17 42 Causes and Prevention of War MIT poli sci dept Stephen Van Evera ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR I WORLD WAR II IN CONTEXT World War II was the greatest war in world history killing some 35 60 million people in an enormous global conflagration This grisly episode closely followed the most elaborate and hopeful effort ever made to design a peaceful world the 1919 Versailles peace Never before had world leaders sought so consciously to use their power to shape a peaceful world as they did in 1919 And never has the world seen such violence as it did in Versailles aftermath In contrast the peace that emerged in 1945 was undesigned yet proved far more durable What does this say of our capacity to engineer a more peaceful world 1 II WAR AND REMEMBRANCE HOW ILLUSIONS REPLACED REALITY IN EUROPE S MEMORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR See Holger Herwig Clio Deceived assigned Sometimes losers write history They did here and sold this history to the winners The world paid dearly for the German authored Great Social Science Experiment of 1898 1918 The experiment destroyed the laboratory But then someone falsified the lab notes III A NATIONAL POLICIES AND IDEAS Germany 1 Germans practiced creative history The German government secretly organized a public relations campaign run from a secret office the kriegsschuldreferat to convince Germans and the world of German innocence and others guilt for World War I As a result Weimar era 1920 s German schools and scholars told and believed lies about a The origins of WWI The Entente powers encircled Germany and instigated the war We were innocent victims b The causes and responsibility for Germany s defeat the Jews and the socialists did it not Ludendorff and the German superhawks Germany s blunders were not evaluated Those few scholars who did evaluate were persecuted c The harshness of the peace Versailles was Draconian In fact the allies demanded smaller reparations at Versailles than Prussia demanded and got from France in 1870 Moral drawn by Germany We need a bigger empire to be safe from our rapacious neighbors Instead of learning that a reach for lebensraum living space was dangerous indeed suicidal Germans learned that gaining lebensraum was essential 2 Germans first embraced Nazi like ideas 1920s then the Nazis themselves 1930s Was World War II really just a one man show Hitler did it No he had many willing helping hands a German neoconservative publishers 1890 1930 Their aim maintain the old oligarchy minimize democratization of ermany See a book by Gary D Stark Entrepreneurs of Ideology Neoconservative Publishers in Germany 1890 1933 1980 b German war cult literature 1920s e g Ernst J nger 1 A professional political scientist Woodrow Wilson was the chief architect of Versailles Not a high point for the field 2 3 B Nazi beliefs about international affairs a Germany is insecure especially Germany can be strangled by cutting off food imports b An empire is the answer Germany needs more territory because it needs an independent economy It especially needs new food producing lands c Germany can conquer an empire Why i Bandwagoning Hitler believed his avalanche theory ii Contempt for the Soviet Union Germans built the USSR but mere Jews run it now so We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down iii The invention of Blitzkrieg and Manstein s war plan This occurred late during 1939 1940 but Hitler seemed to foresee them or their equivalent 4 The German military buildup During the late 1930s Germany spent a far larger share of its GNP on the military than did Britain and France see attached Tables 30 32 from Paul Kennedy This gave Germany a large but temporary military advantage during 1938 1940 5 German antisemitism German society was bitten by antisemitism although less severely than some East European states Antisemitism was fostered by perennial Christian church teaching against the Jews It also assumed a racial caste in the late nineteenth century as social Darwinist ideas swept Europe Japan 1 Militarism appears in Japan The military comes to dominate Japanese national ideas about foreign affairs 1900 1941 2 Ideas the Japanese military believed and or purveyed a Japan is insecure and an empire is the answer i Others are hostile Japan embraced the myth of ABCD American British Chinese Dutch encirclement It spiralled with neighbors unaware that it provoked the hostility it faced ii These hostile powers could strangle Japan Specifically World War I shows that states can strangle each other by blockading their maritime trade as the Entente strangled Germany We could be next iii Japan can and must address this threat by seizing an empire Japanese believed that a Due to factors i and ii Japan needed an independent economy that could function without external trade b A wide empire could provide economic independence c The West is racist and won t ally with Japan so Japan can t secure itself by finding Western allies iv Japan can conquer an empire Seizing an empire is a feasible proposition a Bandwagon dynamics allow it With the Axis Alliance we can scare the US into accepting our expansion b The U S won t resist If we hit America hard it will not fight all out b A sugar coated self image Our empire is good for our fellow Asians and We Japanese are not aggressive After 1937 the Japanese press was forbidden to print articles that may give the impression that our foreign 3 C D policy is aggressive Japan s government absurdly named its barbaric empire the Greater East Asian Co Prosperity Sphere c Note the disintegrated character of Japanese ideas i The US is so aggressive that it will destroy us unless we act and so nice it will let us conquer Asia and will not respond fully if we attack them ii Control of economic industrial resources is so decisive in war that we must gain such control in a war against a state with 10 times Japan s net economic resources iii In World War I blockades strangled states hence we need an economically independent empire even a seaborne empire But WWI also showed that a seaborne empire could be strangled by an enemy with a superior navy like the USA iv Our economy requires empire to expand even though Japan s economy grew by leaps and bounds during 1871 1929 without one 3 Did Japan have alternatives What if Japan had accepted its island borders and sought security through alliances trusting the operation of the balance of power balance of threat to produce help from others if it were