All 2 entries tagged War

World War II: Hitler and Stalin, Guilt and Responsibility

Writing about web page http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL1655337

For Britain, World War II began 70 years ago today. On a personal note, today would also be the 71st wedding anniversary of my mother and father. They married on September 3, 1938; one year later, they heard Neville Chamberlain declare war on Germany. The war didn't stop them from believing in the future; by 1945 they had two baby girls, my older sisters. I'm thinking of them all as I write.

Who was to blame for World War II? This question is not the same as "What was to blame?" World War II had many deep causes. Ultimately, however, the decision for war is a political act, taken by human beings whom we can hold to account for their actions.

So, who was to blame:

• Germany?

In Europe, the guilty men were the leaders of Nazi Germany. Hitler's plan was to build a German Empire in the East, making Germany self-sufficient in food. Hitler intended to conquer, depopulate, and then resettle Russia and Ukraine. This plan, not yet worked in detail, was soon elaborated in parallel with, but somewhat in advance of the much better known plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. Like the "final solution," the Hungerplan was genocidal: it envisaged starving up to 30 million people of the European part of the Soviet Union to death. 

Between Germany and the Soviet Union lay Poland and Czechoslovakia; these states had to be destroyed to clear the path into Russia. The attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, in response to which Britain declared war on September 3, was a necessary step towards Hitler's wider goal. Others contributed to the timing of Hitler's decision and played into his hands in various ways. This is the context in which the behaviour of the British, French, Polish, and Soviet governments should be judged.

• Britain and France?

The worst thing for which the British and French were to blame was the Munich agreement of September 1938. By this agreement Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister, betrayed Czechoslovakia, their ally, by giving part of it away to Germany. They made themselves accessories before the fact of Hitler's crime. Correctly interpreting this as weakness, in March 1939 Hitler broke the agreement and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

• Poland?

Although not signatories to the Munich agreement, the Poles also played a small role. First, they refused Soviet offers to send troops to defend Czechoslovakia. They suspected Soviet motives; it was less than twenty years since the Red Army's last invasion. (And history after 1945 strongly suggests that their suspicions would have been correct.) Second, when it became clear that Czechoslovakia was up for grabs they grabbed their own slice, a Polish speaking region on their border. In this small way they became accessories after (not before) the fact of the crime. On the scale of guilt, however, it was very minor. Like the British and French, they acted out of weakness. The best way to understand the Polish leaders at this time is that they were both overplaying and trying vainly to improve their hand in a game they hadn't chosen to enter and couldn't win; it is also true that they were willing to do so at the expense of others.

• The Soviet Union?

The responsibility of the Soviet Union is more complex and wide-ranging. The Soviet government -- in other words Stalin who, by this time, was an unquestioned dictator --did several things, the sum of which was far worse than the Anglo-French collusion with Hitler at Munich. It is important that they all came after the Munich agreement. Until Munich, Stalin hoped to deter Hitler through "collective security" -- an agreement with Britain, France, and their allies Poland and Czechoslovakia, to contain Germany. The Munich agreement told Stalin that this was no longer an option. As his least bad remaining option, Stalin decided to collude with Hitler himself.

To the public, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (named after the Soviet and German foreign ministers) of August 1939 was simply an agreement between two countries not to attack each other. This in itself was no crime; Moscow had a similar pact with Tokyo that both sides upheld until August 1945. The crime of the pact was its secret clauses. Infamously, it dismembered Poland, which the Soviet Union had previously offered to defend, carving up that country with Germany, and creating the common Soviet-German border across which Hitler would attack less than two years later.

The pact was Hitler's green light to attack Poland, and determined the timing of today's anniversary. By agreeing to it, Stalin became a co-conspirator in Hitler's decision for war. At the same time it is clear that, even without any secret clauses, Hitler was ready to attack Poland anyway. Thus, Stalin made the Soviet Union an accessory to the crime before and after the fact, but he was not the prime mover in the major crime.

Stalin is directly to blame for many other crimes that followed directly from the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. The very worst of these was his decision to approve the mass shooting of some twenty thousand Polish officers whom the Red Army had taken prisoner. The officers killed in the Katyn woods were not just professional soldiers; they were the elite of Polish society, politics, and business. The only possible reason for the massacre was that Stalin had determined to prevent the reemergence of an independent Poland.

Just as Stalin gave Hitler permission to attack Poland, other clauses, with some later amendment, gave Stalin Hitler's permission to do what he liked around the Baltic. Thus the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact led directly to the destruction of the independent states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and to the "winter war" in which Stalin tried, at huge cost, to adjust the Soviet border with Finland. Like Poland, the three small Baltic republics suffered political and social decapitation through the imprisonment and deportation of their former elites.

The official Soviet justification of these measures -- at least, of those that were admitted -- was that Stalin was manoeuvring defensively from a position of weakness and was therefore, like the British, French, and Poles, not primarily to blame; through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he bought the Soviet Union time to prepare for an eventual war with Germany. On first hearing, this justification sounds a little like what I said about Poland: Stalin was trying to improve his hand in a game he had not chosen to play. I take it half seriously. Stalin feared Hitler, realized that war was almost inevitable, and played for time, although he went on to develop many illusions about the likely timing of war and the margin for avoiding it. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact did buy time, and he did use the time to prepare.

There are big differences from Poland, however. One is that the Soviet Union was militarily much stronger than Poland and had much more freedom of action. This must undermine Stalin's excuses for behaving badly. Yet Stalin behaved far, far worse than Poland ever did. The annexations, deportations, and mass killings that he authorized did not buy time or friends, and had little or no justification as preparations for war. On the contrary they caused or intensified anti-Russian feeling in the borderlands that persists to this day. The Katyn massacre had nothing to do with defendng against Germany and everything to do with completing the destruction of Polish independence. One thing to remember about Stalin is that it suited him to have tension on his borders, because this played well with the narrative of encirclement that he used to justify his own rule and the repressions that secured it. 

Stalin's decisions had profound effects on the timing of World War II and the course that it followed. But they did not cause the war. The war's trajectory was determined first and foremost by the character and aims of the nationalist socialist dictatorship in Berlin. If Germany had been governed by liberals, socialists, or traditional conservatives in the 1930s, there would not have been a war in the heart of Europe. Without Germany at war, there would still have been an Italian war in North Africa and a Japanese war in China, but neither the Japanese nor the Italians would have been brave enough on their own to start wars against Britain or America in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

It is true that in 1941 Nazi propagandists tried to justify the German attack on the Soviet Union as a defensive reaction to Soviet preparations for an attack on Germany. This explanation. built on speculation at a time when all the Soviet documents were secret, continues to find traction today in some quarters, but the opening of the Soviet archives has found no more hard evidence for it than there was before.

• Italy? Japan?

Italy was also involved, not only as a signatory at Munich but as an empire-builder around the Mediterrranean. And Japan; don't forget that World War II began in Asia in July 1937 when Japan opened full-scale hostilities against China. Mussolini and the Japanese leaders share the guilt for the war.

• Deeper causes?

When we see several countries bent on the same course, we have to suppose that there might be common factors at work, and these factors might go deeper than any one person's calculations. These deeper factors must include the tensions and imbalances left over from World War I, and the devastating impact of the Great Depression. I've written elsewherethat in the long run the main cost of the Great Depresson was not economic but political, in the way it opened up European politics to dictatorships and aggressive warfare.

Does this reduce the guilt of the individual leaders? I don't think so. A criminal gang that exploits the devastation of a natural disaster to loot and kill is still a gang of criminals.

The idea that World War II had underlying causes is sometimes used to shift the focus away from Germany to Russia. Above, I suggested, "No Nazis -- no World War II." A counter-argument is "No Bolsheviks -- no Nazis." The Soviet Union was a frightening neighbour for both Poland and Germany. Before Hitler came to power, the Bolshevik record of government already included class warfare, mass killings, and concentration camps. Between 1918 and 1924 the Bolsheviks had incited several armed insurrections in Germany. The Red Army had invaded Poland as recently as 1920. This record certainly helped Hitler's racial politics and plans for expansion to play well with the German public. It also undermined any Polish inclination to a common front with the Soviet Union against Germany. 

At the same time, Germany did not attack the Soviet Union to restore democratic government or property rights to the Russians or anyone else. Hitler did not target only communist countries, nor did he spare Poland and Czechoslovakia on the grounds that they did not have Bolshevik regimes. His war in the East was a grab for land and food, regardless of who would be displaced. Saying that Bolshevism was responsible for this has more than a whiff of blaming the victim for the crime. The Bolsheviks should have been held to account for many crimes of their own, but not this one.

• How does Russia see Stalin today?

The major crime was the world war itself. The primary guilt for it belonged to leaders in Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome. The war unfolded through many stages; at various times Hitler won cooperation from London, Paris, Warsaw, and Moscow. Those who colluded with him did so sometimes under duress, sometimes to play for time. In retrospect this might look weak or foolish, but those who did it did so to avoid war, not to cause it.

Sometimes it was worse than that. On occasion, Hitler's allies of convenience worked with him opportunistically, because it suited their other goals. This applied more than anyone to Stalin, who exploited his temporary truce with Hitler between 1939 and 1941 not only to build up defenses but also to weaken or destroy the previously independent states on his borders. In the course of this the Soviet Union committed crimes on its own account, that did not flow from Germany's crimes.

In spirit, my apportioning of responsibilities for World War II may not be that different from the account offered by Vladimir Putin to the Polesat ceremonies marking the anniversary of the German invasion on September 1. For example, Putin condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact -- although only as a "mistake." He also offered a joint Russian-Polish commission to establish the facts of what happened at Katyn, although the facts are already well documented. Apart from that, what Putin said in Poland is not the problem.

The problem with Russia's present-day administration is not what it says abroad, but what it says at home. To the Russian public President Medevev has declared, in remarks that were notably anti-Polish and anti-European, there can be no debate over

who started the war, which country killed people, and which country saved people, millions of people, and which country, ultimately, saved Europe.

And for professional historians in Russia the message of the Presidential decree of May 15 this year, directed against "attempts to falsify history to the detriment of the interests of Russia," is again that on certain matters debate is to be ruled out -- by law if necessary.

The Soviet Union, led by Stalin, did not cause the war, but everything else in Medvedev's formulation is highly debatable. The Soviet Union certainly killed people in very large numbers for purposes that ought to be condemned. For Poland, Katyn was a national tragedy. It is true that the Soviet Union "saved Europe" from German domination, and "saved people, millions of people" from destruction. But Stalin did this primarily to save himself; it is not clear that he deserves their thanks for that.

As for the people that the Soviet Union saved most directly, its own people and the citizens of the countries that the Red Army "liberated," it saved them in order to subjugate them, and it subsequently killed more than a few of them in repressing their freedom and independence.

Stalin's legacy is complex. It is in Russia itself that well-informed debate, free of government pressure and "patriotic" restraints, is most needed. When polled, for example, most Russians approve of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but do not know that the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland under its provisions.

Meanwhile, I'll stop to think for a moment about Roger and Betty Harrison, married under the gathering stormclouds of September 3, 1938, and their war babies.

Mark Harrison : 03 Sep 2009 08:37 |  Tags: History Russia Stalin War |  Comments (10) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

War and the Great Recession: Some Thoughts

A while back, an American journalist wrote to me:

We ... are trying to determine how big of a war we would need to have in order to drive the US out of this recession.  It is common belief that WWII was a major factor in invigorating US economy which had been decimated during the Great Depression.  I was wondering if it would be possible to make a projected estimate for our current situation using that era as a model. 

This question got me thinking and I put quite a lot of effort into some answers, which they did not use. So, I thought I would update them and share them here.

Basically, the question sees the problem back to front and upside down. The problem we should be thinking about today is not how to start a war that can help pull us out of recession. The real problem is that, if we don't pull ourselves and others out of recession fairly rapidly by peaceful means, we will face growing risks of war -- and that could end in a catastrophe for everyone.

So, it is a trick question. Sometimes, however, it is interesting to take trick questions at face value and work out what is wrong with them by seeing where they lead. This is what I did.

• Is the situation of the U.S. economy today comparable with the Great Depression?

At the moment, the situation of the U.S. economy over the next year or two looks bad compared with the recent past, but it is still way better than it was in the 1930s. Economists often work in terms of what is called the "output gap," the proportion of potential output that is unrealized because there is not enough demand in the economy. The Congressional Budget Office currently expects the output gap over the next two years to average almost 7 percent.

There are various ways of calculating the output gap of the U.S. economy before World War II, and it varied a lot from year to year, but any reasonable estimate would be far above 7 percent. At the bottom of the depression, in 1932, the gap was probably around one third. At the end of the first recovery, in 1937, around one fifth of potential output was still not being realized, and in 1938 and 1939 the output gap widened again. It had got back to relatively normal levels by 1941.

So the good news is that, on present forecasts, the fiscal stimulus that is required to fix the U.S. economy is much less than was called for in the 1930s. What everyone should worry about, though, is that if things play out badly in the world as a whole there is plenty of scope for present forecasts to prove optimistic.

• What size of war would be required to provide an equivalent fiscal stimulus?

U.S. GDP is currently around $15 trillion a year, and so an output gap of 7 percent means about $1 trillion a year of lost production. Since, in the U.S. economy, an extra dollar of public spending should give rise to about an extra $1.50 of total (public plus private) spending, a stimulus of around $700 billion a year would be needed to stimulate $1 trillion a year of extra output.

As far as I am aware from press reports and so on, the total U.S. budgetary appropriation for the global war on terror (Afghanistan, Iraq, and the protection of U.S. embassies abroad) has reached around $1 trillion in total, spread over the entire period from 9/11 to the present. I am not certain what the annual cost is currently, and I believe that not all of it is explicitly funded (i.e., the GWOT has been partly funded by the Defense Department taking resources from elsewhere.) For the sake of argument, suppose the net budgetary cost of the GWOT has recently been of the order of $200 to 250 billion a year. To provide a stimulus of $700 billion a year, therefore, the required war would have to be the equivalent of three additional global wars on terror, waged on the scale of the recent past.

How does that compare with the fiscal stimulus package that went through Congress recently? The package is $700 billion spread over two years, and much of it is tax cuts rather than public spending, which will have a lesser impact because tax cuts can be saved rather than spent privately. It is one half or one third of the stimulus that would halt the slide, so it runs the risk of being too little, too late.

One reason for the modest size of the package is that President Obama is restrained by conservative opponents of big government in Congress. I suppose someone could argue that a war might help to overcome such constraints. I think that would be a bad argument. It amounts to saying that we should whip up nationalism in order to stigmatize the people we disagree with as unpatriotic and crush them. That is not unheard of, but it does not appeal to me.

• How good for the U.S. economy would it be to have another war?

History should make us very skeptical. Here are five reasons. First, it is true only in small part that World War II pulled the U.S. out of the depression. In fact, 1940 was the first year after 1919 when U.S. military spending rose above 2 percent of the national income. The fiscal stimulus from New Deal spending was also modest. The main driver of the U.S. recovery up to 1940 was private investment. If World War II had not broken out, this natural recovery process would have continued.

Second, it is true that the wartime period saw a huge further increase in the total output of the U.S. economy. In the three years from 1941 to 1944 the GDP rose by about two thirds. The main element in this was Federal outlays on national defense that brought about a vast increase in the mass production of standardized machinery and equipment for combat and transportation. Because of mobilization and wartime controls, patriotic national feeling, and mass production and the associated efficiency gains, the U.S. economy could temporarily produce far above peacetime norms -- effectively, there was a negative output gap. But the extra output did not make anyone better off; it was mainly in the form of ships, planes, and guns that achieved victory, not higher living standards.

After the war, most of the extra output disappeared and the economy fell back, not towards depression, just towards normal peacetime operation. So the wartime "production miracle" did not bring about lasting gains. The U.S. economy was much more prosperous after 1945 than before 1941, but this was not because of the war. It was because of the return to normal working combined with underlying productivity advances that had continued through the Great Depression, but were temporarily overwhelmed by the lack of demand.

Third, it is true that millions of U.S. citizens had a good war, economically speaking. Many people would previously have expected to live out their lives in poverty in the South and Mid-West. They moved to the industrialized, urbanized North and found new lives there. Many young men gained new skills and experiences by joining the military and fighting or supporting the war effort overseas. You might ask whether there were cheaper ways of achieving the same goals without having to fight a war. I don't mean that American involvement in that particular war was wrong; it was clearly in America's own national interest. But if you want to achieve a more mobile, equal society, and war is not forced upon you, there are cheaper ways.

Fourth, it needs to be said out loud that war is costly to society in terms of death and disability. I looked up what Michael Edelstein has to say in his chapter on “War and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3 (published in 2000), on pages 342 and 349. He measures the budgetary cost of war as the cost of defense above normal peacetime operations, and the social cost is the capitalized value of lost earnings of the killed and injured. Everything is in constant 1982 prices. Edelstein’s estimates are: WW1, budgetary cost $378 billion and social cost $25 billion, WW2 $2,460 billion and $202 billion, Korea $206 billion and $27 billion, and Vietnam $313 billion and $46 billion.

You can see a couple of things. One is that, on this measure, the social costs were relatively small. Why? Mainly because the United States could fight all these wars at a distance against much less well equipped enemies. In World War II, U.S. battle deaths in Europe and the Pacific were around 350,000. In contrast, Red Army battle deaths on the Eastern Front were around 8.7 million.

Another thing is that, on the same figures, the ratio of social to budgetary costs rose continually from war to war. As a share of the combined total, the human costs were around 6% in WW1 rising to 12% for Vietnam. Why? I think, mainly because there was rising productivity, so human life got relatively more expensive. In their book on the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes come up with various figures but their “realistic moderate” scenario (The Three Trillion Dollar War, published in 2007, page 112) suggests about 12% for social costs as a share of the total of budgetary plus social costs combined. (Stiglitz and Bilmes include items of veterans’ welfare costs that Edelstein I think does not, but these appear on both the budgetary and social sides of the balance.)

What does this mean? Well, if you want $700 billion a year of fiscal stimulus through going to war, you’d better factor in that, for every year at war, the U.S. economy will also lose a future income stream with a capitalized value of $100 billion, because of troops killed and injured. That does not seem like a good idea.

Fifth, a war today would bring huge costs in further disruption of the international economy. In 1941 international trade was a small fraction of its pre-1913 volume, so there was little to lose. The world today is much more interdependent than it was in the 1930s. Stiglitz has pointed up the billions of dollars lost to the U.S. economy because the war in Iraq triggered higher oil prices. You need to factor that in too.

Maybe I should finish this bit by quoting Edelstein again (on page 349):

It is absurd to think that the methods and perspectives of economic history come anywhere near to comprehending the meaning of human losses from war. We are far better served by the speeches and letters of Lincoln or the poetry of Sassoon, Brooke, Owen, Graves, and Seager.

OK, but where does this leave us?

I have two conclusions. One is that the only good reason to have a war would be to defeat an enemy. If our leaders want to make our economy work better in everyone's interests, and if they have legitimate instruments to achieve this, and if such improvements would also be an accidental by-product of a war, then that is not an argument for a war. It is an argument for adopting peaceful ways to achieve these things that carry democratic consent and do not also involve the irreversible losses and persistent collateral damage that a war would bring.

My other conclusion is that the original question ("how big of a war we would need to have in order to drive the US out of this recession?") confuses the problem for the solution. It's true that the Great Depression ended in the most terrible war the world has seen. But it did not end because of the war; the depression would have come to an end anyway. In fact, the war curtailed the natural recovery process.

But why did the war come about? World War II happened for a number of reasons, but one of them was the great powers' failure to avert the Great Depression in the first place, and rapidly to mitigate it once it came along. Many of the ingredients for violent conflict were there, but until the Great Depression they lacked a spark. Before 1929, was Germany evolving gradually towards a normal parliamentary democracy? Yes. Would Hitler have come to power without 30% unemployment in Germany in 1932? Probably not.

Eurasia today, from the Baltic to the China Sea, has many of the ingredients for violent nationalism. Scattered around that vast landmass, there is more than enough petrol and a good supply of oil-soaked rags. Meeting in London today, the G20 has the power to coordinate an effective international response to the global economic calamity that threatens us. If they fail, it is not just an economic calamity that we should fear; the world's leaders are playing with matches.

Mark Harrison : 02 Apr 2009 13:08 |  Tags: G20 Globalization Politics Recession War |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem