Étienne Mantoux: End of “The Calumniated Peace: The Economic Consequences of John Maynard Keynes”: Today’s Economic History

Étienne Mantoux says: Britain and America must allow France to impose a satisfactory peace upon Nazi Germany in 1945 — one that places Germany under sufficient territorial, military, political, and economic burdens that it will thereafter lack the power to dominate Europe politically and militarily. If they do not, then perhaps, after 200 years of trying to control or contain Germany, France and the rest of Europe will ally with it. And that would fix those Britons and Americans:

Étienne Mantoux (1944): The Calumniated Peace: The Economic Consequences of John Maynard Keynes

Merely to… act on the principle that whatever Germany may have done, frontiers must remain untouched and Reparations unpaid… will lead Germany’s victims precisely where she wants them to go…. That Germany should be made incapable of renewing her enterprise of conquest is demanded by the interests of all…. Reparations… whether we like the sound of it or not, will face us as a problem again this time, and on a scale even vaster than before…. We may… devise some system of deliveries on the model (say) of the Lend-Lease program… such as will tax Germany’s productive capacity… and diminish to some extent the burden of her victims…. Until this is achieved, the battle of liberation will be only half-won….

There is therefore before us a very real prospect that Hitlerism, even though it has lost the war in arms, might still stand a chance of winning git in spirit…. If the suspicion is allowed to grow among [Europe’s] peoples that the future is to be a continuation of the little game, the rules of which allow Germany to trample periodically over one half or more of Europe, then force Britain’s and America’s sons to die far away from home for its liberation, and finally forbid the victims to obtain fair redress on the ground that Reparations are an economic impossibility and large units an economic inevitability — then there is no extremity to which exhaust and exasperation may not carry them; in their despair, they may no longer know friend from foe, rescuer from oppressor, and then, I dare in my turn to predict, nothing can delay for very long that all-embracing coalescence of the Continent… beside which the offensive and defensive powers of the Hitlerian Reich may well fade into insignificance. Whether to encourage of even tolerate such an outcome is in the interests, economic or otherwise, of anyone on either side of the Atlantic, is for those concerned to decide….

Will justice prevail over expediency, reason over prejudice, reality over illusion, will over destiny? Will Europe survive? Or must its peoples, for want of the means of resurrection, submit in final agony to continental dominion? The answer rests heavily with forces already on the move, and which as our generation cannot sway. All that it can and must do is to learn from the past, react to the present, prepare for the future. It was to the coming generation that Mr. Keynes dedicated his book twenty-five years ago. This is an answer that comes from that generation.