international relations ARTICLE from the Encyclopdia Britannica <script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.

1/1371285/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187383751"></sc ript> international relations, study of the relations of states with each other and with international organizations and certain subnational entities (e.g., bureaucracies and political parties). The field of international relations emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, largely in the West and particularly in the United States as that country grew in power and influence. Its prime focus is diplomatic history, or the history of world diplomacy and events. The purpose of diplomatic history is to explain the origins and the effects of foreign policies, and its focus is each countrys policy-making elite. This involves the historian at once in a complication, however. The statesman exists simultaneously in two realms: the domestic political system whence his authority derives, and the international system in which he represents his state to the world. Pressures and problems, temptations and opportunities arise constantly from both realms. Which one ought to command the historians attention? The founders of modern diplomatic history, beginning with Leopold von Ranke, propounded a view known as the primacy of foreign policy. Founded on German Idealist philosophy, Rankeanism asserted the primary influence of a states geography and external threats in the shaping not only of its foreign policy but of its internal military, political, and cultural institutions as well. An island kingdom like Britain, for instance, free of the constant threat of invasion, could militarily afford and commercially benefit from liberal institutions. Prussia, by contrast, relatively poor and

surrounded by potential enemies, required for its survival as a state rigorous centralization and militarization. The primacy of foreign policy was especially plausible to historians immersed in the diplomacy of medieval and early modern Europe, when foreign policy was a virtual monopoly of the prince and his advisers. The rationalist bias of the Enlightenment reinforced the notion of the international state-system as a kind of self-regulating Newtonian universe in which states revolved about each other in alliance or war according to natural laws of self-interest and balance of power. A wise ruler like Frederick II the Great of Prussia saw himself as the first servant of the state and made policy according to raison dtat, the prudent and rational dictate of dynastic interest. This model of the international system, while reductionist, was not determinist, since it made room for the wisdom and folly, courage and cowardice of individual rulers. The debate over the origins of World War I, and the failure of documentary reconstruction of the diplomatic narrative<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371284/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187383756"></sc ript> to resolve the question of responsibility for 1914, threw diplomatic history into a crisis. By the late 1920s historians like Sidney Fay and Pierre Renouvin were looking beyond the documents for the deeper causes of the war, such as militarism or imperialism. Historians influenced by sociology and economics, in turn, located the seeds of the fateful foreign policies preceding the war in the economic and social conflicts of prewar Europe. A young German, Eckhart Kehr, turned Ranke on his head by postulating a primacy of domestic policy and argued that a states foreign policy derives from domestic social and political forces, not vice versa. In particular, imperialism and militarism were seen to be defensive strategies by which threatened elites attempted to rally their people against a foreign threat as distraction from social tensions at home. If the old history was simplistic and dangerous in its glamorization of the exercise of power, the theory of primacy of domestic policy tended to ignore the fact that governments are obliged to respond to real pressures from abroad regardless of their domestic situation.

An empirical approach, therefore, is to examine the internal sources of foreign policy in all states and also the effects of those policies on all other states as they are transmitted through the international system. The conduct and analysis of diplomacy and war ultimately rest on a calculus of the power of each state in the system and of its perception by others. National power is the product of all those assets, human and material, that contribute to a states ability to influence the behaviour of other states by force, threat, or inducement. Human sources of power include population, educational level and work discipline, morale, motivation (through ideology, patriotism, or charismatic leadership), and skill in military and civil administration. Material resources include land area and climate, geographic location, raw materials, and agricultural resources. Last but not least is technology, which is a function of both human and material resources and which can alter the importance of population and geography and render once-effective administrative systems obsolete. Despite the best efforts of political scientists and military planners, these elements of national power are difficult to quantify and compare. Hence misperception by one state of anothers capabilities and intentions is almost the rule rather than the exception. This is why those elusive assets prestige and intelligence are sometimes decisive in diplomacy and war. International ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187383760"></sc ript> are shaped primarily by those states perceived to be Great Powers, countries whose interests and capabilities transcend their own self-defense or region. For some 200 years after the treaties of Utrecht and Nystad (171314, 1721), the roster of the Great Powers included the same five states: Great Britain, France, Prussia (and, later, Germany), the Habsburg monarchy (Austria), and Russia. A mere three decades after World War I, however, only one of these venerable powers, Britain, had not undergone two or more radical changes of government, and only one, Russia, was still a Great Power. Between 1914 and 1945 the European system committed suicide, and two global superpowers rose relations<script

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to replace it. Five decades after 1945, the Soviet Union was no more, while the ability of the United States to control events was in turn challenged from many sources, giving rise to speculation that the world might be shifting back into a multipolar balance-of-power system. This article provides a single integrated narrative of world diplomacy and politics from the outbreak of World War I to the 1990s. Its twin themes are the rivalries of the Great Powers during the age of the world wars and the Cold War and the replacement, largely through the agency of those wars, of the European state system by a world system with many centres of both power and discord. Because domestic affairs figure heavily in the analysis of each states foreign policies, the reader should consult the histories of the individual countries for more detail. For discussion of the military strategy, tactics, and conduct of World War I and World War II, see World Wars, The. The roots of World War I, 18711914 Forty-three years of peace among the Great Powers of Europe came to an end in 1914, when an act of political terrorism provoked two great alliance systems into mortal combat. The South Slav campaign against Austrian rule in Bosnia, culminating in the assassination of the Habsburg heir apparent at Sarajevo, was the spark. This local crisis rapidly engulfed all the powers of Europe through the mechanisms of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, diplomatic arrangements meant precisely to enhance the security of their members and to deter potential aggressors. The long-term causes of the war can therefore be traced to the forces that impelled the formation of those alliances, increased tensions among the Great Powers, and made at least some European leaders desperate enough to seek their objectives even at<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388454/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187491983"></sc ript> the risk of a general war. These forces included militarism and mass mobilization,

instability in domestic and international politics occasioned by rapid industrial growth, global imperialism, popular nationalism, and the rise of a social Darwinist worldview. But the question of why World War I broke out should be considered together with the questions of why peace ended and why in 1914 rather than before or after. The Bismarckian System, 187190 The era of the Great Powers The European map and world politics were less confused in the decades after 1871 than at any time before or since. The unifications of Italy and Germany removed the congeries of central European principalities that dated back to the Holy Roman Empire, while the breakup of eastern and southeastern Europe into small and quarreling states (a process that would yield the term balkanization) was not far advanced. There the old empires, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman (Turkish), still prevailed. The lesser powers of Europe, including some that once had been great, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain, played little or no role in the affairs of the Great Powers unless their own interests were directly involved. Both physical size and the economies of scale important in an industrial age rendered smaller and less developed countries impotent, while the residual habits of diplomacy dating from the Congress of Vienna of 1815 made the Great Powers the sole arbiters of European politics. In the wider world, a diplomatic system of the European variety existed nowhere else. The outcome of the U.S. Civil War and Anglo-American settlement of the Canadian border ensured that North America would not develop a multilateral balance-of-power system. South and Central America had splintered into 17 independent republics following the final retreat of Spanish rule in 1820; but the new Latin-American states were inward-looking, their centres of population and resources isolated by mountains, jungle, and sheer distance, and disputes among them were of mostly local interest. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by the United States and enforced by the British navy, sufficed to spare Latin America new European adventures, the only major exception Napoleon IIIs gambit in Mexicooccurring while the United States was preoccupied

with civil war. When the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian tsar and Canada acquired dominion status, both in 1867, European possessions on the American mainland were reduced to three small Guianan colonies in South America and British Honduras (Belize). North Africa east of Algeria was still nominally under the aegis of<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388447/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187497048"></sc ript> the Ottoman sultan, while sub-Saharan Africa, apart from a few European ports on the coast, was terra incognita. The British had regularized their hold on the Indian subcontinent after putting down the Indian Mutiny of 185758, while the Chinese and Japanese empires remained xenophobic and isolationist. Thus the cabinets of the European Great Powers were at the zenith of their influence. Europe itself, by 1871, seemed to be entering an age of political and social progress. Britains Second Reform Act (1867), the French Third Republic (1875), the triumph of nationalism in Italy and Germany (1871), the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in Germany (1867), equality for the Hungarians in the Habsburg monarchy (1867), emancipation of the serfs in Russia (1861), and the adoption of free trade by the major European states all seemed to justify faith in the peaceful evolution of Europe toward liberal institutions and prosperity. International peace also seemed assured once Otto von Bismarck declared the new German Empire a satisfied power and placed his considerable talents at the service of stability. The chancellor knew Germany to be a military match for any rival but feared the possibility of a coalition. Since France would never be reconciled to her reduced status and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine imposed by the treaty ending the Franco-German War, Bismarck strove to keep France isolated. In 1873 he conjured up the ghost of monarchical solidarity and formed a Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors League) with Austria-Hungary and Russia. Such a combination was always vulnerable to AustroRussian rivalry over the Eastern Questionthe problem of how to organize the feuding Balkan nationalities gradually freeing themselves from the decrepit Ottoman Empire.

After the Slavic provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina rebelled against Ottoman rule in 1875 and Russia made war on the Ottoman Empire two years later, the Dreikaiserbund collapsed. Bismarck achieved a compromise at the Congress of Berlin (1878), but Austro-Russian amity was not restored. In 1879, therefore, Bismarck concluded a permanent peacetime military alliance with Austria, whereupon the tsarist government, to court German favour, agreed to a renewal of the Dreikaiserbund in 1881. Italy, seeking aid for her Mediterranean ambitions, joined Germany and Austria-Hungary to form the Triple Alliance in 1882. The next Balkan crisis, which erupted in Bulgaria in 1885, again tempted Russia to expand its influence to the gates of Constantinople. Bismarck dared not oppose the Russians lest he push them toward an alliance with vengeful France. So<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371284/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187497066"></sc ript> instead he played midwife to an Anglo-Austro-Italian combination called the Second Mediterranean Entente, which blocked Russian ambitions in Bulgaria while Bismarck himself concluded a Reinsurance Treaty with St. Petersburg in 1887. Once more the Eastern Question had been defused and Germanys alliances preserved. Allied approaches to the Bolsheviks Meanwhile, Wilson and Lloyd George agreed on an appeal directed to the White forces (and radioed to the Bolsheviks) to declare a cease-fire and send representatives to the island of Prinkipo (Bykada), in the Sea of Marmara. This was a fruitless gesture, since neither the Red nor the White regime could survive except by the others total destruction. The Bolsheviks ignored the call for a truce but accepted the invitation; the Whites, with French encouragement, candidly declined both. The Big Three were informed of the failure on February 12, two days before Wilsons return to the United States. Winston Churchill then hurried to Paris to urge on Wilson a vigorous Allied military campaign on behalf of the Whites. But even if the Big Three had agreed to

launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade, their war-weary populations, depleted treasuries, and aroused labour unions would not have permitted it. Five days later Colonel House, who was given charge of Russian matters by Wilson, asked a young American liberal, William Bullitt, to journey to Russia for direct talks with Lenin. Bullitt reached Petrograd on March 8, spoke with Chicherin and Litvinov, then went on to Moscow. Lenin offered an immediate cease-fire and negotiations in return for the cessation of Allied occupation, aid to the Whites, and the blockade. The Bolsheviks, in turn, promised amnesty to all Russians who had collaborated with the Allies. Bullitt returned to Paris in great excitement at the end<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388453/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187466187"></sc ript> of March, only to be denied an audience with Wilson and to find the conference near collapse over the Rhineland question. Lloyd George was under pressure from parliamentary Tories to avoid conciliating Lenin, while the general level of Allied anxiety had been raised by declaration of a Soviet republic in Bavaria and Bla Kuns Communist coup dtat in Hungary on March 21. Kun immediately invaded Czechoslovakia and appealed to Lenin for help (which the Bolsheviks were in no condition to provide). On April 10 a Romanian army attacked Hungary, and successive Red and White terrors ensued. The episodes ended on May 1, when German federal troops deposed the Bavarian Communists, and August 1, when Kun fled the approaching Romanian army. Historians debate whether the Bullitt mission was a missed opportunity. Considering the Bolsheviks final victory, the Allies would have done well to extricate themselves on Lenins March 1919 terms. On the other hand, the document held out little hope for a Russia in line with Western principles or interests. Allied acceptance would have obliged them to pull out their own forces, cut off aid to the Whites, and resume trade with the Bolsheviks. If hostilities had then resumedon any pretextthe Reds would have been able to crush the divided Whites and solidify their control. On the other hand, Lenin was hard pressed in the spring of 1919Kolchak was launching a major offensiveand was

probably sincere in seeking relief. Bullitt himself was consumed with bitterness over his reception in Paris and rebuked Wilson for having so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you. (Bullitt testified before the Senate against the Versailles treaty and retired to France until, in 1933, he was appointed the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Disillusioned with Stalin, he soon resigned.) The fourth approach by the peace conference to Russia grew out of letters from the director of European food relief, Herbert Hoover (March 28), and the Norwegian explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen (April 3) urging massive deliveries of food to Russia. The way to fight Communism, they argued, was with bread, not guns. Colonel House procured Allied consent to offer relief to Russia, but only if Russian transportation facilities were placed at the disposal of an Allied commission. The Bolsheviks replied in derisory terms on May 13, since the conditions would have meant de facto Allied<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388446/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187466206"></sc ript> control of Russia. (In 1921 the American relief commission nonetheless began distribution of food that saved countless Russians from starvation.) Central Europe and the Middle East The reorganization of central Europe Although the Habsburg Empire had ceased to exist, the peace conference dealt with the new republics of Austria and Hungary as defeated powers and systematically favoured the interests of the successor states that had arisen from the ruins of the empire in the last weeks of the war. It was Wilsons hope that peace and self-rule might finally bless the troubled regions between Germany and Russia through strict application of the principle of nationality. But east-central Europe comprised a jumble of peoples with conflicting claims based on language, ethnicity, economics, geography, military considerations, and historic ties. What was more, the new states themselves were in no case homogeneous. The name Yugoslavia could not hide the rivalries within that kingdom of Serbs, Croats,

and Slovenes. Czechoslovakia was born of an alliance of convenience among Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenes. Historic Poland embraced Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Romania, enlarged by the accession of Transylvania and Bessarabia, now numbered millions of Ukrainians, Hungarians, Jews, and other minorities. In short, the Balkanization of central Europe raised as many political disputes as it solved and created many little multinational states in place of a few empires. Poland was a favourite of the Americans and the French by dint of historic sympathies, the votes of Polish-Americans,<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388451/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187469452"></sc ript> and Clemenceaus hope for a strong Polish ally in Germanys rear. The Fourteen Points promised Poland an outlet to the sea, but the resulting Polish Corridor and free city of Danzig contained 1,500,000 Kashubians and Germans. In the north, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia won their independence from Moscow and were sheltered by the British fleet. But an example of the difficulties in applying national selfdetermination was the Polish-Lithuanian quarrel over the disposition of Vilnius. That town (according to 1897 Russian statistics) was 40 percent Jewish, 31 percent Polish, 24 percent Russian, and 2 percent Lithuanian. Vilnius Province, however, was 61 percent Russian, 17 percent Lithuanian, 12 percent Jewish, and 8 percent Polish. In December 1919 the Supreme Allied Council provisionally awarded Vilnius to Lithuania. Poland and Czechoslovakia similarly quarreled over the coal-rich Teschen district. Poles predominated in the district, but historic claims lay with Bohemia. In the end the Great Powers merely ratified the de facto partition effected by occupying Polish and Czech troopsa solution that favoured Czechoslovakia and left a bitterness the two states could ill afford and never overcame. Finally, the Polish-German conflict over Upper Silesia, another coal-rich region of mixed nationality, proved that even the League of Nations could not make an objective judgment. The March 1921 plebiscite called for in the Treaty of Versailles (one of the few concessions awarded the German delegation) showed German preponderance in the region as a whole but Polish majorities in the vital mining

districts. The British delegation in the League argued that Germany could hardly be expected to pay reparations if it lost yet another rich source of coal, while the French sought to weaken Germany further and bolster the Polish economy. Finally, in October 1922, Poland was granted the greater portion of the mines. The Treaty of Saint-Germain disposed of the Austrian half of the former Habsburg monarchy. Tom Masaryk and Edvard Bene, sincere Wilsonians, exploited their personal goodwill to win two major concessions that otherwise violated the principle of national self-determination. First, they retained for Czechoslovakia the entire historic province of Bohemia. This afforded the vulnerable new state the military protection from Germany of the Sudeten mountains, but it also brought 3,500,000 Sudeten Germans under the rule of Prague. Second, Czechoslovakia received territory stretching south to Bratislava on the Danube, providing it with a riverine outlet but creating a minority of a million ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187469465"></sc ript> The Austrian boundary with Yugoslavia at Klagenfurt was fixed by plebiscite in Austrias favour in October 1920, as was the division of the Burgenland district between Austria and Hungary in December 1921. Italys boundaries with Austria and Yugoslavia became one of the most volatile issues of the peace conference owing to Italian truculence and Wilsonian sanctimoniousness. Orlando clung to the Allied promises that had enticed Italy into the war in the first place. But Wilson, offended by the secret war-aims treaties, vented his frustration on Italy. He went so far as to plead his case publicly in the French press on April 24, 1919, a violation of diplomatic etiquette that provoked the Italians to bolt the conference. Upon their return, a compromise of sorts was achieved: Italy received Trieste, parts of Istria and Dalmatia, and the Upper Adige as far as the Brenner Pass with its 200,000 Germanspeaking Austrians. But Wilson refused to budge on Fiume, a province whose hinterland was Yugoslav but whose port city was Italian. On June 19 Orlandos government fell over the issue. In August Fiume was declared a free city, and in September a band of Magyars.<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388450/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl

Italian freebooters led by the nationalist poet Gabriele DAnnunzio declared Fiume a free state. Such passions among Italians over their mutilated victory helped prepare the way for the triumph in 1922 of Mussolinis Fascists. The Treaty of Trianon, delayed until 1920 by the Communist coup in Hungary, partitioned that ancient kingdom among its neighbours. Transylvania, including its minority of 1,300,000 Magyars, passed to Romania. The Banat of Temesvr (Timioara) was divided between Romania and Yugoslavia, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia passed to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia to Yugoslavia. All told, Hungarys territory shrank from 109,000 to 36,000 square miles. The armies of rump Austria and Hungary were limited to 35,000 men. The Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria marked yet another stage in the old struggles over Macedonia dating back to the Balkan wars and beyond. Bulgaria lost its western territories back to the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and nearly all of Western Thrace to Greece, cutting the Bulgarians off from the Aegean. Their armed forces were likewise limited to 20,000 men. Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria also accepted war guilt and reparations obligations, but these were later remitted in light of their economic weakness. The settlement in east-central Europe was a generally well-meaning attempt to apply the principle of nationality under the worst imaginable circumstances.<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388448/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187469476"></sc ript> The new governments all faced aggrieved minorities, not to mention the onerous tasks of state-buildingdrafting constitutions, supporting currencies, raising armies and policewith no democratic tradition or financial resources beyond what they could borrow from the already strapped British and French. Austria in particular was a head without a bodyover a quarter of its population lived in Viennayet was forbidden union with Germany. Hungary suffered violations of self-determination to an even greater degree and was bound to become a centre of aggressive revanche. Disputed

borders, ethnic tensions, and local ambitions hampered economic and diplomatic cooperation among the successor states and would make them easy prey to a resurgent Germany, or Russia, or both. The agreements of mid-decade Reparations agreements Out of the exhaustion of France and Germany after the Ruhr struggle and the desire of American bankers and British diplomats to promote their reconciliation, the period 1924 26 finally produced agreements on reparations, security, and industrial cooperation. An interim<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388450/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187388438"></sc ript> reparations plan, the Dawes Plan, emerged from the London conference of July August 1924. Expecting to join Ramsay MacDonald, Britains first Labour prime minister, in Socialist brotherhood, Herriot instead found himself a supplicant whose bargaining points were few and feeble. France was obliged to evacuate the Ruhr (by August 1925), to end sanctions on the Rhine, and to promise never again to impose sanctions on Germany without the unanimous agreement of the Reparations Commission. The United States would lend $200,000,000 to Germany to prime the pump, and Germany would pay from 1,000,000,000 to 2,500,000,000 marks in reparations for five years. The French government, by contrast, issued bonds worth 44,000,000,000 francs from 1919 to 1925 to finance reconstruction of its devastated regions. In the end, Germany received more money in loans than it ever paid in reparations, so that the cost of repairing war damage was borne ultimately by the taxpayers, investors, and consumers of the Allied nations and the United States. The influx of American capital through the Dawes Plan nevertheless broke the postwar spiral of inflation, default, and hostility and made possible a return to the gold standard. Germany stabilized its currency in 1924, Britain followed in 1925, and France did so in

1926 (officially in 1928). The smaller countries of Europe and Latin America, in turn, pegged their currencies against either the dollar, the pound, or the franc. Finally, the French government agreed in the MellonBerenger Accords (April 20, 1926) to fund its war debts at the favourable rates offered by the United States. The new gold standard and the cycle of international transfers, however, depended on a continuous flow of American capital. Should that flow ever cease, the normalcy so painfully achieved would quickly be imperiled. Security and the League of Nations With respect to security, France had achieved nothing. Of course, the Versailles restrictions on German armaments were still in force, as was Frances rear alliance system, but in striving for collective security the French suffered a series of disappointments. The League of Nations Assembly Resolution XIV of September 1922 endorsed the disarmament commissions recommendation for a treaty on collective security. The Czechoslovakian delegation, led by Edvard Bene, quickly rose to a position of leadership in security matters, with the support of French and British proponents of the League such as Lord Robert Cecil, whose Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance came under discussion in 1923. Bene rightly criticized the Draft Treaty for requiring ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187387354"></sc ript> on the League Council to declare sanctions against an aggressor, for only in rare cases was the accused partys guilt obvious to all, as the 1914 case itself illustrated. Bene also wanted a mechanism for pacific settlement of disputes before resort to arms. More telling, however, was opposition to the concept of collective security in British opinion. Canada, Australia, and other dominions especially opposed an instrument that might involve them in war over some obscure conflict in eastern Europe. In July 1924 London rejected the Draft Treaty. unanimity<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388453/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl

Bene submitted an improved Geneva Protocol (or Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes) in October. Under the protocol, states would agree to submit all disputes to the Permanent Court of International Justice, any state refusing arbitration was ipso facto the aggressor, and the League Council could impose binding sanctions by a two-thirds majority. France enthusiastically supported the Geneva Protocol, but British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain rejected it in March 1925. Herriot had made it known that France would not proceed with the first partial evacuation of the Rhineland, scheduled for January 1925, unless he could show the French people some guarantee of security. Chamberlain suggested to Stresemann in February 1925 that the Germans themselves reassure France through a regional security pact. Stresemann took up the idea, seeing in it a way to head off a bilateral Anglo-French alliance. Herriots government fell in April, but Aristide Briand stayed on as foreign minister to carry through negotiations. Stresemann and Briand met and embraced at Locarno, swore to put the war behind them once and for all, and signed five treaties (Oct. 16, 1925) designed to pacify postwar Europe. Locarno seemed truly a second peace conference and was greeted with cheers and relief in world capitals. The main treaty, the Rhineland Pact, enjoined France, Belgium, and Germany to recognize the boundaries established by the Treaty of Versailles as inviolate and never again to resort to force in an attempt to change them. Moreover, the pact was guaranteed by Britain and Italy, who pledged to resist whatever country violated the demilitarized Rhineland. Germany also signed arbitration agreements with France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, agreeing to submit future disputes to international authority. Locarno seemed a giant step forward. Rather than a Diktat, it was a voluntary recognition by Germany of the 1919 borders in the west. Britain had been brought in to guarantee not only ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187387357"></sc ript> demilitarization of the Rhineland. Italys adherence was a bonus. Germany had negotiated as an equal and looked forward to further abridgement of the Versailles France but also<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388446/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl

restrictions. Above all, Briand hoped, Locarno was the start of the moral disarmament of Germany. But some contemporaries, and many historians, criticized Locarno for being an incomplete system, as dangerous as it was seductive. By way of granting German equality, Britain had guaranteed Germany against French attack as much as France against Germany. England, said Poincar, becomes the arbiter of Franco-German relations. To be sure, France still promised to help Poland and Czechoslovakia in case of German attack, but, after Locarno, Prague and Warsaw discounted the French commitment. What was more, Locarno all but invited German revisionism in the east by explicitly providing not for recognition but for arbitration on Germanys eastern borders. Changes in French military policy also boded ill for eastern Europe. Since 1919, Foch and Ptain had quarreled over whether to adopt an offensive or defensive contingency plan for the French army. In the wake of Locarno the Ptain faction won, and France began to design an imposing system of concrete fortresses along the border with Germany. This Maginot Line (after Minister of War Andr Maginot) was not meant to preclude offensive action by the French army but was in effect (in Fochs words) a Great Wall of China that would breed a false sense of security and weaken Frances will to take the offensive on behalf of her eastern allies. Finally, the aftermath of the Ruhr episode provided French and German industry with a chance to normalize their relations. The evacuation of the Ruhr restored Germanys coal leverage, and Berlin recovered tariff sovereignty in 1925 under the Treaty of Versailles, but the French inflation of 192426 shifted the export price advantage from Germany to France. Long and complicated four-way negotiations (French and German public and private sectors) produced a Franco-German steel syndicate in 1926 providing for coalfor-iron exchanges and an international committee to fix production quotas quarterly. The latter awarded France a 31 percent share compared to 43 percent for Germany, a marked improvement over the 1 to 4 ratio France had suffered before 1914. Franco-German commercial treaties followed in 192627. The agreements of mid-decade ended the bickering and uncertainty of the immediate postwar years and made Germany a partner in the new Europe. In every case, however, the compacts replaced French rights<script

src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388451/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187387360"></sc ript> under Versailles with voluntary agreements dependent on both Anglo-American support and German goodwill. Italy and east-central Europe Fascism and Italian reality The peoples of east-central Europe enjoyed a degree of freedom in the 1920s unique in their history. But the power vacuum in the region resulting from the temporary impotence of Germany and Russia pulled in other Great Powerschiefly Mussolinis Italy and Franceseeking respectively to revise or uphold the 1919 order. Fascism was the most striking political novelty of the interwar years. Fascism defied precise definition. In practice it was an anti-Marxist, antiliberal, and antidemocratic mass movement that aped Communist methods, extolled the leadership principle and a corporatist organization of society, and showed both modern and antimodern tendencies. But the three states universally acknowledged to be Fascist in the 1930s Italy, Germany, and Japanwere most similar in their foreign, rather than their domestic, ideology and policy. All embraced extreme nationalism and a theory of competition among nations and races that justified their revoltsas proletarian nationsagainst the international order of 1919. In this sense, Fascism can be understood as the antithesis of Wilsonianism rather than of Leninism. In the first decade of Mussolinis rule, changes in Italian diplomacy were more stylistic than substantive. But recent historiography argues that this decade of relatively good behaviour was a function of the continuing constraints on Italian ambitions rather than moderation in Fascist goals. Mussolini proclaimed upon taking power that treaties are not eternal, are not irremediable, and declared loudly and often his determination to restore Italian grandeur. This would be accomplished by revision of the mutilated victory, by the transformation of the Mediterranean into an Italian mare nostrum, and by

the creation of a new Roman Empire through expansion and conquest in Africa and the Balkans. Such reveries reflected not only Mussolinis native grandiloquence but also Italys relative poverty and surplus rural population and need for markets and raw materials secure from the competition of more developed powers. In this sense, Italy was a sort of weak Japan. And like the Japanese, Italians bristled at the tendency of the Great Powers to treat them, in Mussolinis words, as another Portugal. Still, Fascist bluster seemed safely unmatched in actions, and London in particular was pleased with the tendency of the Fascist foreign minister Dino Grandi to take refuge on rainy days under the ample and capacious mantle of England in traditional Italian fashion. More than once Grandi dissuaded Il Duce from provocative actions, taking care not<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388449/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187386285"></sc ript> to offend his vanity. The Italian navys inferiority to the British and French, and the armys need for reorganization, also suggested prudence. Fascist diplomacy Italian diplomacy in the 1920s, therefore, was a mix of bombast and caution. At the Lausanne Conference, Mussolini dramatically stopped his train to oblige Poincar and Curzon to come to him. He made Italy the first Western power to offer a trade agreement and recognition to the Bolsheviks and was proud of Italys role in the League (though he considered it an academic organization) and as a guarantor of the Locarno Pact. In the Mediterranean, Mussolini protested French rule in Tunis and asserted for Italy a moral claim to the province. But he satisfied his thirst for action against weaker opponents. He broke the Regina Agreement with the Sans tribesmen of Libya, which had limited Italian occupation to the coast, and by 1928 completed Italys conquest of that poor and weak country. Italys main sphere of activity was the Balkans. When an Italian general surveying the border of a Greek-speaking district of Albania was killed in August 1923, Mussolini ordered a naval squadron to bombard the Greek isle of Corfu. The League of Nations

awarded Italy an indemnity, but not the island. In January 1924, Wilsons Free State of Fiume disappeared when Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pai granted Italian annexation in the Treaty of Rome. Diplomatic attempts to regularize relations between Belgrade and Rome, however, could not overcome Yugoslavias suspicion of Italian ambitions in Albania. In 1924 a coup dtat, ostensibly backed by Belgrade, elevated the Muslim Ahmed Bey Zogu in Tiran. Once in power, however, Ahmed Zogu looked to Italy. The Tiran Pact (Nov. 27, 1926) provided Italian economic aid and was followed by a military alliance in 1927 and finally a convention (July 1, 1928) declaring Albania a virtual protectorate of Italy. Ahmed Zogu then assumed the title of King Zog I. To the north, Italian diplomacy aimed at countering French influence among the successor states. In 1920 the French even courted Hungary and toyed with the idea of resurrecting a Danubian Confederation, but when the deposed Habsburg King Charles appeared in Hungary in March 1921, Allied protests and a Czech ultimatum forced him back into exile. Hungarian revisionism, however, motivated Bene to unite those states that owed their existence to the Treaty of Trianon. A CzechYugoslav alliance (Aug. 14, 1920), CzechRomanian alliance (April 23, 1921), and RomanianYugoslav alliance (June 7, 1921) together formed what was known as the Little Entente. When Charles tried again in October to claim his throne in Budapest, the Little Entente threatened invasion. While France had not midwived the combination, it associated strongly with the successor states through FrancoCzech (Oct. 16, 1925), FrancoRomanian (June 10, 1926), and FrancoYugoslav (Nov. 11, 1927) military alliances. The latter implied that France would side with Belgrade against Rome in case of war and exacerbated the strained relations between France and Italy. Mussolini had more luck in the defeated states of central Europe, Austria and Hungary. But in the former case, Italy was not siding with the revisionists. In return for financial aid to end its own hyperinflation, Austria had promised the League of Nations in 1922 that it would not seek Anschluss with Germany. Mussolini proclaimed in May 1925 that he, too, would never tolerate the Anschluss but set out to curry favour with the Austrian government. An Italo-Hungarian commercial treaty (Sept. 5, 1925), a friendship treaty (April 5, 1927) moving Hungary into the sphere of Italian interests, and a

rapprochement with Bulgaria in 1930 completed Italys alignments with the states defeated in the war. Hungary in particular attracted Mussolinis sympathy. But as long as the combined will of the Little Entente, backed by France, opposed revisionism, Italy alone could force no alterations. On the other hand, military or economic cooperation among the congeries of states in east-central Europe also proved impossible. Czech Polish rivalry continued, however illogical, and after Pisudskis coup dtat in Poland in 1926 even the internationalist Bene sought to steer German revisionism against Poland rather than Austria and the Danubian basin. The Little Entente and French alliances, therefore, amounted to a fair-weather system that would collapse in the first storm. The Locarno era and the dream of disarmament The Locarno treaties promised a new era of reconciliation that seemed fulfilled in the mid-to-late 1920s as the European and world economies recovered and the German electorate turned its back on extremists of the right and left. Locarno had also anticipated Germanys entry into the League. But the prospect of expanding the League Council kicked off an indelicate scramble for Council seats as Britain supported Spain, France supported Poland, and Brazil insisted that it represent Latin America (angering the Argentines). Sweden and Czechoslovakia helped to break the deadlock by magnanimously sacrificing their seats, although Brazil in the end quit the League. Finally, on Sept. 8, 1927, Stresemann led a German delegation into the halls of Geneva, pledging that Germanys steadfast will was to labour for freedom, peace, and unity. Briand, by now the statesman most associated with the spirit of Geneva, replied in like terms: No more blood, no more cannon, no more machine-guns! . . . Let our countries sacrifice their amour-propre for the sake of the peace of the world. The same month, Stresemann tried to capitalize on the goodwill during an interview with Briand at Thoiry. He suggested a 1,500,000,000-mark advance on German reparations payments (to ease the French fiscal crisis then nearing its climax) in return for immediate evacuation of the last two Rhineland zones. The French chamber would likely have rejected such a concession, and in any case Poincar, again in power, stabilized the franc soon after.

The very goodwill expressed at Genevaand removal of the Interallied Military Control Commission from Germany in January 1927prompted London and Washington to ask why the French (despite their pleas of penury when war debts were discussed) still maintained the largest army in Europe. France clung firm to its belief in military deterrence of Germany, even when isolated in the League of Nations Disarmament Preparatory Commission, but the German demand for equality of treatment under the League ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187415690"></sc ript> the Anglo-Americans. To avert U.S. suspicions, Briand enlisted Secretary Kelloggs participation in promoting a treaty by which all nations might renounce the resort to war as an instrument of national policy. This KelloggBriand Pact, signed on Aug. 27, 1928, and eventually subscribed to by virtually the entire world, marked the high point of postwar faith in paper treaties and irenic promises. On July 3, 1928, Chancellor Hermann Mller (a Social Democrat) and Stresemann decided to force the pace of Versailles revisionism by claiming Germanys moral right to early evacuation of the Rhineland. In return they offered a definitive reparations settlement to replace the temporary Dawes Plan. The French were obliged to consider the offera revival of Thoirybecause the French chamber had refused to ratify the 1926 agreement with the United States on war debts on the ground that it did not yet know what could be expected of Germany in reparations. So another committee of experts under another American, Owen D. Young, drafted a plan that was approved at the Hague Conference of August 1929. The Young Plan projected German annuities lasting until 1989. In return, the Allies abolished the Reparations Commission, restored German financial independence, and promised evacuation of the Rhineland by 1930, five years ahead of the Versailles schedule. Why did Briand and even Poincar make so many concessions between 1925 and 1929? Briand, of course, had sincerely hoped for Germanys moral disarmament, and both concluded that Frances treaty rights had become a wasting asset. Better to sacrifice them Charter impressed<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388448/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl

now in return for concessions and goodwill, since they would expire sooner or later anyway. But Stresemann was far from accepting the status quo. His policy of accommodation was designed to achieve the gradual abolition of the Versailles strictures until Germany recovered its prewar freedom of action, at which time he could set out to restore its prewar boundaries as well. For instance, he showed no interest in an Eastern Locarno ensuring the boundaries of the successor states. That is not to say, however, that Stresemann anticipated the use of force or the revival of Germanys extreme war aims. As the decade of the 1920s came to a close, most Europeans expected prosperity and harmony to continue. Briand even went so far as to propose in 1929 that France and Germany explore virtual political integration in a European union, asking only that Germany confirm her 1919 boundaries as immutable. But Stresemann<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388454/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187415706"></sc ript> died suddenly on Oct. 3, 1929, and three weeks later the New York stock market crashed. In the storms to come, the need for firm, material guarantees of security would be greater than ever. But on June 30, 1930, in accordance with the Young Plan, the last Allied troops departed the German Rhineland for home. The economic blizzard Political consequences of the Depression The ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187417364"></sc ript> the origins of the Great Depression and the reasons for its severity and length is highly political, given the implications for the validity of theories of free market, regulated, and planned economies, and of monetary and fiscal policy. It is usually dated debate over<script

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from the New York stock-market crash of October 1929, which choked the domestic and international flow of credit and severely damaged global trade and production. Wall Street prices fell from an index of 216 to 145 in a month, stabilized in early 1930, then continued downward to a bottom of 34 in 1932. Industrial production fell nearly 20 percent in 1930. Unlike previous swings in the business cycle, this financial panic did not eventuate in the expected period of readjustment, but rather defied all governmental and private efforts to restore prosperity for years until it seemed to a great many that the system itself was breaking down. Mutual recriminations flew across the Atlantic. Americans blamed the Europeans for the reparations tangle, for pegging their currencies too high upon the return to gold, and for misuse of the American loans of the 1920s. Europeans blamed the United States for its insistence on repayment of war debts, high tariffs, and the unfettered speculation leading to the stock-market crash. Certainly all of these factors contributed. More tangibly, however, a sudden contraction of international credit in June 1928 made an international emergency likely. Since the Dawes Plan of 1924, Europe had depended for capital and liquidity on the availability of American loans, but increasingly American investors were flocking to the stock market with their savings, and new capital issues for foreign account in the United States dropped 78 percent, from $530,000,000 to $119,000,000. Loans to Germany collapsed from $200,000,000 in the first half of 1928 to $77,000,000 in the second half and to $29,500,000 for the entire year of 1929. A world crisis was also brewing in basic commodities, a market in which prices had been depressed throughout the decade. Mechanization of agriculture stimulated overproduction, and Soviet dumping of wheat on the world market to earn foreign exchange for the First Five-Year Plan compounded the problem. The SmootHawley Tariff, the highest in U.S. history, became law on June 17, 1930. Conceived and passed by the House of Representatives in 1929, it may well have contributed to the loss of confidence on Wall Street and signaled American unwillingness to play the role of leader<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371284/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history

society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187417381"></sc ript> in the world economy. Other countries retaliated with similarly protective tariffs, with the result that the total volume of world trade spiraled downward from a monthly average of $2,900,000,000 in 1929 to less than $1,000,000,000 by 1933. The credit squeeze, bank failures, deflation, and loss of exports forced production down and unemployment up in all industrial nations. In January 1930 the United States had 3,000,000 idle workers, and by 1932 there were more than 13,000,000. In Britain 22 percent of the adult male work force lacked jobs, while in Germany unemployment peaked in 1932 at 6,000,000. All told, some 30,000,000 people were out of work in the industrial countries in 1932. The Depression naturally magnified European bitterness over the continuing international obligations, but the weakest link in the financial chain was Austria, whose central bank, the Creditanstalt, was on the verge of bankruptcy. In March 1931, Stresemanns successor as German foreign minister, Julius Curtius, signed an agreement with Vienna for a GermanAustrian customs union, but French objections to what they saw as a first step toward the dreaded Anschluss provoked a run on the Creditanstalt and forced Berlin and Vienna to renounce the union on September 3. The panic then spread to Germany, rendering the Reichsbank unable to meet its obligations under the Young Plan. President Hoover responded on June 20, 1931, with a proposal for a one-year moratorium on all intergovernmental debts. Short of a general recovery or global agreement on the restoration of trade, however, the moratorium could only be a stopgap. Instead, every country fled toward policies of protection, selfsufficiency, and the creation of regional economic blocs in hopes of isolating itself from the world collapse. On Sept. 21, 1931, the Bank of England left the gold standard, and the pound sterling promptly lost 28 percent of its value, undermining the solvency of countries in eastern Europe and South America. In October a national coalition government formed to take emergency measures. The Ottawa Imperial Economic Conference of 1932 gave birth to the British Commonwealth of Nations and a system of imperial preferences, signaling the end of Britains 86-year-old policy of free trade.

The Lausanne Conference of JuneJuly 1932 took up the question of what should be done after the Hoover Moratorium. Even the French granted the impossibility of further German payments and agreed to make an end of reparations in return for a final German transfer of 3,000,000,000 marks<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388452/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187417395"></sc ript> (which was never made). The United States, however, still insisted that the war debts be honoured, whereupon the French parliament willfully defaulted, damaging Franco-American relations. Failures of the League Panicky retrenchment and disunity also rendered the Western powers incapable of responding to the first violation of the postwar territorial settlements. On Sept. 10, 1931, Viscount Cecil assured the League of Nations that there has scarcely ever been a period in the worlds history when war seemed less likely than it does at the present. Just eight days later officers of Japans Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway to serve as pretext for military adventure. Since 1928, China had seemed to be achieving an elusive unity under Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists (KMT), now based in Nanking. While the KMTs consolidation of power seemed likely to keep Soviet and Japanese ambitions in check, resurgent Chinese nationalism also posed a threat to British and other foreign interests on the mainland. By the end of 1928, Chiang was demanding the return of leased territories and an end to extraterritoriality in the foreign concessions. On the other hand, the KMT was still split by factions, banditry continued widespread, the Communists were increasingly well-organized in remote Kiangsi, and in the spring of 1931 a rival government sprang up in Canton. To these problems were added economic depression and disastrous floods that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Japan, meanwhile, suffered rudely from the Depression because of her dependence on trade, her ill-timed return to the gold standard in 1930, and a Chinese boycott of Japanese

goods. But social turmoil only increased the appeal of those who saw in foreign expansion a solution to Japans economic problems. This interweaving of foreign and domestic policy, propelled by a rabid nationalism, a powerful military-industrial complex, hatred of the prevailing distribution of world power, and the raising of a racialist banner (in this case, antiwhite) to justify expansion, all bear comparison to European Fascism. When the parliamentary government in Tokyo divided as to how to confront this complex of crises, the Kwantung Army acted on its own. Manchuria, rich in raw materials, was a prospective sponge for Japanese emigration (250,000 Japanese already resided there) and the gateway to China proper. The Japanese public greeted the conquest with wild enthusiasm. China appealed at once to the League of Nations, which called for Japanese withdrawal in a resolution of October 24. But neither the British<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388451/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187422256"></sc ript> nor U.S. Asiatic fleets (the latter comprising no battleships and just one cruiser) afforded their governments (obsessed in any case with domestic economic problems) the option of intervention. The tide of Japanese nationalism would have prevented Tokyo from bowing to Western pressure in any case. In December the League Council appointed an investigatory commission under Lord Lytton, while the United States contented itself with propounding the Stimson Doctrine, by which Washington merely refused to recognize changes born of aggression. Unperturbed, the Japanese prompted local collaborationists to proclaim, on Feb. 18, 1932, an independent state of Manchukuo, in effect a Japanese protectorate. The Lytton Commission reported in October, scolding the Chinese for provocations but condemning Japan for using excessive force. Lytton recommended evacuation of Manchuria but privately believed that Japan had bitten off more than she can chew and would ultimately withdraw of its own accord. In March 1933, Japan announced its withdrawal instead from the League of Nations, which had been tested and found impotent, at least in East Asia.

The League also failed to advance the cause of disarmament in the first years of the Depression. The London Naval Conference of 1930 proposed an extension of the 1922 Washington ratios for naval tonnage, but this time France and Italy refused to accept the inferior status assigned to them. In land armaments, the policies of the powers were by now fixed and predictable. Britain and the United States deplored wasteful military spending, especially by France, while reparations and war debts went unpaid. But even Herriot and Briand refused to disband the French army without additional security guarantees that the British were unwilling to tender. Fascist Italy, despite its financial distress, was unlikely to take disarmament seriously, while Germany, looking for foreignpolicy triumphs to bolster the struggling Republic, demanded equality of treatment: Either France must disarm, or Germany must be allowed to expand its army. The League Council nonetheless summoned delegates from 60 nations to a grand Disarmament Conference at Geneva beginning in February 1932. When Germany failed to achieve satisfaction by the July adjournment it withdrew from the negotiations. France, Britain, and the United States devised various formulas to break the deadlock, including a No Force Declaration (Dec. 11, 1932), abjuring the use of force to resolve disputes, and a five-power (including Italy) promise to grant German equality in a system providing security for all nations. On the strength of<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388450/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187422271"></sc ript> these the Disarmament Conference resumed in February 1933. By then, however, Adolf Hitler was chancellor of the German Reich. A common impression of Herbert Hoover is that he was passive in the face of the Depression and isolationist in foreign policy. The truth was almost the reverse, and in the 1932 campaign his Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, was the more traditional in economic policy and isolationist in foreign policy. Indeed, Hoover bequeathed to his successor two bold initiatives meant to restore international cooperation in matters of trade, currency, and security: the London Economic Conference and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The former convened in June 1933 in hopes of restoring the

gold standard but was undermined by President Roosevelts suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar and his acerbic message rejecting the conferences labours on July 3. At home, Roosevelt proposed the series of government actions known as the New Deal in an effort to restore U.S. productivity, in isolation, if need be, from the rest of the world. The Disarmament Conference came to a similar end. In March, Ramsay MacDonald proposed the gradual reduction of the French army from half a million to 200,000 men and the doubling of Germanys Versailles army to the same figure, accompanied by international verification. But a secret German decree of April 4 created a National Defense Council to coordinate rearmament on a massive scale. Clearly the German demand for equality was a ploy to wreck the conference and serve as pretext for unilateral rearmament. Negotiations were delayed by a sudden initiative from Mussolini in March calling for a pact among Germany, Italy, France, and Britain to grant Germany equality, revise the peace treaties, and establish a four-power directorate to resolve international disputes. Mussolini appears to have wanted to downgrade the League in favour of a Concert of Europe, enhancing Italian prestige and perhaps gaining colonial concessions in return for reassuring the Western powers. The French watered down the plan until the Four-Power Pact signed in Rome on June 7 was a mass of anodyne generalities. Any prospect that the new Nazi regime might be drawn to collective security disappeared on Oct. 14, 1933, when Hitler denounced the unfair treatment accorded Germany at Geneva and announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations. The rise of Hitler and fall of Versailles Failure of the German Republic The origins of the Nazi Third Reich must be sought not only in the appeal of Hitler and his party but also in<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388449/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187419623"></sc

ript> the weakness of the Weimar Republic. Under the republic, Germany boasted the most democratic constitution in the world, yet the fragmentation of German politics made government by majority a difficult proposition. Many Germans identified the republic with the despised Treaty of Versailles and, like the Japanese, concluded that the 1920s policy of peaceful cooperation with the West had failed. What was more, the republic seemed incapable of curing the Depression or dampening the appeal of the Communists. In the end, it self-destructed. The first Depression-era elections, in September 1930, reflected the electorates flight from the moderate centrist parties: Communists won 77 seats in the Reichstag, while the Nazi delegation rose from 12 to 107. Chancellor Heinrich Brning, unable to command a majority, governed by emergency decree of the aged president, Paul von Hindenburg. The National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) exploited the resentment and fear stemming from Versailles and the Depression. Its platform was a clever, if contradictory, mixture of socialism, corporatism, and virulent assertion in foreign policy. The Nazis outdid the Communists in forming paramilitary street gangs to intimidate opponents and create an image of irresistible strength, but unlike the Communists, who implied that war veterans had been dupes of capitalist imperialism, the Nazis honoured the Great War as a time when the German Volk had been united as never before. The army had been stabbed in the back by defeatists, they claimed, and those who signed the Armistice and Versailles had been criminals; worse, international capitalists, Socialists, and Jews continued to conspire against the German people. Under Nazism alone, they insisted, could Germans again unify under ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fhrer and get on with the task of combating Germanys real enemies. This amalgam of fervent nationalism and rhetorical socialism, not to mention the charismatic spell of Hitlers oratory and the hypnotic pomp of Nazi rallies, was psychologically more appealing than flaccid liberalism or divisive class struggle. In any case, the Communists (on orders from Moscow) turned to help the Nazis paralyze democratic procedure in Germany in the expectation of seizing power themselves. Brning resigned in May 1932, and the July elections returned 230 Nazi delegates. After two short-lived rightist cabinets foundered, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on

Jan. 30, 1933. The president, parliamentary conservatives, and the army all apparently expected that the inexperienced, lower-class demagogue would submit to their guidance. Instead, Hitler secured dictatorial powers from the Reichstag<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388453/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187419638"></sc ript> and proceeded to establish, by marginally legal means, a totalitarian state. Within two years the regime had outlawed all other political parties and coopted or intimidated all institutions that competed with it for popular loyalty, including the German states, labour unions, press and radio, universities, bureaucracies, courts, and churches. Only the army and foreign office remained in the hands of traditional elites. But this fact, and Hitlers own caution at the start, allowed Western observers fatally to misperceive Nazi foreign policy as simply a continuation of Weimar revisionism. Adolf Hitler recounted in Mein Kampf, the autobiographical harangue written in prison after his abortive putsch of 1923, that he saw himself as that rare individual, the programmatic thinker and the politician become one. Hitler distilled his Weltanschauung from the social Darwinism, anti-Semitism, and racialist anthropology current in prewar Vienna. Where Marx had reduced all of history to struggles among social classes, in which revolution was the engine of progress and the dictatorship of the proletariat the culmination, Hitler reduced history to struggle among biologic races, in which war was the engine of progress and Aryan hegemony the culmination. The enemies of the Germans, indeed of history itself, were internationalists who warred against the purity and race-consciousness of peoplesthey were the capitalists, the Socialists, the pacifists, the liberals, all of whom Hitler identified with the Jews. This condemnation of Jews as a racial group made Nazism more dangerous than earlier forms of religious or economic anti-Semitism that had long been prevalent throughout Europe. For if the Jews, as Hitler thought, were like bacteria poisoning the bloodstream of the Aryan race, the only solution was their extermination. Nazism, in short, was the twisted product of a secular, scientific age of history.

Hitlers worldview dictated a unity of foreign and domestic policies based on total control and militarization at home, war and conquest abroad. In Mein Kampf he ridiculed the Weimar politicians and their bourgeois dreams of restoring the Germany of 1914. Rather, the German Volk could never achieve their destiny without Lebensraum (living space) to support a vastly increased German population and form the basis for world power. Lebensraum, wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, was to be found in the Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe. This heartland of the Eurasian continent (so named by the geopoliticians Sir Halford Mackinder and Karl Haushofer) was especially suited for conquest since it was occupied, in<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388446/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187419648"></sc ript> Hitlers mind, by Slavic Untermenschen (subhumans) and ruled from the centre of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in Moscow. By 1933 Hitler had apparently imagined a step-by-step plan for the realization of his goals. The first step was to rearm, thereby restoring complete freedom of maneuver to Germany. The next step was to achieve Lebensraum in alliance with Italy and with the sufferance of Britain. This greater Reich could then serve, in the distant third step, as a base for world dominion and the purification of a master race. In practice, Hitler proved willing to adapt to circumstances, seize opportunities, or follow the wanderings of intuition. Sooner or later politics must give way to war, but because Hitler did not articulate his ultimate fantasies to the German voters or establishment, his actions and rhetoric seemed to imply only restoration, if not of the Germany of 1914, then the Germany of 1918, after BrestLitovsk. In fact, his program was potentially without limits. The first German move Hitler observed the Abyssinian war with controlled glee, for dissolution of the Stresa Frontcomposed of the guarantors of Locarnogave him the chance to reoccupy the Rhineland ank;grp=770;key=history with minimal<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388448/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl

society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187448746"></sc ript> risk. A caretaker government under Albert Sarraut was in charge of France during a divisive electoral campaign dominated by the leftist Popular Front, and Britain was convulsed by a constitutional crisis stemming from King Edward VIIIs insistence on marrying an American divorce. On March 7, 1936, Hitler ordered a token force of 22,000 soldiers back across the bridges of the Rhine. Characteristically, he chose a weekend for his sudden move and then softened the blow with offers of nonaggression pacts and a new demilitarized zone on both sides of the frontier. Even so, Hitler assured his generals that he would retreat if the French intervened. German reoccupation and fortification of the Rhineland was the most significant turning point of the interwar years. After March 1936 the British and French could no longer take forceful action against Hitler except by provoking the total war they feared. Why did the French, especially, not act to prevent this calamity to their defensive posture? They were not taken by surpriseHitlers preparations had been notedand Sarraut himself told French radio listeners that Strasbourg would not be left under German guns. Moreover, the French army still outnumbered the German and could expect support from Czechoslovakia and possibly Poland. On the other hand, the French army commander, General Maurice Gamelin, vastly overestimated German strength and insisted that a move into the Rhineland be preceded by general mobilization. The French Cabinet also concluded that it should do nothing without the full agreement of the British. But London was not the place to look for backbone. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin shrugged, They might succeed in smashing Germany with the aid of Russia, but it would probably only result in Germany going Bolshevik, while the editor of The Times asked, Its none of our business, is it? Its their own back-garden theyre walking into. By failing to respond to the violation, however, Britain, France, and Italy had broken the Locarno treaties just as gravely as had Germany. The strategic situation in Europe now shifted in favour of the Fascist powers. In June, Mussolini appointed as foreign minister his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who concluded an agreement with Germany on July 11 in which Italy acquiesced in Austrias behaving henceforth as a German state. The RomeBerlin Axis followed on November 1, and

the GermanJapanese Anti-Comintern Pact, another vague agreement ostensibly directed at Moscow, on November 25. Finally, Belgium unilaterally renounced its alliance with<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388454/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187448760"></sc ript> France on October 14 and returned to its traditional neutrality in hopes of escaping the coming storm. As a direct result of the Abyssinian imbroglio, the militant revisionists had come together and the status quo powers had splintered. Meanwhile, on May 5, 1936, Italian troops had entered Addis Ababa and completed the conquest of Abyssinia, although the country was never entirely pacified, despite costly and brutal repression. The Abyssinian war had been a disaster for the democracies, smashing both the Stresa Front and the credibility of the League. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, One day [the League] was a powerful body imposing sanctions, seemingly more effective than ever before; the next day it was an empty sham, everyone scuttling from it as quickly as possible. In December 1937, Italy, too, quit the League of Nations. The civil war in Spain The Spanish Civil War highlighted the contrast between democratic bankruptcy and totalitarian dynamism. In 1931 the Spanish monarchy gave way to a republic whose unstable government moved steadily to the left, outraging the army and church. After repeated provocations on both sides, army and air force officers proclaimed a Nationalist revolt on July 17, 1936, that survived its critical early weeks with logistical help from Portugals archconservative premier, Antnio Salazar. The Nationalists, rallying behind General Francisco Franco, quickly seized most of Old Castile in the north and a beachhead in the south extending from Crdoba to Cdiz opposite Spanish Morocco, where the insurrection had begun. But the Republicans, or loyalists, a Popular Front composed of liberals, Socialists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, and anarchists, took up arms to defend the Republic elsewhere and sought outside aid against what they styled as the

latest Fascist threat. Spain became a battleground for the ideologies wrestling for mastery of Europe. The civil war posed a dilemma for France and Britain, pitting the<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388447/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187452794"></sc ript> principle of defending democracy against the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states. The ineffectual Blum at first fraternally promised aid to the Popular Front in Madrid, but he reneged within a month for fear that such involvement might provoke a European war or a civil war in France. The British government counseled nonintervention and seemingly won Germany and Italy to that position, but Hitler, on well-rehearsed anti-Bolshevik grounds, hurriedly dispatched 20 transport planes that allowed Franco to move reinforcements from Morocco. Not to be outdone, Mussolini sent matriel, Fascist volunteers, and, ultimately, regular army formations. The Italians performed miserably (especially at Guadalajara in March 1937), but German aid, including the feared Condor Legion, was effective. Hitler expected to be paid for his support, however, with economic concessions, and he also saw Spain as a testing-ground for Germanys newest weapons and tactics. These included terror bombing such as that over Guernica in April 1937, which caused far fewer deaths than legend has it but which became an icon of anti-Fascism through the painting of Pablo Picasso. International aid to the Republicans ran from the heroic to the sinister. Thousands of leftists and idealistic volunteers from throughout Europe and America flocked to International Brigades to defend the Republic. Material support, however, came only from Stalin, who demanded gold payment in return and ordered Comintern agents and commissars to accompany the Soviet supplies. These Stalinists systematically murdered Trotskyites and other enemies on the left, undermined the radical government of Barcelona, and exacerbated the intramural confusion in Republican ranks. The upshot of Soviet intervention was to discredit the Republic and thereby strengthen Western resolve to stay out.

The war dragged on through 1937 and 1938 and claimed some 500,000 lives before the Nationalists finally captured Barcelona in January 1939 and Madrid in March. During the final push to victory, France and Britain recognized Francos government. By then, however, the fulcrum of diplomacy had long since shifted to central Europe. The Nationalist victory did not, in the end, redound to the detriment of France, for Franco politely sent the Germans and Italians home and observed neutrality in the coming war, whereas a pro-Communist Spain might have posed a genuine threat to France during the era of the NaziSoviet pact. The return of U.S. isolationism The extreme isolationism that gripped the United States in the 1930s reinforced British appeasement and French paralysis. To Americans absorbed with their own<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388452/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187459445"></sc ript> distress, Hitler and Mussolini appeared as slightly ridiculous rabble-rousers on movie-house newsreels and certainly no concern of theirs. Moreover, the revisionist theory that the United States had been sucked into war in 1917 through the machinations of arms merchants or Wall Street bankers gained credence from the Senates Nye Committee inquiries of 193436. U.S. isolationism, however, had many roots: liberal abhorrence of arms and war, the evident failure of Wilsonianism, the Great Depression, and the revisionism of American historians, who were among the leaders in arguing that Germany was not solely responsible for 1914. Nor were isolationists restricted only to the Great Plains states or to one political party. Some members of Congress favoured punctilious defense of U.S. interests in the world but rejected involvement in the quarrels of others. Some were full-fledged pacifists even if it meant surrendering certain U.S. rights abroad. Left-wing isolationists warned that another great war would push the United States in the direction of Fascism. Conservative isolationists warned that another great war would usher in socialism.

These factions disputed among themselves over the wording of legislation, but their collective strength was enough to carry a number of bills designed to prevent a recurrence of the events of 191417. The Johnson Act of 1934 forbade American citizens to lend money to foreign countries that had not paid their past war debts. The Neutrality acts of 1935 and 1936 prohibited sale of war matriel to belligerents and forbade any exports to belligerents not paid for with cash and carried in their own ships. Thus, the United States was not to acquire a stake in the victory of any side or expose its merchant ships to

submarines. (See the aggression more than the aggressors.

video.) The effect of these acts, however, was to

preclude American aid to Abyssinia, Spain, and China, and thus hurt the victims of

The United States did take steps in the 1930s, however, to mobilize the Western Hemisphere for the purposes of fighting the Depression and resisting European, especially German, encroachments. Roosevelt gave this initiative a name in his first inaugural address: the Good Neighbor Policy. Building on steps taken by Hoover, Roosevelt pledged nonintervention in Latin domestic affairs at the Montevideo PanAmerican Conference of 1933, signed a treaty with the new Cuban government (May 29, 1934) abrogating the Platt Amendment, mediated a truce in the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1934 (with<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1388449/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187459462"></sc ript> a peace treaty following in July 1938), and negotiated commercial treaties with Latin-American states. As war approached overseas, Washington also promoted panAmerican unity on the basis of nonintervention, condemnation of aggression, no forcible collection of debts, equality of states, respect for treaties, and continental solidarity. The

Declaration of Lima (1938) provided for pan-American consultation in case of a threat to the peace, security, or territorial integrity of any state. Japans aggression in China The first major challenge to American isolationism, however, occurred in Asia. After pacifying Manchukuo, the Japanese turned their sights toward North China and Inner Mongolia. Over the intervening years, however, the KMT had made progress in unifying China. The Communists were still in the field, having survived their Long March (1934 35) to Yen-an in the north, but Chiangs government, with German and American help, had introduced modern roads and communications, stable paper currency, banking, and educational systems. How might Tokyo best round out its continental interests: by preemptive war or by cooperating with this resurgent China to expel Western influence from East Asia? The chief of the operations section of the Japanese general staff favoured collaboration and feared that an invasion of China proper would bring war with the Soviets or the Americans, whose economic potential he understood. Supreme headquarters, however, preferred to take military advantage of apparent friction between Chiang and a North China warlord. In September 1936, when Japan issued seven secret demands that would have made North China a virtual Japanese protectorate, Chiang rejected them. In December Chiang was even kidnapped by the commander of Nationalist forces from Manchuria, who tried to force him to suspend fighting the Communists and to declare war on Japan. This Sian Incident demonstrated the unlikelihood of Chinese collaboration with the Japanese program and strengthened the war party in Tokyo. As in 1931, hostilities began almost spontaneously and soon took on a life of their own. An incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking (then known as Pei-ping) on July 7, 1937, escalated into an undeclared Sino-Japanese war. Contrary to the Japanese analysis, both Chiang and Mao Zedong vowed to come to the aid of North China, while Japanese moderates failed to negotiate a truce or localize the conflict and lost all influence. By the end of July the Japanese had occupied Peking and Tientsin. The following month they blockaded the South China coast and captured Shanghai after brutal fighting and the

slaughter<script src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371284/0/170/ADTECH;target=_bl ank;grp=770;key=history society+government+history;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=291225;misc=1328187455664"></sc ript> of countless civilians. Similar atrocities accompanied the fall of Nanking on December 13. The Japanese expected the Chinese to sue for peace, but Chiang moved his government to Han-kou and continued to resist the dwarf bandits with hit-and-run tactics that sucked the invaders in more deeply. The Japanese could occupy cities and fan out along roads and rails almost at will, but the countryside remained hostile. World opinion condemned Japan in the harshest terms. The U.S.S.R. concluded a nonaggression pact with China (Aug. 21, 1937), and Soviet-Mongolian forces skirmished with Japanese on the border. Britain vilified Japan in the League, while Roosevelt invoked the Stimson Doctrine in his quarantine speech of October 5. But Roosevelt was prevented by the Neutrality acts from aiding China even after the sinking of U.S. and British gunboats on the Yangtze. On March 28, 1938, the Japanese established a Manchukuo-type puppet regime at Nanking, and spring and summer offensives brought them to the Wu-han cities (chiefly Han-kou) on the Yangtze. Chiang stubbornly moved his government again, this time to Chungking, which the Japanese bombed mercilessly in May 1939, as they did Canton for weeks before its occupation in October. Such incidents, combined with the Nazi and Fascist air attacks in Spain and Abyssinia, were omens of the total war to come. The United States finally took a first step in opposition to Japanese aggression on July 29, 1939, announcing that it would terminate its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan in six months and thereby cut off vital raw materials to the Japanese war machine. It was all Roosevelt could do under existing law, but it set in train the events that would lead to Pearl Harbor. LINKS Other Britannica Sites Get involved Share

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international relations - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

The world of the early 21st century is a global community of nations, all of which coexist in some measure of political and economic interdependence. By means of rapid communication systems-radio, television, and computers-much of what happens in one place is quickly known almost everywhere else. The speed of transportation in aircraft also makes it possible for people to get around the globe in hours instead of days or weeks. The topic international relations is discussed at the following external Web sites. Citations To cite this page: MLA Style: "international relations." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online. Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 02 Feb. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/291225/international-relations>. MLA APA Harvard Chicago Manual of Style

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