A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  For example, Versailles set up an international system that “prized the homogeneity of populations under the state…rather than the acceptance of multi-ethnicity as the preeminent form of society under dynastic rule”153 (this was somewhat at odds with America’s later mantra on the benefits of “diversity”). Czechoslovakia, for example, contained a large population of ethnic Germans, as did Poland. But other people born in newly created Poland or Hungary were moved to their “rightful” nations. In short, the Versailles Treaty demanded forced deportations and massive mandatory relocations of populations to comply with the map drawing that established the new states. This fact was missed by many observers, who thought the intention was always to integrate and assimilate minorities. A Brazilian delegate to Geneva in 1925, for example, insisted that the goal of the League’s treaties was to end a situation where minorities saw themselves as “constantly alien” and to bring them into “complete national unity.”154

  Of course, already the French were finding this untenable, deporting thousands of Algerian workers as “unassimilable” in 1919, and Portugal had concluded that large parts of its colonial population could never be made Portuguese. Yet even as the League of Nations and the Hilton Young Commission wrestled with the question of whether Africans and other colonial territories could ever adopt representative government in 1929, the League’s own mandate system established at Versailles gave France and Britain governance authority over large parts of the Middle East and Africa. Even more stunning, the League’s wizards required former German colonies to arrange their affairs along democratic principles. Intuitively, the idealistic magi of postwar Europe anticipated the very problems that France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands would experience with Muslim immigrants in the 1990s, but assumed that assimilation was not possible.

  Until 1815, treaties contained protection for minorities, but the idea that religious or ethnic subgroups could serve as a central organizational force of any government was new. For example, no one thought in terms of a “Sunni state” or a “Bantu nation.” Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire acknowledged that it was itself a marriage of expedience between two substantially different peoples. Especially after the nations evolved into their more bureaucratic, centralized form in the late nineteenth century, less attention than ever was paid to the concerns of religious or ethnic groups within the larger state. Likewise none of the European leadership ever expected religious minorities to convert to the more dominant religion, and more important, that they would ever govern. With the London Protocol of 1830, new definitions of nationality were employed in which the Greek state became the representative of the Greek people; and both the Berlin Congress of 1878 and the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85 continued this new application of definitions by permitting minorities to be “protected, deported, or civilized,” depending on the situation.155 Likewise, under the Berlin treaty, East Europeans were to be civilized; Armenians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire would both be deported (although many were killed); and generally populations were either to be removed or protected. In Muslim states under Sharia law, non-Muslims became dhimmis or protected minorities, but in actuality they became fourth-class citizens with few rights. Regardless of the situation, ethnic and religious groups first had to be “defined and labeled as either minorities or majorities.”156

  Wilson’s Commission of Inquiry of 1917 employed the language of minorities and majorities, insisting on the need to protect “minorities or weak [that is, colonized] peoples” and covered a diverse geographical area that included Anatolia, the Balkans, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Russia.157 Five years later, under the Rapallo Treaty (1922), half a million Slavs were stuck inside what was now Italy, but more often, rather than borders changing, entire groups of people were moved under the new terms of “population exchange” and “population unmixing” then in vogue. (The term “ethnic cleansing” would come much later.) Finally, in what was perhaps the last World War I treaty, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 put flesh on the theories by fixing the boundaries of Turkey after a population swap of a million Greek Christians from Anatolia to Greece and 350,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. One student of the treaties concluded, “the Lausanne exchange was no violation; it was an intrinsic element of the principles enumerated at Paris.”158 To protect people, the state had to remove them, and so much the better if they were moved to the state of their natural ethnicity—regardless of where they had lived their entire lives. Thus Sudeten Germans were to be uprooted, Poles living in Germany shipped to the newly created nation of Poland, Magyars forced out of Austria, and so on.

  Ultimately the Jews would suffer the worst from this reshuffling because they had no clearly defined place of residence. But they were not the only minority to exist amid other nationalities in the postwar era. No group paid a higher price for its minority status in the short run than did the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. Rakish, with a resemblance to Errol Flynn, the Ottoman leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) embodied the “good” Muslim from the European point of view (or, what in the twenty-first century would be called a “moderate” Muslim). The future Turkish leader had organized the resistance against the Allied occupying forces in 1919, led calls for a Turkish parliament in 1920, then ascended to the presidency of Turkey in 1923 as that state became the world’s first Islamic republic. He sought a complete Western-style makeover. Suits replaced robes, secularism replaced clerical rule, Ankara replaced Constantinople as the capital. When it came to the Armenians, however, Atatürk looked much like his predecessors. He brooked little political resistance, and certainly did not tolerate the vibrant Christian Armenian community. This minority, comprising Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians, had survived the Romans, Greeks, and Persians, and even maintained its Christian identity under Muslim rule. But its existence under the Muslim dhimmi system was oppressive in the extreme. As a British visitor reported in the 1890s:

  Turkish rule…meant unutterable contempt…. The Armenians (and Greeks) were dogs and pigs…to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence—capricious, unprovoked violence—to resist which…meant death.159

  In 1909, Armenians were wrongly implicated in a countercoup led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II against the “Young Turks,” where Abdul Hamid allied himself against the secularist Young Turks and with the Islamicist factions. In part, he mobilized support by claiming the Armenians had backed the secular government. Troops called into the Adana province to keep order instead went on a rampage against Armenians. After the war, Atatürk focused his attention on eliminating the Armenians, undertaking a systematic slaughter within eyesight of Western naval forces in Constantinople’s harbor.160 Britain and France were outraged at the six thousand Belgians who died under German occupation during the war, but 1.5 million Armenians who were exterminated by massacre, starvation, or exhaustion by the Turks failed to raise an eyebrow.

  Scholars remain divided about whether the Turkish government had a systematic program to exterminate Armenians, and debate continues about whether the slaughters constituted “genocide.”161 But the fate of the Armenians again displayed the unwillingness of Europeans to enforce Versailles’s ideals of national self-determination and the near-impossibility of doing so if they tried. Combined with the Wilsonians’ redrawing of national boundary lines, European nations were condemned to house large numbers of nonnatives: Romania had a minority population of 18 percent, Serbia, 16 percent, and Greece, 10 percent. Eastern Germany was home to three million Poles and hundreds of thousands of other non-Germans. Their fates rested in the same hands that created the very definitions of national identity endangering them—hands that would soon wash themselves clean of any responsibility. />
  Worse, during the war many of the minorities were viewed as traitors or security risks because governments were unsure if their loyalty was to their nation of residence or to their place of ethnic origin. Once World War I ended, they were easy targets during periods of economic hardship. At a time in the Third Republic when France was perhaps the most open to immigrants and foreigners, the columns of Charles Maurras, in the newspaper Action Française, crafted a French version of nationalism that blamed “aliens” for the nation’s economic troubles when French jobs went to immigrants. Some states, such as Romania, dealt with minorities by elevating the power of the state above all. The government, noted the Romanian minister of education, must “mold the souls of all its citizens.”162 Even the Church’s knee had to bow to the state, as community increasingly came to be defined as national, even as national came to be defined as ethnically “French,” “German,” or another designated majority.

  Resettlement ripped groups apart and placed them amid ancestral enemies. Some states engaged in massive relocations of populations across one another’s borders, adding to the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war. To complicate matters, Europe could no longer ship people to America, Australia, or Latin America. Meanwhile, changes in citizenship regulations left even more people without a nationality. Citizenship based on the legal principle of jus sanguinis (by blood—a child’s citizenship was determined by the parent’s citizenship, normally the father, rather than place of birth) was almost universally adopted, leaving only the United States and a handful of other nations granting citizenship by birthplace (by 2011, the United States would be the only such country). The head of the International Red Cross lamented that almost a million Europeans were “unprotected by any legal organization recognized by international law,” which while true ignored the fact that the Versailles Treaty had guaranteed such an outcome by redrawing the map of Europe.163 The League of Nations’ flimsy system of minority guarantees was egregiously flawed, seeking to force-feed a national sense of identity within states from an outside body, while concurrently blessing the deportation of vast populations under the guise of protecting their “human rights.”

  Banditos and Bayonets

  While Europe sank further under the weight of unobtainable dreams, the Americas went their own way. The United States applied a realistic, though occasionally harsh, policy of intervention as necessary, in the Caribbean and Philippines, where American troops came under sharp criticism for the “practically indiscriminate killing of natives.”164 Responding to these unfounded accusations, Marine generals Smedley Butler and John Lejeune both insisted that any civilians killed by American troops constituted exceptions, not the rule, but the issue became politicized when Warren Harding, the presidential candidate in 1920, insisted he would not permit U.S. authorities to draft a constitution and “jam it down [the] throats [of Caribbean neighbors] at the point of bayonets.”165 Once in office Harding continued the Haitian occupation with substantially beneficial results to Haitians. The Haitian government was relatively uncorrupt; officials carefully screened all would-be investors to protect their citizens (to the point that they may have actually retarded growth somewhat); and despite press censorship, there was more free speech and criticism of the United States permitted than would have been under most dictators. By 1929, though, when new riots broke out over student vouchers, the United States was tumbling into the Great Depression, and neither President Herbert Hoover nor President-elect Franklin Roosevelt had any interest in the Haitian distraction. Troops were finally withdrawn in 1934 by FDR, having constructed a thousand miles of roads, 210 major bridges, nine airfields, eighty-two miles of irrigation canals, nearly a dozen hospitals and more than one hundred clinics, and a thousand miles of phone lines. Much of this fell into disrepair or complete collapse after the bulk of the American troops left, once again underscoring the problems in attempting to build nations when effective social, economic, and political institutions were absent.

  Well into the 1920s, American administrations found compelling reasons to dispatch Marines or other troops to warm tropical locales. American Marines kept a small 100-man legation force in Nicaragua after 1909, and in 1916, the little-known Bryan-Chamorro Treaty gave the United States exclusive rights to build a canal and naval bases there, all as part of an effort to protect the Wall Street banking community’s loans and a trans-Isthmian railroad. President Calvin Coolidge, isolationist to his core, ordered the troops out as soon as the debts were paid back to the New York banks, and in 1925, the Marines came home. Immediately, a free election tossed out General Emiliano Chamorro, the president of Nicaragua since 1917, but he led a coup to regain his power in 1926. This time, Coolidge would not support him, and when revolution spread throughout Nicaragua, the Marines came in again (and remained there until 1933) over objections from isolationists like Idaho senator William Borah, who denounced the operation as part of Wall Street’s “mahogany and oil” policy.166

  As in Mexico, relations with Nicaragua produced numerous low-level conflicts in the early twentieth century, including battles between Marines and guerrillas in 1921–22, when American forces were sent in to ensure the repayment of loans to U.S. banks. Smedley Butler, who found himself heading many Caribbean and Latin American expeditionary forces, was later quoted endlessly by the Left when he described himself as a “high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”167 Butler may have had an ax to grind after being passed over as commandant of the Marine Corps, but he accurately described the U.S. military’s role as a collection agency for American investment interests (though European militaries were just as guilty of such an offense). On the other hand, who else does one send when a foreign power steals one’s property?

  Whatever the degree of American investment in Latin American countries, it was never the prime factor in those states’ failure to exploit their natural resources or to develop an industrial infrastructure. Those advocating the “dependency theory” of undeveloped nations, which claims that their lack of progress stems from their dependence on colonial or capitalist states and that they are constrained from establishing their own markets, sources of capital, and infrastructure by the imperialist and developed nations, have held sway in academic debate for much of the twentieth century. But such academicians have ignored the central and critical fact that those states were missing all four of America’s pillars of exceptionalism, and were unable to make substantial progress on their own without first developing the necessary legal and societal framework. In short, the “dependency theory” is dead wrong. One must look elsewhere to explain why Latin and Central America, independent since early in the nineteenth century, have been unable to develop their own markets, capital, and infrastructure for the better part of two hundred years ago.

  In fact, domestic upheaval usually accounted for the most important obstacle to development even with direct American investment and building of institutions. Mexico, for example, beset by revolution after revolution that produced a merry-go-round of leaders between 1910 and 1916, saw its textile output fall during the war by 38 percent, despite a captive world market. Indeed, one of the striking features about Latin America during the first part of the twentieth century is how it had monopolies on many products, yet could not take advantage of its good fortune. By 1938, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico all controlled more than one fifth of the world’s exports in at least one commodity, with little to show for it. Brazil accounted for 60 percent of the world’s coffee as early as 1913, yet its currency value fell, its internal taxes rose, and even though it was thought of as an “advanced” Latin American country, its value-added per person (that is, the difference between the production cost and the sale price of a good) stood at $16 compared with Argentina’s $84.168 Brazil’s productivity was “dismal” in the period 1913 to 1940, and real agricultural wages fell in Mexico. These realities have caused recent scholars to admit that the so-called dependency theory—which arg
ues that virtually all of the Third World’s economic backwardness stemmed from “colonialism” or “imperialism”—has been “unable to offer much guidance as to why some Latin American countries performed so much better than others.”169 Even in cattle raising, where the Latin American countries should have had an edge, their efforts at cattle breeding were poor, producing low-quality herds and blemished hides. Nor was poor productivity linked in some way to concentration of farmland in few hands as larger estates proved no more, or less, flexible or productive than smaller farms.170

  What did hold Latin America back were the missing four pillars and a disconnect in moving cottage industries toward large-scale mechanization, partly due to the absence of finance. Successful companies relied on family networks: Di Tellas in Argentina, the Prados in Brazil, the Gómez family in Mexico, and the Edwards family in Chile. Thus, dependence on foreign investment had little to do with a state’s undeveloped condition. While foreign investment could occasionally be dominant and result in abuses of power, direct foreign investment “played only a minor role in most countries” during this period and was confined to international trade sectors.171 The primary problems were local—the inability to establish private ownership of property for collateral and corrupt top-down legal structures requiring bribes to function.