History Forum / General / British History / December 2006

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a
marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with
conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated,
unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by
which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We
assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late
advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we
lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we
scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms,
pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel
ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage,
civil conflict in the European family. Moved by insane delusion
and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the
foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of
the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing
the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which, if it is carried
into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have
restored, the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken
and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can
employ themselves and live.
    In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us
to feel or realise in the least that an age is over. We are busy
picking up the threads of our life where we dropped them, with
this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal richer
than we were before. Where we spent millions before the war, we
have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and
apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the
utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We look,
therefore, not only to a return to the comforts of 1914, but to
an immense broadening and intensification of them. All classes
alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save
less, the poor to spend more and work less.
    But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is
possible to be so unconscious. In continental Europe the earth
heaves and no one but is aware of the rumblings. There it is not
just a matter of extravagance or 'labour troubles'; but of life
and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful
convulsions of a dying civilisation.

    For one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months
which succeeded the armistice an occasional visit to London was a
strange experience. England still stands outside Europe. Europe's
voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England
is not of her flesh and body. But Europe is solid with herself.
France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Holland, Russia and Roumania
and Poland, throb together, and their structure and civilisation
are essentially one. They flourished together, they have rocked
together in a war which we, in spite of our enormous
contributions and sacrifices (like though in a less degree than
America), economically stood outside, and they may fall together.
In this lies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris.
If the European civil war is to end with France and Italy abusing
their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and
Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction
also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their
victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds. At any rate an
Englishman who took part in the Conference of Paris and was
during those months a member of the Supreme Economic Council of
the Allied Powers, was bound to become -- for him a new
experience -- a European in his cares and outlook. There, at the
nerve centre of the European system, his British preoccupations
must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other and more
dreadful spectres. Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there was
morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous
scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events
confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the
decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from
without-all the elements of ancient tragedy were there."

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/keynes/peace.htm

Worth reading _ in toto_.

--

cheers,

David Read

"Do you know what is more hard to bear than the reverses of fortune? It is
the baseness, the hideous ingratitude, of man." Napoleon Bonaparte.