好英语网凯恩斯是如何预见纳粹德国崛起的
On Dec. 8, 1919, Macmillan Press published a book by a relatively obscure British Treasury official who had resigned from the government in protest over the Versailles treaty that brought the epochal trauma of the First World War to its conclusion.
1919年12月8日，麦克米伦出版社(Macmillan Press)出版了一本书，作者是一位相对无名的英国财政部官员，为抗议结束了第一次世界大战划时代创伤的《凡尔赛和约》，他辞去了政府职务。
The small treatise, the official wrote, sought to explain “the grounds of his objection to the treaty, or rather to the whole policy of the conference towards the economic problems of Europe.” A conservative print of 5,000 copies seemed right for a technocrat’s dissent, which featured meticulously detailed passages that pored over the history and prospects of things like Germany’s coal production and export markets.
该官员写道，这本篇幅不大的专著是为了试图解释“他反对条约的理由，或者说是对巴黎和会所提出的关于欧洲经济问题全部政策的反对理由”。出版社很谨慎，首刷只有5000册，对一位技术官僚的不同意见来说，似乎倒也合适，书中有一些段落详细描述了诸如德国的煤炭生产和出口市场等事务的历史与前景。
凯恩斯和妻子洛普戈娃在二十年代。当时，他在《〈凡尔赛和约〉的经济后果》一书中发出的警告，正在成为现实。
The book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” turned out to be a phenomenon. It swiftly went through six printings, was translated into a dozen languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and brought world fame to its 36-year-old author, John Maynard Keynes.
结果，《〈凡尔赛和约〉的经济后果》(The Economic Consequences of the Peace)获得了巨大成功。很快就印刷了六次，并翻译成十几种语言，销量超过了10万册，这也让书的作者、36岁的约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)举世闻名。
A brilliant and indefatigable scholar, public intellectual, journalist, government adviser and champion of the arts, Keynes would be at the center of things for the balance of his life. The Keynesian revolution reinvented economics in the 1930s, and continues to shape the field today. Keynes, again representing the British Treasury during World War II, was the principal intellectual architect of postwar international order. But he began his career in dissent.
凯恩斯才华横溢、不知疲倦，他既是学者，也是公共知识分子、记者、政府顾问和捍卫艺术的人。在成名后的余生里，凯恩斯一直处于许多事情的中心。凯恩斯革命在20世纪30年重塑了经济学，并在今天继续塑造着这个领域。第二次世界大战期间再次成为英国财政部代表的凯恩斯，是构建战后国际秩序的主要知识分子。但他的事业始于发表不同意见。
Keynes’s book is essentially correct with regard to its most important arguments. But it was, and remains today, largely misunderstood.
凯恩斯的书在其最重要的论点上，基本上是正确的。但这本书过去在很大程度上被误解，而且现在仍然如此。
“Economic Consequences” is majestically written — Keynes was close to the iconoclastic Bloomsbury cohort of artists and writers, and his incisive, candid portrayals of the peacemakers (Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson) reflected the no-holds-barred influence of Lytton Strachey’s recently celebrated “Eminent Victorians.” The book was also wildly controversial for its assessments of the capacity of Germany to pay the reparations demanded by the victorious Allied powers.
《经济后果》一书的笔法很壮观——凯恩斯与布卢姆斯伯里派关系密切，那是一群打破传统的艺术家和作家。他对和平缔造者（乔治·克列孟梭[Georges Clemenceau]、戴维·劳合·乔治[David Lloyd George]和伍德罗·威尔逊[Woodrow Wilson]）入木三分的、坦率的刻画，反映了里顿·斯特拉奇(Lytton Strachey)不久前广受关注的《维多利亚时代四名人传》(Eminent Victorians)一书不加约束写法的影响。该书也因评估德国支付战争赔款的能力而广受争议。
Keynes’s book is essentially correct with regard to its most important arguments. But it was, and remains today, largely misunderstood. The enduring contributions of the book are to be found not in Keynes’ first dissenting clause (his “objection the treaty”), but in the second, about “the economic problems of Europe.” Keynes was sounding an alarm about the fragility of the European order.
凯恩斯的书在其最重要的论点上，基本上是正确的。但这本书过去在很大程度上被误解，而且现在仍然如此。这本书的不朽贡献不在于凯恩斯的第一个反对（他“对条约的反对”），而在于第二个反对，既关于“欧洲经济问题”政策的反对。凯恩斯是在对欧洲秩序的脆弱性发出警告。
Keynes argued that while many Europeans were celebrating a new era in the continent’s economy, too much of what emerged from the war rested on longstanding, underappreciated and elaborately enmeshed networks and foundations. “Unstable elements, already present when war broke out,” he wrote, had been obliterated by years of total war — but then not replaced with something more stable. Reconstituting the general economic order, not exacting shortsighted retribution, was the imperative of the day. This, he believed, was the critical failure of the “peace” — not just Versailles, but the entire political and economic framework in which it was written.
凯恩斯认为，尽管许多欧洲人都在庆祝欧洲大陆经济的新纪元，但战后出现的东西中有太多是建立在存在已久、未得到充分认识、精心编织的网络和基础之上的。他写道，“战争爆发时已经存在的不稳定因素”，已被多年的全面战争摧毁，但在战后并没有被更稳定的东西取代。重建广义的经济秩序，而不是短视地施加报复，才是当时的当务之急。他认为，这是“条约”的重大失败——不仅是《凡尔赛和约》本身，而且是缔结条约的整个政治和经济框架。
And so when economists and historians, then and ever since, zeroed in on questions about, say, whether Keynes underestimated Germany’s capacity to pay its war reparations — they miss the larger point. Keynes could have surely been wrong. But his arguments about the crisis facing Europe, and about what the treaty failed to do, were exactly right.
因此，当经济学家和历史学家们——那时的和那以后的——把注意力集中在诸如凯恩斯是否低估了德国支付战争赔款的能力等问题上时，他们忽略了更重要的问题。凯恩斯有可能肯定是错的。但他对欧洲所面临的危机，以及该条约未及之事的论点是完全正确的。
Keynes recognized that the war had “so shaken this system as to endanger the life of Europe altogether.” But the treaty “includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe — nothing to make the defeated Central empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe,” nothing to restore “the disordered finances of France and Italy.” Forcing Germany into, essentially, servitude, he argued, “will sow the decay of the whole of civilized life of Europe.”
凯恩斯认识到，这场战争已经“严重动摇了这个体系，以至于整个危及到欧洲的生存”。但是，条约“没有包括复兴欧洲经济的任何措施——没有任何东西使战败的中欧帝国成为好邻国，没有任何东西让欧洲的新国家稳定下来”，没有任何东西来恢复“法国和意大利混乱的财政”。他认为，迫使德国陷入本质上的奴役状态，“将播下欧洲整个文明生活走向衰落的种子”。
Keynes was well positioned to grasp the severity of this most perilous macroeconomic muddle. At the Treasury during the war, he had the task of larder of British finance to keep the war effort afloat. At the Paris Peace Conference he was the official representative of the Treasury; in addition, as the responsibilities of chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, required him to stay in Britain, Keynes was deputized to represent him on the Supreme Economic Council.
凯恩斯对把握住这场最危险的宏观经济乱局的严重性有充分的准备。战争期间，他在英国财政部的任务是金融筹款，以将战争维持下去。在巴黎和会上，他是英国财政部的官方代表；此外，由于财政大臣奥斯丁·张伯伦(Austen Chamberlain)的职责要求他留在英国，凯恩斯被任命为其代理人参加了最高经济委员会。
Arriving in Paris on Jan. 10, he was quickly thrown into the maelstrom. Dispatched to meet with German financiers, the young Treasury man negotiated the terms of an emergency shipment of food to Germany, then on the brink of mass starvation.
他于1919年1月10日抵达巴黎后，很快就陷入到漩涡中。被派去与德国金融家会晤时，这位年轻的财政部官员谈妥了向德国紧急运送粮食的条款，当时德国已处于大规模饥荒的边缘。
Keynes would later describe those events in one of his finest long-form essays, “Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy,” which he first read over two meetings in the privacy of the Memoir Club of Cambridge and Bloomsbury intimates. Virginia Woolf returned home from the second gathering and wrote an effusive note singing its literary praises; it was one of two brilliant works (“My Early Beliefs” was the other) that Keynes requested to be published posthumously.
凯恩斯后来在他最好的长篇散文之一《梅尔基奥博士：一个被击败的敌人》(Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy)中描述了这些事件，他分两次在剑桥自传俱乐部和布卢姆斯伯里派密友的会上私下宣读了这篇散文。弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫(Virginia Woolf)从第二次聚会回家后，写了热情洋溢的笔记，对其文学价值大加赞扬。这是凯恩斯要求死后方可出版的两篇杰作之一（另一篇是《我的早期信仰》[My Early Beliefs]）。
His scene-setting has a cinematic quality:
他的场景设置具有电影般的质感：
With some inspired back-channel improvisation, Keynes brought these modest, prefatory negotiations to a successful conclusion. The broader peace process, however, was a catastrophe — and Keynes had a front-row seat.
靠一些借助于灵感的幕后即兴发挥，凯恩斯圆满地结束了这些不太大的、导言性的谈判。然而，更广泛的和平进程是一场灾难，凯恩斯从近距离目睹了这一切。
As the historian Eric Weitz described, German representatives reacted “with stunned disbelief” at the terms presented to them; when the details became public back home, the reaction was shock and anger. The two sides had bled each other white during the war, fighting to a stalemate until the late entry of the distant United States decisively tipped the balance of power. Germany, with no foreign troops on its soil, imagined it was bargaining for the loser’s share of a negotiated peace, not submitting to what amounted to unconditional surrender: colonies stripped, territory lost, navy sunk, army disbanded, reparations imposed.
正如历史学家埃里克·韦茨(Eric Weitz)所描述的那样，德国代表们对摆在他们面前的条款“感到难以置信”；当这些细节在德国国内公之于众时，人们的反应是震惊和愤怒。双方在战争中互相残杀，陷入僵持局面，直到遥远的美国后来的介入才决定性地打破了力量的平衡。并没有被外国军队占领的德国，本以为在达成的和约中争取到输家的份额，未曾料想接受的是相当于无条件投降的条件：殖民地被剥夺，领土丧失，海军沉没，军队解散，被强制缴纳赔款。
Keynes, as he would write in “Economic Consequences” and emphasize repeatedly in the wake of its publication, was concerned “not with the justice of the treaty,” but with its “wisdom and with its consequences.” Behind the scenes, he fought for a more farsighted approach.
正如凯恩斯在《经济后果》一书中所写，并在该书出版后多次强调的，他关心的“不是条约的公正性”，而是条约“是否明智及其后果”。他曾在暗地里为争取一个更有远见的方案而努力。
A flickering moment in April saw hope that his “grand scheme” might be embraced: modest reparations (with Britain’s share ceded to other victims of German aggression), cancellation of all inter-Allied war debts (America would bear the brunt of that burden), the establishment of a European free trade zone (to sidestep likely chaos in international commerce from the confused patchwork of new nations emerging in the east), and a new international loan to nurse the continent through a difficult period of economic disequilibrium.
他曾在1919年4月一个一闪而过的时刻，看到了自己“宏伟计划”可能被采纳的希望：不太多的赔款（英国的份额转让给受德国侵略的其他受害者），取消所有协约国之间的战争债务（美国将首当其冲地承担这个负担），建立一个欧洲自由贸易区（以避免东欧新国家五花八门的拼合可能导致的国际贸易混乱），以及新的国际贷款，让处于经济失衡困难时期的欧洲大陆恢复健康。
This bordered on political naïveté: The Americans would not easily part with their money, nor the French with their vengeance. And in the elections of 1918, British politicians had famously (if fatuously) promised to hold Germany accountable for the full cost of the war, one promising to squeeze the country like a lemon “until the pips squeak.”
这个计划在政治上近乎天真：美国人不会轻易放弃他们的钱，法国人也不会轻易放弃他们的复仇。在1918年的选举中，英国政客们曾出名地（虽然也愚蠢地）承诺，要让德国为战争的全部代价负责，一名政客打保票说，要把德国像挤柠檬那样“直到榨干为止”。
But for Keynes, the stakes were so high as to demand the effort. Historians have focused on his light-handed reparations proposal, but in the moment he was even more exercised over the issue of inter-Allied debts. Those obligations, he wrote in an internal Treasury brief, were “a menace to financial stability everywhere,” imposed a “crushing burden,” and would be “a constant source of international friction.” An international financial order that was little more than a tangle of debts and reparations could hardly “last a day.”
但对凯恩斯来说，所涉及的利益如此之重大，必须为之努力。历史学家们关注的是他较轻的赔款提议，但当时更让他烦恼的是协约国之间的债务问题。他在财政部的一份内部简报中写道，这些债务“威胁到所有国家的金融稳定”，把“摧毁性的负担”强加于它们，并将成为“国际摩擦的持续来源”。一个比债务和赔款的乱摊子好不了多少的国际金融秩序很难“维持一天”。
On May 14, 1919, he sent an anguished note to his mother, telling her of his plans to resign, but hung on, “so sick at what goes on,” for three more weeks. He submitted his formal letter of resignation to Prime Minister Lloyd George on June 5, returned home to lick his wounds, and then channeled his passions into writing “Economic Consequences.”
1919年5月14日，他给母亲写了一封痛苦不堪的信，把辞职的计划告诉了母亲，不过，尽管“对发生的事情感到非常厌倦”，他仍坚持了三周多。6月5日，他向英国首相劳合·乔治(Lloyd George)递交了正式辞呈，回家重整旗鼓，不久后就把激情倾注到撰写《经济后果》一书中。
Keynes waged an intellectual campaign alongside his book, which, despite its runaway success, did little to influence the foreign policies of the relevant powers. Writing in the magazine Everybody’s Monthly to an American audience, he echoed the arguments found on the first page of his book: “Germany bears a special and peculiar responsibility for the war” and “for its universal and devastating character.” But the treaty “leaves Europe more unsettled than it found it,” and interest, not vengeance, must guide policy. It “will be a disaster for the world if America isolates herself,” he added.
凯恩斯在写书的同时发起了一场智识运动，尽管书取得了巨大成功，但对有关大国的外交政策影响甚微。他在《大众月刊》(Everybody’s Monthly)上写给美国读者的文章中，重复了他书中第一页的观点：“德国对这场战争的普遍性和毁灭性特点负有特殊且不寻常的责任。”但是，《凡尔赛和约》“让欧洲变得比条约出来之前更不稳定”，指导政策的必须是利益，而不是复仇。“如果美国把自己孤立起来的话，那将是世界的灾难，”他补充道。
In the preface to the French edition of the book he asked rhetorically, “Will France be safe because her sentries stand on the Rhine” yet “bloodshed, misery and fanaticism prevail from the Rhine eastwards through two continents?”
在该书的法文版前言中，他反问道，“法国会因为她的哨兵站在莱茵河畔而安全吗？”然而，“流血、痛苦和狂热却从莱茵河向东穿过两大洲普遍存在。”
Few listened. The Americans’ brief flirtation with Wilsonian internationalism yielded to a resurgence of nationalism and nativism. Prioritizing domestic demands over global concerns, the United States stubbornly and shortsightedly added to Europe’s economic woes with an unyielding stance on the question of war debts.
没有几个人听到了这些话。美国人对威尔逊的国际主义的一时之兴，很快让位于民族主义和本土主义的复苏。美国将国内的要求置于全球忧虑之上，在战争债务问题上顽固而短视的强硬立场加剧了欧洲的经济困境。
France sought to enforce the treaty as written, going so far as to occupy the Ruhr Valley region in January 1923, in response to Germany’s failure to meet its reparation obligations. The occupation, which lasted two and a half years and was met with passive resistance and hyperinflation, seemed to prove Keynes’s point.
法国寻求严格按照条约的文字强制执行，甚至在1923年1月占领了鲁尔谷地区，作为对德国未能履行其赔偿义务的回应。持续了两年半的占领遭遇了消极抵抗和恶性通货胀涨，似乎证明了凯恩斯的观点。
The balance of the 1920s limped along, with glimmers of progress and cooperation doing little to overcome the big problems Keynes had identified at the outset — fragile finances and political anxieties simmering just below the surface. One strong push would send it all tumbling down, and the 1931 global financial crisis, worsened by France’s search for political advantage as Austria and Germany’s banks teetered, did just that.
20世纪20年代的均衡状态艰难地维持着，偶尔的进步和合作的曙光对克服凯恩斯从一开始就认识到的大问题——脆弱的财政以及隐藏在表面之下的政治焦虑——作用甚微。一个强大的推力将会使均衡瓦解，而1931年的全球金融危机恰好起了这个作用，这场危机由于法国在奥地利和德国的银行摇摇欲坠时寻求政治优势而恶化。
As Keynes noted at the time, “The shattering German crisis of 1931, which took the world more by surprise than it should, was in essence a banking crisis, though precipitated, no doubt, by political events and political fears.”
正如凯恩斯当时指出的那样，“令人痛苦不堪的1931年德国危机，本质上是一场银行业危机，但无疑是由政治事件和政治担忧引发的，这场危机给世界带来的惊诧出乎应有的程度。”
Those politics meant that the crisis was not contained. It spiraled out of control, sending the world economy tumbling into the depths of the Great Depression, and contributing directly to the rise of fascism in Germany and Japan.
这些政治方面的问题意味着危机没有得到控制。危机失控，把世界经济送进了大萧条的深渊，并直接导致了法西斯主义在德国和日本的兴起。
“Men will not always die quietly,” Keynes warned in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” and “in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself.” A generation later, the American diplomat George F. Kennan would argue that the foreign policy horrors of the 1930s could be traced to the “lost opportunities” of the 1920s. Keynes would surely have agreed.
凯恩斯在《〈凡尔赛和约〉的经济后果》一书中警告，“人们不总会毫不挣扎地死去”，而“他们在痛苦中可能颠覆机构的残余部分，并湮灭文明本身”。一代人后，美国外交家乔治·F·凯南(George F. Kennan)会提出理由说，20世纪30年代外交政策悲惨结局可以追溯到20世纪20年代“失去的机会”。凯恩斯肯定会同意这一点。