Understanding The Global Unease After WW1 | Impossible Peace | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is Dan snow and I will tell you about history hit TV it's like the Netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just Google history hit TV and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video two world wars tour the heart out of the 20th century they are a went in the fabric of history one world before another after between these two tragedies a mere 20 years 20 years of peace that produced war a piece that failed impossible please [Music] in four years of fighting the first world war had claimed a life every 25 seconds and when the mincing machine stopped on November the 11th 1918 the bill that had been run up was enormous Great Britain lost 15% of our entire international wealth during the first world war what had been the point of it all surely it was that cut of all the grief and loss would come a new world order one in which peace and prosperity would replace inequality injustice and dynastic swagger for a long time historians saw this moment has a sharp guillotine moment when the world pivoted from this terrible conflict to a new era it wasn't as tidy as that history is only interesting because nothing is inevitable that the first world war would reverberate through to tumultuously codes the 1920s and 30s to reimagines formed and more deadly was not inevitable but 20 years after the guns fell silent they were again about deathlessness louder and more lethal than ever why why did the peace people prayed and paid for last little more than 20 years [Music] why did tyrants rise to control the fate of continents why did a world that had survived a wall collapse into an unprecedented depression why was an age that nostalgia views enthusiastically as a time of jazz prohibition the talkies the radio and the motorcar in reality an age of anxiety when the underlying current was flowing towards disaster the catalog of questions of what if so why did this starts with the first year of peace [Applause] at the beginning of the First World War the United States owned Europe four billion dollars at the end you're opposed the USA ten billion dollars and America was making half of the world's manufactured goods and this bright shining shadow spread by the mass producing richly resourced supremely powerful USA all over the small states and old states of Europe World War 1 really transformed the global economic system because it brought to an end the era of British free trade dominated international economy and introduced a much more autarkic international economy dominated by the United States how were the old world states to avoid tumbling into insignificance George v said well we've got nothing to worry about now we are top dogs now George that's a lovely phrase in January 1919 against the wishes of the British Cabinet minister responsible the imperial government the top dog in India proposed extending its wartime emergency powers indefinitely the result was popular and massive protests the end of the first world war in India was a moment with great hope I mean India had been a loyal member of British Empire imperial armies almost a million and a quarter Indian troops fought under the British flag in fresco war in a few short months cities were in an uproar local martial law was being imposed in Punjab sweeping preventative arrests smart counter demonstrations in which foreign fuel appeals were murdered brigadier-general legend of Dyer was sent with 300 colonial troops to Amritsar we're in April he faced a crowd of 20,000 which refused to disperse so Brigadier Dyer gave the order to open fire [Music] [Applause] ten minutes without a result from the unarmed crowd after 10 minutes 379 men women and children were dead hundreds more were wounded during the interwar period most Americans disliked the British Empire they saw it as a British heel on the necks of people all around the world and this of course was not helped by the Amritsar Massacre which people rapidly learned about the Secretary of State for India Edwin Montague presenting his report to the House of Commons called the massacre at Amritsar a shameful act of racial humiliation and declared that Dyer was guilty of terrorism and Prussian ISM in one of the British Parliament's less proud moments Montagu was shouted down by the Tory opposition with racist bluster and anti-semitic remarks the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 transformed the Indian national movement both for the older previously loyal generation and for the younger radical nationalists they really felt what could no longer be loyal to British imperial cause perversely the British people remained loyal to the unrepentant Dyer the London Morning Post opened a fund for the general which when it was closed had raked in more than 26,000 pounds at a time when a skilled worker like a brick layer who's earning little over one other empires did not confront the challenge of a new world they have not survived the war the German Empire was gone so to the austro-hungarian the Russian had preceded them the Ottoman father within 48 hours of the kaisers flight 25 German dynasties had abdicated the break-up fall the Empire's the breakup of the German Empire break up the ottoman empire break up the austro-hungarian empire you have 13 states that had not been States before they didn't have financial systems they didn't have central markets they had to be created out of out of wartime debris one might also say Germany had never had a functional democracy the Chancellor was made accountable to the washdown only two weeks before the Armistice in the hope that peace talks would be found more congenial if the German delegates were representing the democracy Germany the traditional leaps were kicked out in 1918 the aristocracy ended monarchy went the army was humbled reduced to a hundred thousand men and so the people who had maintained the kind of social and physical stability before 1914 didn't disappear that they lost that that function in Germany the Social Democrats planned a parliamentary democracy but they were obliged to share power with the spartacists led by Kyle each victim Rosa Luxemburg were intent on following the path of the Bolshevik Revolution it seemed most likely that Germany like Russia before it would follow defeat with a revolution but the fry corpse mainly ex-servicemen homemade armies as Richard ovary called them murdered leap minute and Luxembourg and crushed the spartacists on the streets of Berlin after the elections and because of the unrest in Berlin the assembly met for the first time in the town insulin year that gave its name to the Republic Weimar [Music] 76% of the electorate voted for the vine Republic 14 years later almost the same proportion voted for the anti-democratic parties of right and left whose only common cause was destruction of the Republic the reason why they flipped is a fundamental motif of the interwar years the bimah political arrangement allowed for very small parties to make it past the post and so that created this possibility that either no coalition can be stable or that an infinite number of coalition's in a way are possible and that no strong political force can really emerge Russia went from Tsarist Empire the communist republic in nine months Germany from authoritarian monarchy to parliamentary republic in nine days allowances should have be made they went [Music] [Applause] the event of 1919 that would codify this new world order was the Peace Conference a story of chaps and labs in historians are a stylus phrase had the newly elected German government being made part of the peace process things might have gone differently but it was not the process was in the hands of Great Britain France Italy and above all the American President Woodrow Wilson a lot of Europeans wanted the same sorts of things that Woodrow Wilson was portraying they wanted a better world because they had just seen what the war had done throughout Europe in 1919 you get lots of demonstrations well can you listen people on the streets everywhere thinking that this is a great new moment and opportunity for a new kind of world so this sort of story of violence sits against the story of optimism and hope in May 1919 British Prime Minister David Lloyd George remarked that as long as America England and France stand together we can keep the world from going to pieces well Brad she was right but the three victorious powers could not stand together in any meaningful sense they never had Wilson was the neophytes in international negotiations and he was pretty well played by the Allies at Versailles and he had a compromise on a number of things that he did not want to compromise on the peace which seems in the context a boundless Lee unsuitable word added a million square miles to Britain's Empire and about a quarter of that to the French in the carve up of Central Europe the peacemakers created a buffer zone Bartek comprised unstable uncertain states the Baltic States Poland Czechoslovakia the diminished Hungary Yugoslavia and it set them like a knot between the jaws of a cracker it was hoped at the creation of this choral sanitaire of small states who would sponge-like absorb any leaking Bolshevism before it contaminated West lloyd-george said that was a strategy which would not allow him to conceive any greater cause of future war [Music] the division of Europe contrived adversely contained population anomalies that would approve destabilizing the American president looked at the map and preached self-determination but in Europe ethnicities and language books had been Criss crossing the confluent for centuries and self-determination was a tricky principle to apply the president had kicked a hornet's nest only 65% of the population of Poland was polish 51% of czechoslovakians were checked and only 44% of Yugoslavia ins we're from the ruling and dominant Serbs the 13th the Wilson's fourteen points stipulated that Poland should have free access to the sea which could only be achieved by dividing East Prussia from the rest of Germany which might have looked quite neat on a map infrastructurally it was a major problem to create this new polish state different judicial systems different currencies when they started even the the railway system was of course the Blvd system so there was no connection for example between the main the capital Warsaw the new capital and a live one of the major cities because this was in Austria Hungary lost 75% of its territory and 3 million of its population at Versailles Austria must an empire and Bulgaria similarly punished for backing the wrong horse lost territory and 1 million of its population Woodrow Wilson placed great store in the idea of self-determination but there was a conundrum what should be done with Germany's former colonies they where after war populated by what even the most enlightened called child and races one of the most extraordinary consequences of the 1919 settlement was the mandate system where the League of Nations mandated the major powers particularly Britain and France to take over areas of the Ottoman Empire and former German colonists and so on on January the 30th 1919 the Supreme Council of the league agreed to the administration by advanced nations [Music] of those places inhabited by people's not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world whose well-being was a sacred trust of civilization and so was self-determination a basic promise on President Wilson's agenda accommodated the British expected it to mean that the child races could choose whose arms they rushed into and were alarmed mr. Spicer of the British Foreign Office said we cannot hope to take into the British sphere all the peoples of the world who would doubtless like to enter into it the Chinese expected it to mean that they would get back Germany's Chinese territory of Shandong but astonishingly they did Martin kind of hope to take back the previous concessions of the German control was now given to Japan so the anti-japanese sentiment was arising as well as nationalist sentiment what are the consequences of the Paris Peace Conference in China was that it stimulated one of the most important student-driven political movements of the 20th century one that actually gave rise to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party itself and that took place on the 4th of May 1990 historians Suzann Pettersen described the league's mandate system as a program perfectly tailored to the task of rehabilitating the Imperial Order at its moment of greatest disarray Wilford scorned blunt poet diplomat Explorer and amorous deplored the idea of mandates he was opposed to britain spreading what he called it's the based industrialism it's crude cookery and it's flavorless religious greed [Music] and thus innocent British Empire who did seem to be less top dog than baited bear nipped at by Ireland Palestine rock India Egypt everywhere yet it remained the sole superpower as the USA withdrew into itself and Soviet Russia dealt with itself one more illusion of the loose Natori age writing mine come from 1923 Adolphe Hitler would call the United Kingdom the greatest power on earth which it was not [Music] was no doubt that the major global empires the British the French Empire they strong they became large rotted in the First World War but in fact that masked fundamental weakness they'd never really been prepared either power to put the money into defending those areas they didn't seem to be a profound threat well little girl it is finished the President of the United States of America wrote to his wife at the conclusion of the Versailles peace conference and as no one is satisfied it makes me hope we have made a just peace but it is all in the lap of the gods but of course it was not it was in the laps of men including those who sat in the US Congress [Music] President Wilson presented the text of the Versailles Treaty to the Senate on July the 10th he said it was the hand of God who led us into this way and he asked dare we rejected and graped the heart of the world and the Senate on said yes we dare I think there were probably sufficient swing votes in the Senate that had Wilson been able willing to compromise on some of these key issues then he might well have got some sort of sinners of the Senate agreement [Music] Loosli tried to shift American public opinion on a whistle-stop to her but the strain broke him he took his campaign to the American people over the heads of Congress he was got to persuade them by the force of his personality and of course of his ideals that this was going to be a good thing and in the course of that when he was in Colorado he had severe headaches and terrible stroke when in November the Senate put four sides of the vote rejected it and spurned the League of Nations the American president lay partially paralyzed in his band my own view is that the treaty probably could have got through the United States could have joined the League of Nations but it was defeated by a combination of Republican intransigence and Wilson's own stubbornness now if the United States had joined the League of Nations we'll never know but the history of the 1920s and 1930s might have been a bit different on September the 12th gabrielle intendancy and 1,000 followers seized the humble adriatic town of fiume pledging to defend the city's italian meter against the whimsical decision of the peace makers who were tossed it to the newly minted Yugoslavia when writer and poet Osbert Sitwell visited fiume he thought there was a chance that demuccio this frail little genius he called him might create an ideal land where the arts might flourish an alternative to the choice between Bolshevism and American capitalism a young newspaper editor decided he would create the third way his name was Benito Mussolini and in November he launched fascism fascism is indeed and has been spoken about by by historians as a third way phenomena now what do we mean by this I mean essentially it's a it's a revolutionary movement from the right and in that respect it's fascism against communism which is a revolution from the left but of course the really important x-factor in the middle is the Mauri born liberal democracy like Hitler in 1923 mousseline his first foray into politics was a humiliating failure both men proved to be resilient elsewhere the minds of 13 children the most celebrated sportsman of the age the Manassa mauler Jack Dempsey was beating Jess Willard for the heavyweight crown [Music] the 70,000 spectators packed around the ring in the blistering sunshine for the big fight begin the mahogany huge empty circle moving in and out with fatwood equipment the champion lost a few teeth suffered a broken jaw broken cheekbone and some broken ribs the more powerful but not the better man won said the Morning Herald a slogan for the age [Applause] [Music] the United States only officially becomes an urban nation in 1920 and that simply means that more than 50% of Americans in 1920 are living in towns larger than 2,000 people and given that low threshold it's still a rural Society its cities are big but most Americans are still living thoroughly on farms or in small towns [Music] prohibition came to America on January the 16th 1920 the first prohibition Commissioner John F Kramer confidently declaring that this law will be obeyed and sit in his large and small and where it is not about it will be enforced but enforcement relied on a small number of enforcement agents who paid two thousand dollars a year were not immune from temptation except for Isadora Hine Stein who would sally forth with old friend most smith equally unlikely equally overweight in any number of visible disguises to do battle in the bookmakers the legend of the loved feared lava belizean mouth was born [Music] and a few more Izzy scattered over the country wrote the Brooklyn Eagle and the US would be bone dry parched and would 1920 was not a year when men like easy and low were appreciated 1920 was a year when the world needed a drink the impact of the worldwide depression of 1920 is widely understated [Music] in Europe dr. Walter rattle now via our Minister for Reconstruction and later for finance was baffled they write down thoughts and my noughts means a million but no one can imagine billiard does a would contain a million leaves over a million blades of grass in the meadow who knows when those responsible for a nation's economy don't know and rata mejor was one such they're about to be problems and aware Germany was struggling to adjust to a peace treaty in which he had lost all of her colonies main sources of coal zinc potash and iron ore 15% of her wheat crop 18 percent of potato cultivation and all German capital held aboard she'd lost nine-tenths of her merchant fleet which didn't just mean changing the flags on [ __ ] steamers some of the most splendid ocean liners changed some heads the imperative became two knives flagship Berengar eeeh the Bismarck sailed as the White Star Line's majestic and the vital and crossed the Atlantic as the Leviathan Germany was also presented with a bill for reparations to pay the cost of the war something that had been done over centuries you make your enemy pay because you'd won but the payment was classically fixed around the military cost but a French and the British start to include all of these social costs so they include the widow's pensions which is something that was completely puzzled me when I was a student I think understand why everybody was obsessed about these widow's pensions now I know it's cuz it cost an absolute packet on many important counts Germany emerged better place than Great Britain where the cost of living by late 1920 had reached three times its pre-war level where inflation was 22 percent unemployment was over 11 percent and the highest ever recorded and the debt was enormous and inescapable whereas as historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out the Germans were more successful than any other country in defaulting on their debts in such a climate the cost of maintaining what Gibbon the great historian of empire called the arbitrary Dominion of strangers might have seen prohibitive but for France and Britain the alternative to retreat from Empire meant to surrender great power status so they expanded their what is to become of the Ottoman Empire who is going to get which piece of that territorial pie if you like Britain was to get control of what we would recognize today as Iraq and Jordan France was to get control of what we recognized today as Syria and Lebanon roughly the area that we recognize today as the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel was to become under the control of a sort of international condominium they were not supposed to be colonies but the trenches was that the British and the French treated these places as if they were part of their empire painted and pink and green on the map and so on stands guard against raids by camel riders of the Arab tribes [Music] when the Arab tribes threatened trouble Winston Churchill as Secretary of State for war and air cinta Miyamoto Hugh Trenchard head of the Royal Air Force I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs Churchill Road especially mustard gas which would inflict - wound on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury the expectation on the ground inside Egypt or Iraq or Syria is that they're on their way to nation statehood but really when you look at the British in the French they don't see this happening anytime soon on July the 24th 1922 sure if Ian's forces battled some 80,000 French mainly colonial Senegalese and Moroccan troops and the plains of may salon outside Damascus supported by aircraft from artillery the French crushed those who opposed him King Faisal fled and another step was taken in creating the tortured patchwork inheritance of the Middle East the neighboring British sphere of influence was similarly convulsed and was only suppressed in November after extensive use of air power and at a cost of 40 million pounds in 1920 to stabilize recalcitrant Iraq the British sent in diplomat Sir Percy Cox a man who could it was said keep silent in a dozen languages little wonder that in 1920 photoplay magazine wrote an editorial imploring Charlie Chaplin to make a new film because it said we are dull fool and bewildered in a dull fool and bewildered world Charlie Chaplin who in 1914 is unknown and by 1919 as the most famous person in the world many people have tried to explain the appeal of the little trout I think Chaplin because of his musical experience had a very good rapport he understood what people would be amused by but they were being the point about Chaplin was we would all like to keep the policeman we would all like to keep the lungs in the aftermath of the war Italy had multiple changes of government 1919 and 1920 were known as the be in euro also the two red years this paralysis of the established order created an opportunity that was seized by the fasci it's a military term it's about a bundle it's also it's it's a formation of soldiers a protective move of soldiers becomes associated with her with a movement a street movement it's only from 1919 onwards that we start talking about fascism as the political movement groups of fascist sprang up all over Italy one the fashioner combat amento had been founded in 1919 by Benito Mussolini Italy was unusual in having an advanced peasant trade union and after the first world war it became for a while in 1919 and 1920 it did manage to get quite a few gains in the pay and condition of Italian peasants and fascism was designed to kill some of them to give them castor oil to humiliate them to suppress people like that Soviet Russia meanwhile and mistakenly thought it would make a grab for lands loss when he made peace with Germany at brest-litovsk but Poland was no pushover and P asuka's counter-attack on the 15th 16th of August smashed into five Soviet armies destroy three of them and continued the route and tell on August the third in Europe's last great cavalry battle that's lost twenty thousand horsemen charged and counter charged in formation until the Polish lands had swept the field lenin sued for peace and the treaty of riga was signed in march 1921 it was not to be a lasting peace in Russia the civil war that had been tearing at the nation since the Bolsheviks doctor at 7 million losses were four times greater than in the world war was moving to a climax the Russian civil wars were a very messy set of affairs with peasant uprisings and we Michel greens anarchist movements bikes anti Russian nationalist movements on the 20th of October general nikolai yudenich was advancing into the suburbs of Petrograd Denikin driving north towards Moscow and Kolchak advancing out of Siberia had they been United in their purpose Bolshevism would have been doomed they were not it was not the ideology did the white movement formed which was much weaker they failed to communicate that ideology or their vision for the future of Russia to the wider population as well as the Bolsheviks had Trotsky managed to press two million men into the Red Army by mid-november the Revolution had been saved [Music] war Trotsky said is the locomotives of history amidst the conflict urban life began to collapse quite quickly major cities begin to depopulate extraordinary rates people flee the cities return to rural areas where they could have better chance of eking out a normal life lemon learned when he suppressed peasant unrest in 1921 that bullets do not fertilize the soil and terror does not make the wheat grow in March the new economic policy proved if nothing else that Lenin was pragmatist enough to correct his mistakes a partial market economy was introduced but it battled the cronyism and inefficiency that were already evident by 1921 the Bolshevik bureaucracy was ten times the size of the czars and employed twice as many people as Soviet industry in America a different sort of fighting was out on the streets we're Tommy gun's cost about $3,000 each in today's money fired 800 rounds in days and became known as Chicago typewriters prohibition inflated the cost of drinking as much as twenty fold and fortunes were made and paid out [Music] captain bill McCoy ran Caribbean rum along the eastern seaboard just one of the rumrunners but a man who gifted his name to the english language because of the quality of his contraband it was the real McCoy the best known of the gang bosses to trade in bootleg Al Capone had business cards that described him as a secondhand furniture dealer and a real sense of himself as a leading citizen in the depression he organized a Chicago soup kitchen that cost him $300 a day it was legal for doctors to prescribe liquor for medicinal purposes and in 1921 8 million gallons of that medicinal whiskey were withdrawn from federal warehouses the most common ailment according to wags was the status [Music] when it came to electing their president this America described as a country impatient of problems - waiting for the mind in the street chose a man who shrank from problems which he knew to be beyond his powers I don't seem to grasp that I am president said President Warren Harding who confessed I don't know anything about the European stuff prohibition is here and so is Warren Gamaliel Harding elected president by a record majority on the slogan back to normalcy there is no such word as normalcy but the people wanted just the same america's conception of itself was still as the refuge from europe and when many Americans thought of Europe they thought of intrigue with aristocrats and monarchs and leading their countries into bad Wars and America's mission was to stand apart from all that modern America stood apart some said all three pillars [Music] the dollar movies and jazz [Music] Harlem's first Jazz Age hit was shuffle along which featured an unknown Josephine Baker in the chorus jazz simply fit the times the first great African American poet Langston Hughes put it perfectly the rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm [Music] the Jazz Age was boisterous nervous scandalous in Hollywood scandal ended the career of a comedian whose popularity was second only to Chaplin's a young actress died at a wild party Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle was accused of her murder tried and acquitted one juror was moved to say that a gross injustice has been done to him but the stories of how Virginia Rappe died persisted fake news and Fatty Arbuckle was finished on October the 4th 1921 the permanent mandates Commission of the League of Nations assembled in Geneva for its first session lord Kherson described the middle-east mandate as self-interest discreetly veiled by a facade of self-determination during the Cairo conference of March 1921 Winston Churchill colonial secretary by this stage brings together military officials colonial officials interested parties to literally sit down over the course of a conference to put all of their ideas on paper and to come up with the arrangements that will become the boundaries that we recognize today the British conceived a novel solution to the troubles in their middle-eastern mandate Iraq is probably the most artificial of all the states that are created essentially they are lumping together three very distinct provinces of Baghdad Basra and Mosul three provinces that have existed in the in the Ottoman Empire but have never recognized themselves as affiliated in in any sense Britain essentially draws lines around those three provinces and says you are now a single nation-states the British offered the throne of the rock to Faisal recently tipped off the throne of Syria on mr. 23rd 1921 Faisal was crowned king of Iraq the war had been over for three years the peacemakers had gone home they had transformed the maps of Europe and the Middle East in the Middle East a blade minefields and Europe was unsettled perhaps incendiary fascist power was not in the Parliament it was with the squadristi the gangs of paramilitary thugs whose violence bully peasants and townspeople into surrender but in 1921 as junior members of a block put together by Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giamatti to check the lies of the left they entered the Italian parliament of them giannotti said the fascist candidates will be like fireworks they will make a lot of noise but will leave nothing behind except spoke he was right but they made more noise and for longer than he imagined in August 1921 the reparations Commission finally said the sum that Germany was required to pay two hundred and twenty-six thousand million marks [Music] the relationship between that announcement and a notorious hyperinflation that lay ahead was not the sum demanded but the German government's plan for paying the bill which was to print money an astounding Paperchase in which you've got paid your wages than you rushed out to spend them as quickly as you could because by the time you got to the cafe we were going to eat they'd be worth half what they were when you were paid officially there was repeated denial of the possible link between the profligate printing of money and inflation leading historians to wonder whether these people were stupid or if they had a plan to bring on a crisis that might provoke the Allies into canceling reparations what they brought on was a rise of political extremism in August Adolf Hitler member number five five five took over leadership of the National Socialist German Workers Party it makes no difference Hitler said whether they laugh at us or revile us the main thing is that they mention us and he said course towards an unimaginable Cataclysm

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 756,292

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, ww1, ww2, treaty of versailles, austro-hungary, german republic, war reparations, world war one, first world war

Id: VHDU9u3kzts

Length: 49min 31sec (2971 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/zap2]

I believe it.

There goal was “state control” of course they’d grow the size of the state.

[u/jakoning]

In the context of what was still at that point a mostly agrarian economy.

[u/screenwriterjohn]

As bad as the Soviets were, they pulled Russia into the late 19th century.

Russia went from feudalism to Sputnik in about 50 years.

[u/funinthetub]

If you're replacing private industry this makes complete sense. They had for more ambitious goals than the tsar

[u/[deleted]]

Russians are naturally bureaucratic and also accustomed to working outside the system to get by. There’s lotsa them in my region and they are a hard bunch.