"Weimar and Russia" forum Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley: Currents

Harold James "In Weimar Germany, a strong current of thought suggestted that something happened at home, not on the battlefield, that destroyed Germany as a great power. Russians are facing exactly the same kind of problem, and some are offering the same kind of analysis, that the Soviet Union disintegrated not because of any external failure, but because of internal failure."

Harold James is Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1924-1933, published by Oxford University Press. His current project is on international monetary cooperation since Bretton Woods.

he beginning of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has a famous analysis that happy families resemble each other, but unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way. It seems to me that this is not a bad starting point for this comparison between Russia today and Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Comparisons arise not because of the domestic economic and social situations, which are very different, but because both Germany in the 1920s and Russia today are major players in the international system. This is why a great number of us worry so much about the situation of these distressed countries. They are crippled great powers, not fully functioning great powers; great powers who have to search for explanations as to why they stopped being effective.

n Weimar Germany, a strong current of thought suggested that Germany had not been legitimately defeated in the First World War, that there had been some kind of trick, some kind of manipulation. Something happened at home, not on the battlefield, that had destroyed Germany as a great power. The makers of the Weimar Republic themselves helped to encourage this image. The first president of the Weimar Republic, the socialist Friederich Ebert, greeted troops back from the front in Berlin at the end of 1918 by saying that he welcomed people undefeated on the battlefield, and out of this came a "stab-in-the-back" theory that poisoned and undermined the political stability of the new republic.

ussians are facing exactly the same kind of problem, and some are offering the same kind of analysis, that somehow the Soviet Union disintegrated, but it didn't disintegrate because of any external failure. It disintegrated because of internal enemies: maybe Gorbachev and the communist reformers, maybe Yeltsin and his allies, or maybe ethnic groups, international finance, or the Jews. Some of the people held responsible in the case of the Weimar discussion are also blamed for the disintegration of Soviet power. It is irrational, but those are the myths that will circulate and will continue to circulate in Russian politics. The result of this is that both Germany in the twenties and Russia today pose a security threat to their neighbors.

ermany as a result of the Treaty of Versailles was reduced in territorial size. Most German politicians in the 1920s came to accept the western border as revised by the Treaty of Versailles. They accepted the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to France. Most Germans, however, from the democratic parties to the far right, never accepted the territorial revisions of Versailles in the east. They didn't accept the loss of Upper Silesia, the corridor connecting the new Polish state to the sea. Those areas remained a perpetual obstacle in the revisionist campaign to change the status of Germany in the world. It was not just the extreme nationalists who thought this; the man who was foreign minister in the most successful and happiest phases of the Weimar Republic, Gustav Stresemann, was an ardent revisionist when it came to Germany's eastern frontier. He only waited and looked for the appropriate time to amend that frontier. I don't want to push the analogy too far, but it seems to me that there are similarities in the situation of Russia within the whole former Soviet territories. Many Russians find it difficult to accept that their new neighbors, the former Soviet republics, will be viable economic, political, or social entities. They point to higher rates of inflation and economic distress in the big republics like in Ukraine or Belarus as proof that these states are not fundamentally viable. Some analysts suggest that a consensus exists within modern Russia, from the liberals, the group around Gaida, to Zhirinovsky on the right, that the former Soviet republics are incapable of functioning as independent states. What kind of policy prescriptions will flow out of this situation?

n the 1920s and the 1930s, one of the concepts that fatally undermined the ability of the community of nations to deliver collective security was that a fundamental wrong had been done at Versailles. There was a certain sympathy, more extensive perhaps in Britain than in France, but powerful and persuasive, that Germany had been wronged at Versailles, and that some measure of revision was appropriate. Consequently, the initial German steps of remilitarization of the Rhineland, of the taking of the Sudetenland, were not challenged by military action. Far from it: the taking of the Sudetenland was agreed at an international conference in September of 1938 at Munich. If we think what lessons we might learn from this as an international community, I believe we should maintain that international frontiers are international frontiers, whether they are between former Soviet republics or whether they are outside that sphere of political action.

econdly, and this is an area that Gerald Feldman has also talked about, so I don't want to devote quite so much time to it, is the question of the link of these distressed but still potent former great powers to the international economic order. How can economic stabilization be achieved in these cases? In Weimar Germany, the settlement that was achieved at the end of the German hyperinflation in 1923-24, the settlement that was associated with the Dawes plan, with the flow of foreign money into Germany after the Dawes loan, was not a satisfactory or an adequate solutions to the problem. Why? Well, to start with, the rescue operation of Germany was conducted in too personalized a way. Between 1923 and 1924, in the crucial months of the stabilization, the agreement on the basis of stabilization was worked out, informally at first, by a long series of negotiations and discussions among the central bank governors of the world. In particular, the governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, conceived an instant sympathy and confidence for the new president of the German central bank, the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, and on the basis of this, he went much further than any of his colleagues in France or the United States. He pressed forward a settlement that was quite generous in the end. What happens though with that kind of settlement is that it becomes infused with a series of personal negotiations and personal trust, and if things go wrong, the tendency of the political communities in the receiving countries is to start to attack the system and the people who made these agreements.

t is not the case that there wasn't enough Western aid in 1924 for Germany; on the contrary, there was an enormous amount of Western aid. It kept on coming in, and people engaged in very lavish programs of social reconstruction to try to buy off unrest. But immediately after those flows stopped--they would have to stop sometime or other, there was no doubt about it--people started to blame the original negotiators and the international order. So making a favorable settlement on personalized terms was not, in the end, a solution that stabilized democratic politics in Weimar. In fact, the German architect of this settlement rapidly changed his political views. Hjalmar Schacht, the man who appeared as the democratic savior of Germany in 1923-1924, the economic wizard of the recovery program, proved in the end, after 1933, to be Hitler's minister of economics who financed German rearmament and the preparations for World War II.

uckily, we need not experience that kind of situation anymore because we have institutions that act in a depersonalized way. We shouldn't appear to be bailing out particular individuals or particular politics. That will only expose us in the end to immense disappointments. What we should do is say that Russia is like any other member of the international community and it can apply to international institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which operate according to fixed rules. These institutions were created in part in 1944-1945 as a result of the bankruptcy of the system that had existed between the wars. They don't operate arbitrarily; it isn't a fact, for instance, that if the managing director of the International Monetary Fund happens to like the current Russian prime minister he can give more money than if the Russian prime minister at the moment is not such a sympathetic figure. We have to offer aid and support according to rules. That is the only way to avoid the politics of distrust and resentment that will set in if reform programs seem to fade or go wrong.

Presentation by Gerald Feldman | Presentation by Andrei Melville | Summary by George Breslauer

© Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of California