1919: Divergences

When the Peace Treaty was signed in Versailles in the summer of1919, the gulf be­tween German and Japanese imperial projects seemed greater than ever. Germany had not only lost all of its overseas colonies, but had also been forced to renounce any imperial ambitions.

And yet, despite the hugely divergent situations between the two states in 1919, actors in both countries drew similar conclusions from the war, not least about the future directions and necessities of empire-building. Many in Japan, despite its ter­ritorial aggrandizement, were as frustrated and as openly critical as the majority of the Germans about the legitimacy of the Paris peace settlements. In an article entitled A Call to Reject the Anglo-American Centered Peace, Konoe Fumimaro, one Japanese delegate in Paris and a future prime minister (1937-1939 and 1940-1941), went so far as to portray both Japan and Germany as “have-not” nations.³² This as­sessment not only caused some bewilderment, it also pointed to a future in which the two powers were to combine their aggressive assaults on the postwar order.

The imperial lessons of the Great War were plain to see but hard to follow.

Although most African colonies were also lost within roughly the first year of the conflict, Germany's protection forces on the ground could be used to lure some Allied military resources away from the European theater of war. On the other hand, in Africa the pattern of relatively swift defeat was at least broken once.

32

Konoe 1918.

Although no reinforcements ever arrived, the last commander in German East Africa, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, deployed his remaining troops and a large force of African soldiers (askari) to wage a guerrilla war that lasted until after the armi­stice. Unbeaten during the war, the episode of resistance turned East Africa into a crucial site of colonial nostalgia and came to symbolize the supposed harmony be­tween German rulers and their “loyal” former African subjects.^[2542]

Still, overseas sites were at no point the central theaters for Germany in the First World War. Soon after fighting had begun, the conflict began to fuel German heg­emonic ambitions within continental Europe. While official propaganda claimed that the Kaiserreich was fighting a defensive war against hostile Allied encircle­ment, in reality the German government almost immediately drew up a secret ex­pansionist program of gigantic proportions, the September Program of 1914.

The expansionist goals of the military leadership were shared by many state servants, the middle classes, and powerful industrialists, all united in the belief that permanent territorial enlargement was necessary if Germany was to be able to compete with other world powers. The longer the war continued, the more ter­ritorial gains seemed necessary to sustain morale on the home front and among the fighting troops. The military and economic vulnerability of the Central Powers soon led to the use in Europe of policies deployed in their colonies, including the violent exploitation of raw materials and the forced use and deportation of human labor based on Social Darwinian logic. This was the case in several regions under German control, both on the Western front, as in Belgium and France, but even more ruthlessly in Eastern Europe. Supply shortages at home were to be relieved by brutal expropriation in occupied territories, some of which were placed directly under the military command (Ober Ost) and thus removed from civilian oversight. Draconian economic exploitation, the harsh suppression of Eastern nationalist movements, and also the imposition of a new racial order under the conditions of a military dictatorship provoked strong anti-German resistance among local peoples.

The fact that the Kaiserreich's war aims were imperial became obvious in the peace agreements concluded with defeated Bolshevik Russia in March 1918. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk secured Germany and its allies over a million square miles of land, inhabited by some 50 million people, together with half of Russia's industry and the majority of its oil, coal, and iron deposits.^[2543] A vast German continental realm then encompassed a “zone of Russian territory almost as extensive as that conquered by Hitler's Wehrmacht on its march to Stalingrad in 1942.”^[2544] Yet, mili­tary defeat soon followed.

Crucial were the lessons that were drawn about the military defeat and the col­lapse of the home front. First, many German contemporaries concluded that over­seas colonies could not be successfully defended. Second, they assumed that the nations future survival in the context of great power competition would require an empire in the East. Even if those lessons about the lost war were inadequate, since the war had actually been lost on the Western front, they would have significant consequences for the time to come.

The victors imposed a harsh peace settlement on Germany, seen as the main ag­gressor. The victors also branded Germany's role as an overseas colonizer as being “uncivilized,” and not worthy of a “European” power—another humiliation that many Germans believed their country had falsely accepted. Indeed, after 1918, a string of powerful myths emerged about the German war efforts having been betrayed by “enemies” such as pacifist democrats, Marxists, and Jews from within. The “stab-in-the-back” myths (Dolchstoßlegenden) deeply eroded trust in the new republic and in the years to come shaped radical political movements that openly challenged the postwar order and kept alive the aspirations of German empire­building in the East. German fears of being colonized, as exemplified by what was seen as the defilement of the Rhineland by the deployment of French African troops, only increased the will to turn the sudden position of prostration into yet again the status of a world power.^[2545] This turnaround, however, could not be achieved by dip­lomatic means; in the eyes of radical thinkers, it called for another war.

In the end, Japan as well as Germany counted themselves among the losers of the Paris peace settlement. In the case of the former this requires some explanation, as the Japanese Empire had considerable territorial gains and at the same time had profited enormously from the war by securing new global markets. After the (tem­porary) exclusion of Germany and Russia, the world war had also made the club of world powers considerably more exclusive. Thereby, Japan's place in the club of world powers was strengthened. In East Asia, there was no longer any way to ig­nore or circumvent the country. Of the five remaining great powers, Japan was now considered in third place. Still, the most common reaction in Japan was to express insecurity about, incomprehension of, and animosity toward the results of the Paris peace treaties.

One reason behind this was that by the end of the war, Japanese politicians as well as the public were quite surprised by the global dimension of the peace settlement. The highly valued absence of the West in their part of the world threatened to come to an end. The war had given Japan a free hand in East Asia, which the government had tried to exploit through the Twenty-One Demands presented to China al­ready in 1915. Had these demands been met, Japan would have been given control over Manchuria, and China would have become a Japanese protectorate. However, during the war as well as in Paris, it proved difficult to get the other powers to con­cede to such ample ambitions concerning Chinese territory, as China also viewed its international standing and national unity strengthened through its participation in the war.^[2546] By threatening to leave the Paris conference, the Japanese delegation may have succeeded in gaining control of the region around Shandong. However, it quickly became clear that this territorial gain could only be temporary. As a con­sequence of the treaties resulting from the Washington Naval Conference (1921­1922), which served to reproduce the Paris peace order in East Asia, this region was returned to China.

Another reason for the widespread discontent in Japan over the postwar order was of a more diffuse nature. There was a general anxiety about the future that made an expanding empire seem to be an appropriate solution more than ever be­fore. Many of the men who would later be major decision-makers had experienced the chaos and confusion of the early postwar period in Germany firsthand. In the early 1920s, Tojo Hideki, Japan's future prime minister (1941-1944), Yamashita Tomoyuki, the conqueror of Singapore, and Ishiwara Kanji, one of the architects of the occupation of Manchuria in 1931, were all in the young Weimar Republic. Bewildered by the German defeat and its effect, leading military figures began to account for it on the basis of the collapse of the home front in 1918, as well as Germany's supposed lack of a large empire during the war. The conclusions they drew were analogous to those of the German experts. This prompted dreams of contiguous territorial and autarchic empires that were distinguished from British­type imperialism, which was seen as antiquated or old-fashioned, by criticizing its focus on military bases and vulnerable overseas possessions. Ironically, the point somehow overlooked here was that all three of the empires which had vanished with the First World War had been multiethnic and contiguous territorial empires.

A third and final reason for Japanese discontent over the Paris peace order was that colonial rule was being increasingly discredited as a result of the war. Nascent anti-colonial movements, apparent in 1919 in China as well as Korea, threatened further Japanese empire-building. At the same time, Wilson's concept of national self-determination and post-imperialist agenda, which aimed to put an end to co­lonial rivalry and rested on “means of soft power—economic and ideology,” posed seemingly irresolvable problems for Japan.^[2547] Moreover, the stance adopted by the Western great powers was more than contradictory on this point. In Paris, Japan had failed to get the so-called racial equality clause included as a major element of the League of Nations charter. Furthermore, as clearly as the signs pointed for the first time to a non-colonial future and as much as the United States indulged in anti-imperialistic rhetoric, for the time being realpolitik set the course of history in a different direction: Colonial expansion would reach its zenith during the interwar period.^[2548] Thus, in a world that was becoming more imperial than ever before, the Japanese Empire saw itself under pressure by the discrediting of colonialism while imperial competition among the great powers was increasing. From the amalgama­tion of these components emerged a new, Japanese-inspired type of imperial rule in the early 1930s.

III.