Legacies of World War I of Britain,
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy,
Georges Clemenceau of France,
Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.) By the end of
World War I in late 1918, the world's social and geopolitical circumstances had fundamentally and irrevocably changed. The
Allies had been victorious, but many of Europe's economies and infrastructures had been devastated, including those of the victors. France, along with the other victors, was in a desperate situation regarding its economy, security and morale and understood that its position in 1918 was "artificial and transitory". Thus, French Prime Minister
Georges Clemenceau worked to gain French security via the Treaty of Versailles, and French security demands, such as reparations, coal payments, and a demilitarised Rhineland, took precedence at the
Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920,
Germany was made to accept liability for the harm done to the Allies during World War I, and the
War Guilt Clause was the basis for reparations to be paid to the Allies, especially France, by Germany. Roy H. Ginsberg argued, "France was greatly weakened and, in its weakness and fear of a resurgent Germany, sought to isolate and punish Germany... French revenge would come back to haunt France during the Nazi invasion and occupation twenty years later". The two main provisions of the French security agenda were
war reparations from Germany, to be paid in gold and coal, and a detached German
Rhineland. The German (Weimar Republic) government printed excess currency, which created inflation, and it borrowed money from the United States. Reparations from Germany were needed to stabilize the French economy. France also demanded for Germany to give France its coal supply from the
Ruhr to compensate for the destruction of French coal mines during the war. France also insisted on the
demilitarisation of the German Rhineland in the hope of hindering any possibility of a future German attack and giving France a physical security barrier between itself and Germany. The payment of reparations, and the principle of a demilitarized Rhineland, were largely viewed by the Germans as insulting and unreasonable. The resulting
Treaty of Versailles brought a formal end to the war but was judged by governments on all sides of the conflict. It was criticized as neither lenient enough to appease Germany nor harsh enough to prevent it from becoming a dominant continental power again. The German people largely viewed the treaty as placing the blame, or "war guilt", on Germany and
Austria-Hungary and as punishing them for their "responsibility", rather than working out an agreement that would assure long-term peace. The treaty imposed harsh
monetary reparations and requirements for demilitarization and
territorial dismemberment, caused mass ethnic resettlement and separated millions of ethnic Germans into neighboring countries. Already, during the First World War, inflation had become a serious problem for Germany. The
Weimar Republic then printed trillions of marks, much of which went to pay workers striking against French occupation in the Ruhr or to pay back (or otherwise reduce the burden of) domestic wartime debt without raising taxes, which caused
hyperinflation. Hyperinflation further served to discredit the Weimar government.
Adolf Hitler, a leader of the Nazi Party, attempted a coup d'état in 1923 in what became known as the
Beer Hall Putsch, and he intended to establish a
Greater Germanic Reich. Although he failed, Hitler gained recognition as a
national hero by the German population. During the war,
German colonies outside Europe had been annexed by the Allies, and Italy took the
southern half of
Tyrol after the armistice. The
war in the east had ended with the defeat and the collapse of the
Russian Empire, and German troops had
occupied large parts of
Eastern and
Central Europe with varying degrees of control and established various
client states such as a
kingdom of Poland and the
United Baltic Duchy. The
German Navy spent most of the war in port, only to be turned over to the Allies. It was scuttled by its own officers to avoid it from being surrendered. The lack of an obvious military defeat would become one of the pillars holding together the
Dolchstosslegende ("stab-in-the-back myth"), which gave the Nazis another propaganda tool. after World WarI (as of 1922) The demilitarised
Rhineland and the additional cutbacks on military also infuriated the Germans. Although France logically wanted the Rhineland to be a neutral zone, France had the power to make their desire happen, which merely exacerbated German resentment of the French. In addition, the Treaty of Versailles dissolved the German general staff, and possession of navy ships, aircraft, poison gas, tanks and heavy artillery was also made illegal. Austria also found the treaty unjust, which encouraged Hitler's popularity. US President
Woodrow Wilson said his
Fourteen Points would be a guideline for peace and would not penalize Germany. However Wilson could not convince the Allies to agree to adopt his Fourteen Points and the peace was deliberately harsh on the losers. Germans felt betrayed. The Italians were on the winning side but they too felt betrayed by the Allies who, despite promising them the Italian-inhabited lands of
Fiume and
Dalmatia in the
Treaty of London, ended up giving those lands to the newly-created
Yugoslavia instead. The Japanese also started to express resentment for how they were neglected during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles. The Japanese proposition to discuss the issue of racial equality was not put in the final draft because of many other Allies, and the Japanese participation in the war caused little reward for the country. The war's economic and psychological legacies persisted well into the
Interwar period.
Failure of the League of Nations The
League of Nations was an international peacekeeping organization founded in 1919 with the explicit goal of preventing future wars. The League's methods included
disarmament,
collective security, the settlement of disputes between countries by negotiations and diplomacy and the improvement of global welfare. The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift in thought from the preceding century. The old philosophy of "concert of nations", which grew out of the
Congress of Vienna (1815), saw Europe as a shifting map of alliances among
nation-states, which created a
balance of power that was maintained by strong armies and secret agreements. Under the new philosophy, the League would act as a government of governments, with the role of settling disputes between individual nations in an open and legalist forum. Despite Wilson's advocacy, the United States never joined the League of Nations. The League lacked an armed force of its own and so depended on member nations to enforce its resolutions, uphold economic sanctions that the League ordered. However, individual governments were very reluctant to do so. No military forces were involved in the 1920s when several notable small successes and some early failures happened. In the 1930s, there was only one use of military force, the peaceful
1935 Saar status referendum. The League proved incapable of preventing aggression by Italy against Ethiopia. The reliance upon unanimous decisions, the lack of an independent body of armed forces and the continued self-interest of its leading members meant that historians agree that failure was inevitable.
Expansionism and militarism Expansionism is the doctrine of expanding the territorial base or economic influence of a country, usually by means of military aggression.
Militarism is the principle or policy of maintaining a strong
military capability to use aggressively to expand national interests and/or values, with the view that military efficiency is the supreme ideal of a state. The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations had sought to stifle expansionist and militarist policies by all actors, but the conditions imposed by their creators imposed on the world's new geopolitical situation and the technological circumstances of the era only emboldened the re-emergence of those ideologies during the Interwar Period. By the early 1930s, militaristic and aggressive national ideologies prevailed in
Germany,
Japan and
Italy. The attitude fuelled advancements in military technology, subversive propaganda and ultimately territorial expansion. It has been observed that the leaders of countries that have been suddenly militarised often feel a need to prove that their armies are formidable, which was often a contributing factor in the start of conflicts such as the
Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the
Second Sino-Japanese War. In Italy,
Benito Mussolini sought to create a New Roman Empire, based around the
Mediterranean. Italy invaded
Ethiopia as early as 1935,
Albania in early 1938, and later
Greece. The invasion of Ethiopia provoked angry words and a failed oil embargo from the League of Nations.
Spazio vitale ("living space") was the territorial
expansionist concept of
Italian Fascism. It was analogous to Nazi Germany's concept of
Lebensraum and the
United States' concept of "
Manifest Destiny". Fascist ideologist
Giuseppe Bottai likened this historic mission to the deeds of the
ancient Romans. Under the Nazi regime, Germany began its own program of expansion that sought to restore its "rightful" boundaries. As a prelude toward its goals, the
Rhineland was
remilitarised in March 1936. Also of importance was the idea of a
Greater Germany, supporters of which hoped to unite the
German people under one nation-state to include all territories inhabited by Germans, even if they happened to be a minority in a particular territory. After the Treaty of Versailles, a unification between Germany and the newly formed
German-Austria, a
rump state of
Austria-Hungary, was blocked by the Allies, despite the large majority of
Austrians supporting the idea. During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the
Kapp Putsch, an attempted
coup d'état against the republican government, was launched by disaffected members of the armed forces. Later, some of the more radical militarists and nationalists were submerged in grief and despair into the Nazi Party, and more moderate elements of militarism declined. The result was an influx of militarily-inclined men into the Nazi Party. Combined with its racial theories, that fuelled
irredentist sentiments and put Germany on a collision course for war with its immediate neighbours. ,
Beijing, after they captured the city in July 1937 In Asia, the
Empire of Japan harboured expansionist desires towards
Manchuria and the
Republic of China. Two contemporaneous factors in Japan contributed both to the growing power of its military and the chaos in its ranks before World War I. One was the
Cabinet Law, which required the
Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the
Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) to nominate cabinet members before changes could be formed. That essentially gave the military a veto power over the formation of any Cabinet in the ostensibly-parliamentary country. The other factor was
gekokujō, the institutionalized
disobedience by junior officers. It was common for radical junior officers to press their goals to the extent of assassinating their seniors. In 1936, the phenomenon resulted in the
February 26 Incident in which junior officers attempted a coup d'état and killed leading members of the Japanese government. In the 1930s, the
Great Depression wrecked Japan's economy and gave radical elements within the Japanese military the chance to force the entire military into working towards the conquest of all of Asia. For example, in 1931, the
Kwantung Army, a Japanese military force stationed in
Manchuria, staged the
Mukden Incident, which sparked the
invasion of Manchuria and its transformation into the Japanese puppet state of
Manchukuo.
Germans vs. Slavs Twentieth-century events marked the culmination of a millennium-long process of intermingling between Germans and
Slavic people. The rise of nationalism in the 19th century made race a centerpiece of political loyalty. The rise of the nation-state had given way to the politics of identity, including
pan-Germanism and
pan-Slavism. Furthermore,
Social Darwinist theories framed the coexistence as a "Teuton vs. Slav" struggle for domination, land, and limited resources. Integrating these ideas into their own worldview, the Nazis believed that the Germans, the "
Aryan race", were the
master race and that the
Russians and
Poles were inferior.
Japan's seizure of resources and markets Other than a few coal and iron deposits and a small oil field on
Sakhalin Island, Japan lacked strategic mineral resources. In the early 20th century, in the
Russo-Japanese War, Japan had succeeded in pushing back the East Asian expansion of the Russian Empire in competition for
Korea and
Manchuria. Japan's goal after 1931 was economic dominance of most of East Asia, often expressed in the
Pan-Asian terms of "Asia for the Asians". Japan was determined to dominate the China market, which the US and other European powers had been dominating. On October 19, 1939, US Ambassador to Japan
Joseph C. Grew, in a formal address to the America-Japan Society, stated that In 1931, Japan
invaded Manchuria and China proper. Under the guise of the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, with slogans such as "Asia for the Asians!", Japan sought to remove the Western powers' influence in China and replace it with Japanese domination. The ongoing conflict in China led to a deepening conflict with the US in which public opinion was alarmed by events such as the
Nanking Massacre and growing Japanese power. Lengthy talks were held between the US and Japan. The Japanese
invasion of the south of
French Indochina made President
Franklin Roosevelt freeze all Japanese assets in the US. The intended consequence was to halt oil shipments from the US to Japan, which supplied 80 percent of Japanese oil imports. The Netherlands and Britain followed suit. With oil reserves that would last only a year and a half during peacetime and much less during wartime, the
ABCD line left Japan two choices: comply with the US-led demand to pull out of China or seize the oilfields in the
East Indies from the Netherlands. The Japanese government deemed it unacceptable to retreat from China.
Mason-Overy debate: "Flight into War" theory In the late 1980s, the British historian
Richard Overy was involved in a historical dispute with
Timothy Mason that played out mostly over the pages of the
Past and Present journal over the reasons for the outbreak of the war in 1939. Mason had contended that a "flight into war" had been imposed on Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler with the choice of making difficult economic decisions or aggression. Overy argued against Mason's thesis by maintaining that Germany was faced with economic problems in 1939, but the extent of those problems could not explain aggression against
Poland and the reasons for the outbreak of war were the choices made by the Nazi leadership. Mason had argued that the German working-class was always against the Nazi dictatorship; that in the overheated German economy of the late 1930s, German workers could force employers to grant higher wages by leaving for another firm and so grant the desired wage increases and that such a form of political resistance forced Hitler to go to war in 1939. Thus, the outbreak of the war was caused by structural economic problems, a "flight into war" imposed by a domestic crisis. Mason's
Primat der Innenpolitik thesis was in marked contrast to the
Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics"), which is usually used to explain the war. Mason argued, "Nazi Germany was always bent
at some time upon a major war of expansion". However, Mason argued that the timing of such a war was determined by domestic political pressures, especially as relating to a failing economy, and had nothing to do with what Hitler wanted. Mason argued that the Nazi leaders were so deeply haunted by the November 1918
German Revolution that they were most unwilling to see any fall in working-class living standards for fear of provoking a repetition of the revolution. Mason contended that when faced with the deep socio-economic crisis, the Nazi leadership had decided to embark upon a ruthless foreign policy of "smash and grab" to seize territory in Eastern Europe that could be pitilessly plundered to support the living standards in Germany. Mason described German foreign policy as driven by an opportunistic "next victim" syndrome after the
Anschluss in which the "promiscuity of aggressive intentions" was nurtured by every successful foreign policy move. Mason considered the decision to sign the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and to attack Poland despite the risk of a war against Britain and France to be the abandonment by Hitler of his foreign policy program outlined in
Mein Kampf and to have been forced on him by his need to stop a collapsing German economy by seizing territory abroad to be plundered. Overy argued for a difference between economic pressures induced by the problems of the
Four Year Plan and economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign reserves of neighbouring states as a way of accelerating the plan. Overy asserted that Mason downplayed the repressive German state's capacity to deal with domestic unhappiness. ==Proximate causes==