Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (35 page)

Keynes’s wartime life presents an ironic tension between the economic consequences of his expertise as a member of the wartime Treasury – in effect, negotiating the Allied loans that made possible Britain’s continuance as a belligerent – and the convictions that he shared with conscientious objectors, including his close Bloomsbury friends and the pacifists of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s circle. Indeed, he testified on behalf of his friends before the tribunals but, once the war was being waged, he told Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell, ‘There is really no practical alternative.’ And he was practical: one of his coups in the war was to see that there were certain war loans France would never repay to Britain. In 1917, when the Degas collection came up for sale in Paris after the painter’s death, Keynes suggested that the British government should buy some of the impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces and charge them to the French government. The plan was approved, and he travelled to Paris with the director of the National Gallery, both in disguise to escape the notice of journalists, and landed several bargains, including a Cézanne.
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Keynes attended the peace treaty talks in Versailles representing the chancellor of the exchequer. In effect, terms were dictated to Germany, which had to sue for peace in November 1918. The central question was whether the peace should produce reconciliation, reestablishing Germany as a democratic state in a newly conceived world order, or whether it should be punitive to the degree that Germany would be crippled, disabled from ever again making war. The interests of the Big Three did not coincide, and after months of negotiations it became clear that the proposals of the Armistice would not be implemented and that instead an enormous reparation would be exacted from Germany, in addition to confiscation of a considerable part of German territory and redistribution to the victors of her overseas empire.

Keynes was appalled. He resigned in ‘misery and rage.’ His liberal ideals, his view of human nature, and his refusal to concur with the Clemenceau view of German nature as endemically hostile, combined with a feeling of guilt over his noncombatant part in the war (as a Treasury official he was exempt from conscription), propelled him to write his book exposing the treaty. In it Keynes expounded his economic views, as well as analysing the treaty and its effects. Keynes thought that the equilibrium between the Old and New Worlds which the war had shattered should be reestablished. Investment of European surplus
capital in the New World produced the food and goods needed for growing populations and increased standards of living. Thus markets must be freer, not curtailed, as the treaty was to do for Germany. Keynes’s perspective was more that of a European than of a nationalist. Only in this way could the spectre of massive population growth, leading to further carnage, be tamed.
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Civilisation, said Keynes, must be based on shared views of morality, of prudence, calculation, and foresight. The punitive impositions on Germany would produce only the opposite effect and impoverish Europe. Keynes believed that enlightened economists were best able to secure the conditions of civilisation, or at any rate prevent regression, not politicians. One of the most far-reaching aspects of the book was Keynes’s argument, backed with figures and calculations, that there was no probability that Germany could repay, in either money or kind, the enormous reparations required over thirty years as envisaged by the Allies. According to Keynes’s theory of probability, the changes in economic conditions simply cannot be forecast that far ahead, and he therefore urged much more modest reparations over a much shorter time. He could also see that the commission set up to force Germany to pay and to seize goods breached all the rules of free economic association in democratic nations. His arguments therefore became the basis of the pervasive opinion that Versailles inevitably gave rise to Hitler, who could not have taken control of Germany without the wide resentment against the treaty. It didn’t matter that, following Keynes’s book, reparations were in fact scaled down, or that no great proportion of those claimed were ever collected. It was enough that Germany thought itself to have been vengefully treated.

Keynes’s arguments are disputable. From the outset of peace, there was a strong spirit of noncompliance with orders for demilitarisation among German armed forces. For example, they refused to surrender all the warplanes the Allies demanded, and production and research continued at a fast pace.
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Did the enormous success of Keynes’s book create attitudes that undermined the treaty’s more fundamental provisions by putting such an emphasis upon what may have been a peripheral part of the treaty?
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And was it instrumental in creating the climate for Western appeasement in the 1930s, an attitude on which the Nazis gambled? Such an argument forms the basis of a bitter attack on Keynes published in 1946, after Keynes’s death and that of its author, Etienne Mantoux, who might be thought to have paid the supreme price exacted by Keynes’s post-Versailles influence: he was killed in 1945 fighting the Germans. The grim title of Mantoux’s book conveys the argument: The
Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes
.
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What is not in dispute is Keynes’s brilliant success, not only in terms of polemical argument but also in the literary skill of his acid portraits of the leaders. Of Clemenceau, Keynes wrote that he could not ‘despise him or dislike him, but only take a different view as to the nature of civilised man, or indulge at least a different hope.’ ‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen and his colleagues not least.’ Keynes takes the reader into Clemenceau’s mind: ‘The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed, as in each preceding century, a trade rival; a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and France. Prudence required some measure of lip service to the “ideals” of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interest.’
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This striking passage leads on to the ‘foolish’ American. Woodrow Wilson had come dressed in all the wealth and power of mighty America: ‘When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’ Europe was dependent on the United States financially and for basic food supplies. Keynes had high hopes of a new world order flowing from New to Old. It was swiftly dashed. ‘Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewithal to bind the princes of this world…. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs. … But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary. … The President’s slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation in a glance … and was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of a Lloyd George.’ In this terrible sterility, ‘the President’s faith withered and dried up.’

Among the intellectual consequences of the war and Versailles was the idea of a universal — i.e., worldwide — government. One school of thought contended that the Great War had mainly been stumbled into, that it was an avoidable catastrophe that would not have happened with better diplomacy. Other historians have argued that the 1914-18 war, like most if not all wars, had deeper, coherent causes. The answer provided by the Versailles Treaty was to set up a League of Nations, a victory in the first instance for President Wilson. The notion of international law and an international court had been articulated in the seventeenth century by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch thinker. The
League of Nations
was new in that it would provide a permanent arbitration body and a permanent organisation to enforce its judgements. The argument ran that if the Germans in 1914 had had to face a coalition of law-abiding nations, they would have been deterred from the onslaught on Belgium. The Big Three pictured the League very differently. For France a standing army would be to control Germany. Britain’s leaders saw it as a conciliation body with no teeth. Only Wilson conceived of it as both a forum of arbitration and as an instrument of collective security. But the idea was dead in the water in the United States; the Senate simply refused to ratify an arrangement that took fundamental decisions away from its authority. It would take another war, and the development of atomic weapons, before the world was finally frightened into acting on an idea similar to the League of Nations.

Before World War I, Germany had held several concessions in Shandong, China. The Versailles Treaty did not return these to the Beijing government but left them in the hands of the Japanese. When this news was released, on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 students from Beida (Beijing University) and other Beijing institutions besieged the Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace. This led to a battle between students and police, a student strike, demonstrations across the country, a boycott of Japanese goods - and in the end the ‘broadest demonstration of national feeling that China had ever seen.’
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The most extraordinary aspect of this development - what became known as the
May 4 movement
— was that
it
was the work of both mature intellectuals and students. Infused by Western notions of democracy, and impressed by the advances of Western science, the leaders of the movement put these new ideas together in an anti-imperialist program. It was the first time the students had asserted their power in the new China, but it would not be the last. Many Chinese intellectuals had been to Japan to study. The main Western ideas they returned with related to personal expression and freedom, including sexual freedom, and this led them to oppose the traditional family organisation of China. Under Western influence they also turned to fiction as the most effective way to attack traditional China, often using first-person narratives written in the vernacular. Normal as this might seem to Westerners, it was very shocking in China.

The first of these new writers to make a name for himself was
Lu Xun.
His real name was Zhou Shuren or Chou Shu-jen, and, coming from a prosperous family (like many in the May 4 movement), he first studied Western medicine and science. One of his brothers translated Havelock Ellis’s theories about sexuality into Chinese, and the other, a biologist and eugenicist, translated Darwin. In 1918, in the magazine
New Youth,
Lu Xun published a satire entitled ‘The Diary of a Madman.’ The ‘Diary’ was very critical of Chinese society, which he depicted as cannibalistic, devouring its brightest talents, with only the mad glimpsing the truth, and then as often as not in their dreams - a theme that would echo down the years, and not just in China. The problem with Chinese civilisation, Lu Xun wrote, was that it was ‘a culture of serving one’s masters, who are triumphant at the cost of the misery of the multitude.’
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The Versailles Treaty may have been the immediate stimulus for the May 4 movement, but a more general influence was the ideas that shaped Chinese society after 1911, when the Qing dynasty was replaced with a republic.
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Those ideas — essentially, of a civil society — were not new in the West. But the Confucian heritage posed two difficulties for this transition in China. The first was the concept of individualism, which is of course such a bulwark in Western (and especially American) civil society. Chinese reformers like
Yan
(or
Yen)
Fu, who translated so many Western liberal classics (including John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
and Herbert Spencer’s
Study of Sociology),
nonetheless saw individualism only as a trait to be used in support of the state, not against it.
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The second difficulty posed by the Confucian heritage was even more problematic. Though the Chinese developed something called the New Learning, which encompassed ‘foreign matters’ (i.e., modernisation), what in practice was
taught
may be summarised, in the words of Harvard historian John

Fairbanks, as ‘Eastern ethics and Western science.’
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The Chinese (and to an extent the Japanese) persisted in the belief that Western ideas – particularly science – were essentially technical or purely functional matters, a set of tools much shallower than, say, Eastern philosophy, which provided the ‘substance’ of education and knowledge. But the Chinese were fooling themselves. Their own brand of education was very thinly spread – male literacy in the late Qing period (i.e., up to 1911) was 30 to 45 percent for men and as low as 2 to 10 percent for women. As a measure of the educational backwardness of China at this time, such universities as existed were required to teach and examine many subjects – engineering, technology, and commerce – using English-language textbooks: Chinese words for specialist terms did not yet exist.
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In effect, China’s educated elite had to undergo two revolutions. They had first to throw off Confucianism, and the social/educational structure that went with it. Then they had to throw off the awkward amalgam of ‘Eastern ethics, Western science’ that followed. In practice, those who achieved this did so only by going to the United States to study (provided for by a U.S. congressional bill in 1908). To a point this was effective, and in 1914 young Chinese scientists who had studied in America founded the Science Society. For a time, this society offered the only real chance for science in the Chinese/Confucian context.
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Beijing University played its part when a number of scholars who had trained abroad attempted to cleanse China of Confucianism ‘in the name of science and democracy.’
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This process became known as the New Learning – or New Culture – movement.
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Some idea of the magnitude of the task facing the movement can be had from the subject it chose for its first campaign: the Chinese writing system. This had been created around 200
B.C.
and had hardly changed in the interim, with characters acquiring more and more meanings, which could only be deciphered according to context and by knowing the classical texts.
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Not surprisingly (to Western minds) the new scholars worked to replace the classical language with everyday speech. (The size of the problem is underlined when one realises this was the step taken in Europe during the Renaissance, four hundred years before, when Latin was replaced by national vernaculars.)
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Writing in the new vernacular, Lu Xun had turned his back on science (many in China, as elsewhere, blamed science for the horrors of World War I), believing he could have more impact as a novelist.
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But science was integral to what was happening. For example, other leaders of the May 4 movement like Fu Sinian and Luo Jialun at Beida advocated in their journal
New Tide (Renaissance) —
one of eleven such periodicals started in the wake of May 4 – a Chinese ‘enlightenment.’
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By this they meant an individualism beyond family ties and a rational, scientific approach to problems. They put their theories into practice by setting up their own lecture society to reach as many people as possible.
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