25

The Fasci

The course of Britain’s continental foreign policy had been set by Lloyd George at the peace conference in 1919. Its central aim was the reintegration of a peaceful Germany into the international community. A contented and economically flourishing Germany was, Britain believed, necessary for European stability; it was also vital to the balance of continental power, especially now that the ‘threat’ of communism had emerged in Russia. British and French suspicion of Soviet Russia deprived them of their former ally on Germany’s eastern border. No one in Britain believed a successful war could be fought against Germany without Russian aid; therefore Germany had to be mollified.

Britain remained at a remove from European affairs throughout the Twenties. Some observers detected the revival of an age-old isolationist instinct, typical of an island people. We do not have to look very far back in history for the main cause of English aloofness: a terror of becoming embroiled in another European conflict, after the horrors of the Great War. Another factor was the country’s perception of itself as an imperial, rather than as a European, power. Pre-eminent politicians of the age, including Baldwin and Chamberlain, regarded continental affairs as a sideshow to the empire and the ailing domestic economy. The main object of foreign policy was not central Europe but the Mediterranean and the East, where Japan was perceived as a growing menace. In the Twenties, government officials even regarded American ambitions as a bigger concern than the prospect of a resurgent Germany. These worries were partially allayed when a naval treaty was signed in 1922 between Britain, the United States and Japan, but they did not disappear entirely.

In any case, Britain believed it was unnecessary to intervene extensively in continental affairs, since the prospect of European war was remote. In the view of British politicians, previous European conflicts had been caused by the aggression of an overambitious continental power, such as Napoleon’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. In the Twenties, no power was capable of conducting a war beyond its frontiers. Following the Versailles Treaty, Germany had no army and no armaments, and Russia had been economically and militarily enfeebled by revolution; France, meanwhile, had neither the desire nor the military capacity to embark on a campaign of conquest. Successive British governments of the Twenties confidently told their military commanders that no major European war was likely for ‘at least ten years’.

From 1918 to 1931, every British government pursued the country’s key goals – reintegrating Germany within the international order, while promoting the League of Nations and disarmament. In 1923 France had been in dangerous confrontation with Germany when the latter had defaulted on reparation payments. In response French troops had occupied the Ruhr area of Germany. MacDonald, who assumed the role of foreign secretary as well as prime minister in the Labour government of 1923, helped to resolve the situation by facilitating the first negotiated post-war agreement, the Dawes Plan. The accord ended the French occupation and attempted to set reparation payments at a level that was both fair and feasible for Germany, which was then in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. MacDonald energetically promoted the League of Nations, and attempted to draw the ‘selfish and unscrupulous’ French further into its orbit, in order to moderate their hostility towards Germany.

In contrast to MacDonald, Baldwin was, in the words of his private secretary, ‘reluctant to study Europe’. Nevertheless, his foreign secretary, Austen Chamberlain, built on MacDonald’s work and helped engineer the Locarno Treaty of 1925. Through these accords Germany and France guaranteed each other’s frontiers and agreed to settle any future disputes by arbitration, with Britain and Italy promising to assist any party whose territory was threatened. On the armament question, while Labour and Tory governments both advocated arms reductions, their motives differed. MacDonald, a staunch internationalist and former pacifist, favoured disarmament for idealistic reasons; the Conservatives regarded it as an excellent way to save the Treasury money. Throughout the Twenties, defence expenditure was lowered by successive chancellors, including Churchill, until by 1933 it accounted for only 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product. The nascent Royal Air Force received limited funding, and the number of its squadrons was reduced from 187 in 1919 to 18 in 1923, while the army lacked the necessary equipment to fight a large-scale war. Plans were drawn up for a new British naval base in Singapore to counter a potential Japanese threat, but the idea came to nothing. Although a reduction in defence spending was usual in peacetime, some people saw it as a symptom of Britain’s economic decline, while others were concerned about the country’s capacity to protect its empire.

In the years following Locarno all was quiet on the European front, to the delight of British politicians eager to direct their attention elsewhere. Germany consistently paid its reparations, which were gradually scaled down; it also attended meetings of the League of Nations. Germany’s Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, was determined to place ‘a peaceful Germany at the centre of a peaceful Europe’; this aim seemed realistic, since the country had recovered after the slump of the early Twenties. The improvement in German living standards, after the appalling poverty of the hyperinflationary years following the war, encouraged political stability in its democratic Weimar Republic.

In 1928 Germany signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact, along with Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Italy and several other countries. The signatories repudiated war as a means of resolving disputes; a multilateral armament reduction agreement, or even a multilateral disarmament treaty, at last seemed a possibility. The disarmament cause found a passionate and articulate advocate in MacDonald in the late Twenties and early Thirties.

During these years, many English intellectuals were in favour of disarmament. Historians espoused the view that the arms race, rather than German aggression, had been the main cause of the Great War. It was therefore imperative that all nations reduced their armaments and allowed the League to arbitrate international disputes. A variety of vivid war memoirs were also published at the end of the Twenties, reminding readers of the horrors of conflict. Partly as a result of these publications, pacifism gained great currency among the general population; the Oxford Union passed the motion that ‘in the next war this House would not fight for King and Country’, not that many English people believed war was imminent. In its commentary on 1929, The Times wrote, ‘Except for sundry disturbances confined to imperial localities . . . the year passed everywhere in tranquillity.’

And yet closer observation of the continental scene would have revealed a disquieting development. Most of the independent democratic states created at Versailles from the ruins of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, such as Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, had abandoned democratic government and turned to authoritarian rule. Nor had the ethnic minorities within these new countries been successfully integrated; much of the large German population living inside Czechoslovakia, for instance, regarded Germany as its true home. Meanwhile, Portugal and Spain also jettisoned democracy for military government. The shift towards authoritarian rule across Europe was seen as potentially detrimental to peace, since the new rulers criticized the League and espoused aggressive nationalism. The movement to which they belonged was as yet nameless and shapeless. Soon it would have a title of its own.

The miasma then spread to Italy. The country had arrived at Versailles determined to carry off some of the prizes of victory. During the war, the British and the French had promised the Italians extensive territorial gains in return for military support, including most of the Dalmatian coast and a number of colonies. Yet Italy’s claims were rejected, with the British and French reneging on their ‘gentleman’s agreement’. In consequence the Italian representatives angrily withdrew from the conference, and the peace settlement was reviled in Italy. It was in this context that ultranationalistic and paramilitary organizations, or ‘Fasci’, emerged throughout Italy in the early Twenties. These disparate and violent groups were also summoned into existence by the rise of Italian communism during Italy’s severe post-war economic depression. The communists organized massive strikes and demonstrations, inspiring fear among the industrialists and the property-owning classes, who no longer believed that the liberal political elite of Italy’s nascent democracy was capable of dealing with them.

One of these ‘Fasci’ was led by the war veteran and former socialist newspaper editor Benito Mussolini. With rousing rhetoric and considerable charisma, Mussolini held out the vague promise of a ‘national rebirth’. He would impose ‘authority’ and ‘order’ on a society that appeared to be descending into chaos, and take control of the failing economy with the help of the industrialists. He would also redress the terms of the ‘mutilated war victory’ by extending Italy’s territories. His vision, at once atavistic and modern, appealed to many among the middle and landowning classes who saw no fundamental incompatibility between ‘Fascism’ and their staunch Catholicism. The movement flourished in the country at a local level, and by the autumn of 1922 possessed 300,000 members. Encouraged by the groundswell of support, Mussolini decided to try to seize power by marching on Rome with his paramilitary ‘blackshirts’. The march instilled fear in an anxious establishment and the Italian king invited Mussolini to become prime minister. Despairing of Liberal politicians and democracy, the elite had simply surrendered.

The new prime minister made short work of his political opposition, altering the electoral law to his party’s advantage and arranging the assassination of his rival, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti. He then proceeded to suppress all other political parties and non-Fascist newspapers, and locked up political dissenters. By these means, and with the connivance of the Italian elite, Mussolini established a totalitarian Fascist state that assumed control of the economy and the judiciary, while encouraging militarism and discipline in the population through the creation of youth organizations. It also restricted personal freedom, with the threat of arrest to any intellectual who opposed Mussolini in word or deed. Finally, the government created a cult around Mussolini, as Italy’s godlike leader, or ‘duce’.

MacDonald soon established cordial relations with the murderer of Matteotti. Churchill praised the ‘gentle’ Duce in the press, as the saviour of ‘civilised society’ in Italy and ‘the necessary antidote to the Russian poison’. The fear of communism invariably overcame concerns about the threat Fascism posed to democracy. Few British politicians were worried about Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions, none of which were likely to upset the balance of power in Europe.

In other words, an ultranationalist, outwardly aggressive totalitarian state was tolerable in Italy because it was not Germany. Not only was Germany a powerful economic force, but the country was situated at the heart of the continent. Any attempt to extend its borders westwards would provoke another war, and, while eastern expansion was much less of a concern now that Russia was no longer a British ally, an enlarged Germany might still be a threat to continental peace and to British interests.

Another ultranationalist right-wing party had emerged in Bavaria during Germany’s economic depression in the early Twenties. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party offered an antidote to burgeoning German communism. According to the party leaders, Germany had been denied her ‘rightful’ position as the greatest European power by the ‘Marxist’ politicians who had ‘stabbed’ the country ‘in the back’ by surrendering in 1918, and by the ‘vindictive’ Allies at Versailles. The National Socialists were led by Adolf Hitler, a war veteran who earned a reputation as ‘Germany’s Mussolini’ for his mesmerizing rhetoric and eagerness to use paramilitary violence against his opponents. Yet while Hitler’s party attracted strong support among the Bavarian middle class and the landholding peasantry, it failed to secure the blessing of the Bavarian army. When it attempted a coup in 1923, it was easily quashed and its leaders were imprisoned. In jail Hitler composed his rambling semi-literate autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he vilified the Jewish race as a ‘poison’ that had adulterated the ‘pure’ Germanic race. He also identified ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ as the territory into which Germany must expand in order to gain essential ‘living space’. After his release from prison, Hitler renamed his party the ‘Nazis’, but they made little electoral headway, claiming only twelve seats and a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928.

When the financial crash came in 1929, everything changed. In severe economic depression, the appeal of the Nazis increased exponentially. It was stimulated by the widespread support for the Communist party, which organized strikes and protests throughout the country. The German economy appeared to be on the point of collapsing – production fell by 40 per cent, while unemployment rose to 30 per cent. Hitler blamed the crisis on the usual suspects – the Jews who ‘controlled world finance’ and the politicians who had drafted the ‘punitive’ Versailles Treaty. At the 1930 election the Nazis and the communists gained around a third of the popular vote between them; two years later they claimed over half, with the Nazis emerging as the largest single party.

It was difficult to see how the country could be governed without the consent of either the Nazis or the communists, and it was clear which party Germany’s leaders would favour. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor of the German Reich, in the belief that his presidential power could control the inexperienced and ‘vulgar’ Bavarian demagogue. The industrialists and the wealthier classes saw Hitler as a puppet, and preferred any alternative to communism. Yet once in power, Hitler proved to be as ruthless as Mussolini, arresting and killing political opponents, abolishing the unions and the free press, and establishing a one-party totalitarian state. His corporatist approach to economics echoed the Duce’s, as did his emphasis on internal ‘order’ and ‘discipline’. His obsession with German racial purity and persecution of Jews went beyond Italian Fascist anti-Semitism. Hitler was also more emphatic than Mussolini in his criticisms of the Versailles Treaty, demanding that its clauses should be revoked immediately and that Germany should be permitted to rearm.

Hitler’s rise to power did not arouse great concern within the Tory party or England’s right-wing press. Most Conservatives saw the Nazis as preferable to the communists, and many sympathized with Hitler’s grievances. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail praised the new German leader as the ‘saviour’ of his nation and even applauded his anti-Semitism. Hitler’s features soon became as familiar to the British public as those of a native politician. Churchill was virtually alone on the government benches, in the months after January 1933, in describing Nazism as a threat to the British Empire.