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Despite hopes and expectations for a new era based on greater freedom at home and greater collaboration abroad, World War I left a legacy of wounds, ambiguities, and unresolved disputes. During the 1930s, conflicts between empires and colonies, democracy and authoritarianism, and nationalism and internationalism played out on a world stage, and by 1939 sparked a second world war even more destructive than the first.
World War I—the “Great War” that had mobilized both human and material resources on a global scale—created during the interwar years (1918–1939) a general disillusionment with the hierarchical and European-centered nineteenth-century political order. The liberal dream of limitless scientific and technological progress had led to the development of weapons that had killed 7 million soldiers and civilians and had wounded 13 million others. The German writer Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West cited the war as evidence of the West’s imminent deterioration. Furthermore, colonized populations across the globe began to question the supposed “Western superiority” that European nations used to justify their imperial policies. Consequently, although world public opinion clamored for peace and stability, people had a strong sense that a simple return to the antebellum belle epoque (beautiful age) was not the most desirable solution.
Even if some people wanted to restore the bourgeois sociopolitical structure that had existed before 1914, that restoration no longer seemed possible. The mass mobilization, mass production, mass consumption, and mass culture that the war had generated also helped replace the elitist nineteenth-century system with mass societies and mass politics. Throughout the war men and women alike had felt increasingly invested in political affairs, both because of the sacrifices they had made and because the popular press had kept them constantly informed about the war’s happenings. Moreover, knowing that an increasingly global audience relied on the media to provide information and answers, politicians had begun using the media to spread propaganda and garner support. Leaders from every end of the political spectrum had made public promises about what “the people” could expect or demand when the war subsided. After the Russian Revolution the Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) had called for the workers of the world to unite to conquer the forces of capitalism. The U.S. president Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), on the other hand, had promised that when the fighting stopped all those who participated would be able to enjoy greater equality, freedom, democracy, and national self-determination.
Thus, as the war was winding down, people were gearing up to inherit a better world. However, people had multiple and often contradictory ideas about what the new world order should look like. In addition to ideological disagreements among Communism, liberal democracy, and a burgeoning neo-conservatism, people everywhere rallied for expanded suffrage, shorter work days, higher wages, and the right to transform ethnically organized or imperially occupied territories into sovereign nations. Furthermore, whereas many voices spoke out against the technology that had made the war possible, more people than ever clamored for a share of modernity’s amenities, such as the radio and the automobile. When the armistice finally came on 11 November 1918, the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), announced “we have won the war, now we must win the peace.” As Clemenceau predicted, the task of restoring order was to be incredibly difficult, and after the guns fell silent many thorny issues remained unresolved.
In January 1919 the Paris Peace Conference convened to decide the fate of the vanquished aggressors (Germany, Austria, and Turkey) whose empires the war had toppled. One year earlier—on 8 January 1918, to the U.S. Congress—Wilson had delivered his Fourteen Points, which provided the structure for a more equitable system of international relations based on international law and protected by an association of independent nations that would cooperate to maintain order. Although the desire for peace and international cooperation was fairly widespread, and Wilson’s role at the Paris Peace Conference was prominent, most delegates tried to push the settlement in a direction that optimized their own national interests. Despite Wilson’s continuing insistence on the universal right of self-determination, the Allied powers (Russia, France, England, Italy, and the United States but especially France and England) emerged from the peace settlement with more territories than ever before. The vast spoils included oil fields in the former Ottoman Middle East and mineral-rich territories in what had been German East Africa. To appease Wilson, the victorious powers had agreed to manage the territories as “mandates” until they were ready to govern themselves rather than simply annexing them.
Unrest and Revolt
The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations—the intergovernmental organization that Wilson envisioned—went into effect on 10 January 1920. But even before the treaty was officially signed, dissatisfaction, malaise, and revolt emerged all over the map. Following in the footsteps of the Russian Revolution (whose leaders thought the League of Nations was a bourgeois sham), revolutionary politics were brewing in Hungary under the leadership of Bela Kun (1835–1939), in Bavaria under the leadership of Eugene Levine, and in Germany under the leadership of Karl Liebknech (1871–1919) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919). Labor and/or race riots broke out in Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, while Mexico was locked in a civil war that had begun in 1910. Furthermore, fear of the socialist call for worldwide revolution spurred counterrevolutionary forces, and informal armies or vigilante groups set out to take revenge on left-wing activism in the name of nationalism.
Revolutionary activity and social unrest were taking place in southern and eastern Asia. On 13 April 1919, Indian civilians were protesting British policies at Armistar in Punjab when the British general Reginald Dyer ordered soldiers to fire on the crowds, killing 379 Indians and wounding 1,200. After hearing that the Versailles Treaty awarded Germany’s concession rights in the Shandong Peninsula to Japan, thousands of Chinese students demonstrated in Beijing and continued to boycott Japanese goods. In the midst of all this political unrest, an influenza epidemic was circling the globe. It spread via trade routes, and outbreaks occurred in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Brazil, the South Pacific, and in India, where the mortality rate was particularly devastating. The epidemic only intensified the sense of worldwide unease.
Despite such unease, in many ways the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations were a great victory. They filled the advocates of internationalism with hope that peace through disarmament and cooperation might yet be possible. But the peace left nearly as many loose ends as the war. The harsh reparation terms that the peace inflicted upon Germany, along with the contentious ways that it had accorded statehood to some territories and denied it to others, all but guaranteed that further contention would accompany efforts to create international stability. People widely felt that the treaty had not granted many people the recompense they desired for the losses they had suffered. Woodrow Wilson could not get even his own country to agree to the treaty’s terms; on 19 March 1920, the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and in doing so refused to participate in the League of Nations. This shocking event did not augur well for the fate of the Fourteen Points and the world that Wilson envisioned.
Despite the absence of Germany, Russia, and the United States the League of Nations set about fulfilling its aims and functions. In 1921–1922 a conference in Washington drew up a naval treaty limiting the capital ships of Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. Furthermore, a conference on disarmament met in Genoa in 1922, and in 1925 in Locarno, Switzerland, treaties were drawn between Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium guaranteeing the western European boundaries against violation. However, while the Europe-led League of Nations was trying to “make the world safe for democracy,” nations and peoples both in Europe and beyond continued to search for alternatives to liberal democratic Wilsonian ideals.
By 1923 Marxism’s revolutionary threat had been greatly reduced. However, people still feared it enough to bring fascism to power in Italy in 1922 and a military dictatorship to Spain in 1923 and to renew the Nationalist Socialist Party (which would become the Nazi Party) in Germany in 1925 after Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was released from prison. Fascism began to appear as a “third way,” an alternative between the poles of Communism and democracy. As fascism was on the rise in Europe, colonized populations elsewhere grew even wearier of the imperial double standards that offered freedom and democracy at home but oppression abroad. To combat European liberalism’s numerous contradictions, anticolonial forces began to claim various forms of nationalism for their own.
Anticolonialism
In Kenya, where colonialism was fairly recent, Harry Thuku began demanding that the British simply provide better education and return the lands they had seized from the natives. He was arrested by the British in 1922. In India an outright anticolonial nationalist movement was under way. Throngs of Indians followed the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who instigated a campaign of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) in 1922 to attain self-rule (swaraj). In Egypt an elite Egyptian politician asked to be invited to the peace conference at Versailles so that he could present his case for independence from Britain. When he arrived, however, the British arrested him. The incident led Egyptians to revolt, which gained them partial independence by 1922.
In 1926, in an act of good faith, the League of Nations invited Germany to join. Furthermore, in 1928 the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand (1862–1932), and the U.S. secretary of state, Frank Kellogg (1856–1929), initiated a pact to exclude war as an option in foreign policy except in self-defense. Sixty-five nations met in Paris to sign the Kellogg- Briand pact. The Kellogg-Briand pact was a tremendous accomplishment, to be sure; however, the fault lines of the period ran deep. Britain, for example, agreed to sign the pact only as long as Britain could use force within its own colonies. The conflicts that raged throughout the 1930s were not dissolved in Paris in 1928. In fact, they were on the verge of deepening in the face of the devastating economic depression that was just around the corner.
On 29 October 1929 (Black Tuesday), the U.S. stock market crashed and sent shock waves throughout the world economy. By the mid- to late 1920s the consumerism of the “jazz age” that had led to greater production had begun to decline, and prices had begun to fall. Furthermore, wobbly governments deeply indebted from the war and small investors had begun to default on their loans from the United States. As a result federal managers raised interest rates, and financial institutions began to collapse. The panic spread to the world market, where investors had been investing in speculative ventures for a quick profit. The crash led to the rise of tariff borders and hence a contraction in world trade. Everywhere people suffered from unemployment and hunger. The depression caused people to further question the liberal doctrine of free markets, and states began to intervene more heavily in economic affairs.
To many people U.S.-style laissez-faire democracy (opposing governmental interference in economic affairs) seemed to have failed to provide the prosperity it had promised, and people began welcoming authoritarian solutions to poverty and mass unemployment. Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and militaristic Japan mobilized against the liberal democracies whose “moral decay” and “decadence” they claimed to overcome. Leaders such as Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) of the Soviet Union, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) of Italy, and Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany promised to deliver all of modernity’s benefits without side effects such as class division, urban-industrial squalor, or moral and social decay. In order to enact their programs, however, the authoritarian leaders of both the right and the left first identified scapegoats upon whom they could place the blame for the adverse economic and social conditions, and then they advocated violence to dispense with their “enemies” in the name of national progress. Stalin identified the “wealthy peasants” as the primary enemies of the state and proceeded to intern them in work camps. The Nazi Party blamed Jews for all of modernity’s evils. Hitler railed against both “Jewish capitalism” and “Jewish bolshevism,” and when he came to power in 1933, he immediately devised a number of plans to take care of the “Jewish problem”—plans that would lead to the Holocaust.
By the mid-1930s the international order created by the treaties of Versailles, Washington, and Locarno was in a state of decline, and nations everywhere began the process of rearmament. In Spain a civil war (1930–1939) raged between the left and the right. Furthermore, in defiance of the Kellogg-Briand pact Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1932, and the League of Nations stood by helplessly. By 1936 Hitler sent soldiers to occupy the Rhineland, and by 1938 Germany had absorbed Austria. Wanting to avoid repeating the horror of World War I, France and Britain sought a peaceable solution with Germany and made several concessions to Hitler, a solution that people have called “appeasement.” At a conference in Munich in 1938 Hitler received the Sudeten territories; however, in defiance of all agreements he invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. By 3 September the world was once again at war.
Despite all the expectations that people had for a new order based on greater freedom at home and greater collaboration abroad, World War I had left too many wounds, ambiguities, and unresolved disputes. During the 1930s the conflicts between empires and their colonies, between democracy and authoritarianism, between nationalism and internationalism played out on a world stage. By 1939 these conflicts seemed destined to be resolved by yet another war, a world war that would be even more destructive than the first.
Bibliography:
- Hobsbawm, E. (1994). The age of extremes: A history of the world, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Horne, J. (Ed.). (1997). State, society, and mobilization during the First World War. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- Mazower, M. (1999). Dark continent: Europe’s twentieth century. New York: A. A. Knopf.
- Overy, R. J. (1994). The inter-war crisis 1919–1939. New York: Longman.
- Winter, J. M. (1989). The experience of World War I. New York: Oxford University Press.
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