obligation to pay tribute to the victorious powers almost until the end of the century, and what was generally believed to be in Germany “the war guilt lie.”
At the same time Germany was left strong enough to cherish some hope of redressing its position. It remained the most populous country in Europe, after Russia. The people were homogeneous; there were no dissatisfied minorities of any consequence within the shrunken frontiers; Germany possessed important assets: scientific knowledge, industrial development, a national capacity for hard and disciplined work.
And the great coalition which had brought about the German downfall in the war had disintegrated. America was becoming more and more disillusioned with the fruits of its first crusade. Russia’s ties of alliance with France and Great Britain had been severed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Italy had gone its own way under fascism.
There were, to be sure, French alliances with the new and enlarged states of Eastern Europe, with Poland and Rumania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Still more important, Germany during the twenties and early thirties was effectively disarmed. It was on these bases, French armaments and alliances and German disarmament, that the new Continental balance of power reposed.
For more than a decade after the end of the war Europe’s fate was in the balance. An act of generous, imaginative leadership, on the part of Britain and France, looking to some form of European union, might have strengthened moderate forces in Germany and saved the situation; but no such act was forthcoming. Narrow nationalism dominated the scene.
Between Germany and Russia, stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, was a belt of thirteen small and medium-sized sovereign states (Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania). The very existence of many of these states was only possible because such powerful nations as Germany and Russia were knocked out at the same time, Germany by military defeat, Russia by revolution.
The continued independence of the states in this area and their economic advantage called for some form of regional federalism. But old national antipathies and petty local interests were so strong that almost nothing was achieved in this direction.
The hopes of liberals, especially in Great Britain and in the smaller countries which the witty Spaniard, Salvador de Madariaga, described as “consumers of security,” were focused on the League of Nations. But this body failed to develop the independent authority which would have been required in order to maintain peace. Its membership was never universal. The United States and Russia, among the great powers, were absent from the beginning.
By the time the Soviet Union was admitted to the League in 1934, Germany and Japan had given notice of withdrawal. And the Soviet Union’s participation in the League came to an end when it was expelled in 1939 after launching an unprovoked attack on Finland.
The League never possessed the physical means to check aggression. It possessed no army, no police force. It was not a league, in any true sense of the word, just as the United Nations have never been really united. Its members were divided by clashing interests. It could not be, and was not, any stronger than the national policies of its leading members. So it is not surprising that it failed to meet one big test after another.
When Japan upset a complicated and precarious status quo in Manchuria in 1931, the League proved unable to cope with the subsequent crisis. It protested and remonstrated. Japan left the League and kept Manchuria.
Events took a similar turn when in 1935 Italy started an old-fashioned colonial war against Ethiopia, one of the few remaining independent areas in Africa. The League, under the reluctant prodding of the British Government, itself prodded by British public opinion, imposed half-hearted sanctions, aimed at Italian exports. Two steps that would have led to a clear showdown, the closing of the Suez Canal and the stopping of Italy’s vital oil imports, were not taken. Italy conquered and kept Ethiopia—and left the League.
When World War II broke out, the League took no action at all. The European members which hoped to remain neutral did not wish to provoke the wrath of Germany by pronouncing judgment. The last flicker of the League’s moral influence was the expulsion of the Soviet Union.
The experience of the League disproved several optimistic assumptions of its advocates. Contradictions of interest and policy, such as always arise among sovereign states, could not be banished by grouping a number of nations in a so-called league. Nor were governments inclined to go on a hue-and-cry against an offender, to assume a risk of war on account of acts of aggression in remote parts of the world, not very different from many which had been committed in the past.
If the League was too weak to maintain existing frontiers against violence, its usefulness was further impaired because it was never used as a forum for discussion of means of peaceful change. Article 19 of the League Covenant suggested this possibility:
“The Assembly may from time to time advise the reconsideration by members of the League of treaties which have become inapplicable and the consideration of international considerations whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world.”
But Article 19 was never invoked. The League never became an instrument for promoting those policies of freer trade and migration which would have eased the tensions making for dictatorship and war.
With the League impotent, the maintenance of European peace became a matter of old-fashioned national diplomacy. Between 1933 and 1939 there was an amazing shift in the European balance of power. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in March 1933, German military power was inferior to British and French.
The German army was restricted to 100,000 men and was denied aircraft and tanks. (There had been some small evasions of the Versailles limitations on arms, but these were not important until the Nazi regime got into full swing with its rearmament.) The Rhineland was demilitarized; a foreign army could have marched deep into German territory without encountering troops or fortifications. The French alliances with eastern European countries created a partial ring around Germany. Moreover, Germany was suffering from severe industrial paralysis and mass unemployment. These were the consequences of the world economic crisis for a country that was thickly populated and highly industrialized.
What a change occurred in six years! The initiative had passed into the hands of Nazi Germany. Britain and France were on the defensive. Massive rearmament had helped to create full employment in Germany, although at the price of some shortages and a curtailment in living standards for the more well-to-do. The French alliances had crumbled; Germany, as events would soon prove, was far and away the strongest land military power on the Continent.
How had this upset in the European balance of power come about? It was a remarkable example of how ruthless and unscrupulous audacity on one side could prevail against half-hearted, irresolute fumbling on the other.
From the standpoint of power politics, Hitler made only one conspicuous blunder during this period, and this was quickly retrieved. A group of Austrian Nazis attempted a coup d’état in Vienna on July 25, 1934. They seized government offices and assassinated the Prime Minister, Engelbert Dollfuss. But the conspirators were not strong enough to get full control of the government. Mussolini mobilized forces on the Brenner Pass. The Italian dictator was not yet ready to accept a common frontier with Germany.
Realizing that he was not yet strong enough to risk war, Hitler hastily dissociated himself from the Austrian adventure. He removed the German Minister in Vienna, who had compromised himself with the conspirators, repudiated any complicity in the uprising, and removed the Austrian Legion (a force of Austrian Nazi émigrés) from its suspicious proximity to the Austrian frontier. The Austrian question was then shelved for several years.
