The Inter-War Crisis

Revised 2nd Edition

Richard Overy

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134856688
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

The Inter-War Crisis is a concise yet analytical overview of the rapidly-changing world between 1918 and 1939, covering the political, economic and social instability that resulted from the First World War and the eventual descent towards the fresh upheaval of the Second World War.

Revised throughout and containing a new range of illustrations, this third edition covers topics such as the Russian Revolution, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the concepts of the 'end of civilization' and the decline of the West, cultural and scientific responses to an age of anxiety and fear, and the ways in which dictatorship came to replace democracy across so much of Europe. Global in focus, it offers thematic discussions, close analysis of a range of case studies and a clear over-arching narrative structure that guides the reader from the close of one war to the beginning of the next.

Also including a selection of over thirty primary source documents, maps, a chronology of events, a glossary of key terms, a Who's Who of important figures and an extensive and updated guide to further reading, this book is an essential introduction for students of the inter-war period.

Part 1

The background

1 What kind of crisis?

In 1939 the historian E.H. Carr published a widely read and challenging book. He called it The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and his subject was the long period of political and economic instability which ran from the end of the Great War, in November 1918. The book was written before the coming of the Second World War, which turned the crisis years into a mere entr’acte, the ‘inter-war years’, between two periods of violent upheaval. Carr’s title reflected a widespread view in the 1930s that ever since the Great War transformed the established political and international structure, the populations of Europe (and beyond) had lived in the shadow of almost permanent crisis (Carr, 1939).

How is a crisis defined in historical terms? It is clearly not enough simply to recount a record of revolution, armed conflict or business decline, for this is the stuff of much of modern history. Nor is crisis quite the same as an age of rapid, even radical, change. We have all lived with an accelerated rate of change since 1945 – economic, technical, political – without the sense that the world is in perennial crisis. Quite the opposite. The great economic boom since 1945, and the bipolar world system built around American and Soviet power created a growing sense of stability, of change that was managed more or less effectively. Only in the last decades has the post-war order itself begun to dissolve, amidst renewed anxieties about an age of ‘crisis’.

When historians use the word ‘crisis’ they usually employ it with hindsight, taking all the facts together and imposing on them greater coherence or significance than was perceived by contemporaries. The ‘Great Crisis’ in the seventeenth century occasioned by the Thirty Years War may well describe the sum of its parts, but this is not how Europeans described it themselves at the time. The period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was one of intense crisis on any scale of historical judgement, but it was difficult to perceive at the time with any coherence. In an age before mass newspapers, telegraph and telephone, or even an effective postal service, most Europeans had little idea about what was going on. The inter-war crisis differed from earlier upheavals because people were conscious of living through a crisis, aware, as populations had not previously been, that they confronted an age of unstable transformation. Carr’s title was meant to convey that sense, and historians have not scrupled since to accept it at face value.

Why, then, did contemporaries feel they were living through an age of crisis? Or, to put it another way round, what did they regard as stability, and why did they see it under threat? Part of the answer can be found in the expectations of the post-1918 world. After the war, there existed a widespread desire to return to what Americans called ‘normalcy’. The world before the conflict, the world of belle époque, seemed rosier than ever now that it was lost. Europeans yearned for the life immortalized in countless Impressionist paintings, of dreamy warm summers, of picnics in the country, of bars and terraces thronged with the prosperous middle classes, and the gaiety of youth. Life was not like that, of course, for most Europeans before 1914, but it was a seductive illusion.

So, too, was the other great expectation in 1919, that after ‘the war to end all wars’ it might prove possible to construct a new world order based on the liberal outlook of the winners. When the American President, Woodrow Wilson, addressed Congress in January 1918 on American war aims, he outlined his vision of a brave new world ‘made safe and fit to live in … made safe for every peace-loving nation’. He saw in this vision ‘the moral climax of this culminating and final war for human liberty’. There was a widespread yearning for peace by 1918; there was much idealism too, a sense that the war had in some way purged Europe and that it could now once again step out, collectively, along the path of peace and prosperity from which a moment of historical madness had distracted it. The primary aim of the Peace Settlement finalized at Versailles in June 1919 was ‘to achieve international peace and security’ by renouncing war, respecting international agreements and establishing ‘open, just and honourable relations between nations’ (Macmillan, 2001; Manela, 2007).

Against this weight of idealism and illusion, the reality of the post-war world was a grave disappointment. Social unrest, economic stagnation and international political conflict were measured against the hopes for peace abroad and stability at home, and found sadly wanting. These disappointments helped to produce a growing mood of pessimism, a belief that whatever efforts were made to restore the pre-war golden age, or to build a new order rooted in justice and respect for others, Europe or western civilization was in some sense doomed. This was nothing new, of course. Even before the war there had been gathering force for twenty years a profound sense of fin de siècle, of the end of an age. Writers and artists expressed this in a number of ways, but they were united in a sense of loss – of innocence, of moral certainty, of social values, of cultural confidence. The Europe which astonished the nineteenth century with its wealth, inventiveness and power was prey to growing self-doubt and fears for the future. The Great War only served to heighten this sense of passing from an age of certitude to an age of fearful instability [Doc. 1]. Georges Clemenceau, the fiery Frenchman who led his country to victory in 1918, pondered gloomily the frailty of human nature exposed by the war:

Human beings are like apes who have stolen Jupiter’s thunder. It’s easy to foresee what will happen one of these days; they will kill one another to the last man. At most some dozen will escape, some negroes in the Congo. Then they’ll begin the whole story again. The same old story!

(Schwarzschild, 1943: 47)

The collapse of confidence in European civilization and progress can be traced back in part to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who mounted a powerful attack on the stolidly bourgeois, Christian culture of late nineteenth-century Europe. His rejection of God and organized religion, his profound scepticism about all things modern, his scornful rejection of contemporary morality and values, and his hatred of the masses (‘the superfluous ones’), were an inspiration to a whole generation of educated young westerners who despised the self-satisfied, materialistic world around them [Doc. 2]. In Nietzsche they found a prophet of decadent decline, and of strenuous, spiritual renewal. A great many young men went off to war in 1914 with Nietzsche in their rucksack (the German Army even ordered thousands of copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra to distribute to officer recruits). The war turned out to be grim, dirty and brutalizing, a moral desert for those who lived through it. But it did signify Nietzsche’s premonition of decline, of negative evolution. Many intellectuals regarded ‘crisis’ as a welcome purification, before a period of moral and social renewal.

The most famous exponent of European crisis and decline was another German, Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West [Der Untergang des Abendlandes] was published in Germany in two volumes in 1918 and 1922. Although Spengler began writing before 1914, its publication at the end of the war gave it a fortuitous prominence. The book was an international bestseller and won Spengler a worldwide reputation. In it he argued that all civilizations have a natural life cycle of growth, flowering and decay, and that European culture, absorbed with narrow materialism and urban chaos, was in the last stage, the winter of a once fruitful world. Unless Europe could cleanse itself and rebuild its spiritual values and racial stock, it would become prey to primitive politics and wars of extermination; the United States, he argued, would become the successor civilization (Spengler, 1932). The cycle of rise and decline seemed to many Europeans to express what they had experienced across the period of the Great War. The horrors of war – the gassing, bombing, starvation – demonstrated what a shallow veneer civilization was.

Of course Spengler was not thinking just of the war, although the conflict confirmed what fin-de-siècle writers had been saying for years. The powerful sense of imminent doom had a great many causes. In the first place it expressed a reaction against the rapid industrialization and urbanization which transformed European society in the last third of the nineteenth century. When Bismarck founded the new German Reich in 1871, two out of every three Germans worked and lived on the land. Between 1871 and 1911 the population of Germany rose from 40 million to 65 million; when war broke out in 1914 two out of every three Germans lived in cities. The sheer speed of this transformation left traditional European society – peasants, craftspeople, gentry – stranded in a bustling world of sprawling, poorly managed cities, dominated by a new wealthy bourgeoisie. In the middle of the nineteenth century European states had been in the main still run by aristocrats, relying on social prestige and customary allegiance, aided by a small bureaucratic class and army. By the end of the century the state, too, was transformed: central and local government were modernized and their powers greatly extended. State interests were enforced by an army of bureaucrats and officials and were defended by vast conscript armies; politics were run by a loose alliance of modernizing gentry and ambitious, educated bourgeois drawn from both the political left and right.

With industrialism came mass politics. The intellectual pessimist’s nightmare was the rise of new political forces representing the interests of the vast underclass of workers and clerks thrown up by economic change. During the 1880s and 1890s socialist parties and trade unions were founded worldwide. Demands for social reform and political freedom expressed by middle-class liberals were increasingly usurped by talk of revolution and social transformation. Karl Marx, the German social theorist who lived and worked for most of his life in London, exposed what he saw as the alienating, self-serving character of bourgeois society and private property, and offered the promise of revolutionary transition, through the efforts of the new urban proletariat, to a golden age of shared property and creative labour. Even though only a fraction of Europe’s working classes was actually Marxist by 1914, the fear of violent overthrow, and the economic levelling and mass culture that was supposed to follow, was enough on its own to create a climate of insecurity and uncertainty for property holders big and small.

Industrialization, and the modern state-building to which it gave rise, profoundly affected the balance of power between states as well. For much of the nineteenth century European states had collaborated loosely to maintain a Concert of Europe and international peace. But the very idea of a European concert was rendered increasingly obsolete by the rise of new industrial powers overseas, in particular Japan and the United States, and by the spread of European interests worldwide through trade and colonialism. Within Europe the concert was undermined by the changes in the relative economic and military power of the major states. In the 1850s, Britain and France were the largest industrial powers and the leading colonists; by 1914 both had been overtaken as industrial producers by the United States and Germany, and Tsarist Russia, after a short burst of state-led industrialization, was hard on their shoulder. Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Japan had joined the ranks of the colonial powers, and imperial rivalry produced serious squabbles between the European states. The rapid realignment of the powers ended the spirit of collaboration and self-restraint characteristic of much pre-1900 diplomacy. Economic and imperial rivalry spawned popular nationalism at home, which forced the traditional ruling elite to pay greater attention to public opinion, while it sharpened antagonisms between the powers. Both at home and abroad, the sources of stability were in full retreat.

Nowhere was this sense of uncomfortable disorder more evident than in the remarkable cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century. In art, music, literature and science, the frontiers were suddenly and excitingly pushed back, both reflecting and stimulating the urgent changes in society and politics. Only a matter of a few years separated the conventional portraits and landscapes of European high art from the creative experiments of Picasso, Kandinsky or the Dadaists. While Vienna danced to the traditional waltzes of Johann Strauss, another Austrian, Arnold Schoenberg, was taking the first steps towards a revolution in composition that laid the foundation for the contrapuntal, atonal music of the twentieth century. Science produced the motor car, the radio and the aeroplane, which transformed communications and war. Engineers and architects turned their backs on bricks, tiles and slates and began to experiment with steel, concrete and glass, the materials of the modern landscape. The order of the day was experiment and challenge. The comfortable culture of well-off Europeans and Americans was confronted with the ‘shock of the new’, and shock it often was (Teich and Porter, 1990).

Figure 1.1 The First International Dada Exhibition, Berlin 1920. The Dadaist movement challenged artistic conventions with an aggressive modernism that repelled many conservative Europeans.

© adoc-photos/Corbis

If the cultural flowering was exhilarating, liberating, for young artists and intellectuals, it was taken by many as a symbol of degeneration, of chaos confronting order. When in the 1930s Hitler ordered an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ to be set up in Munich, he filled it with the fruits of this early modernism. He ordered the German Chamber of Culture to compel artists to paint objects only in their natural colours and natural forms. For Hitler, and, we can assume, for many of his respectable middle-class followers, ‘Modern Art’ came to express all that seemed distorted and decadent about modernity itself.

The revolution in culture – the core of the pre-1914 fin de siècle – produced a more sinister response. It came to be regarded as evidence of a more fundamental degeneration, not just of art, but of race. ‘What does it all mean?’ demanded one outraged critic of modern culture. ‘It simply means one more phase of the worldwide revolt against civilization by the unadaptable, inferior, and degenerate elements, seeking to smash the irksome framework of modern society, and revert to the congenial levels of chaotic barbarism and savagery’ (Stoddard, 1922: 128). From at least the 1890s onwards, there were widespread fears expressed in Europe and the United States that unchecked population growth, both at home and overseas, might lead to a biological weakening of the white race and the undermining of white civilization. Attention was drawn to the physically damaging effects of urbanization and industrial labour, which threatened to produce a vast underclass of cretinous, deformed individuals who would, through sheer numbers, swamp the healthy elements of the species and produce racial degeneration. Modern science was marshalled in defence of such views. A long list of respectable academics and doctors subscribed to the idea that the race could somehow be engineered through breeding to become biologically sound. The science was known as ‘eugenics’, and its champions included figures on both the political right and left. The object of eugenic study was to find ways – through improved medical care, or compulsory sterilization, or contraception – to limit the reproduction of the allegedly poorer physical specimens in a population. In this way the crisis of racial decline would be averted, and the white race retain its supremacy [Doc. 3].

Views on race were certainly not confined to the extreme nationalist fringe in European politics, and were anything but exclusively German. The inspiration for much of pre-1914 race theory came from a Frenchman, Count Arthur de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The racism of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party was one fragment of a much broader concern with race, evident throughout the western world in an age of global imperialism, and which pre-dated Nazism by a generation. Nowhere was that concern more energetically displayed than in the sprawling Habsburg Empire, which became before 1914 an inflammable cauldron of racial conflict between Germans, Magyars, Jews and a dozen Slavic nationalities. It is perhaps no coincidence that Habsburg Austria, wilting before the onslaught of mass politics, popular nationalism and economic transformation, was home to the worst excesses of European racism and the most self-consciously fin-de-siècle culture. Vienna was a microcosm of the wider tensions generated by rapid political and social change, and of the disintegrative effects of modern culture and sceptical philosophy. The reaction of the Emperor and the Austrian ruling class was to confront the forces making for change, rather than ride with them. At home the empire rejected moves to greater democracy and remained an aristocratic state. The regime sought ways to limit domestic nationalist agitation, and opted in the first decade of the twentieth century for an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy to reverse the long decline in the empire’s international position. In the course of this final rallying of traditional Europe, crisis turned into disaster. Attempts to compel Serbia, chief ally of the movement for Slav independence from Habsburg rule, to accept domination from Vienna and end racial agitation, ended in a war between the two states in late July 1914 which dragged in the other great powers, one by one.

The Great War which resulted was not directly caused by the growing sense of crisis before 1914, although the fatalism it engendered made war seem unavoidable. But even if the war had not broken out in 1914, mass political and national rivalry would almost certainly have dissolved the old social order and international system sooner or later. What the war did do was magnify and accelerate those changes. The armies that marched to the battlefield in 1914 garlanded with flowers from the flag-waving crowds that saw them off expected the war to be ‘over by Christmas’, like the brief wars of 1866 or 1870. Instead, the conflict, fuelled by vast financial wealth and industrial muscle, prolonged by a new military technology that favoured entrenched defences, became a slugging match which consumed 7 million lives, devastated large tracts of Europe, and impoverished the states that fought it. A whole generation of young Europeans was embittered and brutalized by the experience. Thirteen million of them carried the scars of war. Twenty years later half of the French budget was still devoted to paying off war debts and providing pensions for crippled veterans. No family was left untouched; the war became etched in the modern memory.

The war fulfilled the worst of expectations. At its end the political landscape of Europe and beyond was transformed. In 1900 the world was dominated by large territorial empires, ruled, except for France, by hereditary monarchs. In 1920 only two ...