If the costs of the international power
struggle exceeded the gains, there were no longer victors who won and
vanquished who lost. Instead, everybody lost as the entire social
structure was wrenched, dislocated, wracked and down-graded. Certainly
this seemed to be the plain-as-day lesson of the two general wars and
the flurry of minor wars which swept the earth after 1910.
Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way. It was the
obvious lesson stressed by J.A. Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their
respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916). It was the theme of
Norman Angel's _Great Illusion._ It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee's
_War and Civilization._
If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion
would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the
victors. Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival
struggles during the war years which began in 1911. I summarized the
experience in _The Twilight of Empire_(1929).
The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of
1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany
after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939,
followed immediately by the war devastations of 1939-45 were part and
parcel of the same picture. The same may be said for the revolt of the
colonial peoples, downgrading all European "victors" in the war of
1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the
planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist
forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.
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