Post on 15-Feb-2021
transcript
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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.
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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.
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HISTORY DEPARTMENT HISTORY DEPARTMENT
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Interwar Europe
• NATO, 1949
HISTORY DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
Interwar Europe
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Interwar Europe
• General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947)• World Trade Organization (1995)
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Interwar Europe
• Cold War/Military/Warfare Keynesianism
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Interwar Europe
• Multilateralism– Bretton Woods/World Bank/IMF– European Union– NATO– GATT/WTO– Climate Change Accords
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HISTORY DEPARTMENT