International History of the 20th Century and Beyond PDF

August March 1930 September 1930 March 1931 May 1931 September February 1929 1931 1932 Timeline Young Plan Heinrich Brüning Na...

August March 1930 September 1930 March 1931 May 1931 September February 1929 1931 1932 Timeline Young Plan Heinrich Brüning National Socialists Austro-German Austrian Credit- Britain abandons World becomes make large gains in customs union Anstalt crashes the gold Disarmament German German elections scheme revealed standard Conference chancellor opens CHApTER SEvEN CONTENTS Introduction 165 The dual crisis 166 The collapse of the Weimar Republic 169 Revolution and expansion 172 Diplomacy and The path to European deterrence 176 Isolation and co- war, 1930–39 existence 183 From Munich to European war 187 Conclusion 194 Recommended reading 196 z Introduction The coming of the Second World War in Europe is the classic morality tale of international politics. The dramatis personae are more than flesh-and-blood personalities buffeted by impersonal forces; the principal characters stand for good and evil, light and darkness, with few shades of grey in between. As theatrical conventions require, the stirring plot, which pits peace-loving democracies against war-hungry dictatorships, imparts a timeless lesson – that ‘the malice of the wicked [is] reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous’. This quotation from Winston Churchill, the figure most responsible for establishing this version of the 1930s, comes from The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of his history of The Second World War. 165  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R May 1932 December January March 1933 July 1933 October 1933 April 1934 1932 1933 Timeline Franz von Papen Kurt von Hitler Franklin D. World Economic Germany leaves France rejects becomes Schleicher becomes Roosevelt Conference the League of further German becomes German German becomes US breaks down Nations disarmament talks chancellor chancellor chancellor President with Germany For Churchill, the prime mover in world affairs was human agency. The war occurred because statesmen made certain choices – either maliciously calculated or from naively optimistic motives. World war might have been prevented had alternative courses been taken. British and French leaders could have stopped Hitler had they armed more rapidly, stood firm in March 1936 over the League of Nations Rhineland or in September 1938 over Czechoslovakia, and forged a coalition with An international organization Soviet Russia to deter war or, if deterrence failed, to wage it successfully from the established in 1919 by the peace treaties that ended the start. What is compelling about Churchill’s account is that it appeals to our urge First World War. Its purpose to frame the past in the form of a clear-cut narrative that places human agency at was to promote international the centre of the story. peace through collective Yet interpreting the 1930s as a morality tale obscures more than it illuminates. security and to organize conferences on economic and Singling out statesmanship as the key determinant in world politics neglects the disarmament issues. It was way in which material and political circumstances restricted choices. Similarly, to formally dissolved in 1946. see force as the only true instrument in inter-state relations erases the tangible role played by norms, ideas and values in shaping international structures and national strategies. Giving due weight to these fundamentals of political life throws into Geneva disarmament talks sharp relief the moral dimension of what was at stake in the 1930s, without Article 8 of the Covenant of turning the chief personalities into cardboard caricatures of abstract qualities. the League of Nations With these remarks in mind, this chapter will dispute Churchill’s view that ‘there committed its signatories to the lowest level of armament was never a war more easy to stop’ than the Second World War. consistent with national security and the fulfilment of international obligations. It also called for a Preparatory z The dual crisis Commission to meet to draft a disarmament convention. The The Depression was the turning point. The collapse of world trade and finance Preparatory Commission did not meet until 1926, and the cannot be disentangled from the crisis in world politics. All the profound causes disarmament talks did not of the war are rooted in the length and severity of the slump: the rise of radical begin at Geneva until 1932. ideologies and exclusive nationalism, the formation of closed economic blocs, the Britain and France differed Japanese and Italian challenges to the League of Nations and the failure of the markedly over how to proceed, while the Weimar government Geneva disarmament talks (1932–34). The mass psychological impact of refused to accept anything unemployment, grinding poverty and unprecedented rates of financial, industrial short of equality under the and agricultural collapse defies quantification. The prevailing mood of pain and new convention. With Hitler’s fear certainly persuaded those living at the time that civilization was on the brink chancellorship, the chances for general disarmament of an epoch-defining change. The nineteenth-century order of free trade and evaporated. The Geneva liberal finance was breaking up into a few vast autarkic empires. Parliamentary disarmament talks were democracy had also had its day. The modernizing ideologies of the totalitarian formally suspended in June Right and Left would soon dominate the globe. 1934. 166  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R July 1934 September March 1935 April 1935 May 1935 May 1935 October 1935 1934 Abortive Nazi Soviet Union Hitler orders Stresa front Franco-Soviet Czech–Soviet Italy begins its coup in Vienna joins the League conscription in formed mutual assistance mutual assistance conquest of of Nations Germany treaty signed treaty signed Ethiopia Some have suggested that the Depression would not have had such an impact had the major creditor Powers, the United States, Britain and France, co-operated to defend the global economy. Sadly, even if officials had recognized the scale and duration of the Depression early enough, the mutual recriminations over war debts, reparations and trade, which had typified their relations after 1919, intensified during the Great Depression. In the 1920s the Europeans, reliant on dollar loans to feed the cycle of debt and reparations payments, resented the American practice of protecting their own producers while insisting that Europe open its markets to mass-produced American exports. Fears of American economic domination, particularly the domination of the growing markets for manufactured goods, were voiced in London and Paris. The Europeans also quarrelled among themselves. The French attributed their economic woes to the selfish practices of the Anglo-Saxons, and the British suspected that the French used monetary policy as a coercive instrument. At the outset of the slump, officials in Washington, London and Paris resorted first to tariff barriers, trade quotas, competitive currency devaluations and exchange controls to counter its effects. The rush to protectionism reduced the volume of world trade and confirmed the widespread protectionism belief that the true cause of one’s own economic misery was the beggar-my- The practice of regulating imports through high tariffs neighbour policies of the other Powers. with the purpose of shielding Since American trade, credit and foreign investments were fundamental to the domestic industries from functioning of the world economy, the American response to the New York stock foreign competition. market crash was of critical importance. Unfortunately, however, American markets were more important to Washington and New York than European ones. Indeed, for the American president, Herbert Hoover, economic nationalism was instinctive. Even before the economic crisis took shape, he had been hostile to the Young Plan of August 1929, which he regarded as yet another crooked scheme Young Plan to permit the Europeans to dodge war debts by linking them to reparations. Name given to a financial scheme, worked out in 1929 Washington raised tariff barriers in 1930 on almost all items entering American by a committee chaired by the markets just when the Europeans were most anxious to export to the United States American businessman Owen to earn dollars. Meanwhile, France introduced trade controls and preferential D. Young, to reduce German exchange agreements with Eastern European countries. Britain, the state most reparations and arrange fresh credit for Germany. It was reliant on world trade and capital flows, was forced to raise import duties in late informally agreed by German, 1931, and, to the abiding enmity of American officials, negotiated at Ottawa in French and British delegates the summer of 1932 a preferential system of trade within the British Empire. that reparations would be Though much less vulnerable than Britain to the slowdown in world trade, the scaled back further if the former European Allies secured French followed suit in their own empire. a reduction in debt repayments The collapse in economic confidence caused a run on the banks. Lenders called to the United States. in loans. Borrowers lacked the securities and cash to service debts. Banks failed. 167  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R January 1936 March 1936 May 1936 May 1936 July 1936 November November 1936 1936 Timeline Mussolini signals German troops Popular Front Italy annexes Spanish Civil War German– Mussolini to Hitler his march into the wins French Ethiopia begins Japanese Anti- announces disinterest in Rhineland elections (Abyssinia) Comintern Pact Rome–Berlin Austria Axis Credit evaporated. In Europe and America the banking crisis put pressure on golden standard symbol currency exchanges and drained gold reserves. The gold standard began to fall of monetary stability apart. This had psychological and political repercussions. The restoration in the 1920s of the pre-1914 system of currency exchange rates fixed in relation to gold had symbolized the end of wartime monetary expedients. It would act as a check on inflation and promote prosperity. Britain returned to gold in 1925. France did so three years later. In September 1931 the pound was forced off gold. Fifteen other nations eventually suspended the gold standard. The world monetary system each state developed its split apart into three main currency groups. The first consisted of countries, such own way to respond to the as Britain, that had abandoned gold. The second group was the gold bloc. France, crisis which had accumulated one of the world’s largest gold reserves, led this small yet determined group of gold adherents until the Banque de France abandoned gold in 1936. The third group was made up of countries such as Germany, which emulated the Soviet practice of imposing exchange controls and negotiating barter agreements. A banking crisis in Central Europe in the spring of 1931 showed just how politically divisive this breakdown process was. In May the largest commercial lender of the Danube region, the Austrian Credit-Anstalt, became insolvent. The Austrian central bank and British lenders with investments in the region stepped in to help, but additional loans were required. The French government agreed to underwrite commercial loans to Austria, but only if Vienna renounced plans for a customs union with Germany. Since the Germans had recently proposed just such a union, and talks along these lines between Berlin and Vienna had begun, the French demand was not unwarranted. Yet the British saw it as pointless French bullying, while the French believed that British financial inter- vention in Central Europe was intended to undercut French influence. The focus of this Franco-British quarrel moved to Berlin as a run on the Reichsmark devel- oped. In June, to relieve the pressure on German banks, Hoover proposed one year suspension a one-year moratorium on all inter-governmental war debt and reparation on war debts payments. The French, who had not been consulted in advance, interpreted Hoover’s standstill proposal as a strategy designed to rescue Anglo-American commercial interests in Germany at the expense of France’s claims for reparations. It took two agonizing weeks to secure a consensus. The Hoover moratorium was a breathing space. A solution to the debilitating problem of debts and reparations had to be found. Talks took place between the British chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, and the new centre-left premier in France, Édouard Herriot, at Lausanne in July 1932. A replacement for the Young Plan was agreed. Germany would make a final three billion Reichsmark 168  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R May 1937 November November December March 1938 May 1938 September 1937 1937 1937 1938 Neville Chamberlain Hossbach Italy joins Anti- Italy leaves the Germany invades May ‘weekend’ Czechoslovak becomes British Conference Comintern Pact League of Austria crisis crisis Prime Minister Nations (Anschluss) payment (it was never paid). The deal, however, turned on a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. Lausanne would not be ratified until the Europeans had concluded a ‘satisfactory settlement’ with their chief creditor, the United States. Details of the agreement leaked. Hoover was furious – but he was on his way out of the White House. In Europe, some officials speculated that the election of a Democrat to the presidency might transform American policy. Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, was as preoccupied and hamstrung by domestic concerns as anyone else, and shared some of the prejudices of his Republican predecessor. In April 1933 the dollar devalued against gold and a partial export upturn followed. This led to Nazis (or Nazi Party) competitive currency devaluations elsewhere. Plans for interim exchange The abbreviation for the National Socialist German stabilization were put forward at the World Economic Conference in June–July, Workers Party but Roosevelt denounced them. The last chance for a concerted response to the (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche crash passed when the conference broke up. Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)). It was founded in October 1918 failure to coordinate policy = increasement of tensions as the German Workers Party by the German politician z The collapse of the Weimar Republic Anton Drexler to oppose both capitalism and Marxism. It took on its more notorious In addition to dividing those Powers with a stake in the status quo, the economic title in February 1920. One crisis also affected the domestic politics of the revisionist states, especially year later Hitler became the Germany. The causal relationship between the slump and the Nazi regime was Nazi Party Führer (German: leader). complex. Some argue that Weimar Germany’s economy was in decline before the great crash, either as a structural consequence of the world war or as a result of the generous social policies of Weimar governments or both; the slump, according Weimar Republic The German parliamentary to this view, merely accelerated the descending spiral. We need not resolve the democracy that existed debate here to underscore a key point. The political emergency initiated by the between November 1918 and downturn only made the collapse of German democracy the most likely outcome January 1933. Attacked from of the events of 1929–33; the crisis did not make the advent of the Nazi dictatorship both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum, it never a certainty. won the loyalty of the majority To be sure, Germany was acutely vulnerable to the financial storms. Half of of Germans. the deposits in German banks were foreign, mostly American and British. In Europe, German industry was the worst hit by the fall in demand. Moreover, the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic and its founding centre-left Reichstag oalition Reichstag arose from a commitment to social reform and welfare. Modest unemployment The lower house of the German parliament during insurance enacted in 1927 proved to be a major liability as the slump deepened. the Wilhelmine and Weimar From 1929 to 1932 unemployment jumped from about 1.5 million to more than periods. 6 million. Lengthening unemployment lines and declining tax revenue added up to a budget deficit. Bitter debates in the Reichstag over how to spend the shrinking 169  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R September November December March 1939 March 1939 April 1939 April 1939 1938 1938 1938 Timeline Munich Kristallnacht: Franco-German German troops Anglo-French Italy seizes Anglo-French Agreement brutal attacks on declaration occupy rump guarantees to Albania guarantees to (Germany, Britain, Jews in Germany Czech state Poland Greece and France, Italy) and Austria Romania very progressive weimar costitution budget shook the confidence of foreign investors and the domestic electorate. All but included an art. 48 that allowed emergency across Europe this pattern of interlocking financial and political crises destabilized decrees for the president democracies. In Germany, where democracy was associated with defeat and to use as they wanted humiliation, voters disavowed parliamentary politics in huge numbers. For salvation, they looked to the anti-democratic parties of the Left and Right. On the Right a propaganda campaign waged against the Young Plan played on what Bolsheviks many already believed: that Allied reparations and other sinister forces (Bolsheviks, Originally in 1903 a faction Jews, etc.) were responsible for Germany’s suffering. led by Lenin within the In March 1930, unable to break the financial deadlock, Weimar’s last social Russian Social Democratic Party, over time the Bolsheviks democratic coalition government resigned. From then on, until Hitler suspended became a separate party and the Reichstag altogether in March 1933, German chancellors no longer governed led the October 1917 on the basis of a parliamentary majority, but instead enacted legislation through revolution in Russia. After this emergency powers of decree made available to them by the Reich president, Paul ‘Bolsheviks’ was used as a shorthand to refer to the von Hindenburg. The 83-year-old field marshal hoped that this erosion of Soviet government and democratic checks on executive authority would eventually lead to an authoritarian communists in general. regime drawn exclusively from the traditional ruling elites (army officers, the landed aristocracy and senior bureaucrats). While the anti-democratic motives of the Hindenburg circle are not in doubt, the personal aims of the first ‘presidential’ chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, remain a puzzle. Traditionally portrayed as leading the vanguard for the anti-democratic Right, some now suggest that Brüning had in fact hoped to preserve democracy with dictatorial expedients. Indeed, the only way his painful programme of tax hikes and budget cuts could be executed was through decrees. These measures had unmistakable internal and external purposes. First, austerity would demonstrate that Germany could no longer pay reparations (success on this front arrived with the Lausanne agreement). Second, Brüning believed that a balanced budget would ward off inflation until self-correcting social consequences market forces restored German economic growth. The unintended consequence of Brüning’s strategy was that his use of presidential powers accustomed voters to the consolidation of power in the hands of a few, while the severe hardship of his austerity measures converted many to radical causes. In September 1930 the National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazis – broke through to become the second largest Reichstag party with 107 seats; the communists won 77 seats. Subsequently, the Social Democrats, with 143 seats, provided Brüning’s anti-socialist cabinet with passive support to prevent the Nazis from gaining a toehold in government. Nonetheless, Brüning found it impossible to govern Germany in the midst of the crisis without, at the same time, antagonizing President Hindenburg. Ignoring the indispensable role that Brüning had played in the presidential election in 170  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R May 1939 August 1939 August 1939 September September 1939 1939 Molotov becomes French and Nazi–Soviet Pact Germany attacks Britain and Soviet foreign British military Poland France declare minister missions in war on Germany Moscow April 1932 when Hindenburg had seen off a challenge from Hitler, the president lost confidence in the chancellor. Hindenburg disliked Brüning’s flirtation with the socialists, and was outraged when he had the audacity to propose that landless peasants be settled on insolvent aristocratic estates. Accordingly, in May 1932, at the suggestion of the minister of defence, General Kurt von Schleicher, Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen chancellor. The rise of this shallow mediocrity to high office was indicative of just how dangerous a game the conservative cabal around Hindenburg had begun to play. For General Schleicher, the redeeming attribute of the new German chancellor was his malleability. By controlling Papen, so Schleicher believed, he would control the German government. However, much to Schleicher’s dismay, once in office, Papen asserted his independence. To make matters worse, the ambitious and conniving Papen began to ingratiate himself with Hindenburg. While the president’s affection for Papen grew, in the country and the Reichstag the chancellor’s reputation plummeted. Reluctantly, in early December 1932, Hindenburg replaced Papen with Schleicher. It is worth dwelling on the intrigue that followed Papen’s downfall because, as Henry A. Turner argues, this was a moment ‘when the fate of a great nation was highest structure of the german state contingent upon the actions of a handful of individuals’. The chief instigator entangled with extremist regime like nazi was Papen. Allying himself with Hitler, Papen hatched a plot to return to office and to wreak revenge on his one-time sponsor, General Schleicher. Months earlier, both Schleicher and Papen had concluded that no conservative-dominated regime could be established without mass public support. Both men had made secret contacts with Hitler in order to harness his growing radical movement to achieve their own conservative political ends. In fact, to clear the way for a deal with the Nazis, one of Papen’s first acts as chancellor was to lift Brüning’s ban on Hitler’s brown-shirted street thugs, the storm troopers. However, these negotiations always failed for the same reason: Hitler wished to be a ‘presidential’ chancellor, with full emergency powers, but Hindenburg, who distrusted the rabble-rousing former corporal, was only ever willing to appoint Hitler as a ‘parliamentary’ one. Some top-ranking Nazis criticized Hitler for refusing to take power in stages by entering into a political alliance with the conservatives. Hitler held out for all or nothing. He was fighting elections to destroy democracy, not to form a cabinet based on a right-wing coalition in the Reichstag. In January 1933 Papen was ready to offer Hitler what he demanded. The two men agreed to form a new Hitler–Papen cabinet (Papen acting as deputy chancellor). Hitler had a sizeable presence in the Reichstag; Papen had the ear of the Reich president. Meanwhile, Schleicher, who never had any distinctive policies to offer, was embattled on all fronts. He had no firm base of support in the 171  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R Reichstag and soon faced a vote of no-confidence. To remain in office, he needed Hindenburg, but the doddering field marshal shunned him. Not only had Papen turned Hindenburg against Schleicher, but the president now believed that Schleicher was planning a coup. Military government was a real possibility. Schleicher commanded loyal troops. Yet he backed away from using force to stay in power and resigned on 28 January. The next day Papen deceived Hindenburg. He persuaded the president that the new Hitler–Papen cabinet would be supported by a majority right-wing alliance, and that Hitler would govern through the Reichstag; in reality, no such coalition had been formed. On 30 January, once Hitler had been sworn in, the promised Reichstag coalition failed to materialize and Hindenburg had little choice but to offer the new chancellor use of his emergency powers. It was ultimately the woeful lack of judgement of Papen, Hindenburg and Schleicher that created Hitler’s opportunity to seize power and to consolidate Nazi rule afterwards. By no means was this the only potential outcome of the first 30 days of 1933. Had Hitler been denied the chancellorship, his all-or-nothing quest for power might have backfired. His popularity among German voters was already on the decline. As frustration within the Nazi movement grew, the party might have fragmented. H. A. Turner argues that the most plausible alternative to the Hitler chancellorship was a military dictatorship under General Schleicher. This was what Hitler feared most. After all, the small but disciplined German army would have had little trouble controlling the streets. Hindenburg would have had to acquiesce. The prospective opposition to military dictatorship was too divided to mount a challenge. Furthermore, from 1933 onwards, General Schleicher’s military dictatorship would have benefited from the same economic fortunes and easy foreign policy victories that the Nazis in fact benefited from. Certainly Germany would have remained a revisionist state. Schleicher would have ordered early large-scale military expansion. Such plans were under way under Brüning and, in December 1932, to salvage the world disarmament talks, the Western Powers had conceded to Germany the principle of equality of rights in armaments. Unlike Stresemann, who, as we saw in Chapter 2, sought to rebuild German power through diplomacy, Schleicher would have put force before diplomacy in the revision of the hated territorial settlement of 1919. Even so, Germany’s top-ranking army officers were men of prudence. In all likelihood they would have fought rapid, localized conflicts against minor states such as Poland, but not risked another world war. The restoration of Germany to its place as a Great Powers European Great Power was their long-range ambition. None of this of course Traditionally those states happened. Instead, a few individuals, who had failed to appreciate the cunning that were held capable of shared responsibility for the and barbarity of the Nazi leader, betrayed everything that was civilized and management of the humane in German life by turning over the state to Adolf Hitler. international order by virtue of their military and economic influence. z Revolution and expansion The German ruling elites were not the last people to misjudge Hitler and his ideology. Many foreigners saw Nazism as just a more vulgar and brutal form of 172  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R Prussian militarism. The National Socialists, with their goose-stepping para- military units, ubiquitous swastika banners and ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes, had much in common with other mass movements of the Left and Right. The Nazi message resonated with the anti-communism, anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism sweeping across Europe. In Germany, conservatives took comfort in Hitler’s talk of national revival and anti-Bolshevism; radicals looked forward to the implementation of the socialism in National Socialism. Hitler played on public anxieties and used Mein Kampf violence to secure Nazi rule. Political opponents were locked up and all other (German: My Struggle) A semi-autobiographical book political parties were disbanded. Labour unions, the professions, churches and dictated by Adolf Hitler to his other public associations were ‘co-ordinated’ with Nazi practices. A parallel party chauffeur and his personal structure was set up alongside that of the state, and, after Hindenburg’s death on secretary, Rudolf Hess, while 2 August 1934, Hitler assumed the offices of both chancellor and president. he was serving a prison sentence for his part in the Outside observers disapproved of Nazi criminality, but for diplomatic officials the failed Munich beer hall putsch real question was Hitler’s foreign policy. From his campaign speeches and his of 9 November 1923. It was book, Mein Kampf, there was no question that the new German chancellor published in 1925–26 in two would pursue revisionism with at least as much determination as his predecessors. volumes. Sales did not reach the hundreds of thousands Hitler had something much more radical in mind. Before Germany was armed, until Hitler took power in though, he was careful not to provoke the European Powers. When he took 1933. It is a myth that the Germany out of the League of Nations and disarmament talks in October 1933, book was unread or ignored by he did so while proclaiming his love of peace. To maintain the pretence of policy foreign statesmen. It contained no detailed timetable for continuity, he retained until 1938 the foreign and defence ministers appointed by aggression; instead, Mein President Hindenburg. Yet he despised the traditional ruling elites and their obses- Kampf is a rambling sion with shifting frontiers and perpetual diplomacy. As a leader attuned to the exploration of Hitler’s basic new age of mass politics, he was determined to obliterate the old order. Even so, political and racial views. when Hitler assumed office, there was little in his past to suggest that he had the experience or talent to last one year as chancellor. After leaving school in 1907, this social Darwinism A nineteenth-century theory, resentful son of a minor official employed by the Habsburg civil service eked out inspired by Charles Darwin’s a dismal living as a landscape artist in Vienna. In the cosmopolitan capital of the theory of evolution, which Austro-Hungarian Empire Hitler absorbed the social Darwinism, radical nation- argued that the history of alism and anti-Semitism that were later fundamental to Nazism. The defining human society should be seen as ‘the survival of the fittest’. experience in the young Hitler’s life was the trench. He thrived on what he and Social Darwinism was the many others held to be combat’s purifying qualities. The Kaiser’s army awarded backbone of various theories of him an Iron Cross for bravery. After recovering from the shock of Germany’s racial and especially ‘white’ defeat and blindness induced by poison gas, Hitler was recruited by the post-war supremacy. German army as a political agitator. The soapbox demagogue then became an early member of a small nationalist German Workers Party. In November 1923 he anti-Semitism earned national notoriety as the leader of the failed beer-hall putsch in Munich. A word which appeared in Sadly, Hitler’s career did not end in obscurity. Instead, a decade later, he began Europe around 1860. With it, the attack on Jews was based to convert his vision into reality. Two concepts were fundamental to his world- no longer on grounds of creed view. One was race, the other space. Human history, according to Hitler, was a but on those of race. Its struggle between races. Superior races either flourished or perished. To grow, they manifestations include had to preserve their biological purity and conquer ever more living space pogroms in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and the (Lebensraum). Destiny had ordained him as the saviour of the Germanic race from systematic murder of an the folly of its aristocratic leaders. He intended to erase the disastrous 1919 estimated six million Jews by settlement and to wage pitiless war against the most dangerous racial enemy, Nazi Germany between 1939 the Jews. In the eyes of Nazis, the Jews were a parasitic race that plotted to enslave and 1945. 173  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R some races with Bolshevism, such as the Slavs, and to destroy others, especially internal and external goals interconne cted the Germanic (or Aryan) master race. Racism was commonplace in this era of European imperialism, but Nazism constituted a distinctly dogmatic and murderous form of state racism. Hitler did not distinguish between internal and external racial policy. To expand abroad, Germany needed a pure and vigorous see Chapter 2 racial core at home. The possibility of another ‘stab in the back’ by internal enemies had to be removed. Race laws to isolate Jews, Gypsies and other ‘alien’ peoples were brutally enforced, while social measures were introduced to promote the birth rate of ‘healthy’ Germans and to sterilize, abort and later murder those who were deemed to be racially inferior or defective. Hitler’s race revolution inside Germany, however, could not be consummated without a policy of ferocious and ceaseless expansion abroad. War would not only provide the Lebensraum essential for Germany’s growth, but it would also permit the Nazis to sweep away the last remnants of the old conservative order. Germany’s initial military weakness dictated that Hitler’s programme had to 1 unfold in roughly defined stages. The first stage was Germany’s return as a Great Power through large-scale rearmament and territorial expansion in Central and 2 Eastern Europe. Stage two was the conquest of European Russia and the 3 consolidation and ruthless economic exploitation of Lebensraum in the east. The final stage – one that Hitler was unsure he would live to see – would be the final battle for global supremacy against the United States. Achieving this long-term autarky goal called for arms, autarky and allies. In Mein Kampf   Hitler had criticized the A policy that aims at achieving leaders of imperial Germany for gratuitously provoking Britain before 1914 with national economic self- sufficiency. It is commonly a naval armaments race. To secure a free hand on the European continent, Hitler associated with the economic hoped to strike a bargain on naval strength and spheres of influence with the programmes espoused by British, and form a close alliance with Italy, thereby isolating Germany’s arch- Germany, Italy and Japan in enemy, France. The precondition to world domination was, of course, military the 1930s and 1940s. supremacy. As Hitler well knew, the First World War had taught military theorists everywhere that war preparations did not entail simply the build-up of large standing forces to fight the first battles (arms in breadth), but also the acquisition of huge arms industries and self-sufficiency in raw materials such as oil, rubber and iron ore to feed the voracious appetite of protracted modern war (arms in depth). From the very start of his chancellorship Hitler aimed to build arms in depth by turning over the whole German economy to military preparations. At first, the Depression provided enough slack in the German economy to gain a swift head-start on rearmament, but when the scale of rearmament began to strain Germany’s finances, Hitler rebuffed calls from the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, to slow the pace and return Germany to the world economy through trade. Instead, Hitler raised the targets for arms growth and autarky. In September 1936, the Führer appointed Field Marshal Göring to head the Four Year Plan to accelerate the drive for a total war economy. Nonetheless, it would take until the mid-1940s for Germany to be ready to fight and win the wars of ‘great proportions’ that Hitler desired. Relentless German aggression was one of the principal causes of the Second World War. Yet Hitler was not alone in his wish to overturn the status quo. Benito Mussolini dreamed of revolution too. The once-committed socialist broke with the Italian Left over its objection to Italy’s entry into the European war in 1915. 174  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R He fought, was wounded and then returned to civilian life as editor of a right- similarities - vs democratic regimes wing newspaper agitating for Italy to be rewarded for its part in the Allied victory. said to embody population's will - raised during crisis By 1921 he emerged as leader (Duce) of the Italian Fascist movement. A year later, - defense vs communism in the midst of near civil war, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini differences - racism different importance prime minister. Although these events were later mythologized as the ‘March on - mussolini never able to achieve same Rome’, Mussolini’s premiership was in fact the product of an alliance between level as dominance as hitler Italy’s new radical Right and traditional conservatism against the bogey of communism. In the 1920s, while he built up the power and prestige of his regime internally, Mussolini played the responsible statesman in Europe, a posture that also stemmed from Italian weakness as well as the limited scope for mischief- making in the era of Locarno. In the mid-1930s Mussolini appeared to change course. In 1935 Italy embarked on a colonial war in Africa and a year later large-scale intervention in the Spanish Spanish Civil War Civil War. This opportunistic turnabout – not to mention Italy’s dismal wartime Began on 18 July 1936 as an attempted right-wing military performance – has led some to dismiss Fascism as an empty propaganda trick and coup led by General Francisco Mussolini as the archetypal papier-mâché Mephistophelean. However, the Fascist Franco. The coup was Duce was as ruthless and determined as the Nazi Führer. Nazism and Fascism were launched with elite troops both propelled by a distinctive revolutionary dynamic: Hitler planned to realize from Spanish Morocco to topple the recently elected his race revolution through war and conquest; Mussolini also valued foreign expan- socialist and anti-clerical sion as the means to Italy’s total ‘fascistization’. The policies of the two regimes were Popular Front government. shaped by similar national experiences. As recently unified states, Italy and Franco’s Nationalists failed to Germany behaved like restless ‘latecomers’ in this era of intense Great Power rivalry take Madrid, and the Republican government of and overseas imperialism. Their national aspirations had been frustrated at the President Azana remained in Paris Peace Conference. As mass movements arising in times of social unrest, eco- control of much of Spain. nomic dislocation and political deadlock, both dictatorships claimed to be the only Both sides appealed for outside legitimate ‘democratic’ expressions of the national will. help to achieve victory. As a result, Spain became Europe’s Yet there were differences. The racism and anti-Semitism, so fundamental to ideological battlefield. Nazi Nazism, were more peripheral to Fascism (many Italians saw the Duce’s race laws Germany and Fascist Italy of 1938 as a distasteful northern import). Both regimes had been formed with the intervened on the side of the connivance of the conservative ruling elites, but Mussolini was never able to shake Nationalists, while the Soviet Union sent aid to the them off and attain the iron grip that Hitler had on the German state and its people. Republicans. Britain and Italy’s monarchy, the Catholic Church and the armed forces were centres of author- France tried to contain the ity and power that the Duce could not ignore. Another difference lay in their war. The fighting dragged on ultimate goals: Hitler dreamed of total wars of racial expansion culminating in for three terrible years, during which three-quarters of a Germany’s mastery of the globe; Mussolini intended to found a new Roman Empire million people perished. The by seizing the Mediterranean and its ocean outlets as Italy’s rightful spazio vitale. civil war ended in April 1939. ‘Either war,’ he said, ‘or let’s end this commedia of [claiming to be] a Great Power.’ General Franco’s dictatorship The obstacles to a Fascist empire were the two leading status quo Powers, Britain lasted until he died in 1975. and France. Germany, their most formidable potential foe, was Mussolini’s most important potential ally. Contacts between the Nazis and Rome stretched back to the Munich putsch, but Mussolini (at first anyway) and many of his advisers (long after) were wary. Undoubtedly, a resurgent Germany would create scope for a more aggressive policy, but the new Reich might also absorb Austria – one of the buffers between the two states and a focus for Italian influence in South-East Europe – and, worse, begin to demand from Italy territory taken from Austria (South Tyrol). Italian policy reflected this uncertainty. In 1932–33 the Fascist regime proposed a new Four-Power Treaty between the Locarno Powers to arbitrate European 175  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R Anschluss affairs. London and Paris humoured what they saw as an Italian conceit. Apart The political union of from side-lining the League of Nations, the aim behind this démarche was to Germany and Austria. Anschluss was specifically contain Germany for a time in a manner beneficial to Italian ambitions. Hitler, prohibited under the Versailles who had no interest in multilateral security systems, signed the treaty and then Treaty, but was carried out by ignored it. On 24 July 1934 the Austrian Nazis attempted a coup and murdered Hitler in March 1938 without the quasi-fascist chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Italian troops mobilized to deter any resistance from the victors of the First World War. an Anschluss. Hitler, who denied foreknowledge of the coup, disavowed the Austrian Nazis. Italo-German relations cooled, but not for long. The two dictators were on converging ideological paths. The outbreak of the Abyssinian War on Abyssinian War 3 October 1935 marked the junction point. Under the impression that he had On 3 October 1935, the been given a green light in April by the Western Powers for a war in Africa as a brutal conquest of Abyssinia by Italian troops launched reward for Italy’s condemnation of German unilateral rearmament, Mussolini was from neighbouring Italian incensed by the opposition of France and Britain and the imposition of limited Eritrea began. It arose from League of Nations economic sanctions against Italy. The Führer, who exploited Mussolini’s desire to exercise the Abyssinian conflict to remilitarize the Rhineland on 7 March 1936, offered the martial prowess of his Fascist regime and thereby the Italians benevolent neutrality and some material support. The war ended in further his revolution. The war May 1936. Mussolini’s defiance of the Western Powers and the League had was popular inside Italy as impressed Hitler. In January 1936 the Duce signalled his intentions by dropping revenge for Italy’s defeat at objections to Austria becoming a German satellite. Adowa in 1896. Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the In November 1936 Mussolini announced the Rome–Berlin Axis. It was League of Nations, but his followed a year later by Italy’s accession to the German–Japanese Anti-Comintern small kingdom was abandoned Pact. Long after the Axis was announced, British and French statesmen sought to to its fate. The war ended on 5 woo Mussolini away from Hitler. The ideological bond could not be broken. May 1936. Officials in Paris and London pointed to Italian support for General Franco’s Axis rebellion in Spain as the stumbling-block. The reality was that the Duce revelled A term coined originally by in the ‘dynamism’ of his wars. Ironically, the Abyssinian and Spanish adventures italy became Mussolini in November 1936 drained Italy of its war-making potential. The Italian defence budget trebled, but dependent to describe the relationship the money was spent on current operations and wasteful projects such as from germany between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The German–Italian maintaining large numbers of ill-equipped infantry instead of the in-depth Axis was reinforced by the preparations essential for modern warfare. In some ways, the emphasis on quantity so-called Pact of Steel signed over quality and staying power accorded well with Fascist bluster and bullying. by Rome and Berlin in May After all, Italy was treated as a player because it possessed a big navy, a large 1939. More broadly speaking, the term is often used (as in bomber force and an army of ‘eight million bayonets’. However, the Italian Chapter 8 of this book) to peninsula was vulnerable to Anglo-French naval blockade and bombardment. In refer to the relationship a European war, Rome would have to rely on its preponderant northern ally for between Germany, Italy and coal to fuel Italian war industries and for military aid. Mussolini’s resolve to strike Japan. These three Powers were formally linked by the a blow against the status quo thus destined Italy to fall under the shadow of the German–Japanese Anti- Third Reich. This was a fate he embraced. As his son-in-law and foreign minister, Comintern Pact of November Count Ciano, put it, the Axis was ‘based above all upon the identity of political 1936, which Italy signed one regimes, which determines a common destiny’. year later, and the Tripartite Pact of September 1940. z Diplomacy and deterrence Once the Nazi challenge gained strength, a major war became the only way by which it could be stopped. The starting date of that war would depend on the 176  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R moment when the status quo Powers resisted Hitler with force. From 1933 to 1938 Paris and London accommodated the Nazis. On 21 October 1933 Germany walked out of the League of Nations. In March 1935 Hitler ordered compulsory military service in Germany and announced the existence of the Luftwaffe (German air force). In reaction to these unilateral violations of the Versailles Versailles Treaty Treaty, Britain, France and Italy consulted and issued a protest in April. This The treaty that ended the Allied state of hostilities with deceptive display of unity between France and the Locarno guarantors was short Germany in 1919. It included lived. In June Britain signed a bilateral naval agreement with Germany. In October German territorial losses, the Italians, who had only just signed up to military agreements that set out how disarmament, a so-called war they would assist France in a war against Germany, attacked Abyssinia. In March guilt clause and a demand that reparations be paid to the 1936, while Europe was gripped by the crisis in the Mediterranean, German victors. troops marched into the Rhineland. In response, Britain stepped forward to propose a new round of diplomacy, France stood still and Belgium withdrew into neutrality. The emerging security framework of the 1920s was now in ruins. The sense that Europe was on the verge of a great calamity was heightened after July 1936 with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Italy and Germany sent men and matériel to assist Franco’s nationalists, while the Soviet Union supplied the same to the left-wing Republican government. As Europe’s ideological fissure widened, France and Britain negotiated an international agreement on non- intervention in Spain that in practice permitted German and Italian intervention to continue. Orthodox historians have explained this phase of retreat as the product of short- sighted and spineless leadership. Granted, French and British politicians never fully grasped the depth of Hitler’s malevolence. However, hindsight combined with a half-century of scholarly inquiry into the nature of Nazism makes it difficult for us to appreciate the uncertainty about Germany’s intentions that contemporaries had to deal with. In the cabinet rooms, foreign and defence ministries and intelligence departments of France and Britain, pessimists argued that the militaristic Germans sought to dominate Europe, for much the same reason as they did before 1914, while optimists believed that Hitler or those who purportedly had influence over him could be constructively conciliated. Pointing to the statements of the former as evidence of foresight and those of the latter as proof of inanity does injustice to the realities of statecraft. These debates – recurring again and again in the twentieth century – sprang from the inescapable dilemma of coping with what was an inherently ambiguous and menacing situation. Uncertainty alone does not explain the initial responses of Britain and France to the expansion of German power. There were other inhibiting factors. Not least was an all-pervasive sense of revulsion at the cost of the last war. Most French and British politicians had either served in the trenches or lost someone dear. ‘Never again’ was not just a slogan for peace movements and pacifists; it was the moral purpose behind the foundation of the League of Nations, the Kellogg–Briand Pact and world disarmament. The identification of the status quo Powers with liberal internationalism should not be dismissed as starry-eyed idealism. Values expressed in the form of rules or norms of conduct are potential power. As the chief beneficiaries of post-1919 order, it was in the interest of Paris and London to outlaw force and promote institutions for the pacific settlement of disputes. As 177  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R LATVIA S W EDEN DENMARK Baltic Sea Memel LITHUANIA North Sea Danzig Königsberg Vilna EAST PRUSSIA is tu Warsaw V Poznan la Berlin NETHERLANDS Rhine GERMANY Oder POLAND USSR Cologne Lublin BELGIUM Sudetenland LUX. Frankfurt Prague FRANCE Teschen Saar CZECHOSLOVAKIA German expansion German Protectorate Saar regained, 1935 Munich Vienna Bratislava Remilitarized Rhineland, 1936 Dan Austria, March 1938 ube Budapest AUSTRIA Sudetenland, September 1938 Czech state, March 1939 SWITZERLAND HUNGARY R OMANI A Memel, March 1939 Poland, September 1939 0 miles 150 Ceded to Hungary, September 1938 ITALY YUGOSLAVIA Venice Ceded to Hungary, March 1939 0 km 150 Map 7.1  German expansion, 1935–39 Source: After Margaret Lamb and Nicholas Tarling, From Versailles to Pearl Harbor: The Origins of the Second World War in Europe and Asia (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2001) one Japanese official complained, ‘The Western Powers had taught the Japanese western european powers were the game of poker... but after acquiring most of the chips, they pronounced the aware of the impossibility game immoral and took up contract bridge.’ This barb only captures the self- to create a coehsive front interested dimension of Western foreign policy. British, French and American statesmen believed that ‘contract bridge’ was not only good for them, but also good for the rest of the world. The problem was persuading everyone to play by the new rules. This could only be done in the first instance through diplomacy. After all, to uphold the status quo, the Western Powers could not adopt the violent methods of the revisionists without undermining the norms of the liberal state system that they had created. Of the status quo Powers, France had the least room for manoeuvre. In matériel terms, Frenchmen knew that they could not equal Germany’s ultimate strength. The old adversary was not only more densely populated but also more industrial- ized. It took a coalition of Great Powers to win in 1918. To enforce the Versailles Treaty, French soldiers had marched in 1923, but to the enormous cost of the French economy and its relations with the British and the Americans. ‘A country’s defence resides not only in its soldiers and its cannons,’ Premier Herriot once 178  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R observed, ‘but also in the excellence of its legal position.’ France had to have france's hope for Italian and justice on its side in order to construct a coalition powerful enough to face a British support was misplaced resurgent Germany. True, France had security treaties with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. But these small states, bitterly divided among themselves, did not add up to an ‘Eastern bloc’. Moreover, French influence in Eastern Europe plummeted after Germany occupied the Rhineland without a shot being fired. What about Britain and Italy, the guarantors of the Treaty of Locarno? For much of the period, the British did not see themselves as France’s ally, but instead as cool-headed mediators caught between the hotheads in Paris and the bullies in Berlin. As for Italy, Pierre Laval, the French premier, concluded an accord in early 1935 with Mussolini which stipulated that the two states should consult if Germany disturbed the peace. The Duce, however, saw the deal as a appeasement go-ahead for his Abyssinian conquest. The French had no choice but to alienate A foreign policy designed to Italy by siding with Britain and the League of Nations. remove the sources of conflict What about the Russians? In May 1935 France did conclude a mutual assistance in international affairs through negotiation. Since the treaty with the Soviet Union as well as a parallel agreement with Czechoslovakia. outbreak of the Second World The negotiations for these treaties (as well as those with Italy) had begun a year War, the word has taken on before under Louis Barthou, the foreign minister of the centre-right government the pejorative meaning of the of ‘National Union’. Some argue that Barthou’s diplomacy was a transitory phase spineless and fruitless pursuit of peace through concessions of ‘realism’ in French policy-making – an effort to surround Germany with to aggressors. In the 1930s, powerful allies, including the Soviets. Tragically, so runs this interpretation, most British and French Barthou was assassinated in October 1934 and his realpolitik was abandoned in officials saw appeasement as a favour of a craven policy of ‘appeasement’. In fact Barthou’s diplomacy did not twin-track policy designed to remove the causes of conflict mark such a radical break in continuity. Just like his friend Briand before him and with Germany and Italy, while those who followed him, Barthou hoped to build a multilateral and interlocking at the same time allowing for framework of mutual security guarantees in Eastern and Western Europe similar the build-up of sufficient to those signed in 1925 at Locarno. To describe this strategy another way, Barthou military and financial power to bargain with the dictators from was trying to persuade Germany to join in its own containment. Security talks a position of strength. with Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Italy were designed to convince Berlin that Franco-German détente was the only way to alter the peace settlement. As détente we know, Hitler responded to this security-building effort by occupying the A term meaning the reduction of tensions between states. It is Rhineland and thereafter ignoring French overtures. The door on the Locarno era often used to refer to the was slammed shut. superpower diplomacy that Domestic politics in France complicated its foreign policy. During the slump took place between the the French witnessed a 30 per cent fall in national income and growing budget inauguration of Richard Nixon as the American president in deficits, which polarized the electorate between the Right and the Left. Alignment 1969 and the Senate’s refusal with Fascist Italy was anathema to the Left, while a rapprochement with Soviet to ratify SALT II in 1980. Russia infuriated the Right. Governments also changed frequently. Between 1933 and 1940 France was led by 34 separate administrations and had seven different foreign ministers. In April 1936 the election of a centre-left coalition known as Popular Front The Comintern policy the Popular Front exacerbated the ideological rift. Industrial unrest and social announced in 1935 of turmoil erupted. The presence of the French Communist Party in the coalition encouraging communist disgusted the right-wing group. Investors became jittery. The flight of capital from parties to form coalitions with the Paris financial markets drove down the value of the franc. Even the unwaver- other socialist and non- socialist parties in order to ing commitment of the Popular Front premier, Léon Blum, a dedicated social provide a common front reformer and disarmer, to a huge programme of rearmament in 1936 did not against fascism. social unrest, general fear among investors that preferred to stand back lead to economic downturn 179  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R inspire national unity. Once Franco started his rebellion in Spain, the perception of imminent civil war in France (though greatly exaggerated) became widespread. The image of a left-wing government embattled by right-wing generals was just a little too close to home. Blum’s cabinet considered assisting the Spanish Republic, but feared that this might spark civil war in France as well as a general conflict in Europe. The Popular Front therefore championed non-intervention and worked with the British to put it into effect. After the setbacks of 1935–36, what France needed most was time to rearm and a firm embrace from the other powerful parliamentary democracy in Europe, Britain. Unfortunately for the French, the last thing the British were prepared to do was offer security guarantees. Once again, painful memories of the First World War and a long-standing aversion to entangling alliances played an important part here. A deep hostility towards and misunderstanding of the French were equally important. In the early 1930s many British officials believed that German recalcitrance and even the advent of Nazism were attributable to French obstinacy. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s prime minister from 1931 to 1935, considered ‘the diplomacy of France... an ever active influence for evil in Europe’. The ideological conflict in France that followed the election of the Popular Front only served to strengthen the deeply held conviction that it was an unreliable ally. Britain’s strategic predicament also spoke in favour of isolation from Europe. Britain was a global Power. Unlike the French, the British could not focus solely on the Nazi menace. Japan threatened Britain’s eastern possessions and commercial interests in China, while Italy, with its battle-fleet concentrated in the Mediterranean and a large army positioned in Libya, endangered Egypt and the Suez Canal. These commitments exceeded Britain’s defence resources. The rise of the triple threat did not mean that the eyes of British strategists turned away from the German threat. A top-level committee of civilian and military officials reviewing Britain’s defences in 1933–34 identified Germany as Britain’s ‘ultimate potential enemy’. Some influential voices advocated a retreat into reshape the political landscape of the continet for british isolation, but most recognized that Britain could not abandon Europe. Germany security could not be allowed to crush France, occupy the Low Countries and position air and sea forces close to Britain. However, another great war to prevent Germany’s domination of continental Europe would initiate another accelerated period of decline in Britain’s standing as a global financial and trading nation to the benefit of the United States. Peace in Europe was therefore Britain’s ultimate national interest. British diplomats accordingly drew up disarmament conventions and spoke of multilateral security accords for Eastern and Western Europe comparable collective security to those of the French. The formula for the pacification (or appeasement) of Europe The principle of maintaining was plain: Germany would offer France a security guarantee and, in exchange, peace between states by France would permit a relaxation of the Treaty of Versailles. mobilizing international opinion to condemn Britain’s domestic politics reinforced this diplomatic stance. The view that the aggression. It is commonly Versailles settlement had been untenable and indefensible was common among seen as one of the chief the political elite and opinion-makers. As in France, the man on the street regarded purposes of international the League of Nations and disarmament as the twin pillars of foreign policy. organizations such as the League of Nations and the In parliament, the Labour Party was the most vocal in support of the League, but United Nations. enthusiasm for Geneva diplomacy and collective security cut across Right–Left 180  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R boundaries. As a general election approached in the autumn of 1935, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the leader of a cross-party – but in the main Conservative – national government, knew that electoral victory and parliamentary backing for his government hung on one issue: ‘the question of peace and war and the future of the League of Nations’. While the initial preparations for rearmament were under way, Baldwin promised in an election speech that there would be ‘no great armaments’. His first foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, discovered the perils and pitfalls of reconciling a declaratory policy of adherence to the League of Nations and collective economic sanctions with a prudent one of war avoidance. In December 1935 newspapers reported that Hoare and the French premier, Laval, were prepared to defuse the crisis in East Africa by offering Mussolini a protectorate over Abyssinia. Public indignation forced Hoare to protectorates resign. He was replaced by the dashing Anthony Eden, the former minister for Territories administered by an imperial state without full League of Nations affairs, who was regarded by the British public as a League man. annexation taking place, and However, the search for an agreement with Germany – the policy that later where delegated powers took on the pejorative label ‘appeasement’ – was not the product of Britain’s typically remain in the hands material weakness or driven by public opinion. Politicians were sensible to take of a local ruler or rulers. Examples include French these factors into account, but appeasement as practised under Baldwin and his Morocco and the unfederated successor, Neville Chamberlain, was an interventionist policy designed to reshape states in Malaya. Europe to suit Britain’s security interests and to uphold its global empire. A prime example of this sort of thinking put into practice was the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement of June 1935. Hitler’s offer to limit the size of his navy to 35 per cent of the size of the Royal Navy was in fact an attempt to bribe Britain into giving him a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe. While ignoring any suggestion that Britain would turn away from Europe, the British Admiralty and Foreign Office exploited Hitler’s offer to advance their own strategic purposes. In terms of naval strength, the treaty would commit Germany to build a conventional battleship fleet instead of a much more dangerous one composed of small commerce raiders and cruiser submarines. In diplomatic terms, the naval accord would be integrated into the larger set of negotiations taking place between the five leading naval Powers – Britain, Japan, the United States, France and Italy – towards a new global naval armaments limitation treaty. Hitler thus failed to procure Britain’s disinterest in Europe with his naval appeasement. The British instead sought to solve Europe’s troubles through the negotiation of a comprehensive settlement. Similar to French proposals, this new security system would be based on interrelated Western and Eastern treaties of mutual guarantee modelled on Locarno, combined with Germany’s return to the League, as well as a general convention to restrict the use of bombing aircraft against civilians. The question was how to persuade the Germans to lock themselves into this multilateral framework. Most agreed that the answer was to redress German grievances arising from the 1919 settlement. Unfortunately, Hitler had an uncanny capacity to divine exactly the right moment to seize for himself the concession that the French and British were about to offer him in exchange for security talks. In this way, he frustrated British and French diplomacy first in March 1935, with his unilateral denunciation of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and once again, a year later, with the reoccupation of the 181  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R Rhineland. After March 1936 fresh efforts to extract from Hitler the basis for talks went unanswered. While the Spanish Civil War appeared to begin the slide into a general European conflict, some held out the prospect that colonial or economic concessions might induce Hitler to come to the bargaining table. However, indications that such offers might initiate progress originated not from the Führer, but from the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. In London, the misconception that reputed moderates such as Schacht had influence over Hitler sustained the mistaken view that a general agreement with the Third Reich could be negotiated, if only the right diplomatic approach was made. The emphasis in British and French policy on diplomacy did not exclude considerations of force. In 1936 Britain and France launched large-scale programmes of rearmament designed to compel Hitler to negotiate. As chancellor of the exchequer, Chamberlain favoured spending on the Royal Air Force over the British Army because he believed air power to be ‘the most formidable deterrent by addressing german concessions eu powers hoped to to war’. Britain’s planners aimed to build up by 1939 enough air and naval strength integrate nazi germany to deter Germany, but a balance had to be struck between acquiring the armaments but hitler no compromise and made appeasament ineffective to to defeat an initial German attack and husbanding the financial strength necessary secure long lasting peace to purchase overseas supplies and to raise capital abroad for a long war – what was marked by indecision and mistrust between countries termed the ‘fourth arm of defence’. The Maginot Line – a 200-mile system of some looked to US/USSR for salvation fortifications along the Franco-German frontier – was France’s declaration of other wanted to collaborate in europe but ideological division deterrence expressed in steel, barbed wire and concrete. The French also had a large body of trained men to mobilize in case of a sudden German attack, but cuts to defence spending in the early 1930s had left some serious gaps in their air and land armaments. These gaps could not be closed until the 1936 defence programmes paid off in 1939–40. Expectations of what would happen if deterrence failed help to explain the Western response to Germany. British and French strategists agreed that the ‘next war’ would be total, and would follow roughly the pattern of 1914–18. Indeed, the war was likely to begin with another German miscalculation. Hitler and his advisers might gamble that they could win a quick victory by ordering the Luftwaffe to deliver a devastating ‘knockout blow’ on Schlieffen Plan London, or perhaps a Schlieffen-like assault on France with massed bombers and The German pre-1914 plan fast tanks. Once this German ‘knockout blow’ had been repelled, so British and for a pre-emptive military French planners argued, the war would become another contest of endurance. As offensive against France, which would involve troops passing the First World War had shown, Germany did not have the raw materials and through neutral Belgium. It is resources to win such a contest. Thus, while London and Paris mobilized the named after the German army superior quantities of men and matériel available to them from their overseas chief of staff, General Alfred empires and from the rest of the world, Allied sea and air power would cut off the von Schlieffen. Reich from seaborne supplies and pummel its industrial heartland. Once the Allies had reached a crushing level of supremacy, the final offensives would begin. In sum, the premise of British and French deterrence strategy was to threaten Hitler with a long war, by convincing him that he could not win a short one. Since most agreed that another great war would extinguish European civilization, the decision to issue threats of force could not be taken lightly. Aversion to force thus arose from sensible strategic calculations and deep anxieties about a future apocalypse. Statesmen also saw that there was something more at stake in the arms race than relative military strength. The deterrence 182  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R strategies of the status quo Powers were shaped by their national identities, values and a dedication to liberal economies and free societies. As one British minister told his colleagues, Britain could not match the arms drives of the dictators ‘unless we turned ourselves into a different kind of nation’. The lure of doing so was real enough. Even the lifelong socialist Léon Blum once confessed that in ‘attempting to oppose fascism’s bid for power... one is too often tempted to follow in its footsteps’. Yet, as British and French statesmen well knew, the cost of emulating the totalitarians would have been to sacrifice everything their nations stood for. z Isolation and co-existence For salvation from the security crisis, some Europeans looked to either the United States or Russia. Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, for instance, hoped to enlist American support to deter aggression in Europe and the Pacific, while Pierre Cot, the French air force minister, dreamed of a formidable Franco-Soviet alliance based on air power to enforce the peace. However, most of their colleagues feared the cut-throat capitalism of the Americans and the insidious doctrine of the Russians in equal measure. From Locarno in 1925 to Munich in 1938, the preferred solution for those Europeans hoping to erect a new security structure always rested on four-power co-operation between Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Before 1940 there was no prospect that the United States would be willing to save Europe anyway. The slump reinforced the American desire for home-grown solutions to their problems. ‘Each nation’, American officials told the World Economic Conference, ‘must set its own house in order’. In one of his first speeches President Roosevelt announced that ‘our greatest primary task is to put people to work’. Most of his listeners believed that the rest of the world, above all the decadent and untrustworthy Europeans, could look after themselves. This sentiment ran against Roosevelt’s own inclinations. Previously, as an assistant secretary of the navy, he had served under Woodrow Wilson, and was imbued FDR know that america had a moral duty to guarantee collective security with his hero’s ideals. Roosevelt was certain that the distinct American values of across the globe, even in europe freedom, justice and enterprise could transform the globe, and that the Depression did not relieve Americans of their moral duty to make the world a better place. Yet Roosevelt had learned from Wilson’s mistakes. ‘It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead’, he reflected, ‘and to find no one there.’ During his first two terms, public opinion was the chief constraint on policy. Abhorrence of war was expressed through investigation and legislation. Through the Senate Inquiry into the Munitions Industry of 1934–36 (the Nye Committee), Americans tried to expose the sinister forces of militarization creeping into their economy. Through the three Neutrality Acts (1935–37) and the Johnson Act (1934), all of which restricted commerce with belligerents as well as the movement of American nationals through war zones, the United States hoped to isolate itself from any future great war. Roosevelt, who shared their hatred of war and its effects, could not ignore the isolationists. The success of the New Deal, his ambitious programme of public works, investment and reform designed to 183  T H E PAT H TO E U R O P E A N WA R combat unemployment, depended in Congress on the votes of progressive Democrats and Republicans. As it happened, these progressives were also among the most stau