France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century 1900 – 1940

A Reappraisal

A. Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137315458
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why is France so often relegated to the background in studies of international relations? This book seeks to redress this balance, exploring the relationship between the United States, United Kingdom and France, and its wider impact on the theory and practice of international relations.

1

The Anglo-Saxons and the French: The Build-up to the First World War

Introduction: France, Britain and the United States before 1914

The great American liberal President Seth Low of Columbia University wrote to his old friend the British liberal James Bryce in July 1900 that: ‘[t]he century is coming to its end here among many dark clouds, bloodshed, hatred of nations, a general lowering of the ideas which you and I were bought up forty years ago to cherish’.¹ They both understood that the Western civilization they knew and loved was being severely challenged by modernity. The ‘Great War’ of 1914–1918 proved to be its nemesis, a conflict that it is widely accepted bought about a seminal shift in power and influence away from the ‘old’ world of Europe and towards the ‘new’ of the Americas, and especially towards the United States of America itself. This chapter will discuss how even in the supposedly golden period of European dominance that ended in 1914 the balance of power was already swinging from the European shore of the Atlantic towards the American.

Of course it has to be acknowledged that taking 1900 as an arbitrary starting point has its dangers. All of the major figures that we will examine in this chapter had their origins in a nineteenth-century experience. A more logical intellect might well have taken the birth of the ‘Third Republic’ in 1871 as a better starting point for France, given the importance of that upheaval and the associated immediate loss of innocence represented by the suppression of the Paris Commune and the loss of Alsace Lorraine. For the United States the end of the American Civil War in 1865 marked a significant turning point that led to a huge ‘imperial’ expansion within the continent of North America (‘Manifest Destiny’) and overseas, especially the Spanish-American war of 1898. But for Britain the Boer War (1899–1902) or the death of Queen Victoria (1901) makes the turn of the century a useful start date given the symbolic importance of the latter date and the internal ferment about the Empire caused by the former. For both Britain and America 1900 can be seen as marking the beginning of the slow handover of power from one Anglo-Saxon state wedded to the idea of a ‘Greater Britain’ to one increasingly devoted to an extension of the American Imperium.² A cartoon of 1905 by ‘Hazelden’ in the Daily Mirror portrays a smug looking John Bull with Uncle Sam (‘Jonathan’) astride the globe with various small figures (other states) falling off and saying:

Well, Jonathan, there’s still room for you and me, eh?

To which, Jonathan replies:

That’s so. And not much for anyone else soon I’m thinking.³

Jean Jaurès, the French Socialist leader who will be discussed below, also noticed the rise and rise of the United States and worried what it might portend. None of the three countries could have had much idea in 1900 or 1905 that it would have such huge implications.

There was more continuity in international relations than the watershed of 1914–1918 is usually seen as implying. Alexis de Tocqueville made a celebrated defence of the continuities of French politics before and after the French Revolution,⁴ and there is a similar case to be made in examining the politics of the countries we are considering for this period. The most striking continuities are cultural. Modernity, which Ernst Bloch defined in 1938 as having ‘chaos as … its intellectual cornerstone’ or Zygmunt Bauman as ‘the breakdown of the traditional order’,⁵ predates 1914, and much of what happened as a result of the war confirmed this. The study of modernity is a meditation on the violence done by industrial societies to their own populations and to other societies, and particularly in the colonies that all three countries possessed by 1900. Both conservative American historians and those critical of American actions are agreed that the United States was every bit as expansionist a Power as Britain and France well before its rise to global power in the twentieth century. Wherever the white man went he bought modernity and its handmaidens of cultural change and ‘progress’.⁶

What the Great War in effect revealed were cracks in Western civilization that were evident to many before the conflict broke out. As Frank Field and other writers have pointed out, a revolt against the comfortable liberalism of the nineteenth-century European elites was under way well before 1914. It was not only led by French intellectuals who we will consider here like Henri Bergson, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Charles Péguy and Georges Sorel, but also strongly echoed by German thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler and Italians like Benedetto Croce and Gabriele d’Annunzio. In Britain left-leaning or liberal writers and activists like E.D. Morel were equally critical of what they saw as bourgeois hypocrisy about matters of war and peace. British socialist and liberal thinkers, like John A. Hobson and Henry Noel Brailsford, were developing theories of the links between Empire and capitalism that saw their apogee in the emergence of the anti-Western Soviet Union.⁷ British Liberalism itself was about to embark on a long process of ripping itself apart and Bryce’s and Low’s cherished ‘ideas’ were to be damaged almost beyond repair. The British Liberal Party held power from 1905 to 1916 and then in coalition until 1922, the year that Bryce died, but has never again risen to anything like those heights. Its rising star of the period, David Lloyd George, proved capable of great inspiration to Liberals but also of huge division, breaking up the party into two factions in 1916, part of what George Dangerfield called The Strange Death of Liberal England.⁸ But most of all, the pendulum of power was swinging away from the ‘Old’ Continent and inexorably towards the ‘New’. It was by no means clear at this stage that the United States would in effect appropriate and develop European liberalism for its own purposes.

To those who lived through this period change seemed omnipresent. Péguy put it most pungently in 1912: ‘The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years’.⁹ It is no exaggeration to claim that the period between about 1870 and 1914, as Zeev Sternhell has put it, ‘showed all the characteristics of a revolutionary epoch … the years that separate the deaths of Darwin [1882] and Marx [1883] from the Great War, can be seen as among the most rich [fécondes] of the intellectual history of Europe’. This was not only in Europe, though La Belle Epoque [literal trad. ‘The Good Old Days’ or the ‘Banquet Years’] is most often cited as the cradle of high as well as low cultural change, but also in the United States. There the writing of Henry James, Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, as well as that great American art form, the cinema, was transforming the written and visual world every bit as much as the post-Impressionist painters, as were Anglo-Irish poets like W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.¹⁰ In France the ‘avant-garde’ ‘presided’ over by Guillaume Apollinaire seemed to many in France to have betrayed the greatest classical traditions and become ‘déracinés’ (‘uprooted’)¹¹ in the words of the conservative novelist Barrès. The result was to be a poisonous divide in French cultural and political life that led to Vichy collaborationism in 1940–1944 and to virulent anti-semitism on the right (although it was also a feature of some on the left),¹² and the possibly equally repugnant fellow travelling with the USSR of the left.

On a different level, the first half of the twentieth century shows that any such upsurge of ideas is accompanied by political, social and economic upheaval. Richard Vinen has pointed out that ‘[t]he most striking feature of Europe in 1900 was that so many of its inhabitants wished to leave; in the 25 years leading up to 1900, the United States alone took in 25 million Europeans, many of them fleeing persecution, Jews from Continental Europe foremost, others “yearning to breathe free” in other ways’.¹³ Partly this was because the free market and economy that Britain had first promoted was an important vector for forcing the pace of industrialization and the move from country to city that came with the corollary of social dislocation and economic inequality. This was an age that believed in progress, that ‘[g]lobal change was endowed with a systematic direction’ and broadly speaking one that the ruling elites saw as one of huge ‘progress’.¹⁴ In hindsight the period before 1914 was the last gasp of that belief in progress before Europe was introduced to what Emilio Gentile has called the ‘apocalypse of modernity’, the Great War. The subsequent rise of extreme nationalism and socialism meant not only the ultimate emergence of the greatest competitors liberal ideas had faced in intellectual terms, but also the rise of entities like Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the phenomenon of ‘the new man’.¹⁵

So it is paradoxical that while liberal values were certainly damaged by the war, as Field has also written, ‘on 18 January 1919, a stranger to the European scene might have been forgiven for thinking that the principles of liberalism had reached their apotheosis … [But] [t]wenty years later the situation looked very different’. He quotes Paul Valéry as writing in 1919, ‘we later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’.¹⁶ The impact of the Great War on the representation of reality in the cultural world was immense – most obviously in painting and the plastic arts such as a sculpture as well as in poetry and prose. Without the trenches it is difficult to imagine the emergence of ‘surrealism’, one of whose originators was André Breton, who served as a medical doctor at the Front, or the more generalized impact of modernism.¹⁷ The war also wreaked havoc among the ranks of the pre-1914 political elites, especially the old landed gentry of Europe. So to be sure there were also great discontinuities, but they were as a result of the war, not really preceding it, and they tended to deepen the problems that had been latent before the war broke out. Some political institutions and parties that had bestridden the world ceased to exist after 1918. The Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires were obliterated by the treaties of 1919, monarchies fell, the British Liberal Party went into almost terminal decline, and so on. Nonetheless, Arno J. Mayer’s analysis of the ‘persistence of the old régime’ has ‘England continu[ing as] a nation of small shopkeepers, along with all the other European nations.’¹⁸ Mayer reminds us not only that the great pre-1914 economists Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter saw the inexorable rise of the ‘new national bourgeoisie’ that dominated so much of political life in Britain, France, Germany and the United States being partly, and unequally, deflated by the war, but also that those groups bounced back, at least until the Second World War, and arguably beyond it. After 1945 a new world did really seem to emerge from the ruins of the old, but that is a later development. What is important for us in this opening chapter is how these counter-currents of continuity within change affected the way that international relations were viewed and practised by the political and policy elites as the century was born and had started to grow precociously older.

British imperial hegemony, the sense of ‘belonging’ and the rise of Nationalist Europe?

The British Empire before 1914 was the greatest the world had seen since Rome.¹⁹ Bill Nasson’s claim that it had created a ‘British world’ is no exaggeration, including a diaspora on all the inhabited continents.²⁰ This sprawling creation exerted huge influence not only in military and geopolitical terms but also through what Gallagher and Robinson have called an ‘informal Empire’, based on free trade and foreign direct investment, one that also had a huge impact on regions and states well beyond its formal imperial boundaries, such as Argentina, and even Russia and the United States.²¹ The City of London had its parallel in other areas, such as what Tomoko Akami has called ‘an informal empire of news’, the network of physical infrastructure in the form of undersea and overground cables and knowledge infrastructure in terms of the quasi-monopolization of news through organizations like Reuter’s (based in London) after 1870. Indeed the cartel that Reuter’s formed with French news agency Havas, and until 1914 the Prussian Agency Wolff (replaced later in the cartel by American Associated Press), lasted until 1934. This kind of ‘informality’ held within it a parallel with the ‘unequal treaties’ that had been imposed on China and other states, for all other states were in effect beholden unto the cartel for their news and communications.²²

As Inderjeet Parmar has pointed out, the British Empire was dominated by a relatively small elite, most of whom went to the same top public schools, especially Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Westminster, and universities, most notably Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh. Parmar believes that this elite became, especially after 1918, intertwined with American political elites, so that they ‘develop[ed] international networks – social, economic, ideological, and began the process of creating a transnational capitalist class, over and above the nation-state’. The result, he says, was the eventual creation, in the international context, of ‘think tanks’ like the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (‘Chatham House’) in 1919.²³ But in 1900 many of the British side of this emerging elite were coming to terms with British imperial problems, and indeed decline. As the arch-imperialist and Birmingham Conservative Unionist M.P. Joseph Chamberlain put it, Britain was ‘a weary titan, staggering under the too vast orb of its fate’.²⁴ Partly this view was a result of seeing his own and Lord Alfred Milner’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – The Approach Taken: Why Britain, France and the United States?
• 1 The Anglo-Saxons and the French: The Build-up to the First World War
• 2 The Allies During the First World War and Paris Peace Conference
• 3 Difficult Relations in the 1920s – of Reparations, Debts and ‘Rumo(u)rs of War’
• 4 France, Britain and the United States in the 1930s until the Fall of France
• 5 Conclusion: Britain, France and the United States in 1940
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index