September 5, 2006
The Wreck of Europe, Francesco Nitti (1922)

Just two more books on my review list before I can wrap up 2006.

It's no secret that Benzene's so-called book reviews say little about the book at hand before running off on various digressions. This time I'll try to turn it around: we'll start with the digressions and end with the book.

Benzene is back on the blogroll at Done With Mirrors. Benzene tries to keep up with his big-brother-blog, but he's just a little guy and his legs are too short.

Lately, Callimachus has been running a series of stories about the reconstruction of Germany after World War II. It began as a comparison with the failed reconstruction of Iraq ... or rather an anti-comparison. Apparently, somebody -- in the brave new world of the Internet one never needs to construct a straw man; somewhere out there someone is dumb enough to make the argument for real -- has suggested equivalence of Iraq 2003 and Germany/Japan 1945, as a way of criticizing Bush for doing so poorly at a job that Truman et al did so well.

In one of the early posts, Cal quite sensibly argues that it's a ridiculous comparison, listing ways in which the two situations are incomparably different. But now, as he goes on to explore the successes in Germany, he's almost falling into the trap himself, as if he wants to illustrate the right way to do national reconstruction.

To me, this is absurd. I think the differences between Germany and Iraq are understated. It reminds me of the silly meme I used to hear when I was a kid, that the best way for a country to become rich and prosperous is to fight a war with the United States and lose. After all, look at Japan and Germany. We defeated them and now they're doing great.

What everyone fails to notice is that they were doing great before the war, too. The United States didn't create German and Japanese success. Those two nations were already among the strongest, richest, most powerful nations on the globe. The United States only knocked them flat and saw to it that they were on a different path when they got up again.

To make the point directly, even after having their infrastructures obliterated, much of their populations killed, and their governments decapitated, Japan and Germany were still nations with a powerful cultural identity, an educated and literate populace, and several generations of experience with the rule of law, diverse and prosperous economy, and effective government. Iraq is rather the opposite. The nation itself is less than a century old, and almost its entire history is a series of failed governments. Is it any wonder that a successful one has not emerged from the ruins?

Political structures are entropic. It is not the case that order naturally appears once the forces of chaos have all been cleared away. It is the case that chaos naturally appears once the forces of order have all been cleared away.

Even a sturdy plant can be killed. In Germany and Japan, the United States deserves some credit for merely pruning these nations and not uprooting them utterly. Still, to talk as if the United States created the modern democratic states of Germany and Japan is terribly hubristic. Modern Germany and modern Japan were created by Germans and Japanese, and they were built on the foundations of pre-war Germany and Japan.

Likewise, it is hubristic to say that it's up to us to create modern Iraq, whether you're setting it out as a worthy goal or faulting someone for failing to achieve it. Besides being a practical impossibility, I'm not sure a successfully reconstructed Iraq is even logically possible, at least as commonly defined by America. I don't think we've really come to grips with the inherent contradiction in our multiple definitions of "democracy". On the one hand, democracy means "like us", but it also means "they decide for themselves what they want". What happens when they don't want to be like us? We saw the answer to that in Algeria in 1991. I don't think it's changed since then.

On every question of military intervention the United States ever faces, I find myself opposed. Sometimes I am praised for my consistency -- as if it's a virtuous thing for a Democrat to be opposed to Clinton's wars as much as to Bush's wars. And yet, I don't feel like my anti-interventionism comes from a place of principled consistency. My opposition to war is entirely pragmatic. In my view, history shows us that it doesn't work. That doesn't mean it never works, just that the odds are always against you. Sometimes you might get lucky and come out ahead, but you can never expect that.

I have no principled moral objection to our nation controlling the world's resources nor to spreading our political values to every nation. I just don't think it's practical to do it. It makes no difference whether the goal is noble (eg, civil rights for women) or base (eg, give us all your oil). Either way, if the folks on the other side don't want to cooperate, it's going to get ugly.

War is a blunt instrument. If one's goal is only to destroy, it can be pretty effective. If one's goal is to create, to persuade, or to reform, it doesn't do so well. It is horribly expensive. Not just in money and lives, but even in the uncertainty of its own results. If you see something bad and you try to use war to change it, there's a very good chance you could still end up with something even worse.

Edmund Burke had something like that in mind when he wrote,

Burke was writing of the French Revolution, but the same sort of thing applies to changing the world with military intervention. If there is an evil government that you'd like to be gone -- say, for the sake of non-controversy, the oppressive dictatorship in Myanmar -- before you set about tearing it down, you ought to have a very good idea of what might take its place. In his discussions of German reconstruction, Callimachus emphasizes that it's more valuable to be flexible than to have a definite plan. That may be, but you still ought to have some vision of a reasonable goal. Otherwise, you're just spending a great deal of resources -- money, lives, goodwill -- to do nothing more than wreak havoc.

I don't believe, theoretically, that war is completely useless as a tool. I think there can be such a thing as a decision to go to war which is rational and cost-effective, even counting non-economic costs. If I never have opportunity to support such a decision -- and I don't -- it's because the consensus in the world around me overestimates the effectiveness of war so much that the bar never gets that low.

Much of that overestimation comes from retrospective myopia. When we look at past wars, especially in America, we see success. That's the challenge that is often posed to anti-interventionists. "By that same logic, you should have opposed World War II, World War I, the Civil War," they say, with the implication that you condone slavery and the Holocaust.

Some of those are easier to answer than others. Earlier this month, Callimachus wrote a gentle, almost poetic post, in which he questioned whether Lincoln's pursuit of the Civil War was worth it. I admire that. I stay away from World War II and the Civil War. I know where the logic of my beliefs lead, but I just don't feel like getting beat up in the argument where I get put on the side of Hitler. In my younger days, when I was the intellectual equivalent of the brash youngster who goes into bars spoiling for a brawl, I might have, but not now.

My diffidence doesn't extend to World War I, though. There I have no problem stating my opposition to American involvement. (Indeed I have long experience. I distinctly remember writing a paper in school -- I would have been 14 at the time -- arguing the position. I think my argument was rather juvenile, but it was a harbinger.) Regular readers of Benzene know of my extremely low opinion of Woodrow Wilson (and my correspondingly high opinion of his successor, Harding). I know it's more complicated than that, but I tend to blame the bungling of World War I on Wilson.

(I also believe, by the way, that Woodrow Wilson's is the presidential career that our current president's most resembles. Callimachus is in accord with me on this point, though his general opinion of both presidents is not nearly as low as mine. I'm not certain, but I think he believes their motives and ideals were sound but they just bungled the pursuits of them. Also, he probably doesn't suspect Wilson knowingly allowing the Lusitania to be sunk, and even if he does he's probably never even thought about that being another parallel.)

Our superficial American history -- by which I really mean American historical myth -- portrays our involvement in World War I as a simple success: The good guys were losing, we joined them, and thanks to our boys the good guys won. Happy ending. And if World War II came along not long after, it's only because the bad guys needed a second whupping so we had to do it again.

This is really a post-World-War-II view of World War I. Between the wars, when the Great War was a fresher memory, things were much more ambiguous. It was widely understood that the peace was bungled and the new war would result from that. Maybe it's my personal animus that makes me want to blame it all on Woodrow Wilson. It certainly was a large contributing factor that he induced Germany's surrender with his promise of peace without victory only to follow -- whether out of deceit or incompetence, I'm not sure -- by acquiescing in the punishing occupation. But I have to admit that Wilson can't take all the blame.

I've quoted Winston Churchill on the Great War before, and I'll do it again. This is him in 1936, in an interview for an American newspaper:

Churchill's view of American intervention in Europe was not uncommon in the 1930s, but even more it illustrates why we rarely hear opinions like that now: It was necessary to reinvent our history after 1939. When Britain went to war again with Germany for round two, she desperately wanted American help again. When someone (a proto-blogger, no doubt) inconveniently found Churchill's interview from a decade earlier and quoted his opinion back at him, Churchill of course disclaimed having ever said any such thing. (And when the publisher refused to "confess" to having fabricated it, he was indicted by the U.S. government under the latest version of the Sedition Act. Charges were eventually dropped.)

America's retrospective view of its involvement in World War I is clouded by its involvement in World War II. It's hard to make the case that one was right and the other was wrong. If the Germans were bad guys who must be stopped in the 1940s, how could they have been any better in the 1910s? That our involvement with them in the first round had a lot to do with causing them to become so bad later on is rather too fine a point to make.

This misperception causes people to draw the wrong conclusions from history's lessons. How often we hear of Neville Chamberlain's failure to secure peace after acquiescing to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Hitler went on to attack Poland anyway, so the lesson -- so they say -- is that "appeasement" doesn't work. Time after time this lesson is applied to some other troubled land as a defense of continued occupation and a warning that giving an inch will lead to disaster. But it's only by turning a blind eye to the realities of the Versailles treaty, and the utter falseness of Wilson's promises of self-determination and plebiscites, that we miss the real lesson of the Sudetenland: that a region full of Germans with a thoroughly German culture and history should have never been attached to Czechoslovakia in the first place. How does that lesson apply today -- in Kosovo, in Darfur, in the West Bank, in southern Thailand?

But now I'm digressing again, just as I was finally closing in on the present book, though only very obliquely. Because of the shadow World War II casts over World War I, I like reading books that were written before the first and after the other. I'm less informed about the Versailles treaty than I'd like to be. I distinctly recall that, when reading Paul Johnson's Modern Times (about 12 years ago, I think), I was completely surprised by some revelations about Europe in the 1920s. (Poland an aggressive nation? Poland?) But how much better to learn about it from a book written before 1939.

If I were to go looking for such a book, I surely wouldn't have chosen this one, but I happened upon it at one of those library surplus book sales, so I picked it up. Francesco Nitti -- not to be confused with a namesake who was one of Al Capone's cronies -- was one of several ineffectual Italian prime ministers who rotated in and out of office during the period (before, during, and after the War) between Giolitti at his prime and Mussolini. (I count the final government of past-his-prime Giolitti among the rotators, by the way.)

While his gangster namesake was nicknamed "the Enforcer", this Nitti was known as "the Accountant", and it wasn't meant as a compliment. Before his career in politics, Nitti was a professor of economics. For an Italian politician, he held views that were remarkably unromantic. Ultimately, he said, the reason for Italy's sorry state was simply that Italians were consuming more than they were producing. The answer, then, was not to recapture the Italian soul or to conquer North Africa, but simply to work more and spend less. That message was about as appealing to the public then as it is now. Nitti was in office for about seven months, and I get the impression he lasted that long largely because no one could agree on anyone else for the job.

Politically, he was somewhere toward the left of the political spectrum of the day. Many of his programs were what we would call socialist today, but he opposed Italy's Soviet-friendly socialist party. Nitti's disapproval of the Soviet system was pragmatic: He simply saw it as a failure. One of his proudest boasts of his term as prime minister is that rather than suppress Italy's budding socialists, as some recommended, he sponsored their leaders on a tour to Russia so that they could see for themselves what a disastrous state it was in.

As near as I can tell (it's not entirely clear from the prefatory material) The Wreck of Europe is a slightly revised second edition of Nitti's earlier Europe Without Peace (1920), bundled up with some appendixes and a new name. The former is just the sort of book you might expect from a retired national leader today -- partly an effort to tell his side of the story and partly a warning about what he thinks needs to be done now. As the title suggests, Nitti thinks the armistice is a failure. Europe is essentially still at war, except that Germany is now under foreign occupation. The occupation was economically unsound (France had a higher military budget after the armistice than before) and thus doomed to collapse. Nitti wasn't the first to say this -- he mentions Keynes a few times -- but he was one of the first prominent voices.

Nitti's style has a sort of blunt but sophisticated arrogance about it. Compared to today's writing, his is very polite, but there's no mistaking when he thinks someone is just stupid. With only a few exceptions (notably Kaiser Wilhelm; a reference to his "insolent fatuity" probably sounds less stilted in the original Italian) he doesn't directly insult. Often he doesn't name names at all, but it's pretty clear that there are plenty of Italian and French politicians who frustrated him with their lack of a clue. On the other hand, when he thinks someone is smart, he's generous with his praise. Nitti positively gushes about British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. One rarely goes more than a couple of pages without some evidence of Nitti's man-crush on Lloyd George. (This made me want to read whatever, if anything, Lloyd George wrote on the subject.)

Although he doesn't dwell on it, Nitti seems especially frustrated that he was forced out of office just before the Spa Conference took place. He had been instrumental in setting up the conference, and it was his intention, with his ally Lloyd George, to force a reconsideration of the reparations terms of the armistice in order to try to save Germany from the inevitable bankruptcy that would drag down all of Europe. Without Italian support, Britain was unable to push any serious reform. Nitti seems to regard this as a personal failure, and at time it feels like the book is his apology (in both senses of the word) for failing to avert the catastrophe.

I know I haven't made Nitti sound particularly appealing, and perhaps to many readers he wouldn't be. He's a bit of a nag, and more than a little pompous. Still, as a fellow accountant who regularly preaches that saving more and spending less is a higher priority than 90% of the day's political crises, I find him rather likable. But one aspect of his writing that stands out as very ugly is his racism. It takes one by surprise. He'll be going along, detailing how the French-dominated plutocracy is ruining Europe for the sake of profits for multinational corporate interests (plus ça change...). Then he'll mention how the soldiers employed by the French are of African descent, and suddenly his voice becomes bitter and venomous, as if of all the hardships imposed upon the German people, the worst is the indignity of being policed by men of an inferior race.

I briefly wondered if one might find here a clue to Italy's later sympathy with Nazi Germany, but after some consideration I don't think so. (One does find that clue, however, in a section near the end where Nitti outlines how by favoring the interests of the reborn and newborn states of eastern Europe, the Entente has abandoned Italy.) I have to remind myself that Nitti's racism was the norm of the day in all countries of the West, and the only thing unusual about him is that he wrote a book that I happened to read. Like many Italian politicians, Nitti was ambivalent about young Mussolini, but he was never a fascist, and during the war he was imprisoned by the Nazis.

I was particularly attuned to his two uses of the word "Aryan", hoping to get a sense of what the term signified to him in the early 1920s. He first uses it in context of Georgia (the Caucausus one), whose people he calls an "Aryan people". "Aryan" was a linguistic term before it became a racial one (though the Georgian language is surely not Aryan). The second time he uses the word, it's in the context of an aside about etymology, where he uses "Aryan tongues" to mean what we would call Indo-European languages.

I can't decode the internal hierarchy of Nitti's racism. It's clear enough that he considers white folks to black, but there are plenty of distinctions among the white European groups. As you might expect, the Germans are among the noblest of races. Whatever "Aryan" means to him, it's not the test. To my great surprise, he admires the decidedly un-Aryan Magyars (Hungarians) as a noble people, in contrast to the base Czechs and Poles. Go figure.

I haven't quoted much, so here's a paragraph I like. He's speaking of Russia, but it might just as easily be Germany. The Russian monarchy had only recently been toppled in revolution, remember, and the Entente was still actively trying to restore some sort of "legitimate" government to take its place. Nitti, ever the economist, thinks the Entente is interested primarily for the sake of international creditors, and ponders the significance of obliging the Russian people to assume the debts accrued in their name.

Where Nitti, out of office, professes to speak for any Italian government, one wonders if this statement is more a prescription than a description. Still, it's an interesting question, and still relevant today. How many Third-World nations, beholden to the World Bank, might be considered "insolvent debtors"?

Nitti is prescient. He's writing in 1922, long before Hitler or Mussolini came to power -- the fascisti get an incidental mention as a fringe group whose existence is evidence of national discontent -- even before hyperinflation was really out of hand, but already he sees where Europe could be heading:

Nitti does not offer this as a prediction, merely a warning of what might happen if Europe does not come to its senses and start following the path that he and others prescribe. He ends the book on a hopeful note, confident that reason will prevail and Europe will avoid disaster.

He was wrong.

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