War and Power, page 7
But the Great Depression provided an entirely unexpected and unpredicted transformation. Suddenly Hitler’s rhetoric of anger and blame appealed to masses of the population, of all classes, who were deeply fearful for their own future. By the election of July 1932, with the Great Depression in full flow, the Nazi vote total had risen astronomically to just over 37 per cent of all votes – making them the largest party in the country. When another election four months later confirmed that they were now the largest party in Germany (though their vote share actually declined, to 33 per cent), Hitler was invited to lead a coalition of parties as the new chancellor.24
Hitler’s individual psychopathology was perfectly placed to cause, and then determine the course of, the most destructive war in human history. Though there has been some deliberately provocative discussion about whether Hitler was doing anything other than following a slightly exaggerated version of traditional German foreign policy, this is wrong.25 Hitler was always planning on war breaking out under his leadership – the question only being the when and not the if. Having been a soldier in World War I, he was determined to ‘save’ Germany in the future through military conquest.
In his famous book Mein Kampf, dictated after his arrest in 1923 after a failed putsch, Hitler went to great lengths to explain why Germany had to expand. It needed more territory to settle Germans, grow food and provide markets for German goods, he stated. That territory would never be given to Germany – so the nation would have to take it.
At this point the right of self-preservation comes into effect. And when attempts to settle the difficulty in an amicable way are rejected the clenched hand must take by force that which was refused to the open hand of friendship. If in the past our ancestors had based their political decisions on similar pacifist nonsense as our present generation does, we should not possess more than one-third of the national territory that we possess to-day and probably there would be no German nation to worry about its future in Europe.26
As the first part of his plan to unleash a war of expansion, Hitler had to first subjugate the Weimar political system to his personal wishes, which he did remarkably quickly. The Nazis blamed a Dutch communist for an arson attack on the Reichstag and called for a referendum giving Hitler dictatorial powers. It passed, and at that moment German democracy died.
Hitler then personally drove the process of rebuilding the German military and repudiating major parts of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. He ordered the remilitarization of the Rhineland, which under the Versailles Treaty was to be left undefended so as to allow the French to march in quickly. Hitler also determined the course of the Anschluss (the militarized incorporation of Austria into Germany) and the annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, followed not long after by the seizing of the rest of the Czech Republic. Most of the time it was Hitler pressing the rest of the German government to put into action his schemes for expansion. When it came time to attack Poland in the summer of 1939, it was once again Hitler who was at the far edge, driving German policy down a road that he personally wanted.
While Germany was having its foreign policy choices determined by the prejudices of one extreme individual, the British response to these moves was being decided by a small group, in particular Neville Chamberlain. He was the youngest son of Joseph Chamberlain, the British leader who had talked about an alliance with Germany before World War I. Born into British political power, by the 1930s Neville was the one of the dominant figures of his time. Sometimes lampooned as weak because of his tremulous voice and fondness for dressing in old-fashioned winged-collar shirts, he was actually a tough and very successful political leader.
Prime minister from 1937 to 1940 (and very influential as Chancellor of the Exchequer for the six years before that), he became a byword for a political leader who is willing to make enormous concessions to avoid war – or an ‘appeaser’. In some ways this charge is extreme, as Chamberlain was not as exceptional in avoiding war as Hitler was in pushing towards it. That being said, Chamberlain was personally and passionately convinced that Britain needed to avoid war throughout the 1930s for economic and domestic reasons. He believed that the impact of the Great Depression made war far too expensive to contemplate, and he was worried about whether the British population really had the stomach for another large conflict. Because of this, Chamberlain was willing to antagonize the United States by improving Britain’s relationship with Japan, as he was convinced that the Japanese were more reliable allies than the Americans.27
When Hitler started pressing even more forcefully, breaking the Versailles Treaty and eventually taking over parts of other countries, Chamberlain decided at first that it was preferable to cut deals with the German dictator rather than oppose him. In 1938, for instance, Chamberlain could have threatened Hitler with war when the latter started agitating to take over the Sudetenland, which was populated mostly by ethnic Germans but had never been a constituent part of Germany. A territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I, it had been included in Czechoslovakia by the Versailles Treaty.
The Sudetenland was a crucial border region for the defence of Czechoslovakian independence. Moreover, Britain was pledged to fight for Czechoslovakia, and if it had chosen to do so then France and probably the USSR would have been willing to do so as well. While the Czechs were willing to fight, Hitler’s only European ally who could have joined him – Mussolini – was not. Had World War II started in 1938, Germany would have found itself in a far worse strategic position than it ended up in when war broke out in 1939. Its army would have been bloodied, as Czechoslovakia was so well defended (which Hitler was a little stunned to find out about, after Chamberlain had betrayed the Czechs).
Chamberlain, however, was willing to trust Hitler enough to reach a deal and to compel Czechoslovakia to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany. This happened during the famous Munich Conference held at the end of September 1938. Chamberlain even thought it mattered that he and Hitler signed a meaningless pledge not to go to war with each other – a thin piece of paper that Chamberlain showed to the world as if it were some legally binding commitment. Hitler, by contrast, stated this ‘piece of paper is of no significance whatsoever’.28
In trying to appease Hitler, Chamberlain had personally taken a major gamble with Europe’s security. Some have argued that it made sense, as it allowed Britain about eleven more months to rebuild its military. The time gained, however, was not worth the strategic cost. Less than a year of extra preparation led to the end of the existence of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the isolation of Poland. Had war broken out at the end of 1938, Britain would have had more support to fight for Czechoslovakia, while Hitler would have been on his own.
Chamberlain had gambled and lost. Almost immediately after the Sudetenland was handed over, Hitler made it clear that this was only an appetizer. Even though he had solemnly told Chamberlain at Munich that he had no designs on the rest of Czechoslovakia, on 15 March 1939 he had the German Army march out of the Sudetenland and take the remaining Czech lands, including the capital, Prague.i This was too much even for Chamberlain, who decided that if Hitler made another attempt to expand Germany’s borders, this time Britain would fight. When it came to Poland a few months later, Chamberlain was as good as his word. Hitler invaded on 1 September, and Chamberlain declared war two days later.
So World War II, like World War I, started when and how it did because of the interaction of specific German and British leaders with their idiosyncratic (even sociopathic, in the case of Hitler) views of the world.
Leaders and Economic Power: Great Leaps Backward and Forward
China is today one of the two most important full-spectrum powers in the world, exercising influence over significant parts of the globe. With either the first- or second-largest economy in the world, depending on whether you are measuring GDP by raw terms or purchasing power,ii China is the only nation that can challenge the US directly as an economic/technological force. China also has a large and growing military that is a unique competitor to American forces, which have dominated the globe since the collapse of the USSR between 1989 and 1991.
This rise, or more accurately re-rise, of China as a global power is something that outsiders speculated about for more than a century. From the nineteenth century onwards, European and American thinkers and policymakers wondered about the question. One of the people who speculated about the rise of China the most was Franklin Roosevelt. After World War II, the American president made sure that China was included as one of his global ‘four policemen’ who were to organize the post-war world – in part because he was convinced that China would soon become a global power.29 China was given one of the few permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council as a sign of what it would become, not what it was at the end of the war.
Yet, in economic terms, China’s rise kept being delayed. Though it was the most populous nation in the world, with large fertile areas and access to a wide range of natural resources, in per capita terms China remained one of the poorest countries in the world until the 1990s. In 1976, for instance, China’s per capita GDP income was a tiny $165.30 It was far less wealthy than many African countries – including Nigeria, which was much richer at $562 per capita, and Kenya at $246 per capita.31 The United States was in an entirely different economic league from China at this time, with a per capita GDP of almost $8,600 – a figure over fifty times as great.32
The rise of China economically since then has been astounding. By early 2024, its per capita GDP had grown by almost eighty times – to over $13,000.33 The reason for such a remarkable change is at least partly down to the very different policy choices of China’s two most important twentieth-century leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
Mao and Deng are both remembered positively in China today – heralded for helping build modern China up under the control of the Communist Party – and Mao is arguably more popular now than he was in the years immediately after his death.34 Though Mao and Deng were both Communists, and willing to do brutal things to enforce their authority, when it came to economic policy they ended up taking China down very different roads. Mao sabotaged Chinese growth for decades, and when he died in 1976, China was one of the poorest states in the world. It was Deng who instituted the policies that helped create the economic powerhouse that either is or soon could be the largest economy on earth.
Mao Zedong was arguably the most successful and at the same time most destructive leader of the twentieth century – a century that saw many terribly destructive leaders. He was a charismatic figure who excelled at taking and exercising power, and he used these skills to dominate the Chinese Communist Party for almost all of his life. A founding member of the party, Mao helped devise the military and political strategy that saw them grasp power over all of mainland China by 1949.
At this point, however, Mao revealed himself to be economically and socially catastrophic. He seemed motivated by two things in particular – both reinforced by his decades of struggle to control the Communist Party and seize power in China. The first was a predilection for extreme Communist Party ideology – a form of utopianism, and control over the nation.35 The second was a powerful desire for self-preservation and the eradication of those he thought were his enemies. The result was periods where he enforced extremely destructive policies that delayed Chinese economic modernization, killed millions, and left China lagging behind as other states grew.
The two most famous of Mao’s periods of national self-harm were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Great Leap Forward was his attempt to show the world that China was ready not only to overtake the Soviet Union economically, but also to compete with advanced western states.36 It saw him press the country into mass collectivization in agriculture and the establishment of small light industries wherever possible, in a fantastical attempt to supercharge Chinese growth.
The result was human misery on a grand scale. Completely untrained peasants were instructed to create small factories, and many villages built primitive blast ovens to try to smelt metals. In many cases they simply melted down all the pots and pans and miscellaneous pieces of metal, such as door handles, that they could find. The steel they usually created was a useless blob of poor-grade metal that had no purpose in a modernized industrial economy.
At the same time, the push to create mass agricultural communes ended up seeing food production slashed (a situation made worse as many places no longer had pots and pans in which to cook their produce). Transport also broke down under the strain of all the different upheavals. Soon the countryside was gripped by widespread starvation as Mao’s economic masterplan unravelled spectacularly. It is estimated that as many as 30 million Chinese citizens died through starvation and deprivation during the Great Leap Forward (which lasted from 1958 to 1962), making it one of the greatest man-made catastrophes in human history.37
When the Great Leap Forward ended, China had, if anything, fallen further behind. This set the stage for the second of Mao’s periods of personal-rule disaster. The Great Leap Forward was such a failure that he had temporarily lost influence within the Communist Party. A new, modernizing group (including Deng Xiaoping as one of its leading figures) tried to relieve the terrible situation Mao had precipitated. They loosened some state control and brought some calm after Mao’s enforced chaos. In a very short period of time, Deng and this less radical group became dangerously popular in Mao’s mind; so powerful that they represented a threat to his control over the party.
Mao decided to restore his position and influence by unleashing another period of profound ideological insanity, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – usually called the Cultural Revolution.38 Starting in 1966, he empowered a mass of mostly younger cadres in the Communist Party to call for ideological purity, and let them loose to purge those who had shown dangerously moderate tendencies during the period when Deng and his group had influence – and many others besides.
Over the next ten years, the Cultural Revolution saw teachers, scientists, engineers and other educated people who were crucial to the functioning of the Chinese economy denounced, tortured and even killed because they were considered to lack ideological conviction. Often labelled reactionaries by roving packs of young party cadres whose only guiding principle was devotion to the works of Mao himself, those persecuted might be singled out because of how they looked, what they had supposedly said, or simply because they seemed too well-off. The results were monstrous. Though the amount of people directly killed by the Cultural Revolution is still debated, at least 2 million seems the best estimate.39 And tens of millions, maybe over 100 million, were greatly affected by the extremist events.
One of those targeted was Deng himself. A Communist Party member since his teens, Deng had studied in Moscow and become a devotee of Zhou Enlai, who was second in command under Mao and generally believed to be less bloodthirsty. Deng was also a strong supporter of Mao’s party, but he tempered this with a streak of pragmatism – never an easy balancing act in the early decades of the People’s Republic of China. Having had to ‘pick up the pieces’ after the Great Leap Forward, Deng became suspect in Mao’s eyes.40 He thus swiftly fell from power when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution,41 and was packed off to work in a tractor factory in rural China, disappearing from public view. Deng’s son was also mercilessly targeted, eventually leaping from a window in a possible suicide attempt which left him a paraplegic.
For Mao this was all to the good. He intended to use the Cultural Revolution to regain power – and if millions had to suffer and the Chinese economy crumble, so be it. And regain power he did. From 1966 until his death in 1976, Mao was the unchallenged leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the state. Even in his last years, when his mind was clearly failing, no one represented a serious threat to his rule. He had won, and died from natural causes in his bed – to be lionized as one of the greatest figures in Chinese history. Today, when you visit the Forbidden City, the great imperial palace that dominates Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square, you will be greeted by an enormous portrait of Mao, slaughterer of millions, looking down at you with the most self-satisfied of smiles.
The reality was China had suffered greatly because of Mao’s rule, and its development had been severely delayed. When he died, China was one of the poorest societies in the world with a dysfunctional ruling Communist Party and a surprisingly weak military. But Mao’s death would allow the implementation of an entirely different set of economic policies, under a new leadership dominated by Deng Xiaoping. This change in leader would go a long way towards creating the Chinese economy that we see today.
After years of keeping his head down, Deng was brought back to Beijing under the protection of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1973. However as long as Mao was still alive, Deng’s position was tenuous. When Mao died, Deng moved with great speed to take over control of the Communist Party. By 1977 he was back as a central figure and would soon come to dominate over Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng.
As Deng accumulated power, he was careful to destroy much of the impact of Mao’s policies without destroying the reputation of Mao the leader.42 He discredited the Cultural Revolution while praising other elements of Mao’s rule, famously saying that in retrospect Mao’s leadership had been 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad. In reality, Deng acted more like it had been 70 per cent bad and 30 per cent good. What he started doing almost immediately, and then accelerated greatly, was to open up the Chinese economy in ways that would have been inconceivable to Mao. Deng allowed trade with the outside world to grow and interjected market forces into economic relationships, both within China and via trade with the outside world. He helped upgrade Chinese technology through imports, and even allowed foreign investment into the country – thus beginning the process of ending the Communist Party’s direct control of all economic production.
