Failed Imagination? -second edition

The Anglo-American new world order from Wilson to Bush

Andrew Williams

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847794895
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The main aim of this book is to explain how mainly American, but also British, policy makers have planned and largely managed to create an international order in their own image, the 'New World Order'.

1
The imagining of the Versailles NWO, 1914–19

Introduction

The First World War has arguably had the longest lasting and deepest effect of all the events of the twentieth century. It started by giving a brief burst of excitement, one even near hysterical acclaim, to millions of people who had come to believe that the world needed a ‘good war’ to sort out the ills of civilisation. In the enthusiasm, the crowd came into its own for the first time in a distinctly twentieth century form, as Nietzsche, among others, had predicted it might, to find its identity in a new sense of community, the community of those about to die.¹ It ended with many others than Oswald Spengler feeling that Western civilisation had stared into an abyss into which it might now be toppling. ‘Faustian Man’ had made his compact with the ‘Machine’ and was now ‘the slave of his creation’.² It was the end of an era, that of the liberal elites and the beginning of that of the ‘masses’, as was realised by Sir Edward Grey in his statement of August 1914: ‘the lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. The First World War was thus ‘[a] hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for more than a century’.³

At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 the leaders of the West (the ‘Big Four’) – Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Orlando – had to try and resurrect the phoenix of peace and prosperity from the ashes of war. In this they largely failed. This chapter is therefore about the final attempts of the Western liberal elite to try and make this ‘the war to end all wars’. This and subsequent chapters will show how the agenda that they developed during and immediately after the First World War drew on both a new thinking about war and peace and also on a pre-existing current of thought and action through the agency of a relatively small number of people. In a nutshell, this is the debate about ‘idealism’ versus ‘realism’ as it developed during 1914–18.

In addition we shall examine the policy-making process as it developed before the Versailles Conference of 1919. It will be argued that there was nowhere near the intellectual and practical preparation for the Conference as there was to be for the series of conferences that marked the end of the Second World War. Nonetheless, some key elements were identified. Those that have attracted the attention of historians are clearly the thinking of President Woodrow Wilson, and discussions that coalesced in Britain under the umbrella of the Union of Democratic Control, the Bryce Group and governmental bodies such as the Phillimore Committee. Other inputs that have been rather neglected, at least by Anglo-Saxon historians, such as the French Commission Bourgeois, will also be examined, but it must be admitted in nowhere near the detail given to American and British thinking.

The First World War acted as the catalyst for the emergence of an NWO agenda that has undergone constant evolution ever since while maintaining its basic essence. This process is encapsulated in the various projects developed by official and informal groups on both sides of the Atlantic. This is not to deny that ‘structural’ considerations also counted, but these had to be interpreted by policy makers and intellectuals. Sense had to be made of the chaos of the trenches through a process of imaginative reflection that is the warp and weft of the intellectual history of international relations this century. This chapter and those that follow it aim to show how this process evolved, and how it dealt with its failures and successes.

Anglo-American thinking on the post-war settlement

Although the United States was the ‘senior partner’ behind the thinking of what was to become the Versailles Treaty from 1917 onwards, it was the interplay between American and British reflection that can be seen as providing the key intellectual input to both the philosophical basis of the Versailles settlement, and particularly to proposals for a League of Nations (LON). American and, particularly, British ‘society’ had a long pedigree of producing small groups of intellectuals who put much of their effort into pondering the problems of international relations, intellectuals who were as at ease in the drawing room as in the Cabinet. They went to a small number of schools, married other ‘people of quality’, and were tied into not only the literary, but also the economic and governmental life of their country. Part of their influence lay in the fact that there was a shared belief system that derived from the vibrant Victorian ‘ideology’, one that espoused the ideal of parliamentary debate as the nec plus ultra of civilised discourse, and the ideals of economic liberalism and rugged individualism as the main vectors for beneficial change.⁴ Even though this consensus was under threat before 1914 under the assault of more radical socialist ideas, these were largely declamatory and of minority appeal, even among the working classes. The liberal elites were therefore not only contributors to a debate, they were also, and far more than today, the creators of the background thinking for policy, and often policy makers themselves.

In his famous work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E.H. Carr (who was a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference) makes a particular point of attacking the ‘intellectuals’ who supported the call for a change in the nature of international relations before and during the First World War for having injected a damaging note of ‘utopianism’ into the Anglo-Saxon body politick. He claims that these people, many of whom will shortly be described and whom he mostly singles out for particular criticism, sought to make ‘practice conform to theory’, whereas a healthier and older tradition, that of the ‘bureaucrat’ ‘eschew[s] the formulation of principles and [is] … guided on the right course by some intuitive process born of long experience and not of conscious reasoning’. This formulation bears some resemblance to those like Arnold Wolfers who have distinguished between the ‘traditionalist’ and the ‘collectivist’ in British foreign policy, again guided respectively by instinct and long practice and aspiration, often to moral improvement.⁵

It would be more accurate to describe Carr’s thinking as being part of a well-established ‘statist’ perspective – one of his key objections to the League of Nations was that it put too much liberal faith in an international society and not in a world of states. Another criticism that will be developed in subsequent chapters (and especially Chapter 7) was his belief that at least some of this faith derived from an erroneous reliance on an economic ‘harmony of interests’ that was tending to encourage a global interdependence, one which liberals saw as a long-term disincentive to war. As we shall see in the following pages, there were many during the First World War who essentially agreed with his reservations. As we hope to demonstrate in the following pages, he might rather be seen as criticising the result of a process of policy making that tended to ignore the liberal ‘cosmopolitan’ ethic in favour of one that in fact privileged the ‘statist’ aims of the main Allied protagonists.

British liberalism and the outbreak of war

The ‘Liberal Mind’ that dominated British political thinking before 1914 was one that was open but also ‘halting, weak, vacillating, divided and concessive’, as J.A. Hobson described it.⁶ When it was faced with a global, or at least a major, European war, it was faced with a problem that it could not really comprehend or deal with, for ‘war in advanced capitalist countries would be unprofitable and therefore unthinkable’, as Norman Angell had put it in the Great Illusion of 1910.⁷ In spite of its awareness of the probable consequences of war, it became obvious that the Liberal Government of Herbert H. Asquith would have to deny its instincts for peace and fight to stop German domination of the continent of Europe, and it was with a heavy heart that it did so. The Times realised that intervention was ‘not merely a duty of friendship [to Belgium and France]. It is an elementary duty of self-preservation … We cannot stand alone in a Europe dominated by any single power.’⁸ However, it is in the light of the above dominant British liberal mind-set that we must understand the body blow that British society suffered with the onset of the Great War. George Dangerfield saw it in almost apocalyptic terms: ‘And now the half light fades away altogether, and on the splendour of Imperial England there falls, at last and forever, an inextinguishable dark’.⁹ In 1935, when he wrote those words, this was perhaps more clearly the case; in 1914 there were still those who could reasonably suppose that they could turn the tide.

The war was fought by a coalition Government that was made up of representatives of the three major parties, including Labour. Party political differences were somewhat submerged in a common effort to prosecute the war, and what opposition there was to this principal aim was never significant. The argument about how the peace should be made thus largely proceeded in tandem with, and was informed by, the conduct of the war itself. Opposition to the war became more widespread as the war continued, especially after the carnage at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Lyn Macdonald sees in the shock of the futile destruction of Lord Kitchener’s volunteer army ‘the first tremor in the rock-like foundations of British society’.¹⁰ Even if this underestimates the already existing shakiness engendered by the ‘Great Unrest’ before 1914 (a combination of labour unrest, feminist, ‘suffragette’ militancy, and bitter argument about Home Rule for Ireland), there can be no doubt of the impact on elite and mass opinion in Britain of the casualty figures of 1 July 1916 and those that followed.

The debate on the post-war settlement and a hoped for improvement in the nature of international relations relied for its increased pace as the war progressed on both the mounting casualty figures and the attendant suffering of the civil populations of all the combatant states, including those of the Axis. It also relied on the outside influences of major developments in Russia, although this is not a central concern of this chapter. It is in particular clear that the thinking of Wilson and House (of which more below and in Chapter 2) was influenced in 1918 and 1919 by the proposals coming from the Bolsheviks with their own version of the ‘new diplomacy’ and the ‘self-determination’ of peoples. This led to Walter Lippman postulating that the Paris Peace Conference was about the interplay of ‘the reaction [Clemenceau], the reconstruction [Wilson] and the revolution [Lenin]’.¹¹ But the main impetus lay in the interplay of ideas between political commentators and actors in Britain and the United States who had a liberal bedrock to their thinking, but with a widespread feeling that this would have to be modified greatly. The liberal consensus of 1914 was thus split, in Britain and America, into radical and conservative wings, that corresponds in the United States to ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ internationalism. This division will form the basis of the analysis in this chapter.

The Bryce Group

The ‘Bryce Group’ was the first, albeit loosely organised, British liberal group that can be said to have any direct influence on the elaboration of post-war plans. It had a membership that included many pre-war thinkers of note, including G. Lowes Dickinson (who can be said to have initiated its discussions and whose ideas are described in more detail in Chapter 7),¹² Graham Wallas and Arthur Ponsonby. Other key members of the liberal intelligentsia hovered in the circle of this Group, including Professor Gilbert Murray, later a key figure in the League of Nations Union (LNU). It could be argued that through its informal nature the Bryce Group was more directly influential in its contacts with government on both sides of the Atlantic and ultimately on the drafting of the Versailles settlement than more radical anti-war groups such as the Union of Democratic Control (UDC, see below).¹³

Viscount Bryce had been a successful British Ambassador to the USA from 1907 to 1913. As such, he had gained a good, though not warm, rapport with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, as well as much better relations with many prominent academic luminaries such as Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1910. His influence on the Democrat Wilson was less given his closeness to the Republicans, but like his later successor in the post, Lord Lothian, he had an acknowledged influence in the United States.¹⁴ He was also entrusted by Asquith early in the war to preside over a committee investigating allegations of German atrocities in their invasion of Belgium, the invasion of which convinced him to support the war.¹⁵ His findings condemned the actions of the German Government and were published with alacrity in Britain; they had some impact in the United States too, as he was not seen as being anti-German.¹⁶ The new British Ambassador to the USA, Cecil Spring Rice, telegraphed the Foreign Office that ‘[f]riend [i.e. House or Wilson] says that Bryce is the only man whose opinion would carry universal weight with American public who have been quite convinced by the Belgian Report’.¹⁷ The main contact that the Bryce Group had in America was with the League to Enforce Peace (LEP, see below), a largely Republican-dominated body but one which had a profound effect on Wilson’s thinking. It first published the Bryce Group ‘Proposals’ in the USA, giving them prime billing (the first three pages) in a volume of different proposals in April 1917 in the League Bulletin.¹⁸

The Proposals themselves were modest, in that they wished to make sure that after the war the Allies, within which Bryce included the United States as well as Britain and France, would combine in an alliance to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Why study new world orders?
• 1 The imagining of the Versailles NWO, 1914–19
• 2 The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, 1919
• 3 The United States and the planning of an American NWO, 1939–44
• 4 The ‘first follower’ and Roosevelt’s NWO: Britain, 1940–43
• 5 Joint Allied proposals for a NWO: relationships and issues, 1941–45
• 6 International organisation, global security and the NWO
• 7 The economic element of the NWO project
• 8 Self-determination and the NWO
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index