Chapter 15 - The Economic Consequences of the Peace and Nationalism: Revisiting John Maynard Keynes

Summary

Introduction

Eleven in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on November 11, 2018 marked 100 years since the end of World War I. Known as the “war to end all wars” by those who waged and wrote about it, the war demonstrated the foolishness of toxic nationalism harnessed to an unfettered nativist pride that resulted in the killing of a generation of young men. The war saw the deaths of 9 million combatants and 5 million civilians. Four empires collapsed—the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman—and cracks appeared in a fifth, the British, which would lead to its eventual demise 30 years later. The war ushered in economic crisis in Europe, the era of Soviet Communism and the arrival of the United States as a world power. It proved not to be the war to end all wars, but rather, with hindsight, the first installment of a world bloodbath separated by 20 years of economic and social turmoil. One hundred years seems an auspicious time to reconsider how the war ended, and what we might learn with regard to economics and peace from its ending and its aftermath.

In this chapter I consider John Maynard Keynes's (1883–1946) searing critique of the Paris Conference of 1919, and the conclusion of its work, the Treaty of Versailles. Given the current turn in Europe and the United States toward a populism and nativism, I pay particular attention to Keynes conception of nationalism as a cause of the war and as an unmistakable element in “the peace.”

I begin with an observation: perhaps paradoxically, those of us who work in the philosophy of peace need to understand war, its preemptions and its causes and its nature and its ending, in order to truly understand peace. Of the many wars of humanity, I have always had a morbid fascination with World War I. My introduction to it came as I listened to stories of the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign, in the then Ottoman Empire, while I sat as a young child on my grandfather's knee. Such were his accounts of derring-do that my impression of the Dardanelles was a glorious victory by British and Anzac forces who routed “Johnny Turk” and the “Bosch.” It was, of course, one of the many disasters of the war.