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In Our Time
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Archive Episode)
01:06:17
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Keynes' influential attack on the Treaty of Versailles
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- [00:00]
Margaret Macmillan
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:07]
Patricia Clavin
You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply.
- [00:30]
Margaret Macmillan
That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.
- [00:36]
Patricia Clavin
This is history's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:08]
Michael Cox
Hello, Simon here, the producer of In Our Time. Since Melvin announced he stepped down from In Our time after almost 27 years, the reaction's been overwhelming and heartwarming. And thank you to everyone who's been in touch.
- [01:22]
Patricia Clavin
Thank you.
- [01:23]
Michael Cox
Before we return with new programs and a new presenter, we're taking the time to celebrate Melvin's outstanding work with some favourite episodes from our archive. Here's melvin.
- [01:35]
Melvyn Bragg
Hello. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes quit his job at the Paris Peace Conference, where the victors of World War I were deciding the fate of the defeated. Immediately, Keynes wrote the Economic Consequences of the Peace, his warning of why, in his view, the Treaty of Versailles would be disastrous and and soon Germany used this book as proof that the treaty was grossly unfair, a sentiment that fed into British appeasement in the 1930s and has since spawned debate over whether Keynes had only warned of disaster or somehow contributed to it. With me to discuss Keynes, the economic consequences of the peace are Patricia Clavin, professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Michael Cox, Emeritus professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and founding Director of the LSE Ideas, and Margaret macmillan, Emeritus professor of International History at the University of Oxford, Malcolm Macmillan. How had World War I come to an end?
- [02:32]
Margaret Macmillan
It came to an end with an armistice. Germany was the central power and its allies were falling away, and on the battlefield, the German troops couldn't go on. And so the German government, at the urging of the German High Command, asked President Woodrow Wilson to arrange an armistice. It was, in fact, a surrender. If you look at the terms of the armistice, the Germans lost. The big problem was going to be, of course, that they didn't think they had. But when it came to an end. The Allies, Britain, France and the United States which had joined them, thought they were in a very strong position to dictate the sort of terms they wanted to Germany.
- [03:08]
Melvyn Bragg
But just to pick up an almost side remark, you meant a lot of people in Germany didn't think they had lost, thought they could have fought on.
- [03:17]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, the high command played a really sinister role here. I think Ludendorff and Hindenburg in particular, because they were the ones who panicked and said to the German government, we can't fight on. It's true. I mean, the lines were crumbling, the Allied troops were rolling towards the German borders, you've got to make some sort of deal, we've got to stop fighting. About six months later they changed their tune and said, you know, it was the civilian cowardly government that lost its nerve. We could have fought on. And that played into a story, a narrative, if you like, that was going to be very powerful in Germany that we should have fought on. We could have fought on, we didn't really lose. Which of course undermined the treaty.
- [03:52]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. And how much truth do you think there was in it?
- [03:55]
Margaret Macmillan
I don't think they could have fought on. I mean they were out of all the essential things like gas, oil, fuel, they were running out of ammunition. If you look at where the German armies were moving, they were retreating and they had no allies left. All their allies had dropped out and had made separate deals with the Allied powers. And so no, I don't think they could have fought on, but it doesn't matter. It's what people thought.
- [04:16]
Melvyn Bragg
So this is quixotic and fantastical rather than any reality grip.
- [04:21]
Margaret Macmillan
I think so. But it's what people believe can be as important in politics as the truth.
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Melvyn Bragg
So we get to the Paris Conference, the Armistice Conference, let's call it that, which we're going to see basically through the eyes of Maynard Cage will come to him in a minute. What was the aim there when they set it up? What were they going to do?
- [04:40]
Margaret Macmillan
Their aim first was to drop peace terms for the defeated nations. And so there were a number of defeated powers with Germany of course, the key one, but there was also Austria, Hungary, the Great Empire, there was Bulgaria, there was the Ottoman Empire. They were all going to get their own treaties. But what happened is the Allies met in Paris in January 1919 to drop the terms and it took them so long to do that, when the time came, they decided they couldn't sit down and have a full blown peace conference with Germany and its defeated allies, which is what they had intended. And so in the end, they simply gave the terms to Germany and the others and said, take it or leave it, more or less. We'll accept any objections in writing. You have two weeks to do it. And so the peace conference, which started out as a preliminary peace conference, ended up being the real thing. What they thought they were doing was settling the fate of Europe, drawing up peace terms. What they found they were doing was actually being a sort of world government, because the world was in such a state. There were revolutions breaking out, there was hunger, starvation in large parts of Europe. They found themselves actually having to deal with a whole range of problems which they hadn't expected to deal with.
- [05:41]
Melvyn Bragg
So you think this led to a weaker settlement?
- [05:45]
Margaret Macmillan
It led to a settlement which I don't think could have succeeded with all the hopes that were placed in it. I mean, the world was in a dreadful state. I mean, this was a catastrophe. The Great War had been an absolute catastrophe for Europe and for much of the world. And then, remember, the influenza epidemic was going. There were all sorts of diseases breaking out in addition because of malnutrition and so on. Revolutions. The Russian Revolution had taken place. Hungary had a communist government for six months. In May Day in Paris, 1919, they had to close down the whole peace conference because of battles in the streets between right and left. And so I think what they felt they were doing was trying to reconstruct a world. And the task was, I think, beyond almost anyone's power, quite frankly. And so there was bound to be disappointment at whatever came out of the peace conference.
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Melvyn Bragg
So there's a sense of rush to.
- [06:30]
Margaret Macmillan
A conclusion, any conclusion they needed to get it done. And what they were worried about is the alliance itself was falling to pieces. And the Japanese were furious about some of the terms that affected them. The Chinese refused to sign the final Treaty of Versailles. The Italians walked out at a certain point. And so I think, from the Allied point of view, is we have to get something done, because the situation in Europe and the wider world is so perilous, we've got to do something. But of course, later on, people saw it as a great disappointment. I think nobody could have settled the world of 1919, happily.
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Melvyn Bragg
Mick Cox, our guide through this is going to be Maynard Keynes. What was he doing there?
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Michael Cox
Keynes had joined the treasury in 1915. He had previously worked at the India Office. In an earlier period, he'd resigned, but he got brought back into the treasury because he was known to be an expert on money and an expert on credit. And he was brought in particularly to actually deal with the inter allied debt question. To put it rather simply, the war could not have gone on unless we got more and more economic loans from the United States which Britain then dispersed to other allies. So therefore he was there as in a fairly junior way. He was very young, very junior, but nonetheless very central to this whole discussion.
- [07:46]
Melvyn Bragg
Why was he central?
- [07:47]
Michael Cox
Central because of his knowledge. Because basically I should also say by who he knew. Keynes was a person who knew many, many people. One of the reasons he got the position in the first place was because of a man called Edwin Montague who was a influential. He knew Keynes from Cambridge days and he brought him in, but he knew the economics, he would know that. And he became very central. He wasn't that senior, but even if he wasn't senior in terms of, you know, position, nonetheless he simply became very central to this whole debate almost like it was the axis around which this debt. And so therefore when, when, as Margaret said, when the, when the war came to an end, they needed experts to come to, to Paris and one of those experts was this young treasury official with very strong views about the, about the peace and indeed about the economics of the peace. And he was brought there in January. So it was a really quite remarkable ascent for Keynes and he was still very, very young. And by the way, throughout the negotiations, although he wrote the most influential book after it, during the negotiations he was really quite peripheral. He simply had to watch many of these things going on within the inner circles of the Council of Four.
- [08:54]
Melvyn Bragg
So he was not influential of the decisions being reached on the decisions being reached?
- [08:59]
Michael Cox
Well, as it turned out, clearly he wasn't because when he saw the decision which finally arrived at in the summ of 1919, he actually, like quite a lot of other people, let's be perfectly clear, it wasn't just Keynes who came to this conclusion. He was fairly horrified about the terms under which Germany and, and the rest of Europe was being, was being reconstituted or not reconstituted. So yeah, he, it was the decision he made to go away, resigned. He sent a letter of resignation to Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister at the time, with whom he had a complicated relationship, to put it rather nicely. And then he went off to Sussex to the home of some of his, the Bloomsburg group, and sat down for two to three months to write the economic consequence. That's what made him famous after the event. He was significant but not central to the real discussions and most of those discussions were held by other people with whom he fundamentally disagreed.
- [09:51]
Melvyn Bragg
You mentioned the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and so on. How effective he was part of that group. How effective were they in applying their pressure to him? Because most of them are conscientious objectors. And here's this man dealing with war and so on. What happened there?
- [10:08]
Michael Cox
Well, it goes back through the war itself. I mean, it was quite clear that many of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey and all the rest of Virginia, Duncan Grant and the Met, they were conscientious objectors. Keynes was not. However, he did protect them, and he certainly provided them with a degree of degree of employment. You know, he kind of protected them in many, many ways. I think there's two aspects of the relationship with the Bloomsbury Group. One, they disapproved of the war and they did put what I call moral pressure on Keynes through it. And he had it to his friends. He had to justify a war in which he was involved in the economic role which I've described. And I think he kind of sensed that he was under huge moral pressure from them. And I think that played a role the more specific way.
- [10:50]
Melvyn Bragg
Which direction was the pressure leading him to. What were they pressurizing him to do?
- [10:55]
Michael Cox
Well, I think, and this is more complicated, I think that basically Keynes himself, by 1916 and 17, really wanted the war to come to an end as quickly as possible. And I think he kind of felt under the pressure of the Bloomsbury Group, and they were influential with him. After all, these were his closest friends. And I think he always feels that somehow or another he's got appease the Bloomsbury Group, at least talk to them again. The other way, however, in which this plays out. The Bloomsbury aspect of it is, of course, in 1918, Lytton Strachey wrote a very famous book, the Eminent Victorians, which is very, very iconoclast, very, very dismissive of great Victorians who have been the great heroes and heroines of the 19th century. And I think there's no doubt that Strachey himself, and that the way he wrote the book did influence the way that Keynes then went on to write the economic consequence of the piece. Because where you read the pen portraits, particularly of Clemenceau and also of Wilson and also, to a degree, Lloyd George, you can see there's a great iconoclasm. And many people would say he's being very, very unfair on the Big Three, not just the Big Four. But nonetheless, I think that is the influence of Bloomsbury.
- [12:04]
Melvyn Bragg
How good was he at the job that he'd been sent to do?
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Michael Cox
On the economic side, look, he looked to me, and I'm not an economist, but I will speak some economics here, it looked to me he was very well qualified. I mean, he'd studied the statistics, he'd gone through all of this. He was working 18 hours a day from 1915 onwards on all the trade statistics, the industrial statistics statistics, all of the questions of how to get a European reconstruction after the war. And if you read his memos, which start in 1916, we've got to think about the peace, not just about the war. They are very detailed. They're very detailed indeed. So I think he was very, very well qualified to kind of talk about the economics. The question is, the conclusions he arrived at were not the same conclusions that were arrived at by the Big Three or the Big Four when they finally dropped the Versailles Peace Treaty.
- [12:50]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you, Patricia Clavering Wood. The war may have ended.
- [12:56]
Patricia Clavin
But for.
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Melvyn Bragg
People in Europe, what were conditions like while the negotiations dragged on?
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Patricia Clavin
Well, they were extremely difficult because in some senses the war hadn't ended. The war persisted under the armistice, the terms of the armistice and the key thing that the Central Europeans experienced was the blockade. The blockade remained in place.
- [13:15]
Melvyn Bragg
Can you just explain more about.
- [13:17]
Patricia Clavin
So the blockade was the Allied attempt to stop raw materials, food, essential wartime commodities, getting to Germany, getting to Austria, Hungary and their allies. And it was folded, it kind of expanded to incorporate also parts of Russia, which was now engulfed in a civil war. So it meant that some of the conditions that Margaret's described, serious malnutrition, diseases related to hunger, so tuberculosis, typhus, those were increasing between 1918 and 1919. And the tragedy was that on top of that blockade, the empires that had disintegrated were now also blockading one another. The best example of that is Austria, Hungary, which was already falling apart as the war was ending. Now Austria was being blockaded by people who'd formerly been part of that empire. So the new state of Czechoslovakia was blockading Austria, Poland was blockad Austria. So you had this new territory which was the city of Vienna and then part of the Alps, which produced almost none of its own food, because it had been part of an integrated empire, was now starving. And Keynes, I mean, mix, alluded to the fact that Keynes was very aware of the statistics. The blockade is this huge statistical exercise of looking at global markets, what's being traded where, and the British, I mean, it's really the British who are at the center of it, with the French and the Americans monitoring these supplies. So Keynes knows what's happening with regard to the debts that the Allies have accumulated to the United States. But he also knows about what's being traded and where. So he's very sensitive to this kind of implosion in Europe and the fact that actually conditions are deteriorating as the war ends instead of improving.
- [15:06]
Melvyn Bragg
And as you said, the central empires of the old Europe were disintegrating.
- [15:09]
Patricia Clavin
That's right. And they're fighting one another. I mean, it's not. I've talked about the hunger and disease. There's also an explosion of political violence even in place that were on the victorious side. So Italy, which of course in a few years time, succumbs to a fascist government. There are sort of intense civil wars taking place along parts of those borders and there are people on the move everywhere, because you might, if you were a German speaker and you now find yourself in, you know, in what was Galicia, that's now being incorporated into another country, you'll feel safer to go into Austria or move to Germany. So there's these pop. You know, very significant population movements and as people move, they also take their diseases with them and they. And they go to places that have no food for them. So the central and Eastern Europe in particular, and also looking down south towards the former parts of the Ottoman Empire, you know, are in a complete mess. A complete mess.
- [16:03]
Melvyn Bragg
There is a suggestion in some of the notes I brew that more people died through in the first two or three years of the armistice of the beach. And they died in the war.
- [16:13]
Patricia Clavin
Yes, that's what historians now calculate, if you include the disease which was being measured because Germany and Austria, they actually had quite sophisticated medical health care systems. They were actually monitoring and measuring the health of their children. And aid workers were in there too. And you add in disease, you add in ethnic cleansing or political violence. You know, some people calculated at about 4 million deaths up until about 1923. That's really when finally, you know, a kind of a peace where there's less political violence and civil war comes to an end.
- [16:47]
Melvyn Bragg
What Keynes was very close to his family. Mother. The Blooms roof had an effect on him, we've been told by Mick. What about his family? Has he rooted in that to an extent that sways his judgment?
- [17:00]
Patricia Clavin
Yes, I think so. He was very close to his mother. For Florence Keynes, who was quite a forceful woman, a campaigner for women's rights and was. She was involved with Keynes Sister Margaret in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and they're campaigning for the end of the blockade. That's a big. I mean as women get the vote, they don't just stop fighting for things, they start fighting for women's rights and children's rights. So they're very animated by this question over the blockade. And Margaret Keynes is best friends with Eglantine Jebb. And Eglantine Jeb is the person who fund sets up the Save the Children Fund, which is connected to the persistence of the blockade. And throughout the time that Keynes is sent to Paris to calculate the reparations, that's what he's doing in a detailed way. He's trying to work out what compensation will Germany and Austria and Hungary pay for the damage caused by the war. His mother is sending some letters saying, maynard, what are you going to do about these starving children in Vienna, in Austria? So, you know, there's. There's a kind of this. He's connected through his family to a very lively campaign that sees Eglantine Jeb in prison because she's taking these images of the starving children that the Austrians are circulating and disseminating them to the British public. So this becomes really quite a drive.
- [18:16]
Melvyn Bragg
There are so many threads here because his family were very sympathetic to Germans and he had been to Germany, he spoke good German and so on.
- [18:22]
Patricia Clavin
That's right, that's right. And I think that's also. He's got a connection to the Germanophone world. They know that part of the, you know, they holidayed there. He had a German governess. And that's also. I mean, it connects to the way that he's able to disseminate his. Disseminate his ideas and his position through that part of the world subsequently.
- [18:42]
Melvyn Bragg
Do you want to come in, Meg?
- [18:43]
Michael Cox
Yeah, thanks for that. That's a terrific point. I think on the family side, the other thing, of course, to remember, they were big L liberals in the Cambridge environment, and this was actually central to. To Keynes vision of the future world order. And throughout his whole life. Am I a liberal? Yes, I am a liberal. I'm not a conservative, I'm not a state socialist. And by the way, many of the things we know about Keynes during the war and after actually are letters written to both his mother and to his father. So it's a very close and loving, loving relationship. But the whole question that is raised there about Keynes is how can I, as a good liberal, who have witnessed this. He calls it a civil war, by the way. I don't even think he really holds Germany fully responsible for starting the war. It's very, very interesting the way he conceives of it, whereas the Allies in 1998. War Guild. Keynes is saying this is a civil war within the European family. So I think the way he views the war and views Germany, very, very different. And one other very quick point, I think one can really underestimate a kind of pro German sentiment that was in Britain amongst the ruling elites before World War I. I mean, many of the institutions we created, the welfare state, the London School of Economics, was partly founded on ideas about German higher education. We were great admirers. And the British royal family, of course, had a German base. So I think Keynes in many ways reflected a certain Germanophilia, which was still there, I think, in 1919.
- [20:16]
Melvyn Bragg
Margaret?
- [20:17]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, I think when the war broke out, I think I'm right, there were four members of the cabinet who'd gone to university in Germany.
- [20:26]
Michael Cox
You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care.
- [20:32]
Margaret Macmillan
These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care.
- [20:36]
Patricia Clavin
Retirement options and free training.
- [20:39]
Margaret Macmillan
They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.
- [20:54]
Patricia Clavin
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would see, say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:26]
Margaret Macmillan
Which says something. And it went down through the classes. I mean, Robert Graves, who was middle class, his mother was German, so, you know, the most English of poets. But I think also with Keynes, he had this view and I think there's the passage. I think it's in the economic consequence of the piece of what the world was like before the war. You could sit breakfast in London, you get news from all over the world. Commodities were coming in, you were linked in this world that was peaceable because trade was linking it. I mean, it was a utopian vision, perhaps, but I think he was hoping to get back to that sort of world where trade and investment went around, people moved around the world freely. And I think that was a very powerful motivating force.
- [22:02]
Melvyn Bragg
So let's get to the book. He sat down and almost dashed the book off. Didn't had a tremendous zip and drive. It was terrifically successful. Can you just talk about the book and the impact that the book had and what his main. It's a big one. What his main drive was in the book.
- [22:19]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, it makes anyone who writes books rather envious because he wrote it in about six weeks and it's still in print. I don't know how many copies it sold. He also did a deal where he got all the royalties in the uk. He was a very good businessman, Keynes, and he did a very good deal with his publisher. And the book is. It has a very dull title, in my view, but it is a polemic. It's very well done. He writes beautifully.
- [22:39]
Melvyn Bragg
This is the economic consequences of the.
- [22:40]
Margaret Macmillan
Piece, of economic consequence of the piece, which is not something you would pick up in a bookshop. It doesn't sound that exciting. But when you read it, he's got these sketches of the people, some of the rudest stuff he took out. His mother said, you really cannot call Lloyd George a half goat, half man. I forget the exact phrase, but they're still very powerful. Clemenceau, this deeply cynical old man who only cares about France and revenge. Woodrow Wilson, who's an idiot, who's turned around by the wily Europeans until he doesn't know which way he's going. Lloyd George, who has no moral core, who comes out of this strange world. These are quite powerful. And of course, he makes his arguments very powerfully. He writes very well, and he says, what we're doing is a disaster. We should be getting Europe going again. We should be getting Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, the economic engine of Europe, going again. What are we doing? We're doing these foolish, foolish things and we're creating a disaster. And when you read it today, it's still very powerful.
- [23:34]
Melvyn Bragg
And one of the things that made it powerful, the pen portraits. Can you talk about one? Let's talk about the most important, in a way, was of Wilson, Wilson's place in all this, of the United States, and how he described him and why that was. You tell us.
- [23:48]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, he's got a very acute eye, Keynes does. And so he describes him both physically and intellectually. But what I remember about the Wilson portrait is a very handsome man, and one of the things. But he looked much better when he was sitting down, because when he stood up, his legs were too short. And you get the sense right from the beginning that Wilson is not put together very well. And he talks about Wilson's moralism and he talks about Wilson's naivete and how Wilson doesn't really understand what he's dealing with in Europe.
- [24:13]
Melvyn Bragg
Is there an element of snobbery here. He was merely an American and he was very snobbish Keynes, wasn't he?
- [24:18]
Margaret Macmillan
Oh, I think he was. And look, he came out of Cambridge the idolized son of his parents, which gave him, you know, the combination of parents, Cambridge, Bloomsbury group gave him this enormous self confidence and sense that he represented, I think a higher civilization. And yes, I think he thought Wilson was. He didn't call him a booby, but that certainly is the impression you get.
- [24:35]
Melvyn Bragg
I'll come to you in a moment, Mick, but can we just conclude this? So what was the consequence of his portrait of Wilson who became, as time went on, the great player? I mean there's so many players, you don't know where to start, do you really? But he was. Because they began to fund the war. They were, you tell us.
- [24:55]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, the United States had been enormously important, I mean from about 1916 onwards and Patricia and Mick will know it much better than me. The United States had been funding the British war effort. The British in turn had been funding the French and the Italians and the French had been funding the Russians. And so the United States was really the linchpin of the whole system of funding. And I think what Keynes saw in Wilson was someone who didn't really get Europe. But what it did do is feed into again a sort of feeling that was growing in the United States particularly after the war ended that the US should never have got involved in the war. We were dragged in by Wilson. It was not a legitimate thing to do that we should never have gone in and look what's happened. The Europeans are at their old tricks again. And it helped to undermine the validity of particularly the Treaty of Versailles which was the crucial one with Germany. It undermined it in the English speaking countries. Keynes attack on the statesman, an attack on what he called their indifference and their folly and their stupidity. And of course it was popular in Germany because it fed into German preconceptions anyway about the war where it was never that popular was France for obvious reasons.
- [25:59]
Melvyn Bragg
Can we just say one or two more words about the impact that Keynes view of Wilson had on the whole this great tangled web?
- [26:09]
Michael Cox
Well, within the United States there was no doubt that the book, Keynes book, the Economic Consequences of the Peace was used by Wilson's enemies. And many of Wilson's friends at the time said it quite clearly to Keynes. Why are you as a good liberal attacking the man who stands up for international liberalism called Woodrow Wilson? The book, however, sold extraordinary numbers in the United States. I think within a year it had sold 70,000 copies. And in some ways Keynes became even more famous in the United as famous in the United States as he was to become in the United Kingdom itself. I'll just go back to two things, however. The attack on Wilson is vicious and I think in many ways very unfair. So I'll say that now. But there were two things behind that attack. One is he wanted the Americans to cancel the debt basically because until you settled the debt question.
- [27:05]
Melvyn Bragg
Be specific about the debt, please. The debt to whom?
- [27:08]
Margaret Macmillan
By whom?
- [27:08]
Michael Cox
Well, the debt basically from all the European allies, including the UK to the United States, the United States themselves from 1916 onwards, as Margaret said, had effectively paid for the war for the French and British and the Italians and the Russians to continue. So the debt was just huge. And in the economic consequences of the peace, Keynes is quite clear. One of the things we have to do is settle the debt question. Because we don't do that, the financial system is going to be deeply unstable. The other thing is really what Patricia was talking about, Central Europe, the whole fragmentation of what had once been a United States empire. That fragmentation, nationalism, self determination, which has been one of Wilson's great slogans into the war he thought was politically probably necessary but economically disastrous. So there were two aspects of his critique of Wilson other than just the personal attacks on his intellect and his Presbyterianism.
- [28:01]
Melvyn Bragg
Patricia, do you think that at this stage Keynes is ploughing a solitary fox furrow or does he have allies or what? I mean he's, he's a. The book gave him, has given him ever since a particular place and power, one might say in retrospect Anyway, where was he at the time? But did people say we've got to keep an eye on it, he's got it right, he's going in the right direction. Was that happening?
- [28:24]
Patricia Clavin
Well, it was happening amongst the German delegation because one of the things that's surprising about is his ideas circulate very quickly, they move into the German speaking world quite fast because as mix, you know, explained, Keynes was a good liberal and new liberal circles in Europe, there were liberals in the German delegation, but it's also that actually in the treasury, in the bank of England there is a hope that the United States would drop the war debts, I mean this kind of nexus of inter allied debt. But it was enormous, it was enormous. And the complicating factor was that Britain had lent, they'd borrowed the money from the United States but they'd lent it to their own imperial allies, so Canada, Australia, New Zealand. So the debt sort of went through Britain and out into the empire. And the empire states were, they were growing in independence themselves. So it, it complicated intra imperial relations. And the same was true for France. So this was a huge problem. And there was always an expectation that because the United States had entered the, the war, well, in the British mind, late of course, the Americans had not planned to enter the war at all that they would. This was their part, this is their part of waging the war. Because actually sort of what Britain had also hoped it would do in 1914, you know, it would be business as usual. Only it turned out it wasn't. So this was a, and it became a longer term position from the British government than actually the United States would at some point need to drop the debt. But actually the American position hardened. You know, Calvin Coolidge, when he becomes President, says, well, they hired the money, didn't they? And the debt itself is hugely important to the way that America is now positioned internationally. Because the First World War makes, turns America from a debtor nation into a creditor nation. It's now the world's banker, it's the leading source of international capital in the world. It's replaced Britain. New York is now competing with the City of London. So this is also an international opportunity for the United States and they might be withdrawing from international affairs. They don't want to support plans for a collective security to keep France safe and all of that. But this financial power is really important to them. So they're not going to let Britain or the French off the hook. And that's the complication because now Britain and France have to pay off this debt or they have to find the money to do it from somewhere. And that somewhere is the defeated powers.
- [31:03]
Melvyn Bragg
Margaret Macmillan. To what extent were Keynes powers in tune with the public opinion in this country? I think as this goes everywhere, I.
- [31:15]
Margaret Macmillan
Mean, in Britain, yeah, public opinion was changing and it was changing even while the peace conference was going on. I mean, the initial view of a lot of the British was the Germans lost, they should pay. And that was actually quite traditional. If you lost a war, you paid a fine or an indemnity. This time around it was called reparations. It sounded better. It was to repair damage done during the war. It was a sort of dressing up of it. And I think initially there was a lot of bitterness against the Germans. They, after all, had started the war. This is certainly how it was seen in Britain and of course in France. But over the months of the peace conference, opinion seems to have softened. This was before public opinion polls but more and more British were saying, particularly the business community, actually if we squeeze Germany too much, we won't be able to trade with it and that will hurt us. And so you begin to get. And you get people like bishops saying we should show forgiveness and so on. And so I think in Britain you get a diminution, you get a winding down of that really anti German feeling very, very early on and a sense growing that the French are being ridiculous and vindictive.
- [32:17]
Melvyn Bragg
Why?
- [32:17]
Margaret Macmillan
Because the French. Well, my sympathy actually is with the French in a way. The French had lost a lot. They had not started the war, Germany had invaded them. And most of the war on the Western Front pretty well. All the war on the Western Front was fought in Belgium and the north of France, and that had been the great powerhouse of Europe for coal, iron, steel. The factories were devastated, the mines were flooded, the infrastructure was ruined. I mean, France, France lost economically and of course lost a huge number of killed and wounded as well. And so I think in France, the feeling was, we didn't start it. Why should we have to pay to repair everything here? When we look at Germany, it had almost no fighting on its soil. Its infrastructure remains intact. They should pay. In Britain, you begin to get. Division opens up between the British and the French, and the British and the Americans are much more inclined to forgive and forget. Except, of course, when it comes to debts on the part of the Americans.
- [33:11]
Patricia Clavin
The other thing that the French are paranoid about is the fact that Germany's got a much larger population, it's got 20 more million people in it than France has, and they have no or very limited functioning tax system. So the other thing I didn't mention about how they were going to pay all this debt is Britain actually had a pretty good tax system, income tax and all that was in place. France passes a law, the first law to collect income tax in 1914, but it actually doesn't kick in until 1917. So there's no real way of trying to generate this money at home. So that's another kind of really big problem because you then also have to decide who is it you're going to tax? So the kind of questions of, you know, pitting one group of the population against the other is a really big challenge.
- [33:55]
Melvyn Bragg
So it drags on. Mick, what was the real tough point to get through? There were several, but can you tell the listeners where they felt really stuck and didn't know where to go? Sounds to me as if there were places like that all along the way.
- [34:07]
Michael Cox
There were, there were. And for France, and I do agree with Margaret very strongly. The war had been fought on French soil. France had lost enormously. And by the way, all of the money had lent to Russia before 1970, they lost as well. So one could understand the French position. The problem for Keynes in thinking about the French position was, I understand perfectly why politically, but from an economic point of view, if you pursue what he called a Carthaginian peace, then the consciousness. Well, I think he was going back into his old classical mode. He, like, he loved talking about the classic.
- [34:44]
Melvyn Bragg
What was a Carthaginian piece?
- [34:45]
Michael Cox
Well, it was basically the piece which was imposed on Carthage by the Romans when they destroyed Carthage. It wasn't a Carthaginian piece. I mean, this was a piece of metaphor which was overdone. Nonetheless, people always remember it because he taught about this Carthaginian peace. But he understood quite well that even if France was understandably, you know, not entirely happy with. Was more happy with the peace, he could understand the domestic politics, what he didn't get. And this is where he comes in as the economist and this is so important, he does see this, I think, through a very narrowly economic economistic perspective. And I think that's. That was both his strength and in some ways his weakness, because he saw it from a purely economic point of view. And there's France on its back and not surprisingly, pretty unsympathetic to anybody who's going to be sympathetic to Germany, as Keynes was. And that was frankly a circle that could never be squared.
- [35:39]
Margaret Macmillan
It seems to me Patricia and Mick have both mentioned the political side, and I think that's absolutely crucial. I mean, these countries are democracies. The politicians, rightly or wrongly, have to think of the next election and they have to think of what is feasible. And in France, Clemenceau said, my middle classes would rebel if I said, you know, we're going to forgive and forget with Germany, you know, we cannot do it. And I think even in Britain, although British feelings were becoming less vehement against Germany, there still was a feeling that someone should pay up for everything the British had lost. So I do think, politically, and Mick's absolutely right, politically, what Keynes wanted was economically sensible, politically impossible.
- [36:18]
Melvyn Bragg
I'll come back to you, Mick. But Patricia.
- [36:20]
Patricia Clavin
Yeah, it was just a mixed point about Keynes seeing things in a very economic way. I mean, I think the difficulty is he sees it in a financial way, so he's looking at reparations. He's also looking at rapidly rising levels of inflation. Because one of the problems is when you say, I've got a debt. The easiest thing to do is let your just print the money and the debt will sort of disappear. The inflation levels. It's also all the controls on the economy after the end of the First World War have been removed in Britain and France. So Britain has an inflation rate of 50%. Never mind what it's like in France or in Germany. What he doesn't see, which the French do see, is that German economic power is still intact. You know, German industry is still there. Germany still has massive resources of coal, of iron ore. And so that also feeds into it. So it's kind of, you know, where Keynes is wrong is not. It's that he's also missing the fact that quite a lot of German power, he wants to reconstitute it further to help European reconstruction because Britain's best customer is Germany. Germany's best customer was Britain in 1914. But it's also this kind of very narrow fixation on what money is doing. I think that's, that's where he gets it wrong.
- [37:31]
Michael Cox
I was going to come in on, on Clemenceau. It's interesting that Keynes's portrait of Wilson, I think it pretty vituperative, pretty damning. Clemenceau, oddly enough, was in a sense the, the villain of the piece. He was the man who wanted the Carthaginian peace imposed on Germany. Nonetheless, it's, it's, it's quite a sympathetic portrayal of Clemenceau, it seems to me, at least a respectful one. And he took the view, and this was Clemenceau's view. This is the end of the first phase of a war with Germany. This is a truce and we're going to move at some point in the distant future, or not so distant future to another war. He kind of saw an inevitability about the rise of Germany, the power of Germany, which has been described by Patricia, and that's going to come back again. And everything I must do now is to keep Germany as weak as possible for as long as possible because there's going to come another big conflict with Germany in the not too distant future. And in many ways that turned out and proved to be the, the case.
- [38:29]
Patricia Clavin
Well, he was a bit undone by the fact that the Americans had promised to keep France safe and then that promise that. So that's the kind of, you know, the, the Americans were supposed to bind themselves to Britain and French security and then by denying the first Treaty of Versailles and denying the idea of having an international organization like the League of Nations. That's what actually reinforced the French position.
- [38:55]
Margaret Macmillan
Yeah. And then the British backed out. The British said, well, it was an Anglo American guarantee, but we only did it because the Americans were doing it, therefore it falls down. I mean, you know, I think the French. And the other thing about France is, I mean, Clemenceau had been. He'd lived through two German invasions. He'd been there in 1870 when the German Confederation had invaded France. He'd been a young man in Paris, part of the siege of Paris by German troops. He'd spent his life worrying about Germany. And of course, he'd lived through the set, the First World War. He'd become Prime Minister in the dark days of the war. And he and Marshal Foch, the supreme Allied commander, the great French general, were aware that Germany was stronger. And it was not just there were more Germans, there were going to be even more in the future because German women were having more babies than French women. The demographic gap was growing. And they knew by the middle of the 1930s, they were going to have something called the hollow years. There weren't going to be enough men to conscript in the armed services.
- [39:47]
Melvyn Bragg
So where were they? Can we come and put a graph on these discussions at the moment? How long did they go before they realized they didn't have a solution at all?
- [39:59]
Patricia Clavin
I mean, Keynes had proposed that Germany, when he was working for the government, he said, let us, you know, have reparations. He offered about a billion. Billion rice mark, I think gold rice mark. But it was tied into the plans for a stabilization loan because you had to stabilize the German currency, which was inflating in order to pay these loans. So it would be. Germany would pay some reparations as. As France had been made to pay reparations in the Franco Prussian War the century before. But it would be tied in with a chunk of money that would have to come from America that would stabilize the European continent. And they. In the end, Keynes is right that that's actually what they do in 1922, 23, 24, they have a loan that goes first to Austria in 1922 that stabilizes the Austrian currency. And then in 1924, they have something called the Dawes Plan that stabilizes the German currency, and they kind of redesign the reparation package so that brings an end to inflation and it stabilizes the debt situation. The real irony is that Germany ends up paying the Allies, end up giving Germany more money through this loan system than Germany ever pays in reparations.
- [41:13]
Margaret Macmillan
I mean, it's an absurd situation because the Americans are insisting on their loans being paid back by the British. The British are trying to collect their loans from the French and so on. So the Americans then lend money to Germany that pays reparations to the French and the British, who then pay back the United States. And it is ramshackle and it causes all sorts of bad feeling as it goes round. And the total amount Germany owes keeps on being negotiated down, but it causes huge bad feeling in Germany. The Nazis, of course, make a great deal of play with it, so do a lot of Germans. A lot of Germans don't think they've lost the war. And that becomes a conviction among most Germans. I think they don't think they've lost the war. They think the treaty is deeply unfair. They've read their canes. Why should they keep on paying? Everyone should pay. And the view more and more about how the war started becomes one that Lloyd George actually mentions in his memoirs. Europe slithered over the edge into war. I mean, it was no one's fault. We just sort of got into a mess and we had a war. And so Germans more and more see reparations as totally unfair burden. And of course, when Hitler comes to power, he basically just cancels them.
- [42:11]
Melvyn Bragg
Can we come back to Maynard Keynes at this point? Where is he in this congested argument?
- [42:18]
Margaret Macmillan
He's beginning, I think, to change his views a bit. He begins to think that he dealt unfairly with Lloyd George and the other peacemakers. And he does more or less make his peace with Lloyd George. And the two men worked together at the beginning of the 1930s, especially when the Great Depression hits, to try and do something about it. And so I think Keynes learns to recognize. But I'm going to defer both to Patricia and Mick on this because they know much more. But I think he begins to recognize that what he proposed in 1919 was not possible, but he begins to think of ways of making it possible in the future. And he's going to be enormously important when it comes to trying to build international economic institutions during the Second World War, which will prevent some of the tragedies that happened as a result of the First World War.
- [43:00]
Michael Cox
At the end of economic consequences of the peace, there is a section which is hardly ever read. It's called Remedies. And actually, if you look through that, that's quite interesting because one of the things he says is we're simply going to have to scale down the reparations, which effectively had. And that somebody's going to have to give enormous loans to Europe to get it back on its feet largely to Germany, which Patricia has talked about. I, we're still dependent on the United States economically. So you know, he does kind of see a long term process in which what had been discussed in the, in the fevered atmosphere of Paris was simply that fevered atmosphere will simply diminish and memories of what had happened in 17 and 18 will, will go away. Did he change his mind? This is a very interesting question because later on a very famous writer, Elizabeth Whiskerman, made the point that Keynes once said that he wished he had never written that book. There's no strong evidence about that, but there is a sense that by the time of the 1930s, the rise of Hitler, the coming of fascism and Nazism in Germany, the context has changed so dramatically that the way people read Keynes now is very, very different to the way they read.
- [44:05]
Melvyn Bragg
You see him as a harming during the second war.
- [44:07]
Michael Cox
Well, that's putting it a little bit too strongly and I, I wouldn't want to use those words to describe. But somebody who had created.
- [44:14]
Melvyn Bragg
Which word would you use?
- [44:15]
Michael Cox
Well, okay, Melvin, I'll put it this way. Somebody once called him the Isaiah of appeasement. The great historians, Martin Gilbert called him the Isaiah of appeasement. A wonderful phrase. And there's no doubt that when we get to the late 1930s, 37, 38, he's still talking, he does talk appeasement with Germany. He still feels that somehow or another there's that guilt, there's still that overhanging guilt amongst a section of British public opinion. And I think he contributes. I don't think he intended it, but I think that's so, the context is so important.
- [44:49]
Melvyn Bragg
What we've been circling around this book by Keynes, what impact do you think it had at the time on the participants who are making these or not making these deals, Margaret, to start with?
- [44:59]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, many of the deals were made before the book came out. The ones in Paris were made.
- [45:03]
Melvyn Bragg
He was proposing his ideas.
- [45:07]
Margaret Macmillan
Yes, he did have an impact on Lloyd George. I mean Lloyd George was very taken with the idea of canceling the inter allied war debts in order to make reparations unnecessary. And Keynes actually drew up a proposal which Lloyd George showed to Clemenceau and Wilson in the course of the negotiations. I think it was in May 1919 and they looked at it and said very interesting, thank you. But we're not, you know, more or less thanks, we're not going to do anything about it. But I think Lloyd George, who did try while he remained Prime Minister, and then when he was in opposition, did try and come up with schemes for getting Europe integrated again economically. I mean, he had at Genoa, he came up with a plan to try and bring Russia back into the European Community as well. And so I think Lloyd George was very conscious of the argument that Keynes made that there was once an integrated economic system which served Europe and the world very well and were foolish not to try and reconstitute it.
- [46:03]
Melvyn Bragg
Was there a sense. I'll stay with you for a moment. Come in. Was there a sense that looking back and we. Glory of hindsight but a trick was missed by the Allies? Two or three tricks is too, too, too silly a word. But still, I know what I mean. Do you? I mean that they missed. They missed an opportunity. That's a bit better, isn't it? Three syllables.
- [46:22]
Margaret Macmillan
They did miss an opportunity, but whether the opportunity was really there, I don't know. I mean, again, you, you run into the political obstacles, you know, and if you think at the end of the Second World War, people now look back and say, well, why couldn't they have done the equivalent. Why couldn't the United States have done the equivalent of a Marshall Plan after the First World War? The only reason, in my view, the Americans did a Marshall Plan two years after the end of the Second World War in 1947, is because they were scared stiff of the Soviet Union taking over the whole continent. But in 1919, they didn't have that fear. They were worried about upheavals, but they weren't worried about the whole continent being dominated by a single power. And so the pressure behind the Marshall Plan was one of fear and it did make a difference. But that sort of pressure wasn't there. I mean, the pressure in the US was to get out, bring our boys back home. We probably shouldn't have gone into this war anyway.
- [47:10]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah. What impact did the book have in Germany?
- [47:13]
Patricia Clavin
A huge impact. A huge impact. Keynes. I mean, one of the things that's amazing about it is how quickly it appears in the German language. And that's because Keynes is good friends with Moritz Bohn, who's on the German delegation, who's married to a British woman who's a German liberal. Moritz Bond is a very gifted translator, becomes a very important political commentator. And so the book is translated and published in Germany as quickly as it is anywhere else. And it is very quickly incorporated into German foreign policy as a way of, well, this suggestion that actually eminent people inside, well connected people inside the British government recognize that reparations is a Non starter and that the peace itself by implication is unfair. And so that becomes the kind of. And that's the logic that drives appeasement and it's a logic that drives foreign policy in the 1920s to some good effect actually, because it does generate stabilization, it does generate some rapprochement. Keynes anticipates, I mean, I suppose to think about the tricks that were missed. One of the things that Keynes also talks about is the need for international coordination and cooperation on economic and financial questions and that that should be instituted. So he's, he's one of the people that says actually this new thing about the League of Nations is about politics and about disarmament. It really needs to be about economic and social cooperation. And that's at the forefront of everybody's minds in the Second World War. So they, that is, I mean that builds up in a piecemeal way, but Keynes anticipates it and it becomes a.
- [48:43]
Michael Cox
Really important lesson on, on the tricks Mist. I kind of completely agree with Margaret at the very beginning, I mean the possibility of building a stable Europe at that time, given the conditions which have been described, it seemed to me nigh impossible. The really interesting question moving the dial forward is what happens after World War II? And in some ways I'd say canes could not have been implemented after World War I. No more than a decent peace could have been implemented after World War I. It's some of the lessons learned and the conditions have changed so dramatically by 45 that many of the things that Keynes wanted in 1990 actually become more feasible. It seems to me after World War II a united Europe, Franco German reconciliation. Not the opposite, a beginnings of a solution of a German question, although that involved in the end the division of Germany. As we know and more importantly, as Margaret alluded, the United States is in a very, very different position with a very different international outlook after World War II. And later on. I think it was Paul Volcker, the great American economist and most important person at the time, said Keynes is hopeless in 1990. And I kind of don't agree with much of what he said, but it does make so much more sense after World War II when the United States, as Margaret said, fearful of communism and already beginning to think much more internationally rather than in terms of self interest as they did after World War I.
- [50:07]
Melvyn Bragg
Do you want to take that up?
- [50:08]
Margaret Macmillan
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think it's a very different world and I think we also tend, because we know the Second World War was going to come along, we tend to look at the 1920s and say it was all hopeless. In fact, I mean, as Patricia mentioned earlier, the fighting had stopped, the civil wars had mostly stopped. By the mid-1920s, reparations were being managed, the bill was being negotiated down, and Europe's economic recovery was taking place. I mean, trade was back to pre war levels, production was back to pre war levels. And there was real hope, I think, in the 1920s, that somehow the horrors of the war would be put behind them. Germany joins the League of Nations. It pledges that it will respect its borders, at least in the west, and not try and change them by force. The borders in the east were another matter, but there was hope that that could one day be agreed upon. Even Russia, the great Soviet, which was now the Soviet Union, the great revolutionary power, was now becoming much more player in international relations. It was signing agreements. And so I think there was hope. I mean, the peace settlements at the end of the First World War weren't great, but they were constantly being amended and changed. I mean, there were all sorts of conferences in the early 1920s and late 1920s. And if you had looked back in 1929, you'd say, We've come a long way, things are looking good, we're getting over the second, the First World War. They didn't know, nobody knew what was going to happen next.
- [51:26]
Patricia Clavin
I think Keynes did in a way, because of course, I mean, Keynes anticipates that. And that's one of the reasons he has his resonance is because the way that they stabilize the economic and financial system is by returning to a fixed exchange mechanism, the gold standard. And Keynes is one of the first people to say the way that we're doing this is not going to work. And it's that gold standard that then lies behind after the Wall street crash in 1929, which is the American stock market collapse. It's the way that the gold standard operates that pushes the Great Depression out into the global economy and with catastrophic consequences for Germany, that helps bring the Nazis to power. So he does see that, and which.
- [52:08]
Michael Cox
In turn leads of course to Keynes great book, the General Theory, which is in a sense the anti orthodox statement that markets alone and orthodoxy, economic orthodoxy, are no solution, solution to the problems either facing the world or Germany or the United States. And he becomes a great admirer too, remember, of the New Deal and of Roosevelt, with whom he had substantial conversation. So this, this story, Melvin moves Forward into the 30s and then into the post war period as well.
- [52:36]
Melvyn Bragg
Margaret? No. Do you?
- [52:37]
Margaret Macmillan
No, no, I agree with both my colleagues I think it does. And I think Keynes saw very clearly the economic weaknesses of the, and the, the problems in the structures that were meant to manage the world. And those became very clear at the beginning of the 1930s. And I think that did then lead him to play this enormously important role in developing the Bretton woods institutions, the World bank, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which became the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, which were going to be enormously important after the Second World War in preventing the sorts of things that had happened after the First World War. But you know, he was learning as much as anyone was. Even his profession, economics was a very new profession. So this was a process of trial and error. And I think we can look back and see where they went wrong. But at the time, the choices before them were very, very difficult. I'm not excusing what they did, but I'm saying we have to try and understand it. Given what they were facing, taking a.
- [53:39]
Melvyn Bragg
Big hindsight breath, what did they get right about that armistice? They all, A lot of very clever people assembled and gave themselves time and they had the American back and so on and so forth. What do you think worked there in.
- [53:57]
Patricia Clavin
1945 after the First World War? After the first. What worked. One of the things that we would pull out now is actually the articulation of rights. Actually that it's about those self determination is quite problematic. The way that you might organize ethnic groups within a particular nation state. What Wilson articulated and what many people expected, and that's why when he comes to Europe, he's fated everywhere, you know, he's seen as this great hero, is that there's an expectation that this peace settlement will recognize the rights of groups and to a certain extent the rights of individuals, and that there'll be a platform to articulate that at the League of Nations. And of course, I mean, Margaret's mentioned it already, you know this, that the expectations are so great after such a terrible conflict and the expectation of peace is so great when in fact there's war being waged around everywhere. So I think that that's, it's one of the few places in a way they got it right, but they were facing enormous, enormous challenges.
- [55:01]
Michael Cox
I would also add, and often it doesn't get left out of the narrative, but I think it's something we need to come back to again and again and again. The League of Nations, I mean, okay, we know it quote unquote failed. It didn't stop war, it didn't stop German aggression no more than it Stopped Italian fascism or Japanese imperialism in Asia. Nonetheless, it erected a possibility of discussion, debate, the use of international law, of treaties, as a way of discussing and if not fundamentally resolving all differences, but at least a platform, a parliament of the world, if you like, in which you could have that kind of discussion. I think too much faith was put in it, but it's not surprising. And by the way, it's important to note that what does the do in 1942, 43 and 44 in the middle of World War II? They start talking about creating a United nations on the back of some of the failures of the League. But at least the League was an inspiration. I also want to bring this back in, that the League was so inspiring, not just for elites, but for masses of ordinary people around Europe. League of nations unions were created all over Britain, all over Europe, and all over the United States. So it's a very inspiring idea. It didn't solve all the problems of the world, which we've already discussed, but nonetheless, it gave a vision of a new world order, a new, New possibilities for the world.
- [56:19]
Margaret Macmillan
Yeah, well, and it was popular all over the world, actually. It was popular in Japan, it was popular in India. It was popular in some of the colonial possessions. And I think what was very important about it were the institutions it built up, which Patricia's written about, of course, so well, institutions to deal with economics, institutions to deal with labor. The International Labor Organization was part of the League of Nations, International health organizations. I mean, these are the sorts of things in a world that. That is globalized, we need so that we can deal with things like pandemics. And so what the League did was not just the sort of high profile stuff of getting people together to talk about peace and avoiding war. It was actually building ways in which different peoples around the world could deal with each other and we could deal with common problems, which, as we know, we still need very much today.
- [57:05]
Michael Cox
I agree. And to add to the list of things the League did, it also was very, very instrumental in discussing slavery. And it was also very interesting work on drugs. You know, one of the very first moments in historical time, I think, where you had proper international discussions about the drugs trade. And I think too often people in my profession, international relations, have kind of dismissed the League of Nations, a piece of idealism which was bound to fail. But I think, as Margaret has said and as Patricia has written so well, the League opened up possibilities of many discussions on many fronts which still remain with us today.
- [57:40]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. That was a tour De force. And thank you very much indeed. Thank you to Margaret Millen, Patricia Clavin and Mick Cox, and to our studio engineer, Duncan, Duncan Hanant. Next week, Plankton, the source of most of the oxygen we breathe. Thanks for listening.
- [58:00]
Patricia Clavin
And the In Our Time podcast gets.
- [58:02]
Margaret Macmillan
Some extra time now with a few.
- [58:04]
Patricia Clavin
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [58:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, that was smashing. Now, I'm afraid if we can tax you for a few minutes more, what.
- [58:13]
Michael Cox
Did we really want to say?
- [58:14]
Melvyn Bragg
No, no, no, it isn't anything like that. It just turned out to be a completely unexpected hit. It came from a trade unionist friend of mine in the Lords. I like him a lot. And he just said, what happens after the program? And I said, oh, they just talk away about the subject, but I don't, I say very little. He said, oh, I like to hear that. And so we said, well, let's have a go. This. Just have a go now.
- [58:38]
Margaret Macmillan
I always like it. I mean, I listen to. I listen to your program a lot. And I always like the end bit when people say, oh, wish.
- [58:43]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, here you've got. So my only question, the kickoff question. What? And I'll go around the table. What would you like to say that you didn't say? Didn't have time to say.
- [58:53]
Patricia Clavin
Yeah, Patricia, A couple of things about Keynes, really. I think that what's quite extraordinary about him and clearly intimidated everybody, was he is extremely clever and it's what jumps out of his correspondence. He has an ability to master technical material and summarize it really quickly. So when he's working in the treasury, they send him to do all sorts of strange things when they're trying to pin down Winston Churchill, who's Minister of Munitions. And Keynes gets to the bottom of a really quite complicated issue really quickly. And I think that it's the kind of range of what he's able to do. This extraordinary text that's written with such brilliance. And you can see Woodrow Wilson with his white gloves and his, you know, looking like the sort of swanky man around town and completely hopeless diplomat. And yet he's also doing these complications at the same time. You know, he has just been doing hugely complicated calculations of different types of debt and different types of trade. It's. It's just an extraordinary range. And he's ill quite a lot of the time. That's the other thing that Keynes is ill. He's not. Not a well child. He's ill at the Paris Peace Conference and they all have the Paris cold. But then through his career, he suffers and in the Second World War, he has. He's dying of cancer and he's still doing all of these incredibly difficult negotiations they interview him about. But this is in response to Mick's point about, you know, does it have a resonance in the Second World? Well, the Americans interview him in the Second World War as they're preparing for the end of the war, about reparations and whether they should try and impose reparations on Germany, because there is a plan to turn Germany into a pastoral land, to kind of remove all of the industry and really make it agricultural and impose financial reparations. And Keynes is much more measured, much more careful about it this time around, but he's also in a policy setting, so it's. It's the way that I think anybody that writes about him finds it extremely difficult to capture all of the different aspects of this man because he's so mercurial and brilliant and his passion for.
- [61:10]
Margaret Macmillan
The arts as well. Yeah, you know, he's extraordinary. I mean, and his marriage I find so interesting.
- [61:15]
Melvyn Bragg
Belly dancer?
- [61:16]
Margaret Macmillan
Yes.
- [61:16]
Michael Cox
Did you look?
- [61:18]
Margaret Macmillan
I mean, who. Sounds absolutely wonderful, but I don't suspect. Ever read his memos? Or was it the slightest bit interested in economics? But it seems to have been an enormously successful marriage. He is a fascinating man, and he is, as you say, many different facets and extraordinarily clever. And he has this great capacity, which I may say, not all economists have, of writing very clearly. You understand what he's saying?
- [61:40]
Michael Cox
Well, I'm at the London School of Economics, so I've got to be a bit careful here. There's an abiding image in my mind, Melvin, about Keynes. It's during the war, and he's writing a memo about war dead, and he's sitting at Charleston farm, where his Bloomsbury friends had a farm. Duncan Grant, who had once been one of his lovers, and Vanessa. And he's sitting there writing it in, kind of almost looking like a kind of farmer, almost writing this memo. And I recently visited Charleston again and went to his room where that wonderful painting from Duncan Grant is, and I was kind of moved. And I thought, how many economists write one of the most important books in the world? Doing a bit of weeding in the morning, talking about art and literature with his literary friends in the afternoon, quite literally, and then getting back to write what clearly was one of the most influential books of the early part of the 20th century, which is still being talked about and read today. So I find that kind of nice, you know, not conflict, but this way he could combine all these things together. Now, what, what makes him such a fascinating figure? Not just that he was an economist, but he was an economist. Plus, plus, plus so many other things in the arts and many, many other things.
- [63:00]
Margaret Macmillan
Yeah, no, and I think the whole question that comes up, which we did get into, but how do you end a war so that you don't have future wars? And someone said at the time of the Treaty of Versailles again in 1919, the key one with Germany, that it's neither strong enough nor weak enough. And I think that was the problem. It was strong enough to infuriate the Germans and make them feel it was deeply unfair. But there was no enforcement mechanism, there was no proper way of enforcing it. And once the United States withdrew slightly from world affairs, the British turned to their empire again and the French and a few smaller allies were left trying to enforce it. And that was part of the problem. What I also find interesting is if you look at the end of the Second World War, Germany was actually treated far, far worse. The country was occupied, it was divided. Its infrastructure, its cities lay in ruins. Reparations were extreme, extracted. The Soviets took everything they could get their hands on. I don't think we have a total bill of how much the Soviet Union.
- [63:58]
Melvyn Bragg
Took out, but they actually took whole factories away.
- [64:01]
Margaret Macmillan
They took whole factories, a lot of which sort of rusted away in boxcars somewhere in Siberia, because the Soviets weren't always terribly organized. But, you know, you never hear, I've never heard anyone, even on the German right, saying, we were very unfairly treated after the Second World War. And it's an interesting question.
- [64:17]
Melvyn Bragg
Why is that?
- [64:18]
Margaret Macmillan
Well, that's what I'm wondering. Because the defeat was so total and this time it was brought home to the Germans in a way that it wasn't in the First World War. You know, they were occupied, Germany was occupied. This time, it wasn't in the First World War. So there could be no question about whether or not they'd lost, but it's not led to a desire for revenge, unlike the First World War. So how you end a war is. I'm not saying I know the answer, but we're facing it now with Ukraine. How do you end a war so that doesn't immediately create the grounds for a new war?
- [64:44]
Patricia Clavin
I think what Keynes pointed out in that text too was. I mean, it was partly this stress on planning and looking to see where the problem is. So, you know, part of the argument he makes in the economic consequences of the piece is to say, you know, you haven't planned at all for the social and economic consequences of this war. There's been no. So there's a kind of focus on what governments might do, there's a focus on how populations are behaving, but that's about kind of constituting states and borders. But what you're not thinking about is the place of markets. And I think that's why Keynes always has his resonance for people who are interested in understanding what markets are doing in relation to states and society, that this is a kind of key reference point and why he's so important to them.
- [65:30]
Michael Cox
Just to add one other thing, Keynes wrote many more books and other books, not. Not only the general theory and not only the economic consequences, but who today reads his Theory of Probability, written in 1921, 22, 3. Who today reads the thing on Indian currency reform, his very first book, written about 1912, 1930. Who reads his triatize on money? I mean, one of the great things about the economic consequences of the piece, whether you like it or hate it, whether you think it's fair or unfair on Wilson or whoever is, people are still reading it. And I think one of the reasons is because it's written in such a way as to make it entirely readable. Winston Churchill said this later. I said it didn't read like economics. Maynard, I so enjoyed it because it didn't read like economics. I won't say this about my friends at the London School of Economics at all, but nonetheless, there's a kind of lesson there for academics. How do you write in such a way that the general public, if I can use that overused term, want to read what you've.
- [66:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Actually, when you do programs like this, where the general public, public relations, which.
- [66:31]
Michael Cox
Is why we're all here, we wouldn't have come for anybody else.
- [66:35]
Patricia Clavin
But you do it through history too, don't you? I mean, that Keynes is sort of writing with economics out of a time where economists thought about what economics looked like in the past. You know, it's kind of historical, you know, change through time. Whereas Keynes, I mean, that's one of the kind of big debates he has in the late 1930s, is as quantitative economics starts to appear, he starts to question the value of this type of methodology. So it's another one of his important intimations.
- [67:00]
Michael Cox
A rather strange liberal, because if you look at the people he admired historically, he admired Edmund Burke, the great critic of the French Revolution. And who did he think was the first and greatest of the Cambridge economists? Thomas Malthus, you know, and he was a Malthusian himself. He thought that one of the problems Europe was facing before the First World War was overpopulation. So it's kind of an interesting liberal, a rather dissident liberal, I think we'd have to say.
- [67:27]
Melvyn Bragg
The great producer himself, Simon Tillerson, is about to enter.
- [67:30]
Michael Cox
Does anyone want tea or coffee? No, I'm fine. The water's been running. Melvin, would you mind if we all took. I took a photograph. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. When you look at what's going on around the world, it's easy to think that we humans are incapable of living peacefully. But there are out there people who disagree.
- [67:59]
Margaret Macmillan
I keep going because someone has to hold the line between grief and revenge.
- [68:06]
Michael Cox
I'm Matthew side, and in my sideways miniseries chasing Peace from BBC Radio 4, I'm meeting people who have radical ideas about how we can stop what feels like an inevitable slide into conflict. Listen first on BBC Sounds.
- [68:30]
Patricia Clavin
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he'd would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.