Between Two Wars

Abstract

German philosophers are understandably inclined to pessimism. If the period 1919–39 covered by this chapter offers some remarkable exceptions to Hegel’s gloomy maxim, he might well have retorted that some of the lessons then learned later proved to have been misleading. In the early 1920s, for instance, one lesson very widely drawn from the history of the century’s first fourteen years was that `great armaments lead inevitably to war’.¹ It was given early application in a proposal addressed in July 1921 by President Harding (1921–3) of the United States to the governments of Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Because the German High Seas Fleet had lain on the bottom of Scapa Flow since its scuttling on 21 June 1919, these four governments then represented the world’s leading naval powers and were invited to join the fifth, the United States, at a conference in Washington on the subject of naval limitation.

What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it (G.W. F. Hegel, 1770–1831, cited in Oxford Dictionary if of, Quotations, 1979).