Still, although the public life of these countries would have been polarized and degraded, they would probably have remained capitalist democracies. The U. Britain, possibly with its empire in premature dissolution, would have been forced to seek a strong Atlantic alliance. As for the Soviet Union in this scenario, it is hard to imagine the Germans putting up with its existence after it had served its purpose.
Doubtless some surviving Romanov could have been put on the throne of a much- diminished Russia. If no Romanov was available, Germany has never lacked for princelings willing to be sent abroad to govern improvised countries. This leaves us with the most interesting question: what would have happened to Germany itself? Before the war, the German constitution was working less and less well. Reich chancellors were not responsible to parliament but to the Kaiser. The system could work only when the Kaiser was himself a competent executive, or when he had the sense to appoint and support a chancellor who was.
The reign of Wilhelm II showed that neither of these conditions need be the case. In the twenty years preceding the war, national policy was made more and more by the army and the bureaucracy.
It is unlikely that this degree of drift could have continued after a victorious war. Two things would have happened which in fact happened in the real world: the monarchy would have lost prestige to the military, and electoral politics would have fallen more and more under the influence of populist veterans groups. We should remember that to win a great war can be almost as disruptive for a combatant country as to lose it.
There was a prolonged political crisis, indeed the whiff of revolution, in victorious Britain in the s. Something similar seems to be happening in the United States today after the Cold War. While it is, of course, unlikely that the Kaiser would have been overthrown, it is highly probable that there would have been some constitutional crisis which would have drastically altered the relationship between the branches of government.
It would have been in the military's interest to push for more democracy in the Reich government, since the people would have been conspicuously pro-military. The social and political roles of the old aristocracy would have declined, since the war would have brought forward so many men of humble origin. Again, this is very much what happened in real history. If Germany had won and the Allies lost, the emphasis in these developments would certainly have been different, but not the fundamental trends.
All the bad and strange things which happened in Germany in the s are conventionally blamed on the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. We forget, however, that the practical effect of these terms was really very limited.
The diplomatic disabilities on Germany were eliminated by the Locarno Pact of The great Weimar inflation, which was engineered by the government to defeat French attempts to extract reparations, was ended in The reparations themselves, of course, were a humiliating drain on the German budget, but a system of financing with international loans was arranged which worked satisfactorily until the world financial system broke down in the early s.
Even arms development was continued through clandestine projects with the Soviet Union. It is also false to assert that German culture was driven to insanity by a pervasive sense of defeat. A reader ignorant of the history of the 20th century who was given samples from this literature that did not contain actual references to the war could reasonably conclude that he was reading the literature of defeated peoples.
There was indeed insanity in culture in the s, but the insanity pervaded the whole West. Weimar culture would have happened even if there had been no Weimar Republic. We know this, since all the major themes of the Weimar period, the new art and revolutionary politics and sexual liberation, all began before the war. There would still have been Bauhaus architecture and surrealist cinema and depressing war novels if the Kaiser had issued a victory proclamation in late rather than an instrument of abdication.
He began working on it years before the war. The book was, in fact, written in part to explain the significance of a German victory.
These things were simply extensions of the trends that had dominated German culture for a generation. They grew logically out of Nietzsche and Wagner and Freud. A different outcome in the First World War would probably have made the political right less suspicious of modernity, for the simple reason that left wing politics would not have been anywhere nearly as fashionable among artists as such politics were in defeat.
I would go so far as to say this: something very like the Nazi Party would still have come to power in Germany, even if that country had won the First World War. I realize that this assertion runs counter to the historiography of most of this century, but the conclusion is inescapable. Politics is a part of culture, and the Nazis represented a kind of politics which was integral with Weimar culture. Salvador Dali once said, perhaps ironically, that he approved of the Nazi Party because they represented the surrealists come to power.
The connection is deep, as with the Nazi affinity for the modernist post-rationalism of the philosopher Heidigger, and also superficial, in the styles the party promoted. The Nuremberg Rallies, for instance, were masterpieces of Art Deco stagecraft, particularly Albert Speer's "cathedral of ice" effect, created with the use of searchlights. As a young hopeful in Vienna, Hitler once passed up the chance to work as a theatrical set designer because he was too shy to go to the interview.
But whether he knew it or not, that is what he became. The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich formed a historical unit, one whose advent was not dependent on the accident of who won the First World War. The Nazi Party was other things besides a right wing populist group with a penchant for snazzy uniforms.
It was a millenarian movement. The Party's core began as a sort of occult lodge, like the Thule Society of Munich to which so many of its important early members belonged. It promoted a racist theory of history not unlike that of the Theosophist, H. Blavatsky, whose movement also used the swastika as an emblem.
Like the Theosophists, they looked for a new "root race" of men to appear in the future, perhaps with some artificial help. When Hitler spoke of the Master Race, it is not entirely clear that he was thinking of contemporary Germans. This is not to say that the Nazi Party was a conspiracy of evil magicians. I have two simple points to make here.
The first is that the leadership had some very odd notions that, at least to some degree, explain the unique things they said and did. The other is that these ideas were not unique to them, that they were spreading among the German elites.
General Von Moltke, the chief of the General Staff at the beginning of the war, was an Anthroposophist. This group drew the peculiar ire of the SS, since Himmler believed that its leader, Rudolf Steiner, hypnotized the general so as to make him mismanage the invasion of France. The Nazi Party was immensely popular on university campuses. The intellectual climate of early 20th century Germany was extraordinarily friendly to mysticism of all types, including in politics.
At present, argument about the war mainly consists of two mutually uncomprehending camps. On the one hand, there are those who, as Margaret MacMillan put it recently , think the war was "an unmitigated catastrophe in a sea of mud". On the other, there are those who insist that it was nevertheless "about something". At the time, says MacMillan, people on all sides thought they had a just cause.
But what was the something that the first world war was about? To answer that it was a war between empires, which it surely was, is fine as long as some effort is made to distinguish between the empires. But this rarely happens in a debate that is polarised between collective myths of national sacrifice on the one hand certainly in Britain and France and an indiscriminate muddy catastrophe on the other. The more one tries to examine and maybe get beyond these dominant narratives, as we should next year and as the centenary rolls on, the more a bit of the counterfactual may help the process.
The first world war came to an end in November , when the German armies surrendered near Compiegne. But it could plausibly have ended in a very different way in spring , if Ludendorff's offensive on Paris and towards the Channel had succeeded.
It nearly did so. And what might 20th-century Europe have been like if it had? Obviously, it would have been dominated and shaped by Germany. But what kind of Germany? The militaristic, conservative, repressive Prussian power created by Bismarck?
Or the Germany with the largest labour movement in early 20th-century Europe? German history after would have been a contest between the two — and no one can say which would have won in the end. But one can say that a victorious Germany, imposing peace on the defeated allies at the treaty of Potsdam, would not have had the reparations and grievances that were actually inflicted upon it by France at Versailles.
As a consequence, the rise of Hitler would have been much less likely. In that case, neither the Holocaust nor the second world war would necessarily have followed.
If Germany's Jews had survived, Zionism might not have had the international moral force that it rightly claimed after Hitler's defeat. The modern history of the Middle East would therefore be very different — partly also because Turkey would have been among the victors in In the kaiser's Europe, defeated France would be the more likely seedbed for fascism, not Germany.
But with its steel and coal still in German-controlled Alsace-Lorraine, France's military and naval potential would have been contained. Meanwhile, defeated Britain would have seen its navy sunk in the Heligoland Bight, have been forced to cede its oil interests in the Middle East and the Gulf to Germany, and have been unable to contain Indian nationalism.
In practice, the British empire would have been unsustainable. Today's Britain might have ended up as a modest north European social democratic republic — like Denmark without a prince.
Meanwhile America, whose entry into the war would have been successfully pre-empted by Germany's victory, would have become a firmly isolationist power and not the enforcer of international order. Franklin Roosevelt would solve America's postwar economic problems in the s, but he would never fight a war in Europe — though he might have to fight one against Japan.
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