EUROPE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
President Woodrow Wilson’s hopes for a permanent
association to adjudicate peace amongst nations took shape in the League of
Nations that was birthed in 1920. The League was fashioned around its covenant
or constitution as the basis for its operations and binding agreements.
With its headquarters in Geneva, it consisted of an
assembly in which members had an equal vote, alongside the right of veto and a
smaller council of four permanent members and four (later rising to six and
eventually nine) members chosen on a rotating basis by the assembly.
The vision of the League was hinged on security;
individual and collective. Its members were pledged to seeking peaceful
solutions to disputes and to assist one another against aggression. The vision
was far reaching and could have become a practical platform for maintaining
world peace but for a few shortcomings found in its covenants and in the
attitude of some key members.
The League did resolve disputes between nations such as
Finland and Sweden, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany, Albania and
Yugoslavia. There were specialized agencies dealing with issues related to the
status of Danzig and the Saar, refugees and global trade on narcotics. Out of
the league’s initiative came the international labor organization and the
international court of justice with its headquarters in The Hague.
That the league eventually floundered in its bid to
impose and promote world peace lay with the instruments and mechanisms guiding
its operations. To start with because every decision had to be unanimous or set
aside, this cast a huge burden on the decision making process. Secondly, not
many nations were willing to surrender part of their sovereignty to the
collective body in order for its decisions to be binding and far – reaching.
Infractions and disobedience to its covenants were not
rigorously sanctioned and enforced. The decision by the US senate not to ratify
America’s membership of the league by ratifying the Versailles treaty left the
league without the support of one of its most important founding fathers. The
membership tenure of some key nations was chequered and tenuous at best.
The US did not
join. Russia only from 1934 to 1939, Germany from 1926-1933, Turkey joined only
in 1932 while Brazil withdrew in 1926, Japan in 1933 and Italy in 1937. Its
dependence on sanctions as a means of enforcing its covenant was at best
illusory and at other times, outrightly counterproductive.
For instance in sanctioning Italy for its invasion of
Ethiopia, the economic boycott called for, was rendered ineffective when iron,
steel and oil were excluded from the list and before a year could expire, they
were lifted.
Worse still the
league was ineffectual when Germany sent troops into the demilitarized Rhine
land in violation of the Versailles treaty; and there was never a coordinated
response to any of Nazi Germany’s infractions against the Versailles treaty
like its re-armament programs and re – occupation of the Saar and even the
outright invasion and annexation of Austria.
The impunity of the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in
violating the terms of the Versailles treaty and the lack of coordinated and
determined response on the part of the league members spelled its death knoll.
Anschluss
German troops cross the
Austrian border in March 1938. Anschluss, the union of Austria and Germany, was
achieved without Austrian resistance.
Corbis
Other nations like
Japan and Italy soon took a cue from Germany in rendering the League of Nations
impotent. The appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain the British Prime Minister
compounded the problems of the league.
Even its founding members hardly took the League of
Nations and its covenants into consideration in taking major political
decisions involving global peace and respect for the territorial integrity of
nations whose boundaries were being violated like Austria, Czechoslovakia,
Finland, Poland etc.
A positive notable development however sprang forth in course
of the existence of the League of Nations when the new French foreign minister
Aristide Briand in taking office in 1925 pledged to work for a United States of
Europe and on September 9, 1929, he made a speech to the then 27 members of the
league in which he suggested the forming of a European Federal Union.
On May 1st 1930, the French foreign minister
actually presented a memorandum from the French government on the organization
of a system of European Federal Union. The proposal was well articulated and he
pressed the need for Europe to adopt steps for enforcing collective security
and economic collaboration. The idea was that European unity could bury the
nationalistic agitations that were threatening the peace of Europe.
His proposal also centered on the need to set up a plan
involving the establishment of a European conference within the frame work of
the committee and a secretariat putting politics before economics in the
European community while working towards the establishment of a “common market”
in which “the movement of goods, capital and people” would be gradually
liberalized and simplified.
The details according to the French foreign minister were
to be the specific responsibility of the individual governments concerned. He
however insisted that the process of dialogue and understanding must recognize
the equality and sovereignty of each individual nation.
Quoting the memorandum he said “is … of each nation to be
able to affirm itself still more consciously by cooperating in the collective
effort within a federal union that fully respects the traditions and
characteristics of each of its constituent people”. The initiative was not
enthusiastically followed up by the other European members of the league and
only a few countries like Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and to a point Czechoslovakia,
Norway and Greece lent their support to the initiative.
The rest were openly skeptical and even out rightly
indifferent to the initiative. The Netherlands however alone, argued the need
for collective unity. Others felt such an initiative threatened the existence
of the league and this view was held by countries like Poland, Sweden,
Switzerland and the U.K.
Several other countries felt that rather than set up any
other parallel organization, the league should work towards recruiting nations
like Russia and Turkey which were then not yet members. The Wall Street crash
of October 1929 only served to accentuate the view that Europe’s pressing
problems were economic rather than political.
Many countries thereafter became more conscious of the
need to protect their individual economies by raising tariffs and imposing
restrictions on imports, pursuing a unilateral rather than a multilateral approach
to solving Europe’s economic problems. All these rather intensified the
nationalistic and altruistic tendencies of the European states promoting
competition, rather than co-operation.
The German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann who had
helped to formulate the Locarno treaties of 1925 confirming among other things
the new western frontiers of Germany, and who was also a fervent believer in
European cooperation and unity unfortunately died in 1929 before the idea of
European unity and collaboration could take root.
A powerful spokesman advocating Germany’s obligations to
observe the Versailles treaty and promote peace in Europe, Stresemann who won
the Nobel peace prize in 1926 was a potential candidate for pursuing Briand’s
initiative. Unfortunately three years after Stresemann’s death, Briand himself
died in 1932, and the most the European countries of the league voted to do,
was to endeavor to put the plan before the assembly of the League of Nations.
To compound matters, the German Catholic Centre partly
led by Chancellor Heinrich Bunning showed complete indifference to the striving
for European unity even as events were pushing the Weimar Republic to the brink
of collapse in the face of the growth of extreme groups such as fascists, nationalists,
communists and the National socialists’ workers party.
Aristide Briand’s death in 1932 also coincided with the onset
of the Great Depression that helped to undo the spirit of collective bargaining
and resolution of disputes that were beginning to flower in Europe and instead,
led to the entrenchment of nationalistic, sectional, racial and ethnic tensions
in Europe.
GERMANY AND THE
WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Demonstration Against the
Versailles Treaty
On June 22, 1919, the
government of Weimar Germany, under international pressure, accepted the Treaty
of Versailles. The treaty held Germany solely responsible for World War I, and
accordingly imposed harsh conditions on Germany. A fundamental revision of the
“Dictat of Versailles,” as the peace treaty was referred to in Germany, became
the pressing goal of a wide cross-section of German society. Mass
demonstrations and rallies against the Treaty of Versailles, like this one in
Berlin, were the order of the day.
ORF
Enterprise Ges.m.b.H
Following its defeat in World War 1 and the abdication of
Emperor Wilhelm II as Kaiser, Germany was proclaimed a Republic by the
government of the then Chancellor prince Maximilian Von Baden who also resigned
in favor of the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert who formed the new
government in November 1918.
The proclamation took place on November 9, and on
November 11, Germany signed the armistice peace terms bringing the war to an
end. The new Republic that emerged like any child of circumstances was plagued
with fundamental problems bordering on its legitimacy and popular support from
the word- go.
For a government conceived in defeat, that signed the
unpopular armistice agreement coupled with the even more unpopular Versailles treaty,
the Weimar Republic came to bear the brunt of the blames and reproach
concerning defeat in World War 1.
With the nationalist
socialist party of Adolf Hitler branding the signatories to the peace of 1918, ‘November
criminals’ the stigma of illegality, betrayal and conspiracy came to hang heavy
on the fortunes of the Weimar republic. The government was not only unpopular
but also unstable, having to contend with revolutionary forces from the left,
extreme right and centre left.
That it was
democratic did not strengthen its support base either, partly because the
culture of democracy and freedom were still an alien concept in the early 20th
century Germany. The idea of a strong government that imposed its will on the
people were what the German people were accustomed to, not one that had its
roots and foundation in a peace treaty prepared by foreign powers and signed by
Germany in a moment of defeat.
Crises dogged the footsteps of the Weimar Republic right
from its inception. The new Republic came first under pressure from both left
wing and right wing politicians particularly the left wing socialists and
Marxists “Sparta cists” led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who organized
strikes and founded Soviet model workers and soldiers’ councils. The
insurrection however was crushed by the army in January 15, 1919 when both
leaders were arrested and killed violently.
On the other hand right wing ex-army officers came
together to form the paramilitary Freidkorps who also sought to besiege the
government. In the bid to give the new Republic constitutional footing,
elections were held on January 19, 1919 to elect delegates to the 163 seats,
the Catholic centre party won 89 seats and the Progressive party won 75 seats.
The coalition of these three parties formed the
government; to the exclusion of the old conservatives now called the National people’s
party with 42 and the new people’s party with 21 seats. On the left the
independent socialists held 22 seats.
This assembly met on February 6, 1919 at Weimar an
ancient city on the Weimar River, basically to avoid the predictable opposition
that sitting in Berlin would have exposed the gathering to, as feelings were
still running high in Germany over the defeat in the war and humiliating peace
treaty that ensued.
The new parliament (Reichstag) did not reconvene in
Berlin until the spring of 1920 and even then the Republic was named the Weimar
Republic. The new constitution was modern, democratic and embraced the concept
of representative government and democratic rights which were yet to be firmly
etched in the psyche of the average German.
The constitution
was inaugurated on July 31 1919. In March 1920, the new republic was shaken by
an attempted coup d’état coupled with an election in June that resulted in
serious defeat for the republicans.
The centrist Democrats and the Social democrats both lost
considerable seats in the parliaments shifting the momentum to the forces of
the extreme right, made up of right – wing parties and the left wing socialists
and other smaller parties that made considerable gains.
The original coalition that formed the new Republic
suddenly found themselves in the minority and the new groups, violent in
expression dominated the new parliament. On the streets, political violence was
widespread. Things got to a head when on August 26 1921, two former officers of
the German armed forces shot and killed Mathias Erzberger, a Catholic centre
party deputy who had negotiated the peace terms.
On June 24 1922
three right wing students shot and killed Walter Ratheneau, the newly appointed
foreign minister who was Jewish. And to cap it all on November 8 1923, an
abortive putsch involving elements of Adolf Hitler’s National socialist party
and other right wing extremists was crushed and Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering
and Erich Ludendorff were implicated and charged to court.
In the midst of these all, the Weimar Republic continued
and even recorded some remarkable success in the economic arena as the German
economy flourished and the revived economic fortunes of Germany helped partially
to stabilize the polity. Germany was even able to make substantial reparations
payment and grow its economy substantially; increasing its share of European
and world trade.
Germany at a time stood next to the United States in
terms of economic performance boasting of more per capita income than any other
nation in Europe. As the 20’s progressed, more and more Germans began to
fantasize the issue of national rebirth, extreme nationalism and the glory of
the fatherland.
The rise of National Socialism and its extreme doctrines
built around the myth of the superiority of the Aryan race, the manifest
destiny surrounding Germany’s ascendancy in Europe, the need to uproot the Jews
as the main obstacles to Germany’s nationalistic aspirations, the need to
re-unite Germans wherever they may be found, began to resonate with a cross
section of the German people and fan the flames of racial, ethnic and nationalistic
bigotry.
Midnight SS Ceremony
The Schutzstaffel, or SS,
was the most feared organization within Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist
Party. During World War II (1939-1945), the SS was responsible for running the
Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers at which many hundreds of
thousands of people were systematically killed. Shown here, new members of the
SS are sworn in at a midnight ceremony.
Bruce
Coleman,
The German people under the influence of the teachings and
propaganda of the Nazi party and other extreme right wing groups were
encouraged to see themselves more as Germans, the Aryan race destined to rule
the whole world while other European races and peoples were presented as
racially inferior and destined to be subjugated and conquered.
Adolf Hitler while in prison over the Munich Putsch wrote
his thoughts in his book ‘Mein Kampf’ in which he set out his beliefs, thoughts
and vision for Germany. By appealing to the altruistic tendencies in the
people, reminding them of their inherent racial supremacy, Hitler created a
consciousness in Germans of their innate superiority that made his national
socialist party extremely popular and appealing.
He conveniently labeled the defeat of 1918 as the work of
Jews, fifth columnists, communists and other enemies of Germany. In convincing
the nation that Germany did not really suffer a defeat on the battlefield, he
began to prepare the people for another re-match, a contest of wit and muscle
for a people whom he convinced did not lose the war but were rather stabbed in
the back.
Germany thus
entered the 1930s initially hesitant, undecided but gradually yielding, as
successive elections showed to the rhetoric’s and propaganda of the national
socialist workers party. The Nazi’s kept improving their electoral fortunes in
election after election until by 1930 no party could form a coalition
government without the support of Hitler’s national socialists’ workers party.
In the 1932
elections, the Nazis had become the single largest party in Germany’s parliament
and were now in a position to form a coalition government of their own.
The Emergence of
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party
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