#43 The Global Geo-Political context 1914-1945
The World in Turmoil, 1914 to 1945: War, Revolution Crisis and Destruction: Part 1
Over the next four blogs, I will cover:
The Last major colonisation: The Middle East, Arab oil and the Palestinian question
Colonial aspirations of the war-making powers
Germany: Hitler‘s colonies and Mitteleurope
Racism and Eugenics in this period
The Struggle for World Power between Britain and the USA: how the USA became the leading power
To provide a timeline of the period I am about to cover, here are some key dates:
1911 - Italians attack Ottoman territories in north Africa
1914-1918 - The Great War in Europe
1916 - The Irish Rise against the British
1917 - the USA joins Britain
1917 - The Russian Revolution and the 14/18 war
1919 to 1921 - Russian civil war and invasion by European and US troops
1918 - Ottoman surrender
1919 - Greek invasion of Turkey
1923 - Irish Civil war continues, Ireland is divided
1936-39 - Spanish civil war
1937 - Japan invades China
1939-45 - World War Two
1941 - Japan invades USA; bombing of Pearl Harbour
There is a large volume of writings, research and media attention that covers these years. Yet there is a lack of an overall perspective, which would provide some degree of understanding of not just what happened but why it all occurred. The title of the blogs in this section, The World in Turmoil, 1914 to 1945: War, Revolution Crisis and Destruction, in many ways summarises the intensity of this period.
It is now over 100 years since the first conflagration finished, and still, nations are viewing the events in nationalistic terms. We are still repeating the axioms 'we must never forget' and 'we must learn lessons of history', without offering any attempt at an honest appraisal of why it happened, what the events were all about, and - above all - how our governments were responsible for the carnage of two world wars.
Council of Four at the WWI Paris peace conference, May 27, 1919 (L - R) Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Great Britain), Premier Vittorio Orlando (Italy), Premier Georges Clemenceau (France), President Woodrow Wilson (USA).
Here is a short list of the events, many overlooked:
The end of three ancient empires which had lasted for hundreds of years: Russian, Ottoman, and Austria-Hungary.
The creation of new, much smaller nation-states, based on a single language and religion. These are seen in many history books as a natural consequence of the rise of nationalism, usually ignoring the racism with which they were closely associated at the time. Examples abound: Turkey, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Serbia and a range of others.
The ideologies of nationalism and racism were perhaps at their height after 1918.
There was a breakdown of the world’s economic system: the Gold Standard had been at the heart of global financial policy through most of the 19th century.
The struggle to maintain world power and to take new colonies was the very heart of these wars
Colonisation continued as a major part of dominant countries’ foreign policy. European, Japanese, and USA states were actively involved in this.
Map of colonial and land-based empires throughout the world in 1914, by Andrew0921, (CC BY 3.0), via Wikipedia.
The Holocaust, the rise of Nazism and Hitler are not included in this list. They have been analysed extensively elsewhere; but more importantly, they have often not been understood in the context of all these other major events. Too often the rise of Nazism, Hitler, and the Holocaust have been seen as uniquely evil events that are set outside of history when in reality this is what made them appear. I shall deal with these questions in a later blog.
The blogs of this section have been divided into ‘intended’ and ‘unintended’ consequences. I have assumed that the nation-states and their ruling classes, were willing actors with clearly defined war aims and equally clear goals during the year 1914 to 1939. The unintended consequence, in the end, were the total loss by the colonizing states of everything they had fought for since the 16th century. The European struggle for wealth and power across the globe was a complete failure by 1945, at least as far as the ruling classes were concerned. I shall return to this issue many times in the blogs to come.
These wars led to the loss of the colonies; the struggle for European wealth and power over these 30 years speeded up the transformation of the world. The first struggle for wealth and power by war can be understood as lasting from 1789 to 1815; the second parallel struggle by war was from 1914 to 1945. In both cases, the wars ended with a single dominant nation, Britain in 1815 and the USA in 1945; both thereafter attempted to command and control the world’s wealth.
1945 was the beginning of a new era for the whole world.
Understanding this Period
The 30 years from 1914 to 1944 represent years of such death and turmoil at every level that it is hard to exaggerate the suffering across the globe. Many of the events of this period have become so seared into people’s memory, contemporary events are frequently compared and contrasted with them. For the first time in world history, many of the peoples of the world were at war in the 1914-18 war, as were all the peoples of the world in the 1939-45 war. At the times when there was no war, there was chaos across the global economy, which affected everyone’s lives.
Humankind had created a system of production and trade that was global. In doing so, tensions that could not be handled peacefully led to the breakdown of civilised living. Not only were men and women slaughtered in their millions on all sides of the world; the organisation of how people lived, and under what political system, fundamentally changed over these 30 years.
Destruction of peoples and societies was a consequence of the elements that this blog series has emphasised: the struggle for colonies, the racial ideas which had come to be seen as 'truth'; the industrialisation of the weapons of war, machine guns, tanks, and poisonous gases; and above all else, the struggle for world power. The problem that any historian faces when writing about this period is how to make sense of such deep turbulence. What does making sense mean? The answers in these blogs will come through as we progress.
“Preconceived ideas generally control historical observations. Historians, especially those who make a living in academic circles, must necessarily work within paradigmatic confines of the prevailing orthodoxy, especially where taboo subjects are concerned. The heretic must labor in the scholarly fringes..... with no major avenue for dissemination.... it is likely that a revisionist account of Pearl Harbour and the origins of the war with Japan can never receive a fair hearing in mainstream circles until the presentation of World War II as the 'good war' is no longer of instrumental value to the reigning establishment.”
- Stephen Sniegoski, The Case for Pearl Harbour Revisionism, sept 2004
The 31 years from 1914 to 1945 live on in our memories to this day. Many of the events are remembered with horror and are so important that they haunt the imaginations of 21st-century populations.
By 1917, the war was going terribly wrong (so far as the British and the French were concerned) and it was unclear that either side had the advantage. On both sides, there was fear of starvation, lack of munitions, the possibility of revolt, the calling up of teenage boys and middle-aged men to fight because there were no other able-bodied men left to fight and die. The decision of the USA to enter the war on the side of Britain and France suddenly made all the difference.
The New York Times, 3 April 1917.
American soldiers on the Piave front hurling hand grenades into Austrian trenches, 1918.
In the 21st century, the waste of lives in both wars seems almost unimaginable. Hitler as the leader of Germany has become the epitome of everything evil; it is as if we need a modern devil to explain our world. Hitler, Nazism, and the Jewish Holocaust haunt contemporary dialogue, and so we avoid further analysis and understanding. It is in this sense that readers should consider the above quotation by Stephen Sniegoski: an excellent but little-known historian who has a novel story to tell, outside the main frame of history.
Historians and the wider public in the 21st century have taken up rigid positions about these 30 years. Both wars are seen as 'good wars' in whatever media you choose to read, listen or see them in. It has been assumed that we were fighting for honourable human ends, namely for 'liberal and democratic values'. These blogs make no such assumptions. Liberal and democratic values have simply become assumed in the second half of the 20th century; in the periods before 1945, they were the ideas of a few well-meaning idealists. The war aims of the leaders throughout these 30 years, in western and eastern Europe or Japan, were the continuation of 19th-century goals, through violence, new wealth and power, which meant expansion and colonisation.
Yet today few see it this way. Endless books, TV shows, films, and references to evil in the present time are presented with Hitler as the epitome. Yet balanced history should be written to understand events even as terrifying as these wars: that means, placing them within the context in which they occurred. It is time that the winners - the USA, the UK, and all others - take a long view, and understand the events of those years as part of the processes of history. Responsibility for the 1914 and 1939 wars, for the rise of Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust, was as much ours as our enemies at the time. We were and are all responsible, as these blogs will illustrate.
We shall proceed in the framework that has been established in these blogs and examine this period in terms of colonialism and racism. Racism is seen today solely as a denigration of 'other' peoples; whereas up to 1945, race had been understood as the organisational framework of all peoples. Colonies were organised on racial lines, and when ‘weaker’ people were discarded, it was understood in terms of the so-called destiny of 'superior races'. All people were divided into racial groups, and the ideas of racism were normal. These two frameworks were taken for granted by all leaders of both sides at the time and are now insufficiently debated when looking at this period.
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Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.