The Global Question: “Return to Normalcy?”
Overview
Challenges after the First World War
At the end of the First World War people around the world faced a number of challenges. The Allied Powers had to implement the treaties that ended the war, rebuild the portions of Europe devastated by the war, and establish economic and political stability in the aftermath of this conflict. To complicate matters the United Kingdom and France had been economically exhausted by the war; many in the U.S. were unwilling to participate in the construction of a new world order; Lenin was in the violent process of crafting a centralized and authoritarian government for the new Soviet Union, ; and numerous ethnic and/or national groups across Eurasia yearned for national sovereignty in new national states. On top of these challenges, many Western intellectuals were beginning the process of alienating themselves from Western civilization, believing that it was beyond salvation. The responses to these challenges were only partially successful at best. And the numerous failures in addressing these challenges paved the way for the Second World War.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how the social, political, and military costs of World War I fostered geographic and demographic shifts in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
- Explain the global challenge to liberalismby totalitarianism through the movements of communism, fascism, and National Socialism.
- Explain the factors that led to the global depression in the 1930s.
- Compare and contrast the reactions of nations worldwide to this global depression.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Paris Peace Conference - 1919-20 meeting of delegates from the Allied nations that crafted the treaties which ended World War I
In the 1920 U.S. presidential election campaign Warren Harding ran on the slogan of a “return to normalcy,” by which he meant a return to the way life in the U.S. had been before the First World War. His winning sixty percent of the popular vote in that presidential election reflected the reservations that many Americans had about WWI and U.S. participation in it. Globally, it was one of a number of manifestations of the trouble people were having coming to terms with World War I.
Those who thought about WWI wondered what this war said about humanity and its development. The belligerents had mobilized their societies in what was at that time a total war for combatants and civilians alike, which had achieved at best mixed results. A number of writers, historians, and philosophers, wondered pessimistically about the future of humanity. Otto Spengler wrote about this theme in his two-volume The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922. All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) narrated the pointless aspects of the fighting on the Western Front during the First World War. Other writers, such as Ernest Hemmingway commented about the tragedy of this conflict: A Farewell to Arms (1929). The disaffection of these members of the intelligencia reflected a larger response from people in the participating nations. This popular response to WWI would influence the foreign and military policies of nations around the world.
The people in the victorious and defeated nations had questions about this conflict. In the Allied nations people wondered what had been won. Many Americans supported policies during the twenties and thirties that would keep the U.S. out of another world war at any cost. Similarly British and French leaders followed an approach of appeasement in dealing with Hitler’s annexation of Austria, conquest of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 – 9, in order to avoid another European conflict marked by trench warfare. People in the Central Powers were left with resentment and anger, most visibly in Germany. These feelings grew out of peace treaties drafted at the 1919 – 20 Paris Peace Conference that were in some ways too harsh and in other ways too lenient.
Germany and the Treaty of Versailles
Later it would be realized that the harsh aspects of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany constituted some of the seeds of the Second World War. And U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that WWI might be “the war to end war”—a phrase originated by H. G. Wells—backfired.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how the social, political, and military costs of World War I fostered geographic and demographic shifts in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
- Explain the global challenge to liberalismby totalitarianism through the movements of communism, fascism, and National Socialism.
- Explain the factors that led to the global depression in the 1930s.
- Compare and contrast the reactions of nations worldwide to this global depression.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Treaty of Versailles: the most important of the peace treaties that ended World War I, which was signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Stab-in-the-back myth: the notion, widely believed in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918 – 19 (Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the “November Criminals.” When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the “November Criminals” who seized power while betraying the nation.)
Reparations
The victorious Allies of WWI imposed harsh reparations on Germany, which were both economically and psychologically damaging. Historians have long argued over the extent to which the reparations led to Germany’s severe economic depression in the interwar period.
World War I reparations were imposed upon the Central Powers during the Paris Peace Conference following their defeat in the First World War by the Allied and Associate Powers. Each defeated power was required to make payments in either cash or kind (a term associated with service). Because of the financial situation Austria, Hungary, and Turkey found themselves in after the war, few to no reparations were paid and the requirements were cancelled. Bulgaria paid only a fraction of what was required before its reparations were reduced and then cancelled. However, Germany was not relieved of their debt as quickly. Historian Ruth Henig argues that the German requirement to pay reparations was the “chief battleground of the post-war era” and “the focus of the power struggle between France and Germany over whether the Versailles Treaty was to be enforced or revised.”
The Treaty of Versailles and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments required Germany to pay 132 billion gold marks ($33 billion USD) in reparations to cover civilian damage caused during the war. Because of the lack of reparation payments by Germany, France occupied the Ruhr in 1923 to enforce payments, causing an international crisis that resulted in the implementation of the Dawes Plan in 1924. This plan outlined a new payment method and raised international loans to help Germany to meet her reparation commitments. Despite this, by 1928 Germany called for a new payment plan, resulting in the Young Plan that established the German reparation requirements at 112 billion marks ($26.3 billion USD) and created a schedule of payments that would see Germany complete payments by 1988. With the collapse of the German economy in 1931, reparations were suspended for a year and in 1932 during the Lausanne Conference they were cancelled altogether. Between 1919 and 1932, Germany paid fewer than 21 billion marks in reparations.
The German people saw reparations as a national humiliation, and the German Government worked to undermine the validity of the Treaty of Versailles and the requirement to pay. British economist John Maynard Keynes called the treaty a Carthaginian peace that would economically destroy Germany. His arguments had a profound effect on historians, politicians, and the public. Despite Keynes’s arguments and those by later historians supporting or reinforcing Keynes’s views, the consensus of contemporary historians is that reparations were not as intolerable as the Germans or Keynes had suggested and were within Germany’s capacity to pay had there been the political will to do so.
The Weimar Republic
In its 14 years in existence, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, and contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War, leading to its collapse during the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Weimar Republic is an unofficial historical designation for the German state between 1919 and 1933. The name derives from the city of Weimar, where its constitutional assembly first took place. The official name of the state was still Deutsches Reich; it had remained unchanged since 1871. A national assembly was convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the Deutsches Reich was written and adopted on August 11, 1919. In English the country was usually known simply as Germany.
In its 14 years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism (with paramilitaries, both left- and right-wing), and contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War. The people of Germany blamed the Weimar Republic administration, rather than their wartime leaders, for the country’s defeat in WWI and for the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. However, the Weimar Republic government successfully reformed the currency, unified tax policies, and organized the railway system.
Weimar Germany eliminated most of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, but it never completely met its disarmament requirements and eventually paid only a small portion of the war reparations (by twice restructuring its debt through the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan). Under the Locarno Treaties, Germany accepted the western borders of the republic, but continued to dispute the Eastern border.
Challenges and Reasons for Failure
The reasons for the Weimar Republic’s collapse are the subject of continuing debate. It may have been doomed from the beginning since even moderates disliked it and extremists on both the left and right loathed it, a situation referred to by some historians, such as Igor Primoratz, as a “democracy without democrats.” Germany had limited democratic traditions, and Weimar democracy was widely seen as chaotic.
Weimar politicians had been blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I through a widely believed theory called the “Stab-in-the-back myth,” which contended that Germany’s surrender in World War I had been the unnecessary act of traitors, and thus the popular legitimacy of the government was on shaky ground. As normal parliamentary lawmaking broke down and was replaced around 1930 by a series of emergency decrees, the decreasing popular legitimacy of the government further drove voters to extremist parties.
The Republic in its early years was already under attack from both left- and right-wing sources. The radical left accused the ruling Social Democrats of betraying the ideals of the workers’ movement by preventing a communist revolution, and they sought to overthrow the Republic and do so themselves. Various right-wing sources opposed any democratic system, preferring an authoritarian, autocratic state like the 1871 Empire. To further undermine the Republic’s credibility, some right-wingers (especially certain members of the former officer corps) also blamed an alleged conspiracy of Socialists and Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I.
The Weimar Republic had some of the most serious economic problems ever experienced by any Western democracy in history. Rampant hyperinflation, massive unemployment, and a large drop in living standards were primary factors. In the first half of 1922, the mark stabilized at about 320 marks per dollar. By fall 1922, Germany found itself unable to make reparations payments since the price of gold was now well beyond what it could afford. Also, the mark was by now practically worthless, making it impossible for Germany to buy foreign exchange or gold using paper marks. Instead, reparations were to be paid in goods such as coal. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the industrial region of Germany in the Ruhr Valley, to ensure reparations payments. Inflation was exacerbated when workers in the Ruhr went on a general strike and the German government printed more money to continue paying for their passive resistance. By November 1923, the US dollar was worth 4,.2 trillion German marks. In 1919, one loaf of bread cost 1 mark; by 1923, the same loaf of bread cost 100 billion marks.
From 1923 to 1929, there was a short period of economic recovery, but the Great Depression of the 1930s led to a worldwide recession. Germany was particularly affected because it depended heavily on American loans. In 1926, about 2 million Germans were unemployed, which rose to around 6 million in 1932. Many blamed the Weimar Republic. That was made apparent when political parties on both right and left, wanting to disband the Republic altogether, made any democratic majority in Parliament impossible.
The reparations damaged Germany’s economy by discouraging market loans, which forced the Weimar government to finance its deficit by printing more currency, causing rampant hyperinflation. In addition, the rapid disintegration of Germany in 1919 by the return of a disillusioned army, the rapid change from possible victory in 1918 to defeat in 1919, which fueled the Stab-in-the-back myth, and the political chaos may have caused a psychological imprint on Germans that could lead to extreme nationalism, later epitomized and exploited by Hitler. It is also widely believed that the 1919 constitution had several weaknesses, making the eventual establishment of a dictatorship likely, but it is unknown whether a different constitution could have prevented the rise of the Nazi party.
Geopolitical Consequences of the First World War
The period from 1919 through 1924 was marked by turmoil as Europe struggled to recover from the devastation of the First World War and the destabilizing effects of the loss of four large historic empires: the German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The dissolution of these empires created a number of new countries in eastern Europe and the Middle East, most of them small, each with a number of ethnic minorities. The creation of these new nations sparked a number of conflicts.
Learning Objectives
- Explain how the social, political, and military costs of World War I fostered geographic and demographic shifts in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
- Explain the global challenge to liberalismby totalitarianism through the movements of communism, fascism, and National Socialism.
- Explain the factors that led to the global depression in the 1930s.
- Compare and contrast the reactions of nations worldwide to this global depression.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
League of Nations: an intergovernmental organization founded on January 10, 1920, as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War; the first international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. Its primary goals as stated in its Covenant included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.
self-determination: principle that a people have the right to determine their sovereignty and international political status
Kellogg-Briand Pact: a 1928 international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them”
Spanish Civil War: a war from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans (loyalists to the democratic, left leaning and relatively urban Second Spanish Republic along with Anarchists and Communists) and forces loyal to General Francisco Franco (Nationalists, Falangists, and Carlists - a largely aristocratic conservative group)
Internally these new countries tended to have substantial ethnic minorities who wished to unite with neighboring states where their ethnicity dominated. For example, Czechoslovakia had residents who associated with the following nationalities: German, Polish, Ruthenian and Ukrainian, Slovak, and Hungarian. Millions of Germans found themselves minorities in the newly created countries. More than two million ethnic Hungarians found themselves living outside of Hungary in Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Many of these national minorities found themselves in bad situations because modern governments were intent on defining the national character of the countries, often at the expense of the minorities. The League of Nations sponsored various Minority Treaties in an attempt to deal with the problem, but with the decline of the League in the 1930s, these treaties became increasingly unenforceable.
One consequence of the massive redrawing of borders and the political changes in the aftermath of World War I was the large number of European refugees. These and the refugees of the Russian Civil War led to the creation of the Nansen passport. In a related set of developments, the presence of ethnic minorities made the location of the frontiers difficult to determine. New states defined by the presence of specific ethnic groups struggled to find ways to include members of other ethnic groups. For example, Czechoslovakia failed to find a place for Sudeten Germans who lived on the northern, western, and southern edges of the new nation, which Adolf Hitler exploited in 1938 with his annexation of the Sudetenland.
Economic and military cooperation among these small states was minimal, ensuring that the defeated powers of Germany and the Soviet Union retained a latent capacity to dominate the region. In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeat drove cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, but ultimately these two powers would compete to dominate eastern Europe.
At the end of the war, the Allies occupied Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Ottoman government collapsed. The Treaty of Sèvres, a plan designed by the Allies to dismember the remaining Ottoman territories, was signed on August 10, 1920, although it was never ratified by the Sultan. The occupation of Smyrna by Greece on May 18, 1919, triggered a nationalist movement to rescind the terms of the treaty. Turkish revolutionaries led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a successful Ottoman commander, rejected the terms enforced at Sèvres and under the guise of General Inspector of the Ottoman Army, left Istanbul for Samsun to organize the remaining Ottoman forces to resist the terms of the treaty. After Turkish resistance gained control over Anatolia and Istanbul, the Sèvres treaty was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which formally ended all hostilities and led to the creation of the modern Turkish Republic. As a result, Turkey became the only power of World War I to overturn the terms of its defeat and negotiate with the Allies as an equal.
Self-Determination
The right of peoples to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law. It states that peoples, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference. The explicit terms of this principle can be traced to the Atlantic Charter, signed on August 14, 1941, by Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It also is derived from principles espoused by United States President Woodrow Wilson following World War I, after which some new nation states were formed or previous states revived after the dissolution of empires. The principle does not state how the decision is to be made nor what the outcome should be—whether it be independence, federation, protection, some form of autonomy, or full assimilation. Neither does it state what the delimitation between peoples should be, nor what constitutes a people. There are conflicting definitions and legal criteria for determining which groups may legitimately claim the right to self-determination.
The employment of imperialism through the expansion of empires and the concept of political sovereignty, as developed after the Treaty of Westphalia, also explains the emergence of self-determination during the modern era. During and after the Industrial Revolution, many groups of people recognized their shared history, geography, language, and customs. Nationalism emerged as a uniting ideology not only between competing powers, but also for groups that felt subordinated or disenfranchised inside larger states. Such groups often pursued independence and sovereignty over territory, but sometimes a different sense of autonomy has been pursued or achieved. In this situation, self-determination can be seen as a reaction to imperialism.
The revolt of New World British colonists in North America during the mid-1770s has been seen as the first assertion of the right of national and democratic self-determination because of the explicit invocation of natural law, the natural rights of man, and the consent of and sovereignty by, the people governed; these ideas were inspired particularly by John Locke’s enlightened writings of the previous century. Thomas Jefferson further promoted the notion that the will of the people was supreme, especially through authorship of the United States Declaration of Independence, which inspired Europeans throughout the 19th century.
Leading up to World War I, in Europe there was a rise of nationalism, with nations such as Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria seeking or winning their independence. Woodrow Wilson revived America’s commitment to self-determination, at least for European states, during World War I. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in November 1917, they called for Russia’s immediate withdrawal as a member of the Allies of World War I. They also supported the right of all nations, including colonies, to self-determination. The 1918 Constitution of the Soviet Union acknowledged the right of secession for its constituent republics. This presented a challenge to Wilson’s more limited demands. In January 1918 Wilson issued his Fourteen Points that, among other things, called for adjustment of colonial claims insofar as the interests of colonial powers had equal weight with the claims of subject peoples. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 led to Russia’s exit from the war and the independence of Armenia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland.
Similarly, the Allies replaced the dissolved Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires with new smaller and more homogenous Austrian, Hungarian, German, and Ottoman states, along with a number of new states and the cession of portions of the old empires to extant nations. The Allies carved Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The German Empire lost Northern Slesvig to Denmark after a referendum. The defeated Ottoman empire was dissolved into the Republic of Turkey and several smaller nations, including Yemen, plus the new Middle East Allied “mandates” of Syria and Lebanon (future Syria, Lebanon and Hatay State), Palestine (future Transjordan and Israel), and Mesopotamia (future Iraq). The League of Nations was proposed as much as a means of consolidating these new states, as a path to peace.
During the 1920s and 1930s there were some successful movements for self-determination in the beginnings of the process of decolonization. In the Statute of Westminster, the United Kingdom granted independence to Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, the Irish Free State, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Union of South Africa after the British parliament declared itself as incapable of passing laws over them without their consent. Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iraq also achieved independence from Britain and Lebanon from France. Other efforts were unsuccessful, like the Indian independence movement. However, Italy, Japan, and Germany all initiated new efforts to bring certain territories under their control, leading to World War II.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact
The Kellogg-Briand Pact (or Pact of Paris, officially General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) intended to establish “the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy,” but it was largely ineffective in preventing conflict or war. This treaty was a 1928 international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them.” Parties failing to abide by this promise “should be denied the benefits furnished by this treaty.” It was signed by Germany, France, and the United States on August 27, 1928, and by most other nations soon after. Sponsored by France and the U.S., the Pact renounces the use of war and calls for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Similar provisions were incorporated into the Charter of the United Nations and other treaties, and they became a stepping-stone to a more activist American policy. It is named after its authors, United States Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French foreign minister Aristide Briand.
The text of the treaty reads:
Persuaded that the time has come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated; Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty;
Hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavour and by adhering to the present Treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy; Have decided to conclude a Treaty…
After negotiations, the pact was signed in Paris at the French Foreign Ministry by the representatives from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, British India, the Irish Free State, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The provision was that it would come into effect on July 24, 1929. By that date, additional nations embraced the pact, including Afghanistan, Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Guatemala, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Romania, the Soviet Union, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Siam, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. Eight further states joined after that date (Persia, Greece, Honduras, Chile, Luxembourg, Danzig, Costa Rica and Venezuela), for a total of 62 signatories.
In the United States, the Senate approved the treaty overwhelmingly, 85–1, with only Wisconsin Republican John J. Blaine voting against. While the U.S. Senate did not add any reservation to the treaty, it did pass a measure that interpreted the treaty as not infringing upon the United States’s right of self-defense and as not obliging the nation to enforce it by taking action against those who violated it.
Effect and Legacy
As a practical matter, the Kellogg–Briand Pact did not live up to its aim of ending war or stopping the rise of militarism, and in this sense, it made no immediate contribution to international peace and proved to be ineffective in the years to come. Moreover, the pact erased the legal distinction between war and peace because the signatories, having renounced the use of war, began to wage wars without declaring them as in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, and the German and Soviet Union invasions of Poland. Nevertheless, the pact is an important multilateral treaty because, in addition to binding the particular nations that signed it, it has also served as one of the legal bases establishing the international norms that the threat or use of military force in contravention of international law, as well as the territorial acquisitions resulting from it, are unlawful.
Notably, the pact served as the legal basis for the creation of the notion of crime against peace. It was for committing this crime that the Nuremberg Tribunal and Tokyo Tribunal tried and sentenced a number of people responsible for starting World War II.
The interdiction of aggressive war was confirmed and broadened by the United Nations Charter, which provides in article 2, paragraph 4, that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” One legal consequence of this is that it is clearly unlawful to annex territory by force. However, neither this nor the original treaty has prevented the subsequent use of annexation. More broadly, there is a strong presumption against the legality of using or threatening military force against another country. Nations that have resorted to the use of force since the Charter came into effect have typically invoked self-defense or the right of collective defense.
These challenges in the aftermath of the First World War threatened international order and domestic stability in a number of nations. Failure to respond successfully to them set humanity on a path to a Second World War.
Attributions
A refugee family returning to Amiens, France, looking at the ruins of a house on Sept. 17, 1918. Credit: Courtesy IWM. Source - https://www.cnn.com/style/article/photographs-life-after-world-war-i-imperial-war-museum/index.html
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