Conversations with History: Niall Ferguson

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Neil Ferguson who is the Lawrence a Tisch professor of history at Harvard University a senior research fellow of Jesus College Oxford University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution his new book is the war of the world 20th century conflict and the descent of the West yep welcome back to our program nice to be back when did you conceive the idea of this book it was about 10 years ago I think I went back and checked there was a proposal for a book that was going to be concerned with world war two but also with ethnic conflict in Central and Eastern Europe and in the intervening period I did a few other things but the project rolled on I kept gathering material and accumulating photocopies in the way that one does always thinking how best to turn this into into a viable project and in the last I guess 18 months it came together very fast partly because I turned it into a television series in Britain which I hope will be shown in the u.s. at some point but also because I had a book deadline so there was a frantic writing period but but I was writing up stuff I'd been thinking about and teaching for really quite a long time and and as writing does the writing the actual writing just come naturally after you've dug in and done the research pretty much I mean I think thinking is the hardest bit about doing history that there's a certain easiness about just absorbing lots and lots and lots of material and when I looked at my shelves I suppose just before I started writing I lined all the material up and I'd sort of sorted it into roughly the the boxes I wanted it in and and some of it in electronic format you know how these things are some level historians of beachcombers who just go around making stuff up and they carry it around in the equivalent of lots and lots of plastic bags but when I lined all the material up I was rather daunted because I'd accumulated a lot over the years getting that raw material into a structure is the hard bit one of the advantages of using television as a medium is that you're forced to get the structure right mmm because there's not actually that many words in an hour of television once you've boiled it down into six hours you've got a structure which is pretty robust mainly because you've redrafted the script 20 times and so once that's done the writing of the book which in a sense flesh is out this skeletal structure is very straightforward I mean it's it's all in there you just have to have enough hours in the day to get it done it's a big book and so let me give you an exam question could you very briefly state your the main thesis of the whole book and then we'll break that apart sure what the war of the world itself needs some explanation is a title it's it's an illusion obviously to HG Wells is science fiction classic the War of the Worlds which has had many movie and D radio reincarnation Xand and the central theme is that what Wells imagined happening that's to say a city laid waste by hostile invaders with very powerful weaponry did in fact happen it's just that we didn't need Martians to invade the earth for London to be bombed to rubble we we had other human beings to do it and so the question is why was it that in the 20th century there was so much violence of the sort Wells imagined so many cities devastated so many populations laid waste without any need for alien invaders why were we the aliens why did we treat other human beings as aliens that that's the sort of central question the the book asks so it's a kind of answer to the question why was the 20th century so violent to put it very crudely and and an attempt to resolve a paradox since the 20th century was also the most extraordinary century in terms of economic scientific and other forms of progress now having posed the question that way what why so much violence amid so much progress I then had to break it down when I broke it down by saying okay 20th century were honest isn't evenly distributed it's really heavily concentrated in certain places at certain times for example Ukraine is not a great place to be born in say 1904 your chances of dying a violent death particularly if you're a male or fantastically high whereas I was born in Scotland in 1964 and nobody's fired a bullet in me to date and that that seems to me to be a really important insight all the previous explanations I knew of to to try to unravel the violence of the 20th century couldn't help me with timing or with location they were all far too general you know it was the technology or wicked leaders or evil and extreme ideologies none of these things tell you why Ukraine is more dangerous than Scotland than why 1904 is more dangerous than 1964 so the book has a very simple three-part answer to this question it says really this that there are three things that help you identify the timing and location of very extreme violent events one is economic volatility it's the really economically bumpy times that tend to coincide with violence the second is ethnic disintegration its multi-ethnic societies that are the most dangerous ones when they tear one another apart you get much much more violence than elsewhere and finally it's when Empire's decline that violence is most likely to escalate and many many empires declined and fell in the course of the 20th century I think it was about 12 in all so there you have a sort of three part answer and you'll notice that each of my my part begins with the letter E which from my point of view makes it much easier to remember easier place it on the books to our bookshelf yeah but it's just from it's an aid to memoir because if I'm trying to answer a question as difficult as that on a regular basis it helps to have a mnemonic now you touched just a moment ago on what you discovered with ethnic conflict and namely there were trends toward assimilation of communities for example the Jewish community in Germany before you know the the downfall came so so let's go beyond that now because what what you're seeing as you look at the conflict is a lot of movement of peoples in this area that you've identified so they're the people moving people falling under the rule of different empires talk a little about that because these were the factors that among others led to the disintegrate which began to happen yes I wanted to write a book that had World War two at its core and of course that includes the the Holocaust but I realized that couldn't really explain those things if I didn't go right back to the beginning of the century and what I've called the the first stage of globalization because in the first stage of globalization you get extraordinary mobility unprecedented mobility people are moving in their millions around the world in a way that they never had before and that includes enormous migrations from The Pale of Settlement as it was known in in Russian controlled Eastern Europe to which Jews had been confined under Soros rule westwards not only to the United States but in many cases simply to Western or Central Europe now these mass migrations are fascinating not least because they're part of an extrordinary period of economic prosperity but they're also associated with a dissolution of traditional religious communities if you go back into the 19th century certain mid 19th century religious communities are quite sealed off from one another I mean decisions about marriage which is for me a very very important indicator are quite strictly controlled by 1900 these structures of if you like common or control of marital decisions are breaking down because in the big cities that interest me the most these cosmopolitan cities whether you're talking about oh I don't know a Vienna Budapest Berlin Hamburg places where the the great migrations lead people to structures of religious observance are weakened just because people are on the move and also because they're meeting what we used to call the other they're meeting people from different communities and human beings are members of one species all pretty much sexually compatible the stuff happens in other words what happens is that people start to make romantic decisions sexual decisions marital decisions beyond the control of their religious leaders and that's really quite new so you get from virtually nothing a sudden upsurge in rates of intermarriage in Central and East European cities and that was when I first started tracking and I was really stunned by what I found because I found that in the 1920s in some cities Hamburg was the one I knew best one in every two marriages involving one at least one Jewish partner was mixed and the rate was even higher interested it wasn't that far below in the city life Breslow and the more I looked for this kind of data which isn't very easy to find I should say I mean I was digging around in dusty old censuses trying to find out who married whom the more amazed I was in post-revolutionary Russia there was a huge upsurge in marriage between Jews and non-jews and there were a few countries where this didn't happen Poland it didn't happen anything like so much and so I was left with a question in my mind and the question was what went wrong what went wrong with this process of assimilation and integration which in the 1920s made many German Jewish leaders think that their community was simply going to dissolve I mean there was going to be a dissolution of the Jewish Question because everybody essentially was going to marry out now when you have that question being posed in the 1920s how on earth do you get within a few short years to genocide and that's really one of the central questions than the book are and I recall that you because what becomes a key element here is not only the the movement of the Jews and other nationalities as these changes were but Germans moving East basically and you you actually note at a point that that the Jews and the Germans got along pretty well actually they were dispersed in the east before the rise of the Nazis well that this region was the region that I was most fascinated by as a kind of crescent of territory that runs down from the Baltic Sea through central Eastern Europe down into parts of Romania and then as far east as the river Volga of German settlement some of it dating back to medieval times some of it as recent as the 18th century and in these areas beyond the borders of the Germany Bismarck created the Germans were very often minority they were often a dominant minority they might be the landowners in the Baltic States or the prosperous farmers in Transylvania but they were clearly a relative minority surrounded by various different kinds of Slavic peasantry and so interestingly in around 1900 if you'd gone to somewhere like Chernov it's a town I became fascinated by Germans and Jews were in a sense partners because there were both german-speaking and they were both minorities you would tend to find that the the German Gentiles running the bureaucracy and the German Jews running the university but they really weren't deeply separated in fact they were a more or less inseparable social delese and that to me is fascinating because those sorts of communities existed all over Eastern Europe Prague is another good example at a place that is essentially run by German speakers many of them Jewish in what you might call a sort of Czech sea of of peasantry and it's those places that go wrong they are the ones that break down those relationships between the two minorities the Jews on the one hand and the Germans and the other those are the things that malfunction so disastrously in the 1930s and 1940s and I wanted to try and explain that because I don't think it's really been explained before and let's talk about what some of those factors were but but one of the the points that moves to your your second point of analysis is what we were witnessing during this period is the breakdown of the old kind of multinational empire which governed in a way I almost get the sense of kind of being laid-back a kind of tolerance of different communities and creating a situations where they could live side by side although developments then led to different hierarchies which became a problem this I think is why the breakdown of Empire is an integral part of the story clearly there were multi-ethnic communities in North America this wasn't unique to Central Eastern Europe New York was one of the cities with the largest immigrant Jewish population in the world actually in 1900 but but in a sense New York doesn't become one of the killing fields of the 20th century why not well the answer is that it's very far from the kind of Imperial fault lines that interests me the trouble about central Eastern Europe was that it was the it was the place where multiple empires met is this sort of fault line between Romanov Russian Empire Habsburg Austrian Empire Ottoman Turkish Empire and Horan zone and Prussian M are four great empires all bumping up against one another rather like tectonic plates before an earthquake now in these empires which were by definition more or less multinational very large encompassing huge tracts of land minorities enjoyed a certain security because a these empires weren't capable of totalitarian type control of their subjects they never really relied on delegated authority to local elites and be because they becaus Napolitan and multi-ethnic there wasn't a sense in which minorities were as it were anomalous there were great many minorities in the Habsburg Empire and in some ways the people running it were a minority that the German speakers of Vienna so I guess one of the hypotheses of the book is that for all their underserved floors these empires may in fact have been preferable to what succeeded them after the first world war namely a whole complex of nation-states that were essentially based on the principle of majority rule and in which minorities were much less secure and much more like to be persecuted so the end of empire in central Eastern Europe spells trouble for ethnic minorities and that case I mentioned earlier of churn of its illustrates the point quite well because very shortly after the end of the First World War Romanians are storming around central churn of its proclaiming that it's now churn out II a Romanian city that the German civil servants have to hop it because now you have to speak Romanian to be a civil servant and the German professors and generous professors have to hop it because now the language of instruction will be Romanian it's deeply traumatic to be on the receiving end of that if you have been the ruling elite of a town and I think that kind of pattern replicated itself in interns all over Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War you you make an interesting point which I want to play with right now and that is that the technologies the instruments of consolidation of bringing order to an empire had within them the seeds of the disintegration of the Empire and you talk especially about the railroads and it actually what it reminded me of was the internet today that is that that you're dealing with the problem well how does the world find order and empires have done some of that but but the talk a little about the railroads because they were a way to unite different parts of the Empress he became something else right I mean I spend a lot of time on railroads doing this project including a stretch of the trans-siberian railroad and it became almost the light motif of the project because rare words at the beginning of the 20th century looked like instruments of power the Russian state built railroads with great enthusiasm in order to mobilize its army more effectively I mean a lot of railroads went westwards from from central Russia towards the Prussia an Austrian frontier for a very obvious reason and it wasn't trade so as an instrument of power politics railroads for crucial and that's of course why in some measure we can understand 1914 as in a JP Taylor's famous phrase a war by timetable in which the outbreak of war is in many ways inseparable from the exigencies of railway timetables getting your troops into position in time before the other guys do and yet already even before 1914 it was becoming obvious that always had as it were an alternative and rather subversive role for an empire like like Russia's one of the most interesting things about the 1905 revolution in Russia the first real tremor that shakes the Tsarist system is how the revolution spread along railroads and it was often in railway towns that unrest first occurred that was also interesting they were pogroms happened and the interaction of revolutionary activity and anti-semitic activities one of the things that makes 1905 very very interesting a harbinger of what lies ahead I mean people are simultaneously protesting against Soros incompetence in the russo-japanese war and beating up or even murdering local Jews as if they're in some sense to blame for foreign defeat so there's a very very subtle process going on it turns out that railways aren't just for transporting troops they can also transport seditious ideas it's clear that the notion that the Jews were in some ways to blame spreads along railway lines and the notion that they've beaten up the Jews in town X is reported in town why and it so does becomes along the railway line and happens there so we always have that role and they play of course another role altogether an even more horrific role in the interwar period when they become the means of transporting ethnic minorities to their deaths and we all think of cattle trucks in connection with the Holocaust but actually the Germans were late comers to this technique because the Turks had used railroads to transport Armenians to the deserts of Syria and Stalin had used cattle trucks to transport ethnic minorities all over the Soviet Union if he didn't trust them so so railways are very much a kind of key part of this story they are transformed from instruments of warfare modes of transport for commerce into revolutionary conduits and ultimately into engines of genocide now the third component of your analysis is looking at economic volatility during this period and I think you're suggesting that at some points in their evolution you know empires bring a kind of economic stability because integration is recurring within them but but the larger global events during this period become near catastrophic as Germany has to repay its World War 1 debts in our talk a little about that because it's the third component of what you're trying to say this economic volatility is a really important concept partly because it reminds us that ups can be destabilizing as well as downs and what I'm interested in when I talk about volatility is precisely the frequency and amplitude of economic change and we've kind of forgotten what it's like to be in a recession in the last 10 or so years have been among the most smoothly ran least volatile periods in all economic history particularly in the United States but also in Western Europe but but it wasn't like this in the early 20th century and it certainly wasn't like this in the mid 20th century when growth would fluctuate very violently from huge booms to sudden dramatic busts the most famous of course being the Great Depression my argument is that that helps us with the timing of extreme violence there's no doubt that a multi-ethnic society comes under great strain when volatility surges even in good times you get complaints about who benefits from what we would now call globalization I mean the benefits aren't evenly distributed of rapid growth and say Sarris Russia or in Turkey they're actually quite often skewed towards ethnic minorities who tend to be taking advantage more successfully of the economic opportunities of a global economy and then along come the bad times and that's the moment at which the majority may turn around and say look the scapegoats are there in the big fancy houses the people who made the money in the good times so I think volatility is critical for our understanding of why a multi-ethnic society can tear itself apart in relatively stable times neighbors may live quite peacefully next door to neighbors of a different ethnic or sectarian group but when things are all over the map economically those relations are likely I think to become strained and I think the book shows that quite convincingly it helps us certainly to understand the timing of violence it was much more likely to happen in say the 1930s and 40s than in any previous of succeeding decade I read the book at its entirety and I really recommend it because it's it's a remarkable capacity to put pieces of the story together in in one you know larger context and when I was going over my notes in preparation for the interview I had suddenly it dawned on me and that what when we get to World War two and the causes of that war what you're really showing us is that new kinds of empires emerged with the collapse as these multinational empires were collapsing they were really state empires that sought to resolve internal problems and reshape the world is that a fair Restatement of what you're getting at because it's very clear that when you look at Germany and Japan they're dealing with a set of problems they're going to use their foreign policy to achieve it they're going to use military power talk a little about that because this was a almost like a second iteration of top trying to bring order to the world what's interesting about these new empire states as as I call them whether you look at the Soviet Union which was one the Third Reich Nazi Germany which was another nationalist Japan which was a third is that they are unquestionably impure in their dimensions I mean they aspire to control large tracts of land inhabited by foreign people so there's no question of their being ethnically homogenous on the other hand they tend to try to govern themselves far more like nation-states a far more centralized and they insistence on uniformity is far greater so they're far less tolerance of ethnic minorities than these old empires I was talking about before so the new Empire states are really very dangerous things and they're capable of tremendous internal violence against their own people but also capable of extraordinary external violence that they're extremely aggressive and this of course comes down to that critical question of living space that was posed by writers on geopolitics in the mid century there was this sense particularly in Japan and Germany densely populated societies with by comparison with say the United States or the British Empire very little free territory there's a sense in which and it's not an implausible argument in the 1930s that to cope with the depression Germans and Japanese need more land and so that the whole project becomes an imperial one but it's an imperial one which is I think more ruthless than previous imperial projects because the conception is we want the land we don't really want the people well currently there and so the imperial projects that emerge for a thousand-year Reich in Central Europe and Eastern Europe and for a Greater East Asia co-prosperity zone imply not only living space but also killing space you are going to get rid of at least some of the indigenous peoples in order to clear the way for your own master race to reprobate I think that makes these empires really quite distinct from previous empires they're very much more systematically violent if you like much more determined to engage in mass murder than previous empires had been and they had the capacity to do that I mean they bring in a sense industrialized Jennifer yes I mean this is of course a critical point that the countries that do many of the worst things in the mid 20th century are among the most sophisticated in the world and you can't say that higher education inoculates a society against barbarism because Germany in the 1920s had the universities in the world bar none and a very high proportion of Nobel prizes were being awarded to Germans from these universities more than in the United States more than the United States which was significantly behind indeed Germany was really where you went if you had scientific ambitions at that time so we have a puzzle here which is that really the most sophisticated societies produced the greatest barbarism Japan - clearly the most advanced Asian Society in the 1920s capable as Germany was of running a democratic system and in yet and yet able to unleash within a few short years extraordinary levels of organised violence waged very ruthlessly in the sense that there was never any restraint in the way that violence was used by these empire states when they let rip and indeed the lack of restraint the the ruthlessness was almost a signature of both regimes there was a sense that that the traditional restraints on the conduct of war were suspended when Japan went into say Nanjing or when the Germans invaded Poland the gloves were off and I think one of the things that's most troubling about the book is the the idea that it's highly educated men who are often responsible for the worst atrocities we can't pretend that there's some kind of lower middle class affair because Nazism is essentially devised and implemented by people with doctorates with with very high levels of education and I recall a footnote in which the the there were a high number of PhDs that were head of these killing units that went in in the in the first wave of the German invasion the SS was in the leech organization it attracted specialists in racial theory in eugenics and we forget know that these disciplines have been completely discredited that they were or seemed to be at the cutting edge of modern science in the 1920's 1930's and people who specialized in racial theory held eminent posts in universities not only in Germany but in the rest of the world so these people were natural recruits to a project to redraw the ethnographic map of Europe Hitler was of course not a very well-educated man he was an autodidact with very incoherent ideas but when it came to turning Hitler's diffuse aversion to Jews and his paranoia about miscegenation into policy you turned to these people and they came from the universities donned their black uniforms and perpetrated horrific crimes as if their education had in a sense strip them of moral restraints rather than equipping them with it and and racial theory becomes a key component of this that that for example the Jews pollute the blood of the of the Aryan race and and so on and so forth I mean that that's a key element in our clay shall we say a key plank in the I think you call it a political religion that Hitler came to power on and as you point out he headed a mass movement and he was pocketed win large numbers of Florida it's not a plurality I think in the in the voting on the question he should probably have formed a government earlier than he did actually because their Nazi victory in 32 is really decisive and it's only by some rather fruitless play that they can keep it out of power until 33 there's no question that Hitler articulates popular feelings not a majority not a majority you need a majority this was a PR system and with proportional representation the Nazis clearly we're in a position to form a government by 32 but he articulates the feelings of a very large number of Germans one of the things that I was able to show in the book is that if you take all the people who were ever voted for a fascist party in Europe and the period of the depression an overwhelming majority of them were German speakers and this is true not only in the German Reich but it's also true when you look at Austria and look in in countries like Czechoslovakia so in a sense as a mass movement fascism was a quite peculiarly German when other fascist parties didn't do anything like as well there were very very few fascist parties that could mobilize the way the Nazis could and so part of the question is how far is anti-semitism what makes Hitler popular or is it in a sense a kind of cranky preoccupation of the extremists in the party and now it's it's tempting to say it's it's a marginal phenomenon it doesn't talk about it that much in 32 33 it's essentially an economic protest vote that the Nazis capitalize on or it's an anti Versailles anti peace treaty vote and yet when you look at how often the the themes of what became Nazi government propaganda were present in the popular culture of vimar Germany in the 1920s you have to wonder I mean for example one of the great bestsellers of the early 20s was a book called the sinned against the blood by a guy called martyred inta and this book is an absolutely classic Hitlerian fantasy about racial pollution and when Hitler says in mine camp that the Jews polluted the blood of the areas he means something quite specific he's talking about inter marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-jews and of course he's actually talking about something that as we said earlier was happening it's not in that sense an imaginary construct but it translates this high level of intermarriage into an anxiety which Hitler is not alone in feeling that something is changing as it were in German society that something is fundamentally being altered by this pattern of assimilation and integration what's interesting is the extender which these ideas are imported from places like the United States and jobs have never really been worried about race before because in a sense they'd not being part of the the gradient aerial projects of the 16th 17th and 18th centuries and that in the english-speaking world a fear of miscegenation fear of intermarriage across racial boundaries was very well-established and had produced anti-miscegenation laws and a very large number of American States so he's taking ideas from outside the German world and importing them and applying them to the particular predicament of Central Europe in the 1930s I think it's a very very potent appeal that those ideas turn out to have it's not just the cranks in other words but highly educated men with PhDs who come to believe that the Jews are a quote racial tuberculosis or some kind of parasitic embodied that has to be explained from the German folk now once you've got highly intelligent highly educated and well equipped Germans believing that you can go an awful lot further than with pogroms in in Russia in 1905 you can go all the way down the railroad track ultimately to Auschwitz I'm going to show your book again and I want to segue into the present you cover a lot that we have only an hour and to segue into the present I want to focus on a point you make about the British response to the Nazis and I I culled from what you were saying two points one that Chamberlain's government misperceived when they could have actually acted against Hitler and stopped him on the one hand and then secondly that the British military understood that it was caught between a rock and a hard place that is the security of the British Isles and being able to stop Hitler on the continent on the one hand and then protecting the Empire and that they could not do both so in both cases these were important issues that affect the outcome you know as we were leading up to war and they really have implications for today yeah I think that they do although one has to be very very careful about drawing any kind of analogies with the 1930s it's done much to readily today I hear once again terms like appeasement being trotted out by secretary Rumsfeld we hear the this extraordinary neela jism Islamofascism characterized terrorists I'm very skeptical about these analogies what argument in the book is that in 1938 there was a tremendous opportunity to stop Hitler early because Hitler took a huge risk of a Czechoslovakia by threatening to go to war on behalf of the german-speaking minority in the Sudetenland if Britain France and conceivably also the Soviet Union had called Hitler's Bluff and forced a confrontation either he would have had to back down or he would have had to wait in a very vulnerable situation because Germany was not ready for war his military commanders told him that they would have been fighting not only the Czech army but they would have had to defend their borders in east and west against potential intervention the Germany's economic position was not very secure and hit this domestic position was in some ways quite flakey at this point it was a fantastic opportunity to stop him in his tracks and it was missed missed I think in large measure because Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the people around him completely underestimated Hitler's vulnerability and exaggerated what they would gain from another 12 months of peace and this was the fatal mistake they said to themselves we're not quite ready for war or we don't have enough fighter planes the Germans may may be able to bomb London and indeed they exaggerated that threat quite seriously what we need is time if we only had time we could be more ready for war than we are right now so let's just do whatever it takes including selling the Czechs down the river to get another 12 months what they fail to realize it's an elementary mistake but at but a profound one is the 12 months also get given to Hitler under those circumstances and with those 12 months Hitler did much more to secure his position and then they were able to do in particular Hitler strikes his deal with Stalin which completely secures germany's eastern frontier now once that happens the war breaks out and on a on a basis far more disadvantageous to the western past than it would have been in 1938 so I see 1938 really and in rather Churchillian terms as a huge missed opportunity instead of flying as he did three times to Germany to appease Hitler Chamberlain should have stopped taking it as calls and essentially said bring it on hesitate to use that phrasing but he should certainly have called Hitler's bluff because I think either Hitler would have gone ahead and find himself in a war that would have been quite hard to win or he would have had to fold and that would have damaged his prestige pretty pretty badly now of course I used the phrase bring it on deliberately because there's a potential inference you could draw from this you could say here's an argument for preemption that in fact what was needed against Nazi Germany was action sooner rather than later and that leaving it until 39 made matters a great deal worse because by 39 The Dictator was stronger now you could make arguments about the Middle East that follow a similar pattern though as I've said you have to be very careful there are no Hitler's in the Middle East Saddam was not Hitler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not Hitler that these are very much lesser mortals if you like certainly less dangerous regimes on the other hand when you start talking about nuclear weapons you enter even more dangerous territory than Britain was in in the 30s I mean Goering had the Luftwaffe even the live from bombers weren't particularly large he was a long way from even the possibility of a nuclear weapon so there are some pretty big strategic lessons to be learnt the new 30s we just have to be quite careful how we how we go about learning them because these analogies are not perfect and Iran clearly isn't that the Third Reich what about this conflict between the the the requirements of protecting the British Isles versus the protecting the Empire yes I mean this is one of the ways in which the situation is really very different in the 30s that the great english-speaking Empire has vast commitments territorial commitments and military commitments on the other side of the world and as they sit down and review their strategic options British decision-makers have a problem on their hands because they're vastly in excess of what Britain's military can possibly defend the obvious case being the Singapore military base which was supposed to be a new strong point for British power in Asia with the potential for a very substantial naval presence that would notionally deter Japan or anybody else from attacking British assets but which was in fact indefensible in the event of a European war because you couldn't possibly send the ships there that you would need in home waters so British strategy is to use Paul Kennedy's famous phrase a function of overstretch they do not have the financial resources to defend all these places at once they know it so they have to just sit there and hope that they don't get hit by the perfect storm and the perfect storm is simultaneous German Japanese and Italian attack and of course they do and that illustrates I think the danger of hoping that the worst-case scenario won't happen because by and large if you just hope that it generally does so so if you look around the world today what-what-what-what region seems to have this mix of elements that that are at the core of your analysis of this earlier period is I had an epiphany as I was concluding the book I remember sitting down and thinking okay well I think I understand now why central Eastern Europe and Manchuria Korea in Asia were such dangerous places its economic volatility its ethnic disintegration its empires and decline why does that seem strangely familiar where could that possibly be yeah Beebe said today and and there's an obvious answer because the Middle East today has all three of those elements in place already I mean economic volatility I I worked it out it's it's been sort of four or five times more volatile than the US economy over the past 20 years ethnic disintegration well what's happening in Baghdad and central Iraq as a Sunni and Shiite Iraqis kill one another is an almost perfect illustration of the kind of cycle of ethnic violence I described in the book and you've got an empire and decline the United States which had a hegemonic position in the Middle East certainly in the mid 1970s is now incapable of managing what by 19th century standards is a relatively small colonial operation to try and stabilize Iraq and looks potentially like a busted flush in in nuclear non-proliferation it's not great to have those three things simultaneously happening in a region and my fear is that far from are having a clash of civilizations on our hands between Islam and the West what we actually face is a huge clash with in civilization ie within Islam between Sunnis and Shias but but more generally it seems to me this this is the potential to escalate beyond Iraq's borders because many of the countries that border Iraq are ethnically mixed that that it's only on the Far East that you have largely Shiite Iran and the Far West of the Middle East then you have largely Sunni Egypt in the middle you've got a whole bunch of countries that share with Iraq a multi-ethnic character so the nightmare scenario is that what we're seeing in Baghdad is escalating sectarian conflict could in fact become more widespread and there I think there is a good analogy to be drawn with the 1930s and 1940s it looks an awful lot like what happened in Central and Eastern Europe and interestingly Middle Eastern countries are at roughly the same level of economic development today as places like Poland and Ukraine were back back in 1930 if the hope was in the unipolar moment as it was referred to in the public debate here in the United States it was that the American Empire which we deny as an empire would bring to this part of the world stability and an order and and I guess what would have to say that the two instruments by that which that would be done would be a democratization on the one hand and America's unbalanced technology in the military realm your book talks a lot about that those two instruments will primarily the military instrument as a way to save lives and use capital to win wars to do all sorts of things so so bring your analysis from the book to to what you see as problematic if you do in such an effort to bring order to this this region which you just described as being very much like the ones you were describing in the other is I suppose the United States and this is also true of written as this double advantage I mean it has a very good political system democracy with the separation of PARs the rule of law and all of that and it also has tremendous technological strength in the realm of weaponry as well as in in the civilian sphere and this of course makes it both an attractive place and a powerful place but there's a there's a problem I mean one of the problems is that democracies tend to recognize the the perils that they face rather late in the day it's quite hard in fact to be an effective preempt er as a democracy because even if you're right it's still much harder to persuade people of the legitimacy of war than if it's a war of retaliation and preemption just isn't as attractive as as as lashing out after a Pearl Harbor event it was extremely hard to persuade Americans that they needed to become a norm in World War two and let's not forget that it is only after Pearl Harbor that they do become involved and I look at some length of the opinion polls which tell us fascinating things about Americans that that early on they're quite hostile to the axis but they're deeply reluctant to compromise their neutrality and actually fight the axis so that's one problem and I called it in an earlier book Colossus that the problem of the attention deficit disorder the short time horizon of democracies when they do intervene militarily they want quick results they quite rapidly lose patience so that's one problem about being a democracy and that they are the problem about being a as it were a techno warrior relying heavily on sophisticated weaponry is that while it may make you very good blasting cities from the air and we've got increasingly good at that since the bludgeon like strategic bombing of world war ii we've we've achieved the the smart bomb that can fly down the chimney of oh dear the chinese embassy but it was supposed to be a major serbian asset we have in fact perfected aerial warfare the trouble is we've got so good at that that we've forgotten the rather more old-fashioned form of military activity which is which is low intensity conflict street to street fighting patrols curfews human intelligence I mean in a sense our very was our ability to substitute capital for labor that's what aerial warfare was all about killing Germans with the minimum number of Allied lives being put on the line was tough luck if you were fly one of those bombers but it was preferable and throwing wave upon wave of infantry division's against the Axis powers but the more good you are at that sort of sophisticated warfare the less good you're likely to be at what might be called post-conflict operations and I think we're seeing that very clearly in Iraq that for all it's tremendously sophisticated weaponry the United States turns out to be quite bad the kind of Constabulary Duty's of empire as a historian you must get very frustrated at the extent to which the policy debate distorts history we mentioned already you know the concept of Islam Islamic fascists appeasement you know all of these very important policy debates get implicated in a distortion of what history demonstrates because there's always an argument in history but this goes beyond that well how do we deal with that basically get everybody besides getting everybody to read your book but behind that well that would help how we get stopped now I think I think this is a really important point because what we see at the moment is an attempt to interpret our present predicament in a rather caricatured World War two idiom I mean Islamofascism illustrates at the point well because it's a completely misleading concept in fact there's virtually no overlap between the ideology of al Qaeda and fascism it's just a way of making us feel that we're the greatest generation fighting another world war like the war our fathers and and and grandfathers fought so you're translating a crisis symbolized by 9/11 into a sort of pseudo World War two so 9/11 becomes Pearl Harbor and then you go after the bad guys who are the fascists and if you don't support us then you must be an appeaser this is this is really really misleading because I don't think in fact 9/11 bears the slightest relation to power I mean how long have you got we could go through it point by point it's clearly something very very different and I think this language is being used mendacious Lee to play on that the very strong pool that World War two still has on our emotions I mean I'm fascinated by the fact that the most popular computer games among young males are include to an extraordinary extent world war ii games they vastly more popular than any other history context game they proliferate and in a way I see this in my my young son's gaming habits they're they're fascinated by Medal of Honor and like I'm trying to persuade them to adopt a more sophisticated game called the calm and the storm which actually is a historically well-informed game but we are we are drawn to World War two and therefore when politicians want to make us feel that we're fighting the good fight that we're on the side of the Angels they can use World War 2 era language and I think distort our predicament so as a historian my only possible response to that is to run around writing books and op-eds and doing television interviews trying to persuade people but Islamofascism as a fantasy if anything bin Laden is more like Lenin than he is like Hitler because he's he's got a vision of international revolution he's certainly an anti-capitalist he would like to undermine the United States partly by economic means he's very good at recruiting what Lenin used to call useful idiots too so there's a sort of parallel to be drawn but I think it's more with Bolshevism pre 1917 Bolshevism which was in many ways a terrorist network of extreme communists that that's a useful parallel but of course it has much less moral salience than than the Islamofascist cliche I can't help because I know that your distinguished career involves a lot of work on international economic institutions and and the relation of money to power to ask you and how do I see a situation are we today in the International economy I mean one has only to think of the u.s. debts the the the Chinese surpluses and the Middle Eastern and and other countries producing oil and and the wealth that they have is this a is this something that that in addition to the region of the the Middle East fitting your pattern it is this something that we should worry that its global imbalances are a fascinating subject we are in an extraordinary world in which Americans don't save but financed they're exceptionally high living standards by borrowing the savings of much poorer Asians who save upwards of a third if not a half of their incomes now this enormous transfer goes through a strange route whereby the People's Bank of China buys American bonds and banknotes and short term Treasury bills approaching a trillion dollars it's an astonishing number you could do an awful lot with that and yet it sits there in the reserves of the People's Bank of China earning interest not a very high rate of interest which is then duly paid by the United States Treasury and I think I think this is a relationship that many Americans are baffled by it's great as long as it lasts because these are in a sense this is a low interest rate credit facility from the rest of the world to the United States and it allows Americans to drive bigger cars own larger houses and import many many more cheap electronic goods than they otherwise would be able to and now this reminds me of nothing more than the position of the British Empire in its twilight years for most of its existence the British Empire was a creditor Empire it lent out the money rather than borrowing it but after World War two in fact during World War two Britain's Empire became an indebted Empire and indeed it relied very heavily on an overdraft facility from the United States now running an empire when you are a borrower is a different ballgame because at some point your creditors may call up and say we're not sure we like what you're doing and and you better stop doing it otherwise this this credit line is going to be terminated that happened to Britain in 1956 during the Suez Crisis when the Eisenhower administration effectively pulled the plug on the British presence in Egypt by saying we won't support the pound if this continues at least that was a part of the reason for the collapse of the Suez policy it's not unimaginable that somewhere down the line the United States could find its own foreign policy room for manoeuvre limited by its dependence on particularly Asian central banks we shouldn't forget also that the Middle East as it accumulates earnings through oil exports is also part of the source of funding for America's deficit and so we're in the sort of ghastly situation whereby one of America's principal allies in the Middle East Saudi Arabia earns very huge amounts of money from its oil exports and then channels much of that money into Pakistani madrasahs we're a fundamentalist since what harvest Islam is taught this is why I coined the phrase the the axis of allies to describe the sort of central problem of American strategy at the moment that the real trouble if you're worried about radical Islam especially in your allies camp rather than among say North Korea or for that matter Iran so if China in the US or the the two empires one declining and one emerging then the this is a new twist this very high interdependence although there was high interdependence before World War two but but this is this is qualitatively of a different level I think its quantitative yeah I mean it there's no question that before 1914 the Russian Empire was very heavily dependent on French capital after World War Two the British Empire was very heavily dependent on American capital a lot depends on just how relations between China and the United States progress if they're harmonious and there's a sort of sino-american friendship then the deal could be perpetuated for quite some time it certainly serves China's purposes to have Americans consume by importing exports from China's manufacturing zone so it's not as if this is a bad deal from a Chinese point of view and just in the same way that having a good relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom meant that the decline and fall of Britain's Empire was in some measure cushioned I mean an impasse don't decline at the same rate we need to bear that in mind and one of the points I make in the book is that there's no there's no standard duration for empires some are very short-lived like Hitler's some lasts a very long time like the Ottoman Empire somewhere in the middle you find the European empires we don't know how long the American Empire if you will forgive my using controversial phrase we don't know how long it will last we don't know how long the United States will be the dominant power in East Asia may even have ceased to be already because there isn't a standard timeframe some Empire's collapse really quickly my sense is that the United States is going to experience a sort of bumpy downward slope and it won't be it won't be an instantaneous collapse because the US still has an awful lot going for it as an economy and as a society it's not very good at governing far away halt poor dangerous countries but it's good and an awful lot of other things and that we should lose sight of Neal on that note I want to thank you for writing the book which I will show our audience again and recommend very highly and so thank you very much for joining us on our program and thank you for writing the book thank you all right and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 86,646

Rating: 4.7521129 out of 5

Keywords: human, history, niall, ferguson, economics, violence

Id: Wtw6UWx_UuA

Length: 58min 5sec (3485 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008