7.11: Chapter Summary and Key Terms

Post-War Order and the Seeds of Disorder

In 1922 the French poet, essayist, and philosopher Paul Valery reflected on the feelings of unease that still clung to the post-war world:

The storm has died away, and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared, we are almost destroyed by what has been destroyed; we do not know what will be born, and we fear the future, not without reason. We hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely more precise than our hopes; we confess that the charm of life is behind us, abundance is behind us, but doubt and disorder are in us and with us.

While more eloquently expressed than most, Valery’s feelings of anxiety were shared by many of his contemporaries who found it harder to believe than ever before that history had a trajectory, that it was leading to something better. The hope that the war’s end would mean a return to the heady days of early summer 1914 – when European elites could sleep soundly, assured that their civilization represented an unprecedented engine of progress and order – had been dashed. 

The world needed to be remade. But rather than responding to the calamity of industrialized global warfare with an honest assessment of the failures of the modern world, the victor nations instead decided to tinker around the edges. Far from renouncing nationalism, imperialism, racial hierarchy, and competitive industrial capitalism that had led to the complete breakdown of the pre-war order, the treaties and institutions that emerged in the wake of the First World War embedded them all deeper into the system. In place of the multiethnic empires that had collapsed due to revolution or defeat on the battlefield, the plan was to shepherd the rise of new, more coherent, and rational nation-states based around populations that shared ethnic and linguistic identities. Doing so required ignoring the actual complexity of such identities and the fact that such complexity was one of the key sources of tension in the pre-war Balkans. Thus, Woodrow Wilson’s famed “Fourteen Points” referenced the existence of “clearly recognizable” and “historically established…lines of allegiance and nationality.” In doing so he promoted the idea that the nation represented the natural expression of an ethnic community rather than a recent and, given the recent war, fatally flawed invention of the 19th century. 

Race and Imperialism

Similarly, race and imperialism continued to influence the post-war world. As we saw earlier, Woodrow Wilson became a hero to many colonized people through his call for self-determination. Yet, those who put their hopes in Wilson were disappointed when the post-war settlements continued to deny them a voice. As a result, anticolonial protests erupted in China, Korea, India, and Egypt in the Spring of 1919 when it became clear that the Treaty of Versailles would not extend self-determination to people like themselves. Mao Zedong may have pictured Wilson as a helpless rube among the “thieves of Versailles” (“poor Wilson…”), but there is no reason to assume that the continuation of empire, the granting of self-determination to formerly subject peoples in Europe and not elsewhere, and the creation of Mandates represent a failure of Wilson’s vision. He was an avowed white supremacist and one of his closest allies at Versailles was the Prime Minister of South Africa Jan Smuts who just before the war had declared in a public speech the vital need to preserve, “white supremacy on this planet.” Rather than a failure to achieve political ideals then, we should see the post-war settlement as the realization of a different set of ideals. For Wilson, Smuts, and many others creating and maintaining world order required the continuation of racial hierarchy. In their minds, consent of the governed was all well and good for some, but not for “racially backward” peoples who were unsuited for democracy. 

This unwillingness to recognize the voices of the world’s subject peoples had consequences. Prior to the First World War, colonial nationalism tended to center on Western-educated elites who, even in their opposition to imperialism and racism, continued to put their faith in the liberal world order to produce incremental progress. By refusing to address the issues of imperialism and racial hierarchy and, in fact, further entrenching them, the post-war settlement put such elites in an awkward situation. Some sacrificed their credibility by clinging to their belief in Western liberalism. Japanese liberals, for instance, who argued that the best path forward for Japan was to win acceptance into the Western-dominated international order would be further undermined in the 1920s by the establishment or continuation of racist immigration policies like "White Australia" and the 1924 Immigration Act in the U.S. Anti-immigrant sentiments, especially towards southern and eastern Europeans, swept across the US after World War I. The US government enacted the National Origins Act, a component of the Immigration Act of 1924, to set immigration quotas for each European nation and greatly reduce the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States. Figure 7.11.1 is a political cartoon that depicts this anti-immigrant sentiment. The caption at the top reads, "Europe, take notice. This is not a dumping ground. Signed Uncle Sam."  In the cartoon, Uncle Sam is making sure that European immigrants and undesirables are not dumped in the USA. 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Political cartoon from the Ku Klux Klan newspaper Fiery Cross, May 1924," Hoosier State Chronicles, in the Public Domain.

As the legitimacy of  Western-style liberalism faded, Japanese politics would increasingly come to be dominated by those promoting ultra-nationalist militarism, culminating in military rule after 1930. Other figures, though, responded to the war years by renouncing old beliefs and embracing a new vision. In India, Mohandas Gandhi had once been “a staunch loyalist and co-operator,” with the British Empire based on the belief that in service to it, he could “gain a status of full equality in the Empire of my countrymen.” Having experienced and witnessed years of repressive tactics, discrimination, and racial arrogance on the part of “Englishmen and their Indian associates,” by 1919 Gandhi had become the most prominent anti-colonial figure in India. Through his efforts, Indian nationalism was transformed from a debating club made up of Western-educated lawyers into a mass movement centered on Gandhi’s distinct program of nonviolent civil disobedience. As a demonstration of how far he had come from his earlier pro-imperial stance when he was arrested in 1922 on the charge of “promoting disaffection towards the Government established by law in India,” he proudly pled guilty stating: "Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law…I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. … In fact, I believe that I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in non-cooperation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” 

In China, Mao Zedong had spent the war years voraciously reading everything he could relating to Western political philosophy, economics, and science. He was convinced that the key to China’s salvation lay within these works. While already on the path towards radicalization by the war’s end, Mao was nevertheless presenting Woodrow Wilson as a sympathetic figure as late as Spring, 1919. Like many young Chinese, Mao’s political awakening came within the May 4th Movement that emerged in opposition to the Treaty of Versailles and its granting of Chinese territory to the Japanese. Over the next two years, he began drifting towards Marxism. It was the perfect doctrine to appeal to Chinese youths who were both certain that traditional Chinese culture was the source of the country’s backwardness and were suspicious of the West. In the words of one young Chinese intellectual, “Marxism was a Western heresy to use against the West.” Mao would become a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party in the Summer of 1921 and for the next 6 years served as the Party secretary in his home province of Hunan. While the Party’s top leadership tended to follow the lead of the Soviet Union in terms of activities and doctrine, Mao’s experience working with peasants in Hunan began to move him in a new direction, towards what would eventually be called Maoism. Writing to his superiors in 1927, Mao issued what turned out to be a prescient prediction of what was to come: “In a very short time … several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.” 

We began this chapter with W.E.B. Du Bois’ fiery words of denunciation of the entire Western project and we will end the chapter with Du Bois as well. Four years before penning those words, Du Bois had taken up his pen to write an editorial for the journal Crisis urging Black Americans to take up the cause of resisting “the menace of German militarism.” He wrote: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.” Controversial at the time, Du Bois would quickly regret ever writing it. Already by 1920, his disillusionment was total. Black service in the segregated U.S. army had not opened a path toward acceptance and equality and, even worse, the 1920s saw a resurgence of white supremacy marked by horrific domestic terrorism led by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Lynchings in this era were so numerous, in fact, that the practice was separately noted as proof of American barbarism by the Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao and the Japanese politician Okuma Shigenobu. So, when Du Bois reflected on the war and its consequences in an essay titled “The Souls of White Folk” he was not in a conciliatory mood:

What then is the dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to compare with the fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer…Is, then, this war the end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned…the despising and robbing of darker peoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of world war, – it is but the beginning!

The delusions that clouded the minds of so many did not affect Du Bois who saw as clearly as anyone that the post-war order was untenable. This was indeed not the end of world war. As we will see in the coming chapters, a new storm was about to break.

Key Terms

• The Balkans: A region of southeastern Europe that had once been ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Rivalries among the new nations there as well as older empires helped spark WWI
• Gavrilo Princip: Bosnian-Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie
• Western front: the theater of World War I involving mostly German armies versus the French and British armies. By the end of 1914, this front was made up of opposing trench lines stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
• Gallipoli: a peninsula on the European side of the Bosporus, about 200 miles (320 km) from the Ottoman capital in Istanbul. Site of an Ottoman defeat of a British invasion force in 1915
• The Armenian Genocide: Beginning in April 1915 this was an attempt by the Ottoman Empire to eliminate its Armenian population
• Force Noire: Literally “Black Forces”, an idea by the French general Charles Mangin to overcome France’s low population relative to Germany with an army made up of its colonial subjects
• Chinese Labor Corps (CLC): China was technically neutral during the war but did provide significant labor to the Allies under the auspices of the CLC. The 140,00 members of the CLC contributed to all aspects of the war effort and continued to provide labor for the French and British up to 1920.
• The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: After the October Revolution in Russia the new communist state signed the treaty to end their participation in the War. Ceded significant territories in the West to Germany and allowed the Germans to shift men and resources to the western front.
• Influenza Pandemic: The H1N1 variant that struck towards the end of the war and was spread globally as soldiers returned home after the peace. More people died during the pandemic than due to the fighting itself
• Racial equality clause: Clause that the Japanese delegation to Versailles proposed to be added to the charter of the League of Nations. Was ultimately rejected due to the efforts of the U.S. and Australian delegations
• Treaty of Versailles: The treaty that officially ended World War I. Signed in the town of Versailles, France in 1919
• Mandates: Under the new League of Nations, these would be areas of the former Ottoman and German empires placed under the stewardship of member nations (including France, Great Britain, Belgium, Australia, and South Africa). Generally understood to be a new form of colonialism
• Zionism: The movement to establish a Jewish homeland. Emerged in response to the continued prevalence of anti-semitism in Europe which convinced European Jews like Theodor Herzl that they would never be accepted as full citizens unless they had their own nation
• Red Summer: a series of race riots that occurred in the United States over the summer of 1919.