The Economic Consequences of the Peace

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THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE
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1
The Economic Consequences
of the Peace
by John Maynard Keynes
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THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE
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2
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
by John Maynard Keynes
1919
Chapter 1
Introductory
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
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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. Seated
indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French saloons of
state, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson
and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging
characterisation, were really faces at all and not the
tragic-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show.
The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary
importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions
seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society;
yet the air whispered that the word was not flesh, that it was
futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events; and
one felt most strongly the impression, described by Tolstoy in
War and Peace or by Hardy in The Dynasts, of events marching on
to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected by the
cerebrations of statesmen in council:
Spirit of the Years
Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Immanent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.
Spirit of the Pities
Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?
Spirit of the Years
I have told thee that It works unwittingly,
As one possessed not judging.
In Paris, where those connected with the Supreme Economic
Council received almost hourly the reports of the misery,
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE
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disorder, and decaying organisation of all Central and Eastern
Europe, Allied and enemy alike, and learnt from the lips of the
financial representatives of Germany and Austria unanswerable
evidence of the terrible exhaustion of their countries, an
occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the President's house,
where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid
intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare. Yet there in
Paris the problems of Europe were terrible and clamant, and an
occasional return to the vast unconcern of London a little
disconcerting. For in London these questions were very far away,
and our own lesser problems alone troubling. London believed that
Paris was making a great confusion of its business, but remained
uninterested. In this spirit the British people received the
treaty without reading it. But it is under the influence of
Paris, not London, that this book has been written by one who,
though an Englishman, feels himself a European also, and, because
of too vivid recent experience, cannot disinterest himself from
the further unfolding of the great historic drama of these days
which will destroy great institutions, but may also create a new
world.
Chapter 2
Europe Before the War
Before 1870 different parts of the small continent of Europe
had specialised in their own products; but, taken as a whole, it
was substantially self-subsistent. And its population was
adjusted to this state of affairs.
After 1870 there was developed on a large scale an
unprecedented situation, and the economic condition of Europe
became during the next fifty years unstable and peculiar. The
pressure of population on food, which had already been balanced
by the accessibility of supplies from America, became for the
first time in recorded history definitely reversed. As numbers
increased, food was actually easier to secure. Larger
proportional returns from an increasing scale of production
became true of agriculture as well as industry. With the growth
of the European population there were more emigrants on the one
hand to till the soil of the new countries and, on the other,
more workmen were available in Europe to prepare the industrial
products and capital goods which were to maintain the emigrant
populations in their new homes, and to build the railways and
ships which were to make accessible to Europe food and raw
products from distant sources. Up to about 1900 a unit of labour
applied to industry yielded year by year a purchasing power over
an increasing quantity of food. It is possible that about the
year 1900 this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing
yield of nature to man's effort was beginning to reassert itself.
But the tendency of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by
other improvements; and -- one of many novelties -- the resources
of tropical Africa then for the first time came into large
employ, and a great traffic in oilseeds began to bring to the
table of Europe in a new and cheaper form one of the essential
foodstuffs of mankind. In this economic Eldorado, in this
economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it,
THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE
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most of us were brought up.
That happy age lost sight of a view of the world which filled
with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our political
economy. Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no
false hopes. To lay the illusions which grew popular at that
age's latter end, Malthus disclosed a devil. For half a century
all serious economical writings held that devil in clear
prospect. For the next half century he was chained up and out of
sight. Now perhaps we have loosed him again.
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man
that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater
part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a
low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably
contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of
capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the
middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost
and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities
beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of
other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone,
sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole
earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably
expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the
same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the
natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the
world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their
prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple
the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the
townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that
fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith,
if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any
country or climate without passport or other formality, could
despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for
such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and
could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge
of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth
upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and
much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of
all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and
permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and
any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The
projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial
and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and
exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were
little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and
appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary
course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of
which was nearly complete in practice.
It will assist us to appreciate the character and
consequences of the peace which we have imposed on our enemies,
if I elucidate a little further some of the chief unstable
elements, already present when war broke out, in the economic
life of Europe.
I. Population
In 1870, Germany had a population of about 40 million. By
1892 this figure had risen to 50 million, and by 30 June 1914 to
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about 68 million. In the years immediately preceding the war the
annual increase was about 850,000, of whom an insignificant
proportion emigrated.(1*) This great increase was only rendered
possible by a far-reaching transformation of the economic
structure of the country. From being agricultural and mainly
self-supporting, Germany transformed herself into a vast and
complicated industrial machine dependent for its working on the
equipoise of many factors outside Germany as well as within. Only
by operating this machine, continuously and at full blast, could
she find occupation at home for her increasing population and the
means of purchasing their subsistence from abroad. The German
machine was like a top which to maintain its equilibrium must
progress ever faster and faster.
In the Austro-Hungarian empire, which grew from about 40
million in 1890 to at least 50 million at the outbreak of war,
the same tendency was present in a less degree, the annual excess
of births over deaths being about half a million, out of which,
however, there was an annual emigration of some quarter of a
million persons.
To understand the present situation, we must apprehend with
vividness what an extraordinary centre of population the
development of the Germanic system had enabled Central Europe to
become. Before the war the population of Germany and
Austria-Hungary together not only substantially exceeded that of
the United States, but was about equal to that of the whole of
North America. In these numbers, situated within a compact
territory, lay the military strength of the Central Powers. But
these same numbers -- for even the war has not appreciably
diminished them(2*) -- if deprived of the means of life, remain a
hardly less danger to European order.
European Russia increased her population in a degree even
greater than Germany -- from less than 100 million in 1890 to
about 150 million at the outbreak of war;(3*) and in the years
immediately preceding 1914 the excess of births over deaths in
Russia as a whole was at the prodigious rate of two million per
annum. This inordinate growth in the population of Russia, which
has not been widely noticed in England, has been nevertheless one
of the most significant facts of recent years.
The great events of history are often due to secular changes
in the growth of population and other fundamental economic
causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of
contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of
statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists. Thus the extraordinary
occurrences of the past two years in Russia, that vast upheaval
of society, which has overturned what seemed most stable --
religion, the basis of property, the ownership of land, as well
as forms of government and the hierarchy of classes -- may owe
more to the deep influences of expanding numbers than to Lenin or
to Nicholas; and the disruptive powers of excessive national
fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of
convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of
autocracy.
II. Organization
The delicate organisation by which these peoples lived
depended partly on factors internal to the system.
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The interference of frontiers and of tariffs was reduced to a
minimum, and not far short of three hundred millions of people
lived within the three empires of Russia, Germany, and
Austria-Hungary. The various currencies, which were all
maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one
another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an
extent the full value of which we only realise now, when we are
deprived of its advantages. Over this great area there was an
almost absolute security of property and of person.
These factors of order, security, and uniformity, which
Europe had never before enjoyed over so wide and populous a
territory or for so long a period, prepared the way for the
organisation of that vast mechanism of transport, coal
distribution, and foreign trade which made possible an industrial
order of life in the dense urban centres of new population. This
is too well known to require detailed substantiation with
figures. But it may be illustrated by the figures for coal, which
has been the key to the industrial growth of Central Europe
hardly less than of England; the output of German coal grew from
30 million tons in 1871 to 70 million tons in 1890, 110 million
tons in 1900, and 190 million tons in 1913.
Round Germany as a central support the rest of the European
economic system grouped itself, and on the prosperity and
enterprise of Germany the prosperity of the rest of the continent
mainly depended. The increasing pace of Germany gave her
neighbours an outlet for their products, in exchange for which
the enterprise of the German merchant supplied them with their
chief requirements at a low price.
The statistics of the economic interdependence of Germany and
her neighbours are overwhelming. Germany was the best customer of
Russia, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and
Austria-Hungary. she was the second-best customer of Great
Britain, Sweden, 'and Denmark; and the third-best customer of
France. She was the largest source of supply to Russia, Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Austria-Hungary,
Roumania, and Bulgaria; and the second largest source of supply
to Great Britain, Belgium, and France.
In our own case we sent more exports to Germany than to any
other country in the world except India, and we bought more from
her than from any other country in the world except the United
States.
There was no European country except those west of Germany
which did not do more than a quarter of their total trade with
her; and in the case of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Holland the
proportion was far greater.
Germany not only furnished these countries with trade but, in
the case of some of them, supplied a great part of the capital
needed for their own development. Of Germany's pre-war foreign
investments, amounting in all to about £1,250 million, not far
short of £500 million was invested in Russia, Austria-Hungary,
Bulgaria, Roumania, and Turkey. And by the system of 'peaceful
penetration' she gave these countries not only capital but, what
they needed hardly less, organisation. The whole of Europe east
of the Rhine thus fell into the German industrial orbit, and its
economic life was adjusted accordingly.
But these internal factors would not have been sufficient to
enable the population to support itself without the co-operation
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of external factors also and of certain general dispositions
common to the whole of Europe. Many of the circumstances already
treated were true of Europe as a whole, and were not peculiar to
the central empires. But all of what follows was common to the
whole European system.
III The Psychology of Society
Europe was so organised socially and economically as to
secure the maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some
continuous improvement in the daily conditions of life of the
mass of the population, society was so framed as to throw a great
part of the increased income into the control of the class least
likely to consume it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were
not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power
which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate
consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the
distribution of wealth which made possible those vast
accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which
distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the
main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had
spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would
long ago have found such a régime intolerable. But like bees they
saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole
community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.
The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the
great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century
before the war, could never have come about in a society where
wealth was divided equitably. The railways of the world, which
that age built as a monument to posterity, were, not less than
the pyramids of Egypt, the work of labour which was not free to
consume in immediate enjoyment the full equivalent of its
efforts.
Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a
double bluff or deception. On the one hand the labouring classes
accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled,
persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the
well-established order of society into accepting, a situation in
which they could call their own very little of the cake that they
and nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And
on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the
best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to
consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed
very little of it in practice. The duty of 'saving' became
nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of
true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake
all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has
withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of
production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake
increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated.
Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer,
and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation.
Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in
theory -- the virtue of the cake was that it was never to be
consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you.
In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices
of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being
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society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in
proportion to the appetites of consumption, and no one, if it
were shared all round, would be much the better off by the
cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of
today but for the future security and improvement of the race --
in fact for 'progress'. If only the cake were not cut but was
allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by
Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest,
perhaps a day might come when there would at last be enough to go
round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our
labours. In that day overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding
would come to an end, and men, secure of the comforts and
necessities of the body, could proceed to the nobler exercises of
their faculties. One geometrical ratio might cancel another, and
the nineteenth century was able to forget the fertility of the
species in a contemplation of the dizzy virtues of compound
interest.
There were two pitfalls in this prospect: lest, population
still outstripping accumulation, our self-denials promote not
happiness but numbers; and lest the cake be after all consumed,
prematurely, in war, the consumer of all such hopes.
But these thoughts lead too far from my present purpose. I
seek only to point out that the principle of accumulation based
in on equality was a vital part of the pre-war order of society
and of progress as we then understood it, and to emphasise that
this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions,
which it may be impossible to re-create. It was not natural for a
population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to
accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of
consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the
bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer
willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no
longer confident of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully
their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus
precipitate the hour of their confiscation.
IV. The Relation of the Old World to the New
The accumulative habits of Europe before the war were the
necessary condition of the greatest of the external factors which
maintained the European equipoise.
Of the surplus capital goods accumulated by Europe a
substantial part was exported abroad, where its investment made
possible the development of the new resources of food, materials,
and transport, and at the same time enabled the Old World to
stake out a claim in the natural wealth and virgin potentialities
of the New. This last factor came to be of the vastest
importance. The Old World employed with an immense prudence the
annual tribute it was thus entitled to draw. The benefit of cheap
and abundant supplies, resulting from the new developments which
its surplus capital had made possible was, it is true, enjoyed
and not postponed. But the greater part of the money interest
accruing on these foreign investments was reinvested and allowed
to accumulate, as a reserve (it was then hoped) against the less
happy day when the industrial labour of Europe could no longer
purchase on such easy terms the produce of other continents, and
when the due balance would be threatened between its historical
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civilisations and the multiplying races of other climates and
environments. Thus the whole of the European races tended to
benefit alike from the development of new resources whether they
pursued their culture at home or adventured it abroad.
Even before the war, however, the equilibrium thus
established between old civilisations and new resources was being
threatened. The prosperity of Europe was based on the facts that,
owing to the large exportable surplus of foodstuffs in America,
she was able to purchase food at a cheap rate measured in terms
of the labour required to produce her own exports, and that, as a
result of her previous investments of capital, she was entitled
to a substantial amount annually without any payment in return at
all. The second of these factors then seemed out of danger but,
as a result of the growth of population overseas, chiefly in the
United States, the first was not so secure.
When first the virgin soils of America came into bearing, the
proportions of the population of those continents themselves, and
consequently of their own local requirements, to those of Europe
were very small. As lately as 1890 Europe had a population three
times that of North and South America added together. But by 1914
the domestic requirements of the United states for wheat were
approaching their production, and the date was evidently near
when there would be an exportable surplus only in years of
exceptionally favourable harvest. Indeed, the present domestic
requirements of the United States are estimated at more than
ninety per cent of the average yield of the five years
1909-13.(4*) At that time, however, the tendency towards
stringency was showing itself, not so much in a lack of abundance
as in a steady increase of real cost. That is to say, taking the
world as a whole, there was no deficiency of wheat, but in order
to call forth an adequate supply it was necessary to offer a
higher real price. The most favourable factor in the situation
was to be found in the extent to which Central and Western Europe
was being fed from the exportable surplus of Russia and Roumania.
In short, Europe's claim on the resources of the New World
was becoming precarious; the law of diminishing returns was at
last reasserting itself, and was making it necessary year by year
for Europe to offer a greater quantity of other commodities to
obtain the same amount of bread; and Europe, therefore, could by
no means afford the disorganisation of any of her principal
sources of supply.
Much else might be said in an attempt to portray the economic
peculiarities of the Europe of 1914. I have selected for emphasis
the three or four greatest factors of instability -- the
instability of an excessive population dependent for its
livelihood on a complicated and artificial organisation, the
psychological instability of the labouring and capitalist
classes, and the instability of Europe's claim, coupled with the
completeness of her dependence, on the food supplies of the New
World.
The war had so shaken this system as to endanger the life of
Europe altogether. A great part of the continent was sick and
dying; its population was greatly in excess of the numbers for
which a livelihood was available; its organisation was destroyed,
its transport system ruptured, and its food supplies terribly
impaired.
It was the task of the peace conference to honour engagements
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