Europe [individual assignment]
Fragile Peace and Political Extremism in Europe
Peace prevailed in Europe during the 1920s, but was fragile at best. Political violence and civil war rocked Germany, Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe until 1922, and even afterward, it was exhaustion, rather than true amity, that preserved peace on the continent.
The League of Nations resettled refugees and carried out famine relief, but with few powers of enforcement, it soon proved a woefully inadequate peacekeeper.
European economies struggled, even during the comparatively prosperous 1920s, and then plunged into free-fall during the 1930s, as the effects of the Great Depression spread outward from the United States.
Democracy did not flourish in interwar Europe. In 1919, 23 governments there could be considered democratic. By 1939, half of those had become dictatorships of varying degrees of severity. Italy slipped into fascism as early as 1922, and Germany was driven to Nazism in 1933 by the Depression. Even well-established democracies like Britain and France experienced political weakness and economic sluggishness. Only U.S. investment and German reparations kept the British and French economies afloat during the 1920s, and even then, unemployment, deficits, and strikes were the norm.
The Depression made things worse, and both political systems suffered: British elections returned weak-willed coalition governments, whereas the French government lurched from left to right and back again in frequent elections.
On the foreign-policy front, economic frailty and political indecision made it difficult for Depression-era France and Britain to cope with the growing threat of Nazi Germany.
Another source of interwar stress for France and Britain was the growing difficulty of holding on to empires. National movements were increasingly restless in colonies like French Indochina and British India. Hoping to make imperial rule seem less burdensome, Britain – starting with the 1931 Statute of Westminster – began the long transformation of its empire into the more egalitarian British Commonwealth, which exists today.
The general crisis of democracy meant that interwar Europe's most dynamic regimes were the dictatorships, several of which attained totalitarian levels of control over their people. The first new dictatorship was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the Soviet Union, the communist regime led by Vladimir Lenin that took power in Russia in October of 1917. The Bolsheviks were the most radical of Russia's communists, led by Vladimir Lenin and his second-in-command, Leon Trotsky. The Bolsheviks struggled for survival between 1917 and 1921, pulling out of World War I and then defeating their anti-communist enemies—the Whites—in the terrible Russian Civil War, which resulted in the death of millions from disease, starvation, and persecution, and the emigration of hundreds of thousands more.
Lenin quickly created a one-party dictatorship and a secret police (originally the Cheka, eventually the NKVD and, later, KGB), and tried to modernize the country along Marxist lines. To appease masses, in 1921, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), a more gradual approach to socialist development that allowed for limited private trade. This lasted until 1928, although Lenin died in the meantime, in 1924.
In 1928, Joseph Stalin gained control of the Soviet government and became one of the most oppressive dictators of all time. Immediately overturning the NEP, Stalin returned to the revolutionary policy of overnight modernization, with his Five-Year Plans (complete centralization of the economy to bring about rapid industrialization) and the collectivization of agriculture (the forced transfer of peasants from villages to state-run farms (collective farms), both to control them more tightly and to confíscate their grain more efficiently, in order to pay for the Five-Year Plans). Although the USSR indeed modernized under Stalin, the price was steep. Millions of peasants who opposed collectivization were imprisoned or executed, and four to six million more died in the Great Famine (1932-1933) caused by Stalin's grain confiscations in southern Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. In l936-1938, Stalin used the secret police to carry out a series of mass arrests and show trials, called the Purges, executing approximately a million people and exiling millions more to labor camps called gulags. Like other modem dictators, Stalin used propaganda to indoctrinate his subjects and glorified himself by means of an extravagant cult of personality.
In Italy, dictatorship came from the right. After World War I, Italy’s constitutional monarchy was undermined by economic downturn and political chaos. The upper and middle classes, fearing social breakdown and communist revolution, sought a strong leader to restore stability. In October 1922, the king turned in desperation to Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascist Party, placing him in charge of Italy's government for the next 21 years. Fascism, Mussolini’s invention, is best described as right-wing radicalism (as opposed to right-wing conservatism, which seeks to prevent change). It is anticommunist but also anti-capitalist and anti-democratic and characterized by militaristic nationalism. Mussolini killed and arrested few people compared to Stalin and Hitler, and he modernized Italy with new highways, literacy campaigns, and the industrial development of backward regions. He was well-regarded, both at home and abroad, during the 1920s. On the other hand, he imposed censorship, used propaganda to create a lavish cult of personality, and suppressed trade unions and political parties. His foreign-policy aggression, plus his decision to ally with Hitler, damaged his international reputation during the 1930s, and the Depression undercut his modernizing efforts at home.
Germany’s road to dictatorship was longer than Italy’s, and the result infinitely worse. From 1919 to 1933, Germany was governed by the democratic Weimar Republic. Dogged during the early 1920s by hyperinflation (which caused several years of nightmarish poverty) and political unrest from the left (a communist uprising in 1919) and the right (several assassinations and coup attempts, including one by the fledgling Nazi Party in 1923), the Weimar regime managed to restore economic and political order between 1924 and 1929. In 1930, however, the Great Depression ended this temporary calm, causing mass unemployment—nearly 40 percent of the workforce, by 1932 —and boosting the popularity of Germany's most extremist movements: the Communists and the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, originally from Austria, but a fierce pan-German patriot. A conscious imitator of Italian fascism, Hitler despised communism and democracy in favor of militaristic nationalism. He embraced racial hatred of many groups, but especially a virulent form of anti-Semitism — all expressed in his infamous memoir Mein Kampf.
During the relative stability of the late 1920s, the Nazis enjoyed little political appeal. But when the Weimar regime failed to cope with the Depression, ordinary Germans began heeding Hitler's rhetoric.
They remembered their resentment of the Treaty of Versailles. Many came to believe the Nazis’ anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about how Jews had supposedly sold Germany out during World War I, or were enriching themselves while the rest of Germany suffered through the Depression, or were responsible for international communism.
During the Weimar electoral crisis of the early 1930s, as vote after vote failed to produce a clear majority, the Nazis emerged as Germany’s largest party, but the communists also gained in popularity. In January 1933, Germany's president—the conservative war hero Paul von Hindenburg, who had little love for the Nazis but feared the communists even more—appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany.
With blinding speed, Hitler established himself as an absolute dictator. In February 1933, the Reichstag building, seat of the German government, was set ablaze by a communist arsonist, allowing Hitler to declare a state of emergency and to pass the Enabling Act in March. This suspended the Weimar constitution and gave Hitler the power to rule by decree. He soon outlawed all political parties, banned trade unions, and turned the press and mass media into instruments of Nazi propaganda (relying on a cult of personality similar to Mussolini’s and Stalin’s). In 1934, he assumed the presidency when Hindenburg suddenly died, and he violently purged remaining rivals within the Nazi Party in the “night of the long knives.’ To control dissidents and opponents, the Nazis built concentration camps like Dachau and created a secret police, the Gestapo. Hitler’s system of state capitalism, similar to Mussolini’s, ended German unemployment with a giant program of public works and highway building, coupled with mass military conscription and renewed arms production—both of which required the renunciation of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s belligerent foreign policy was a key reason for the steady erosion of European and global peace during the 1930s.
The Nazis also acted on their notorious obsession with racial purity, believing as they did in the Aryan myth: the misguided notion that Germans and other northern Europeans were the “truest" descendants of the earliest Indo-Europeans. Hitler’s regime targeted several races as “undesirable," including Slavs, Africans, and Roma (Gypsies)—but from the Nazi perspective, the worst of these "subhumans," and the source of all of Germany's troubles, were the Jews. In this way, the Nazis added extra malevolence to a streak of anti-Semitism that had long existed throughout Europe. Although the Nazis eventually resorted to genocide, their prewar anti-Semitic policies emphasized discrimination and physical harassment. Jewish writings and artworks were banned or burned, Jewish businesses were boycotted, and Jews were forced out of professions like law, medicine, civil service, and university teaching. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of their civil rights and forbade intermarriage between them and non-Jews. Sporadic violence, including the 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass"), ramped up during the late 1930s, as the regime tried to pressure Jews into leaving the country. Most stayed, either because places like Britain, Canada, and the United States refused them entry or because European Jews did not anticipate how much worse Nazi rule would become.
Questions for experts
1. What were the most significant events in the region? Why have you chosen them?
2. What factors influenced on the development of the given European countries?
3. What distinguishes Europe from other regions and countries considered in this topic? (Before answering read about other region in the topic 12).