Chapter 7
Global Wars to Globalization: c. 1914–Present
THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914–1918)
Causes of the War
Although the Versailles Treaty, which marked the end of the First World War, stated emphatically that the Germans and their allies were responsible for starting the war, the reality is a bit more complicated. The following are some of the major reasons why Europe exploded in 1914, setting the stage for a conflict that would shatter the very foundations of the continent.
Political and Social Tensions in Europe
The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a number of political and social crises around Europe that may have led politicians to willingly pursue a foreign war with the hope that it would divert attention from domestic issues.
Great Britain and Ireland
Great Britain faced the contentious issue of Ireland, which threatened to explode as Nationalist forces began to press for independence (a movement called Home Rule, with roots dating back to the 1860s), while their political opposites, the Unionists, expressed their increasingly determined desire to remain a part of Great Britain. These parties were associated with religious communities; the Nationalists were overwhelmingly Catholic, and hoped to break away from what they viewed as Protestant rule, while Unionists tended to be Protestant. Leading into World War I, Unionism grew around Protestant areas in the north of Ireland, most significantly in the province of Ulster. Great Britain was also shaken, as was France, by a growing number of labor conflicts that resulted from the overall stagnation of wages during this period.
France
In France, the Third Republic was in crisis over the Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894 and involved a Jewish officer who was falsely accused of telling military secrets to the Germans. The incident revealed the virulence of French anti-Semitism while also showing the extent to which many in France despised the very idea of a republican form of government.
The “Affair” was also tied to another contentious issue splitting the French public—the question concerning the proper role of the Catholic Church in a democratic French state. Increasingly, by the end of the century, the individuals who governed France were openly hostile to the Catholic Church which they considered to be anti-republican. These politicians worked to exclude the Church from French life by enacting laws such as one that eliminated the Church from primary and secondary education.
Russia
Russia rang in the twentieth century with the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, which, when Russia lost once again, revealed the complete bankruptcy of the Tsarist state. This led to a revolution in the following year. Initially, the goal of the revolution was met—the creation of the Duma, or parliament—that would transform Russia into a constitutional monarchy. Tsar Nicholas II agreed to rule in conjunction with the Duma. Throughout the following years, the Tsarist regime recovered and once again functioned primarily as an unwieldy autocracy.
Germany and Austria-Hungary
The other imperial regimes, Germany and Austria-Hungary, also saw war as a possible means of escaping from a relatively bleak domestic political situation. In Germany, worker agitation was on the rise, and the Kaiser and his inner circle dreaded the possibility of a Socialist revolution, although the threat did not really exist.
Austria-Hungary had to deal with its constant, seemingly insurmountable nationality problems. In the Hungarian part of the empire, the process of “Magyarization,” the mandatory dominance of the Magyar language and culture, created great hostility among the other nationalities, who in fact made up the majority of the Hungarian population. As the Austro-Hungarian Empire lumbered from one crisis to the next, it appeared as though the union’s demise was always just around the corner.
Entangling Alliances
In 1879, Bismarck created the Dual Alliance, a military treaty with the Austro-Hungarians. However, because Bismarck correctly foresaw that it would be suicidal for Germany to face a war on two fronts, he signed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 in order to make it clear that the treaty with Austria-Hungary was purely defensive in nature and not meant to show possible hostile intent toward Russia. Unfortunately, once Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), an inordinately pigheaded man, pushed Bismarck out of office, the Russians began to view the Germans with increased trepidation, particularly since Wilhelm didn’t bother to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890.
While France had remained diplomatically isolated after 1870, Germany’s diplomatic missteps led the Russians to join the French in a military treaty that pledged that the two countries would fight together in the event of an attack on either state by the Germans. German fears of being encircled were enhanced when in 1904 Great Britain signed an Entente Cordiale with France, resolving certain contentious colonial issues. German fears were further increased when three years later, Great Britain signed another entente with the Russians. This is why during the First World War, Britain, France, and Russia were referred to as the “Entente” powers.
Increased Militarization
One of the worst decisions that the Kaiser and his officers made was to build a high seas fleet in 1897. Britain and Germany were not necessarily natural enemies, with the British readily accepting the fact that Germany possessed the most powerful army on the continent. Navies, however, were a completely different matter for the British, because they saw their fleet as their only means to protect their vast colonial empire. The British were particularly horrified given that the Germans took advantage of a revolution in battleship design and built powerful new ships known as Dreadnoughts, thus making the British fleet suddenly obsolete. The rivalry between Great Britain and Germany now became far more openly hostile, as each side scrambled to enhance its fleets. In the end, navies were not particularly significant in the outcome of the First World War; the Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only major naval battle of the war. Across Europe, the production of vast stores of weapons by the Great Powers dramatically increased tensions and played a critical role in the advent of the war.
Crisis in the Balkans
The immediate crisis that led to the war was the assassination on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones. Ferdinand was murdered by a Bosnian Serb who wanted to see Bosnia become part of an enlarged Serbian state.
The crisis in the Balkans had brought Europe to the brink of war in 1908, following the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, previously Ottoman territories, by Austria-Hungary. The weakness of the Ottoman state allowed Bosnia and Herzegovina to be taken away from it. The Austro-Hungarians annexed these territories, not because they wanted more Serbs within their empire, but because they feared the lands would be taken by the Serbian state, a national state that the Austro-Hungarians saw as the greatest threat to their own survival as a multinational empire. Gavrilo Princip (1895–1914), the Archduke’s assassin, had operated with the full cooperation of the Black Hand, a secret Serbian nationalist group with strong ties to Serbian officials in both the government and the army. Seeing that Serbian authorities were tied to the bloodshed, the Austrians issued an ultimatum that was clearly designed to provoke a Serbian refusal and achieve what the Austrians truly wanted—war with the Serbian state.
Europe on the Eve of World War I
The Course of the War
On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia, knowing that it risked setting off a larger European conflict. Russia had promised to protect the Serbs, but despite this pact, the Austria-Hungarians felt that they had to take the risk or their multinational empire would collapse. Additionally, Austria-Hungary had the backing of Germany, the “blank check,” which bears significant responsibility for the start of the war because it was the one power that could have possibly restrained the Austria-Hungarians from taking such an aggressive stance.
As a precautionary measure, Russia responded to the Austria-Hungarian declaration on Serbia by beginning the process of mobilization. Germany demanded that Russia stop the process, which the Russians refused to do, in part because they knew that their own mobilization would take much longer than that of the Germans. They also feared that if the war spread beyond just the struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, they could be caught unprepared. The Germans, seeing the continuation of Russian mobilization, decided that they had to declare war on the Russians, which they did on August 1. The whole net of entangling alliances began to fall into place as France started to mobilize on that same day, which led the Germans to respond with a declaration of war on the French.
When the shelling began in August 1914, there was tremendous enthusiasm among the citizens of the combatant nations. To their great discredit, the parties of the Second International, which for years had claimed that they would not support a capitalist European war and spoke glowingly of international brotherhood, voted in each of their respective nations to support the war effort. One of the few Socialists who spoke out against the war was the idealistic leader of the French Socialist Party, Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). He was shot on the eve of the war by a fanatical French nationalist who hated Jaurès’s pacifist posture. French Socialist leaders attended his funeral and on the same day voted in the Chamber of Deputies to support the government in the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Part of the enthusiasm for war stemmed from the misbegotten belief that the struggle would be a short one. This premise was based on observations made from such admittedly quick conflicts as the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870), both of which lasted only a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, the decades following those conflicts had witnessed the rise of new weapons that favored soldiers on the defensive, such as machine guns, barbed wire, mines, and more powerful artillery shells, all of which created the eventual stalemate on the western front. Even the introduction of airplanes possibly made the war a more defensive affair because the planes were used for spotting the enemy’s positions, making it harder to stage surprise offensives. Also, the economic expansion, industrial strength, and national wealth wrought by the Second Industrial Revolution allowed the participants to stay in the war much longer than before.
The Germans began the war by attempting to implement the Schlieffen Plan, which relied on a rapid advance through northern France, with the expectation that France would be knocked out of the war in six short weeks, allowing Germany’s military might to be transported by rail to the east where it would be used to defeat the Russians. The German plan required the invasion of Belgium, a nation created in 1830 with the promise that its neutrality would be guaranteed by the major European powers. The German sweep through Belgium, which broke this guarantee, brought Great Britain into the war on the side of the French and Russians. The brutal German occupation of the small nation inflamed public opinion in the United States.
The German plan had succeeded in the early weeks of the war, although, with hindsight, the Belgians’ spirited defense would prove very costly to the Germans, who were operating on a strict timetable. By the first week of September, German troops had threatened Paris, leading the French government to flee the capital. After the Germans crossed the Marne river, a French army under General Joffre (1852–1931) counterattacked and stopped the Germans at what became known as the First Battle of the Marne. For the remainder of the fall season, the various armies to the northern coast of Flanders made a mad scramble to see if either side could be outflanked. By the first winter of the war, both sides settled down to what now looked like a much longer contest. Both sides would hold positions that would remain virtually unchanged for the next three years.
Although everyone expected the war to be a glorious affair, trench warfare proved to be anything but glamorous. At first, the trenches were just rapidly dug ditches, but as the stalemate continued, huge networks of defensive fortifications were built. Life in the trenches was a series of horrors as the men had to deal with rats bloated from chewing on readily available corpses, noise from artillery, and extreme boredom as the war dragged way past the time that soldiers had expected to be heading home. The soldiers were fairly well protected in their trenches, but unfortunately, both sides insisted on periodically sending their soldiers “over the top” into no man’s land to stage assaults on enemy trenches. These excursions often became little more than suicide missions, as soldiers got caught on the barbed wire or found that their artillery did little to break the fighting spirit of the opposing side.
The war in the east was rather different from that in the west. At first, the Russians met with success against the Austro-Hungarians, but as the fighting began to stalemate in the west, German forces shifted to the east, where they began to pile up victories against the brave but poorly equipped Russians. The eastern front never became bogged down with trenches like in the west, in part because the huge size of the theater of war made it much easier to maneuver.
The Horrors of Modern Warfare
In early 1915, poison gas began to be used by both sides. The petrochemical revolution of the Second Industrial Revolution had unleashed a new weapon on the battlefield, and while the introduction of gas masks cut down on the losses from these gases, it was another sign that modern warfare was an increasingly inhumane affair.
Attempting to break the stalemate in the east, the British decided to launch an attack on Turkey, which had entered the war on the side of the central powers. Winston Churchill (1874–1965), who at the time was the First Lord of the Admiralty, organized the plan, which was such a disaster that it almost led to the complete obliteration of his political career. Churchill reasoned that knocking the Turks out of the war would allow the British to send supplies to the hard-pressed Russians through the Black Sea. In April 1915, five divisions landed on the beach of Gallipoli. Unfortunately for the soldiers, who were for the most part from Australia and New Zealand, the Turks were well dug in and the attack failed. By January, the British withdrew after suffering withering losses.
The British were not the only ones who sought the pivotal breakthrough that would end the stalemate. In 1916, the Germans decided to launch a massive offensive against the French fortress of Verdun, a fortress that France would have to defend at all costs or risk creating a disaster in French public opinion. The Germans organized a huge number of artillery pieces, including some “Big Bertha” guns that fired shells weighing more than a ton. While it appeared as though the Germans might take the fortress, the French were able to put up a spirited defense under General Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), who unfortunately survived the battle to later become the disgraced leader of the defeated Vichy French state following the German victory in 1940. While the Germans hoped to bleed France dry by attacking Verdun, in the end, both sides together lost 600,000 troops in one of the most costly battles of the war. The French and British, however, learned little from the failure of the German offensive. Each side was convinced that it held the secret to breaking the stalemate, and over the next year, both Entente powers launched wasteful and ineffective offensives, such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Passchendaele, in an attempt to break the German lines.
THE END OF THE WAR
The year 1917 turned out to be the critical turning point in the war. The war in the eastern front came to a close as Russia became embroiled in revolution, and by December 1917, the leaders of the new Bolshevik state sued Germany for peace. For the Germans, this looked like it could be the turning point, enabling them to focus all their forces on breaking the impasse in the west. This German advantage was never to occur because of the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917, a result of Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the ill-considered Zimmermann Telegram. In 1915, the Germans declared that the waters around Great Britain were a war zone and warned that they would sink any ship—either British vessels or those from neutral lands—that tried to enter into British ports. Although this policy may appear to have been inhumane, at that time, the British were blockading German ports, but because of their powerful surface fleet, they did not have to rely on using submarines to indiscriminately sink ships. In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the Lusitania, a British passenger ship, stirring tremendous anger in the United States, from which 120 of the ship’s passengers hailed. As a result of an American warning, the Germans agreed to end their attacks on neutral shipping, but as the war continued to drag on, the Germans decided in early 1917 to resume the practice.
Although it would take roughly a year for the Americans to make an impact in the war, their entry turned out to be a decisive factor. The Germans decided in 1918 that they had to move quickly if they hoped to achieve victory before the Americans could send in large numbers of fresh troops. Beginning in March, the Germans decided to gamble everything on victory. For four months, German troops met with the kind of success they had enjoyed in the first months of the war. Paris was once again evacuated, but Germany lacked the manpower and raw materials to exploit its initial victory, and by the summer, large numbers of Americans played a critical role in blocking any further German advance. By August, the German offensive was turning into a retreat, as Germany increasingly revealed how absolutely exhausted it was from the fighting.
After realizing that there was little it could do to block the Entente powers from marching all the way to Berlin, the German high command informed the Kaiser that Germany had to sue for peace. A new German government, led by Prince Max von Baden (1867–1929), a man known for his moderate political views, contacted the American President, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), and asked for an armistice that would be based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points—an idealistic document that sought to reduce future tensions between nations by maintaining free trade and an end to secret negotiations. Events in Germany, however, were spiraling out of control, and throughout November, soldiers and workers began to form soviets, or councils, and to demand that these loosely organized political debating societies be given authority to rule the state. Fearing that Germany would follow Russia’s example and undergo a Bolshevik Revolution, the Kaiser was convinced to abdicate, leading to the creation of a republic, which was empowered for the signing of the armistice that brought the war to a close on November 11, 1918.
The War on the Home Front
The First World War was the first armed struggle to witness the complete mobilization of society at large. This was total war—something that would be experienced again during the Second World War—in that no segment of the population within any of the participating nations could avoid its impact.
Once people realized that their initial expectation of a quick war was wrong, political leaders began to understand that they would have to mobilize all national resources. The war, therefore, was a major contributing factor to the increased role that government played in the twentieth century. All aspects of the economy became regulated to support the war effort, including price controls, the banning of strikes, rationing, and the planned use of national resources such as coal. In Great Britain, the government regulated pub hours, ensuring that they closed in the afternoon to prevent factory workers from staggering back to work drunk.
Governments also began to play a larger role in trying to manipulate public opinion. Censorship became a basic task for all governments. They read and censored the letters soldiers sent home to shield the public from the full extent of the horrors of trench warfare. The governments believed that if the people realized the true nature of the war, support for it would rapidly diminish. Governments also set up propaganda offices to create films and posters to help boost morale. One reason so many Germans were later willing to believe Hitler’s claims that Germany had not lost the war on the battlefield but had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews and other so-called enemies of the German people was that they had been told by their government, up until the day that Germany surrendered, that all was going well at the front and that victory was just around the corner.
War and Civil Rights
War has a way of quickening long-term trends. In the United States, the Second World War helped pave the way for the Civil Rights movement, and the First World War helped bring about the greater emancipation of women. Prior to the war, Great Britain saw an expanding female suffrage movement. The Women’s Social and Political Union, better known as the Suffragettes, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), organized a militant campaign to win the vote. The Suffragettes disturbed political meetings, destroyed stained-glass windows in historical churches, and set fires to draw attention to their cause. Once the war began, the Suffragettes supported the war effort and encouraged women to do their share for the nation. By the end of the war, more than 5 million British women were employed, many in dangerous jobs such as those in munitions factories. At the end of the war, British women were rewarded for their contribution to victory by being granted the right to vote in 1918. At the same time, in Germany, the Weimar Republic granted complete female suffrage as well.
The Versailles Treaty and the Costs of the War
It is impossible to determine a precise count of the human costs of the war. Around 9 million men lost their lives in battle, and approximately 23 million more were wounded. Many men who came home from the front were permanently affected by gas. Germany suffered about 6 million casualties (killed and wounded combined). France’s losses were 5.5 million, proportionally much greater than Germany’s losses, as France’s pre-war population had been less than two-thirds that of Germany’s. Very few French families escaped losing a loved one, and today, if you travel to France, you’ll find a memorial in every town to those lost in the war. Incredibly, the loss of life from the war was soon dwarfed by an outbreak of influenza, which claimed an estimated 30 million lives worldwide.
Besides the loss of lives, the economic costs of the war were unprecedented. Hundreds of towns and villages in France and Belgium were destroyed, and even today, an occasional Belgian farmer is killed while plowing over an unexploded shell dating back to the trench wars in Flanders fields. Economically, both victors and vanquished were shattered. The nations of Europe, which had been the creditors to the rest of the world, were now heavily in debt to the United States, the only participant that still had a fully functioning economy. After the war, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace attempted to discern the war’s actual cost and estimated a figure of $338 billion. The wealth accumulated from the unprecedented economic growth of the Second Industrial Revolution dissipated in a matter of five years.
The terrible human and economic costs of the war must be considered when looking at the negotiations marking the end of the conflict. Five separate settlements were reached at the peace conference that took place in Paris, though the first and most famous of them was the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors, the same place that the German Empire had been declared back in 1871. This event witnessed several competing visions on how to reshape the postwar world:
• Wilson wanted to reshape the world on the basis of the principles outlined in his Fourteen Points, a peace that would allow for national self-determination and an international body, the League of Nations, that would work to settle disputes between nations. Yet it was easy for an American president to be conciliatory, particularly because none of the fighting had taken place on American soil, and the loss of American lives, though significant, paled beside that of France and Great Britain.
• The French Premier, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), represented a completely different outlook from Wilson’s. No nation had suffered during the war more than France, and Clemenceau had to satisfy a French public that wanted to ensure that Germany would never again be a threat.
• The third major participant, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George (1863–1945), while not as intransigent as Clemenceau, also wanted to see Germany punished. England was, as usual, interested in naval superiority and colonies. In the end, the treaty represented the triumph of Clemenceau’s position over Wilson’s.
To justify the demand for German payment of reparations, the victorious allies included Article 231 in the final treaty, which forced Germany to accept all responsibility for the outbreak of the war on behalf of herself and her allies. Although Germany may have had an additional measure of blame, all the nations of Europe bore some guilt, so Article 231 was quite unfair. Germany also had to pay a huge reparation sum of 132 billion gold marks to the Entente powers. Other clauses of the treaty included the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and the occupation of French troops in those parts of Germany on the western bank of the Rhine and a strip of land on the right bank. These territories, while still German, were to remain demilitarized. France would maintain economic control over the coal and iron mines of the Saar border region for fifteen years. Additionally, Germany was to have an army of no more than 100,000 men, was banned from having an air force, and could maintain only a tiny navy to protect its coastal waters.
Other treaties signed in Paris in 1919 reordered the map of Europe. With the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the reduction in size of Germany, new nations were re-created in central Europe.
• Czechoslovakia was born, combining the lands of the Czechs and Slovaks and also including a significant number of Germans.
• Hungary became fully independent, though it was somewhat reduced in size.
• An independent Romania was also created out of former Austro-Hungarian lands.
• Serbia was rewarded with additional territories for being on the victorious side; the resulting enlarged state, Yugoslavia, was what the Serbs had dreamed of. This dream had been one of the root causes of the war.
• For the first time since the eighteenth century, there was an independent Poland.
• The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were carved out of parts of the former Russian Empire.
• Although most of these states started as democracies, within a short time span, a host of problems, including economic and social issues, led all of them—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—to become dictatorships.
Middle East and Africa Post-World War I
One place where nationalist sentiments were not satisfied was in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. During the war, the British made numerous promises to both Arabs and Jews to gain their support for the war effort. With the advent of peace, the British ignored these hasty wartime promises, and Great Britain and France divided the area into colonial spheres of influence. Also, despite the contributions that colonial soldiers made to the war effort, the French and British made no move to reward their African colonies with independence.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Though it is hard to imagine, some Russian soldiers were thrown into battle during the First World War without guns, having been told to pick up rifles from their fallen comrades. This is just one way in which the First World War revealed the complete incompetence of the tsarist regime. Although it is hard to imagine any autocratic state functioning well during an unprecedented crisis like a world war, the problem was made more severe by the sheer stupidity of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II (1868–1918), who decided during the second year of the conflict that he should emulate the warrior tsars of the past and assume personal command of the army.
In his absence, Nicholas left his wife Empress Alexandra in charge of the state. Alexandra turned out to be completely ignorant in matters of statecraft and was personally under the influence of a mystical Russian monk named Gregory Rasputin (1872–1916), who, she believed, had the power to control the bleeding of her son Alexis, a hemophiliac. Rasputin took advantage of Nicholas’s absence to encourage the empress to place his friends in important state offices despite their obvious incompetence. With the war going badly for the Russians, false rumors began to spread that Alexandra and Rasputin were lovers and that the German-born empress was doing her best to make sure that Russia was defeated. (Similar rumors were spread about the British royal family, who also had German roots, leading them to change their family name from Saxe-Coburg to the more English-sounding Windsor.) Rasputin met his end in 1916 when he was killed by a group of arch-monarchists, who feared he was destroying the prestige of the throne. The problems in Russia, however, extended well beyond what could be solved by removing the monk from his position of influence.
The Provisional Government
Two revolutions occurred in Russia in 1917. The first was in March, when order collapsed in the capital city of Petrograd (formerly and currently St. Petersburg) as the population grappled with a severe shortage of food. Troops were called out to disperse the demonstrations, but instead of following their orders, the solders joined with the strikers. On March 14, the tsar abdicated. What became known as the Provisional Government took over authority. This government was made up of members of the Duma—the Russian parliament that arose out of the 1905 revolution—and was provisional because it was supposed to exist only long enough to establish a constituent body which would then write a constitution for the new Russian republic.
One sign of future trouble was that workers and soldiers continued to form soviets, as was the case in the revolution of 1905. These soviets consisted primarily of assorted Russian Socialists, with the majority belonging to the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary wings, while only a minority belonged to the most extreme of the social groups, the Bolsheviks. Russian socialism had split into assorted factions back in 1903 when Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) insisted that a small party of professional revolutionaries could seize power on behalf of the working class. His followers became known as the Bolsheviks. The group that insisted that Russia had to proceed through the proven historical stages before it could achieve an ideal socialist society, as Marx had mandated, became known as the Mensheviks. This led the Mensheviks, who dominated the Petrograd Soviet, to initially support the Provisional Government, since it fit their idea that a bourgeois revolution needed to precede a socialist revolution.
Tragically for the history of Russia, this short-lived republic faced problems of the greatest magnitude. One controversial decision was made when the Provisional Government decided to remain in the First World War rather than withdraw from the fighting. This decision stemmed partly from a sense of responsibility to the other Entente powers, but more important to this decision was the presence at that time of German troops on Russian soil. This presence led the Provisional Government to believe that a renewed war effort, led by a democratic regime, would inspire Russian support. The Provisional Government also decided to delay the redistribution of the great estates, which were supposed to be broken up to provide land for the peasantry. Seeing that their demands were not being met, the peasants acted on their own initiative and seized the great estates.
The Triumph of the Bolsheviks
In April, Lenin returned from exile in Switzerland, aided by the Germans who transported him through their territory in a sealed railcar. The Germans did this because they thought that Lenin would undermine the Russian war effort, never expecting that he would be able to seize power. Over the ensuing months, the Bolsheviks continued to build up their strength, particularly among the workers and soldiers in Petrograd. By the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the largest party in the soviets.
As the situation in the city became more desperate and unrest continued, Lenin decided to seize the moment, and on November 9, new Bolshevik figurehead Leon Trotsky (1870–1940) rode the momentum of his party’s electoral success to take over key positions in the city, including power stations and communication centers. The revolution came off without much violence as the Provisional Government simply collapsed. Much violence would ensue, however, over the next three years, as the Bolsheviks had to cope with a bloody civil war to maintain their power.
Lenin and his party operated under the assumption that the revolution in Russia was only the first in a series of Communist revolutions that would begin in Germany and then move on to the remainder of western Europe. Therefore, the Bolsheviks were willing to accept a draconian peace with Germany, because they believed that Imperial Germany would shortly disappear and the territorial settlements would no longer matter. By the end of 1917, the Germans and the new Bolshevik state had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, thus removing Russia from the war. The treaty was exceedingly harsh and involved German confiscation of huge tracts of Russian land (perhaps more unfair than what the Germans were punished with in the Treaty of Versailles). The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was never fully implemented because of Germany’s defeat in the war and the Allies’ refusal to allow Germany to gain territories in the east. Much of the territory became Poland and the Baltics instead.
THE INTERWAR YEARS
The German Weimar Republic
The story of the German Weimar Republic is nothing short of tragic, though its ultimate failure should not be surprising given its problematic birth at the end of a disastrous war. It has sometimes been argued that the death of Weimar came not in 1933 with the triumph of Hitler and his Nazi party, but rather in 1919, in the very early days of the republic, when its leaders were forced to sign the vastly unpopular Versailles Treaty.
Although forces from the extreme political right caused its final demise, in the first years of the republic, the far left was a much greater threat to its stability. The republic was created in November 1918 and was initially led by Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), a moderate Socialist, who served as its first president. To put down a rebellion led by radical Marxists like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and to secure his republican regime, Ebert was forced to rely on the old imperial officer corps. Because the army was in no position to put down the rebellion alone, Ebert gave approval for the formation of “Free Corps,” voluntary paramilitary groups often with extreme right-wing leanings. In 1920, some of these Free Corps became involved in an attempt to overthrow the democratic state, but a general strike by workers put an end to what became known as the Kapp Putsch. However, by 1920, it was clear that although the threat from the left was eradicated, the far right was an even greater danger to the long-term viability of the Weimar state.
By 1924, the republic had achieved some degree of stability, despite the continuing effects of the Versailles Treaty penalties. In the postwar years, Germany suffered from terrible inflation as a result of the government’s wild printing of money to pay its reparations debt. This insanely high inflation, which eventually led to an exchange rate of 11 trillion marks to the dollar, shattered the German middle class who saw its life savings disappear overnight. In 1923, the Chancellor of Germany was Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), the leader of the German People’s Party, a conservative party that supported the Weimar Republic. Although this hyperinflation may have done more than even the Great Depression to damage the long-term possibility of success for the republic, in the short term, Stresemann was able to get the economy back on its feet. He was even able to work out a new agreement on reparations, making them less damaging to the German economy.
By 1925, Germany was slowly rebuilding its relations with the other nations of Europe. Germany signed the Lucarno Agreement with France, by which Germany agreed to accept the current borders between France and Germany (and therefore French control over Alsace-Lorraine). They also resolved other issues, such as initiating the withdrawal of French troops from the Rhineland. In the following year, Stresemann capped off these efforts by entering Germany into the League of Nations. By 1929, the republic appeared as though it was taking root within Germany, though the outbreak of the Great Depression would reveal how shallow German support for republican government truly was.
The Soviet Experiment
Following the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917, Lenin and his tiny party ruled over a land that had been completely shattered. An indication of how little support they held within the nation can be seen by the elections for the constituent assembly that were finally held a few weeks after the Bolshevik revolution. Despite attempts to intimidate voters at the polls, the best the Bolsheviks could garner was one-quarter of the seats in the assembly. With such a showing, it was not surprising that armed Red Guards dispersed the assembly at the end of its first and only meeting.
Over the next several years, the Communists (the name adopted by the Bolshevik party in 1919), worked to solidify their control over the vast Russian state. For three years they had to fight a life-or-death struggle against the “White” forces, a loose term for the various anti-Communist factions, including dedicated monarchists and ardent republicans. The Whites received support from a British and American contingent, who nominally were sent to protect supplies the Allies had sent during the war but were really in Russia to keep an eye on events. The Civil War provided justification for Lenin and Trotsky to launch a “Red Terror” against their opponents, some of whom were right-wing extremists who were genuine enemies of the Bolshevik state; others were fellow Socialists, like the members of the Menshevik party, who feared the formation of a Communist dictatorship in Russia. By 1920, the Communists had defeated the various White armies and firmly established Bolshevik rule over Russia.
In the early days of the Soviet Union, there was still an expectation that the revolutionary tide would sweep across western Europe. To that end, in 1919, the Russian Communists founded the Third (or Communist) International to aid in the cause of revolution. The rise of this body, often referred to as the Comintern, had a major impact on the various Socialist parties of western Europe, as some Marxists turned to the new Soviet state for guidance. The majority of Socialists, however, were horrified by the obviously repressive nature of Lenin’s regime. This led to a split across Europe between those who formed Communist parties and those who maintained their ties to the original Socialist parties. In Germany, this split within the ranks of the left played a major role in the eventual rise of the Nazis; the German Communists saw the Social Democratic Party as more of a threat to their eventual success than the Nazis. By 1920, when it was becoming clear that the revolutionary tide across Europe was barely a trickle, the Comintern shifted its focus more toward aiding the success of the one Marxist state, the Soviet Union, which filled all the leadership posts in the organization.
As the leaders of the Soviet Union increasingly turned their attention to internal questions within Russia, a debate ensued within the party concerning economics. During the Civil War, the party imposed “war communism,” extremely tight control over all aspects of the economy. In 1921, anger over the harshness of this program led to a rebellion by the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base, once one of the primary strongholds of Bolshevik support. While the rebellion was crushed with stunning brutality, it did lead Lenin to replace war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP). This policy placed the “heights of industry” in government hands but also allowed a significant scope for private enterprise. Under this program, the economy made a quick recovery to pre-war levels.
The question remained, however, as to how to build a socialist state. This debate became closely intertwined with the issue of who would succeed Lenin as the leader of the party after he died in 1924. One possible candidate for the post was Trotsky, who enjoyed immense prestige as the builder of the Red Army that had won the Civil War. Trotsky thought that the NEP was too much of an ideological compromise, and he envisioned the return of an economic structure more akin to war communism. Trotsky, as the leader of the “Left Opposition,” also argued that it was necessary to focus on the spread of revolution to the industrialized nations of western Europe; he believed that communism could not survive unless it spread to other lands. His major opponent in this debate was Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), the “Right Opposition” leader who advocated continuing the NEP and building communism within the Soviet state.
Stalin
In the end, it was neither Trotsky nor Bukharin who took up the mantle of Lenin but Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) instead, a Georgian who had joined the party in 1902 but played a relatively minor role in the seizure of power in November 1917. Stalin was completely uninterested in ideological debates; he wanted to establish his own power within the Soviet system. To achieve this power, Stalin cunningly worked with Bukharin to maneuver Trotsky out of authority. In 1927, Trotsky and his ally Gregory Zinoviev (1883–1936) were expelled from the party. Stalin waited two years before he also ousted Bukharin. Eventually, beginning in 1936, Stalin launched a series of show trials in which his former opponents were tortured until they confessed to all sorts of crimes against the state.
While the complete story of Stalin’s brutality will never be fully known, close to 10 million Russians were arrested in the late 1930s; several million were executed immediately or eventually died in the brutal detention camps that Stalin set up in Siberia. Stalin eventually decimated the ranks of the “Old Bolsheviks” who had joined the party prior to 1917; he destroyed the officer corps and anyone else he perceived as disloyal to the state or to him. In 1940, an agent sent by Stalin assassinated Trotsky, who had earlier been sent into exile.
Once in a position of undisputed authority, Stalin adopted the policy of the Left Opposition and its program to rapidly turn Russia into an industrial nation. To achieve this goal, in 1928 Stalin implemented the first Five-Year Plan, a comprehensive, centrally controlled plan for industrial expansion. To pay for this unprecedented economic growth, Stalin followed Trotsky’s plan to extract the necessary money by squeezing the peasantry through the forced collectivization of Russian agriculture. The state waged an open war on the kulaks—the wealthy peasants—and sent party cadres to the countryside with the order to kill any peasant who refused to join the collective farm. Millions of kulaks were shot or died from starvation, as they destroyed their crops and farm animals rather than turn them over to the hated Communist state. The human cost was staggering; perhaps 10 million people in the countryside died as Stalin moved the available crops to urban areas. The result, however, was that by the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union emerged as a major industrial power while the western nations were embroiled in a devastating economic depression.
The Great Depression
Traditionally, we think of the Great Depression as beginning in October 1929 with the stock-market crash, which was soon followed by people hurling themselves out of windows (though there is little evidence such suicides took place). It should be understood, however, that the roots of the problem were deeper than just a crash of the financial markets, and the worldwide depression would not begin in earnest until the banking crisis in 1931.
In May 1931, the collapse of Vienna’s most powerful bank, the Credit-Anstalt, created a domino effect. Banks throughout Germany and eastern Europe started to fail as citizens began to question banks’ solvency. They withdrew their savings rapidly, which depleted available reserves until otherwise-healthy banks could not return depositors’ money and were forced to fold. Meanwhile, in the highly uncertain economic environment, banks stopped making loans and individuals started trying to save whatever money they could. This resulted in a major drop in demand for industrial goods. With the decline in demand came a corresponding decline in the number of available jobs, since there was less of a market for goods produced. However, rising unemployment only suppressed demand further, since unemployed workers had no money. Many countries worsened these problems by trying to remain on a gold standard, a fixed exchange rate between their currencies and gold. The gold standard prevented countries from using controlled inflation to help get out of the depression. Inflation, by increasing the amount of available money, allows individuals to meet their increased desire for savings while having some money left over to spend; it also discourages people from saving too much, since they realize their money will be worth less in the future than it is today.
The 1920s: Perception vs. Reality
Our image of the 1920s is that of the “Jazz Age,” a glittering time chronicled in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The reality was far less festive. The war had been incredibly devastating to the worldwide economy. In places such as Great Britain, the 1920s remained a time of economic stagnation. Much of the postwar economic recovery in Germany was dependent on the availability of American bank loans, monies that the Germans in turn used to lend at higher interest to the newly emerging nations of eastern Europe. This led to what looked like solid financial gains in both the United States and Germany from 1924 to 1929, but in many ways it was a false prosperity. The decline in available credit brought on by the collapse of the American stock market caused the veneer of prosperity to rapidly fade.
The problems of the gold standard were made even worse by the common belief that the way to deal with an economic depression was to further tighten the supply of money, until all the “bad loans” went bust and “failed companies” went out of business (even though many of these were perfectly sound and were essentially innocent bystanders to the total economic collapse). Governments also tried to rein in their spending to balance their budgets, which only further suppressed the overall demand for goods (while also exposing unemployed workers to worse suffering, as social support programs, veterans’ benefits, and so on, were cut). The English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was almost a singular voice of dissent. He argued that since the problem was a lack of demand in the private sector, governments could best fix it through deficit spending, temporarily providing people with jobs and income again to enable a spending recovery, and thereby restore the economy to health. This was known as “priming the pump,” as this temporary increase in government spending in areas like public works would unfreeze the economy and get money moving again.
The depression worsened as governments took further misguided measures such as raising tariff barriers to protect domestic manufacturing. The United States was the first to take this step when it raised the tariff wall in 1930. All the other nations of Europe soon followed, including Great Britain, where free trade was a doctrine held with almost religious intensity.
The depths of the depression were truly staggering. By 1932, the economies of Europe were performing at only half the 1929 level. The depression hit hardest in the United States and in Germany, where eventually almost one-third of the available workforce was unemployed. In the United States—a stable democracy—those embroiled in the depression elected Franklin Roosevelt as president and subscribed to his New Deal. In Germany—a shaky democracy at best—the crisis resulted in the death of republican institutions and the triumph of a political ideology that was anathema to the very spirit of democracy—fascism.
Fascism
During the interwar years, as democracy appeared to be faltering, millions of people across Europe looked to fascism as a movement that offered the means to rebuild their shattered lives. Historians actively debate the definition of fascism; some claim that nothing really can be labeled as a fascist ideology outside the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. Fascist parties emerged across Europe and in other parts of the world, including the United States. They did not all possess the exact same set of beliefs; there are certain ideas, however, they all hold in common, which can be useful in defining the movement.
The word fascism comes from the Latin term fasces, a reference to a small bundle of sticks the Romans carried as symbols of authority and community. These bound sticks were symbolic of one central goal of fascism—to destroy the notion of the individual and instead push for a common community. In some ways, this sounds similar to what the Communists wanted to achieve—a unified society devoid of class differences. But the fascist concept was not tied to an international identity, as communism was, nor did fascism advocate the end of class distinctions. Instead, fascism pushed for another identity, one that was rooted in both extreme nationalism and often in some mystical racial heritage, such as that found in the Volkish ideology pursued by the German Fascists.
Fascists were deeply antagonistic to the idea of parliamentary democracy, which they viewed as anarchical and effete. Instead, fascism favored the idea of a strong leader; the Italian Fascists had Il Duce, the Germans, the Führer, men who, in an almost mystical manner, represented all the desires and dreams of the nation. This antagonism toward democracy is interesting, because in the two nations where fascism triumphed, Italy and Germany, Fascist governments were created using the ballot box and not forced by an armed coup. While despising democracy, Fascists also rejected all forms of socialism, a significant factor in why the movement rose to power. Many middle-class individuals were fully aware that the Soviet regime had collectivized all private property and saw fascism as the only barrier to the triumph of the hated communism. While many Fascists, like Hitler, hardly bothered to contemplate a fascist economic program, Mussolini promised that an Italian fascist state would implement what he called corporatism— an association of employers and workers within each industry that would iron out all contentious issues regarding production and wages.
To a certain extent, fascism was antagonistic toward much of what is representative of the modern world. Fascists were against the political emancipation of women, they hated modern art, and they despised a religious faction that had become emancipated in modern times—Jews. Anti-Semitism was a key component in Fascist movements throughout Europe, except in Italy, in part because Jews were seen as standing outside the arch-nationalistic identity that was so dear to the heart of all Fascists.
Fascism in Italy
The first state to have a Fascist government was Italy, and because the empowerment of fascism occurred prior to the Great Depression of 1929, it was not this financial devastation that caused the movement. In Italy, fascism emerged partly out of a deep national dissatisfaction with its participation in the First World War. In 1915, Italy decided to enter the war on the side of the Entente powers, in part because it was interested in extending Italian control over those areas of Austria-Hungary that were home to a significant number of people who spoke Italian as their mother tongue. Italy’s military participation was initially disastrous, leading to the almost total collapse of the Italian front in 1917, but Italy stayed in the war and played a role in the eventual triumph of the Entente powers. It was a costly victory, but many Italians thought it would be justified with the gains they would receive at the peace table. In the event, Italy got most of what it had been promised by the British and French, but with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian state, many Italians believed that they should have been more generously rewarded for their participation.
Following the war, Italy underwent a marked political transformation. In 1919, the political system adopted proportional representation, whereby parties would be rewarded seats in the legislature on the basis of their percentages in the national vote. This new system favored the creation of mass parties such as Mussolini’s Fascist movement. Italian politics were also transformed by events in 1919 and 1920, years that witnessed a series of factory occupations by angry workers who seemed to portend the advent of a Bolshevik state. This led many landowners and businessmen to turn against democratic politics. They began to look for another political solution and thought they had found it in fascism, a political movement that was just emerging in Italy.
The founder and leader of the Italian Fascists was Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). His father was a Socialist, who named his son after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. Mussolini adopted his father’s Socialist beliefs and became the editor of the party newspaper. Interestingly, for a man who would eventually become an extreme nationalist, during his years as a Socialist, Mussolini wrote, “The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.” His views began to shift during the war when Mussolini broke with his fellow Socialists and supported Italy’s entrance into the war, a war in which Mussolini eventually served but without any particular distinction, like Hitler.
Returning to civilian life, Mussolini founded a new party, the National Fascist Party. The party quickly formed paramilitary squads (the Blackshirts) to fight leftist organizations, thus earning them the gratitude of factory owners and landowners who filled the party coffers with much-needed cash. By 1921, the party had begun to seat members in the Italian parliament and emerge as a significant presence in Italian political life.
Although his party still only had a few seats in the legislature, by October 1922, Mussolini demanded that King Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946) name him and several other Fascists to cabinet posts. To provide support for his demands, Mussolini organized his black-shirted thugs to march on Rome and possibly attempt to seize power. If the King had declared martial law and brought in the army, there is little doubt that the Fascists would have been easily scattered. The King, however, was a timid man who was not altogether unsympathetic to the Fascist program, so he named Mussolini as Prime Minister. The Fascist march on Rome turned into a celebration instead of a possible coup.
Fortunately for Mussolini, there was very little opposition to his consolidation of political power. He played at being a parliamentary leader for only several months after taking over in 1922. He then implemented a number of constitutional changes to ensure that the niceties of democracy no longer limited his actions. Mussolini’s grip on power in the early years was only shaken in 1924 when he and the party were involved in the murder of a Socialist politician. Mussolini, however, was able to take this crisis and turn it to his advantage: He further consolidated his power by basically banning all non-Fascist political activity.
Perhaps because of the nature of the land that he governed, Mussolini found it hard to recast Italy in his Fascist image. Rather than achieving the revolution that many of his followers wanted, he made peace with more established institutions, such as the Catholic Church, when in 1929 he signed the Lateran Pact with the papacy; for the first time, the papacy officially recognized the Italian state. In the latter part of the decade, Mussolini tried to implement the corporatist economic program that was supposed to be a hallmark of the new Italy, but in practice it never lived up to the promise. Italy did rebound economically in the late 1920s, but then again, so did the rest of the world economy.
German Fascism
A more thorough Fascist reordering of the state took place in Germany. While the Nazi regime in January 1933 marks the final stage in the collapse of the Weimar Republic, in many ways the failure of the republic dates back to the first years of the Great Depression. In March 1930, a government led by Hermann Müller (1876–1931), a Socialist, resigned over a crisis concerning unemployment insurance, which because of the depression was beginning to be an unbearable burden for the German government. This was the last truly democratic government in Germany until the end of the Second World War.
The long-term health of the Weimar Republic was shaky in that the president was Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934). If there had been a genuine reordering of German society following the collapse of the imperial regime and the rise of a republic, then a bombastic general like Hindenburg would have been cast aside with scorn. Unfortunately, Weimar never really escaped its recent past. The republic had as its leader a dedicated monarchist, who in 1925, prior to running for the office of president, contacted his former emperor in exile in Denmark to ask the emperor’s approval to run for office.
President Hindenburg took the opportunity of the resignation of the Socialist Chancellor to install a more authoritarian government. Hindenburg selected Heinrich Brüning (1885–1970), the leader of a middle-of-the-road Catholic party. Brüning proposed an economic program that would have done little to solve the economic crisis and simply led to increased political opposition by the left and the right. Because Brüning could not achieve a parliamentary majority, he took the terrible step of involving Article 48, an emergency decree within the Weimar Constitution that enabled him to govern under presidential decree.
For the remainder of his long life, Brüning would try to defend his next decision, which was to call for new parliamentary elections in September 1930, just as the economic crisis worsened. Brüning thought the electorate would back him on his austerity measures, while what actually happened was that the two most extreme political parties, the Communists and the Nazis, emerged as the big winners. The election transformed the Nazis from a tiny party with only twelve seats in the Reichstag to a major force holding 102 seats.
Why the Nazis?
The rise of the Nazi Party seems bizarre in hindsight, but made more sense to people who had not yet seen the horror of rampant nationalism in the form of the war and the Holocaust. Many Germans were still powerfully angry about the Treaty of Versailles, which the Nazis denounced as an affront to national pride (and a serious drain on resources). Many early Nazi supporters also believed in the Dolchstosslegenda (stab-in-the back legend) which was the claim that the German army only lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by various hated groups: Jews, Communists, Weimar-Republicans, big businesses, and so on.
Despite their conservatism, the Nazis were also one of the few groups to provide some coherent social support during the depression. While denouncing “Bolshevism,” they championed certain moderate socialist rhetoric (such as increasing workers’ wages and improving the common well-being), provided some support in the form of soup kitchens, and served free beer at political meetings. Most importantly, though, the Nazi Party indulged the people’s desire for blame: The Nazis combined violent hatred of the Communists and the moderate Socialist party with denunciations of international capitalism as a “Jewish conspiracy” bent on war-profiteering and extorting workers, all while telling Germans that they were superior simply by virtue of being German. These positions were self-contradictory nonsense—but very appealing nonetheless.
With such a hostile Reichstag, Brüning continued to govern under Article 48. For the next two years he attempted to implement his austerity program, which only served to deepen the economic crisis. By the spring of 1932, Hindenburg removed Brüning and put in his place Franz von Papen (1879–1969), a wealthy anti-parliamentary conservative. In the elections held in November, the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag with 196 seats, and in January 1933, Hindenburg, despite a certain measure of personal disgust for Hitler, asked him to become chancellor.
It was a remarkable achievement for the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). As a young man, he had gone to Vienna to study at its Academy of Fine Arts, but unfortunately for the history of Europe, Hitler proved to have little talent as an artist and was rejected. It was while living in Vienna that Hitler developed his virulent anti-Semitism, although the roots of his hatred toward Jews are hotly disputed. Because he had little sympathy for the multinational character of the Habsburg Empire when war began in 1914, he volunteered to serve in the German army where he survived a poison gas attack.
In 1919, he joined the German Workers’ Party, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, one of the small extremist groups that formed in the early days of the Weimar Republic. By 1923, he thought the party was strong enough to seize power, so he launched the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, falsely believing that it would set the stage for a revolt throughout Germany. Following this failure he was put on trial but used this opportunity to stage a spirited defense before the court and to gain greater attention for himself and his movement. In prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), outlining his extremist views, along with his desire, shared by Germans of assorted political persuasions, to overturn the Treaty of Versailles.
Following the Beer Hall failure in 1923, Hitler decided that in the future he had to use the existing political structure to achieve power rather than use extraordinary means like a coup. The Nazis, however, were not just a simple political party politely trying to convince the German electorate of the reasonableness of its views. Like Mussolini’s Fascists, the Nazis enlisted a corps of armed thugs to support their political rallies and to disrupt opposing groups’ meetings. This helped lead to an increase in political violence in Weimar, as all political parties had begun to sponsor armed factions; street fighting became endemic in the streets of Berlin and other German cities. Ironically, even though the Nazis often instigated the violence, Hitler had strong appeal as a “law-and-order” candidate who would put an end to the brawls.
When Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933, he rapidly sought to consolidate his power. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire, although to this day it is not entirely clear who set it. The Nazis, who may have set the fire themselves, blamed the Communists for the incident. By claiming that there was a Communist plot against the state, Hitler encouraged the Reichstag to vote to grant him emergency powers, allowing him to eliminate virtually all human rights while granting the executive branch of the government almost total authority. In the last election held in Germany until the end of the Second World War, the Nazis, despite having control over the state, received only 44 percent of the vote. Hitler followed the vote with an Enabling Act, which gave the party emergency powers to govern the state and combined the authority of the chancellor and the president into one with a new non-republican sounding title—the führer (or leader). Finally, by the summer of 1933, Hitler banned all political parties except the Nazis and followed with an attack on the independent trade union movement.
Consolidation of power also meant that Hitler had to work out an arrangement with the one institution within the state that was still a threat—the army. The army was highly concerned about the growing size and power of the S.A., the Nazi political army that had played such an important role in the party’s rise to power. Once Hitler was in power, the S.A. was expendable. In June 1934, Hitler organized the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he murdered his old ally Ernst Röhm (1887–1934), the leader of the S.A., who had wanted to make it the backbone of a new revolutionary army. Following the attack on the S.A., the members of the German army agreed to give their complete loyalty to the new German state and eventually would swear a personal oath to Hitler.
The Nazification of the German state soon proceeded apace. To create support for such a program, the Nazis put a great deal of effort into creating a Ministry of Propaganda under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945). German life had always been chock full of organizations like hiking groups and choral societies. The Nazis did their best to reorganize such groups along lines that the state could control, and huge organizations such as the Hitler Youth were established to indoctrinate the young. For those who refused to accept the new state of affairs, the Nazis organized a ruthlessly efficient police apparatus to silence political opposition and to intimidate anyone who even considered dissenting from the party line.
Western Democracies in Crisis
Woodrow Wilson had promised that the First World War was fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” and for a time it looked as if his vision was accurate as democracies began to sprout throughout Europe in such places as the newly emerging nations of eastern Europe and in formerly monarchical states like Germany. Sadly, this democratic renaissance was to be short lived. By the 1930s, not only had democracy faltered in almost all the new states that had been born out of the Versailles Treaty (with the exception of Czechoslovakia), but it also appeared to be in crisis in western Europe, as France and Spain struggled with contentious political issues that threatened the very existence of parliamentary sovereignty.
Great Britain
Just as in the nineteenth century, Great Britain remained politically stable, though it certainly did not remain stagnant. One significant change was the emergence of the Labour Party, as it supplanted the liberals to become Britain’s second-largest political party. The First World War had revealed fundamental problems within the Liberal Party, which was much more comfortable with the trappings of the Victorian world, as opposed to the age of total war. Labour had achieved prominence by more effectively voicing the concerns of the working man. British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George had encouraged British soldiers and civilians to fight hard for the war effort by promising to make their country after the war a “land fit for heroes.” Unfortunately, unless heroes happen to like high unemployment, urban slums, and a growing number of labor disputes, all of which were endemic in the 1920s and 1930s, they may have been rather disappointed, yet accurate, in thinking this new Britain was much like the old.
France
France had won an incredible victory in the First World War and had achieved such long-term goals as the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine and what she thought was the permanent reduction of the threat posed by Germany. However, just as in Great Britain, the war merely diverted attention from, but did not solve, the tremendous economic and social tensions on the eve of the war. Economically, France did grow in the 1920s, but it could hardly offset the tremendous impact of the Great Depression. The economic crisis helped spur the radicalization of French politics, as groups from the far left and far right gathered support. In February 1934, following a right-wing riot that looked like it was going to shake the French Republic to its core, a number of parties on the center and left began to work together to form a “Popular Front” to block the possibility of a Fascist victory in France as had occurred the previous year in Germany.
This “Popular Front” proved to be successful in May 1936, when a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals (the name belies the fact that this was a center-left party) won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. They selected the leader of the Socialist Party, Léon Blum (1872–1950), to be Prime Minister. The new government worked to solve some of the labor issues that had plagued France for decades. In June, they put through the Matignon Agreement, allowing workers to collectively bargain with employers, reducing the work week to forty hours, and granting the right to fully paid vacations. Attention to social problems, however, had to be delayed, as France had to now grapple with an issue that challenged the very existence of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War.
In the past few chapters, you have read a lot about the twists and turns of the French government. Let’s review all of that in the following handy chart:
Brief History of French Governments from the Ancien Régime until WWII
| Bourbon Monarchy | |
| Constitutional Monarchy | (1791) |
| Based off of Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen | |
| First Republic | (Sept 1792) |
| Reign of Terror | |
| Jacobins | |
| National Convention | (1792–1795) |
| Directory | (1795–1799) |
| Oversaw France’s first bicameral legislature | |
| Marked by partisanship stemming from the Revolution | |
| Consulate | (1799–1804) |
| Napoleon’s coup d’état | |
| First Empire | (1804–1814) |
| Think of the painting of Napoleon as Emperor | |
| Ends with Hundred Days after escape from Elba | |
| Bourbon Restoration | (1814–1848) |
| Louis XVIII | (1814–1824) |
| Charles X | (1824–1830) |
| Experiences tide of revolutions common in Europe in 1830 | |
| Bourgeoisie tired of his absolutist rule | |
| Louis-Philippe | (1830–1848) |
| Takes power in bourgeoisie-led July Revolution | |
| Reign is called the July Monarchy (bourgeoisie friendly) | |
| Class tension—Workers call for a Representative Democracy | |
| Second Republic | (1848–1852) |
| Workers revolt in June (June Uprising) | |
| Louis-Napoleon elected leader (calls himself Napoleon III) | |
| Second Empire | (1852–1870) |
| Move to empire is approved on referendum | |
| Otto von Bismarck eventually removes Napoleon III from the throne | |
| Franco-Prussian War | |
| Third Republic | (1870–1940) |
| Strong bicameral parliament, weak president | |
| Conflict with Catholic Church | |
| Paris Commune | (1871) |
| Radical movement arose during the vacuum created by Franco-Prussian War | |
The Spanish Civil War
Spain had become a parliamentary democracy only in 1931, following the fall of the Spanish monarchy in that year. The first elections in the Spanish republic brought about a victory for a coalition of liberals and Socialists. Unfortunately, the problems facing Spain were extremely severe, and the new government had trouble finding solutions. Many landless farm laborers waited in vain as the government failed to implement a promised land reform that would break up the vast estates of the rich. Increasingly, the failings of the government created more radical sentiments among the workers, which was matched by equally aggressive action from the parties of the far right.
In February 1936, a Popular Front coalition of the leftist parties—created to avert what they felt was a threat from Spanish Fascists—won a narrow electoral victory. This government attempted to achieve what the earlier socialist government could not, including significant reforms such as land redistribution. They still did not operate quickly enough to satisfy the disaffected masses who seized land and factories. This failure to maintain order was used by the far right to stage a coup to overturn the government.
In the summer of 1936, a group of army officers under the leadership of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) took control of large parts of Spain. Their belief that the republic would simply collapse proved to be false, as republican loyalists bravely organized to defend the state against the nationalist insurgents. Spain was swept into an incredibly brutal civil war, which soon brought about the participation of German and Italian support for the nationalists.
The fascist states of Germany and Italy were interested in testing out their new armaments, thus leading to one of the most brutal events in the war. On market day, in the city of Guernica, German and Italian planes bombed and strafed the civilian population. Guernica was not a military target in the least; it was targeted simply to instill fear among republican supporters. Although the Fascists willingly offered their support to those on the Spanish right, France and Great Britain refused to come to the aid of their fellow democracy. Instead of assistance, they promoted a nonintervention policy, which meant that the Spanish Loyalists had to make a Mephistophelean pact with the Soviet Union, whereby the Soviets would provide desperately needed arms in exchange for Spanish gold. Because of Soviet support, the Communists, who were initially a small faction on the Spanish left, began to play the preeminent role on the republican side.
Tragically, the Communists, having received their marching orders from Stalin, put as much effort into destroying their allies on the left as they did to defeating the nationalists. George Orwell wrote a fascinating firsthand account of these events in his story Homage to Catalonia, which details how the Communists destroyed the anarchist movement in Catalonia in June 1937. After reading Orwell, you will not be surprised to learn that by 1939, the nationalists had captured Madrid and triumphed over the republic.
The Road to the Second World War
From the very beginning of his political career, Hitler had made clear his desire to overturn the Versailles Treaty. Once in power, he set about to keep that promise. In 1935, he openly began the rearmament of Germany, something that was prohibited by Versailles. Seeing that France and Britain did not respond to such an act of provocation, in the following year, the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland. While the French contemplated an aggressive response to this act, they knew that since they lacked British support, they would have to act unilaterally, and so they did nothing. Rather than satisfying Hitler, these steps convinced him of the weakness of the democracies, so he continued with his plans.
Germany Invades Austria
The very first sentence of Mein Kampf states Hitler’s desire to absorb Austria into the larger German Reich. In March 1938, this became a reality as German troops moved into Vienna. Despite postwar claims by the Austrians that they were the first victims of Nazi aggression, the Anschluss was welcomed by a majority of Austrians who celebrated by wildly greeting Hitler on his arrival in the city and by attacking their Jewish neighbors.
Germany Invades Czechoslovakia
Hitler next set his sights on Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was the singular success story of eastern Europe; it was a thriving democracy, had a strong industrial base, and a relatively strong army. It was burdened with nationality problems, most particularly the animosity toward the state from the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans who lived in the western part of the nation. France had assured the Czechoslovak state that in the event of German aggression it would come to its aid. Unfortunately, these assurances, which also included guarantees for its security from the Soviet Union, ultimately came to nothing.
Great Britain Tries to Appease Germany
The British eventually settled on a policy known as Appeasement. In 1937, Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) became British Prime Minister and head of a conservative government. Chamberlain recognized that events in 1936 had been detrimental to British interests. These events included the German occupation of the Rhineland, the creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, and even the Olympic games that had been held that year in Berlin, which were a propaganda victory for Germany. Chamberlain was not a fool, and he certainly had little sympathy for the brutality of the Nazi state, but he believed that it was impossible for Great Britain to fully rearm against the combined strength of Germany and Italy. As a result, he wanted to work out some sort of understanding with either Mussolini or Hitler.
Appeasement began with British recognition of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia. The British did nothing when Hitler annexed Austria. However, the policy of appeasement would stand a real test over the question of Czechoslovakia, which Germany threatened to invade unless the Sudetenland, the western part of the Czechoslovak state that was largely inhabited by ethnic Germans, was turned over to the Reich. In a radio address during this crisis, Chamberlain said it was “fantastic and incredible to be involved in a war because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” In September, with Europe on the verge of war, Chamberlain flew to Munich to attend a four-power summit with France, Italy, and Germany to discuss the future of Czechoslovakia, whose leaders were not even invited to attend. At this summit, the powers signed the Munich Agreement, which led to the transfer of all Sudenten territories to Germany. In return, Hitler promised to respect the sovereignty of what remained of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain returned home to London and was met by a huge crowd that roared with joy as Chamberlain announced that there would be “peace in our time.” Rather than peace, his actions led to destruction in Czechoslovakia one year later when the Germans ignored the Munich Agreement and seized most of what remained of the nation.
Before we are too quick to criticize the appeasers, we need to remember several things.
• First, politicians such as Chamberlain saw it as almost a sacred responsibility to remove the specter of war from Europe. The First World War was still vividly remembered by all who had lived through it.
• Also, from the British point of view, the Versailles Treaty was unjust, and part of what Hitler wanted appeared to be self-determination for nationalities, an idea that the respected President Wilson had promoted in his Fourteen Points.
• Finally, with hindsight, it is clear that Hitler never intended to maintain any of his promises. It may be unfair to have expected that the appeasers would have been able to foresee Hitler’s intentions. In 1938, few individuals in Great Britain other than Winston Churchill fully understood that Hitler had to be stopped at all costs.
Germany and the Soviet Union Invade Poland
Following the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s attention was now drawn to the next contentious area—Poland. The Polish nation born out of Versailles included land that had once been part of the German Empire. To allow Poles access to the sea, the new nation was given a strip of territory that split East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Now that he realized Hitler’s intentions following the complete occupation of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain was determined to stop further German aggression. He worked out an arrangement with France whereby the two nations would respond in the event that Poland’s borders were threatened.
At the same time, the Soviet Union was inquiring as to whether the British and French would consider forming a military alliance directed against the Germans. The British and French rebuffed the Soviets in part because, after Stalin’s purge of the officer corps, they questioned the effectiveness of the Soviet military, and they found little evidence that Stalin was any more a man of his word than Hitler. Once Stalin realized that he was getting nowhere with the British and French, he announced on August 22, 1939—to the shock of the rest of the world—that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact. The way was now open for Germany to invade Poland, while the Soviets were able to seize eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, all lands that Russia had lost in the First World War.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939–1945)
The war began on September 1, 1939, with an attack on Poland. The Poles fought bravely; however, the Germans had learned critical lessons from the First World War and practiced blitzkrieg warfare, swift attacks using tanks and other highly mobile units, supported by warplanes. Within a month, the Polish army was routed and the British and French forces to the west maintained their defensive positions.
Over the winter of 1939–1940 little warfare occurred, earning the time period the nickname the “Phony War.” This lull came to a shattering end in April 1940 when the Germans attacked Norway and Denmark to secure necessary iron ore supplies for Germany. In May, the Germans followed up these successes with an invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands before launching their ultimate goal, an attack on France. In six short weeks, the French army, considered after the First World War to be the finest in the world, was destroyed.
The Fall of France
Part of the problem for the French was that in 1940, their hearts were just not in the war. The blitzkrieg attacks in the east and the quick defeat of the Scandinavian countries bred tremendous pessimism among the French political and military leadership. The French were still following a military strategy that was tied to the way the First World War had been fought. During the interwar period, they built the Maginot Line, a series of seemingly impregnable defenses to protect their soldiers during what they automatically assumed would be another war of stagnant positions. The Germans simply bypassed the fortifications, which were not extended to the Belgian frontier, and encircled the French armies. The British, seeing that France was about to fall, staged a heroic retreat from the Belgian beaches at Dunkirk, in which every available British ship, no matter the size, was used to take the British army back to Great Britain so that it might fight another day.
Following the military debacle, a new government was formed in France under the elderly Marshal Pétain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun. Pétain had been a bit of a defeatist in the First World War, and those pessimistic tendencies rose to the forefront once again as he decided to pull France out of the war and use the opportunity to create a more authoritarian French government. Pétain’s Vichy regime brought to an end the Third Republic that was blamed for France’s defeat.
Although almost the entire officer corps had been defeatists, one charismatic general, Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), arrived in London and from there issued a call for French forces in the colonies to form a new French army to retrieve the national honor. Vichy authorities immediately labeled de Gaulle a traitor and began to happily assist the Germans. Nevertheless, a free French force did flourish under de Gaulle’s leadership. On French soil, the Maquis, or French resistance, found itself fighting against both the Germans and against the Vichy state.
Germany Against Great Britain
Hitler always believed that the British shared similar traits with the German Aryans. Because of such foolish racial theories, he thought that the British would see the folly of their ways after the fall of France and make peace with Germany. Great Britain, however, was gearing up for what would be the most dangerous moment in its history. Fortunately for the survival of the nation, it had an extraordinary leader in Winston Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Churchill committed the nation, which he inspired through a series of stirring speeches, to continue the war no matter what may come. In the House of Commons, Churchill declared, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and that the only goal for Britain was to “wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.” In response to Britain’s refusal to sue for peace, Hitler decided to attack.
The Battle of Britain was not the one-sided struggle that is often portrayed. It is true that the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had many more planes and trained pilots. But the British had radar, which had been developed at Cambridge University and could detect oncoming German attacks. The British Spitfires and Hurricanes were better planes than the German Messerschmits. Unbeknownst to the Germans, the British had also cracked the German secret military code. Furthermore, there was no comparison in terms of military leadership. Hitler was convinced that he was a military genius following the rapid fall of Poland and France, although fortunately for the eventual triumph of the Allies, that was clearly not the case. The German air force was led by the incompetent morphine addict Hermann Göring (1893–1946), who, after a token group of British planes dropped bombs on Berlin, decided to end the effective raids that had been staged on British air bases and directed the Luftwaffe to attack British cities. This strategy created tremendous suffering in the cities (the Blitz), and it also allowed the Royal Air Force (RAF) time to recover. By the end of September 1940, Hitler decided to drop the plan to invade Britain and move on to his ultimate dream, the defeat of the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust, the slaughter of six million Jews, did not begin suddenly, nor is it clear at what point the Nazis decided to destroy European Jewry. Anti-Semitism had always been at the heart of Nazi ideology. Soon after taking power, the Nazis implemented the Nuremberg Laws, depriving Jews of citizenship and forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing whenever they left their homes. Marriage and sex between Jews and Gentiles were also forbidden. While some Jews left Germany immediately after these restrictions were implemented, many refused to leave, thinking that things could not get any worse. Nevertheless, the following years would witness only a slow, steady decline for German Jews as they were forced out of all professions and had their stores boycotted and property confiscated. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” so called because of the resonating sound of shattered glass from Jewish stores and homes that rung out throughout that night. The events of that night proved that the Germans were interested in eliminating the Jews, as several hundred people were killed and 30,000 Jews were shipped to concentration camps.
One sign that demonstrates the Nazi obsession with the so-called “Jewish Question” is that when the Russians were putting up stiff resistance and Germany had not been able to defeat them, the Nazis still chose to direct resources that could have been used in the war effort to exterminate European Jewry instead. The conquest of Poland had placed the largest concentration of Jews in the world directly under German control. To deal with them, as well as with the large numbers of Jews from the other conquered territories, Hitler had his top lieutenants organize the “Final Solution.” By the end of 1941, 1 million Jews were slaughtered, most in mobile vans poisoned by carbon monoxide gas or machine-gunned by specially designated S.S. troops. This was not efficient enough for the Germans, however, and so in January 1942, the top leadership met in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to plan a more efficient slaughter.
The Nazis organized a camp system throughout Poland, including concentration camps, where Jews from around occupied Europe were gathered, and extermination camps, the most notorious of these being Auschwitz. Upon arrival in the camps, the prisoners would be subject to a sorting process, where S.S. doctors, including the notorious Doctor Mengele, selected who would be sent to work camps and who would be sent immediately to die in the gas chambers. Besides Jews, the camps also contained “gypsies” (or Roma as they prefer to be called), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Russian prisoners of war, Communists, and others considered by the Nazis to be “undesirables.” Approximately 7 million such individuals were slaughtered, in addition to 6 million Jews.
How Much Did the Allies Know?
There has always been a debate over what the Allies knew about the Holocaust and what they could have done to stop the German death machine. Although the S.S. took every precaution to hide the Final Solution, which was partly why the Nazis chose Poland as the site of the camps, word of the terror reached the West right from the beginning. Such reports were initially doubted: Who could believe such monstrosities were taking place? The sheer bulk of reports, many from eyewitnesses to the slaughter, however, made it clear that an unprecedented event in human history was taking place. The debate on what could have been done will never be resolved. Many believe that attacks on the German rail network used to bring Jews to the camps could have possibly been of help, although Allied military leaders always claimed that the planes that could have been used for such raids were needed for more immediate military targets.
One reason why two-thirds of European Jews were so effectively rounded up for slaughter was that the Nazis never lacked help among the conquered peoples of Europe to assist in this task. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Israel, has a special row of trees in honor of those Gentiles who risked their lives to help rescue Jews; however, a forest would be needed to represent the sheer number of people who aided the Germans in implementing the Holocaust. In France, Vichy officials rounded up Jews and turned them over to the Nazis before the Germans even asked for their help. In the Ukraine, Croatia, and in other parts of eastern Europe, the local population set off on their own initiative to exterminate their Jewish neighbors. Anti-Semitic feelings obviously ran deep throughout European society in the early twentieth century.
The Turning of the Tide
The Second World War had three critical turning points. The Battle of Britain was certainly one, as was the eventual entry of the United States into the war. The third turning point may be the most important of all—Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Germany Invades the Soviet Union
Initially, the attack went according to plan, as German forces drove deep into Russian territory, catching the Soviet forces completely unprepared, even though Stalin had been warned by numerous sources, including his own intelligence agency, that such an attack was imminent. By the end of 1942, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and Leningrad, but both cities were held owing to the Russian forces’ dogged defense and the extraordinary sacrifices of the citizens of the Soviet Union. Because of their common enemy—Germany—Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union were to form a rather unlikely alliance that would not only destroy the Third Reich but also shape the postwar world.
The War in North Africa
By 1941, the war had become a global conflict. The Italians under Mussolini had entered the war as allies of Germany just as France was about to collapse. The Italians also extended the war to North Africa, as they attempted to push the British out of Egypt. The Italians were hard-pressed to achieve this goal, forcing the Germans to come to their aid. The Germans had one of their best officers, Erwin Rommel (1891–1944), the “Desert Fox,” positioned in this theater of the war. For a while he met with remarkable success, eventually proceeding within sixty miles of the Egyptian city of Alexandria. However, at the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, a British army under the leadership of General Montgomery (1887–1976) pushed the German and Italian forces back to Tunisia.
U.S. Involvement
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in 1941, the United States was involved in the conflict with the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). The entry of the United States into the war sparked a new energy to the war in the west, as the United States landed troops in Africa and joined with the British in pushing back the Germans and Italians. By 1943, the Allies had pushed the last of the Axis forces out of Africa and sent troops to Italy, the “soft underbelly” of the Axis. By 1943, Italy was knocked out of the war, although in many ways, the Italian campaign did not have a huge impact on the eventual course of the war.
Following a meeting between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in Tehran in November 1943, the decision was made that the British and Americans should stage an invasion of western Europe from Great Britain. On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the D-Day invasion. While another year of brutal fighting was yet to be experienced, the landing of the Allied forces in Europe and the Russian counterattack following the lifting of the siege of Leningrad marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.
On May 8, 1945, a week after the suicide of Hitler, Germany surrendered unconditionally. Japan had entered the Second World War with the goal of creating a vast empire in the Pacific where it would be able to exploit the natural resources of the conquered lands and use these territories as a market for Japanese manufactured goods. Such dreams of hegemony over the Pacific ended violently with the dropping of the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which was followed two days later by a second atomic bomb, this time on the city of Nagasaki. On August 14, the Japanese surrendered (signing the formal surrender document on September 2), thus bringing to an end the bloodiest conflict in human history.
The Aftermath
The Second World War was even more staggering in its destructiveness than the First World War. Civilian casualties—rather than military deaths—made up the majority of the 50 to 60 million people who lost their lives during the conflict. For the Soviet Union alone, although the precise numbers remain the subject of debate and will ultimately never be fully known, losses were upwards of 25 million. Cities across the continent were leveled as brutal attacks on civilian targets, initiated when the Germans bombed Warsaw in 1939 and then followed up in places such as Rotterdam and London, were eventually thrown back on the Germans, with 50,000 killed in the fire bombing of Dresden and with almost every German target of any military, economic, or administrative value laying in ruin. In Berlin and in other German cities, one found the Truemmerfrauen, or “rubble ladies,” who in the absence of men and machinery began the slow process of removing the wreckage by hand.
In 1945, it seemed as if all of Europe was on the move. The roads were clogged with displaced persons, including Jews who had survived the death camps and couldn’t go back to their homes but also seemingly had no place to go. In many cases, Jews would live for the next several years under difficult conditions in camps the British set up in places such as Cyprus, unable to follow their dream and go to Palestine.
Russian POWs returned to the Soviet Union and immediately faced rearrest under the orders of Stalin, who thought their failure to die in battle might be an indication they were spies or had seen too much of life in the West to be satisfied with conditions in the Soviet Union. This was in spite of the fact that Soviet POWs had been treated with incredible brutality by the Germans, who saw them as subhuman.
Millions of Germans also poured west, fleeing from the forces of the Soviet Union, who were extracting their revenge through mass rape. Other Germans were forced from their homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as the civilians in those countries refused to countenance living with ethnic Germans they blamed for the start of the war.
At the end of the First World War, cries of “Hang the Kaiser!” could be heard in the capitals of the victors, but in the end, nothing was done to punish those individuals who were blamed for the war. However, by 1945, with the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the realization of the unspeakable scale of the slaughter, it was agreed by the Allies that Germany would not only have to undergo a process of denazification, but that the perpetrators of these crimes would have to be punished as well.
The new legal concept of “crimes against humanity” was applied to the defendants who took part in the first Nuremberg Trial that began on November 20, 1945, and ended on October 1, 1946. With the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels, the leading Nazi to stand trial was Hermann Göring, who escaped the hangman’s noose by swallowing poison that was smuggled into his cell, while eleven others were sentenced to death. Other trials were held for leading industrialists, military commanders, judges, and those involved in the Final Solution. Many Nazis escaped justice by fleeing to the Middle East and South America, such as the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, while some, such as Gestapo officer Adolf Eichmann, were eventually brought to justice. Questions arose over what to do about the rank-and-file Nazi party members, and although millions were investigated, relatively few received punishment. By June 1946, the Americans transferred responsibility for denazification to the German legal authorities, who quietly brought the process to a close.
In the years following the war, West Germans would refer to 1945 as “Zero Hour,” marking the darkest point in their national history. Many commentators thought that not only Germany but all of Europe would remain on its back, with minimal economic development and the renewed threat of war. Remarkably, Europe staged a thorough recovery over the next twenty years and in the process transformed the lives of people throughout the region and ushered in an age of political and social stability.
EUROPEAN STABILITY
The most important factor in European affairs in the period after 1945 was the emergence of political, economic, and social stability. Even while the war was raging, Allied statesmen began to think about ways of rebuilding Europe and creating lasting peace.
In 1941, President Roosevelt put forward the Atlantic Charter, advocating the establishment of an international organization to replace the ineffective League of Nations. Four years later, this dream became a reality when delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco to formally create the United Nations. To ensure the participation of the United States, whose nonparticipation in the League of Nations doomed that body to failure, the new organization was to be based in New York. In July 1945, the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement (with others signing onto it in October), indicating that the United States was not going to return to its interwar isolationism and would instead remain committed to European recovery and stability.
Besides the significance of America’s commitment to European affairs, other reasons help account for the development of stability in Europe. The level of destruction brought by Germany and Italy in a war they initiated and the extent of their atrocities against civilians led to a discrediting of Fascism as a political movement. Revanchism, a French word for revenge and often applied to the desire to regain so-called lost territories, was a major factor in destabilizing European affairs during the interwar period, as many nations—besides the most prominent example of Germany—sought to regain territories lost in the peace treaties following the Great War. In part due to the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, revanchism became the cry of fringe groups in the postwar period rather than the stated policy of national governments.
Probably the most important factor in explaining postwar European stability was the emergence of democratic governments that were able to carry out policies that dramatically improved the economic conditions for their citizenry. Class conflict, which had been a destabilizing factor in the 1920s and 1930s, was replaced by a new social contract in which workers, in exchange for giving up their most extreme demands, received promises of full employment, living wages, and social welfare.
THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR
There have been three major schools of thought on the causes of the Cold War.
1. For the Traditionalists (a position that emerged in the earliest days of the Cold War), the Soviet Union, under the brutal dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, was fundamentally responsible for the development of hostilities between the East and West.
2. Beginning in the 1960s (in part a reflection of the challenges that were being posed to all forms of established authority and anger over the Vietnam War), a new school of Cold War thought, known as Revisionism, began to appear. For the Revisionists, fear of a postwar economic downturn (as was the case after 1918) meant that, in 1945, the United States was not seeking to make the world safe for democracy but was instead seeking to make it safe for American trade.
3. By the 1980s, a third position began to emerge, that of the Post-Revisionists, which perhaps not surprisingly took a middle ground. For the Post-Revisionists, even if the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the responsibility, the United States was more active than the Traditionalists might argue.
In many ways, the views of historians have not been altered all that fundamentally by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening, if at times tentatively, of their archives. What is often today referred to as the neo-Traditionalist point of view is currently in the ascendancy, although one can easily find in scholarly books and journals writings reflecting the other two traditions.
One can make the argument that the Cold War rivalry was largely inevitable. In an often-quoted passage, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, wrote,
There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans…Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.
When de Tocqueville wrote that passage in 1835, he certainly wasn’t thinking about ideological differences, but such differences did emerge dating back to the establishment of the communist state in 1917, which was followed by limited Allied involvement in the Russian Civil War. Even during the war, although cooperation certainly existed, mistrust played a role in the relationship between the Soviet Union and its Western allies, ranging from Soviet anger over the delay in opening a second front to fears that the British and Americans were seeking to negotiate a separate peace with the Germans.
The Yalta Conference on the Future of Germany
Once the war came to an end and cooperation was no longer necessary for victory, mutual antagonism came out, beginning with the debate over the future of Germany. At Yalta, the Big Three agreed to the temporary division of Germany, and in the aftermath of the war, Germany was divided into four zones (France was given a zone at the insistence of the British), with an Allied Control Council to make joint decisions. None of the Allies apparently wanted or expected dismemberment. Nevertheless, Yalta had provided each of the Allies with the opportunity to effect transformation in their own zone, with the end result that the Soviet Union would obviously transform their zone in a far different manner than the Western Allies. Ultimately, Germany would become a Cold War showcase for the rival ideologies.
The method chosen by the Soviet Union to gain control over political life in its zone was the subversion of a democratic structure it pretended to support. The Soviets began in their zone by allowing for the reestablishment of all non-right-wing parties that had existed in the Weimar Republic. Walter Ulbricht, the Soviet-selected leader of the German Communist Party (KPD), thought that because most Germans didn’t want to go back to the world of Weimar and its capitalist crises, there would be genuine support for the KPD. The problem was that mass rape, dismantling of factories to be sent back to the Soviet Union, and the failure of land reform led to anger at the Soviets and their clients in the KPD. Seeing that no groundswell of electoral support would be forthcoming, Ulbricht brought about the forced merger of the KPD and the more popular Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1946 and created a one-party state, a technique the Soviets were to find useful as they sought to gain control over other governments in Eastern Europe.
While these political developments were taking place, tensions were increasing over the issue of reparations. Neither the Americans nor the British were diametrically opposed to reparations, and an agreement had been reached at Yalta with an amount set at 20 billion dollars. At Potsdam, further negotiations led to the agreement that each occupying power would collect reparations in its own zone, with the hard-pressed Soviets receiving 25 percent from the amount collected by the other three.
The problem was that the Western Allies began to fear that carrying out a reparations program would leave the German economy prostrate, with the British and American public left paying the bill to feed the Germans. Even President Truman had been shaken by what he saw when he traveled to Germany for the Potsdam conference and noted, “Unless we do what we can to help, we may lose next winter what we won at such terrible cost last spring.” On his own initiative, in May 1946, General Lucius Clay, the commander of the American zone, ended the collection of reparations, which was soon to be followed by the other two Western Allies, which meant that goods stopped flowing to the Soviet Union.
Increasing Tensions Outside of Europe
Tensions were also increasing between the Americans and Soviets in regions outside of Europe. Back in 1941, the Soviets and British jointly divided and occupied Iran, with an agreement that they would both leave at the end of the war. In 1945, the British promptly left, but the Soviets refused and demanded oil concessions. When Truman heard that Soviet tanks were heading to the capital of Tehran, he sent warships into the Persian Gulf, and Stalin responded by removing his troops.
Stalin also tried to intimidate Turkey, which was neutral in the war, into granting the Soviets naval bases along the straits to give the Soviet fleet access to the Mediterranean, something Russia had long desired. To show the Turks he was serious, Stalin massed troops along their common border, and it was only when he understood that the United States would fight to protect Turkey that he backed down and withdrew his forces.
American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union was in a state of flux in the immediate postwar period. In part, this reflected the replacement of Franklin Roosevelt, who felt that his good wartime relationship with Stalin could serve as the basis of postwar ties, with the no-nonsense Harry S. Truman, who saw Stalin in a more wary light.
American policy was also influenced by the writings of George Kennan, an official in the State Department. In 1947, Kennan wrote what became known as the Long Telegram, in which he indicated that in our relationship with the Soviets, we were dealing with a state that viewed us as an ideological enemy and would never seek to find the means for coexistence. In this and in articles that appeared under the pseudonym “X” in the journal Foreign Affairs, Kennan became the architect of the policy of Containment, in which our goal needed to be the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
Containment and the Creation of NATO
Containment as an actual policy was first tested in Greece, where a Communist-led insurgency was fighting against the newly reestablished Greek government. Great Britain, which had assumed a watchdog position in Greece at the end of the war, informed the United States in 1947 that it lacked the economic resources to continue to support the Greek government. Seeing this as a major Soviet attempt to gain control over a strategically important nation (even though Soviet aid to the Greek Communists would later be shown to be quite minimal), Truman went before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, and stated in what is known as the Truman Doctrine that, “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” He then proceeded to ask for money, which eventually reached the amount of $400 million to be given to the Greek and Turkish governments.
Containment was also going to figure into one of the most important decisions made by the United States in the postwar period. Rejecting George Washington’s admonition in his farewell address to stay clear of permanent alliances with foreign powers, the United States decided to counter directly the threat posed by the millions of Soviet soldiers based in Eastern Europe by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Joining the United States as initial members were Great Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Norway, with Greece and Turkey joining the alliance in 1952.
SOVIET DOMINANCE OVER EASTERN EUROPE
In 1944, seeing that Soviet troops were advancing through Eastern Europe, Winston Churchill traveled to Moscow to meet with Stalin. As Churchill recalled years later, after pushing a piece of paper in front of Stalin, “There was a slight pause. Then he [Stalin] took his blue pen and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.” This document became known as the Percentages Agreement, because it divided the various nations of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence based on percentages, with for example, Soviet influence being at 90 percent in Romania and only 50 percent in Hungary. The agreement was seriously flawed, as Poland was left out of it entirely. The United States refused to accept the agreement.
With the war in Europe winding down, Stalin expected to be able control the future of those areas liberated by the Red Army. With the enormity of Soviet losses in the war in mind and unwilling to see Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter as a source of future peace, Stalin wanted to establish a protective shield to protect the Soviet Union from any future invasion from the west. Meeting in Yalta, on the Crimean Sea, the British and Americans were able to get the Soviets to accept a high-minded Declaration of Liberated Europe, stating that in those countries that were Axis or liberated, governments were to be formed that were “broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population” and that free elections were to be held at the earliest possible time.
The Iron Curtain
Churchill rushing to get an agreement signed in in 1944 reveals his growing concern that Eastern Europe would become dominated by the Soviet Union and that there was not that much that the Western Allies could do to block this development. Several years later, it was Churchill who delivered his famous speech at Westminster College and used a metaphor that would represent Soviet control over Eastern Europe when he decried the fact that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Poland
On the question of Poland, Stalin was going to continue with his plans to establish a government dominated by Polish Communists; the only concession he granted was that an undetermined number of anticommunist Poles based in London would be added to this provisional government. This aspect of the Yalta Conference has proven to be very controversial, with Roosevelt being accused of selling out the Poles. The tragic reality was that the Soviets had troops on the ground in Poland, and there was little that the United States and Great Britain could do about it short of war. There was going to have to be a price for having the Soviet Union for an ally against Germany.
When the promised elections in Poland were finally held under conditions of intimidation in 1947, the Communists received 80 percent and proceeded to bring any sign of a multiparty state to an end. The Soviets understood that they would have to use force to maintain Communist control over Poland because they were hated in that nation—a loathing that grew worse when the role of the Soviets was revealed in the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the forests of Katyn at the start of the war.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe
Nevertheless, in the rest of Eastern Europe, the Soviets hoped that control could be achieved through less violent means. The Soviet Union seemingly had a number of advantages in this goal, including the economic and social failure of the states of Eastern Europe during the interwar period (with the exception of Czechoslovakia). This meant that few were advocating a return to the politics of the past, although in most of Eastern Europe, the Soviets were viewed as liberators from the horrors of German dominance. With the exception of Poland, the Soviet Union initially tried to establish “People’s Democracies” in Eastern Europe. For the Communists, this was a go-slow program, with governments that were more proletarian than in the bourgeois West but were still not ready for a full-fledged Communist system as found in the Soviet Union.
In many ways, the push for tighter control over Eastern Europe came about in reaction to the offer of Marshall Plan money to all the nations of Europe. Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a threat to informal Soviet control over countries like Hungary or Czechoslovakia, because by taking the money, those countries would automatically be drawn toward the capitalist West, so Stalin moved to assert more direct control. In Hungary, the Communists practiced “salami” tactics, where intimidation and false plots against non-Communist political leaders sliced them away from the body politic. Using such tactics, the Hungarian Communist Party forced its competitor, the Smallholders’ Party, out of existence by 1948 and in the following year won a tainted election with 95 percent of the vote.
Czechoslovakia
In Czechoslovakia, the situation was different, because in the immediate postwar period, the government was dominated by men like President Eduard Benes, who although a non-Communist understood that it would be necessary to maintain a pro-Soviet foreign policy if Czechoslovakia were to retain its national independence. Also, the Czechs were more favorably disposed toward the Soviet Union, whom they gratefully saw as liberators, while feeling they didn’t owe anything to the West, which had sold them out at Munich in 1938. This balancing act failed in the wake of Czech desire to accept badly needed Marshall Plan monies. To put pressure on Benes’s government, the Czech Communists formed a “People’s Militia,” which intimidated Benes into forming a new government dominated by Communists.
When the body of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, was found shattered outside his window—either a suicide or a murder victim—it was clear that a multiparty Czechoslovak state was coming to an end. The Social Democrats were forcibly absorbed into the Communist Party, and in controlled elections in May 1948, the Communists won a complete victory and proceeded to set up a Soviet-style state.
Yugoslavia
The major exception to Soviet control over Eastern Europe took place in Yugoslavia. Initially, Yugoslavian resistance was based on a broad alliance against the brutal Croatian puppet government established by the Germans. As the war continued, however, a civil war broke out among the partisan groups with the Communists, led by Josip Tito, fighting against the royalist Chetniks. The civil war ended with the triumph of Tito’s Communists, but Stalin never trusted Tito, in part because of the assistance he received during the war from the British and Americans, as well as the fact that Stalin never liked indigenous Communist movements that he couldn’t directly control. Relations between the two states remained poor in the ensuing years, and by 1948, a formal break took place. Although Tito became the West’s favorite Communist due to his independent foreign policy, at home he maintained a brutal, communist-style police state.
THE END OF IMPERIALISM
The British had hoped to maintain their vast empire following the war. The United States, however, was extremely reluctant to allow this, and Great Britain, which was dependent on American loans, was forced to concede the point. The beginning of decolonization took place on August 15, 1947, when India declared independence, initiating a domino effect throughout the rest of the Empire.
Israel
In 1947, the British announced that they were withdrawing from Palestine, leaving the United Nations to determine its fate. Demands for a Jewish homeland had grown louder following the Holocaust, and Arabic nationalist sentiment also had increased. In response, the United Nations agreed to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab homelands. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded, but it was immediately attacked by its Arab neighbors. Surprisingly, the small Jewish state pushed back its enemies and the proposed Arab Palestinian state never left the drawing boards.
Egypt and Africa
Great Britain maintained significant influence in Egypt, even though the latter had been an independent nation since 1922. This began to change when Abdul Nasser (1918–1970) became president. In 1956, he announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, which the British still controlled. In response, Britain, France, and Israel planned a surprise attack on Egypt. The immediate outcry from the American and Soviet governments made it quite clear to Britain and France exactly who were the dominant powers in this postwar world. They bowed to the American and Soviet demands to withdraw.
Soon after, the British saw the writing on the wall, and they began the process of decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1957, the nation of Ghana declared its independence from Great Britain, and in the ensuing years Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed Ghana’s lead. Because these territories all contained few British settlers, independence came about without too much trouble. In Rhodesia, on the other hand, in 1965, the large number of British settlers formed their own white-supremacist government and declared their independence from Britain. Not until 1980 would Africans win control over that land, which they renamed Zimbabwe.
Indonesia, Vietnam, and Algeria
For nations such as France and the Netherlands that had a less-than-sterling military record in the Second World War, holding on to their colonies became an important part of restoring national honor. The Dutch maintained a costly and ultimately unwinnable struggle in the East Indies to keep the land they had first occupied in the seventeenth century. By 1949, the Netherlands reluctantly agreed to recognize Indonesian independence.
France almost ripped itself apart in its attempt to hold on to Algeria. This followed a bitter loss in Indochina (Vietnam), where a nationalist movement under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) fought first against the Japanese during the Second World War and then against the French, as the latter attempted to restore its colonial authority. By 1954, France realized it was an impossible task and agreed to divide Vietnam into two states: a northern Communist-led nation and a republic in the south dominated by the United States.
Although the French could accept the loss of Indochina, Algeria was different; it had been a French possession since 1830 and more than a million native French lived in the territory. France almost erupted in civil war over the Algerian question in 1958, until de Gaulle took the helm of the French government and used his immense prestige four years later to grant Algerian independence.
THE CREATION OF A EUROPEAN UNION
In the aftermath of the war, there were several factors that contributed to the goal of establishing greater European cooperation. For the French in particular, pan-European cooperation would provide a means for keeping an eye on its traditional enemy, Germany. There was also a growing sense that economic rationalization and cooperation were needed to end wasteful competition and ease tensions between nations. Additionally, concern over the Soviet Union, which led to military cooperation through the establishment of NATO, aided the cause of European unity.
The first stage in this process took place in the realm of economic cooperation, with the establishment of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which had the task of handling the money provided by the United States through the Marshall Plan. The United States made it clear when providing the money that it did not want to see it used to revive unprofitable industries in order to salvage national pride, and the United States insisted that Europeans use the money in a cooperative manner. The OEEC also began the initial work on lowering tariffs and eliminating trade barriers among those states receiving assistance.
The next development was the creation in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The ECSC combined and administered the steel and coal resources of its member states: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. The main architect of the ECSC, Frenchman Robert Schuman, stated that one byproduct of this form of economic cooperation was that “any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” The ECSC also provided certain models that were important for the future development of European unity, such as the establishment of a supranational assembly to guide the ECSC (which was renamed the European Parliament in 1962), a court of justice, and direct income for the Community in the form of taxes.
In 1957, the original members of the ECSC signed the Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Community (more commonly referred to as the Common Market). The members of the EEC, who were joined by Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973 in the first expansion of the Community, lifted almost all trade restrictions among member states. In 1986, in the first major revision to the Treaty of Rome, the European Single Act provided for the free movement among member nations of capital, labor, and such services as banking and insurance.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 led to the establishment of a common currency, the Euro, with banknotes and coins going into circulation in January 2002, with the exception of Denmark, Sweden, and most significantly the United Kingdom, which refused to give up the pound. The Maastricht Treaty also introduced new areas where there was supposed to be increased cooperation, such as in defense, justice, and environmental affairs, which resulted in a name change from the EEC to the European Union (EU).
Recent and Future Expansion of the European Union
The European Union has undergone a number of expansions in its list of member states (the largest crop of entrants joined in 2004), notably with nations that were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact or part of the Soviet Union, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007, and Turkey entered into negotiations for membership back in 2005. Turkey’s European Union bid has been controversial for a number of reasons. Some EU officials doubt that Turkey can meet economic targets required for membership, or they question Turkey’s commitment to human rights. Some have expressed concern about admitting a Muslim state into the EU with a large population that would make it second only to Germany.
EU expansion has also led to the desire to make it work more efficiently, which led to the writing of a European Constitution, the caveat being that all EU members had to approve the constitution for it to go into effect. France, however, a nation that has been at the forefront of European cooperation, voted “no” in May 2005 in a national referendum. What this will mean for further European integration is not yet clear.
POST-WWII DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN EUROPEAN STATES
Great Britain
The postwar period in Great Britain began with what at the time was considered to be one of the greatest political upsets in electoral history—the replacement of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his Conservative Party with the Labour Party and its leader, Clement Attlee. It probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, because although many in Britain were deeply grateful to Churchill for the steely leadership he provided during the war, there was a sense that he was not the man to lead them in times of peace.
Economic and Social Reforms
Even while the war was in full swing, there was a sense that when the war ended, Britain had to move beyond the dismal economic and social conditions that had prevailed during the interwar years. Sir William Beveridge, a member of the Liberal Party, had produced in 1942 (at the request of the government) a report that recommended that all adults should pay a weekly contribution, and in return benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed. For Beveridge, the benefit of such a system was that it would provide for a minimum standard of living “below which no one should be allowed to fall.” The electoral triumph of the Labour Party was due to the belief within the British public that it was the party most committed to implementing this far-reaching plan for reform, and with its victory in 1945, Labour began the establishment of a cradle-to-grave social welfare program—the highlight being the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS), which provided for a comprehensive system of free health care.
Nationalization of Industries
Attlee and the Labour party were also committed to a program of nationalization of major industries. Beginning in 1945, the government took control of the Bank of England, the railroads, and the electric, iron, and steel industries. This was not as revolutionary as it might appear, because in many cases, these industries had already been placed under government control during the war years. Fair compensation was paid to the existing owners, and company management (which some of the more radical members of the Labour Party wanted to see handled by the workers through committees) remained in the hands of professional managers, in many cases the same individuals who had led the firm prior to the takeover.
Economic conditions remained fairly grim in the immediate postwar years. Britain was now a major debtor to the United States, because its own gold and foreign currency reserves had been depleted to save the nation from the Nazi onslaught. The Labour party remained committed to sizeable military expenditures, because Britain still had large military commitments overseas, and the advent of the Cold War also affected spending. Although the standard of living improved for many people in the immediate postwar years due to the increase in social services, this period is generally referred to as the “Age of Austerity” and lasted until 1954, when the wartime rationing of butter and sugar finally came to an end.
By the 1951 general election, the Labour Party and the public were fairly exhausted from the pace of change, which provided a renewed opportunity for Churchill’s Conservatives. Aside from reversing the nationalization of the iron and steel industries, the Conservatives did not return the remaining industries to private hands and continued to support the social service network implemented by the Labour Party. This has come to be known as the “Politics of Consensus,” because although the two major parties may have differed on details such as funding levels, they were in general agreement on the need to provide social services and that government should play a large role in the management of the economy.
Economic Decline
Although one can refer to a postwar “economic miracle” in Germany and Italy, such talk for Great Britain would be wide off the mark. Britain’s economic growth by the 1950s was clearly less than that achieved by the nations of Western Europe. The reasons for Britain’s economic decline in the postwar period remain controversial, but one can generally see factors such as the reliance on older factories, whereas plants in places like Germany were rebuilt with the latest technology following the destruction brought by the war. Britain also lacked the central economic planning that was to prove to be critical for French economic growth, and Britain had to deal with aggressive unions that wanted higher wages without agreeing to produce gains in productivity. Some scholars have even looked to cultural reasons for Britain’s decline suggesting, for example, that the study of the sciences in British universities took a back seat to the pursuit of the humanities.
Following a period of Conservative dominance in the period after 1951, the Labour Party reemerged as the dominant political party in the period from 1964 to 1974. Although Prime Minister Harold Wilson was leading a party that would prove to be successful at the polls, he was not able to strengthen the position of Britain in the global economy.
Violence in Ireland: Bloody Sunday
During these same years, the situation in Northern Ireland worsened, with the British government sending troops into the troubled province in 1969. On January 30, 1972, thirteen Catholics were killed when British soldiers fired on civil rights marchers. The day became known as Bloody Sunday and led to a renewed surge of violence by groups such as the Irish Republican Army that were opposed to the British presence in Northern Ireland.
Margaret Thatcher and the Post-Thatcher Years
In 1979, Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Labour government proved unable to deal with a wave of strikes that negatively affected road transport and public services, known as the “winter of discontent.” This provided an opportunity for the triumph of the Conservative Party and its leader Margaret Thatcher, who became Britain’s first female prime minister. Thatcher had made it clear that she wanted to break with what she viewed as the failed policies of the past and stated, “I am not a consensus politician, I am a conviction politician.” Thatcherism, the eponymous term for her economic policies, included tight control over the money supply to reduce inflation, sharp cuts in public spending, and a cut in taxes, particularly for higher earners.
Thatcher sought to make Britain more competitive in the global market by reducing the power of the trade unions and by reprivatizing those parts of the British economy still under the control of the government. Thatcher was a very divisive leader, and her career might have come to an early end if it had not received a boost following the successful war that Britain fought with Argentina in 1982 over the Falkland Islands. Thatcher ran into trouble during her third term when she tried to introduce market principles into the running of the NHS and education system, and her hostility to working toward further European integration created dissent within her own party. In 1990, she resigned and was replaced by John Major. Major continued with most of Thatcher’s domestic policies, though perhaps without some of the vindictive gusto that she had brought to British politics. Because he was more pro-European than Thatcher, he signed the Maastricht Treaty.
In 1997, after being out of government for eighteen years, the Labour Party triumphed under its youthful leader Tony Blair. Blair, who had become the leader of his party in 1994, had moved Labour away from its socialist roots, creating what he referred to as “New Labour.” Rather than renationalizing the economy, Labour under Blair focused on improving Britain’s social services, reform of the House of Lords, and the devolution of power away from Westminster and toward regional parliaments in Wales and Scotland. Blair received a second term in 2001 and a third in 2005, although the margin of Labour’s victory in the 2005 election was significantly reduced because of anger over Blair’s support for the war in Iraq.
Blair resigned as Labour Leader in May of 2007, and Gordon Brown, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Blair for many years, rose to become both leader of the Labour Party and prime minister of the United Kingdom. Brown served until 2010 when David Cameron (a Conservative party leader) became prime minister.
France
France in 1945 had to deal with the grim aftermath of what one writer has termed the “Strange Defeat” of 1940. France largely chose to deal with the difficult Vichy years by propagating certain myths, including the idea that France was a nation of resisters against German occupation, that few supported Marshal Pétain and Vichy, and that the tragic fate of the Jews in France was entirely the responsibility of the Germans. Marcel Ophuls’s powerful documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) helped open the door to questioning these national myths, although it remained several years before French television was willing to show the film. Under President Jacques Chirac, the nation finally began to address France’s role in the deportation of 66,000 Jews to Germany, along with other issues involving collaboration activities during the war.
Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French government-in-exile, expected to dominate political life in postwar France, but he stepped away from politics when the newly established Fourth Republic refused to establish the strong presidency that de Gaulle felt was needed if France was not going to repeat the mistakes of the politically contentious Third Republic. French political life was also transformed, if in a more positive manner, by the granting of the vote to women. It was left to the Fourth Republic to grapple with a series of colonial problems, including the disastrous defeat in Indochina in 1954 and in the same year a revolt that broke out in Algeria.
The crisis in Algeria, which led to fears that a military coup would take place in France itself, brought about the return of de Gaulle to politics, and he led the vote for a plebiscite in 1958 establishing the Fifth Republic, which contained the powerful presidency whose office de Gaulle now held. Although his enemies saw him as dictatorial, de Gaulle was committed to restoring France to a leading place on the global stage. To do this, he committed France to taking a leading role in Europe, which meant vetoing Britain’s attempt to enter the Common Market in 1962.
To ensure that it could provide for its own defense, France refused to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1968. France also maintained an independent foreign policy marked by its withdrawal from NATO’s unified command in 1966 and its recognition, over the strong objections of the United States, of the Communist government in China.
Economic Struggles
France’s economy in the 1950s and 1960s made significant strides from the serious economic difficulties it faced at the end of the war. In 1945, five million men returned home from Germany and needed jobs, the transport system was shattered during the heavy fighting in the last year of the war, and the country had limited supplies of coal and food. This dire situation favored the French Communist Party, which had a good wartime resistance record (although it only turned against the German occupiers following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941) and appeared to offer answers to these economic problems. Although the Communists were part of the first postwar coalition government, they were pushed out of the coalition in 1947, in part with the support of the United States, which made it clear that economic assistance would not be forthcoming if the Communists remained in the government.
In that same year, France began the implementation of an economic program designed by Jean Monnet, who was also one of the founders of the European Community. The Monnet Plan established the Commissaritat General du Plan (CGP), which provided for nonpolitical technocrats to run the economy. With increased foreign investment and rational central planning, the French economy, which had traditionally lagged behind Germany and Great Britain, began to take off. This transformed life in France as newly prosperous consumers began to buy cars, televisions, and dishwashers. It also, however, created a sense that their unique way of life was being transformed by what its critics referred to as Americanization, embodied most directly by the newfound popularity of that most American of products, Coca-Cola.
By 1968, disenchantment among the young over what they considered to be the sterile course of French life, as well as anger over classrooms, laboratories, and libraries that were bursting at the seams as more students pursued higher education, led to student revolts at every major French university, with the most serious situation taking place in Paris. In May of that year, students forged an alliance with workers, but this soon petered out as the students’ demand for a thorough reordering of French society clashed with the more limited demands of the workers for wage increases and better working conditions. Although de Gaulle survived this crisis, in the next year he resigned.
France continued to be led by members of the Gaullist party until the electoral victory in 1981 of Socialist leader François Mitterrand, the longest-serving president of France. A moderate within his party, Mitterrand focused on social reform programs and reducing unemployment rather than radical plans for the socialization of the French economy. Mitterrand, who was reelected in 1988, retired from politics in 1995 and was replaced in office by Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist mayor of Paris.
Chirac served two full terms as president of France for a total of twelve years, the second longest tenure in the job after Mitterand. He ran on a platform committed to healing social ills (such as racism and labor strikes), providing tax cuts, and instituting job programs. Unfortunately, social unrest grew in his second term with some of the worst rioting seen in France since the late 1960s. Chirac also came under fire during his presidency for several instances of corruption that took place while he was mayor of Paris and for general wastefulness in spending, particularly where his own palace services were concerned.
Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded Chirac in May of 2007, winning a runoff against Socialist Segolene Royal. He vowed to implement a controlled immigration policy and an ambitious development plan to modernize the country. After Sarkozy, Francois Hollande of the Socialist party took office in 2012 and serves as president still today.
Italy
The fall of Mussolini’s government in 1943 presaged a violent civil war that lasted until the end of the Second World War. Because the Italian monarchy was tainted by its association with the Fascists, a referendum in 1946 led to the establishment of a republic. The Christian Democrats became the party of government, dominating political life in Italy until the 1990s. In Italy, unlike the rest of Western Europe, the Communists remained a significant opposition party. In part, this was due to the influence of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), one of the founders of the Italian Communist party, whose writings encouraged a measure of political flexibility that was certainly not found within the more doctrinaire French Communist Party.
Italy made outstanding economic progress in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that it was referred to as the “economic miracle.” In part, this was achieved through the large role played by the state in the Italian economy through the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), which was created in 1931 during the Fascist years. The IRI controlled shipbuilding, airlines, metallurgy, and the chemical industry, with the automaker Fiat being the only large manufacturer to remain in private hands.
Italy benefited from its early commitment to the Common Market, as well as from the cheap labor supply provided by the 6 million southern Italians who moved to the north in the 1960s. Attempts were made to address the longstanding poverty of the south, with an interest in the “southern question” emerging as a peculiar byproduct of Mussolini’s exile of political opponents to the south. This meant that a number of postwar Italian political leaders had a firsthand acquaintance with the economic plight of that region. Land reform broke up the large estates, and money was pumped into the region through a series of five-year plans, but to this day, there is a significant economic gap between north and south.
By the 1970s, economic problems were increasing, including high unemployment, inflation, and the loss of a staggering number of workdays to strikes. The Christian Democrats limped on as the party in power, in part because despite their own failings, there was seemingly no other option. A revival of the mafia took place in the south, while political terrorism from the extreme left led to frequent attacks on politicians, judges, and business leaders. The most brazen of these terrorist attacks took place in 1978 when the Red Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minster Aldo Moro and eventually murdered him when the government refused to negotiate his release.
Although Italy remains politically stable, frequent changes of government remain a part of the political landscape as do charges of corruption, which after years of being ignored, shook the Christian Democratic Party in the late 1990s. In 2006, questions regarding corruption led to the defeat of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative media magnate who controls most of the major media outlets in Italy outside of government control. Romano Prodi of the Olive Tree party became prime minister in May of 2006, his second time assuming the position (first was in 1996). Since then Italy has had as prime minister Berlusconi again (2008-2011), Mario Monti (2011-2013), Enrico Letta (2013-2014), and Matteo Renzi (current).
Germany
The first years after the war were extremely difficult in Germany, as the nation dealt with the sheer magnitude of its defeat and the incredible destruction from the war; in 1947, industrial production was still only half the prewar level. Adding to the problems was the reality that if there was one place in Europe where Cold War tensions could flare up into actual fighting, then that location was Berlin, a city that was divided, like the country at large, into four occupation zones.
A series of crises would periodically flare up over the divided city, the first taking place in June 1948, when the United States and Britain introduced a new currency into their occupation zones without seeking Soviet approval. Stalin retaliated by blockading the city of Berlin, completely cutting off the city from the west. Why Stalin took this step is not entirely clear, but perhaps he felt that this was a way to push for negotiations on the status of the city. An odd quirk from the negotiations at Potsdam was that, although there was no written agreement on access to Berlin by rail, road, or water, there were three officially designated air corridors. Seeing this as an opportunity, U.S. General Clay once again showed personal initiative and began to send supplies by air, with President Truman soon offering his full support. The Berlin Airlift went on for ten-and-a-half months and came to an end in May 1949, when Stalin lifted the blockade with no preconditions.
A Divided Country: East and West Germany
Seizing on the momentum achieved by the successful airlift, in 1949, the United States, Great Britain, and France agreed to combine their zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany, with the city of Bonn as its capital. The Soviet Union responded several months later and decreed that its zone in eastern Germany would become the Communist-dominated German Democratic Republic. Possible reunification was suggested by Stalin in a note he sent in 1952 to the West German government, in which he implied that Germany could be reunified and exist as an unarmed and neutral state. There has been a historical debate over how sincere Stalin was in his offer, though he may have been willing to allow for German unification because he desperately wanted to forestall West German rearmament. In any event, the offer was rejected, and West Germany rearmed and entered NATO in 1955.
Germany would remain at the center of the Cold War, with the city of Berlin as the critical hotspot. In 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave an ultimatum to the West saying that they could stay six months and then had to pull out all their troops and allow Berlin to become a free city with access controlled by East Germany. President Eisenhower refused to budge and made it clear that he would launch another Berlin airlift if necessary.
The Building of the Berlin Wall
The next stage in the conflict over Berlin began at the ungodly hour of 2:00 A.M. on August 13, 1961, when East German border police began to string a barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin. This was followed over the next several days by the building of a concrete barrier, the infamous Berlin Wall. For the East German Communists, this was deemed to be necessary because they were suffering a serious brain drain as the educated elite were leaving the country in droves, with more than 2.5 million having passed to West Germany by 1949.
The reaction of the Western Allies was fairly mild, because putting up the wall did not impact what the West thought was essential to its Berlin policy: the presence of Western troops, free access to the city, and political self-determination for West Berliners. Kennedy’s critics said he should have done something when the barrier was just barbed wire, but short of war, there was little to be done. As proof that there may be something to the old adage “Good fences make good neighbors,” the building of the Berlin Wall proved beneficial, in that it meant that the constant crises over Berlin would now come to an end with the acceptance by both sides of a divided city.
Political, Social, and Economic Reforms
The early years in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany were dominated by Konrad Adenauer, who served as chancellor from 1949 to 1963 as the head of the Christian Democratic Union party. Adenauer, an anti-Nazi German conservative who had been mayor of Cologne in the Weimar Republic, greatly feared the Soviet Union and therefore preferred to see a West German state tied to the West rather than a unified Germany that was forced into neutrality. Adenauer’s government also attempted to address the terrible crimes committed by the Germans during the Nazi period by paying compensation to Jewish victims of the Holocaust as well as making direct payments to the state of Israel.
Adenauer’s government also ushered in a period of economic growth, aided in the immediate postwar years by the influx of millions of Germans who had fled west from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. In the most dramatic example of a postwar economic miracle, the West German economy grew from $23 billion in 1950 to $103 billion in 1964. Equally significant, this newfound prosperity trickled down through the population so that workers experienced increased wages from higher productivity, which they used on hitherto-unimagined luxuries like new cars and foreign vacations. The main government architect of this economic boom, which was notably achieved without high inflation, was Gerhard Ritter, Adenauer’s minister of economics and chancellor following Adenauer’s retirement in 1961.
During the Adenauer/Ritter years, the Social Democrats looked like they were going to remain in a position of permanent opposition. Electoral success arrived through a combination of two elements: dropping the Marxist language of class struggle, which the party did in 1955, and the emergence of the charismatic Willy Brandt as the leader of the party. Brandt, who rose to national prominence as mayor of Berlin, became chancellor in 1969, the first time a Socialist led a German government since 1930.
Although remaining firmly tied to the West, Brandt felt it necessary to reach out to the Soviets and their satellite states in Eastern Europe. This policy of contact, known as Ostpolitik, led to the signing of treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and provided for de facto recognition of the East German state. In a famous display of national contrition, Brandt, on a visit to Poland in 1970, knelt before a monument to those who fell during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Despite the international acclaim that he received, including the awarding of a Nobel Prize in 1972, the end of Brandt’s term as chancellor occurred swiftly in 1974, when a member of his staff was arrested as an East German spy.
Brandt’s successor as chancellor was Helmut Schmidt, who despite having to face economic problems stemming from the oil crisis of 1973 was still able to lead the Social Democrats to an electoral victory in 1976. As in Great Britain and the United States, the early 1980s seemed to represent a surge in conservative politics, and in 1982, the CDU achieved an electoral comeback under Helmut Kohl.
German Reunification
It was Kohl, however, who would move with speed and determination to bring about German reunification in 1990. He also worked with French President Francois Mitterand to promote the Maastricht Treaty which created the European Union. Kohl’s tenure as chancellor of Germany, at sixteen years, was longer than that of any German chancellor since Otto von Bismarck. The aura surrounding him eventually wore off amid continuing problems in the newly reunified Germany, including high unemployment. In 1998, the German electorate turned once again to the Social Democrats under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder.
Schröder had promised more jobs during the 1998 election, and during his first term, unemployment did go down, only to rise back up to the level he had inherited from Kohl and later to a record-breaking level. After narrowly winning reelection in 2002, in large part because of his strong opposition to the looming U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Schröder introduced several reforms that many perceived as a dismantlement of the welfare state. These reforms were very unpopular with the core constituency of the Social Democrats. In July of 2005, Schröder intentionally lost a vote of confidence in the Bundestag (German Parliament), paving the way for early elections in September of that year.
Angela Merkel of the CDU became the first female chancellor of Germany in November of 2005 after striking a coalition deal with the Social Democrats. This deal was brought about by the extremely close election in September of that same year whereby no party received a majority of seats in the Bundestag. So far, the German economy under Merkel is booming and her approval rating is high. As any politician will tell you, however, what goes up can just as easily come down. Time will tell how successful Germany is in dealing with its tough domestic issues.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST BLOC
Having suffered two foreign invasions in the twentieth century, the Soviet Union set as its priority the establishment of a system of satellite states in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 to establish military ties with its satellite states and the COMENCON to link their economies. From the start, however, there was tension.
Reform in Hungary
In 1956, similar strikes in Poland set off an even more important movement for change in Hungary, where reform-minded Communists led by Imre Nagy took the helm of government and began a liberalizing process. The Hungarians wanted to create a multiparty system, pull themselves out of the Warsaw Pact, and reestablish Hungary as a neutral nation. By late 1956, the Soviets grew tired of such demands, which threatened the whole system of satellite states, and crushed the reform movement, killing thousands along the way.
East Germany and the Berlin Wall
In 1953, East German workers went to the streets first to criticize the government’s plan to increase productivity, then later to demand greater political freedom. By 1961, life was so grim in East Germany that millions of individuals fled to the West, which led the Soviets to construct the Berlin Wall.
Power Struggles in the Soviet Union
Within the Soviet Union, significant developments followed the death of Stalin in 1953. The winner of the power struggle for his replacement was Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who, in a significant reversal from the previous regime, did not execute the losers in this political contest. At the Communist Party’s twentieth national congress in 1956, Khrushchev, standing before a secret session, made a speech in which he attacked the many crimes of Stalin. Khrushchev claimed that Stalin’s government had deviated from the political program of Marxist-Leninism, rather than being a natural outgrowth of it, and that the only reforms that would be acceptable would be those that stayed within the guidelines offered by Marxist-Leninism. Although Khrushchev made a successful visit to the United States in 1959, tensions between the two nations were heightened in the following year when the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia. By October 1962, the two nuclear superpowers nearly went to war when the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s skillful handling of the crisis, however, allowed both nations to avoid the specter of a nuclear nightmare.
The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
The relative liberalization of the Khrushchev years came to an end with his forced retirement in 1964. His successor, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), did not reinstate the terror of the Stalin years, but he did seek to once again strengthen the role of the party bureaucracy and the KGB and encouraged the further clampdown on reform in the satellite states.
By 1968, disaffection with this step backward led to the emergence of a reform movement in Czechoslovakia. The goal of this “Prague Spring” was to bring about a more humanistic socialism within certain limits, such as keeping the nation within the Soviet Bloc. Brezhnev still saw this as a threat to the entire Warsaw Pact and initiated what became known as the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” declaring that the Soviet Union would support with all the means at its disposal (including military intervention) any established communist state in Eastern Europe that was threatened by internal strife. The reform movement was crushed and its leader, Alexander Dubcˇek, was replaced by someone more to Brezhnev’s liking.
Reform in Poland and Eastern Europe
The most significant challenge to the Brezhnev Doctrine came in Poland, a land whose people were deeply stirred when in 1978 Karol Wojtyla, a Polish Cardinal, was elected Pope John Paul II. Two years later, led by Lech Walesa, an electrician, a massive strike took place at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, where workers demanded the right to form an independent trade union. Solidarity, as the new union was called, survived the declaration of martial law and being outlawed by going underground, in part with the aid of the Catholic Church. By 1989, the Polish economy was in such a shambles that the government was forced to negotiate with Walesa and his union. Surprisingly, the negotiations resulted in the promise for multiparty elections, which, when they took place in that same year, resulted in the defeat of all Communist candidates.
When the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) took charge of the Kremlin, he indicated his opposition to the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” With reform looming overhead, 1989 proved to be one of the most remarkable years of the century, as Communist-led regimes peacefully collapsed in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania. In East Germany, the collapse of the regime in that same year was followed in 1990 by the reunification of East and West Germany and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Romania proved to be an exception to this peaceful transformation, as the violent dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–1989) desperately tried to hold on to power. In the end, his government collapsed, and he and his wife, Elena, were executed on Christmas Day 1989.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
As their satellite states underwent a complete political transformation, people within the Soviet Union expressed their desire for change. Disasters like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl revealed the deplorable state of affairs within the nation. Gorbachev wanted to limit the extent of this change; he accepted the need for glasnost, or openness in debate, as well as perestroika, an economic restructuring of the state, but he was no democrat and still wanted to see the Communist Party lead these reforms. Events, however, went beyond his control, and in 1990, the government was forced to allow the political participation of non-Communist parties. Nationalist movements throughout the Soviet Union also popped up, beginning with the declaration of independence by Lithuania, followed by the insistence of the Russian Republic, another Soviet state, that its laws superseded those of the Soviet Union.
By the end of 1990, Gorbachev appointed some hard-liners to government positions to make the prospect of future reform far less likely. Instead, the whole system collapsed. In part, this was the result of the rivalry between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007), who served as chairman of the Russian Parliament. In August 1991, hard-line communists decided that Gorbachev’s policies were threatening the existence of the Communist Party and staged a coup while Gorbachev was on vacation, placing him under arrest in his Crimean home. This turned out to be the last gasp of the Soviet Union, as Yeltsin bravely defied the plotters when he stood on a tank outside the parliament building and led the resistance. The coup failed and with it any hope of preserving Communist control. One by one, the assorted republics left the Soviet Union, and by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved; soon after, Gorbachev resigned.
A New Russian Republic
In 1991, Yeltsin was elected president of the newly created Russian Federation with 57 percent of the vote amid heightened expectations among Russians following the end of the Soviet Union. Sadly, when he resigned from office in 1999, Yeltsin acknowledged that his time in office was a lost opportunity, and in his resignation speech, he went so far as to say to his nation, “I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our dreams have not been realized.”
Beginning his first term in office, Yeltsin decided to move the economy rapidly from centralized state control to free-market capitalism, a policy strongly advocated by many foreign economists, including advisors from the International Monetary Fund. This policy, which supporters and skeptics both referred to as “shock treatment,” was based on significant short-term economic dislocation followed by greater economic stability and expansion. Unfortunately, the pain proved even harsher than expected and was marked by the transfer of state assets to a handful of well-placed oligarchs and hyperinflation, which created turmoil for millions of Russians who depended on fixed state pensions. Official corruption and the emergence of vast mafia-style criminal organizations also became mainstays of the new Russian state and greatly contributed to a diminishment of Yeltsin’s popularity.
The transition to political democracy was equally troubled. Conflict with the Congress of People’s Deputies (the Parliament of the Russian Federation) over his economic policies brought about a series of confrontations with Parliament, leading to a serious crisis in October 1993 when the Congress began impeachment proceedings against the president. Yeltsin responded by ordering tanks to shell the building where the Congress met and ordered the legislature to be dissolved. Without a recalcitrant parliament to block his plans, Yeltsin was able to impose a new constitution providing enhanced power for the presidency and the establishment of the Duma, a new parliamentary body.
In 1996, Yeltsin surprised many Kremlin observers by running for reelection, despite having suffered several strokes and also having appeared drunk on public occasions. When his reelection seemed about to be derailed by a growing electoral threat from a resurgent Communist Party, Yeltsin turned to the business oligarchs who agreed to fund a lavish campaign for him in exchange for greater access to the remaining state assets, although the oligarchs were also fearful that the election of a Communist government would hinder their economic activities. Yeltsin comfortably won reelection, but except for working out a peace treaty that brought a brief end to the fighting with separatists in Chechnya, there were few other significant accomplishments during his second term.
Just prior to his resignation in December 1999, Yeltstin chose the relatively unknown Vladimir Putin as his prime minister. A former officer in the KGB, one of Putin’s first acts upon assuming the presidency was to protect Yeltsin and his family from prosecution for corruption. Because other possible presidential candidates were surprised by the rapid promotion of Putin and the resignation of Yeltsin, Putin had a tremendous political advantage over his rivals and was easily elected to his own term as president in 2000.
In sharp contrast with Yeltsin, Putin has garnered significant popular support among Russians and he would have been easily reelected in 2004 even without his control over most media outlets. Part of his popularity stemmed from a rise in worldwide oil prices, which provided a huge boost to the Russian economy, although once again, Russia is in danger of repeating the Soviet mistake of the 1970s when it became too dependent on the proceeds from this one commodity.
Many Russians also embraced Putin’s attempt to restore Russia to a higher place on the world stage. After a sharp military decline in the 1990s, Putin sought to restore Russia’s military might, principally to ensure regional dominance. He has also at times made use of the sort of rhetoric denouncing the West that has not been used since the Cold War and ordered the resumption of regular patrols of strategic bombers, which were suspended in 1991.
In 2008, Putin was replaced as president by Dmitry Medvedev, a businessman and a young independent, widely regarded as Putin’s puppet. Putin then moved to take the office of prime minister. In 2012, they swapped and currently Putin is back as president of Russia while Medvedev is the Prime Minister.
Democracy Under the Putin Presidency
Democracy, which never truly thrived under Yeltsin, has received further blows during Putin’s presidency, such as in the aftermath of the Beslan massacre of September 2004, when Chechen terrorists seized control of a school leading to the death of more than three hundred hostages. The tragedy was used by Putin as an excuse for enacting a law that ended the practice of popular elections for governors in Russia’s provinces, with the spurious claim that it would be more efficient to fight terror with a more centralized government. The suspicious deaths of several Russian journalists and the poisoning in London of former spy and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko has further chilled the political climate in Russia.
Ethnic Warfare in the Former Yugoslavia
Uncertainty has been the hallmark of the former Yugoslavia. Its former leader, Josip Tito (1892–1980), led a successful resistance force against the Germans during the Second World War and after the war helped establish a Yugoslav state that avoided being tied to the Soviet Bloc. His strong leadership limited the intense ethnic rivalries within the country, but after he died in 1980, Slovenia and Croatia broke away from Yugoslavia to create their own states.
In 1992, a majority of the Muslim and Croat populations living in the Yugoslavian province of Bosnia wanted to follow suit. Bosnia’s Serbs, however, refused to allow themselves to become part of a Bosnian state in which they would be a minority, and with the help of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević, they carried out “ethnic cleansing,” the forced removal, and, at times, genocidal murder, of Muslims and ethnic Bosnians in certain regions under their control. One of the last great atrocities of a century that has known so many was the Serb shelling of the Bosnian capital of Sarejevo, particularly the firing of shells on market days, when more people would be out on the streets. Such horrors led to the American-brokered Dayton Accords of 1995, which provided for a precarious peace for a time.
The next stage of the conflict in the Balkans centered on the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, a territory that the Serbs saw as the cradle of their national identity, stemming from their defeat in the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks in 1389. In 1998, Milošević ordered an assault on Kosovo, using as his justification the attacks made on Serbs living in the province by the Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.), a small militant group that wanted to see the creation of an independent Kosovo. When the Serbs refused to sign a treaty that would have granted the Kosovars greater autonomy, NATO in March 1999 launched an aerial bombardment on Serbia that lasted for 74 days. This was the first offensive action taken by NATO against a sovereign nation in the alliance’s history and resulted in the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo.
For Milošević, this was the beginning of the end of his dominance over Yugoslavian politics. In 2000, he was forced to call new elections, which he lost to Vojislav Kostunica. While Milošević was reluctant to turn over the reins of government to Kostunica, his hand was forced when hundreds of thousands of Serbs went into the street to demand he honor the election results. Though initially President Kostunica said that he would not turn Milošević over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, he changed his mind in 2001 in order to receive badly needed economic assistance from the West—though the point wound up being moot when Milošević died of a heart attack while his trial was still ongoing in 2006.
In February 2007, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was no evidence linking Serbia under the rule of Slobodan Milošević to genocide and war crimes committed in the Bosnian War. However, the court did find that Milošević and others in Serbia did not do enough to prevent acts of genocide from occurring. Still today there is widespread disagreement and controversy over whether what occurred in this era was ethnic cleansing or genocide, or whether there is a significant difference between the two, and the ruling bodies (the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice) and courts have prosecuted numerous people involved in the warfare.
In January 2009 the European Parliament passed a resolution to commemorate July 11th as a day of remembrance and mourning of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. That incident was a July 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys and forcible deportation of nearly 25,000 women, children and elderly.
CHAPTER 7 TIMELINE
| Year(s) | Event |
| 1914 | Assassination of Franz Ferninand (June 28) |
| 1914 | Austria-Hungary issues ultimatum to Serbia (July 23) |
| 1914 | Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia (July 28) |
| 1914 | Russia begins mobilization (July 29) |
| 1914 | Germany declares war on Russia (August 1) |
| 1914 | Germany declares war on France (August 3) |
| 1914 | Germans defeat Russians at Tannenberg (August 26–30) |
| 1914 | First Battle of the Marne (September 5–10) |
| 1914 | Completion of the Panama Canal |
| 1915 | Gallipoli campaign begins (April 25) |
| 1915 | Sinking of the Lusitania (May 7) |
| 1915 | Germans begin attack on Verdun (February 21) |
| 1916 | British launch attack at the Somme (July 1) |
| 1917 | Zimmermann Telegram (January 19) |
| 1917 | Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare (February 1) |
| 1917 | Bolsheviks sign armistice with Germany (December 3) |
| 1917 | United States declares war on Germany (April 6) |
| 1917 | Provisional Government established in Russia (February) |
| 1917 | Bolshevik seizure of power (November) |
| 1918 | Worldwide influenza outbreak |
| 1918 | Female suffrage begins in Great Britain |
| 1918 | Germany Republic established after abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (November 10) |
| 1918 | Armistice brings the war to a close |
| 1919 | Treaty of Versailles |
| 1919 | Mussolini organizes first Fascist party |
| 1919 | Weimar Constitution established |
| 1920 | Formation of Communist International |
| 1922 | Mussolini becomes Prime Minister of Italy |
| 1923 | German hyperinflation |
| 1923 | Beer Hall Putsch |
| 1924 | Death of Lenin |
| 1924 | Dawes Plan |
| 1925 | Treaty of Lucarno |
| 1928 | First Soviet Five-Year Plan |
| 1929 | Beginning of collectivized farms in Soviet Union |
| 1929 | Lateran Accord between Mussolini and the Catholic Church |
| 1929 | Young Plan |
| 1929 | Stock market crash |
| 1930 | Nazis make huge electoral gains |
| 1931 | Bank failures |
| 1932 | Hindenburg defeats Hitler for the German presidency |
| 1932 | Nazis become largest party in Reichstag |
| 1933 | Hitler becomes Chancellor |
| 1933 | Reichstag fire |
| 1933 | Enabling Act |
| 1933 | Germany withdraws from League of Nations |
| 1933 | German boycott of Jewish businesses |
| 1934 | Beginning of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union |
| 1934 | Night of the Long Knives |
| 1934 | Hitler becomes Führer after death of Hindenburg |
| 1935 | Germany openly begins rearmament |
| 1935 | Italian invasion of Ethiopia |
| 1935 | Nuremberg Laws directed against German Jews |
| 1936 | Berlin Olympics |
| 1936 | German remilitarization of the Rhineland |
| 1936 | Beginning of the Spanish Civil War |
| 1938 | Germany absorbs Austria in Anschluss |
| 1938 | Munich Agreement leads to dismemberment of Czechoslovakia |
| 1938 | Kristallnacht (November 9) |
| 1939 | Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact |
| 1939 | Invasion of Poland |
| 1939 | Britain and France declare war on Germany |
| 1940 | Fall of France |
| 1940 | Winston Churchill replaces Chamberlain as Prime Minister |
| 1940 | Battle of Britain (July–October) |
| 1940 | Germans begin Blitz on British cities (September to May 1941) |
| 1941 | Germany launches Operation Barbarossa |
| 1941 | Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor |
| 1941 | 30,000 Jews killed at Babi Yar over two days |
| 1941 | Atlantic Charter |
| 1942 | German advance stopped at Stalingrad |
| 1942 | Battle of Midway (June) |
| 1942 | Wansee Conference organizes the Final Solution |
| 1943 | Battle of Kursk |
| 1943 | Allies land in Italy |
| 1943 | Mussolini’s government fails |
| 1943 | Warsaw ghetto uprising |
| 1944 | Percentages Agreement between Churchill and Stalin |
| 1944 | D-Day |
| 1944 | Germans launch Battle of the Bulge (December 16) |
| 1945 | Yalta Conference (February 4–11) |
| 1945 | Hitler commits suicide (April 30) |
| 1945 | V-E Day (May 8) |
| 1945 | Victory of British Labour Party over Conservatives (July) |
| 1945 | Potsdam Conference (July 17–August 2) |
| 1945 | Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) |
| 1945 | V-J Day (August 14) |
| 1945 | United Nations’ charter is ratified (October) |
| 1945 | Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity begin (November) |
| 1946 | Establishment of French Fourth Republic |
| 1946 | Referendum establishes the Italian Republic |
| 1946 | Churchill delivers Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College |
| 1947 | George Kennan writes the “Long Telegram” |
| 1947 | Truman Doctrine |
| 1947 | Introduction of the Marshall Plan |
| 1947 | India and Pakistan become independent states |
| 1948 | Break between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia |
| 1948 | Establishment of the State of Israel |
| 1948 | National Health Service established in Great Britain |
| 1948 | Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe solidified |
| 1949 | Formation of NATO |
| 1949 | Berlin Airlift leads to ending blockade after 11 months |
| 1949 | Establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany |
| 1949 | Establishment of Democratic Republic of Germany |
| 1951 | Establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community |
| 1953 | Death of Stalin |
| 1954 | French suffer defeat in Indochina |
| 1954 | Algerian revolt begins |
| 1955 | Establishment of the Warsaw Pact |
| 1956 | Soviets send in troops to put down Hungarian uprising |
| 1957 | Ghana declares its independence from Great Britain |
| 1957 | Signing of the Treaty of Rome establishing the EEC |
| 1958 | French plebiscite leads to creation of the Fifth Republic |
| 1961 | East Germany begins construction of the wall dividing Berlin |
| 1962 | France vetoes Britain’s attempt to join the European Community |
| 1962 | Cuban missile crisis |
| 1968 | Wave of student protests in Europe and the United States |
| 1968 | Prague Spring |
| 1969 | Willy Brandt becomes German Chancellor |
| 1972 | Irish Troubles begin with the shooting of 13 Catholic peace marchers on “Bloody Sunday” |
| 1973 | Oil crisis |
| 1978 | Red Brigades kidnap and murder former Prime Minister Aldo Moro |
| 1978 | Papal election of John Paul II |
| 1979 | Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister |
| 1981 | Francois Mitterand elected president of France |
| 1985 | Mikhail Gorbachev becomes leader of the Soviet Union |
| 1989 | End of Communist rule in Eastern Europe |
| 1990 | Reunification of Germany |
| 1991 | End of Soviet Union Boris Yeltsin elected president of newly created Russian Federation |
| 1992 | Maastricht Treaty |
| 1992 | Beginning of a series of violent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia |
| 1997 | Tony Blair becomes prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland |
| 1999 | Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russian Federation |
| 2002 | Introduction of the euro |
| 2004 | Entry into NATO of former Warsaw Pact nations |
| 2008 | Dmitry Medvedev becomes president of Russian Federation (Putin becomes prime minister) |
| 2010 | David Cameron becomes prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland |
| 2012 | Medvedev and Putin switch positions; Medvedev becomes prime minister and Putin becomes president |
CHAPTER 7 REVIEW QUESTIONS
Try these questions to assess how well you understood and retained the information covered in the chapter. Answers and explanations are in Chapter 8.
1. During the first years of the Great Depression, governments responded to the economic crisis by
(A) supporting the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes
(B) launching major public works projects
(C) committing their countries to a laissez-faire economic policy
(D) reducing their expenditures in order to balance their budgets
2. Mussolini attempted to improve the relationship between the Italian state and the Catholic Church by
(A) mandating that all Italians attend mass
(B) placing loyal Fascists in key clerical positions
(C) emphasizing his own path towards religious belief
(D) signing the Lateran Treaty, which resolved some of the longstanding issues between the Church and the Italian state
3. The British won a major propaganda victory at the start of the First World war because of
(A) the sinking of the Lusitania
(B) the Zimmerman Telegram
(C) German atrocities in Belgium
(D) the destruction by the Germans of major Parisian landmarks
4. The term “popular fronts” refers to the idea of
(A) political parties of the center and the left working together to block the triumph of Fascism
(B) Communism uniting with unions to oppose bourgeois governments
(C) the elimination of class conflict
(D) using German and Italian forces to support Spanish nationalists
5. The Nuremberg Trials of 1945–1946 were the first tests in international law of the concept of
(A) collective guilt
(B) the natural rights of victims
(C) crimes against humanity
(D) genocide
6. The Matignon Agreement in France (1936)
(A) failed to lead to the forty-hour work week
(B) provided the legal right for unions to organize and strike
(C) led to the end of the Popular Front government
(D) ended the informal practice of owner-employee cooperation stemming from the Great War
7. The British government had an impact on private life during the First World War in all of the following ways EXCEPT
(A) the regulation of pub hours
(B) rationing
(C) conscription
(D) billeting of soldiers in civilian residences
8. The Atlantic Charter was the founding document behind what entity?
(A) The International Monetary Fund
(B) The World Court
(C) The European Union
(D) The United Nations
9. The Percentages Agreement signed between Stalin and Churchill dealt with
(A) Yugoslavia’s future under Tito
(B) the political future of Poland
(C) spheres of influence in Eastern Europe
(D) the question of postwar reparations
10. The Truman Doctrine came about as a direct result of
(A) remaining issues from the Potsdam conference
(B) the presence of Soviet troops in Poland
(C) the issue of the status of Berlin
(D) Britain’s withdrawal from Greece
11. During the “Prague Spring” of 1968, Czechoslovakia attempted to
(A) break completely free from the influence of the Soviet Union
(B) end military links with the Warsaw Pact nations
(C) introduce a capitalist economy
(D) allow greater personal liberties
12. The German “economic miracle” was in part due to
(A) socialization of the means of production
(B) a labor force enlarged by Germans fleeing from the east
(C) a high degree of central planning
(D) limiting overseas investment
13. All of the following are true concerning the student revolts in Paris in 1968 EXCEPT
(A) they involved student organizations with differing ideological agendas
(B) they stemmed from overcrowding in French universities
(C) they helped spark a general strike by French workers
(D) they caused the fall of Charles de Gaulle’s government
14. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika program
(A) ended the practice of central economic planning
(B) failed to improve the average Russian’s standard of living
(C) provided the economic foundation for improved foreign ties with the West
(D) focused on heavy industry at the expense of consumer products
REFLECT
• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to answer multiple-choice questions correctly?
• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you have achieved sufficient mastery to discuss effectively in an essay or short answer?
• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can answer multiple-choice questions correctly?
• For which content topics discussed in this chapter do you feel you need more work before you can discuss effectively in an essay or short answer?
• What parts of this chapter are you going to re-review?
• Will you seek further help outside of this book (such as a teacher, tutor, or AP Students) on any of the content in this chapter—and, if so, on what content?