Bret Stephens: Post-Post-9/11 Looks Just Like Pre-World War II
[Bret Stephens is a writer and news commentator for the Wall Street Journal.]
After 9/11, historians and pundits rushed to give a new era a suitable name. My favorite was Norman Podhoretz's, who called it "World War IV." In doing so, he recast the Cold War as World War III while putting the attacks in a century-long context of the global struggle between democratic and totalitarian forces.
But the election of Barack Obama and the financial crisis have now ushered us into the post-post-9/11 world, and this era, too, needs a name. Let's call it "the Locarno Restoration."
Locarno, a picturesque Swiss town on the shores of Lake Maggiore, was the site of a series of treaties signed in 1925 between France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Belgium. They ostensibly guaranteed the post-World War I borders on Germany's western frontier with France and Belgium, but agreed that Germany's eastern frontiers could be subject to revision. They also paved the way for Germany's membership in the League of Nations.
Though now mostly forgotten, the Locarno Treaties were, as Henry Kissinger once wrote, "greeted with exuberant relief as the dawning of a new world order." For the rest of the 1920s, people spoke of "the spirit of Locarno," which meant, in effect, that personal good will begat good political results, whatever the underlying facts. The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain each won a Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts -- proving, if nothing else, that the Nobel committee was in the grip of fools long before the prize went to Jimmy Carter.
Of course Locarno failed. It failed in part because it implicitly acknowledged that Germany would not have to honor the terms (however invidious) of the Versailles Treaty, in part because it exposed the limits of how far Britain and France were willing to go to guarantee the peace in Europe, and in part because it betrayed smaller powers, particularly Poland, whose parliamentary democracy was soon overthrown in a coup d'état.
Above all, Locarno failed because it combined wishful thinking with political weakness in a way that was bound to be tested and exploited by the fascist powers. If the 1930s were, per W.H. Auden's line, a "low, dishonest decade," it was mainly because the 1920s were so high-mindedly self-deceived.
We are in a similar state today...
Read entire article at WSJ
After 9/11, historians and pundits rushed to give a new era a suitable name. My favorite was Norman Podhoretz's, who called it "World War IV." In doing so, he recast the Cold War as World War III while putting the attacks in a century-long context of the global struggle between democratic and totalitarian forces.
But the election of Barack Obama and the financial crisis have now ushered us into the post-post-9/11 world, and this era, too, needs a name. Let's call it "the Locarno Restoration."
Locarno, a picturesque Swiss town on the shores of Lake Maggiore, was the site of a series of treaties signed in 1925 between France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Belgium. They ostensibly guaranteed the post-World War I borders on Germany's western frontier with France and Belgium, but agreed that Germany's eastern frontiers could be subject to revision. They also paved the way for Germany's membership in the League of Nations.
Though now mostly forgotten, the Locarno Treaties were, as Henry Kissinger once wrote, "greeted with exuberant relief as the dawning of a new world order." For the rest of the 1920s, people spoke of "the spirit of Locarno," which meant, in effect, that personal good will begat good political results, whatever the underlying facts. The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Britain each won a Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts -- proving, if nothing else, that the Nobel committee was in the grip of fools long before the prize went to Jimmy Carter.
Of course Locarno failed. It failed in part because it implicitly acknowledged that Germany would not have to honor the terms (however invidious) of the Versailles Treaty, in part because it exposed the limits of how far Britain and France were willing to go to guarantee the peace in Europe, and in part because it betrayed smaller powers, particularly Poland, whose parliamentary democracy was soon overthrown in a coup d'état.
Above all, Locarno failed because it combined wishful thinking with political weakness in a way that was bound to be tested and exploited by the fascist powers. If the 1930s were, per W.H. Auden's line, a "low, dishonest decade," it was mainly because the 1920s were so high-mindedly self-deceived.
We are in a similar state today...