed to raise an eyebrow.

Scholars remain divided about whether the Turkish government had a systematic program to exterminate Armenians, and debate continues about whether the slaughters constituted “genocide.”
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But the fate of the Armenians again displayed the unwillingness of Europeans to enforce Versailles's ideals of national self-determination and the near-impossibility of doing so if they tried. Combined with the Wilsonians' redrawing of national boundary lines, European nations were condemned to house large numbers of nonnatives: Romania had a minority population of 18 percent, Serbia, 16 percent, and Greece, 10 percent. Eastern Germany was home to three million Poles and hundreds of thousands of other non-Germans. Their fates rested in the same hands that created the very definitions of national identity endangering them—hands that would soon wash themselves clean of any responsibility.

Worse, during the war many of the minorities were viewed as traitors or security risks because governments were unsure if their loyalty was to their nation of residence or to their place of ethnic origin. Once World War I ended, they were easy targets during periods of economic hardship. At a time in the Third Republic when France was perhaps the most open to immigrants and foreigners, the columns of Charles Maurras, in the newspaper
Action Française,
crafted a French version of nationalism that blamed “aliens” for the nation's economic troubles when French jobs went to immigrants. Some states, such as Romania, dealt with minorities by elevating the power of the state above all. The government, noted the Romanian minister of education, must “mold the souls of all its citizens.”
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Even the Church's knee had to bow to the state, as community increasingly came to be defined as
national
, even as national came to be defined as ethnically “French,” “German,” or another designated majority.