This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.
Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s view of the Treaty of Versailles (1919)
It was peace – after a fashion. But it often did not seem it. Huge turbulence, like a tidal wave after an earthquake, followed the war. The seismic upheavals took five years to subside. The soldiers returned home to a drastically altered political, social, economic and ideological landscape. The war had destroyed political systems, ruined economies, divided societies, and opened vistas onto radically utopian visions of a better world. It was labelled the ‘war to end war’. Why, then, did it pave the way instead for another, even more devastating conflagration? Why did the hopes of millions for peace, and for a better society built on greater freedom and equality, so swiftly evaporate? How, instead, did Europe lay the foundations of a dangerous ideological triad of utterly incompatible political systems competing for dominance: communism, fascism and liberal democracy? Yet why, in these early crisis years and despite the immediate post-war traumas, did communism triumph only in Russia, Fascism only in Italy, while democracy survived in most of the remainder of Europe – not least in the country at the pivotal centre of the continent, Germany?
LANDS ‘FIT FOR HEROES’?
During the British election campaign of 1918 the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, hailed by many as ‘the man who won the war’, spoke of making ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’. Even in what had before the war been Europe’s richest country, and one left physically almost entirely undamaged by four years of fighting, the words would soon seem no more than a hollow mockery to many soldiers who had come home from the trenches.
Early demobilization of the soldiers in Britain had, in fact, been fairly smooth. From 3.5 million at the Armistice in 1918, the army fell in size to 370,000 men by 1920. An immediate post-war economic boom meant that by the summer of 1919 four-fifths of the soldiers had been discharged, and most of those had found work (sometimes at the expense of women employed during the war). But the boom ended as quickly as it had begun. By the autumn of 1920 it was over. Deflationary policies (following those in the USA), introduced to protect sterling, had a drastic effect on living standards. Wages, which had initially kept up with rising prices, fell sharply. Class tensions remained high. In 1919, 35 million days had been lost in industrial disputes. In 1921 the figure was 86 million. Unemployment doubled over the three months from December 1920 to March 1921. By the summer, 2 million were without work. Most of the unemployed lived in squalid, dilapidated accommodation. Homes for heroes had been promised in 1918. But by 1923, 822,000 new houses were needed just to cover the basic housing shortage – greater than in 1919 – let alone replace millions of desolate slum dwellings.
By 1921, countless former soldiers, many of them badly disabled, were living in dire poverty, begging on the streets or trying to eke out a living by selling matches and mementoes, eating at food kitchens, sometimes forced to sleep in doorways or on park benches. ‘We were no longer heroes, we were simply “unemployed”’ was one former officer’s bitter commentary. ‘Ex-servicemen were continually coming to the door selling boot-laces and asking for cast-off shirts and socks,’ remembered Robert Graves, poet, writer and former front-line officer. ‘Patriots, especially of the female variety, were as much discredited in 1919 as in 1914 they had been honoured,’ recalled Vera Brittain, who had left a comfortable upper-middle-class background and volunteered to nurse the wounded at the front. She saw ‘a world denuded of prospects and left arid and pointless’.
The situation in Britain, dismal though it was, was far from the worst in Europe, certainly among the countries directly involved in the fighting. Terrible though they were, the British casualties fell below the highest rates. The United Kingdom’s military dead numbered 750,000 (a further 180,000 dead from across the empire), Italy’s almost half a million, France’s 1.3 million, Austria-Hungary’s almost 1.5 million, Russia’s around 1.8 million, Germany’s just over 2 million. Some of the smaller countries suffered worst in proportionate terms. One in three Serbs and Romanians sent into battle was killed or died of injuries or disease. The proportion of the dead among the fighting troops from the major belligerent countries ranged between 11–12 per cent (Russia, Italy and the United Kingdom) and 15–16 per cent (France, Germany and Austria-Hungary). The wounded, disabled and incapacitated greatly outnumbered the dead in all countries. The overall death toll was more than twice as high as the combined total from all major wars between 1790 and 1914. The influenza epidemic of 1918–19 then caused deaths worldwide twice as high as those on European battlefields during the war. To add to the horrific toll were the victims of related post-war violence and border conflicts.
The economic cost of the war was immense – over six times the total of all countries’ national debt from the end of the eighteenth century until 1914. In countries most directly affected by the fighting, production after the war was drastically reduced from what it had been in 1913. The United Kingdom, by contrast, fared much better. Its government indebtedness, even so, was nearly twelve times higher in 1918 than it had been in 1914, and its total net debt to the United States, the highest among the Allies, standing at nearly 4.5 billion dollars by 1922, now meant, as for most of Europe, lasting dependence on credit from the USA. Neutral countries were also economically buffeted by the war. Mostly, like Sweden, they had been able to expand their economies to cope with wartime demands. The impact on neutral Spain, however, was to intensify its economic problems and to deepen the social, ideological and political fissures already present in the country.
In western Europe physical devastation from the war was largely confined to Belgium and north-east France. These battleground regions suffered grievously. Hundreds of thousands of houses had been destroyed, industry was extensively damaged, vast acreages of land were left unfit to till, and a large proportion of livestock had been killed. The worst affected areas were, however, no more than 30 to 60 kilometres wide. Beyond the fighting zone, France, along with the rest of western Europe, suffered remarkably little destruction. In the east, where the war had been more mobile, it was a different story. Serbia, Poland and the regions that would become Belarus and Ukraine, trampled on and ravaged by advancing and retreating armies, underwent extreme devastation.
Victorious soldiers going home to a hero’s welcome in London at least found a country recognizable from the one they had left. Soldiers returning – often in disarray – to Vienna, Budapest, Munich or Berlin were in contrast plunged into revolutionary upheaval and economic chaos. Oddly, defeated Germany coped better than victorious Britain (or for that matter neutral Holland) in managing the post-war labour market and keeping down unemployment – partly by forcing women out of the jobs they had entered during the war and replacing them by men. Inflation, too, helped. Deflationary economics at this point would have wrecked the German economy still further and made it impossible to find jobs for so many ex-soldiers. The rampant inflation that the government did nothing to curb was, however, a price which would soon be paid in other, seriously damaging, ways.
Inflation had gathered pace in Germany during the war, when the national debt rose almost thirtyfold, paper money in circulation over twentyfold. Prices were about five times higher in 1918 than they had been before the war, and the currency had lost about half of its earlier value. Germany was not alone. Austria-Hungary’s wartime inflation and currency depreciation were even greater. Most countries experienced inflation on some level during the war. Prices were three times higher in 1919 than they had been in 1913 in France, the Netherlands, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, almost two and a half times as high in the United Kingdom. Especially in central and eastern Europe, however, price inflation galloped out of control in the post-war years. In Poland, Austria and Russia the currency was ruined amid hyperinflation. Jan Słomka (whom we met in Chapter 2), for many years the mayor of the village of Dzików in south-eastern Poland, recalled a few years later the impact of the rampaging inflation after the Austrian Crown had been replaced by the Polish paper mark in 1920:
If anyone sold anything and did not at once buy something else with the money, he would lose heavily. There were many who sold house or field, or part of their cattle, only to keep their money either at home or in some bank. These lost all they had and became beggars. On the other hand, those who borrowed money and bought things with it made fortunes. There were endless heaps of money. One had to carry it in briefcases or baskets. Purses and the like were useless. For things for the house one paid in thousands, then in millions, and finally in billions.
Only the introduction in 1924 of an entirely new currency, the złoty, produced stabilization in Poland.
In Germany the descent into hyperinflation was part of the grave political crisis that gripped the country in 1923 after the French, retaliating for German defaults on reparations payments, had occupied the Ruhr industrial heartlands. But the roots of the hyperinflation lay in war financing, based on the gamble that Germany would win the war and recoup its costs from the defeated countries. The economic consequences of the defeat then offered little incentive to Germany to prevent inflation. The German war effort had been mainly financed by domestic war loans. Inflation offered the means to liquidate these domestic debts. Early post-war measures to check rising prices gave way, once the reparations bill (which could only be paid in gold marks, not depreciated currency) was known in 1921, to a strategic readiness to accept high inflation.
As well as paying off domestic debts and staving off serious labour militancy that deflationary measures had prompted, for example, in Britain, inflation helped German industry to make a quick recovery after the war and gave a major boost to German exports. Industrialists could borrow what they needed for investment and repay the loans in depreciated currency. And as the German currency lost value, goods could be exported at highly competitive prices. It was little wonder that Germany experienced enormous growth in industrial production and shrinking unemployment between 1920 and 1922, at a time when deflationary policies in the USA, Britain and France saw exactly the reverse – falling rates of production and rising unemployment.
The wages of skilled industrial workers in Germany could often keep pace with inflation, at least at first. Trade unions had been able to build upon employers’ wartime concessions to secure improvements in pay and working hours. But for the unskilled, or those on fixed incomes or pensions, the inflation was a mounting disaster. In 1923, during the Ruhr crisis, it ran completely out of control and turned into an outright catastrophe. In 1914 the US dollar – by the end of the war the crucial hard currency in Germany – had been worth 4.20 marks, at the end of the war it had climbed to 14 marks, by late 1920 it stood at 65 marks, in January 1922 it had reached 17,972 marks, and in November 1923 it had rocketed to a dizzy 44.2 billion marks. What such scarcely comprehensible figures meant to ordinary individuals living on their modest savings is graphically highlighted by the fate of an elderly, well-educated Berlin man whose savings of 100,000 marks might in different times have provided for a reasonably comfortable retirement but, with the currency worthless, was enough only to buy a ticket on the underground railway. He took a trip on the underground around his city and, on returning, shut himself in his apartment, where he died of hunger.
Nowhere in post-war Europe was there a land ‘fit for heroes’. Grieving widows, orphaned children, crippled soldiers mingled with the hungry, the unemployed and the destitute in towns and villages across the continent. The war had left around 8 million invalids in need of state support. In Germany alone there were over half a million war widows and over a million orphans. Among the 650,000 who had suffered serious injury were 2,400 men blinded in the war, 65,000 who had lost either an arm or a leg, and over 1,300 who were now double amputees. Medicine had made advances during the war. But surgery could not fully heal such terrible wounds. And beyond the crippled bodies were the damaged minds, traumatized by war experiences – numbers estimated at 313,000 in Germany, 400,000 in Britain. Many never recovered, suffering from inadequate psychiatric treatment and scant public understanding of their condition. War invalids faced economic hardship and social discrimination. Employers did not want physically handicapped workers, while former soldiers psychiatrically damaged by the war were often seen as ‘hysterics’ or suspected of feigning illness to obtain a pension.
The prominent British socialist and pacifist, Ethel Snowden (whose husband, Philip, would become the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924), vividly captured the social misery in Vienna just after the war: ‘Uniformed officers sold roses in the cafés. Delicate women in faded finery begged with their children at street corners. Grass was growing in the principal streets. The shops were empty of consumers . . . At the Labour Exchanges many thousands of men and women stood in long lines to receive their out-of-work pay . . . Gallant doctors struggled in clinic and hospital with puny children covered with running sores, with practically no medicines, no soap, no disinfectants.’
In eastern Europe the situation was even more dire. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from the Russian Civil War faced bleak prospects wherever they went and seldom a friendly welcome from people themselves suffering great hardship. Poland, much of it ravaged for years by fighting, was in a terrible state. Half the population of Warsaw was receiving unemployment relief of some minimal kind just after the war, disease was widespread, and in eastern Poland there was near starvation. ‘The country,’ reported Sir William Goode, head of the British relief mission to central and eastern Europe in 1919, ‘had undergone four or five occupations by different armies, each of which had combed the land for supplies. Most of the villages had been burnt down by the Russians in their retreat [of 1915]; land had been uncultivated for four years . . . The population here was living upon roots, grass, acorns and heather.’ The wonder is not that there were widespread political disturbances in much of post-war Europe, but that revolutionary upheavals were not more extensive.
Nearly everywhere people had to contend not just with severe material hardship, but also with personal loss. In a people’s war, with such immense casualties, there had to be some national recognition of the magnitude of the suffering.
French families wanted their loved ones buried in the churchyards of their home villages. The government eventually yielded to public pressure and the state paid for the exhumation and reburial of 300,000 of the identifiable dead. This was possible, if a huge logistical and bureaucratic procedure, because the French dead had fallen mainly in their own country. For other nations, something similar was not feasible. The dead had to be commemorated where they had been killed, although victors and vanquished were kept separate. The French, especially, could not bear the thought of their loved ones lying alongside Germans. So where the German dead lay buried alongside the French and British, they were exhumed and reburied in separate cemeteries. The result was the establishment of war cemeteries, each country’s uniform in somewhat different ways, on or near the former battlegrounds. The cemeteries symbolized immortal heroism and sacrifice for the nation. They also touched popular piety, evoking the sense that the sacrifice had not been in vain, and that the fallen would rise again in the presence of God. Among the serried white ranks of identical gravestones in the manicured lawns of the British cemeteries would sometimes lie a soldier whose identity could not be established, accompanied by the simple inscription: ‘Known unto God’. Bringing home an unknown soldier and interring him in a national shrine soon became the focal point of a nation’s collective mourning. In 1920, amid enormous pomp and ritual, the French interred an ‘Unknown Soldier’ beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the British in Westminster Abbey in London. Italy, Belgium and Portugal followed these examples soon afterwards.
What was possible in national commemoration for the fallen of the western front was not replicated in the east. No monument at all was erected in Russia. There, the war flowed without pause into the revolutionary struggles and the even greater losses of the horrific civil war. With Bolshevism’s triumph the First World War – viewed as simply a conflict of rapacious imperialist powers – receded behind the heroic myth of the civil war. Ideological demands meant that the First World War could have no place in collective memory.
Nor could a feeling of national unity in memory of the fallen similar to that of the victorious western powers be expected for the defeated countries, where the war had been divisive and led not just to military disaster and immense loss of life, but to huge political upheaval and ideological confrontation. Germany inaugurated a national monument to the dead in Berlin only as late as 1931 (though many local war memorials preceded this). The meaning of the conflict and the German defeat were too bitterly contested to find unity in any war commemoration. At one end of the spectrum of public emotion lay grief, horror at the human cost of the war and pacifism, so movingly captured in Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture, conceived during the war, completed more than a decade later, and placed in a Belgian cemetery, of parents mourning the loss of their son. At the other end of the spectrum was the sense of national humiliation and anger at the defeat and accompanying revolution, which incorporated war heroism into hopes of national resurrection and rebirth. It was encapsulated in the ‘myth of Langemarck’. Near this Flemish village with a German-sounding name, some 20,000–25,000 hastily assembled and badly trained young German volunteers had lost their lives in a futile battle with the British as early as autumn 1914. At the hands of German propaganda, this near senseless loss had acquired lasting legendary status as a demonstration of the sacrifice and heroism of youth that was the necessary basis of national renewal. The myth of the fallen remained in Germany a central focus of ideological dispute that would find its disastrous resolution in the 1930s.
The horror of the war made pacifists of many people. ‘The War itself had turned me into an opponent of war’, was the reaction of the German socialist playwright Ernst Toller to what he described as ‘a catastrophe for Europe, a plague on humanity, the crime of our century’. From her revulsion at the death and suffering, and despondency at the loss of her fiancé, her brother and two close friends, the English writer Vera Brittain became a pacifist, socialist and ardent fighter for women’s rights. In France, Madeleine Vernet, who before the war had run an orphanage, founded the ‘League of Women against War’, attracting support from feminists, socialists and communists. There, as in many parts of Europe, ideals of peace and an end to the social inequalities built into capitalist competition found ready ears. Idealistic pacifism remained, however, confined to a minority. Most of the soldiers returning home were not pacifists. They had fought, and would if patriotic duty and necessity demanded it reluctantly fight again. But they overwhelmingly wanted peace, security, a return to normality and a better future, without war. The vast majority wanted to get back to their farms, their workplaces, their villages and towns, above all to their families. This was the most commonplace reaction – certainly in western Europe – as people tried in different ways to reconstruct lives that had so often been upturned by the experience of this terrible conflict. The horror of what had happened produced the overwhelming conviction that there must never again be war.
CHAMPIONS OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Not all, however, felt that way. There was an altogether different and competing legacy of Europe’s great conflagration – a legacy that glorified war and welcomed violence and hatred. For many, the war simply did not end in November 1918. The culture shock of defeat, of revolution and the triumph of socialism, and the paranoid fears of ‘Red Terror’ in horror stories spread by refugees fleeing from the Russian Civil War fed a brutal mentality in which the killing and maiming of those viewed as responsible for the disaster became a duty, necessity and pleasure – a normal way of life.
New and frightening levels of intense political violence were a characteristic of much of post-war Europe. North-western Europe was not exempt, as testified by the high level of violence in Ireland between 1919 and 1923 during the struggle for independence from British rule – including sectarian killings, arbitrary brutality by British paramilitaries (the ‘Black and Tans’), and eventually a brief but bloody civil war in 1922–3. The short-lived ‘Easter Rising’ against British rule in 1916 had been quickly suppressed, though it included counter-productive brutality towards prisoners and executions of the leaders of the insurrection that left an enduring legacy of bitterness. This fed into the guerrilla war for independence that, from 1919 onwards, was waged with much intimidatory violence by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The British responded by deploying the Black and Tans. So called after their improvised uniforms – part police dark-green (not actually black), part army khaki – the Black and Tans comprised around 9,000 ex-servicemen, augmented by 2,200 former officers who formed an Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, a force hated by Irish nationalists. The atrocities of the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division, including rape, torture, murder, and the burning down of houses of supposed insurgents, went a long way towards poisoning Anglo-Irish relations for decades. Even Oswald Mosley, who more than a decade later would go on to lead the British Union of Fascists, was disgusted by their actions. Indeed their violence was sickening – a lasting stain on British history.
But Ireland was an exception in north-western Europe – an exception even within the United Kingdom. The British government had always regarded Ireland as a quasi-colony, to be treated differently from other parts of the British Isles. Extremes of repressive violence were otherwise reserved for Britain’s colonial possessions (such as the shooting by British troops under General Reginald Dyer of several hundred unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar in April 1919 as the struggle for Indian independence gathered support, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi). At home, on the British mainland, the scale of post-war disorder nowhere seriously threatened to turn into revolution. Civil defence formations were used in Britain and France to combat strikes in 1919 and 1920. But social and political unrest was contained by the state and fell far short of gathering any revolutionary momentum. Paramilitary mobilization became a significant concern only a decade or so later in France, under different circumstances, and never threatened to upturn the political order in Britain.
In southern Europe it was a different matter. Mounting political violence formed a backdrop to the rise of Fascism in Italy by 1922 and to the establishment of a military dictatorship in Spain the following year. And at the south-eastern tip of Europe the extreme violence that long pre-dated the First World War, and which had included the deportation and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915, continued in the early post-war years. The worst occurred when, after three years under Greek occupation, the Turks retook the multi-ethnic Aegean port of Smyrna (now Izmir) on Turkey’s western shores in September 1922, set fire to the parts of the city inhabited by Greeks and Armenians, and massacred tens of thousands of them. The endemic violence in the region finally subsided in 1923 with the end of catastrophic attempts by Greece to extend its territory to include western Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne that year ratified an exchange of population (actually expulsions), the largest before the Second World War, with the establishment of the new Turkish republic. It amounted to the first internationally agreed case of major ethnic cleansing – of over a million Greeks (most of whom had already fled from Anatolia the previous year) from Turkey and 360,000 Turks from Greece.
The epicentre of the new and extreme counter-revolutionary violence, greater than anything witnessed here since the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, was located nevertheless in central and eastern Europe. Here, whole societies, not just soldiers returning from years of exposure to killing and inured to bloodshed and suffering, had been brutalized. Scorched-earth policies and the deportation of civilians had been part of the war on the eastern front. And there the fighting did not stop in November 1918 but flowed without break into fierce border conflicts in Poland and into the Russian Civil War – of a horror that sent shock waves convulsing throughout eastern and central Europe.
Preventing Bolshevism from spreading to their own homelands was a crucial motive of counter-revolutionaries, some of whom readily participated in the anti-Bolshevik campaigns in the Baltic and elsewhere. But the violence was not simply a reaction to what was happening in Russia. The left-wing revolutions that swept the lands of the defeated Central Powers encountered opposition everywhere. Armed paramilitary organizations gathered strength amid the political chaos. Their leaders had invariably experienced the slaughter at the front, often in the east, during the First World War. What had horrified most Europeans had been for these men an exhilarating experience. They heroized fighting and extolled killing. When they came home, it was to a world that they did not understand, a world, as one put it, ‘turned upside down’. They felt a sense of betrayal, or simply saw no future in a return to mundane, often poverty-stricken, civilian life. Many who felt like this found their way into the racial violence of paramilitary politics, burgeoning especially between the east of Germany and the west of Russia, and from the Baltic to the Balkans. The German Freikorps (freebooters, at government expense), often under aristocratic leadership, are estimated to have attracted between 200,000 and 400,000 men. They operated where border conflicts, radical ethnic nationalism, the threat of Bolshevism and a visceral hatred of Jews created a potent mix of violent emotions.
Around a quarter of the 225,000 German officers returning home in 1918, mainly lower-ranking from middle-class backgrounds, joined one or other of the paramilitary Freikorps units. So did a large number of unemployed former soldiers and landless labourers, hoping to acquire some land in the east and meanwhile contenting themselves with what they could plunder. War veterans were, however, outnumbered by activists too young to have fought in the war, though sharing a similar mentality with those disaffected by the peace – a ‘war youth generation’ fed on militaristic values and expectations of national glory.
The paramilitary recruits looked for ways to uphold – or try to recreate – the camaraderie, the ‘trench community’, the male bonds, and the sheer excitement of armed conflict. They recalled, or imagined, a sense of unity, of patriotic fervour, of commitment to a cause worth fighting and dying for. And this greatly magnified the bitterness they now felt towards those who, in their eyes, had demanded the enormous human sacrifice that had brought not victory and glory but defeat and humiliation. It enormously heightened the thirst for revenge that these paramilitary recruits felt against those deemed responsible for loss of parts of their homeland and those they viewed as creating a world opposed to all that they stood for – a world shaped by disorder, lack of authority, injustice, chaos (seen as fomented by the ‘Reds’) and ‘effeminate’ democracy. Their response was extreme violence.
The new upsurge of violence had no clear or coherent ideology. Greed, envy, thirst for material gain, desire to grab land all played their part. The violence itself owed far more to untrammelled activism than to a preconceived view of a future society or the form of the state. But it was ideological just the same; targeted and not random, aimed at the revolutionary forces – mainly perceived as internal enemies – that threatened to destroy the values they held dear.
Most prominent among these internal enemies were communists, socialists and, not least, Jews. For many of the champions of counter-revolution, these internal enemies blended into one another. When they saw Jews playing a prominent part in revolutionary movements – Leon Trotsky among others in Russia, Béla Kun in Hungary, Victor Adler and Otto Bauer in Austria, Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, together with several leading figures in the short-lived ‘soviet republic’ in Munich in April 1919 – it just confirmed their fantasies, set in motion by that pre-war forgery of the Tsarist police, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ to undermine Europe’s culture, morality and political order. Jews had for the most part welcomed the Russian Revolution as heralding emancipation. They had great hopes of a socialist future without discrimination and persecution. They joined the revolutionary movement in disproportionate numbers and came to play a significant role in Soviet administration and policing. As many as 75 per cent of the Kiev political police (the Cheka) in 1919 were Jewish, for instance. In eastern Europe, Jews became identified with Bolshevism – though most were, in fact, not revolutionaries. They were to pay a terrible price.
Many soldiers had soaked up the poisonous antisemitic propaganda that the Central Powers and the Russians had spread in the trenches as adversity deepened and defeat became ever more likely. The chaotic conditions in central and eastern Europe that followed the end of the war saw a cascade of anti-Jewish violence. ‘Jews are hated everywhere,’ wrote a Russian sociologist in 1921. ‘They are hated by people regardless of their class or education, political persuasion, race, or age.’ He saw hatred of the Jews as ‘one of the most prominent features of Russian life today, perhaps even the most prominent’. The civil war led to an onslaught on Jews, at its worst in Ukraine. In some 1,300 pogroms there between 50,000 and 60,000 Jews were killed. The continued fierce fighting between Ukrainians and Poles in East Galicia spawned anti-Jewish violence in over a hundred townships, including Lvov, where seventy Jews were killed during a major pogrom when the Polish army entered the city in July 1919.
There was extensive anti-Jewish violence, too, in Hungary after the collapse of Béla Kun’s short-lived communist regime in August 1919. A flavour of the intense hatred of Jews and their identification with Bolshevism was captured by the remarks of an otherwise refined and charming Hungarian aristocratic lady, recalled by Ethel Snowden in summer 1919: ‘I would kill every Bolshevik if I could have my way; and they wouldn’t die an easy death either. I would roast them in front of a slow fire. Think of what those dirty Jews have done to some of our best men. And all my clothes and jewels gone! . . . Some horrid little Jewess is pulling [my beautiful white boots] on to her ugly feet this very minute, I am positive.’ Given such a mentality, atrocities towards Jews in the wake of Hungary’s post-war political turmoil were hardly surprising. In the parts of the country west of the Danube more than 3,000 Jews were murdered, according to a report in 1922.
Even in the new Czech republic, a beacon of emerging democratic freedom among the new states to emerge from the Habsburg Empire, there were pogroms, while student riots forced the Jewish rector of Prague University to resign in 1922. Germany and Austria experienced no pogroms. The violent antisemitic rhetoric did its work, nevertheless, in poisoning the atmosphere that led to the murder of Jews in prominent political positions, such as Kurt Eisner, the Bavarian Minister President, in 1919 and Walther Rathenau, the Reich Foreign Minister, in 1922.
The violence of the counter-revolutionaries knew few bounds. It invariably went far beyond the revolutionary violence that they claimed to be combating. ‘Red Terror’ is estimated to have taken the lives of five persons in Austria, up to 200 in Germany, and between 400 and 500 in Hungary. There were at least 850 victims of counter-revolutionary violence in Austria. The suppression of the Bavarian ‘soviet republic’ at the end of April 1919 brought a death toll of 606 persons, 335 of them civilians. And ‘white terror’ in Hungary, following the collapse of Béla Kun’s soviet regime in Budapest, killed around 1,500 people, at least three times the number who had died at the hands of the Reds.
‘No pardon is given. We shoot even the wounded,’ wrote one student volunteer to his parents after participating in the repression of a communist uprising in Germany’s Ruhr district in 1920. ‘We slaughtered whoever fell into our hands . . . There were no human feelings left in our hearts,’ recalled another young German who participated in paramilitary fighting in the Baltic in 1919. Rudolf Höss, who later, as commandant of Auschwitz, presided over an unprecedented programme of orchestrated mass killing, remembered the fighting in the Baltic as more grim than anything he had witnessed during the First World War – ‘pure slaughter to the point of complete annihilation’. The Baltic and Upper Silesia, where there was fierce fighting between Poles and Germans between 1919 and 1921, were the settings for a huge loss of life, perhaps as high as 100,000, at the hands of paramilitaries.
Paramilitary violence declined sharply after 1923. But those who had been at the forefront of the violence did not alter in character or attitude, even if they had to adapt to changed times. Many would find new opportunities in the fascist movements that gathered support across Europe during the 1930s. And in the regions of greatest violence there would be far worse to come – in no small measure as a reaction to the successful establishment of Soviet communism in Russia.
BOLSHEVISM TRIUMPHANT
It was inevitable that the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 would not be accepted without a fight by those who stood to be dispossessed of land and other property. The result was a civil war of unimaginable savagery and bloodshed that raged for three years and cost the lives of over 7 million men, women and children, around four times Russia’s losses in the Great War, the majority of them civilians. Huge numbers died from associated hunger and epidemic disease as well as actual fighting and terroristic repression.
What constituted the civil war was actually a series of wars, loosely interconnected through the common aim of the ‘White’ counter-revolutionary forces to try to strangle the new Soviet regime at birth. There was an international dimension. The ‘Whites’, led in the main by former high-ranking Tsarist officers and Cossacks, were backed by Allied troops, weaponry and logistical support. Some 30,000 Czech, American, British, Italian and French troops helped the White army fighting westwards from Siberia in 1919. The Allies provided munitions for the Whites equivalent to the entire Soviet production that year. Foreign support waned thereafter, however, and was of less importance than Soviet accounts of the civil war later claimed. For a time, especially in 1919, the outcome was far from certain. But by late 1920, Bolshevik power over practically the entirety of the vast territory of the former Russian Empire had survived. The final stages of the civil war merged with the war in 1920 of the increasingly victorious Red Army against Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s Polish army. After the Poles had been driven out of Kiev (which changed hands a dozen times during the civil war) and the Red Army had been repulsed in August by Piłsudski’s forces at the gates of Warsaw, an armistice in the autumn of 1920 produced a settlement that extended the Polish eastern border with the Soviet state. The Treaty of Riga in March 1921 guaranteed the new border – at least until the next great war.
The anti-Soviet campaigns, reaching their climax in 1919, took place largely in the peripheral regions of the former Russian Empire. The key to ultimate victory by the Reds, however, was their control of the large central core zone of Russia, together with superior organizational capacity and utter ruthlessness as well as divisions among their opponents. The vast territory gave the Reds access to huge manpower reserves (conscripted with the help of a good dose of terror in the countryside) and foodstuffs, ruthlessly extracted from an increasingly truculent but brutally cowed peasantry. This made possible the rapid expansion of the Red Army, which grew from a mere 430,000 men in October 1918 to 5,300,000 by the end of 1920. Badly equipped, ill-provisioned and often undisciplined though it was, the huge mass army, commanded by 75,000 former officers of the Tsarist army, marshalled by ferocious discipline, and fighting to defend the revolution, was more than a match for the numerically weaker and less cohesive White forces. Although the popularity of the Soviet state (which had been built heavily upon promise of land reform for the overwhelmingly peasant population) was rapidly declining, Bolshevik supremacy, the suppression of opposition parties, and ruthless terror against any who offered resistance meant that there was little alternative to compliance.
In any case, the Whites put forward little by way of a social programme that could favourably compete with that of the Bolsheviks. The White leaders, conservative Russian nationalists whose only objective seemed to be to turn the clock back to the pre-revolutionary period, were unable to win much support from non-Russian nationalists in peripheral regions. Ukraine, for instance, had a population of some 32 million, largely peasant, fervent Ukrainian nationalists who could not be mobilized for the Greater Russian cause. The Whites lacked not just a coherent programme; they were also organizationally weaker than the Soviets, could raise only smaller armies, suffered from poor communications, and had no coordinated military strategy. Yet the outcome of the civil war was far from a foregone conclusion. It took three years of the most bitter and bloody conflict before the Red Army was assured of outright victory. It would, nevertheless, have been against all the odds had Bolshevism not ultimately prevailed.
When the civil war ended the Soviet economy was in ruins. Industrial production had fallen by over 66 per cent compared with 1913, agricultural production by 40 per cent. Politically, too, the problems were enormous. By early 1921, under the extreme food shortages caused by peasants holding back their produce, industrial workers in Russia’s big cities – the heartlands of Bolshevism – were in revolt against the coercive methods of the regime. Martial law had to be declared in Moscow and St Petersburg in the wake of huge strikes in February (new Russian calendar). Mounting danger for the regime reached a critical point in a rising by sailors – avid Bolshevik adherents in 1917 – from the naval base in Kronstadt, just outside Petrograd, in March 1921. The regime reacted with utter ruthlessness. Trotsky warned the rebel sailors that they would ‘be shot like partridges’ if they did not surrender within twenty-four hours. When they continued to resist, Trotsky was as good as his word. A major assault on the fortress at Kronstadt was launched by 50,000 troops from the Red Army. After a battle lasting eighteen hours, the uprising collapsed. Over 10,000 rebel sailors and Red Army soldiers lay dead. Thousands more rebels were executed or sent to concentration camps.
The uprising of one-time ardent supporters had shocked the Bolshevik rulers to the core. If that was a warning, the regime faced a much bigger challenge in winning over the vast majority of the population, the peasantry, whose hostility to Bolshevik land policy had become acute. Immediately following the revolution, in order to win peasant support the Bolsheviks had legalized the redistribution of land among the peasantry. But the forced requisitioning of peasant produce during the civil war and early attempts to introduce farming collectives had created a rebellious peasantry. The collectives were unproductive; the peasants deliberately sowed less. Sometimes the forced exactions of grain in any case amounted to no seed left to sow. The result was famine in 1921–2. Peasant revolts broke out in numerous regions, sometimes accompanied by gruesome violence against local Bolsheviks. Lenin saw the threat to the regime from the peasant wars as greater than that of the Whites in the civil war. The response was a massive use of force to put down the peasant risings during the summer of 1921. Thousands of peasants were shot, tens of thousands more sent to camps. But the big stick was not enough. Coercion alone, as the civil war had shown, would not produce food.
The Bolsheviks had not only completely alienated the major section of the population on whose cooperation they depended politically; they desperately needed the peasants to produce more. This brought a volte-face by the regime’s leadership. Lenin bought off an increasingly rebellious peasantry by a ‘New Economic Policy’ introduced at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. This relaxed party control over agriculture and re-established a partial market economy while retaining state ownership of all major branches of industrial production, transport, energy and communications. Goods started to appear again. Economic recovery was soon under way – even if there was great resentment in the towns at the profiteers who shamelessly exploited the new conditions of supply and demand.
By the time of Lenin’s death in January 1924 the economy had revived. The regime had weathered the major storm. Despite the buffeting it had taken, all parts of the Soviet state were by now in the hands of the Bolshevik Party. The party’s organization, rigidly controlled from the centre by its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, created a system of patronage and corruption that bought the allegiance of growing numbers of placemen and apparatchiks. The number of bureaucrats quadrupled to 2.4 million within four years of the revolution. And a huge influx of new party members – almost 1.5 million entrants by 1920, two-thirds of them from peasant backgrounds, hoping for better lives – helped the Bolsheviks to consolidate their hold on power, and to extend their penetration of the countryside.
Early idealistic notions of popular participation in the running of political, economic and social matters through elected representatives in the soviets, based upon worker control of production, had of necessity been reformulated. Communism itself would have to wait till the dawn of the utopia. Meanwhile, power in the socialist state would and could only be exercised by the avant-garde of the proletariat, the party. Any opposition could be dubbed ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’ and had to be destroyed. ‘Bourgeois’ law could not stand in the way of the merciless extirpation of class enemies.
Terror as an essential weapon in the class war was central to the Bolshevik revolutionary project. ‘Let there be floods of bourgeois blood – more blood, as much as possible,’ the Bolshevik press had urged in 1918. ‘We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,’ Lenin had written that summer. Turning the hatred of peasants, desperate for land, against kulaks, portrayed as land exploiters but often only marginally better-off peasants, was part of the strategy. Describing them as ‘bloodsuckers [who] have grown rich on the hunger of the people’, Lenin decried the kulaks as ‘rabid foes of the Soviet government’, ‘leeches [who] have sucked the blood of the working people’ and advocated ‘death to all of them’.
By 1922, when the regime felt strong enough to attack religious worship and to destroy the hold of the Orthodox Church, Lenin encouraged ‘merciless war’ against the clergy. ‘The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot, the better,’ he stated. The early Soviet Union was already a regime in which conventional law had no place, one that gave licence to the unconstrained power of the Cheka, the state security police. ‘The Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent,’ declared its head, Felix Dzerzhinsky. This was a cynical understatement. Arbitrary imprisonment, torture and executions became commonplace. How many fell victim to the terror of the Cheka is not known. Estimates put the figure at several hundred thousand, including those thrown into prisons and camps. Inside the prisons, the torture methods deployed were hideous in the extreme.
The essential characteristics of Bolshevik rule had, then, emerged during Lenin’s lifetime. What followed was continuation and logical consequence, not an aberration. Within the Bolshevik leadership, intense political, ideological and personal conflicts had been just about held in check as long as Lenin lived. But his death at the start of 1924, following a long illness, opened up a protracted and bitter power struggle. The winner, though this only gradually became obvious, turned out to be Joseph Stalin. Under his leadership, a new and even more terrible phase in the early history of the Soviet Union was to follow.
Despite the paranoid fears on the European Right, Bolshevism soon proved to be non-exportable. The Soviet leaders had at first reckoned with the spread of revolution across Europe. But during the civil war they had to accept that this was not going to happen. Lenin realized this no later than the autumn of 1920, when the Red Army was defeated by the Poles outside Warsaw. Conditions in Russia were completely unlike those in the rest of Europe. The very vastness of the country – the largest on earth, far greater in size than the rest of Europe put together, stretching 5,000 miles from east to west, and 2,000 miles from north to south – imposed its own peculiarities of political control. Uniquely in pre-war Europe, Tsarist rule had been unconstrained until 1906 by any constitutional restrictions, and thereafter only by fig-leaf constitutionalism. Russia had no independent basis of law and no representative framework of pluralist politics that could have worked for the gradual reform of state institutions elsewhere.
Compared with other parts of Europe, civil society in Russia was weak. Only a small property-owning middle class had emerged, and repression of political dissidence had produced an intelligentsia that was tiny but radicalized. Despite rapid modernization that had created an impoverished proletariat in the big industrial cities, Russia had remained intensely backward economically, a country in which the peasantry – more than 80 per cent of the population – lived largely in communes, often in the economic bonds of servility under the neo-feudal dominance of those who possessed the land, and they viewed the state and its officials with great hostility. Violence, brutality and scant regard for human life had been deeply embedded in this society. The Russian peasantry, as Lenin rightly adjudged, were a revolutionary class with no stake in property and order. Nowhere else in Europe was this true, even accounting for peasant antipathy towards estate owners in many parts of the continent and insurgent tendencies among agricultural labourers in some regions of Spain and Italy. Russia offered socially, economically, ideologically and politically propitious preconditions, even before the calamities of the First World War radicalized conditions and swept away Tsarism, for a fundamental revolutionary transformation that could not be replicated elsewhere.
Following the civil war, Soviet Russia became in effect an alien body, as good as quarantined from the mainstream of European politics, turned in on itself and subjected to the immense internal brutality that would accompany the building of the Soviet state and the modernization of its economy over the following years. As a million or so fleeing emigrés, many of them former supporters of the Tsarist regime, spread horror stories about Soviet Russia in European capitals, feeding the anti-Bolshevik hysteria as it spread across the continent, Bolshevism swiftly turned into a bogeyman to be feared and reviled, a negative focus for the politics of the conservative and radical Right.
During the deliberations of the leaders of the victorious powers, meeting in Paris in 1919 at the Versailles Conference to redraw the map of Europe, Russia already figured only as a negative entity. Militarily supporting the attempt to destroy Bolshevism and not prepared to recognize the Soviet Union, they had no option but to leave the thorny question of the validity and contours of Europe’s eastern borders open.
THE GREAT CARVE-UP
The new map of Europe, when it took shape, looked very different to that of 1914. Four empires – the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and German – had vanished (though the new republic in Germany retained the name ‘Reich’, the symbol of a historic German Empire in Europe stretching back to Charlemagne). Their collapse amounted to a cataclysmic shift in the political structures of central, eastern and southern Europe. Ten new nation states (including, by 1923, Turkey) emerged in their wake.
The task of creating Europe’s new order fell essentially on the four leaders of the victorious powers: the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, the French Premier, Georges Clemenceau, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando. The challenge facing them when they arrived in Paris to begin work in January 1919 was unenviable. Driven by Wilson’s idealism, behind which lay the calculated aim of global economic dominance by the USA and a post-war world built in the American image, they had lofty ambitions. One was to set up a framework that would prevent Europe from again descending into war by establishing a League of Nations to guarantee collective security and international peace.
It was a noble ideal. After its foundation in January 1920 the League, comprising forty-eight member states by the end of that year with its headquarters in Geneva, sought to work for international cooperation, to protect ethnic minorities, and to do everything possible to mitigate the humanitarian crisis in central and eastern Europe. But most important of all was the commitment to uphold the post-war international settlement. This would prove a pipe-dream. Without military might to intervene, notions of an effective multi-national framework of collective security were illusory. And, for all that it was intended to be a truly global organization, the League remained in practice a largely European affair, dominated especially by the interests of Britain and France. Wilson’s political opponents in the USA would ensure that America, which was meant to be the League’s key player, was not even a member.
Wilson’s central ideal, which underlaid the deliberations in Paris, was ‘self-determination’. The term was susceptible to different meanings and Wilson was content to be vague about its definition, not least since its implications for maintaining power in the colonies were barely palatable to the major imperial powers, Britain and France. For Wilson, self-determination essentially meant government derived from popular sovereignty – the right of a people to have their own state, which would ideally evolve over time and not result from violent revolution.
In the disastrous conditions of post-war Europe, however, self-determination – a revolutionary concept – was a demand for the immediate future, not a long-term aspiration. The Bolsheviks had in fact been the first to use the concept. But their interest in self-determination was purely instrumental. Their support for nationalist movements was extended in order to undermine and destroy the existing multi-national empires in Europe and more generally to weaken or overthrow imperialism. However, in Stalin’s words, ‘when the right of self-determination conflicts with another, a higher right – the right of the working class that has come to power to consolidate that power’, then ‘the right of self-determination cannot and must not serve as an obstacle to the working class in exercising its right to dictatorship’. As this made abundantly plain, ‘national self-determination’ in the emerging Soviet Union was to become wholly subordinated to the centralizing power of the Bolshevik state.
The vision of self-determination that underpinned the deliberations at the Versailles Conference in 1919 (to which the Soviets were not invited) ran completely counter to the Bolshevik interpretation. It was to be the framework for a world order based on liberal democracy – government by popular consent in a state resting on popular sovereignty. The underlying problem, however, was that precisely in the most unsettled parts of the continent the claim to popular sovereignty was based on ethnic nationalism. And most of the territories of the fallen empires contained more than one nationality staking a claim to land, resources and political representation. In the countries of western Europe (as in the USA) the state had over time shaped the nation; association with the institutions of the state had gradually formed a national consciousness. But in most of central, eastern and southern Europe, national consciousness had emerged from the demands of a people defined by ethnicity, language and culture to establish a state that represented – often exclusively – their interests. How was self-determination to be squared with competing claims to a sovereign nation state?
It was obvious to the ‘Big Four’ from the outset that the complex ethnic mix of central and eastern Europe made national self-determination impossible to achieve. The peacemakers could only do their best – and hope that functioning nation states, in which ethnic differences were superseded by national unity in a multi-ethnic state, would emerge over time. However they adjusted Europe’s boundaries, these were bound to include some sizeable national minorities, whose rights would be safeguarded (so it was thought) by appeal to the League of Nations. None of the new states, apart from the small rump of German-speaking Austria, was ethnically homogeneous. Three and a half million Hungarians, for instance, ended up living outside Hungary, many in territory handed to Romania, while 3 million Germans found themselves living in Czechoslovakia. When the new lines on the map were finally agreed, they had, in fact, less to do with the self-determination of nationalities than with the feasibility of satisfying some territorial claims at the expense of others, while trying to minimize any likely ensuing tension or hostility.
Almost everywhere there were hotly disputed territories. Claims resting on ethnicity were almost invariably spurious – merely a (sometimes transparent) cover for territorial ambitions, driven by economic, military or strategic reasons. Claims and counter-claims – between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia (all wanting some of Macedonia), between Greece and Italy (over Albania), between Romania and Hungary (both staking claims to Transylvania), or between Poland and Germany (disputing Silesia) – were all made by paying lip-service to self-determination, but they were actually no more than attempts at traditional territorial aggrandizement. Some claims could barely even pretend to be about self-determination. These included Italy’s demands for the predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol; the almost entirely Slav-populated Dalmatian coast; parts of Asia Minor settled mainly by Greeks and Turks; and, what became a cause célèbre for budding Fascists, the small port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), which had only a partially Italian population.
Trying to adjudicate on the complex disputes caused nightmares for the Big Four in Paris. Some artificiality behind the new state boundaries was inevitable. In a number of cases – Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929), and Poland – it was a matter of recognizing existing reality in states created from the fallen empires at the end of the First World War. In other instances, it was to reward support for the Entente during the war and to punish the subjugated enemy. Romania, for example, was a major beneficiary, doubling its size, largely at the expense of Hungary. In central Europe, Austria, Hungary and Germany were major losers in the territorial redistribution.
Rejoicing among the winners from the territorial settlement was more than matched by dismay, anger and smouldering resentment among the losers. In Italy the fury over Fiume played into the hands of the rabid nationalists. The proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had himself coined the phrase ‘mutilated victory’ to imply that Italy had been cheated out of rightful gains from the war, made the cause of Fiume his own and in mid-September 1919 led a motley paramilitary force into a bizarre occupation of the small Adriatic town, which lasted for fifteen months. In the Treaty of Rapallo signed between Italy and Yugoslavia in November 1920, Fiume was eventually designated a free city with land links to Italy. But Fiume remained a banner for the Fascists, who were gathering strength in Italy, and it was to be annexed by Benito Mussolini in 1924.
However difficult proved so many of the territorial issues arising from the war that the Big Four gathered in Paris had to deal with, their central and overriding priority was Germany. They were unanimous in holding Germany primarily to blame for the great conflagration. In their eyes the invasion of France (for the second time in just over forty years) and the breach of Belgian neutrality, accompanied by atrocities against the civilian population, pointed the finger of blame squarely at Germany. The questions of punishment and retribution for the exorbitant costs of the war were, therefore, the most pressing concerns of the Allied leaders. More crucial still was ensuring that Germany should never again be in a position to plunge Europe into war. German militarism and industrial muscle might, if not sufficiently tamed, again threaten Europe’s peace. On the other hand, Germany’s economic importance to a future Europe was obvious. Moreover, crushing Germany (which would have been popular in France, especially) might open the door for Bolshevism to spread into the heart of Europe.
A problem for the Allies was that many Germans did not recognize that their country had been militarily defeated. Germany was undestroyed after four years of war. No Allied troops had stood on German soil at the Armistice, though German forces at that time still occupied much of Belgium, and Luxembourg. German soldiers were welcomed home with festive flags and flowers. The Prussian War Ministry declared soon after the Armistice that ‘our field-grey heroes return to the Heimat undefeated’. It was untrue. But the sentiment was repeated by the High Command of the Army; then in December 1918 by no less a person than the new Socialist head of government, Friedrich Ebert. The legend soon to be put about by the counter-revolutionary Right, that the troops at the front had been stabbed in the back by labour unrest fomented by revolutionary socialists at home, could germinate in fertile soil.
When the Allied terms were announced in early May 1919, the palpable shock in Germany was much greater than it would have been had its military defeat been obvious. The terms were severe – though not as harsh as those that the Germans had imposed on the Russians at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, and too lenient for the liking of French public opinion, thirsting for much more draconian punitive measures. Germany was to lose some 13 per cent of its pre-war territory in Europe (including rich agricultural and industrial regions, mainly in the east), resulting in the exclusion of around 10 per cent of its pre-war population of 65 million. In economic terms, the losses were damaging but not irreparable. The real damage was political and psychological – the heavy blow to national pride and prestige.
The sense of humiliation was heightened by the Allied stipulations for demilitarization. The once mighty German army, which had still managed to put about 4.5 million men in the field in 1918, was to be reduced to a mere 100,000 men, and conscription was barred. The navy (whose ships and submarines had been taken into Allied hands or destroyed after the Armistice) was reduced to 15,000 men. No submarines were to be permitted in future. And Germany was banned from having a military air force.
The anger in Germany at the territorial changes was immense, and it crossed political and ideological boundaries. The Treaty of Versailles was denounced as a victors’ Diktat. ‘I am in no doubt that the Treaty must be revised,’ wrote the diplomat Bernhard von Bülow in 1920. ‘We must use the monstrosity of the Treaty and the impossibility of implementing so many of its stipulations in order to bring down the entire Versailles Peace.’
There were certainly some awkward hostages to fortune should Germany ever become powerful again. Danzig (today’s Gdansk), for instance, an almost entirely German industrial port but now surrounded by Poland, was designated a League of Nations ‘free city’, with Polish access to necessary coastal trading facilities. Another fudge was produced to adjudicate on the Saarland, lying on the border with France and industrially important because of its coal and iron-ore deposits – so coveted by the French though mainly German populated. The French were given ownership of the mines, but the Saarland itself was placed under League of Nations administration for a fifteen-year period, after which the inhabitants could decide by plebiscite whether they wanted to belong to France or Germany or retain the status quo. Yet another uneasy arrangement was reached on the Rhineland. The French, desperate to ensure lasting security, wanted a permanent Allied occupation of the almost wholly German-populated area and Germany’s western border to be fixed at the Rhine. France had to settle for occupation of the Rhineland for a period of fifteen years. The Germans were powerless to do anything about it – yet – but the deep sense of grievance did not go away.
Other painful amputations of German territory also played into the hands of nationalists who, even if forced to bide their time, kept alive hopes of a later revision of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In the west, the changes were relatively insignificant. The small, predominantly German-speaking border area of Eupen-Malmédy was given to Belgium. The northern part of Schleswig, mainly Danish speaking, went to Denmark. But in the east, the territorial losses were more acutely felt. What became known as the Polish Corridor took away West Prussia and Posen from Germany, incorporating them in the new state of Poland, but in the process it cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. German resentment at territorial losses was amplified in 1922 when, following an inconclusive plebiscite conducted amid heated nationalist agitation on both sides, the industrial belt of Upper Silesia, rich in coal and other minerals, was also assigned to Poland.
The deepest anger and resentment of all were reserved for Article 231 of the Treaty, and its implications. Article 231, later commonly known as ‘the war guilt clause’, deemed that Germany and its allies were responsible for the war. It provided the legal basis for Germany’s liability to pay reparations for war damages – vehemently demanded by a baying public opinion in both France and Britain. The amount of reparations was left to an Allied Commission to determine and, in 1921, was eventually fixed at 132 billion gold marks. Huge though the sum was, it could have been repaid over time without crippling the German economy. In the event, most of it would never be paid. Reparations were, in fact, not primarily an economic problem. The real damage was political. They remained for over a decade a cancer in German politics – sometimes receding, at other times recurring to attack the nation’s political health through inciting further nationalist agitation. By the time the reparations were in practice written off, in 1932, Germany was in crisis again and a more dangerous nationalist menace than ever before was looming.
The Big Four had faced huge objective problems in attempting to rearrange Europe’s boundaries. They were also subject to pressures from the public of their home countries. Unholy compromises were inevitable. Nevertheless, they had produced not so much a framework for lasting peace as a recipe for potential future disaster. The compromises left behind a Europe resembling a flimsy house of cards. For the time being the new order would hold, if only for the negative reasons that no force was powerful enough to destroy it. But Germany was the lingering problem. Should it ever again become militarily strong, the house of cards could easily come tumbling down. The Paris peacemakers had contained, but not eliminated, Germany’s capacity to cause further problems. The militarism, aggressive nationalism and power ambitions that they had concluded to be the cause of the war were left dormant rather than eradicated. Neither the loss of territory and economic resources nor reparations were enough to cripple Germany permanently. Even the drastic reduction of the size and capability of the army and navy had left the military leadership intact. German military leaders, the economic and political elites, and significant sections of the population inwardly rejected both the terms of the Treaty and the representatives of the new democracy in Germany who had signed it. As such, they rejected Europe’s new order. Given changed circumstances, they would want to alter it to Germany’s advantage. For the time being Germany was helpless, but a wounded giant.
FRAGILE DEMOCRACY
A laudable principle had underlain the deliberations in Paris: the intention that the new Europe would be a continent of democracies, of government representing not the interests of unelected princes and landholders, but the will of the people, expressed in pluralist political parties, free elections and parliamentary assemblies.
In the first post-war years representative parliamentary democracy became the model for government everywhere outside the Soviet Union. Even in the Caucasus – a region beset by huge inter-ethnic violence – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan hoped to become sovereign republics before they were conquered by the Red Army during the civil war and subsequently incorporated in the Soviet Union. Nine new democracies (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Austria and Hungary) emerged from the ruins of the former Habsburg and Tsarist empires. The Irish Free State was created as a democratic republic in 1922 when the larger southern part of Ireland secured effective independence from Britain (though formally remaining until 1949 a dominion of the British Crown). Turkey became a republic with a parliamentary constitution the following year after a war of independence, the expulsion of Allied occupying armies and the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate.
European countries adopted democracy partly because the ‘Big Four’ leaders of the victorious powers, most of all President Wilson, insisted on democratic government as the basis of the new Europe. But even more so, the war itself had been a democratizing process, stimulating pressures for the introduction of democratic rule – mainly articulated by socialists, nationalists and feminists – from within the collapsing monarchical systems. People had been mobilized in vast numbers to fight the war. Once it was over, they demanded change, improvement, representation, hope for the future. The result was a major widening of the political base of society. It was an unstoppable trend. Mass politics were here to stay. The right to vote was extended almost everywhere to include all men and in some countries all women – though even then not to all women in Britain and not to women at all in France (thanks to the Senate rejecting a motion that had gained overwhelming backing in the Chamber of Deputies). Political parties were as a consequence able to mobilize far larger numbers of voters. The British electorate rose, for instance, from 8 million to 22 million voters between 1884 and 1918, the German from 14.5 million to just short of 36 million between 1912 and 1919. The increased potential for mass mobilization, of course, also created the potential for political movements to challenge and undermine democracy itself. Channelling, orchestrating and mobilizing public opinion was now a vital part of political life. The press had also gained increased power. The scope for manipulation of the masses, also to promote intolerance and authoritarianism, had been greatly widened.
Radicalized politics shaped the first turbulent years of peace. A multiplicity of parties emerged in many countries, drawing support from specific sectors of the population or particular interest groups. It was rare to find stability of the kind that underpinned the British political system, in which parliamentary power had long been contested by the Liberals (soon to be replaced as a major force by Labour) and the Conservatives. The British ‘first past the post’ electoral system, producing a single winner in each constituency, deterred the emergence of small parties, encouraged party discipline in Parliament, and made coalition government the exception rather than the norm (though coalitions had, in fact, existed between 1915 and 1922). Proportional representation, the system generally favoured in continental Europe, coupled with the major extension of the franchise, tended, by contrast, to result in irreconcilable parliamentary divisions and weak governments. The spectrum in most countries embraced support at varying levels for Communist and Socialist, peasant and nationalist, Catholic and Protestant, Liberal and Conservative parties. Fragmentation and governmental instability were the usual consequences.
Socialism made big advances among the working class of industrial areas, but it was almost everywhere divided, as the more militant sections of labour, inspired by events in Russia, became drawn to communism. In much of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, where overwhelmingly peasant populations were concerned above all with the ‘land question’ (mainly involving redistribution of land from big estates), populist agrarian parties gained widespread, though fluctuating and unstable, support. These often blended into nationalist parties, representing significant ethnic groups in the emerging nation states, and frequently became a destabilizing factor where there were substantial ethnic minorities or disputed borders. Especially in the new states, trying in usually unpropitious economic circumstances to build a national identity and establish firm political foundations, democracy faced big problems. Mostly, in these early post-war years, democracy in fact survived the challenge. But it was a contested system of government – rejected by powerful elite groups and by some volatile, newly mobilized parts of the population.
Only in the economically advanced states of western and northern Europe that had proved victorious in the war (Britain and France) or remained neutral (the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland) was pluralist democracy an established and generally accepted system of government. Here, the problems of dealing with the post-war social and economic shock waves were serious and divisive, producing industrial unrest and working-class militancy (often inspired by the revolution in Russia). But the anti-democratic forces were relatively small and could be contained. Apart from Ireland, there were few destabilizing pressures from national minorities. And for all the turmoil in Ireland, which subsided only with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, there was consensus behind the idea of parliamentary democracy, leading to a stable two-party political system. With the partial exception of France, where minorities on the Left and Right rejected the liberal democracy of the Third Republic, the existing form of democratic government enjoyed almost universal backing. There was no crisis of legitimacy.
The main problems lay elsewhere. The parliamentary systems in Greece and Bulgaria, for instance, dated far back into the nineteenth century, though they had long provided scarcely more than a facade for factionalism and clientelism. Popular forces were exploited and manipulated by well-entrenched traditional power-elites and oligarchies. Violence and repression were regular occurrences. Post-war Greek governments, destabilized by the disastrous war with the Turks in Asia Minor, were beset by bitter conflict between rival factions of royalists and supporters of the divisive figure of Eleftherios Venizelos, leader of the Liberal Party and for long the key figure in Greek politics. But the dominant force, increasingly wielding decisive influence on state power, was the army leadership. A coup by anti-royalist army officers forced King Constantine I to quit the throne in 1922 after the defeat by the Turks. He was succeeded by his son, George II, who was himself forced out two years later – this time following a failed coup attempt by a group of royalist officers, who included the future dictator, Ioanis Metaxas. In March 1924 the monarchy was abolished and Greece became a republic. The bitter divisiveness of internal politics thereafter subsided, though did not disappear.
In Bulgaria, exhausted and economically ruined by the war, the Agrarian Union, representing smallholding peasants (who had benefited from a substantial land redistribution), formed the largest party, followed at some distance by the Communist Party (founded in 1919) and the Socialists. Government under Alexander Stamboliiski, the Prime Minister and leader of the Agrarian Union, was, however, repressive and corrupt. He made powerful enemies, most dangerously among army officers. By 1923 they were ready to act to end the democratic experiment. Stamboliiski was deposed and the army took power.
Factionalism and violence, driven both by class conflict and traditional tribal loyalties, were even more evident central ingredients of what was merely a facade-democracy in the new state of Albania (created in 1913). The country emerged from wartime partition and occupation by its neighbours – Greece, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro – to enter a brief but troubled period of great instability. Political parties emerged, divided on questions of land reform and the framing of a constitution. But the interests of landowners and clan leaders dominated. Factions formed around two leading figures, Fan Noli, a graduate of Harvard University and bishop of the Albanian Orthodox Church, and Ahmed Bey Zogu, scion of one of the most powerful Muslim families. Torture, killings, bribery and corruption were regularly deployed by both men and their followers. In a political system closer to neo-feudalism than genuine parliamentary democracy, Noli ousted Zogu, who fled the country, in an armed revolt in June 1924. Six months later Zogu returned, backed by an army he had raised, including many foreign mercenaries, deposed the government and forced Noli and his followers to flee. In January 1925 the remaining members of parliament elected Zogu as President with extended powers for a seven-year term.
In Romania, where a pluralist system under a constitutional monarchy had existed since 1881 but where the state had been transformed by the great extension of territory (doubling its size) following the war, the powers of parliament remained weak while those of the ruling class – the aristocracy, military, Orthodox Church hierarchy and the upper levels of the bourgeoisie – were strong. Land reform (a response prompted by the threat of Bolshevism), incorporation of ethnic minorities, social mobility and increase in the urban proletariat led to overlapping conflicts and continuing internal crisis.
In each of these countries, post-war difficulties in overwhelmingly underdeveloped agrarian economies, border disputes and territorial demands, as well as nationality issues, brought with them political tensions. Newly enfranchized sections of the population, especially a politically inchoate peasantry, offered extended room for demagogic mobilization – and manipulation. Authoritarianism never lurked far from the surface.
There were equally grave difficulties in Spain, where, despite neutrality, the economy had been drastically disturbed by the war. Wracked by waves of strikes directed at the authority of the state itself, Spain seemed a country on the verge of revolution. Had it been a belligerent power, perhaps the war would indeed have tipped it into revolution. As it was, the constitutional monarchy, founded in 1876, which had long relied upon an oligarchy of liberal and conservative elites, held on in a grossly unrepresentative parliamentary system. The rapidly growing Socialist movement had more than doubled its membership since the end of the war, but electoral discrimination left it with a mere handful of seats. The control of the dominant elites was nevertheless weakening, their liberal-conservative political base fragmenting. And thirty-four governments between 1902 and 1923 contributed to widespread contempt for the feeble and ineffective parliamentary system. The ruling class saw that the state was too weak to uphold their interests; the opponents of the state, primarily within the working class, were however too weak to overthrow the system. The result was stalemate.
Castigating ‘the weakness of Liberalism’, there were calls in Spain for a ‘civil dictatorship’ to head off ‘Bolshevist anarchy’. Demands for strong government and the restoration of order, coupled with fear of revolution, forged a coalition of interests ready by September 1923 to support a coup and takeover of power by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Backed by the army, the Catholic Church, the landed elites, big business and the middle classes, the coup was opposed only by a feeble attempt at a general strike by a demoralized and divided working class. Martial law, press censorship, a single party of national unity and a corporate structure of labour relations were introduced, the anarcho-syndicalist trade-union organization was outlawed (to the satisfaction of its socialist rival), and some leading opposition figures were imprisoned. But Primo’s dictatorship was relatively mild, and, through a programme of public works, it even briefly stirred a sense of growing prosperity in Spain. Above all, Primo succeeded temporarily in restoring order. For most Spaniards that was what mattered. Few wept tears over the death of what had been no more than a facade-democracy. Most people were indifferent. For the time being, counter-revolution triumphed.
In the successor states, parliamentary democracy was a fragile flower, planted in less than fertile soil. It faced challenges from the outset by powerful social groups and populist (usually nationalist) forces. But it survived the post-war crisis, even if only Finland and Czechoslovakia proved durable successes.
Finland’s independence had been established in 1918 only after five months of bitter civil war between Reds and Whites (which left as many as 36,000 dead), and a parliamentary democracy was enshrined in the constitution of 1919. Despite government instability (reflecting ideological divisions between conservatives, social democrats, agrarians and Swedish nationalists), the determination to preserve that independence against the threat from the nearby Soviet Union underpinned the legitimacy of the new state. The Finnish President (Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg in the first years of independence), a head of state with wide executive powers, also played a big part through his backing for the still unconsolidated parliamentary system.
The same was even more true of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-war years. The President (and effective founder of the state), Thomas Masaryk, was a convinced democrat, helped by a loyal army, an efficient bureaucracy inherited from the Habsburg Empire, and an economy with a good industrial base pulling out of post-war recession. He was crucial in holding together a system that class and nationality interests in over twenty political parties threatened to undermine. In December 1918 and the first days of 1919 Masaryk used Czech troops to suppress moves to establish an independent republic in Slovakia. He called upon Allied assistance and proclaimed a state of emergency as he deployed new army units commanded by French officers to repel an invasion to recover Slovakia by pro-Bolshevik forces from Hungary in May and June 1919. And he proved adept at appointing a cabinet of officials independent of divisive party allegiances to tackle a wave of serious disturbances that summer. The government then used martial law to counter a wave of strikes in November and December 1920, instigated by the pro-Soviet faction of the Socialist Party.
This was an important turning point. Thereafter the Czech parliamentary system held together, somewhat shakily at first, but with increasing authority. The revolutionary Left became isolated as most people wanted peace and order. A broad balance was struck between agrarian interests and those of the industrial proletariat, which was bigger in the Czech lands than in any of the other successor states but mainly supportive of parliamentary democracy, not communism. Political integration of the Slovaks and also of the sizeable German minority (which for now swallowed resentment at various forms of discrimination) kept separatist tendencies at bay. Democracy gradually became stabilized – though implicit tensions were held in check rather than eradicated.
In the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the importance of newly won independence and widespread hostility towards Bolshevism in the neighbouring Soviet state helped for the time being to sustain backing for parliamentary democracy despite unstable governments which, crucially, upheld the interests of the big agrarian lobbies while restricting the small communist parties. Democracy remained fragile, however, and government was dependent on the tolerance (which would not prove of long duration) of the military leadership and nationalist paramilitary organizations.
In Yugoslavia the parliamentary system (under the Serbian monarchy) established in the constitution of 1921 was an unpromising arrangement. It represented a narrow victory of centralism over federalism, but separatist tendencies continued to defy government efforts to propagate a sense of Yugoslavian identity in a country of some twenty ethnic minorities and significant divisions of the three main groupings of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The new state had to combat strong pro-Bulgarian paramilitary forces in Macedonia as well as separatist pressure for an independent Macedonia, and armed Albanian rebels in Kosovo. It was chiefly threatened by Croat resentment at Serbian domination. No unifying identity could be created, but Croat separatist tendencies were, if with difficulty, kept in check. The Slovenes saw their own language and culture best protected in the Yugoslavian state, other national minorities were weak and divided, and Italian expansionist ambitions stirred pro-Yugoslavian sentiment along the Adriatic coast.
Acute though Yugoslavia’s ethnic divisions were, the overwhelmingly agrarian country had no industrial proletariat to speak of and the Communist Party, banned and persecuted from 1921 onwards, was thereafter largely insignificant. The country’s manifold corrupt factional interests, often benefiting from land redistribution, had more to gain by supporting rather than undermining the new state. Not least, the very structural weakness of a parliamentary system in which proportional representation produced forty-five parties, mainly upholding ethnic and regional particular interests, and led to the formation of twenty-four governments in eight years, in practice bolstered the dominance of the royal court and its corrupt clientele, the military (and paramilitary support organizations) and the security services. For the time being, what in reality amounted to no more than a facade-democracy could continue in existence.
In contrast to the manufactured, weak sense of Yugoslavian identity, Polish national consciousness had gathered strength during the nineteenth century. The rebirth of Poland as a state in 1918 following 123 years of partition between Russia, Prussia and Austria, then the war against the Soviet Union – one of six border wars the new state had to fight between 1918 and 1921 – provided an initial sense of national unity. This was embodied by Marshal Josef Piłsudski, widely viewed as Poland’s saviour, and by a nationalism enhanced by the Polish majority’s antipathy towards the country’s large ethnic minority populations. But unity rapidly gave way to deep and bitter divisions in a poor country wracked by war and the ruinous effects of hyperinflation.
The divisions were partly along ethnic lines. Nearly a third of the Polish population (and in some areas a majority) comprised ethnic minorities – 14 per cent Ukrainians, 9 per cent Jews, 3 per cent Belorussians, just over 2 per cent Germans, among others. Their nationalist aims inevitably clashed and caused tension with the assertive nationalism of the Polish majority. Class divisions were if anything even more politically polarizing. Land reform, in a country with a large peasant population, was a central priority for a grouping of parties of the non-communist Left, and steps towards a significant redistribution of land (though with compensation for big landowners) were eventually taken in 1925. But land reform was bitterly opposed by a right-wing bloc of parties, keen to defend the privileges of the propertied classes.
The democratic constitution introduced in Poland in 1921 drew especially on the model of the French Third Republic and, like its inspiration, led to weak government and an unwieldy, fragmented lower house (the Sejm) of a two-chamber parliament. A plethora of parties – peasant, worker, minority nationalities – jockeyed for influence. The main bodies were the Block of National Minorities (in which the concerns of the different nationalities often proved incompatible); the conservative National Democrats (upholding the interests of landowners, industry and a middle class seeking protection against ‘foreign’, especially Jewish, influence); the Peasant Party (seeking above all redistribution of land from the big estates); and the Socialists (anxious to preserve the substantial gains – including the introduction of an eight-hour working day – they had achieved in the near-revolutionary conditions at the end of the war). Frequent changes of government produced neither stability nor clear policy direction. Democratic government, in the eyes of much of the population, seemed increasingly incompetent – incapable of solving the country’s huge problems through a parliament of squabbling politicians who put party interests above those of the nation.
The problems mounted when drastic austerity measures were introduced to arrest the hyperinflation (which in November 1923 reached 1.65 million Polish marks to the dollar) and again in 1925 when the recently introduced new currency, the złoty, itself came under pressure and brought about the fall of the government. Democracy in Poland had survived, with difficulty, the traumatic post-war years. But it had never stabilized and become a universally accepted system of government. At times Poland had seemed on the verge of civil war, or a military putsch. Disillusionment with democracy was widespread. There was talk of the need for an ‘iron hand to lead us from this abyss’. By 1926 the national hero, Piłsudski himself, declared his readiness to fight against what he saw as the domination of Poland by political parties seeking only the material benefits of office and personal enrichment. It was the prelude to the coup he led in May 1926, and the beginning of authoritarian rule in Poland.
Most Austrians, now living in a tiny German-speaking nation state rather than a huge empire, placed their early hopes in union with Germany, but these were soon dashed by the Allies. Thereafter there was little basis for political unity. Deep fissures ran as a three-way split between the Socialists and the two major anti-socialist political forces, the Christian Socials (the largest party, close to the Catholic establishment, increasingly vehement in its Austrian nationalism) and the smaller, but vociferous German Nationalists (who favoured union with Germany). Big armed militias, largely peasant based and set up to defend Austria’s vulnerable and disputed borders, particularly against Yugoslavian incursions in the south from Slovenia, were not just nationalist, deeply Catholic and strongly antisemitic, but also vehemently opposed to what they saw as socialist rule from ‘Red Vienna’.
Even within Vienna, socialism was alien to much of the middle class, the state bureaucracy (with its strong continuities from the old empire) and the Catholic Church hierarchy. And outside Vienna, socialism struggled. Most of the new alpine republic was rural, conservative, patriotically Austrian, ardently Catholic – and fervently anti-socialist. After the initial, revolutionary phase, these forces, inherently authoritarian, would grow in strength. From 1920 onwards the Socialists, the main driving force behind the establishment of democracy, played no part in Austria’s government. Democracy, associated above all with the Socialists, was pushed increasingly onto the defensive.
The one country outside Russia where it proved possible to set up a Soviet republic, though of brief duration, was Hungary. (A soviet-style government that assumed power in Bavaria in April 1919 did not break out of its temporary Munich base before being crushed by the army and right-wing paramilitaries.) In Hungary a weak coalition government of two small liberal parties and the Social Democrats (who relied upon support from only part of a relatively small working class) was unable to push through necessary social reforms or to tackle the urgent issue of land redistribution in a country where the Magyar nobility retained enormous privileges and ran vast estates with a near servile peasantry. Big demonstrations in towns demanded radical change. Communist propaganda fell on ready ears. Moderate social democrats lost influence. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils increasingly challenged the power of the government. Agricultural labourers took over some former royal estates. The last straw was when the Allies demanded withdrawal of Hungarian forces facing the Romanians, with the certain loss of territory that this would involve. Refusal of the government to accept the ultimatum on 21 March 1919 produced a communist-led government that proclaimed a Soviet Republic and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in Hungary.
The four months of this regime were a catastrophe. Hasty and draconian state intervention to nationalize the economy and confiscate bank deposits was accompanied by forced requisition of food, persecution of the Church, and, amid mounting state-sponsored terror, the arbitrary arrest of hundreds of property-owners. Some of these were released only on payment of large ransoms, others were shot. Several hundred Hungarians fell victim to the ‘Red Terror’. As the country descended into anarchy, Hungary faced attack from Romanian, Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian forces. By August 1919 the regime was in desperate trouble. It had alienated the middle class, the peasantry, and even the bulk of the working class. The fact that the regime’s leader, Béla Kun, and most of the communist Commissars behind the ‘Red Terror’ were Jewish stoked up antisemitism. Only help from Soviet Russia could have saved the Hungarian communist regime – and then, perhaps, just temporarily. But Soviet Russia, fighting for its life in a civil war, could offer no military aid. The failure to export communism to Hungary was the clearest sign that notions of world revolution, radiating from the Russian example, would have to be abandoned.
Béla Kun’s hapless government resigned on 1 August 1919, just before Romanian troops, by now occupying most of Hungary, entered and looted Budapest. Kun fled, eventually to Russia, where he was to end his life as yet another Stalinist victim. Within months, right-wing nationalist conservatives had reasserted their control in Hungary. Land reform was curtailed; estate-holders were able to hold on to their property, and to their power. The military, the bureaucracy, business leaders and the better-off sections of the peasantry, all horrified by Kun’s regime, also welcomed what they saw as the restoration of order through conservative authoritarianism. The war hero, Admiral Miklos Horthy, was consequently able to preside from 1920 as head of state over authoritarian governments that were to last for almost the next quarter of a century. The immediate response to the ‘Red Terror’ of Kun’s regime was the unleashing of a far wider ‘White Terror’ (claiming about 5,000 lives and imprisoning thousands, according to some estimates), in which right-wing officer detachments of the National Army carried out a wave of atrocities directed mainly at communists, socialists and Jews.
Hungary, like Spain, was an exception to the trend in the first post-war years. Democracy, if sometimes narrowly, was generally able to endure the enormous upheavals of this turbulent period. This was in part because across Europe it had idealistic, enthusiastic backing, mainly from the socialist and liberal Left who had long and passionately sought to throw off the shackles of traditional elitist, authoritarian rule and envisaged a fairer, more prosperous society in a democratic future. It was mainly, however, because the old order had suffered a shattering defeat at the end of the war. Its adherents were too weak to challenge the establishment of democracy or to overthrow such a new system of government that could call upon extensive, if unstable, popular backing, arising from a combination of social and political interests. The weakness of the elites, coupled with their extreme fear of Bolshevism, meant they were ready to tolerate, if not warmly support, a pluralist democracy that they could often manipulate to their advantage. This could usually be achieved by latching on to populist nationalism, which could be whipped up by heated disputes over border territory. But nationalist parties and movements were themselves mostly divided. The absence of unity on the nationalist as well as the elite Right meant that a coherent challenge to democracy could rarely be mounted in the early post-war years.
Weakness among the former ruling classes was mirrored to some extent by the weakness and splits on the Left. The revolutionary supporters of Bolshevism were nearly everywhere outside Russia in a minority among socialists, who in their great majority backed parliamentary democracy. Often, therefore, what materialized was uneasy survival where neither the counter-revolutionary Right nor the revolutionary Left was powerful enough to upturn a newly created democracy.
The major exception to the pattern of democratic survival, other than Primo’s takeover of power through a coup in Spain, was Italy, the first country – and the only one during the post-war crisis – in which liberal democracy collapsed to be replaced by Fascism.
FASCISM VICTORIOUS
A pluralist parliamentary system of government had existed in Italy since Unification in 1861. To call it democratic, however, would be to stretch the meaning of the term. Resting on an extremely limited electorate, Italian politics were factional and corrupt, dominated by a small oligarchy of Liberal notables. Reform of the suffrage in 1912 almost tripled the size of the electorate, from under 3 million to nearly 8.5 million voters (most of them still illiterate). But little significant change to the government system followed. Then came the divisive and traumatic war, which Italy, after much wavering and secret negotiations, eventually entered in 1915 on the Allied side. Immediately after the war, in December 1918, all adult Italian males were given the vote – a reward to the soldiers – and the following year a new electoral law introduced proportional representation. The hope was to bolster support for the government. But the reform backfired massively.
Amid the post-war turmoil, the newly enfranchized population turned their backs on the old liberal politics and voted in large numbers for the newly founded Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano), representing Catholic interests, and the Socialist Party, which declared its aim to be ‘the violent conquest of political power on behalf of the workers’ and the establishment of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The Socialists professed their allegiance to the Communist International (Comintern) that Lenin had founded in March 1919 in Moscow. At the election in November of that year they trebled their seats in the Chamber of Deputies, while the Populists almost quadrupled theirs. Support for the Liberal establishment was strongest in poorer, largely agricultural southern Italy, where clientelist politics still prevailed. But the Liberals and their supporters were now in a minority in parliament. Party politics fragmented. Government became destabilized – there were six changes of government between 1919 and 1922 – and increasingly paralysed. Italy seemed on the verge of a red revolution.
Throughout 1919 and 1920, which came to be dubbed the biennio rosso (‘the two Red years’), Italy experienced huge social and political conflict. In industrial cities there were large numbers of strikes (over 1,500 in each year), factory occupations, worker demonstrations, and looting of shops by crowds angry at price rises. In parts of rural Italy recently demobilized peasants seized land from large estates and more than a million agricultural labourers joined strikes. As disorder grew alarmingly, as the government was plainly unable to restore order, as fear of revolution and anxieties of the propertied classes about Socialism mounted, and as the fragmentation of party politics offered no way through the morass, political space opened up for a new political force. It was to be filled by the Fascists.
A number of small paramilitary movements prosaically calling themselves Fasci – ‘groups’ (or, literally, ‘bundles’, the name deriving from the Latin term for the set of rods that had been the symbol of order in ancient Rome) – sprang up in the cities and towns of northern and central Italy amid the political disorder, attracting mainly lower-middle-class ex-servicemen (especially demobilized officers) and many students. There was no central organization. But what the various movements had in common was the relative youth of their members, their militant ultra-nationalism, their glorification of war, their violence, and their visceral dislike of what they saw as the discredited, divisive, weak and corrupt parliamentary politics of the Liberal establishment. Italy’s heroic war effort, in their eyes, had been undermined by the political class. Italy could never be great under the leadership of the old notables. They should be swept away. What the Fascist militants offered was radical action to renew Italy. This was implicitly revolutionary in that it was directed towards violently and fundamentally changing the existing state. What exactly would replace it was left open.
Among the myriad Fasci was one founded in March 1919 by Benito Mussolini, a former editor of the official socialist newspaper, who had broken with the socialist Left when he fervently advocated intervention in the war in 1915. He viewed the war, in which he had fought and been wounded, as a heroic period in his own and Italy’s past. The programme presented at the foundation of his Fasci di Combattimento in 1919 was little different to that of the other Fasci, and distinctly revolutionary in tone. Many of its proposals could have been advanced by the Left: universal suffrage; suppression of all noble titles; freedom of opinion; an educational system open to all; measures to improve public health; suppression of financial speculation; introduction of an eight-hour working day; workers to be organized in cooperatives and to share profits; the abolition of the political police, the Senate and the monarchy; and the foundation of a new Italian republic based upon autonomous regional administration and decentralized executive power. The aim was ‘a radical transformation of the political and economic foundations of collective life’.
Mussolini was later, however, to disavow what seemed concrete social and political aims, declaring that these had been not an expression of any doctrine but merely aspirations to be refined over time. Fascism, he stated, was ‘not the nursling of a doctrine worked out beforehand with detailed elaboration; it was born of the need for action and it was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical.’ This was a rationalization, almost twenty years after its beginnings, of the fundamental change that his own movement had undergone within no more than two years. For Mussolini, the supreme opportunist, the programme announced in Milan was there to be ignored, bypassed or adjusted as political needs determined. The ‘socialism’ of his movement was always subordinated to the aim of national rebirth, a vague but powerful notion that was capable of uniting, at least superficially, quite disparate interests. Principles meant nothing to him, power everything. So his movement turned from revolution to counter-revolution. Early backing for workers’ strikes gave way by autumn 1920 to the deployment of Fascist paramilitary squads to break strikes in the interests of landowners and industrialists. The violence of the squads escalated sharply over the following months. Mussolini had recognized that he could not defeat socialism and communism by trying to compete for the same base of support. To gain power, he needed the backing of those with money and influence. He had to win over the conservative establishment and the middle class, not just disaffected ex-servicemen and violent thugs.
Why Mussolini, at first only one of numerous Fascist leaders and regional chieftains, came to dominate the early Fascist movement owed less to his forceful and dynamic personality – all Fascist bosses had in some way to be forceful personalities – than to his use of the press and to the connections he forged with industrialists to maintain his newspaper, Popolo d’Italia. His brand of radicalism – the emphasis on national unity, authority and order, the readiness to impose order through violence against those who stood in its way (the socialist Left, revolutionaries, striking workers) – was not only compatible with the interests of the conservative ruling class, but directly served them. With order breaking down and the liberal state incapable of restoring it, the Fascists became an increasingly useful vehicle for Italy’s political and economic elites.
By mid-1921 the government was assisting the Fascists with money and arms to combat growing disorder. The police were told not to intervene. In the May election, the Liberal Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolotti, incorporated Fascists alongside nationalists, liberals and agrarians in a ‘national bloc’ in the hope of taming them and weakening the opposition of the Socialist Party and Italian People’s Party. The national bloc gained the most votes overall (though the Fascists themselves won only 35 seats out of 535). But the Socialists and People’s Party were not sufficiently weakened. The chronic government instability continued. And the existing state system had only minority support in parliament. The Fascists, though electorally still small, were a growing force. From a mere 870 members at the end of 1919, they now numbered 200,000.
The breakthrough came not in the economically backward, overwhelmingly agricultural south, nor in the northern cities such as Milan, where Mussolini’s movement had begun. It was in the more commercially developed countryside of central Italy, in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, the Po Valley and Umbria, that Fascism gained strength. Landlords and leaseholders, facing socialist unions, agrarian cooperatives, and domination of local councils by the Socialists or People’s Party, would pay for lorry-loads of Fascist thugs, often transported in from local towns, to beat up their opponents, force them to drink castor oil, drive them from office, destroy their property and otherwise terrorize them – with the police standing by. Former ‘red’ provinces were turned within weeks into Fascist strongholds. Newly erected Fascist ‘syndicates’, the worker or peasant members ‘encouraged’ by the threat of terror to join, replaced the former socialist unions. By June 1922 the syndicates had half a million members, mainly peasants. Unruly agitation was transformed, to the liking of landowners and industrialists, into docile compliance.
The squadristi – paramilitary bands of thugs, usually a dozen or so strong – were controlled by powerful regional Fascist bosses. Mussolini, if the most important of the Fascist leaders, was far from dominating the movement. In fact, when he tried in 1921 to tone down the anti-socialist violence, to show his credentials to the governing elite as a patriotic ‘moderate’ seeking constructive national unity and even proposing to come to terms with the socialist unions, the regional Fascist bosses rebelled. Mussolini was forced to resign as leader and only reinstated after he had given in to the radicals and renounced any notion of pacification of the socialists. His national standing, control of the Fascist press, and links with industrialists and other powerful figures made the regional bosses, divided among themselves and mutually distrustful, willing to reinstate him. He returned the favour by demonstrative support for the squads, which took control in numerous northern towns over the following months. And in October 1921 he formally established Fascism as the National Fascist Party.
The organizational framework was widened to 2,300 local sections (each providing regular party subscriptions) over subsequent months, giving Mussolini an extended political base. The middle classes, increasingly disenchanted with weak liberal government, flocked into the party. By May 1922 the membership stood at over 300,000 – a 50 per cent increase in under six months. A disproportionate number of landowners, shopkeepers, clerical workers and, especially, students swelled the socially disparate movement, which generally had the sympathies of local elites, the police and judges.
By autumn 1922 Fascism had penetrated the social and political establishment and had acquired a strong basis of popular support. A general strike called by the socialist unions in August had been an abject failure, but had increased the fear among the middle classes. In contrast to the evident weakness of the Left, a big rally of 40,000 Fascists in Naples on 24 October appeared a manifestation of strength. Mussolini was ready to swallow another of the initial demands of his movement, that Italy should become a republic, and now declared that he did not want to abolish the monarchy. He proclaimed the readiness of his movement to seize power, and demanded a new government with at least six Fascist ministers.
In fact, the ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October was nothing of the sort. The King, faced with the resignation of the government, was misinformed that 100,000 Fascist militia were marching unstoppably on Rome. Actually there were no more than 20,000 poorly armed ‘blackshirts’ who could easily have been repulsed by the army – had the army wanted to turn them back. When a last attempt to form a liberal government failed, the King invited Mussolini to become Prime Minister. Far from leading a march of triumphant Fascists into Rome, Mussolini arrived by train, dressed in a black shirt, black trousers and a bowler hat. He was constitutionally appointed, and the government he led was a broad coalition, including ministers from the Liberals, the Nationalists, the Democrats and the People’s Party as well as Mussolini and three other Fascists. In mid-November the new government received a resounding vote of confidence from parliament. But given the chronic governmental instability of recent years, few expected it to last long.
That soon changed. Careerists now rushed to join the Fascist Party, which swelled to 783,000 members by the end of 1923 – well over double its membership at the time of the ‘March on Rome’. Fascism was becoming institutionalized. Its initial squadristi core of brutal fighters and fanatical believers was being diluted by the intake of opportunists looking for jobs and advancement – including former nationalist rivals, many of them monarchists and conservatives. Mussolini still had no clear plans for a one-party dictatorship. But he was gaining in confidence and, compared with the traditional gerontocracy of party notables, he already cut a more dynamic figure. In November 1923 he engineered a vital change to the electoral system to give the leading party in an election two-thirds of the seats if it polled more than a quarter of the votes. Ostensibly, the change was to ensure governmental stability. In practice, it guaranteed that, to stay in power, liberals and conservatives would have to support his government. In the election of April 1924 under the new allocation system, the national bloc, most of them Fascists, won two-thirds of the votes anyway, giving them 375 seats out of 535, thanks in no small part to a campaign of violence against their opponents. Opposition parties remained in existence. But the Socialists and People’s Party had lost much of their former strength. Outside the working class, most Italians were, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ready to accept Mussolini’s leadership.
A dangerous flashpoint occurred in June 1924 when the Socialist leader Giaocomo Matteotti, who had denounced the election result as fraudulent, disappeared and was later found dead – murdered, as all rightly presumed, by Fascists, almost certainly on the orders of Mussolini or leading members of his entourage. A first-rate political crisis ensued. The Socialists withdrew from parliament in protest – a move whose only effect was to strengthen the position of the government. Opposition remained divided and impotent. Mussolini, meanwhile, played the moderate. He made concessions to bring some nationalists, monarchists and rightist Liberals into government posts, and incorporated the Fascist militia into the armed forces. Fearful of any revival of socialism, the ‘big battalions’ – the King, the Church, the army and major industrialists – backed Mussolini. But the Fascist provincial bosses made their own support conditional upon their leader moving to a fully fledged Fascist regime. A new wave of violence emphasized the point.
As throughout his rise to power, Mussolini faced both ways, manoeuvring between conservatives who were needed to establish political control, and his Fascist radicals, unhappy at any steps towards moderation. Forced to accommodate his party bosses, while adamantly refusing during a speech in parliament in January 1925 to acknowledge his complicity in Matteotti’s murder, Mussolini publicly accepted full responsibility for what had happened. Placating the radicals, he stated: ‘If two irreconcilable elements are struggling with each other, the solution lies in force.’ The principle was put into practice. Political opponents were arrested, opposition parties suppressed, the freedom of the press was abolished and government left almost completely in the hands of the Fascists. The ‘foundations of the totalitarian state were laid,’ Mussolini later wrote. The Matteotti crisis might have broken Mussolini. It ended by strengthening him. Fascist power was secure.
Why did Fascism break through in Italy but nowhere else during the post-war crisis? Crucial to Mussolini’s success were the existing, and rapidly worsening, crisis of legitimacy of the liberal state, the impact of the war, and the perceived revolutionary threat. Nowhere else apart from Spain was the crisis of legitimacy so profound in the immediate post-war years. And Spain had not participated in the war. The impact of the war in Italy, by contrast, can scarcely be exaggerated.
The Italian state, recently unified, but still for the most part economically backward and socially divided, rested upon a narrow base of oligarchic politics before the war. This could no longer be sustained after the war. Intense social and ideological divisions had been glaringly exposed by intervention and magnified by the calamitous losses during the conflict. Millions of Italians had been mobilized to fight. Many were now open to political mobilization. The belief that, in the eyes of countless thousands of ex-servicemen and many others, victory had been ‘mutilated’, that Italy had been cheated out of the promises of national glory and imperialist expansion, that the sacrifice had not been worth it, fed a vitriolic rejection of the existing state and its representatives.
The sense that the ruling oligarchy had betrayed Italy’s heroic war veterans provided an initial base for Fascism’s core support. The emotional appeal to nationalist commitment, to national rebirth, and to the destruction of the weak and decadent liberal state held strong attractions to many in this atmosphere of resentment, disunity, disorder and socialist revolutionary threat. Big electoral gains for a Socialist Party preaching the need for a violent seizure of power by the workers, and the early growth of a Communist Party after its foundation in 1921, made the threat of revolution, so soon after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, seem very real.
The post-war changes to the franchise had completely destabilized government. The fragmentation of politics in the centre and conservative Right, and the patent inability of the government to combat the threat that the new strength of the Socialists, in the eyes of property-holders, posed, provided the political space in which Fascism could mobilize support. Extreme violence against perceived internal enemies extended this support, especially in the commercially developed areas of the countryside of northern and central Italy.
But for all its radicalism, Fascism could not have attained domination without the support of the ruling elites, who threw in their lot with Mussolini’s movement. Mussolini did not seize power; he was invited to take it. Thereafter, the conservative, monarchist, military and Church elites, fearful of Socialism, were happy to back the methods of intimidation and manipulation that, by 1925, gave Fascism close to monopoly control of the state.
The European country where conditions seemed closest to those that encouraged the rise of Fascism in Italy was Germany. So why, when democracy collapsed in ‘victorious’ Italy, did it survive the post-war crisis in defeated Germany?
DEMOCRACY SURVIVES IN GERMANY
North of the Alps, Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ had an immediate effect on the extreme radical Right in an increasingly troubled political scene in Germany. Since 1920 a racist-nationalist hothead with remarkable demagogic talents, Adolf Hitler, had been making a stir in Munich’s beer halls, though scarcely beyond. In 1921 he had become leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which in some ways, including the build-up of a violent paramilitary arm, resembled Mussolini’s early Fascist Party. The Nazi Party (as the NSDAP became dubbed) differed little from that of similar extreme racist nationalist movements in Germany. But Hitler could draw the crowds like no other speaker. Although still small, his party had rapidly built a following, mainly in Bavaria – a state with considerable regional autonomy within the German federal system and since 1920 the bastion of nationalist opposition to what was portrayed as ‘socialist’ democracy in Prussia, by far the largest German state.
Hitler’s movement had grown from 2,000 or so members in early 1921 to 20,000 by the autumn of 1922. And when one of his leading acolytes announced to the roars of a big beer-hall audience a few days after the ‘March on Rome’ that ‘Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler’, it gave the nascent personality cult developing around the Nazi leader a substantial boost. As Germany descended into economic and political crisis in 1923, following the French occupation of the Ruhr, Hitler’s power to mobilize the violently anti-government nationalist extremists was sufficient to propel him to a leading position in the maelstrom of Bavarian paramilitary politics that was developing into a force ready and prepared to move against the elected Reich government in Berlin. Democracy was gravely endangered.
The anti-democratic nationalist Right – conservative as well as radical – had, in fact, begun to recover remarkably quickly from the shock of defeat and revolution in November 1918. In the fear (exaggerated, as it turned out) of the revolution becoming radicalized along Bolshevik lines, the new Socialist interim government in Berlin had even before the Armistice struck a fateful deal with the leadership of the defeated army that allowed the officer corps to get a second wind. In essence, the revolutionary government had agreed to support the officer corps in return for backing for the government in combating Bolshevism. The split on the Left between those favouring parliamentary democracy and the minority that, looking to Moscow, had formed the German Communist Party and sought a root-and-branch Soviet-style revolution, would prove a lasting hindrance to the new democracy that emerged in 1919. The serious threat to democracy came, however, from the Right – temporarily undermined by the defeat and revolution, but subdued, not destroyed. By the spring of 1919, the revival of the anti-socialist, anti-democratic Right was already under way. Strong support came from the middle class and landholding peasantry, whose visceral detestation of Socialism and fear of Bolshevism was accentuated by the month-long attempt to impose a Soviet-style government in Bavaria in April 1919.
By March 1920 an extremist group within right-wing military circles, headed by Wolfgang Kapp, a founding member of the annexationist pro-war lobby organization, the Fatherland Party, and General Walther von Lüttwitz, the inspiration behind the paramilitary Freikorps, felt strong enough to try to overthrow the government. Within a week their putsch attempt proved a fiasco. Kapp, Lüttwitz and their chief supporters fled to Sweden. Significantly, however, the army had taken no action to suppress the rising. The attempted coup had been foiled by a general strike called by the trade unions and by the refusal of the civil service to carry out Kapp’s orders. The Left was still capable of defending democracy.
However, when serious clashes in the aftermath of the Kapp Putsch took place between armed socialist and communist self-defence units and government-supported Freikorps groups in Saxony and Thuringia, and especially in the big industrial area of the Ruhr (where workers had formed a ‘Red Army’), the army was called in and brutally restored order. Dubious though its loyalty to the new democracy was, the army had turned into its essential prop. Right-wing extremists took refuge in Bavaria. Meanwhile, democracy was weakening. The mainstays of the new democracy, the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre Party and the Left Liberals, saw their support dwindle from almost 80 per cent to only 44 per cent of the seats in the Reichstag between January 1919 and June 1920. The core democratic parties had lost their majority, and at national level only once, in the elections of 1928, briefly came close to regaining it. It was said, inaccurately but with pardonable exaggeration, that Germany was now a democracy without democrats.
The reparations issue more than anything else kept political tensions high during 1921–2, and it was like oxygen to the nationalist Right. Political violence was never far away. Right-wing terrorists carried out 352 political murders between 1919 and 1922. Parliamentary democracy was attacked from the Left as well as from the Right. An attempted communist rising in Saxony’s industrial belt in the spring of 1921 led to fierce fighting for a few days before it was put down by Prussian police. Despite their defeat, the communists continued to gain support in industrial areas. In Bavaria, by contrast, where the state government refused to implement the Law for the Protection of the Republic, passed by the Reichstag in 1922 to combat political extremism and violence, the extreme nationalist Right was winning new backing.
In 1923, as hyperinflation destroyed the currency – and the savings of middle-class Germans – politics polarized. The spectre of communist revolution was again glimpsed. The army was sent in to suppress a communist ‘October Revolution’, in one case by shooting on demonstrators, in Saxony and Thuringia. A short-lived communist rising in Hamburg collapsed after clashes with police, leaving over forty dead. But the threat from the Left passed quickly. That from the Right was more dangerous, and focused on Bavaria. The large and by now combined paramilitary armies were a force to be reckoned with. General Ludendorff, no less, had become their symbolic figure, Hitler their political spokesman. But the paramilitaries, important though they were in Bavarian politics, stood little chance of toppling the government in Berlin without the backing of the German army – the Reichswehr.
The army leadership had taken an ambivalent stance since the foundation of the republic, supporting the state in the abstract though merely tolerating the new democracy without enthusiasm. The head of the Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt, sent unclear signals. He refused to intervene to restore order in Bavaria while at the same time, as rumours of a putsch grew stronger, warning the Bavarian political leaders against supporting the increasingly loud and shrill nationalist clamour on the extremist paramilitary Right. The Bavarian Reichswehr leadership had favoured a march on Berlin and proclamation of a national dictatorship – echoes of Mussolini’s exploits in Italy. But when von Seeckt blew cold on the idea, and stated that he would not move against the legal government in Berlin, the Bavarian army retreated from backing a coup.
Pushed into a corner, Hitler felt he had no choice but to act or see his support drain away. The attempted putsch, theatrically launched by Hitler in a big Munich beer hall on 8 November 1923, collapsed ignominiously next morning in a hail of police gunfire in the centre of the city. The threat from the Right, as well as that from the Left, had been contained. The collapse of the beer-hall putsch was the lancing of a boil in the body politic. The putschists were rounded up and, a few months later, the ringleaders, including Hitler, were tried and sentenced – unduly leniently – to terms of imprisonment. The extremist Right fragmented. The crisis subsided. The currency was stabilized soon afterwards and a new, more amenable, framework for repayment of reparations established. Democracy had survived – but only just.
War, defeat, revolution and the peace settlement had traumatized and polarized Germany. Governments were unstable. The middle classes feared and hated Socialism, giving sustenance to shrill nationalist agitation and brutal paramilitary violence on the anti-democratic Right. In all this, there were similarities to post-war Italy. Unlike Italy, however, democracy retained strong, well-organized support, not just among the large Social Democratic Party but also among the Catholic Centre Party and the Left Liberals. Pluralist politics, if not parliamentary democracy, drew on a lengthy history. Political participation had well-established deep roots and could draw upon more than half a century of universal male suffrage. Moreover, unlike Italy, Germany was a federal system. Although the main democratic party, the Social Democrats, retreated into opposition at Reich level, and though Bavaria developed into a stronghold of the anti-democratic, nationalist Right, Prussia, by far the biggest state, remained under the government of staunchly democratic parties. This in itself would not have been enough to save democracy had the power elites – lukewarm at best towards the new republic – turned their backs on it.
But, most crucial of all, the army leadership, whose attitude towards parliamentary democracy had from the beginning been ambiguous, supported the state at the height of the 1923 crisis, whereas Mussolini’s movement could reach for power only because it had the backing of the Italian military. This was decisive in allowing democracy to survive the post-war crisis in Germany at a time when it collapsed in Italy. The German military leadership plainly had serious doubts about the putschists’ chances of success – memories of the ignominious failure of the Kapp Putsch in 1920 were still fresh in the mind. Beyond such doubts, the unwillingness to underwrite a putsch reflected the worry that the military would not be able to master the daunting problems which would face them both at home and abroad should they be forced to take political responsibility in Germany.
The country’s crippling economic woes and international weakness were sufficient reason in themselves to avoid lending support to a dilettante attempt to topple the elected government. A right-wing dictatorship, following a successful putsch, would have been from the outset in a precarious military and economic position. It would have had no obvious way of resolving the economic crisis. Whether the Americans would have provided financial aid for a regime run by the German military is extremely doubtful. And a further default on reparations under an assertive national government might have led to renewed French intervention and the loss of the Rhineland. Gravely weakened in the post-war settlement, the German army would have been in no position to offer armed resistance. The time to back an authoritarian solution to the problem of democracy, as the army leadership saw it, had not come.
Until reparations could be terminated, loosening the shackles of Versailles and rebuilding the army would have to wait (though secret arrangements with the Soviet Union following the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 offered some degree of cooperation in the training of officers, evading restrictions imposed at Versailles). But without army support, the extreme nationalist Right in Germany had no possibility in 1923 of emulating the rise of Fascism to power that had taken place in Italy the previous year. The danger to democracy passed. New and better times were about to arrive. But the threat had only subsided, not disappeared.
• • •
By 1924 the post-war crisis was over. But beneath the surface of the calmer times to follow, the outcome of the First World War and the post-war settlement had left trouble brewing. The main threat to Europe’s lasting peace would come from the unholy combination of hyper-nationalism and imperialism. A world of nation states was emerging. In Europe a new order based on nation states, many of them unstable, had been a crucial outcome of the war. But the imperial dream among Europe’s major powers was still very much alive. The victorious Allied powers, Great Britain and France, saw their future prosperity and prestige continuing to rest on their empires. They were the great winners in the post-war settlement, significantly expanding their imperial possessions outside Europe by taking control of former German colonies around the world and the territories of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.
A secret deal struck in 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot had carved up much of the Arab Middle East between Britain and France. In all, Britain added another million square miles to its empire, France around a quarter of a million square miles. The new creations of Syria and Lebanon were handed to France, mandates for Palestine (including Transjordan) and Iraq to Great Britain (turning the Middle East in the process into the future cornerstone of imperial defence). In 1917 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, supporting the aims of the still small Zionist movement, had announced that the British government favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. The announcement was partly intended to gain Jewish support in the USA for the war – America had yet to enter the conflict – and also to ensure that the strategically important area of Palestine would not, as had been foreseen, later be handed to the French. The consequences of both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration would reverberate not just through Europe but throughout the entire world, especially during the second half of the twentieth century – and beyond.
The one-time or would-be great powers, Germany and Italy, also still harboured imperialist pretensions. Humiliated by the loss of colonial possessions or failure to gain them, they felt themselves to be thwarted ‘have-not’ nations. For now they could do nothing. But the foundations for future trouble had been laid. There was no unbroken umbilical cord that tied a second great world conflagration to the first. Things could have turned out differently. Nevertheless, the legacy of the Great War made another major war in Europe more, rather than less, likely. Meanwhile, thinking the worst was over, Europeans began to entertain realistic hopes of future peace and prosperity.