Chartbook 278: Recasting Bourgeois Europe ... almost at fifty. In honor of Charlie Maier.
Chartbook 278: Recasting Bourgeois Europe ... almost at fifty. In honor of Charlie Maier.
A truly great historian taught his last class this week. For many of us in the field, Charlie Maier’s Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (1975) is the benchmark of scholarship in political economy. I vividly remember the first time I found a copy of the book in a University book store in America, perhaps it was in Chicago, and how it brought me up short.
As a token of appreciation to Professor Maier, I post below a piece I wrote back in 2013 on his extraordinary first book. I wrote this essay about Recasting as I was finishing my own book on the same period, Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916 – 1931, looking back, it is even clearer to me now how much I owe to Charlie Maier’s work.
Adam Tooze Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I, (Princeton, 2nd ed 1988)
March 2013
As one of the endorsements of the 1988 reissue of Maier’s classic has it, “Recasting Bourgeois Europe is one of the few books that every student of the interwar period has to read.” For the professional scholar in the field, this is an understatement. It is not a book one reads once. It is a book one revisits many times, and on each such visit it appears in a different light, reshaped by experience and the impact of other literature. As Maier himself wrote on the occasion of writing the new preface, each such encounter reveals “historical interpretation” once more as a “continuing adventure.”[1]
In Maier’s preface of 1988 he situates the book with typical insight as the product of its own time. “The comparative model of corporatism that the book suggested as the common denominator of stabilization efforts in the 1920s, ... reflected the circumstances of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.”[2] The concept of a “corporatist Europe” was one, Maier remarked in a footnote, that he had seized upon like an “emergency paper currency”, “assigned a given value or internal use”, he made “no claim” that it had any “universal value”.[3] But revisiting the work in the late 1980s he was at pains to stress that it was not merely a product of its time. By the late 1980s the inflationary dragons of the aftermath of Bretton Woods had been slain. But nevertheless Maier insisted, the basic problem addressed by corporatism remained real. “The great exertions of the First World War and the subsequent social upheavals would have led to the negotiation (or the authoritarian imposing) of social compacts regardless of price changes. Corporatist stabilization was not merely an answer to the passing problem of postwar inflation. It was an answer to a more basic question of modern society, “class divisions”.[4]
A long continuity thus connected the period around World War I down to the 1980s. Interestingly, one could already sense around the edges of Maier’s writing in the late 1980s the sense of an imminent break in regime. In comments he contributed to the discussion of an essay by David Montgomery on the American working-class, he remarked how the high levels of unemployment in the 1980s marked a break with the decades after world war II.[5] He remarked on the weakening of the trade unions under Reagan and Thatcher. He also noted the precariousness of Japanese investments in the United States which he ominously analogized to America’s investment in Europe in the 1920s. The worry on the minds of policy makers in the wake of the stock market crash of 1987, Maier remarked, was not inflation, but deflation. After the long period of late 20th century stability, were these the shades of 1929? In the event, in 1989 it was the Communist not the capitalist countries that suffered the ensuing crisis, which Maier himself was to diagnose with such brilliance in his essay on a future history and his study of the crisis of the GDR regime, Dissolution. There was transformation in the West as well, but once more capitalism survived fundamental upheaval by recasting itself.
In the 1970s, Maier’s relatively sanguine view of the economic disruptions that followed World War I, was characteristic of the moment in which he wrote. Whereas work done in the interwar period had tended to treat the inflation as a disaster, by the 1960s and early 1970s it was coming to be seen in a different light. Through a complex process of redistribution the effect of the inflation across the combatant countries between 1918 and 1926 was to transfer the cost of the war to the richest. The inflation served as a means of keeping the major interest groups aligned. Maier was emphatic on this point. ”The notion that the middle classes were “destroyed”, he insisted “or that Germany was thereby made vulnerable to Nazism is simplistic”. If Germany suffered a shipwreck in the hyperinflation of 1923 and if some of the genteel rentiers ended badly, “once the (life)boats boats were launched ... “ the existing elites recovered their grip, reasserted themselves against the disorganized and weakened labour movement and put the working class to the oars “for the long row ahead”.[6] This was the characteristic view of the inflation that underpinned Maier’s optimistic view about bourgeois stabilization. As in the 1970s, inflation was the path of least resistance. It was in the course of the 1990s that this view was revised. Gerald Feldman and Charles Maier shared a common formation in the political economy of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976 Feldman became a leading figure in a wide-ranging project to explore the political economy of the German inflation. If one compares Feldman’s summation of that project, The Great Disorder which appeared in 1993 with Recasting Bourgeois Europe, the contrast is striking. For Feldman the inflation was a cauldron within which bourgeois society consumed itself and out of which anti-semitic impulses emerged that were to fuel National Socialism. Niall Ferguson with typical counterfactual vigor was to take this argument to its logical conclusion, insisting that the best way to have forestalled Hitler, to have achieved a true bourgeois stabilization would have been for comprehensive deflation to have been forced through in 1920, which, all agree, would have required an authoritarian, conservative turn at an early stage. In Italy this was accomplished with force by Mussolini’s fascism and its liberal and conservative allies. Might the same have been possible in Germany?
Though there are striking differences between their views of the German inflation, Maier and Feldman are of the same generation. Both were concerned with process of order that took place “below the surface”. [7] For Maier and Feldman this was in the first instance a move against naive political history. But looking back at their work it marks an interesting difference between both of them and the generation that came after. In recent years historians like other students of politics and culture have become increasingly preoccupied with the most vivid and dramatic sources of order, above all violence. Violence is not absent, of course, from Maier’s view of interwar Europe, notably in his brilliant account of the failure of liberalism in Italy. The destruction of the left in the Po valley after 1920 is given its due weight. But the squadistri were only a passing phase in the postwar stabilization. As Maier goes to considerable lengths to show, between 1922 and 1925 as Mussolini stabilized inflation and held down the trade unions, Italian liberals could with some reason regard his regime as the fulfillment of their vision of stabilization. Clara Mattei’s recent book on Italian liberal economics and austerity doubles down on this argument.
In Maier’s account of bourgeois stabilization, violence is always strictly a means to an end. Throughout, Maier’s deemphasizes both politics and violence in favor of more fundamental factors. In talking about Germany he remarks: “the Ruhr invasion (of 1923 AT) may have changed little that would not have otherwise occurred; such brief explosions as the Kapp putsch (of 1920, AT) or the occupation of the Factories altered even less.” What they did was to make “manifest underlying tensions and conflict. But they altered little, demolished few arrangements that were not already undermined. Their institutional legacy was slight.”[8]
By contrast with the serious treatment given to the squadistri, Maier’s treatment of political violence in Germany is cursory. He begins his main narrative in the autumn of 1919 by which time the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheavals of November 1918-May 1919 had passed. Luxemburg, Liebknecht and the Freikorps get barely a mention. But fighting resumed of course in 1920 and continued in Silesia into 1921. The battles in the Ruhr following the Kapp Putsch, which involved tens of thousands of armed men and the deployment of heavy weapons are barely mentioned, nor are the serious confrontations between German protestors, police and French occupation troops, or the mass evacuations from the Ruhr in 1923.
No doubt many would see this as a weakness. But in light of the increasingly one-dimensional and deterministic stress on violence as a driver of modern European history in much of the current literature, rereading Recasting Bourgeois Europe offers a welcome corrective. Maier’s emphasis is resolutely non-deterministic. “In contrast to most discussion of German history”, as he wrote in the 1980s “which treated earlier periods as preludes to Nazism, the outcome I wished finally to account for was the era of post-1945 growth and stability. The book implicitly posits a view of European development in which the Depression, National Socialism and the second war were interruptions, albeit catastrophic ones, between a provisional political and social settlement and a more permanent one.”[9] This, Maier admitted, was an ambivalence that lurked in Recasting. As it showed, there was a model of viable corporatist stabilization to hand in the 1920s, but in light of the tensions stored up by the war and its aftermath that stabilization was well-nigh impossible to secure. But if this is a contradiction, it is not in Maier’s text, but in the reality that he seeks to describe. Resolving this contradiction into a simple determinism of disaster is what has made so many of the histories of the last generation into one-dimensional accounts of a “dark continent”, doomed to repeat at home the violence it had unleashed in the colonies. For those seeking a new history not simply of European violence, but of the complex balance of European war and peace, Recasting Bourgeois Europe is a touchstone to revisit. It certainly served that role for me in writing my book Deluge.
What made the difference between the unresolved tensions of the interwar period and the relatively more durable stabilization after 1945, Maier went on to show in his essays of the 1980s, was the division of Germany and “intervention of the United States”. Postwar “stability and renewal”, he admitted, “seem less a function of corporatism or neo-corporatism ...” than of American influence, and thus of “empire”.[10] In dialogue with his own earlier work Maier thus announced in the late 1980s another strand in his more recent writing, a preoccupation with the question of American power.[11] And in his diagnosis of the difference between the aftermath of World War I and World War II, Maier is surely correct. But what this reference to “empire” highlights is another feature of Recasting Bourgeois Europe that marks it as a product of the 1970s. The crisis of bourgeois Europe that Maier describes in Recasting is one largely confined to the Europe of the Treaty of Rome dominated by France, Italy and Germany. It is a Europe from which Britain and the British Empire are absent.
The fact that Britain was absent from a text such as Recasting Bourgeois Europe signaled the enduring divide between teaching and research of European as opposed to British history. Though Maier’s sweep is vast and he did gesture towards British experience and the singular role played by Lloyd George, to the extent that Recasting became a standard text of European history it helped to reinforce the divide between Britain and the continent. From the point of view of Maier’s own narrative this was regrettable because postwar Britain was in fact the classic case of the restoration of bourgeois stability. It was also the European country where given the size and degree of freedom enjoyed by the labour movement the question of liberal corporatism was posed with singular intensity right the way down to the 1970s.
Including Britain might thus have reinforced the basic narrative of Maier’s Recasting. But it might also have modified it. The first difference would have been to tilt the balance from inflation to deflation. By focusing on Italy, France and Germany, Maier wrote a history dominated by the politics of inflation, whereas in fact from 1920 onwards, led by Britain and America, much of the world economy experienced a severe deflation. This fits well with Maier’s broader argument, in that it was tied up with a powerful impetus to stabilization. It weakened both the trade unions and the expensive imperialist ambitions of the right-wing and underpinned the “world-wide thermidor”.[12] But it did so through a logic that was rather different from that highlighted by Maier. Rather than being driven by corporatist decision making processes, deflation came in the wake of a reassertion of control by Treasuries and central banks. Indeed, as Martin Daunton has shown for Britain and Gerald Feldman showed for Germany it was a move designed to restore state authority and to take the wind out of the sales of the advocates of corporatism.[13]
The second and rather more obvious effect of bringing Britain squarely into the frame would be to add an imperial dimension. France and Italy had empires as well, of course. But, in their case it was Europe that dictated strategy. By contrast, British policy towards Germany, France and Italy was shaped powerfully by its imperial concerns. British policy on debts and reparations in Europe were balanced with its need to reach a global modus vivendi with the United States and Japan. This was not a familiar role for the British elite. In the absence of consistent American engagement, Lloyd George’s coalition played a more central role in world affairs than any British government before or after. If the current moment demands a global retelling of the Recasting of Bourgeois Europe, then that is most easily constructed by way of the inclusion of the British Empire. (This was the project that I set myself in writing Deluge).
In the 1980s and 1990s Maier’s historical work gravitated around Germany and its unmasterable past. In the 2000s he was led towards globalization. Meanwhile, at our current moment (this essay was written in 2013), entering the fifth year of Europe’s most serious crisis since 1945, returning to Maier’s Recasting evokes a feel of nostalgia. It is not just the compact West European geography and Maier’s sanguine long-run outlook that inspire backward glances. There is another dimension of Maier’s analysis which comes to the fore today in a way that it perhaps did not do on earlier readings. The current moment is not one in which trade unions and employers engage in corporate bargains over the heads of parliaments. And yet this is nevertheless a moment of profound crisis in Europe’s parliamentary politics and one in which the difficulties of democratic politics in confronting crises of public finance and the collapse of a crucial part of the private economy have been painfully revealed. Reading Maier’s account of the politics of 1919-1924 what we see is not just the interest group wrangling and the economic crises, but also the historical seriousness with which key members of the German, French and even the Italian political class responded to the crisis. The notion of a bourgeois order provided the political class with a repertoire, a “collection of images, ideas and memories” with which to manage the crisis. Stresemann and Poincaré, in particular, exemplified for Maier an “older state ideal” that was determined to preserve an “untrespassed realm for public policy” and to resist the rise of a “new feudalism” brought on by the surrender of policy to business interests. To do so involved juggling a hugely complex balance of foreign and domestic policy in the hope of preserving the social bases of national liberalism.[14] When a future Charles Maier comes to write a history of our current moment of crisis – one cannot help wondering - will there be similar stories to tell?
I wrote those lines in 2013 and they echo down to the present moment ten years later.
[1] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I, (Princeton, 2nd ed 1988), xv.
[2] Maier, Recasting, x.
[3] Maier, Recasting, 9.
[4] Maier, Recasting, xi.
[5] Charles S. Maier, “The 1920s –Consolation or Warning?: A Response to David Montgomery” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 32 (Fall, 1987), pp. 25-30.
[6] Maier, Recasting, 364.
[7] Maier, Recasting, xv.
[8] Maier, Recasting, 580.
[9] Maier, Recasting, xii-xiii.
[10] Maier, Recasting, xiv.
[11] Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass. 2006).
[12] Maier, Recasting, 136.
[13] M. Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914-1979 (Cambridge, 2007).
[14] maier 414
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